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SONOS One the winner. Sorry!

What's your take on this?

https://gizmodo.com/5990383/th...

BFR is a privately funded next-generation reusable launch vehicle and spacecraft system developed by SpaceX

SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by 'a Few Hundred Meters'

In-orbit refueling

This graph demonstrates that as fewer people were subjected to the frustrations of Internet Explorer, murder rates fell significantly:

https://gizmodo.com/5977989/in...

Or it might just be that the rate of IE use fell, and completely separately, murder rate also fell at the time, with no relationship between the two. They are correlated (more murders happened when people used IE), but that doesn't prove that IE causes murder.

Frequently, two correlated facts are caused directly or indirectly, by some third fact that causes both. As a dumb example, driving to work is correlated with drinking coffee - when people drink coffee, they often drive to work. Coffee doesn't cause the commute, both are caused by morning.

Not to poo-poo their work, but this is definitely not a first. A quick google search reveals several:
      https://gizmodo.com/its-almost...
      https://spectrum.ieee.org/auto...
      https://www.ted.com/talks/a_ro...

I also remember a DARPA project to create a flying insect with a camera, that was powered entirely by ambient wi-fi. It would fly a bit, then spend hours charging, then fly a bit more.

High/fast execution is their MO. talk of building a "sky scrapper" in 19 days!!

And perhaps falling down even faster!!

This has been mentioned on Slashdot before, at least in the comments.

Basically, many app developers use frameworks to build their apps. These framework developers can dip into data from multiple apps and use that data to locate people. They can also identify people by geo-fencing the phones at night, when most people are home asleep, and correlate that to tie an identity to a phone.

refences:
https://www.otherlevels.com/bl...
https://gizmodo.com/your-favor...

No one is guilty of vehicular manslaughter. This is an accident due to bad design. You don't jail the engineers or architects who design a building that fails in an earthquake.

You do if it wasn't designed to code.

You don't arrest the airline execs when a plan component fails.

Maybe not the exec, but certainly the maintenance engineer who committed fraud that resulted in the death of people.

So here - who's to blame? Who decided to live-test an experimental system that can operate with the safety disengaged?

You are completely missing the points.

1. Quantity != Quality.

McDonald's serves BILLIONS. Does that mean they serve gourmet food? No, just cheap, popular, crap.

2. Avatar was a formulaic, rip-off of "Dances with Wolves" in space, which Cameron even admitted.

Yes, exactly, it is very much like that. You see the same theme in "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and also "The Emerald Forest," which maybe thematically isn't that connected but it did have that clash of civilizations or of cultures. That was another reference point for me. There was some beautiful stuff in that film. I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way. It's almost comfortable for the audience â" "I know what kind of tale this is." They're not just sitting there scratching their heads, they're enjoying it and being taken along. And we still have turns and surprises in it, too, things you don't see coming. But the idea that you feel like you are in a classic story, a story that could have been shaped by Rudyard Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

"Going native" is not a new thing. i.e. Pocahontas and Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest which shares themes with Avatar has been done for ages, and will continue to be done in the future.

The GP is just pointing out he found Avatar far too derivative -- probably because he remembers these other movies.

Personally, I'm still going to enjoy the visuals of Avatar on my BluRay regardless of how formulaic and copy-cat it was. But I'm also not going to bury my head in the sand saying it was "original". I will recognize that it snuck in the out-of-body experience (OBE) and consciousness transference in a accessible way. The joke about unobtanium was a good social commentary and parody of how we have become dependent on oil. Avatar has some deeper themes if one so wishes to pursue:

* Avatar: A Multi-Dimensional Pop Parable for Ascension
* The Theology of Avatar

Was Avatar well executed? Yup.
Was Avatar original? Nope.
Was Avatar good? Good is relative to what the view has already seen.
WHY was Avatar popular? Ah, now THIS is probably the better question to ask but that is a discussion for another day.

Brin warns of AI yet his own employees have spoken against Google's involvement in a Pentagon - Google partnership involving AI and military drones. https://gizmodo.com/thousands-...

Meh. Many Google employees disagree with those Google employees. Sergey hasn't commented on it, AFAIK, so we don't know where he stands. It's not a cut-and-dried issue as some like to think.

Brin warns of AI yet his own employees have spoken against Google's involvement in a Pentagon - Google partnership involving AI and military drones. https://gizmodo.com/thousands-...

Almost all of the US has clean air, except for the biggest cities. And the pollution there is primarily car exhaust, not businesses.

[Citation Needed] that shows that car exhaust is the main source of air pollution in cities and not truck exhaust, ship/train exhaust, power plants, or agricultural emissions.

