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well, yes.

And the FCC is busy rewriting code (legal code) to strip local municipalities of their right to manage their open spaces and licensing revenue forcing muni's to permit carriers to mount transmitters on every single light pole, building corner, sign or bump of dirt the carrier desires under the blanket of a "master contract".

It's not like 5G is a just a bogus label over 4G or anything.. right? https://www.theverge.com/2019/...

oops.

In this case, the government shutdown is probably doing us a favor.

well, yes.
And the FCC is busy rewriting code (legal code) to strip local municipalities of their right to manage their open spaces and licensing revenue forcing muni's to permit carriers to mount transmitters on every single light pole, building corner, sign or bump of dirt the carrier desires under the blanket of a "master contract".
It's not like 5G is a just a bogus label over 4G or anything.. right? https://www.theverge.com/2019/...
oops.

Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.

Backing up a large drive has ALWAYS been difficult. The only thing that changes is the size of the number. Some of my early machines have 40MB hard drives and I had no practical means to back up that much data at the time. Now it might be 40TB but the problem is the same and so are many of the solutions. Back then we had tape, second hard drives, removable discs. Today we have... tape, hard drives and removable disks (solid state or optical instead of floppies). The more things change the more they stay the same.

Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)

How about 30TB?

Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:

• Apple iTunes flaw went unfixed for years and allowed remote access which enables spying and a lot more. There was also news of a hidden backdoor API in OS X for years which granted root privileges. This too could have enabled spying and a lot more.
• Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
• As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
• There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.

As soon as the attendant gets the impression that he system just works, he will be doing something else than watching the system.
Watch Hulu for example https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
It is human nature.

Yesterday, theverge highlighted this as "Apple says cheap battery replacements hurt iPhone sales - The easier it is to replace a battery, the less willing people are to buy a new iPhone", which was a scandalous way to finally admit they knew and intended to fucking with batteries on purpose.

Today, I find it nice they downgraded that article and replaced exactly the same news to a stock market insight - "yeah nah the largest company in the world won't make as much sales as it expected, likely will still profit anyways, GG".

The vast majority of messages avoid that peak: hardly anyone waits for the exact midnight to send a message. So the load gets smeared onto quite a chunk of time.

Look around you at the next NYE party and you will see just how wrong you are. Most people queue them up ahead of time and lots of people are hitting Send as the ball drops... (hint to devs, if someone has typed a partial message transmit that to the server in case they come back and hit send later - course Facebook was just screwed by that recently when it was found they had cached images on the server from never sent messages...).

At least it is spread across time zones but that is still a LOT of people, especially from the U.S. coasts.

The engineering problem boils down to: send short messages between pairs of arbitrary sources and destinations (although usually the source and destination are close to each other), with message size usually within 50-100 bytes. Let's be generous and say that with metadata they fit within 1500 bytes

Come on man, you know that modern web API's are not that compact, and we are talking Facebook here. You are off by an order of magnitude at least, way more when you stop to think that on NYE way more people are sending images also... One single response to a post on Facebook I just did with 14 words had a 9.5kb body going out, and a 21.2 k response.

Let's estimate the flow: after everyone raises the toast, exchanges hugs and kisses, says greetings, then sits down with the phone -- sending, let's say, 10 messages. This should take around half an hour. You get 300K messages per second. Not so impressive...

Think MILLIONS, possibly BILLIONS and you might be closer to the mark. On a *normal* day, Messenger and Whats App process over 60 billion messages a day... so that is 2.5billion messages every hour *normally*.

And that was from 2016. Do you think people send more, or fewer messages now than then!

Financed by the Chinese who have set electric vehicles as one of the industry's to dominate in the future (they have these 25 year plans and EV's are part of it) - Faraday hired a bunch of folks from U.S. car companies (Tesla mostly), siphoned off whatever knowledge they wanted and then pulled the money out and left the U.S. company to die. The Chinese manufacturers vehicles look really good actually - SUV's that look like SUV's (the G3 especially).

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

The very reason why facebook exists is to sell the personal information of its users.

If this is all they did, it would be only half sleazy (still sleazy, because they would rely on obscuring the privacy disclosures and knowing people just click through the pages of legalese). But Facebook is going full sleazy, by also tracking and selling the personal information of people who don't use their sites, via shadow profiles. People have no way to know they're being tracked, and no way to opt out.

What could the AG have to gain by winning a lawsuit against a company that was doing exactly what they were telling their users - and customers - they were going to do?

