I don’t know about the statement made by Santos Rios, manager of a Cellular Image outlet off Saratoga Avenue in San Jose , “if cell phones weren’t safe for you, they wouldn’t let us sell them.” There are plenty of things “they” let people sell that are later found to be unsafe. But we don’t need everything we do in life watched over by the government.
from MercuryNews.com -
SAN FRANCISCO — From banning plastic shopping bags to making homeowners recycle their banana peels and coffee grinds, San Francisco has often led the way in writing the most — take your choice — cutting-edge or over-the-top laws in the land.
Now the city’s going after killer cell phones.
By becoming the first town in America to require retailers to post radiation-emission information beside every make and model of phone they sell, city supervisors have once again dropped down a rabbit hole of controversial public policy.
Smoking bans in restaurants are one thing (although I don’t care what people say…the new ban in my area appears to be hurting some businesses). But when I read coffeehouses are finally beginning to ban Wi Fi in order to sell more coffee (which is the point of a coffee shop) I was disappointed (they’ve been complaining for about five years, so this is nothing new).
What really gets me is that they are pushing the art of conversation along with selling coffee. It’s not just about taking up space at tables. And it looks like it’s perfectly fine to come in and sit down with a briefcase and old-fashioned notebook of paper – but not a laptop.
Looks like until more shared workspace buildings are opened up (when money falls from the sky), office nomads will have to buy their cup of Joe at the drive-thru and head home to work in solitude.
from the Los Angeles Times -
Housed in an old San Francisco warehouse, Four Barrel Coffee — with its vintage record player, 53-year-old coffee roasting machine, tables hewn from recycled wood and wall of mounted boar heads — calls one of the world’s most wired cities home.
But don’t expect to get an Internet connection there.
[...]
Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, flipping the switch to lure customers. But now some owners are pulling the plug. They’re finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line. Others want to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into “Matrix”-like zombie shacks where people type and don’t talk.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Ndamukong Suh isn’t a generous guy. I just find this so self-indulgent. If communications and videos need to be sent to players individually and on-the-go versus at home on a computer, or in the locker room on one large screen, why not via an Iphone? I repeat, “one large screen” as opposed to this,
Think about that for a few seconds. Picture a recruit stepping into the Huskers’ locker room for the first time and seeing the lights dim while 123 iPads come on with a recap of Jared Crick’s biggest hits, Prince Amukamara’s pivotal interception, Niles Paul’s acrobatic catch or Alex Henery’s dramatic field goal.
As much as I love technology, this whole concept just makes me snicker. I’m not sure what the “compliance reasons” are…Will the guys lose the Ipads if they aren’t attached to their lockers? How about attaching a chain and tire to each one? Bottom line, these are lockers for crying out loud.
from Huskers.com -
When Nebraska recruited Ndamukong Suh, one thing that really captivated a serious pre-engineering student from Portland, Ore., was a mock-up of what players’ lockers might look like in a future locker room.
It wasn’t his name or his picture that charmed Big Suh. It was the computer that would be built in to the top of his locker.
Well, the technological sweet spot of reliability and affordability never materialized, and Suh never forgot.
Who is this person? Obviously someone who has something very important to say (at least to a specific faction). A high school drop out. Quite young…only 27. What’s the buzz about Chinese blogger Han Han?
from Brietbart -
A top-earning author with a dozen titles under his belt, Han was named by TIME magazine as among the world’s 100 most influential people, grouping him alongside US President Barack Obama and pop star Lady Gaga.
He said he had also recently rejected an invitation to promote a commercial product on his blog with the reward of 10,000 yuan (1,500 US dollars) for each word he writes — with no word limit.
“Some people are beneficiaries of a flawed judicial system. Some are beneficiaries of a chaotic society. I just happen to have benefited from telling the truth,” he recently told reporters at the Hong Kong Book Fair.
Han conceded that technological advances have played a vital role in his success.
“In the Internet era, once an article is posted online, there is nothing one can do to deny its existence,” Han said, referring to the fact that his readers always managed to copy contentious articles from his blog to their own sites — before they were taken down by China’s Internet police.
There always seems to besome warning of some type of revolution on the horizon. Here’s a new one. I don’t know if I would call it a “revolution.”
Is it a bird? Is it a plane (well, sort of…how about a drone…on U.S. soil)?
In the coming years, law enforcement agencies will seek to useUAVs to police borders, control crowds, track criminals, detect illegal narcotics activities, and spot crime. Other potential civilian uses include mineral and energy exploration, agricultural surveys, communications relay, and wildfire monitoring. The revolution is coming.
from Social Science Research Network, Rapp, Geoffrey Christopher, Unmanned Aerial Exposure: Civil Liability Concerns Arising from Domestic Law Enforcement Employment of Unmanned Aerial Systems. North Dakota Law Review, Vol. 85, pp. 623-648, 2010; University of Toledo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-08
Thinking about making a business face the music on Facebook? You may have the urge to post a legitimate opinion or complaint, but the loss of business that may result could lead to a lawsuit that really makes you grumble.
fron the New York Times -
After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge.
Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the company.
T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.
By the end of next year it should be pretty routine. It’s expected 2 out of 3 airline passengers will be treated to head-to-toe scans. So if you are a regular traveler, while it’s a small amount of radiation you will be exposed to, it could be a pretty consistent amount. Should we believe the government when we are told it’s perfectly safe to be exposed to this whole body, low dose radiation? is there a potential for harm for any group of people? What’s the alternative…driving?
from NPR -
“Many people will approach this as, ‘Oh, it must be safe, the government has thought about this and I’ll just submit to it,’” says David Agard, a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But there really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk.”
Agard and several of his UCSF colleagues recently wrote a letter to John Holdren the president’s science adviser, asking for a more thorough look at the risks of exposing all those airline passengers to X-rays. The other signers are John Sedat, a molecular biologist and the group’s leader; Marc Shuman, a cancer specialist; and Robert Stroud, a biochemist and biophysicist.
“Ionizing radiation such as the X-rays used in these scanners have the potential to induce chromosome damage, and that can lead to cancer,” Agard says.
It was the result of “inadvertently” using some bad code in their Street View program. Possible? Of course. You have to wonder what Google would want with bits and pieces of Wi-Fi information Street Viewpicked up from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Millions of pages of that data were collected.
There are some neighborhoods of people whopurposely share Wi-Fi. And if you tap into community hot spots such as coffee houses, libraries or airports you are wide open to a similar instance of what “inadvertently” happened with Google. But you already new that.
Home or away, it’s probably safe to say, nothing is really secure anymore. But you should at least make your home Wi-Fi network password secured anyway.
from Mercury News -
For the past four years, Google has been reaching into unprotected Wi-Fi networks in homes and businesses in more than 30 countries and retaining data about people’s online activities, a practice that the company said Friday was inadvertent and has been stopped.
[...]
Google said it would delete the data as quickly as possible, and promised to enlist an independent “third party” — perhaps a government agency or other independent group — to review the circumstances behind the breach. But the admission provoked concerns from some privacy advocates.
