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How do you patrol a beat remotely? How do you conduct an orchestra remotely? How do you mug someone remotely?

Drone, robot, robot. Wait, that's about a robot getting mugged ;) But seriously, it's only a matter of time. Battle bots are a thing. With the right one, you could mug someone. Or perhaps just a robotic mobile gun with a hopper on top into which your victim deposits their valuables.

Not everyone has jobs programming. Most jobs have to be done in person.

Service industry jobs have to be done in person. You can't repair someone's washing machine remotely. Yet. But it is inevitable that just as cars are designed to be assembled by robots today, all kinds of things will be designed to be maintained by robots tomorrow. If your appliances were designed such that all the goodies could be accessed from the front of the machine and manipulated easily by robots, then they could conceivably be repaired first by telepresence, and later by an autonomous robot. A car designed to be assembled by robots could also be shipped to a central facility (ironically, probably on a train) and repaired by robots.

This is the problem. You want to know why people turn these alerts off? Because they get woken up at 3AM and get told to look out for a gray car that's in the other side of the state. Yeah, sure, I might do that. Or I might turn the alerts off entirely and then miss one I might have been able to help on.

Beyond that, the effectiveness of Amber alerts is highly debatable. According to Engaget, less than 5% of mobile Amber alerts led to a rescued child. Even then, it's unclear that any Amber alert has ever actually saved a child. The majority of Amber alerts are issued in family custody cases, where the child's life was never in any real danger. Vocativ has a good (but broken) set of infographics about how effective they are.

Part of the problem is that the alert is too short (limited to 90 characters) and can't include links to details or images of the child of vehicle they want people to look out for.

There are ways to fix the Amber alert system - let them link to details and include pictures of the child, don't sound them if the phone is silenced because that just gets people to turn them off - but adding them to Netflix and Spotify won't help. (Although it's also unclear this bill includes Amber alerts - it may just be things like hurricane or flash flood warnings. Which seems like things you'd want to deal with at the device level rather than Netflix or Spotify.)

that too, but it's also wrong link because it's fucking bloomberg, who thinks having javascript disabled or rejecting cookies is a 'terms of service violation'. fuck 'em. search engines exist. they are not the only source for news or 'news'.

here's some noscript friendly alternative sources...

https://arstechnica.com/inform...

https://nypost.com/2018/07/05/...

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

any of these will let you read the article with noscript and adblock active.

captcha: blocked

That's just not how it went. And in any case, physical limits are hardly preventing PS Now from finding success and getting good reviews-- though people still say you're way better off with ethernet than wifi presently. Even that isn't a fundamental physical limit.

Onlive scoring good (not perfect) reviews for game performance in 2010-2011, as demonstrated below, with much worse than current consumer internet connections... is evidence that we're not up against physical limits. But it was an awful deal, and that + the Microsoft litigation killed them. After the fire sale of assets the service was indeed awful, from what I understand.

Top 3 reviews of found googling the words onlive 2011:

https://www.engadget.com/2010/...
> With an up-to-18Mbps AT&T U-Verse connection in San Jose, California, we found OnLive games loaded as quickly as on console -- sometimes much quicker -- and were actually quite playable. The controller never felt quite as responsive as that of a dedicated console nor the images quite as crisp, but we'd say that most of the time the overall experience was only slightly behind what we expect, only bogged down by the occasional annoying stutter. Frantic first-person shooters and driving games weren't as accurate as we like, but over the course of a couple days we adjusted to the mild lag, racking up plenty of kills, scoring the occasional headshot and drifting around some fairly tight corners as well. In Prince of Persia, a game that can require fairly precise timing in combat, we were still able to parry foes' swords and execute tricky jumps with a little bit of forethought, and a multiplayer game of Unreal Tournament III was intriguingly balanced -- if slightly laggy -- thanks to the fact that all players had 0 ping to the (virtual) host server.

https://www.pcgamer.com/onlive...
> And yet streaming from the net via OnLive is remarkably playable. Obviously it feels a bit sluggish compared with playing on your own native hardware, but for many games, especially those designed with laggy console controllers in mind, including the likes of Arkham Asylum and Human Revolution, it's far from unpleasant.

http://www.businessinsider.com...
> The game had minimal loading times, and while the graphics weren't as crystal clear as on a video game console (because of OnLive's compression technology), the level of detail was pretty amazing. It looks just as good as watching Netflix streaming. Controls originally felt a little delayed, but after a few minutes I felt right at home. I wanted to notice latency and laggy controls (due to my input getting beamed to the over the web, then a response getting beamed back), but I didn't find any in this game.

