Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s oft-rumored, Beats-based streaming music service may have more to offer artists than a big wad of cash. Tipsters for 9to5Mac claim that the service (reportedly called just “Apple Music”) will give artists the freedom to share things beyond th…

It used to be a huge problem when thieves would steal smartphones from their victims on the street. This is because security in phones back then wasn’t so good, but now thanks to fingerprint scanners and features like Activation Lock, and also built-in kill switches, smartphone theft is actually starting to go down.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for smartwatches, like the Apple Watch for instance, which is probably one of the more expensive smartwatches in the market at the moment and the most desired given how much in demand it is to the point where Apple can’t keep up. This was pointed out by the folks at iDownloadBlog who have expressed their incredulity at the fact that the wearable lacks similar security features that Apple’s iOS devices are enjoying, like Activation Lock for example.

Jeff Benjamin at iDownloadBlog even conducted a little experiment where he showed how easy it was to reset the Apple Watch, unpair it from his current phone, and pair it with a new phone that has a completely different Apple ID. In fact one could even bypass the passcode to wipe the watch. The upside is that if the thief is trying to get into your device, the passcode will protect it, but if they plan on wiping it and reselling it, then it’s pretty much useless.

One of things that they point out Apple could do is to remember the Apple ID used to pair with your iPhone, and when someone tries to unpair it or reset the device, the Apple ID password is required. That’s just one of the many possible security features Apple could consider, so hopefully this is something the Cupertino company is already thinking about.

Apple Watch’s Lack Of Security Makes It Ripe For Snatch Thieves , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

John Wooden is nothing short of a god worthy of worship on my college campus. Not only did he deliver ten national championships to UCLA over the course of twelve years, he also delivered a lifetime of words to lives by. Among his most famous sayings was a simple secret to success: “No whining, no complaining, no excuses.” But just last week as I passed his statue in front of our notorious basketball arena, I noticed something written in chalk below his figure: “It’s not whining. It’s fighting for something we should have had long ago — equality. #blacklivesmatter”

It should come as no surprise that racism is alive and well on my college campus, much like racism is alive and well in this country. But what makes this statement especially saddening is its directive at a college campus: a microcosm which in theory should be a beacon of progress and hope for future generations. Where difference is a point of celebration, and diversity leads to greater acceptance. This is not such a place. America is not yet such a place.

I see acts of judgement and exclusion every day, with little change from the time I started my tenure at UCLA four years ago. Take for instance our campus-wide elections for the university students association. Students meet in secret before campaigns are officially allowed to begin. Each party systematically vets potential candidates to gauge their electability in order to concoct a perfect slate. In the subsequent weeks, the candidates duke it out with each other by all means possible. And what always follows are more messages of hate, slander, racism, anti-Semitism and gay bashing than I would have ever expected. All for a petty political contest. Candidates are systematically attacked for that which simply should not matter. That which absolutely does not matter. I guess my point is that in a place where young people should be obeyed by thoughtful musings of a hopeful future, somehow reversions to prejudice, discrimination and hate are commonplace. And at a time when these individuals are at a critical juncture in their lives, so many are choosing the path that has been too often taken by this country’s forefathers.

Yet, this should come as no surprise. How could it when turning to the rest of the United States, where stories of prejudice are much worse and often much more violent. Reports on the television and in the newspaper are not magnifications of rare incidents. They are reflecting that which has been true since the beginning of our founding: the blatant exclusion and systematic degradation of minorities in America. There is nothing novel about racism in our history. Intolerance maintains a longevity and power unlike any other founding principle of America. It endures and it rules.

This is disheartening. No; this is tragedy. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” If ever I have seen a moral conflict so glaringly obvious, it is this. It is today when people are dying at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us. It is today when twenty-year-olds would rather target another person for his or her race than discuss issues that might help improve their educational system.

We are rioting in the streets, protesting for the same injustices that have plagued our nation for far too long. We are watching on the news, images of our brothers and sisters, friends and countrymen who do not stand alone in their need to be heard, their need to be answered. I say “we” because those people, those people are you and they are me. Baltimore is just as much my home as is the golden state. Those who feel slighted, betrayed, persecuted, villainized, targeted, murdered, forgotten by this society, have also been forgotten by my society.

I feel shame and sadness for the things I see. On the brink of entering the world and coming into my own, I feel a strong sense of duty to make right the wrongs that have persisted for far too long. I hope this is a feeling shared by my peers. For we are the ones who will inherit the status quo, and we have the choice and the obligation to change it. We have the opportunity to start the conversation, to move the debate, and act decisively.

So what are we to do? What is the answer? The best response, the only response, is one that no longer lingers in the cowardly and ignorant shadows of neutrality. Taking a stance is the first move in any direction forward. No matter how big or how small, there needs to be a moment of impact where refusal of the present meets a vision for the future.

