There's actually a panic button in the app which resets to an innocuous set of stock photography. It's not perfect, but it's better than being caught in a situation that you're describing.
No, for power reasons and the way that bluetooth works you have to expressly put the app in sync mode with someone nearby, which isn't ideal but is a good start. That being said anyone can post anything so there's certainly the option for adversaries to propagate their own information.
Yeah if I remember correctly the built in Bluetooth file transfer actually won't send an apk, which was definitely surprising to us too. We could send it over our custom app, but that's the problem - what we're trying to send is the custom app itself.
Yeah exactly, and this seems to be the reason that android doesn't allow apks to be sent over Bluetooth, so we haven't really found a solution so far unless you count swapping SD cards.
This is a great point. We were trying to figure out a way for people to first pass the app between devices locally so it could spread and be used in a situation where the internet was down, but we haven't figured anything out there yet. Maybe your idea of figuring out a use for it before that situation arises is a better idea.
No actually I don't think we do, but I'll check since that would obviously be a big problem. If you get a sec would you open an issue for us so we remember? Thanks for pointing this out.
I'm not exactly sure how the adhoc stuff works on android but there's a specific api for it which is usually used for local gaming. In any case the use case for this app is that the Internet is shut down in your location so you probably don't want to connect to it anyway.
I was talking a little bit about this in a comment down below, but android just added adhoc wifi networking (in v4.1 maybe?) so it's not too widespread. iOS has had it for a while, but the app is currently android only, which seems to be the most appropriate OS for the project anyway.
Either way it'd be great to support it for those power reasons you mention and for how much faster it would be to sync.
We are considering as a next step having signed messages so you know at least two messages came from the same person. We want to maintain anonymity to protect posters, but it'd be interesting to know that posts were at least coming from the same person. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about though, sounds like you're more meaning person to person private messaging right?
The app is Android only at the moment, so there's that, but also it actually doesn't use bluetooth file exchange, just connects via bluetooth and sends a data stream which can include encoded photos. Actually on iPhone it would be a little easier because P2P wifi connections have been standard for a few OS versions (they're new in Android), so the connection would be a little easier to establish and way faster.
I also didn't realize that vine was making real movies with sound, thought it was just animated gifs then someone turned on a blender in a clip and I freaked out, hah.
I think the eBook marketing is right on the borderline of what makes sense to have on the site. "I made $3K in 2 weeks marketing diet shakes" would clearly be over the line because it's not a technical effort. Writing an eBook is somewhere closer to what the site seems to be about, but not that close. Clearly this isn't a site about any business, so just the fact that it's an "e"book makes it appropriate? If I wrote a successful hardcover book that wouldn't seem too appropriate for example. I agree it's a grey area, but thought it was worth the discussion to find out what everyone thought.
You definitely have a right to vote, I just wanted to let the community open a discussion on what the focus of the site is. If a bunch of newer users were upvoting sports news I think this would be an easy conversation, this isn't sports news but it's worth talking about.
I have a hard time describing any license that limits your rights as one promoting freedom. I never understood why the FSF wasn't more behind the BSD style licenses.
This is sheer insanity to me. I just don't understand why comp sci isn't taught as a fundamental course like math. Do you have a sense why nobody was enrolling? Was it seen as too hard, too nerdy, something else?
This is a great point, I didn't consider how many people got turned off a computer right from the start because of an unfriendly interface like a basic prompt.
Interesting - do you remember at all how you first got into programming? How did you even find out it was an option? And what was the first thing you tried to make?
BTW, I'm the OP and I'm 38, I started with Logo on Apple II's at the Library, but I'm wondering if there's something more we should be doing to help kids get into this stuff.
Well put. However, I would argue that we should be attempting to reach the kids who might not realize they could or would like to be future engineers. The problem with the book analogy is that it's very obvious how you would make a book, all the pieces all there in front of you. It's not obvious how you might make an app for the iPad, none of the requirements are present. When I show kids how they're made, they're generally amazed.
Finally, I'm not sure we should trust our educators without question, this stuff changes very quickly and very few of them are programmers. In the 30 years since I've been programming there doesn't seem to be much change in how programming is taught in schools, so it might be time for a rethink.
I don't think the prompt itself is the thing, it's the perception that the machine is under their control. In these kinds of things perceptions seem to matter a lot, especially to kids.
In case anyone is in a position to hire programmers and cares about treating creative people fairly, we have an open source Hacker Employment Contract: https://www.docracy.com/hackercontract that tries to fairly handle stuff like IP created after hours.
Every time one of these rover photos gets posted I find myself scrolling around the high res version looking at rocks for a while. Amazing that this is coming from Mars - seems worth it to not to let this kind of thing become routine.
My guess is that if you achieve sustainable output beyond breakeven then it's a more reasonable engineering challenge to scale that up. The key here being sustainable, none of these technologies are too close to that yet it seems.
Am I correct in thinking that previous rocket designs don't have any redundancy built in? This seems like a big improvement in reliability but I'm not super familiar with other rocket designs.