Why I wanna fuck around with two cameras, when I can have FIVE?

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability.

And what behavior is that?

Apple didn't intentionally "brick" anything. It's not reasonable to expect them to support 3rd party displays which they neither designed nor vetted for their products.

Except that Apple have also done this with refurbished displays eg where the glass has cracked, but the underlying electronics are fine so the gladd was replaced
It's also been proven when a display was swapped from one fully working iphone6 to another working iphone6

This ain't auto parts.

Fake Auto parts can cause serious injury or even death
Personally I'd prefer to use a 3rd party part in my phone than my car. I'm far less likely to have a life changing injury from my phone

How in the world did this make it to production without SIL/MIL/HIL testing?

dSpace sells HIL benches specifically to test ADAS

Personalization is also on the cards. Alexa for Hospitality will eventually allow guests to temporarily connect their Amazon account to the Echo in their room so they can play their own music from services including Amazon Music and Spotify, or listen to audiobooks via Audible. When they check out, their account will be automatically disconnected from the device.

What could go wrong? And it's not like Alexa will still work when you're out of the room and housekeeping is there, etc... (sigh)

If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 1 2.

Technical legal merits aside... and yes I think the Supreme Court will send this back to the lower courts because the plaintiffs should have standing to sue, but the crux of the issue is whether this is good or bad for consumers.

And it is clearly bad for consumers to allow Apple to continue to monopolize their ecosystem from top to bottom. Apple is too big for that now. This has or inevitably will lead to stagnation in the marketplace, higher costs for consumers, less choice already. It is the classic situation of bad for consumers and bad for the free market that drives anti-trust laws.

If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 1 2.

I forgot who but, somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy.

You make good points. I however think otherwise. For example, I think Trump's rollback of Obama's financial regulations that were designed to abate another 2007 - 2008 crash will put us in even more danger. As I watch the stock market soar, I can't get the word 'bubble' out of my mind.

...We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them...

Admittedly, some do think it's a good idea to invest mostly in a single stock or industry, but I don't think that's a good idea for fossil fuels; the writing is on the wall. Diversifying your stock portfolio has always been a good idea, anyway.

Before Trump, the solar industry was booming. The fastest and largest growing job market was in renewable energy, specifically solar (1). Trump has seriously curtailed this growth with tariffs and elimination of tax credits, while at the same time, Trump has repealed rules and promoted coal, shale oil and fracking. As a result, oil production is up, and it has become much less affordable for business and home owners do go solar (2). Nonetheless, I find it telling, and perhaps foretelling, that the oil industry isn't happy about Trump's steel tariffs, NAFTA spats, and other policies (3). Something's not right; something smells and just seems rotten. And as the Ruskies say, a fish rots from the head down. But I digress.

Even with this turnabout, solar and renewable energy will soon be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels, and in some cases are cheaper now (4). I suspect that a few years after the US becomes the world's leading crude oil producer (5), solar and renewables will begin to surge and eventually dominate. Cheaper is better for the average consumer and business alike, which is better for the economy, and so the marketplace will abide. Eventually. Best to divest your fossil fuel investments before then. At least diversify while you still can.

BTW, some say fusion reactors are economically viable now (6). It may be true, but I expect it will take some 20 years before they come online. Such is the nature of the beast. Eventually my money will be on them. After all, cheaper is better.

(1) http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/2...

(2) https://ntknetwork.com/u-s-oil...

(3) https://www.politico.com/story...

(4) https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

http://energyinnovation.org/20...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

(5) http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/0...

(6) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-...

First, TCL+Blackberry=Blackberry mobile.

Blackberry mobile is one of the few android makers (if not the only one) which assigns a crytpo key *in hardware* to each device to protect it from tampering in the field. They do not use a Vanilla linux kernel, instead opting for a Hardened linux.

