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People do so all the time.

http://thepowerofpoop.com/epat...
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5...
https://www.google.com/search?...

Call me when I can buy a lightweight headset that paints the image on my retina with a frikkin laser beam.

They're working on it.

According to Forbes, they're already building the factory lines. Also at Wired, MIT tech review,
Wearable.com, Techcrunch and The Verge.

According to various reports, the Stein initiative is now asking for at least $4.5m for the recount to proceed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Verge is reporting that the total sum necessary for a recount including attorney fees will likely be greater than $6m. My personal opinion is that this is money well spent simply to ensure the integrity of the electoral system in the United States.

But hover is/was my favorite game from Microsoft - even beating out Pinball.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

Don't forget about his plan to nuke the Martian polar ice caps:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1...

For a while after that, he changed his twitter picture to that of him holding a long-haired white cat, so at least he has a sense of humor about it... well, that or he really is one:

"Do you expect me to talk, Elon?"
"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to buy my electric car."

That would't make business sense. I think this move is a strategically great move of Microsoft.

The price of operating systems is steadily approaching zero. macOS updates are free and the OS comes with the hardware. ChromeOS is free. Microsoft already provides the license for free for smaller devices. PC sales are slowing and that's what moves OS licenses. People have fewer reasons to upgrade. What Microsoft realized is that hardware and services are the future, not operating system licenses. And to capitalize on that, they need their software to run everywhere. That means Visual Studio for Mac and SQL Server for Linux.

So no, I really don't believe helping the WINE project is a bad move for Microsoft at this point. Anything that increases adoption of Microsoft software and services is what matters now.

Actually, the geologists weren't predicting the earthquake, they were DENYING the earthquake.

Speaking of fake news, that is incorrect. The geologists were predicting the earthquake, and they said it was improbable but not impossible. A government official said there was "no danger" in an interview before actually meeting with the scientists, and the public accepted that statement as being the scientific consensus.

"A large earthquake along the lines of the 1703 event is improbable in the short term," said Enzo Boschi a member of the Italian Serious Risks Commission, during the meeting. "But the possibility cannot definitively be excluded." After the meeting, the government held a press conference in which it told Italians that a major earthquake in the region of L’Aquila was improbable. And in a television interview, government official and hydrologist Bernardo De Bernardinis said that "the scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy" during the seismic disturbances. That interview, however, was actually taped before the meeting on March 31st, and the statements made by De Bernardinis were false — tremors don’t release energy that would otherwise be implicated in an earthquake. But given its airtime and De Bernadinis’ authority, residents of L’Aquila who saw the interview were given the distinct impression that his comments were representative of the scientific meeting.

Source.

Samsung is bending over backwards to try to make this right

Sure, they'll exchange your phone before it starts on fire. However, if it's already started on fire - taking some of your house with it - they wont return your phone calls.

When the iphone 4 showed up with a defective antenna design? You're holding it wrong!

Psst. Fandroid. Yes, you. Check this out for a second and count the number of Samsung devices on the first page. Now, what you were you saying with the iPhone 4?

Yes there's a difference in the severity of the problems as they relate to public safety - unless of course you're trying to make a critical phone call using a defective iphone 4. However there's also a difference in how the customers were treated. Apple customers are habitually treated like shit. Of course this is only one example of a company that thinks so little of its customers that it would blame them for a problem they created.

You were saying, Hateboi? Apple has dominated hardware reliability surveys since the Precambrian era of computing and smart phones.

I did. You don't seem to know what Tesla has done. Probably because it's not covered in your RAND reports.

They have driven that many miles, 6 months ago. And simulated 10x more. And they have 100,000 cars on the roads doing this every day.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5...

Also, " the problem is that consumers CAN'T "test-drive" on public roads enough to even demonstrate parity in vehicle safety" is a lot of horseshit.

>"Any reference?"

I will admit I am yelling "fire" without seeing the flames. My bad, and I should probably tone it down.