At the very minimum, I hope to see a decision (or, even better, a law) that forbids companies to track anybody who hasn't explicitly opted in to being tracked. Facebook, Google and the other data vampires should be allowed to keep and use only information that can be directly traced to somebody who has opted in. If, for example, somebody has my e-mail address in his Google contacts or on his Facebook account, neither company should be allowed to use, sell or disclose it to 3rd parties without my specific permission. If, for example, Slashdot tattles on my IP and activity to Google via all the calls to gstatic, google-analytics and so on, Google should not be allowed to save or use this information, because I don't have a Google account and I haven't agreed to being tracked.

Of course, companies can make opt in a condition for using their properties: if you want to create a Facebook account, or use Google Maps, you must agree to tracking. But if you don't agree, and you don't even have accounts with them, they should not be allowed to track you.

They are cheaply made, that's how they get such large profit margins. Just like this where their poor manufacturing process ("The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro’s metal and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple.") results in them not being able to make the case flat.

You see the Apple fanboys often crowing about how much profit Apple makes, well the reason for that is quite simple: the products are made very cheaply.

This is what Logitech does
They already bricked their old Harmony Link Hub
https://www.theverge.com/circu...

If you don't want Logitech to fuck you over, don't buy Logitech products.

Logitech has a history of screwing their users. Consider that in your future purchasing decisions.

As we understand it now, the data mining and analytics company, based out of London, gained access to data on as many as 50 million Facebook profiles thanks to generous data-sharing policies Facebook app developers enjoyed back in 2014. This data, which was sold to Cambridge Analytica against Facebook’s terms of service, reportedly informed the firm’s election ad targeting toolset used by the campaign of President Donald Trump and others.

Turns out they have been, at least in New Jersey.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

Meanwhile, Google's mass surveillance of western society continues unabated.

I've been saying this for a decade. The conclusion didn't require a team of overpaid researchers to deduce.

And you can keep saying it for another decade and still be wrong. Up until recently there was no incentive to open up more rare earth mines because the Chinese were supplying everyone cheaply. But then they stopped and now rare earth mines are opening up, thus solving the supply issue. Amazing, eh?

Sorry I know I said I wasn't going to keep trying to convince you but forgot to add these links:

  https://consumerist.com/2014/0...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/...

that shows that ISPs were in fact limiting bandwidth pre-2015 NN rules.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy added, "[T]he Free World depends on a free Internet. “. Too bad in practice they gleefully watched Ajit Pai crush that notion while they lined their pockets with $101M Big Telco Payola ( https://www.theverge.com/2017/... ).
Further, Republican Rep. Lamar Smith cited a debunked study ( https://www.politifact.com/tru... ) to claim Google provides biased results for searches about President Donald Trump. Smith accused Google of having a liberal bias "programmed into the company's culture."

It's hard to say how big a number it is because I don't know the denominator. Though in 2017, this number was 2 billion. 0.2% of 2 billion is 4 million devices. 0.3% is 6 million devices. In total, that is 10 million active devices. That's more than the number of people who live in New York City. It doesn't sound like a "very very small number" to me.

We're also approaching the year when we were promised self-driving cars. 2018, or ~2017, or 2018. It's going to be a few years of failed predictions.

Good god. In the 1970s we were promised that by now you'd be living on Mars going to work in a automatic self-flying car while a flesh-covered robot masturbates you.

We're also approaching the year when we were promised self-driving cars. 2018, or ~2017, or 2018. It's going to be a few years of failed predictions.

"Microsoft is a cloud company, ..."

Cloudy thinking?

Microsoft seems to me to be extremely badly managed. Some of the many, many stories:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)

Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression (May 27, 2016)

Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads (March 17, 2017)

Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. (March 21, 2017)

There is no way to justify Microsoft managers operating the company like that. If Microsoft had paid $100,000,000 for negative advertising, it wouldn't have gotten such extremely bad results, in my opinion.

GM has been making cars & trucks for a long time.

They don't seem particularly good at it (in terms of quality or price).

Not to mention safety. Any car can have safety defects - issue a recall and fix the problem. But not GM. GM cracks down on whistleblowers and makes them suffer.

Current GM employees know the score - don't mention these kinds of problems and you won't be fired (at least for now).

https://www.theverge.com/2014/...

https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/...

It is my opinion that Microsoft's mis-management and abuse is not reported sufficiently. Joking may help people adjust.

Microsoft is damaging customers and itself.