We must consciously choose to see our country as it is: a nation where color, income, class, and education are indicators of exclusionary, prejudicial acts. There is an undercurrent of racism and hate and as it boils to the surface, we must acknowledge this truth in order to fix it. Listen to the messages that speak out. They are not whines; they are cries, calls, demands for a greater society. One that seeks to represent and benefit the sum of all, not a portion of some.

We need to elect representatives who know this truth, and who want to be agents of change. We must reject status quo politics that allow institutional racism, that keep minorities unemployed and underprivileged, and that allow innocent Americans to die. Our leaders should be seeking policies of greater inclusion and representation. And as citizens, we must demand more for ourselves and for each other.

I want to thank whomever wrote on the statue of John Wooden. Yours is a message that should be heard and received. Moreover, yours is a message that deserves a respectful response in the form of action. Action, from us all.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Start with a failing economy. Throw in a team of inexperienced politicians, people in fact who had spent their careers deliberately avoiding official politics. Add a population with the highest possible expectations. And, as a wild card, introduce an international community that was not offering very much in the way of financial assistance.

This was the situation in Poland in September 1989 when Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist prime minister in the region in more than 40 years. Considering the odds against Poland at that time, it’s remarkable that the country survived and, eventually, prospered.

Ryszard Holzer is a writer and journalist. When we first met in 1989, he was working on an underground newspaper, which remained underground for a while even after Solidarity was legalized. “We were like that Japanese soldier who emerged from the jungles of the Philippines 25 years after World War II ended,” he told me with a laugh when we met up again in Warsaw in August 2013.

After 1989, he tried tabloid journalism but never could become accustomed to the new focus on celebrities. He spent a decade at the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, and then became a business writer. He currently works for the Polish Newsweek.

At the end of our wide-ranging conversation, he identified three mistakes that the Polish government made in that critical first year of transition.

“I didn’t understand back then, 23 years ago, how different and contradictory the interests of different groups could be,” Holzer told me. “I much more believed in the common interest. This was the great mistake, or maybe it was not a mistake, of Bronek Geremek when he was the head of Solidarity’s parliamentary group (OKP). In early 1990, it was clear that OKP would fall apart. And Bronek was trying to do everything possible to keep it together as one body because he believed that it was his duty to provide support for the Balcerowicz reforms. He didn’t really believe that the differences were anything but the ambitions of the different members of the group. He didn’t believe in contradictory interests. He treated them only as ambitions.”

The Solidarity camp fell apart, and it was not an easy breakup. “From my perspective today,” Holzer continued:

I would say to Bronek: try to negotiate an amicable divorce between the different groups. Tell these people to make their own parties and then create a coalition. And then they can negotiate interests and views. This probably would have been less effective from the point of view of supporting the Balcerowicz reforms, but probably there would have been less animosity among the politicians coming from the Solidarity bench. It was like a marriage in which the couple hated each other, but they also had a child — the Balcerowicz plan — who was close to taking an exam. The couple hated each other but didn’t want to divorce for fear of disrupting the child and the exam preparation.

The second mistake concerned the justice system. “Balcerowicz would never tell you that he made a mistake,” Holzer said.

We meet from time to time these days when I need to ask him something important. Balcerowicz is not a person you ask, ‘What are your mistakes?’ But he knows that the biggest mistake back then was that there was no real reform of the justice system. He didn’t know then how important the justice system is for the economy. He knows it now. Back then was the only moment when you could do this kind of reform, when you can create a new system. We only had a half a year to do that reform. And we didn’t do it. That was a big mistake.

And the third mistake was the educational system. “Schools were reformed only something like 12 years ago,” he lamented. “For the first 10 or 11 years, of course there were new programs, but teachers were very poorly paid.”

There are still major problems in Poland, he pointed out. But problems are normal. The politicians, however, are not addressing them. “I’m not panicked about the future,” Holzer concluded. “We still have quite smart people here and quite a good economy. So I don’t expect civil war or the country falling apart. But I expect a political and economic crisis at some level in Poland.”

The Interview

You started out in the student movement?

I was too old for that. The Independent Students’ Association (NZS) was born in 1980, already after my studies. I’ve been engaged with the underground cultural life back in the 1970s — as a student and emerging poet/writer. I finished my studies in 1979, and then I was conscripted into the army. This was a story in itself. In the army, I was a deputy head of a motorized unit at a huge military training area in the northwest of Poland. It was August 1980, and we expected and were afraid that we would be used for suppressing the strikes. There was gossip that we would be sent to Torun to suppress the strikes there.