Here is an example of what can happen: http://arstechnica.com/securit... It shows just how easy it can be for them to insert something that can be abused.

The real danger is that with a binary-only, closed-source browser like Chrome, there is really no easy way know what it is doing behind-the-scenes or what backdoors it might have for them or governments. It is probably harder to prove it is not spying on users than proving it is. And Google has far more incentive to track everything you do compared to, say, Mozilla. Of course, if you also use Google search and/or sign-in with a Google account while using Chrome/Chromium, you are turning it into a type of approved super spyware on the spot.

http://betanews.com/2012/03/01...
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

I am amazed at how cavalier people are about their privacy, especially when it involves Google. The scariest thing is that most people have no idea just how much data is being collected about them (and yes it happens with all browsers and all services, but it is stepped up to overdrive with Google).

And if you are curious, no, I don't use Google's search engine directly, I always use http://startpage.org/ I also install Firefox browser on my Android devices and use that and startpage for searching.

Your words echo Trumpsky's denials but US Intelligence service says otherwise:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1...

Wow, what a trustworthy source!

Remember when they kept trying to get people to believe that North Korea hacked Sony over a shitty movie? Remember when there was zero evidence of that happening or even being remotely possible? Remember when they quietly dropped it when the truth started coming out?

Your words echo Trumpsky's denials but US Intelligence service says otherwise: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1...

Yeah, you know how US Intel has been known to lie, both on purpose and also on accident? I have absolutely no reason to believe them when they say 'trust us', especially when they are talking about starting a cyberwar.

...a report on Thursday found those pledges would see temperature rises significantly overshoot the threshold, with 3C of warming. Environmental groups urged governments to do more.

Oh, you mean like climate engineering to take positive steps to reduce the temperature and soak up excess carbon already up there and maybe prevent the damage already on track to happen? No?? That's so evil that we shouldn't even consider it?

How about nuclear energy? That doesn't fart out carbon, and then we can still use, you know, electricity rather than... "Unequivocally no" again? Oh, right, because Chernobyl happened that proves it can't work. I'm sure a similar nuclear disaster now is just as likely and would be much worse than a silly little 3 degree temperature rise.

So the solution is... wishes, everyone riding around on bikes, and moral superiority? Because it looks to me like we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock of fossil fuel interests keeping us from actually doing anything before it's a crisis, and naive environmentalists groups who rule out actual solutions on the grounds that they might not be completely perfect.

...would like to disagree with Schiller in the strongest possible terms: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1... "A company that built up its entire product line on the adulation and money of professional photographers is now turning its back on them and blowing up the best bridge between the tools of their trade: camera and laptop. Without an SD card slot in the computer, weâ(TM)re left having to tote an adapter everywhere ($50 when bought from Apple), or buying a USB-C cable for our cameras ($30), or relying on entirely unreliable wireless transfer apps. Maybe thatâ(TM)s fine on the MacBook, but itâ(TM)s not okay on the MacBook Pro."

Fine here is my source on older hardware.

And here is the cpu which is a glorified i3 with hyperthreading also called the i5. It is not the quadcore model.

Apple has alot of explaining to do. If this were a normal company this product would bomb unless priced appropriately sub $1000. Like I said this is a 2016 MacBook Air. Not a power anything.

We're talking about Canada, where Blackberry not long ago has given encryption keys to the Canadian Mounted Police that gave access to ALL messages from non enterprise users, and this case seems all but forgotten with the company releasing new phones supposed to be the most secure phones ever.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...

So yeah, to me it kinda sounds like a slippery slope. But nothing in comparison to what was already done.

The fact that Blackberry is still alive and well (as much as the company can be on their own merits), never had a public outcry after what they did, and that the case seems to be forgotten with tons of people still using and praising the company for their efforts... even after the CEO explicitly supported the idea with a vague public comment... I think it's pretty clear that something like what was described in this post would be pretty ok.

http://blogs.blackberry.com/20...

Having access to numbers located in the immediate vicinity of a crime isn't all that much in comparison to having access to the messaging content of an indiscriminate list of costumers of a certain class from a certain brand of phones.