Some of the many, many stories:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)

Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression (May 27, 2016)

Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads (March 17, 2017)

Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. (March 21, 2017)

Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, so modern app appers app with the Lenovo Appbook with Appboard! https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17788476/lenovo-yoga-book-c930-dual-e-ink-screen-price-photos-release-date-ifa-2018

It doesn't have LUDDITE keys. It only apps modern appy app apps!

Apps!

This seems like a problem that SpaceX is going to solve for them.

The Canadian government will follow this up with funding for First Nations to get on board and then claim victory.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/...

Zipline International
Rwanda delivers blood and medication to remote clinics by drone. Fast, safe.

With precise control of the cars, it should be feasible to get inter-car gaps down to only a few feet, or even to zero, locking them together into an ad-hoc, very temporary train. If we assume only one car per second, that's 480-960 people per minute, in the same ballpark as a subway. At 4.4 cars per second it could carry 2100 to 4200 people per minute.

Ah, but this is science fiction. Currently we don't know how to do this in a safe manner. Musk himself only projects 30 second headways, a far cry from 1 second or 0.23 second headways like you suggest.

And the ability to make use of the console at all in areas where the best available Internet connection is slow and/or harshly capped

Pretty much. And to keep everything in context, that has been Microsoft's plan for the Xbox One since before its launch.

Many have forgotten, but the E3 prior to the consoles release, it was going to require "always on" internet connectivity to even launch a single player game, let alone actually need the network for anything.
They were also going to put unique keys in with discs for use in locking a game to your hardware and prevent reselling. A used game without an unused key would be useless, and require the purchase of a new key at full retail price (on top of whatever you paid for that used plastic disc)

https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/12/4422014/xbox-360-is-offline-alternative-to-xbox-one

Xbox chief Don Mattrick offered up his own thoughts on the Xbox One online requirement ahead of Microsoft's E3 keynote,

"Fortunately we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360," says Mattrick. "If you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device." Mattrick's comments appear to ignore scenarios where internet connectivity can be unstable or unreliable.

They only back peddled quite some time after massive backlash from pretty much everyone.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/19/microsoft-reversing-xbox-one-internet-used-game-policies

Xbox One will also no longer restrict used games, and will instead allow discs to be exchanged in the same way they are on Xbox 360. There will be no additional restrictions for trade-ins or lending games to friends.
and
"Since unveiling our plans for Xbox One, my team and I have heard directly from many of you, read your comments and listened to your feedback," Microsoft's Don Mattrick wrote. "I would like to take the opportunity today to thank you for your assistance in helping us to reshape the future of Xbox One. You told us how much you loved the flexibility you have today with games delivered on disc. The ability to lend, share, and resell these games at your discretion is of incredible importance to you. Also important to you is the freedom to play offline, for any length of time, anywhere in the world."

Those facts are not important to Microsoft, and they don't even claim so. They just want peoples money, and this back peddle was the best way to get more of that.

5 years ago for many people this day and age might as well have been over a lifetime ago.
Microsoft will continue to keep trying until raping their customers makes more money than giving them what they want.

How does one company launching and running 7000+ satellites grab you? In rockets that they can fly again and again basically just by refueling like a car?

That sounds pretty space-age to me.

I very much agree. Especially since this will quadruple the total number of satellites in orbit and be over ten times the number of working satellites currently in orbit.

How does one company launching and running 7000+ satellites grab you? In rockets that they can fly again and again basically just by refueling like a car?

That sounds pretty space-age to me.

I can see you harumph-ing all the way past multiple Mars landings and human colonies...

The FCC is also the treaty designated US government regulatory body that makes sure the satellites won't cause other troubles. See for example this story of a company that didn't listen to the FCC's no and went to India. Last I checked, it wasn't going well for their future plans.

This article alludes to Waymo doing some trips fully driverless:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

One quote:
"Waymo still uses backup drivers in most of its trips."

And the director of operations says:
“I’ve done fully driverless in Phoenix as well a few times, and it’s pretty normal,” she said matter-of-factly. “It just works.”

It takes a human to create the level of lucrative hype that 'Paris-based art collective Obvious' have managed to come up with. Back in the day, Slashdot would have covered the more interesting story behind the Christie's auction, which you can read here:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

'Obvious' just seem to have grabbed source from an Open Source project, generated a few images, cranked the hype up to 11, and made a killing. The community this comes out of, and especially the programmer who implemented the algorithm, aren't terribly impressed:

https://twitter.com/DrBeef_

If you want a go, the code is on github:

https://github.com/robbiebarra...