I remember the night we were at the camp, sleeping in tents. I was drinking with one of the officers, a captain as far as I remember, talking and drinking late into the night. We were both terribly afraid.

He said, “Ryszard, what am I going to do?”

I said, “I don’t know, but I’m not going to kill people.”

He said, “Okay, but maybe our choice will be to kill or be killed.” It might sound funny these days, but it was not funny at all. We were very afraid.

You were quite young.

I was 25. I left the army after a year —

Nothing happened in August 1980?

No, nothing happened. We were all conformists. Some of us were a little less conformist, some a little bit more. I too was a conformist. I was not talking to everyone in the army – it was not like civil life where there was a strong group of similar-thinking people — about what I thought about the fucking Communists and the Soviet Union. I was also afraid. Jacek Kuron was not a conformist, and nor were the people in KOR (the Workers Defense Committee, later KSS KOR, the Committee for Social Self-Defense). But the majority of people were. This captain I was drinking with, the head of the company, he was a little bit more conformist than I was, and the political officer was a little bit more conformist than the captain.

The political officer got his instructions from Warsaw. Every morning, he met with the company and told us what was “really” going on. This was in August. Every day, his instructions were more and more different from reality, from what was reported on TV, for example — because his instructions were sent from Warsaw with a delay of about a week. After a week, he came to us and said, “You know guys, I have these instructions of what to tell you. But it completely doesn’t make sense.” It was completely different from what appeared in the official newspaper. He gave up. “Just read the newspapers,” he told us, “I’m not going to discuss this with you.”

Me and some other guy, another university graduate, we were meeting with soldiers in some remote place. We were talking with them about what was really going on in our opinion. We were making counter-propaganda, so to say. A guy who had been a radio officer — each company had a person like that — he took an antenna to the top of the tree in order to get Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. In August 1980, it looked like the army was going to fall apart. But later on, more problems appeared and Party control over the army became strengthened.

After the army I went back to Warsaw and worked for Tygodnik Solidarnosc (Solidarity Weekly). This was my first permanent job. I was 26. I worked in the Letters department. In those remote times, people used to write letters to the newspaper. We got something like a thousand letters a day. It was unbelievable. There were 15 people working in the letters department, reading these letters all the time. I don’t know what happened to those letters, whether they still exist some place. They would be a very interesting document of those days.

What were your responsibilities?

We were just reading the letters and answering the letters, or passing the letters to the county commission of Solidarity or to the different authors or other people. We were deciding what to do with the letters. After a few months, I became responsible for deciding which letters to publish and then editing those letters. The last page of Tygodnik Solidarnosc was a page of letters from workers, scientists, teachers.

Do any letters stick out in your memory because of how unusual they were?

They were usually comments about the political situation or proposals for how to change the situation. Plenty of the letters were about the situation in the state enterprises, complaints about bosses or the quality of life, that there was too much work or very badly organized work. Some were about politics, but not all. Self-censorship was still rather strong. People very rarely wrote about relations with the Soviet Union. There were some anti-Semitic letters, but very few. The same with nationalist letters. Most people were writing about what was going on in their factory, in their town, the relations between nomenklatura and normal people. Also plenty of complaints about lack of food, lack of apartments.

Before going to the Army, I was engaged in the underground movement in Warsaw but less as a student and more as a young writer. I was a member of the Writers Union, the official organization of writers, where there was a branch for young writers. We were not doing anything very important. It started with different open letters. Every month, there was another letter to the Sejm or to the first secretary of the Communist Party, complaining about how Polish history was treated or how people were treated. It started for me in 1976, with a letter of protest over the suppression of the worker strikes in Ursus and Radom. The workers were beaten, treated awfully, fired from their jobs. I knew who was gathering signatures for the letter. I was very much afraid of signing that letter. So I avoided the people who would ask me to sign. But after a week or so, one of the other students from my group asked me, “Ryszard, maybe you will sign this letter of protest?” I didn’t want to sign, but I signed. And I was convinced that the next week I would be sent to Siberia. But nothing happened. So I signed another letter and another letter. After a while I was interrogated by the secret police, but it didn’t seem very serious. It was routine. They didn’t like their work, those guys, and they were bored.

I was also circulating various underground magazines and books. I went to the army. I worked for Solidarity newspaper. I also worked for Solidarity’s cultural weekly. Then Martial Law came and I didn’t have this work any more. I was one of the editors of the weekly of one of the underground papers — Tygodnik Wojenny (Martial Law was stan wojenny). We created this newspaper, then with other friends we also started the other one — cultural magazine called Wyzwanie (Challenge). Culture was very important — it’d been our weapon. Then my daughter was born.