Would I be ok with this? No, I wouldn't... like I said, slippery slope. At least this case was handled properly with a court order and all, and a message to respond is not that much of a bother, but anyone can see how actions like that can go wrong pretty fast. In a way, it's still relatively indiscriminate based on mobile location - it doesn't mean by any stretch of the mind that a person is suspect of anything, but they are still being targeted.

These days, it doesn't sound like that much of a jump going from requiring a court order to do that and doing it without one, doesn't sound that much of a jump from getting phone numbers to getting private content, and it might not be that much of a jump going from sending messages asking for cooperation to outright pre-emptively arresting people. Sure, hard to imagine the police and judges making such a jump and being this irresponsible - but then again, we have enough proof how overreaching they can become.

I know lots of people won't get the base concept, but essencially mobile companies are revealing private information - for a good cause, yes, and at a minor level in this case, yes. But let's say that in the list is someone who does not want his or her location disclosed at the time of the crime, not being involved with it, for some reason. This is one problem with indiscriminate targeting.

I would be ok with helping the course of an investigation, I would not be ok with mobile companies logging and releasing private information. As for Blackberry, of course, the company is dead to me. Has been for quite a while now. But it's ridiculous how people still defend it.

CBS All Access" ... is a network TV channel's obscure streaming site

It's not really obscure. They already have about a million subscribers and it may already profitable, though they don't seem to have released individual numbers for the HBO and CBS streaming services so it's impossible to tell. The new content will almost certainly help increase those numbers.

For decades there have been people saying that wanted cable TV to let them buy individual channels instead of a bundle because the increased cost for the handful of channels they want would still be cheaper than the bundled price for 300 channels that they don't want. This gives them what they asked for and it turns out that about a million people weren't just talking out of their ass.

It's pointless to talk about numbers we don't actually know so I'll just address the fact that CBS is not a cable channel, they are a national network of OTA TV stations that anyone in the US can already watch for free. You can even buy a cheap USB TV tuner and record it if you want to watch something later. The only way I'd ever consider paying for it is if I were living abroad but they say they restrict access to only the US and I don't know how much VPN wack-a-mole they do.

The delay came first. Star Trek Discovery was delayed until May 2017 way back in September 2016.Here's the link.

Fuller reduced his duties just this week (late October 2016).

CBS All Access" ... is a network TV channel's obscure streaming site

It's not really obscure. They already have about a million subscribers and it may already profitable, though they don't seem to have released individual numbers for the HBO and CBS streaming services so it's impossible to tell. The new content will almost certainly help increase those numbers.

For decades there have been people saying that wanted cable TV to let them buy individual channels instead of a bundle because the increased cost for the handful of channels they want would still be cheaper than the bundled price for 300 channels that they don't want. This gives them what they asked for and it turns out that about a million people weren't just talking out of their ass.

You won't see widespread fiber to the home in your lifetime. Running all new wiring, to every house, in every neighborhood, in every city, was never a good idea. Would I like gigabit fiber? Of course. Who wouldn't. But the U.S. is too big

Comes up every time someone discusses the sorry state of internet in the US. Size has nothing to do with it. We don't need to run fiber to every square mile of death valley. 3% of the united states land is urbanized. We don't need to cover even all of THAT. If you live in Lander WY, you accept you're not going to have great internet offerings. Farmer Brown in western kansas isn't going to start a rebellion if LA gets fiber and his cows don't. But how many cities aside from the three that Google Fiber did have sensible fiber?

The issue is exclusively oligopolies and their ability to lobby. Verizon proved as much with New York.

End restrictions on municipal broadband.

It's a start, but Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and the other big guys undoubtedly have other strategies to undermine those efforts. Suing to stop them for unfair competition is only the first defense. With Google fiber, they engaged in misinformation campaigns that didn't work, but they'll get better, and IIRC, google had to lobby KC to allow google to touch their phone lines without being shot on sight.

