A University of Michigan study of 6.5 million car crashes will undoubtedly be the source of many tense discussions around the kitchen table if not Vegas comedy riffs, finding that an inordinate number ofaccidents happen when both drivers are women.
Insert your own tired women-are-bad-drivers comment here. And if you post this story on your Facebookpage, get ready for a commenta-palooza.
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What entrepreneurs of big businesses do is search for an unfulfilled need in the market, and fill it, often with a fancy new product. This is a great money making strategy,
If your laptop is ever lost or stolen, this security software will work hard to protect your precious data and help you recover the device.
Think quick; where’s your laptop right now? I bet you felt just a little twinge of worry until you remembered its location, right? Imagine how you’d feel if it was lost, misplaced, or stolen. How would you get it (and your data) back? How could you keep a thief from making evil use of private or corporate data stored on the laptop? We’ve rounded up a half-dozen products that aim to put your mind at ease.
A laptop antitheft product should keep your data safe, and keep strangers from using the computer. It should protect your private data and resist a thief’s attempts to disable its protection. On a laptop that’s merely lost, it should create a communication avenue for an honest finder to arrange the laptop’s return. And of course, if the laptop has truly been stolen it should help you recover it. Different products emphasize different goals. Here’s how they stack up.
Location, Location, Location
When you can’t find your laptop, the first thing you want to know is its current location. Most antitheft productsuse WiFi lookup to determine the laptop’s geolocation. They check nearby WiFi hotspots against a database, typically Google’s or Skyhook’s, to find out where the laptop is.
It’s also possible to roughly determine the device’s location based on the IP address of the network to which it’s connected. IP-based geolocation doesn’t have nearly the accuracy of the WiFi-based technology, though. Where WiFi can locate the device within a city block or better, simple IP geolocation can be off by miles.
Snuko Anti-Theft & Data Recovery Premium ($29.95/year direct, 2.5 stars) uses IP as a fallback if it can’t obtain a location using WiFi. That fallback proved important in testing, because at present Snuko’s WiFi geolocation isn’t fully functional on some XP-based systems. LoJack for Laptops by Absolute Software($39.99/year direct, 4.5 stars) uses only IP-based geolocation, meaning you can probably determine what city the laptop is in, but not much more. WiFi geolocation comes as part of LoJack’s premium package, which costs $20 more.
If you’re at all concerned about privacy, you’ll probably decide you don’t want the laptop maintaining a history of everywhere you go. You can protect your privacy by turning off the geolocation history until and unless the laptop goes missing. GadgetTrak Laptop Security ($34.95/year direct, 3 stars) offers a nice compromise. You can set it to display just the latest known location, without keeping a history. That way you’ll know a thief’s current location even before you remotely enable location history.
Stealth or Scare Tactics
Laptop Cop ($65 direct, 4 stars) and LoJack install in stealth mode, deliberately hiding their processes and leaving no visible evidence of their presence. Their aim is to covertly gather information about the thief without letting him know he’s under observation.
LaptopSentry 3.1 ($9.99 direct, 2.5 stars) and Laptop Superhero ($29.99/year direct, 2.5 stars) take quite the opposite approach. LaptopSentry sounds a loud alarm if a locked-but-running laptop is disconnected from its power cord. Laptop Superhero sounds a loud, whooping alarm when the owner remotely sends it a lockdown command.
When NASA’s space shuttle program was announced back in 1972, it was billed as a major advance — a key step in humanity’s quest to exploit and explore space.
The shuttle would enable safe, frequent and affordable access to space, the argument went, with flights occurring as often as once per week and costing as little as $20 million each. But much of that original vision didn’t come to pass.
Two of the program’s 134 flights have ended in tragedy, killing 14 astronauts in all. Recent NASA estimates peg the shuttle program’s cost through the end of last year at $209 billion (in 2010 dollars), yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.6 billion. And the orbiter fleet never flew more than nine missions in a single year.
The shuttle program is drawing to a close, with its last-ever mission — the STS-135 flight of Atlantis— slated to launch Friday (July 8). So now is as good a time as any to ask: Was it worth it? Or, put another way: Could NASA have found a better use for that $209 billion?