It was not that I was so very afraid. I lost my faith. I was completely sure that it would be forever like this, forever and forever and forever. When I look back to the Martial Law period, and those first years after Martial Law, I don’t remember the sun or any warm days. I remember only winter and snow and autumn and rain and everything was grey and boring. This was the time that I really thought about emigration. But to make this decision about emigration, you have to have some power in yourself to decide that you’re going to do something. I didn’t have even this power. I was somehow broken. Martial Law broke all of us in some way. There were people who were broken by police, by agents. I was broken because of my internal lack of will. I thought it would always be like this. I would have my daughter and my wife and my circle of friends. I was organizing poetry readings, prose readings, and exhibitions at a church every two weeks. So there was some cultural activity. I was writing. I left Tygodnik Wojenny and Wyzwanie. I was distributing underground papers and books. I had a scholarship from the underground to work on my literature. I was doing some translations. I worked as an interpreter for some Western journalists. I wrote some poems, some books. But when I look back to the 1980s, I feel that this time was passing by just like water through my fingers. I don’t really know what was I was doing those years.

It’s when you published your book of poems.

Yes, my first book of poems was prepared before Martial Law and was published in 1982 or 1983 officially. Even during Martial Law books were published. The same year, I published a book of underground poems. In 1987, I published a book of fairy tales. And in 1987 or 1988, I published a book of short stories. I was also working on my novel, which I never finished. I read it 20 years ago and threw it away because it was awful. In the 1980s, I decided in my head that I would not be a journalist any more. I would become a writer. But I was probably not talented enough to become a writer.

Then the Round Table came, and I still didn’t realize how important it was. During the Round Table, I was still broken, according to my self-definition. Just before the Round Table talks started, but after they’d been announced, the same people I’d been working with before asked me if I would join them in another underground paper, Przeglad Wiadomosci Agencyjnych. So I joined them. It was still in the underground. It was funny. Even after Mazowiecki became prime minister and there was an official Solidarity daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, we were still doing our underground weekly. We were like that Japanese soldier who emerged from the jungles of the Philippines 25 years after World War II ended.

Do you think this underground newspaper is still going on today?

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

According to multiple reports, investigators believe that Amtrak Regional Train 188 — the train that derailed in Philadelphia Tuesday night, killing at least seven people and injuring more than 200 — was speeding when it jumped the tracks. Just before it derailed, the train was rounding a curve where the speed limit was 50 mph. As it took that curve, Amtrak Regional 188 was traveling over 100 mph.

The National Transportation Safety Board announced that information Wednesday. But Michael Noda, a Philadelphia transportation blogger, already knew it. Some time prior to the announcement, Noda had used surveillance video and basic arithmetic to show the train was going much, much faster than it should have been. The Huffington Post confirmed Noda’s methods in a phone interview, and replicated his arithmetic.

Here’s how it works: On Noda’s site, Sic Transit Philadelphia, he analyzed video obtained by CNN of the train rounding a bend immediately before the crash. Looking at the time on the surveillance video, Noda counted 4.5 seconds between the first car coming into view and the last car passing out of the frame.

Based on Noda’s identification of the train’s eight cars — an ACS-64 locomotive at the front, followed by seven Amfleet I passenger cars — he was able to calculate the length of the entire train. The combined length of a 67-foot ACS-64 and seven 85-foot Amfleet I cars is 662 feet. That means the train traveled 662 feet in 4.5 seconds.

To calculate how fast the train was going in miles per hour, Noda converted feet per second to miles per hour. First, to convert seconds to an hour, he found the ratio of 4.5 seconds to the number of seconds in an hour. Since there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, a 4.5-second interval occurs 800 times in an hour.

Then, to find out how many feet a train going at the same rate would travel in an hour, he multiplied the distance traveled in 4.5 seconds — 660 feet — by 800, the number of times that a 4.5-second interval occurs in an hour. This means that a train traveling at a rate of 660 feet every 4.5 seconds will travel 529,600 feet in an hour.

Finally, Noda divided the total feet per hour — 529,600 — by the number of feet in a mile, which is 5,280. He found that the train was going just over 100 mph.

Noda, who lives in Francisville, a North Philadelphia neighborhood not far from the site of the crash, started writing about public transportation when he moved to Philadelphia from suburban Ohio several years ago. Coming from a place without any public transit, Noda said, moving to Philadelphia was an “eye-opening experience.”

Now Noda advocates for public transportation investment at the local level. He is on the advisory board of The 5th Square, a political action committee devoted to “smart policy for transportation, public space, land use, and better governance in Philadelphia,” according to its website.

For Noda, though, transportation blogging is just a hobby. He makes his living playing professional poker. And Tuesday’s crash notwithstanding, Noda says the odds are still very much in support of train travel.

“Rail is still incredibly safe on a statistical basis,” he said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.