"Today's NY Times delivers a great story of the development of the iPhone by Apple. It focuses on the events during the leadup to Steve Jobs taking the stage with shockingly buggy prototypes and pulling off the show that is now history. 'Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.' One of the big problems was the phone's connectivity. The man in charge of the iPhone's radios, Andy Grignon, had to deal with Jobs's anger when rehearsals didn't go well. Grignon said, 'Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, "You are [expletive] up my company," or, "If we fail, it will be because of you." He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.'"
"Earlier this week, a small helicopter drone tumbled out of the sky over midtown Manhattan, crashing to the sidewalk near Grand Central Station. On the way down it almost hit a businessman, who plucked out the video card from the wreckage and handed it over to a local television-news station. In the video, the drone (a Phantom Quadcopter) lifts off from what looks like an apartment terrace and buzzes its merry way toward some nearby skyscrapers, pausing for a few panoramic surveys of the Manhattan skyline. But the operator is clearly inexperienced, crashing the vehicle against the side of a building, and the flight lasts a mere three minutes before a final collision sends it to the street. Drone enthusiasts and engineers blamed the Quadcopter's poor performance on the pilot's possible reliance on GPS mode; when flying in an area crowded with tall buildings (and they don't get much taller or more crowded than in Manhattan) that block GPS signals, a vehicle can quickly think it's off-target and attempt to correct, leading to crashes. In theory, the FAA forbids the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles over crowded areas such as Manhattan, but that hasn't stopped any number of hobbyists from launching drones. And hobbyists aside, the industry for commercial drones is picking up: over the summer, the FAA approved a pair of small, unmanned aircraft systems for flight, and Airware (which builds autopilot computers for drones) recently accepted funding from Google Ventures. That's led legislators to begin exploring ways to regulate domestic drone use (particularly with regard to use by law enforcement), and it begs the question: should drones be regulated? And if so, how?"A similar incident just happened in Australia, where a small drone operated by an unknown owner crashed into the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Counter-terrorism officials felt they had to investigate, of course.
Ya Baby!The Guardian has released new documents from Edward Snowden showing how the U.S. National Security Agency targets internet anonymity tool Tor to gather intelligence. One of the documents, a presentation titled "Tor Stinks," bluntly acknowledges how effective the tool is: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time. With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand." (Other documents: presentation 1,presentation 2.) The NSA is able to extract information sometimes, though, and Bruce Schneier details what we know of that process in an article of his own. "The NSA creates 'fingerprints' that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. ... After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems." Schneier explains in a related article why it's important that we figure out exactly what the NSA is doing. "Given how inept the NSA was at protecting its own secrets, it's extremely unlikely that Edward Snowden was the first sysadmin contractor to walk out the door with a boatload of them. And the previous leakers could have easily been working for a foreign government."Ok...Listen up...Your much trendy iphone is not as secure as my android phone...no seriously!Privacy has triumphed! I want to carry a Trident!BP Disease..Don't eat shrimp anymore!Ok...be still and listen...not everyone is evil.
Why was the woman recently shot at the white house? An officer responds:
I'll explain from the perspective from the other side of the gun.
Officers are NOT trained to "shoot out tires" We are specifically told to never, ever try and shoot out someones tires. There's two major reasons why.
A) discharging our firearm is permitted only to control a "deadly force threat" (imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury to ourselves or others). If we shoot at someone, it better be because we reasonably believe that the subject WILL kill/hurt someone if we fail to act. We are trained to shoot until the threat is controlled. For us, that typically means shooting at a person's center of mass. why? You ask? Because center of mass is the largest target, meaning we are more likely to score a hit and most likely to stop that subjects deadly force threat the quickest. We cannot "shoot to wound",because, a wounded subject is still capable of killing or harming you or someone else. Shooting to wound is using "pain compliance" to establish control....but we are using a lethal force control option. WE are using a level of force that is likely to cause death or serious bodily injury, to address a threat that we feel can be managed through non-lethal means. The very act of using a firearm to "wound", negates your justification for using that level of force. We use lethal force to "stop" a deadly force threat. We are trained to stop the threat in the quickest, most effective, means.
B) we are responsible for every bullet that leaves our firearms. This includes richochets. If we're shooting at someone to "stop" their deadly force threat, and a bullet misses and injures a bystander, we are only responsible for the failure to make sure all our shots hit the correct target (whether that is because of a lack of range training, or improper equipment, whatever). Referencing my first point, if we shoot to "injure" their car....well we aren't stopping the threat. A flat tire doesn't stop a car, it doesn't make the driver less capable of getting out and opening fire. We would be using lethal force to control a resistance that we de facto acknowledge can be met with less lethal control. So NOW, that stray bullet or that richochet, has injured or killed an innocent bystander...when we had NO justification for using it in the first place. That's why we have things like tire strips..or tazers. Those are ways for us to flatten tires...or stop a threat, that are not "lethal force". Our failure to have access to less lethal control options is not justification for excessive force.
It is sad what happened to this woman. But honestly, you feel that her behavior was excusable? How was anything about what she did before, during, and after this video reasonable? Reasonable people do not drive into police barricades and strike officers trying to stop them. Reasonable people do not lead police on vehicle pursuits. Reasonable people do not ram police cars blocking them.
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