How many non-users did Cambridge get information on? It's been known for some time - and was admitted in congress recently - that facebook has profiles for non-users as well as actual users. For myself and ... well, I'm told repeatedly that I am the only remaining person alive between the age of 8 and 80 who doesn't have a profile there ... it would be really interesting to know if Cambridge got information on "us" as well.

Citation please. Zuckerberg admitted to running analytics on anonymous users--you know, keeping web server logs--NOT to creating "shadow profiles," a term that still makes zero sense. I've read the Gizmodo article and I really think it comes down to somebody who doesn't understand what a relational database is and how trivial it is for FB to suggest contacts based on the loads of info your friends and family have already provided. There is no need to pre-generate anything.

Simplified example: Friend A and Friend B frequently tagged you in pictures. They also tagged Stranger C. Do you know Stranger C?

My suspicion is that they will simply stop suggesting contacts, as they should. Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent your friends and families from tagging you all over the place and providing all sorts of details about your life.

Been done before.

Yeah, sure it has newer tech and everything, but it's been done before.

Except it wasn't the entire edge of the phone. It was the part with the antenna:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

You know, like every other phone on that link that advises you not to hold the phone around the antenna. This is why you need to get out of the Apple Hatorade Distortion Field, it emptied out your brains and replaced them with excrement. Now, why don't you whine for a while about Apple's "walled garden" before firing up your console to play some manufacturer-approved game like Call of Duty. Or bitch about how the iPhone Plus bends at the same pressure where you Galaxy cracks. Or moan about how Apple doesn't have a replaceable battery before checking Facebook on your Moto Z, which doesn't have one either and also ditched the headphone jack before the iPhone 7 was released.

Because that's the kind of dumb hateboi bitch you are.

...it's already happened in parts of the US, where EZ Pass is required for some bridges and tunnels.....

E-ZPass Is the Best Tracking Device That's Already in Your Car https://gizmodo.com/e-zpass-is... It's not just for bridges and tunnels anymore...

Another phone copying the competition. Wake me up when this cool new slider phone is on the market.

There's science to prove such an event happens. https://gizmodo.com/what-would...

But those "multi-billion dollar mega-corps" expend a lot of effort trying to portray themselves as non-nerdy, and they don't always succeed. For example, in this article

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-security-chief-alex-stamos-hits-back-at-media-1819261214

a Facebook executive complains that journalists think "that a problem hasn’t been addressed because everybody at these companies is a nerd". The article goes further to claim that "journalists ... deride their employees as out-of-touch tech bros".

The resultant mask costs $50,000 and the hardware required to make it several hundred thousand.

you say that like you think that is expensive or something. the Govt has paid more than that to unlock the san bernardino phone if a govt wants in, a few hundred thousand isn't going to stop them.

A bit earlier they banned North Korea, and I did not speak out because I was not a North Korean.
Well, it just pissed me off to come back and see thousands videos deleted! (most rather harmless songs). There was the UN sanctions excuses but no evidence that so-called "official" channels are really official, since anyone (who would care enough) can record TV broadcasts and pretend.

I didn't expect this would be a precedent for e.g. banning US videos about guns, and as much as I don't like "gun nuts" much or I think AR-15 should be sold at gas stations or between the candy and booze aisles etc. (or sold at all!), I find this concerning.

Where did you get the idea there were no videos or photos?

https://gizmodo.com/at-long-la...

I can see the curvature of the Earth in that video, but it's curved the wrong direction! What the fuck?

But did it really happen?

There were lots of videos and witnesses to his previous cancelled/failed launches.

This successful launch has no video (that's been shared) and scant witnesses.

Of course there was video. VIdeo of the launch and video of paramedics extracting him from the crashed spacecraft. More than one video, too. The main one was shot by an AP cameraman. All sorts of witnesses, too.

Where did you get the idea there were no videos or photos?

https://gizmodo.com/at-long-la...

Now, tell us how this is supposed to be better than a paper ballot.... idiots

I'll tell you, Chad. First, paper ballots can have questionable disputes as to whether they were filled out correctly, have "hanging chads" and other controversial issues. Are you old enough to remember the Gore-Bush Florida fiasco?

Blockchaining anonymized ballots, then making them publicly available for everyone to count, validate, etc. should stop officials destroying ballots before a recount, as in the primary involving Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2017. BTW, Even digital ballots can be destroyed, as they were in the special election for the seat Jeff Session vacated.

