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Comment Re:Correlation is not causation (Score 1) 264

We are talking about colleges and universities here, not generally.

Students live and work in the same place usually. If there's an outbreak it should be possible to control it fairly easily. Campus security/police, simultaneous restrictions etc. It's the closest you get to the way the Chinese dealt with it, because the college has disciplinary control over the students (and controls workplace and living spaces usually).

I live in a University Town and despite some initial cases they soon vanished and didn't hop over into the wider community. It took some effort but it was nowhere near the same challenge as out in the community.

Comment Correlation is not causation (Score -1) 264

Schools and Colleges all return Septemberish. Second wave happened world over at same time.

Schools returning had other effects, parents who were working from home or not working could return. The weather gets poorer and nights get darker so less time spent outside.

Students aren't usually socially connected enough to the local community to contribute to spread and outbreaks even if fairly large are easily controlled.

Comment Re:What a disaster.... (Score 1) 196

You can't write a law to cover all the possible ways people with disabilities may need adaptions. It depends on the disability and the service provided..

Accessibility of web sites is perhaps a more modern problem, because hand in hand with the decrease of accessibility (particularly through forced apps) has been coupled with a lack of phone contactable websites / services. If you could order your pizza by phoning at no cost and get a similar experience talking to someone as from the app, then this might not be an issue.

Comment Re:nothing new (Score 1) 147

I wonder if social media itself is really the cause rather than as a symptom. People who are lacking motivation can just endless scroll fairly mindless stuff to keep themselves seemingly occupied. I'm pretty sure the amount of posting / interacting with other people is fairly minimal and it's just consumption. I'd be amazed if this heavy "social media" use was actually communicating in any meaningful way with other people.

This has been obvious enough in the workplace, demotivated staff fill a whole day just scrolling through news sites or watching 24 hr news. It's background life.

Comment Re:A magnificently pointless idea (Score 1) 162

You've missed the point on several levels. One of the novel features of this setup is it just takes a straight £2 or whatever it is charge from the tap. THe performer doesn't need to enter a price.

I use contactless a lot, I can pay by phone, card or a keyfob. Neither really require very much fishing. I don't usually even remove my card to pay, just tap my wallet.

Comment Re:Thiny veiled age discrimmination? (Score 1) 345

MSN Messenger was really big in the UK particularly with under 12s - messenger was the chat app of choice. My 19 year old and 11 year old have hotmail addresses for that reason. Don't forget the xbox factor as well. That was cut in 2013 so there are still a lot of 18-30 somethings using hotmail addresses. Older people with fixed lines (and stability) tend to use ISP given addresses or their work accounts. Not the defacto e-mail address they ended up using from playing games or chatting with friends.

So really it's just another age / maturity indicator.

Comment Re:Which government? (Score 1) 105

This legal request workload is actually a really big problem for multinational cloud providers.. That's a good business reason for using end-to-end encryption and other technical measures that would prevent the company from accessing or monitoring the data. If they can't see it or collect it, they can't disclose it. It's a lot easier to do that then spend thousands of man hours of legal time responding to complex access requests worldwide. The resulting services/devices are generally more secure and consumers like it, except when their device is locked out.

Patriot act etc. style provisions require hand over of records (such as Telco call logs used for billing) and allows foreign wire level snooping (ie. outsource spying to the UK/Canada/NZ/France etc.)

So really the answer to the Amazon question really depends on their current technical architecture. If they have clear records/files then they have to hand them over when asked.

Comment Re:Two hours at 25mph is a shift? (Score 1) 135

The typical use is driving round continuously at maybe 20-25mph average patrolling a town/city I guess. So that car is going to last 4-5 hrs with a few donut stops. Police also operate 24 hrs, the car isn't expected to get a break. If they need to be ready to attend an incident a few miles out at any given time, it's easy to see how these things are totally impractical for police work. Maintaining a 2x-3x larger fleet for hot spares just seems to be throwing more money at a bad idea.

By way of comparison the london black cab company is producing a hybrid that can do 70 miles electric then a further 400 off gasoline. That sort of arrangement would have been much more suited to the police typical use. A city taxi isn't that different usage pattern to a police patroller.

Comment Re:Exploding heads (Score 2) 173

Android changed this year. SafetyNet does make the android eco-system more secure. However, it does not make an individual phone any more secure for the end-user.

SafetyNet is a bit like tripwire. It does a verification of running root-level processes and sends a signed device checksum off to Google. If your device is rooted / has malware / etc. then it won't pass this check. There are no indicators to the end-user that something bad has happened to their phone except that any apps that use SafetyNet will no longer work - e.g. Pokemon Go, Android Pay and the PlayStore.

The phone will still be usable, you can still side-load apps etc. so this actually encourages end-users to continue to use a phone that's probably got malware.

Oh and you can still root a phone, then unroot it and it'll be happy again. This is a security layer that benefits the the app developers only, no more cheating at online games.

However - I would hope this change would give the vendors a real motivation to release updates. If Apps are "No longer compatible with this device" because they are not keeping the phone updated with new releases, then you'd have a real legal case to return the phone. Not so much in the US, but the EU has good consumer protection.

Jason.

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