Break up the telecos, seize their copper, and send the executives to Rikers for massive fraud and anti-competitive behavior, and fiber will follow....

You won't see widespread fiber to the home in your lifetime.

Yeah, I know...

Twitter used to be free speech, but now it seems to be banning people right and left with the excuse "hate speech". In many cases the speech contains no insults whatsoever, and in many cases the speech is using clear terms in a non-insulting way to put forth a political view.

Google has several clear examples. For example, Scott Adams was banned from twitter for no apparent reason, and apparently gets banned from periscope [streaming app owned by twitter] whenever he starts talking about Trump.

Twitter is trying to engineer a "safe place" where no one can be insulted, and only approved speech is allowed.

It's bad enough that wikileaks threatened to start its own Twitter in response to the ban of Milo Yiannopoulos.

I think people are starting to realize that twitter's war on free speech makes it less interesting. When a celebrity with 9 million followers gets banned, that's 9 million customers who get put off and go somewhere else.

And I think that wikileaks will eventually be the answer. There's been no public announcement, but it's entirely possible that wikileaks *is* working on a twitter replacement, and of course it would be completely free speech.

By catering to the censors and thought police, twitter is digging its own grave and will get replaced by someone who's not afraid to stand up for free speech.

In a year or two, twitter will be on the cupboard of history, alongside companies (such as Google+) that restricted and pissed off its customers.

As soon as the iphone fingerprint reader works reliably, in all weather conditions without delay, and is no longer easily defeated by anyone with a 3-D printer, perhaps there would be some few people interested in paying extra money to make a perfectly functioning life-saving machine more complicated and prone to failure.

Citation: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5... [Your phone’s biggest vulnerability is your fingerprint]

I dunno. This story just makes me feel better about not buying Apple products. I can buy any cable I like and not have to worry about this bullshit.

"OMG. You didn't buy a genuine monster cable! Quick, toss it out before it EXPLODES!"

Which bullshit? The bulishit of shoddy cables destroying your laptop?

One major issue with nuclear usage is the long-lived residue of the current Uranium-based reactors. The storage of the radioactive 'trash' got scuppered by a 'tree-hugger' substituting an organic filler (cat litter) for the inorganic (again cat litter - but just dry clay pellets). This led to the bursting of a drum of material that has - so far - completely closed operations at the waste storage facility in New Mexico. - - http://www.theverge.com/2014/5... - - - from the article - one of the radioactive shipments was mixed with organic instead of inorganic material. "‘Green’ cat litter," he writes, is "made with materials like wheat or corn. These organic litters do not have the silicate properties needed to chemically stabilize nitrate the correct way." The result: "solutions can ignite when they dry out." You gotta' love the system that allows substitutions of critical materials like this.

Contact Netflix and tell them you are cancelling your subscription due to this action on their part.

It will do you no good at all...

If Netfilx won't deliver to your location, your only alternative is bittorrent. And since you paid for the service, you need not feel guilty about it.

I read somewhere a few months ago, that Apple was snapping-up AR (and VR?) talent. They don't do that for no reason.

Ah, here's an article...

It is proven technology as it already delivers supplies to ISS and returns safely. They have tested the abort system on the ground along with the other systems. I do not see why they will not be ready for flights in 2018. Boeing on the other hand is still way behind

Keep dreaming. SpaceX has never launched a person into space. Dragon 2 may be ready for testing by 2018, but given SpaceX's recent spotty record with launches, NASA in no way will put an astronaut on a SpaceX rocket or an untested Dragon 2. Their safety rating and supplier quality control needs to be dramatically improved before that happens.

It is proven technology as it already delivers supplies to ISS and returns safely. They have tested the abort system on the ground along with the other systems. I do not see why they will not be ready for flights in 2018. Boeing on the other hand is still way behind

Brian Green is the guy whose Galaxy Note 7 replacement caught fire in a plane. According to this article, he's replaced it with an iPhone.

Last time I checked, the government wasn't trying shut him or 4chan up/down.