Running Snoopsnitch reveals a very, very green field, meaning that all the patches are "really" applied. And not like some other android phones, which report a patch level, but in reality do not apply the fixes...

It also has an app called DTEK, which lets you see in depth what your apps are up to.

More info in this old but still relevant article:

https://www.engadget.com/2015/...

Of course, if you do not want a PKB, then you are equaly (or more) secure, and have a longer SW support with an iPhone.

here's a real life example of what can happen https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

Steve Jobs is winding fast in his grave. That's bigger than anything from any other vendor. Courage?

When I needed a cheap ass phone a couple of years ago, I bought a Blu with a 7" screen off Amazon for about $100. It also replaced my tablet that my son broke.

At any rate, it was ridiculously large and I eventually broke the screen when helping someone move.

I do miss reading on that phone though. It was the size of a paperback.

Steve Jobs is winding fast in his grave. That's bigger than anything from any other vendor. Courage?

Expect more performance hits once this is patched.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

Nothing new on the suspension front since the introduction of the Citroen DS.

False. There are two new things actually being put on vehicles: the magnetorheological damper, and multimatic dssv. In the not-too-far future, we will be using dampers that generate electricity, which should also open up some new options for tunability. It's also possible to have regenerative suspension using hydraulics, but that approach is unlikely to see production now that every automaker is planning to electrify basically every vehicle in the future. If you're going to have a battery with a high charge/discharge rate onboard anyway, you don't need to fool around with hydraulics.

Blame apples large phones on apple following the leader.

https://www.engadget.com/2014/04/06/apple-consumers-want-what-we-dont-have/

Never mind that Chevy is going to be shipping production cars without a steering wheel next year.

A little ahead of yourself there, Sparky. Chevy is petitioning for that. Note the very first sentence in that article is "If the Department of Transportation grants GM's latest Safety Petition."

The point is not that they don't care at all about sexual abuse of minors, because of course they do, but they also have a (not so) hidden agenda against consensual adult sex work, which is why they made the law so much broader than it needed to be. Here is some reading on this from sex blogger Violet Blue. As others have also noted, this is just part of a bigger bipartisan war on sex that also places porn in the firing line.

rally2xs pointed out:

"Of course with electric cars, no more "road trip" vacations or driving the kids off to college because it can only go 100 to 200 miles on a charge and then it takes 8 hours to recharge."

Maybe not:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

The problem with that story is that we've heard about a godzillion such "potential breakthroughs" over the past 10 or so years - but not one working, commercially-available product based on them has come to market. And I'm pretty sure that, if one was anywhere near ready for real-world application testing there'd be a continuous drumbeat of breathless stories from all the usual sources heralding its imminent arrival.

All I hear at the moment is crickets ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

"Of course with electric cars, no more "road trip" vacations or driving the kids off to college because it can only go 100 to 200 miles on a charge and then it takes 8 hours to recharge."

Maybe not:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

And if it won't do "road trip", I'm not going to buy it, so someone needs to figure out road trip with or without a supercapacitor. 1st leg of my vacation last month was >800 miles.

Supercapacitors in cars instead of or in addition to batteries could be the hot setup:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

The thing is, if your car is giving up its charge to the grid, and you suddenly want to go somewhere, that's not ideal. But if the car has a supercapcitor that can charge in 10 minutes, then it works much better. The power wall for storing charge could come into play by charging the car quickly, since drawing that kind of amperage through the grid wouldn't be possible - 200 amp service at 240 volts is only 48 KwH an hour, so with the best electric car mileage currently being around 4 miles per KwH, that's about 192 miles of electrical energy per hour available to charge the car's battery. Fine if you have an hour to kill before you leave, but if you want to go right now, you can't. But a battery charging a supercapacitor, especially several batteries in parallel, could charge in several minutes - just set it to charge 10 minutes or so before you leave, and it's done when you're ready.

So this could be the storage that the grid really needs to go renewable.

Problems? If there's a disaster on the way, such as a hurricane, everyone is going to want to be leaving at once. Most home batteries will be supplying current to charge cars, not supply the grid. If the weather is bad, which it ought to be with a hurricane on the way, the solar isn't helping, and if the wind is too fast for wind turbines, does the whole thing fail at the worst possible time? Maybe.