Finally, restricted ballot access, paper or digital, may hide other things potentially more devastating to the electoral process. Did state so-in-so lie when they said that although the Russians did break in, they didn't compromise their election? And Whether or not the Russians (or whoever) compromised the Presidential election this last time, have there been even more egregious problems in the past? What could all this portend for the future?

We should follow Sierra Leone's lead, "Blockchain the vote", and draw open the curtain on a supposedly fair and free, but definitely a suspiciously concealed electoral process.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/01/17/the-legacy-of-hanging-chads

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2017/12/15/experts-browards-elections-chief-broke-law-in-destroying-ballots-150258

https://gizmodo.com/alabama-supreme-court-okays-destruction-of-digital-voti-1821223685

Of course they do! They constantly "play down/block" a lot of conservative posts, stories etc, but, PROMOTE liberal causes & stories. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05... https://gizmodo.com/former-fac... http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/0... https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

But the monitors did not detect airborne contamination in December, possibly because some of the particles that spread were too heavy to stay aloft.

They are calling it a "failure" of the airborne particle detectors to detect particles that were not in the air. If the particles are not in the air then people aren't going to breathe them in. It might collect on the soles of their boots but if they are licking the soles of their boots then they need to be checked for mental issues first, then radiation contamination second.

It sounds like there were failures in managing the spread of radioactive material but this mention of a "failure" of airborne particle detectors is not one of them.

Radiation is everywhere and if we are going to regulate its spread then we need to have sane regulations. If Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant then it would be shutdown for exceeding the annual acceptable dose of radiation for employees.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/grand-...

We need to take another look at our regulation of radioactive material. If it is as dangerous as the law says it is then we need to close off Grand Central Station and declare it a superfund site. If Grand Central Station is in fact safe to inhabit then so should any other place with an equivalent level of radioactivity.

In a world where Apple thinks it can sue over rounded corners and "slide to unlock", then yes. They absolutely copied the design. In the real world, it's also a yes.

If you think that Apple copied the Prada in 3 months, then what do you think Samsung did?

https://gizmodo.com/261172/set...

vs.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/1...

Renewables are always cheaper. The price of fuel for fossil fuels will go up.

People have been saying this (since forever). On the rare occasion when you can get a proponent of the theory to commit themselves to a particular testable prediction about the real world, their track record is quite dismal.

Now, as a scientifically-minded person, if the proponents of a theory continue to make incorrect predications about the real world (or walk their predictions back saying 'next decade' for 50 years straight), at some point we have to conclude their theory is just not very good. This is the measure of scientific knowledge: you have to make a prediction ahead of time and then check whether it came true.

On the other hand, if you believe you have confident knowledge of what direction the price of crude oil will go by 2027, you can make a killing. I absolutely invite you to do so and will really have no grudge if you are right in your bet and make bank.

[ Note: there are very good environmental reasons not to rely on coal/oil/gas indefinitely, even if they they resulted in cheaper energy. That's a different claim from the OP saying 'renewables are always cheaper'. ]

All in all, the tactic of funding poor applicants to achieve a verdict is common and used by all civil rights organizations

The only civil right Peter Thiel cares about is his right to inject himself with the blood of teenage boys..

https://www.vanityfair.com/new...

And no, that story has not been debunked.

https://gizmodo.com/someone-is...

Fortunately, more knowledgeable people have done more sophisticated analyses of this very hypothetical, and they put their estimates [antarcticglaciers.org] closer to 3.44 meters, aka 11 feet of sea-level rise.

This article (linked in a comment above) says it's much more than that, based on a study by the British Antarctic Survey:

The total potential contribution to global sea level rise from Antarctica is 58 metres, similar to previous estimates but a much more accurate measurement

Of course, your source doesn't say what you says it does, the figure you quoted is for the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Antarctic Peninsula only:

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has a global eustatic sea level contribution of 3.2 m ...
The Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet would contribute 0.24 m to global sea level rise on full melting ...
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet has a sea level equivalent of approximately 60 m

Yes, it's not likely that all that ice will melt any time soon, we should be much more worried about things like permafrost melting or a massive amount of methane clathrates being released as the ocean warms, but at least get the figures right.

Not all of it, actually. A goodly amount looks like it's water. Here's a neat map showing what researchers think it looks like without all the ice:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-i...

Pretty neat. Looks like it would make for a great setting for a role playing game.

Ferret

...IF you engage in discriminatory behaviour you are gonna have a bad day ...

Not really. You just have to select an unprotected class to discriminate against. You can say or publish whatever you like regarding straight white males and never expect to have any repercussions. Doubly so if you're a protected class. Should they dare to talk back they will be dealt with severely. Just ask this guy:

https://gizmodo.com/google-fir...