Our government actively shuts down speech it does not agree with.

And in Europe, government shuts down un-PC speech all the time. The new anti-troll policies are just part of the assault; these governments also collude with social media and raid the homes of people who say the "wrong" things.

Do you trust government to define what is true, and what is not, by censoring what they perceive to be untrue or "offensive"?

I don't know where you are getting your "facts", but there have been much more than 3 phones catching fire.

As of September 15, 2016, the US CPSC reported 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage.

As of October 10, 2016, there have been at least 5 reports of replacement phones catching fire.

I have bought rechargeable batteries for the last 20 years. Not a single one of them has caught fire. In the case of the Galaxy Note 7, there is obviously a single, focused product that has a critical flaw.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8...

3) This is a phone with the original fault, unfixed. They haven't ruled that out yet.

From The Verge article on the incident:

More worrisome is the fact that the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.

[...]

Running the phone's IMEI (blurred for privacy reasons) through Samsung's recall eligibility checker returns a "Great News!" message saying that Green's Galaxy Note 7 is not affected by the recall.

Unless some fraud took place (either someone swapping an original device into his new box or the guy trying to pass off an original device as a new one for some twisted reason), we can say that it's NOT an original device.

Good luck making any appreciable money on any other mobile platform.

Good luck making any appreciable money on the iOS mobile platform.

I assume you haven't watched any of the WWDC Keynotes. I think the 2016 one mentioned over 50 BILLION DOLLARS (!!!) so far paid to Developers from App Store "Royalties".

So SOMEBODY is making some money. And it's only your own damn fault if that's not you.

This is the year of the trifecta:

1) Linux on the desktop
2) Cubs win the World Series
3) President Trump!

3a) Another burning Samsung

After the alert mechanism was misused in my state for an Amber alert for an incident hundreds of miles away, I turned these alerts off.

Exactly the same here: After I was woken up from sleep at 2AM by an Amber Alert for a child that purportedly missing 200 miles away (who turned out to be with her father) I turned the alerts OFF.

However, in their favor, the adjustments to the alert system also are going to improve the geographical targetting, so that they will be more narrowly broadcast to just the areas affected:
http://nymag.com/selectall/201...
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9...

LOREN GRUSH 3:21:49 PM EDT Tanker will go up 3 to 5 times to fill up the ship.

https://live.theverge.com/elon...

Perhaps something like the Ehang 184 all electric autonomous quadcopter scaled up from a drone so that it's large enough to carry a single passenger up to 10 miles or roughly 23 minutes of flight. I bet this meets the needs of many Uber trips!

What is Allo? A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request.

Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature.

That's about the same sales pace as Apple TV, annually. So I assume that if the Echo isn't a hit - neither is the Apple TV. Which doesn't bode well for Apple's play into the living room...

McLaren have denied it in a comment to The Verge:

McLaren said in a statement to The Verge that the company "is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9...

Am I the only person who's starting to lose track of who owns the rights to what after Nokia sold off its phone business to Microsoft?

I was under the impression that the right to use the "Nokia" name (which MS got the right to after buying the phone division) was due to expire after some time (#) and that was why MS were phasing it out.

The previous story linked in the summary seems to imply that MS sold off the ex-Nokia feature phone business to FIH, but they're still apparently making feature phones as "new Nokia phones" [my emphasis]

Yet Nokia itself announced it was licensing its name to a (different) manufactuer- HMD Global for similar purposes.

So what's going on? Does MS still own the name- or have a license to it- for smartphone and tablet use. Or has Nokia got it back? I can't see either party signing an agreement that would let them both use it for competing products in the same field (i.e. phones and tablets) at the same time; that sounds unworkable.

(#) This seems to be fairly typical when another company Y buys out X's widget division; they get the right to use X's name for a while (and presumably a non-compete from X, not that X is usually concerned with re-entering the field they've just left). I assume (for example) this is why the "Samsung" M3 external USB hard drives have been rebranded as "Maxtor" but remained otherwise identical- Seagate (who have long owned the Maxtor brand) bought out Samsung's HDD business a while back.