There have been a string of security screwups from T-Mobile. From severe bugs to straight up data theft.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/02/23/2118227/critical-t-mobile-bug-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-users-accounts
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/11/t-mobile-website-flaw-social-engineering-hacks/

A quick search for "T-Mobile data leak" provided numerous results to several instances. If this is their idea of "amazingly good" then yeah, I guess it is. After all "amazingly good" isn't exactly an empirical measure, it's sitting right in the middle of subjectivity. There are a lot of adjectives that are better than "amazingly" or "good", and maybe "amazingly good" is how they choose word the description of the their level of terrible security.

T-Mobile doesn't see that as a problem because it has "amazingly good security."

Only a few months ago T-Mobile's websites had a major security hole allowing hackers to access all kinds of information about users:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/...

If you're rich, you already can: https://www.engadget.com/2013/...

If these assholes were actually anything other than disingenuous, overpaid lickspittles, they'd do something about Caller ID spoofing.

Um, they did exactly that last November. And even before they issued the new rules, they cracked down on two spoofing robocallers last year to the tune of $82 million and $120 million.

Maybe you would have known that had you spent just a bit more time actually reading up on the subject and a bit less time throwing around inflammatory rhetoric.

TFA, and another poster, point out that this rule has been vacated (not just modified) so now there may be no legal restrictions on robocall devices.

Unless, of course, the current board passes a new regulation. [*crickets*]

TFA and the other poster clearly didn't read the opinion. The TCPA as a whole remains intact -- the only nuances that were rolled back were (1) the FCC's prior interpretation that smartphones constituted automated telephone dialing systems, and (2) the FCC's prior interpretation that companies using automatic dialers could be held liable for calling a phone number that used to be owned by someone who had given the company consent to call them, but then was (unbeknownst to the caller) transferred to someone else.

Meanwhile, as was all over the news at the time, the FCC actually issued MORE rules clamping down MORE on actual robocallers back in November. Crickets indeed.

Yeah, I tend to leave out solar because it is inoperable or diminished so often because the sun isn't always available. I like solar, but it doesn't do a thing for you at night, and when it is available, it is too available, and produces more power than is being used, and so can't be fully exploited without batteries big enough and cheap enough for us to use. And since solar is over-available on sunny days, the power is sold for such a low price, due to supply and demand, that it's a profitability problem for the electric grid industries. No, I don't want solar at home, its just something else to go wrong and need repair and insuring for yet another insurance payment.

We really, really, really need that magic battery that makes the intermittent sources of power, as well as electric cars, practical. Or maybe a supercapacitor:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

https://www.engadget.com/2014/...

I was going to wait till the summer to install it, but I succumbed and installed it last week. It takes a little getting used to, old habits are hard to reform, and it's not quite finished (what software ever is), and much of the software that's out to run on it is Beta.

But...

I think it's brilliant. I've fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what's to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome...

A few weeks later he was dead.

... of a computer manufacturer that builds hardware that makes it easy for the operator to sanitize the exterior of the case, but has a reputation for doing the opposite when it comes to software - and even has a history of loading pre-installing spy-ware:-

https://www.engadget.com/2017/...

So basically it's an updated Acer Iconia

Not at all.

No, they haven't updated it.

So basically it's an updated Acer Iconia Dual screen or Toshiba Libretto W105? How is that not prior-art?

So basically it's an updated Acer Iconia Dual screen or Toshiba Libretto W105? How is that not prior-art?

Just get rid of the superfluous details and abstract the most salient ones.

Assume the universe is a sphere.

yeah - if I recall correctly, on this very site, was a leaked memo from Microsoft finger-pointing that 30% of Vista BSOD's were due to NVidia's drivers or something stupid like that..

That's the sort of thing that Microsoft was up against -- people would blame Vista for that, instead of NVidia.

I believe what happened was that SolarCity found they were spending more on salesmen's salaries than they were getting back in profit, so they stopped doing it.

Oh, but there IS!! Looky here: https://www.engadget.com/2017/...