For example documented here: https://gizmodo.com/barbie-f-c...

This guy was already doing that in 2014?

So unless you buy the enterprise edition of Windows (Cost: $84 per PC, per year, minimum 5 licenses), or are attending a university that will enable you to obtain the Education edition on windows (Cost: averages about $9,970 per year) you can't even do what you suggest. Windows explicitly ignores the settings that turns this functionality off.

Actually the reason you can't really control Windows is because Windows is proprietary software. No amount of registry changes, config file changes, or changing one's practices with Windows will place Windows under the user's control. That's the same for any variant of Windows no matter how much one pays or if the software bears the name "enterprise".

Microsoft has a universal backdoor in Windows. Even disconnecting the Windows computer from the network won't place that computer under the owner's control. What the article complains about isn't new: tricking and forcibly pushing users into switching to Windows 10, privacy controls that ignore the user's settings and rat on the user regardless, and dropping support for processors Microsoft doesn't want to support instead of letting the users do the work are all part of the same theme—this is what non-free software can do.

It prevents your ISP from injecting crap into your pages, like Comcast has been known to do.

Face swapping in porn vids is a cute trick, but it doesn't take a genius to see the implications of this technology, especially when combined with synthetic voice technology being able to accurately impersonate anybody's voice with just a 1 minute sample. If you thought Photoshop fakery for political gain was bad (for example, the darkened pic of OJ on the cover of Time or the fake John Kerry/Jane Fonda pic from the 2004 election), we're now on the verge of a new era of video fakery for spreading lies, disinformation, and smear campaigns. It used to be said that "pictures never lie" but Photoshop put an end to that (yes, I know photo manipulation has been practiced for decades in the analog age, but it was generally beyond the capability of the average person). With video, the best one could do was to use clever editing to discredit somebody (as happened to Shirley Sherrod). Not anymore. Now anybody can make a scandalous video. If these deepfakes can be done by one person with a desktop PC, what can an organization with deep pockets accomplish?

"Much of this techlash is misguided."

Lets list some top shelf, recent bad things happening at the big tech giants:
- Google is suppressing relevant links in your search results that don't agree with their world view and/or whatever country you are searching from. If a conservative organization that controlled 90% of all search was doing this, it would be wall to wall media coverage, but the truth is Google is warping reality, rather than using straight relevancy to your search terms, now they are also deciding what is relevant.

Google must be regulated as a common carrier to protect the free exchange of ideas (a ubiquitous search engine is the very definition of a common carrier), and only a very narrow list should be censorable, and that list must be defined by the government with federal oversight and transparency and accountability to the people, not some unaccountable corporation. For example, sites inciting actual unjustified violence (in their content, not in some random user generated comment), sites promoting violent jihad, sites promoting harming children, etc.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion...
https://www.reddit.com/r/googl...

- Google and Facebook combined control 60% of all advertising revenue on the web, and routinely block content from receiving revenue if they don't agree with it (conservative video blogs on Youtube for example.) No other entity has more than 5% market share of online advertising. http://fortune.com/2017/07/28/...
- Google recently fired an employee who was asked for input on their internal hiring policies. When he highlighted a number of reasonable, demonstrable facts that contradict Google's diversity initiatives, one of his upper level managers leaked his memo to the press and he was subsequently fired (they are now facing a massive class action lawsuit, and more and more stories of the fascist intolerant alt left behavior at Google are coming out.) (no citation needed, well documented on slashdot.)
- Facebook first facilitated Russian (and likely Chinese and others) meddling by allowing false advertising stories to run during the election, then they tried to implement news censors, the vast majority of which were targeted against conservative sites, to the point that there was massive backlash and they got hauled in front of congress to explain WTF they were doing. They utilized blatantly biased censors as well as sites like politifact (which has very little facts beyond the actual name, and is a demonstrated shill for the alt left and not some non-partisan group) and the ADL (also an alt left hit squad group with zero credibility to anyone who has been paying attention).
https://gizmodo.com/former-fac...
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
Some concrete examples of conservative banning: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20...

- Twitter has been caught red handed gleefully describing how they shadow ban people for expressing political views with which they disagree, rather than advocating anything objectively wrong. The political bans have been 90% right leaning people. Those on the left who have been banned have been advocating actual violence, and often associated with the terrorist group Antifa.

To use an analogy (those always work well, ha) there's a huge difference between saying "this is how pipe bombs are constructed" and "we encourage you to use pipe bombs on people" but linking isn't even that; linking is "here is where you can find a page that tells you how pipe bombs are constructed." To put it another way, it's the difference between giving someone a drug dealer's number and actually dealing drugs. It is insane to consider linking "copyright infringement" especially since the place linked to is completely out of control of the linking party. This song and dance has been played out before.