Statistically insignificant. Tesla stats will only matter when tens of thousands, if not millions, of trips have been made under autopilot. Then compare accident rates.

How few trips do you imagine have been made under autopilot so far? the 100 million mile mark was passed back in May. 100M/10k=10k. Since a Tesla can only go 300mi on a charge (assuming the best case) that means that they have to have had at least 333,333 trips. In actuality, of course, the number has to be much, much higher than that. Odds are beyond good that with 100M miles, there are more than 1 million trips.

Haven't been keeping up with current events, have you? YouTube is demonitizing (thus killing) channels that don't meet their vague as all hell "guidelines" that include "political or controversial content". Wanna guess what is happening?

Well those "#killallmen" "DieCISScum" and "lets kill whitie" channels? They are all fine, none of them are being affected no matter how racist and sexist they are, but any that call them out on their bullshit or point out SJW insanity like Trigglypuff? Well I hope you didn't need that channel for anything,they have even shut down a channel multiple times that does nothing but host news broadcasts of crimes from around the USA because it makes the BLM movement look like shit by showing who they are protesting for.

Considering the fact that the head of Google is the CTO of the Clinton campaign should not make this surprising to anyone, but between this and Google manipulating search results to aid Clinton they are about as fair and balanced as Jezebel or Twitter.

The caps are not put in place by ISPs to make people pay for TV as the summary claims. (Why would an ISP that has no video services at all have caps if that were truly the reason? What is T-Mobile's TV service?) They're put in place to keep people who think they ought to have 100% fulltime use of a shared resource from keeping other users from getting what they are paying for.

So this is just about network management?

Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity
http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Another Broadband CEO Admits: Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Capacity
https://consumerist.com/2016/0...

Leaked Comcast memo reportedly admits data caps aren't about improving network performance
http://www.theverge.com/smart-...

Comcast Admits Broadband Usage Caps Are A Cash Grab, Not An Engineering Necessity
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

this one seemed to be the best answer, http://www.theverge.com/2016/9...

The new ceramic Watch is listed as "edition", but the gold and rose gold edition watches haven't made the Series 2 cut, at least per Apple's website. Presumably they didn't sell well enough to be worth upgrading, since the new ceramic model is, despite being "edition", only costing a couple hundred more than the priciest stainless watches.

As for upgrade plans Apple offers, if you're buying the solid gold Watches, either 1. you can afford to take the hit or 2. you're a wealthy and significant-enough tastemaker that Apple will directly deal with you. They made a solid gold Watch band for Beyonce, after all.

I also wish we'd wait for an agreed standard. Lightning is essentially a Apple-only standard. Lightning headsets will only ever work with Apple devices, we need a good common digital standard.

Apple has a long history of eschewing standards in favor of their own approach. Sometimes this is in the name of progress, sometimes not. I'll never spend $170 on headphones, bluetooth or otherwise. Especially when said headphones are from a company that can't even seem to get the Bluetooth spec right for any third-party stuff such as my car, headphones, or data link to a tablet.

Have fun not owning a smartphone then. Every other phone on the market now seems to be an almost exact copy of the iPhone 6. Look at the Galaxy Note 7 and Galaxy S7 -- indistinguishable aside from the pointless wrapping screen that people crack all the time. No way Samsung isn't going to go to USB-C -- the reversible connector that Apple designed and donated to the USB group.

Well everybody else seems to be going with USB-C:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6...

... so why shouldn't Samsung? Then there is the option of puting a USB-C connector on the iPhone 7 (the plug looks small enough) and Samsung does that as well everybody will follow them in which case people could use ubiquitous wired headphones on what ever device they have. Once that happens all people have to piss and moan about is having to unplug the headphones to charge the phone which does not concern me since I have been using Bluetooth headphones for years.

Because the Verge is the blog when we achieved a great scientific endeavor (landing a craft on a comet), all they could do was complain about a scientist's shirt.