No, it's required. Apple gets around it in the EU by shipping a micro USB to Lightning dongle, so the charger can be the legislated standard with a micro USB output.

Citation needed, and no, the US Army's claims that lack supporting evidence do not count - especially given they generally include the word "may".

Sure, DJI is definitely doing *some* data collection (as are most of the action cam/drone systems, either directly through the device or through on-line accounts associated with it) because they tell you so, but they're also claiming to be actively taking steps to improve enduser privacy and have blocked third party apps that have been caught doing so. Like MS Windows' telemetry, it's 100% clear that some data is being collected, but the actual extent of it seems to be based mostly speculation and rumour rather than fact and I've yet to see any really definitive articles that quantify with actual proof the scope of what is being collected and what countermeasures a privacy concious user might take to minimise the "damage" (and any operational compromises those countermeasures might entail). For instance, you claim that DJI is tracking location data in realtime using your phone, which is certainly possible, but the handset-drone comms uses the controller radio transmitter and the phone is USB tethered, so you should be able to put the phone into flight mode and simulate being in an area with no reception - or even just *be* in an area with no reception to prevent that from happening - unless they retrospectively upload it later, but again, I've not seen any definitive articles with evidence to back this up.

So, for anyone considering a drone purchase or that already has one and is getting concerned about the levels of tracking, does anyone have any decent links on this?

After seeing what can happen to innocent citizens, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/... and https://www.engadget.com/2017/... , I would have been terrified to see what was waiting outside the door. I know that the examples which I cited are an exception to what happens however it still is something which would immediately come to mind if I were in such a situation.

You mean this rumor?
https://www.engadget.com/2017/...

Maybe Apple just decided to publish a paper on car, pedestrian and cyclist detection using LIDAR because they were bored?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.063...

Uber/Lyft is roughly $15 for a 5 mile ride. Figure you live 5 miles from work. That's $30/day, 250 workdays/year, or $7500/yr.

That's squarely in-line with the cost to own a new car. $6354/yr for a small car, $8171/yr for a medium sedan. Except that ownership cost assumes 15k miles/yr driven. The Uber/Lyft cost above is for only 2.5k miles/yr. So if you own, you're paying the same as two 5 mile rides per workday, plus you get to drive 12,500 miles anywhere you want each year for free.

Basically, when you use Uber/Lyft, you're paying for use of a car plus the time and services of a driver. When you own or lease your own car, you're eliminating the cost of having a personal chauffeur.

Look guys, to me, Messaging on Android has always been a big mess. I don't know why seemeingly smart folks at Google can't fix this. I sometimes wonder whether these folks use the products they author.

If they did, and cared, they'd see the mess we ordinary folk find ourselves in. This page throws some light on the issue.

rather than, say, building nuclear reactors

Thankfully the Dutch are also building nuclear reactors. Safer thorium reactor trials could salvage nuclear power The Dutch are aware that there are mathematical limits to renewable energy (due to intermittency), and consequently they are building clean baseload nuclear energy.

Given the reality of climate change, it is immoral to oppose nuclear power

It used to be called XBMC, i.e. Xbox Media Centre, a media player. It seems like it does illegal streaming too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The original announcement for the 64 bit version says

https://betanews.com/2017/06/0...

If you intend to use Kodi with add-ons to stream potentially illegal content, you may wish to consider a VPN.

Or look at this

https://www.engadget.com/2017/...

Apparently there are third party plugins which allow you to stream stuff for free, though the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment etc are on the case.

I believe the site you wanted to comment on is over there

California just told us not to keep our phones in our pockets., which is a bit like "wearing" a device. Of course I keep mine in my pocket all the time. So far, no burns or bone tumors on my hip. I mean, we kind of sort of thought this whole issue of RF was put to bed didn't we? Here it is rearing its ugly head again.

I need a phone to function in modern society though. I don't need whatever it is "wearables" are offering right now.

Maybe some day the "fitness band" will be sophisticated enough to diagnose the cancer that it caused.

But NASA and in the aircraft industry still have less problems with bugs

How many external attacks are their on the systems? All NASA has to do is not include legacy MacOS binary compatibility to keep spacecraft relatively virus-proof.