Via Google Search for comcast injecting javascript , I found this, this, this, and this.

This issue is these cheap "routers." Here's more detail.

First, the issue 'taint got nuttin' to do with routing. The Google devices are sending lots of mcast traffic which affects WiFi. That's strictly a WiFi AP/bridging function. Second, although it may clog WiFi for a while, there's no excuse for an AP to crash because of it.

Third, people need to stop calling these things routers. That's like saying Dr. Dre is a Doctor. They don't route multicast, they don't do routing protocols. Most won't even route between networks, they'll only do some forms of NAT. They're cheap, home, multifunction (most of them have internal switches and/or APs) NAT gateways, not routers. In this case, it's an AP issue, not a router issue.

I'm not sure what a "A cheap enterprise-grade 4-5 port router" is. Any modern enterprise router will do wirespeed to at least 10G. There may be some SOHO ones which still use a CPU to do forwarding and where pps is still the bottleneck. There are certainly firewalls which do cpu forwarding. But none of them will crap out when packets arrive faster than they can forward them - they'll just drop some.

These people talk as though conservatives were oppressed, but if you read a little more (unless someone is misquoting someone), you'll find out that the "conservative" thing that Gudeman was caught doing, had jack shit to do with conservatism or anything related to left/right politics, and indeed was only tangentially related to politics at all. He could have just as easily claimed he was persecuted for being a communist, and that would be every bit just as accurate (i.e. totally unrelated). Check out this absolute nuttery :

Gudeman also posted supportive comments on internal forums about then-President-elect Donald Trump in the fall of 2016 and bickered with a Muslim co-worker who wrote about his fears of religious discrimination. Gudeman wrote that he looked into the employeeâ(TM)s background and questioned him about a recent trip to Pakistan, according to the lawsuit. These comments led to his termination in December 2016.

âoeGoogle HR stated that Gudeman had accused [his co-worker] of terrorism based on [the co-worker]â(TM)s religion, and this was unacceptable,â the lawsuit says.

So everyone, take a deep breath. When these kind of people say "conservative," they actually mean paranoia to the point of crippling mental illness, and support for president Trump, at the expense of all Americans -- conservatives and everyone else too.

No matter where you on the left/right scale somewhere, these people are completely fucked up. I wasn't being silly enough when I said he could claim he was disliked for his communism. It'd be less of a stretched analogy to say he was disliked for his shoplifting or spitting on any other employee whenever he saw them wearing a red shirt, or taking a dump in the break room while masturbating. Oh, and being a communist or "conservative" or whatever else fake label you want to put on opinions that are essentially non-political.

Gudeman is the screaming crazy cat lady from The Simpsons. And nobody could work with him? Imagine that!

By the same token, you can now replace CEOs with a corporate BS generator coupled to an AI speech synthesizer. I'm sure they can pass a Turing test calibrated to the intelligence level of most CEOs. Think of the cost savings!

You have no idea how many times I've given up on collective good arrangements even to as small of a scale as my own household. I'm seriously considering getting a safe when I get my next TV so I can lock up the remote control when I'm not home. I would love to share it, but it spends 90% of it's time misplaced.

I've also considered drilling a hold through the casing somewhere and affixing a cable to it - since some public use things do work.

They're throttling the internet speed in response to copyright infringement notices.

And we know that copyright infringement notices have never been wrong. Let's see...I seem to recall a news story about copyright infringement from earlier today:

https://gizmodo.com/man-s-yout...

Oh, Federalist - the true home of fake news. They even fake the fake news list. Let's list a couple of lies:

1) Federalist says that there was a fake surge in transgender suicides. This is not true, the linked article cites the increased number of suicide hotline calls.
2) They cite the Medium article that says that there are possible signs of fraud: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/w... - it's true. Statistical analysis shows that the resulting configuration is quite unlikely.
3) Multiple government climate change sites got purged: https://gizmodo.com/another-go...

In short, how to tell that a conservative lies? Easy, his lips are moving.

Iovine wasn't the founder of beats. He and Dre stole them from Monster.
https://gizmodo.com/5981823/be...

Yeah China has some real top notch engineers.

Even worse, I believe he was a sharepoint admin. He specifically took the job to try and steal documents (the CIA caught him doing the same and warned the NSA not to hire him). He's not some great savior whistleblower who happened to stumble onto something nefarious. He went searching for something that he could release for fame.

Event Horizon? https://io9.gizmodo.com/all-th...