The whole point of my post was to discuss personal responsibility for one's health, and the social cost for ignoring it. I do not believe anyone would be so foolish as to actually try to chip humans, and I agree, I cannot imagine people being so foolish as to give up so much privacy for nothing more than free universal healthcare.

It's not like the road to hell is paved with financial incentives or anything ...

SpaceX's revised FCC filing calls for about 1.6k of the initial 4.4k constellation to be at 550km orbit. Brings the minimum latency down to 15ms, instead of 25-35ms.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
https://forum.nasaspaceflight....

Public option is the way forward, but I'm not so sure Elon should be in charge. How someone thinks their aesthetic distaste for beeps and the color yellow should take precedence of safety, I'll never understand.

The article is pretty detailed:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

If the article is correct, the cash subsidy for the factory has ballooned to $4.1 billion, and it won't make what was originally proposed. The payback of the subsidy is "...not 20 years, not 42 years..." likely never. The number of jobs is likely less than the 13,000 promised.

If one stops to think about the idea, it makes sense for a plutocracy that believes in a surveillance state to build spyware into the products its communications industry exports.

Not really. All good and well unless someone figures it out. Then *everyone* stops buying your products. You are out the surveillance and the profits.

They know that in basic capitalist economies, people look for the least expensive option to maximize the most amount of profit.

Except this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

Huawei and ZTE technology will largely be banned from use by the US government and government contractors. The ban was signed into placed by President Trump today as a component of the much larger Defense Authorization Act.

The entire notch exists because Apple is introducing Face ID with the iPhone X, a replacement for Touch ID that uses infrared cameras to scan your face and log you into your phone. Apple’s camera array is significantly larger than the single sensor on the Essential Phone, making the cut-out a lot bigger as a result. Apple definitely could have avoided this, either by creating a device with a slightly larger top bezel to accommodate the camera array, or by using a black background across the status bar to hide it.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16306298/apple-iphone-x-screen-notch

Here's some homework for you. Read about how China's domestic Android manufacturers are busy sucking the remaining life out of the I-phone market in China.

India's I-phone story is even sadder. The two biggest populations in the world. Then what? Pakistan, another huge one. No growth there for I-phone. Same is true of just about every rapidly growing economy.

It was a parody post, right? This is the Apple that can't even make a wireless charger.

Get your own platform, they said.

Just more "Slashdot's typical terrible coverage".

The criticism of the WSJ article was that it recycled old information and presented it as new. The fact that there had been a DOJ investigation was not news; Tesla confirmed a Bloomberg story on it in September. The request for documents from Tesla happened over a month ago. WSJ made this big front-page "DOJ is closing in!" article based on the fact that... the FBI sought documents and testimony from some former employees. It caused the stock price to plunge, but by the end of the day it had almost fully recovered (and surged past that the next day) as investors realized that they were just recycling a story. Then after the 10-Q repeated the news that broke in, I'll repeat, September (that the DOJ had requested, and been given, documents related to the production ramp), a number of outlets ran prominently with the exact "Tesla confirms DOJ investigation!" article, as if this was actual, new news. They're milking the heck out of this.

FYI: the DOJ case was launched simultaneously with a civil case on the exact same issue. Tesla already won the civil case. Obviously. Seriously: if missing projections while publicly describing what's going on as "production hell" is actionable, then virtually every company in the United States would be bankrupt.

These are the two cellphone construction techniques that make generate e-waste.

Good thing Apple has a Plan for that:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/... ...and Witness the Result:

https://appleinsider.com/artic...

So, tell me: What are the OTHER Computer/Cellphone OEMs doing in this regard?

Those brokers are not nearly as dangerous as things like Google buying access to MasterCard's data. Facebook and MasterCard also appear to have bidirectional sharing agreement.

If you don't touch that, it's like fighting the drug war while conspicuously avoiding ever moving on the cartels and focusing only on street dealers and their suppliers.

My phone is due for an upgrade - HTC One M8. The battery only lasts for about 3-4 hours of web browsing now, and there's no new android upgrades, but otherwise there's not really anything wrong with it.

But since I plan on keeping my next phone for 4-5 years, I'm not going to upgrade to a new one until it supports the new L5 GPS standard that allows accuracy down to 30cm. People say "why do you care?" but the answer is for lane-level navigation with google maps. Sure it's not there yet, but it will be eventually, and it would be lame to buy a new phone now that doesn't have this feature, when I expect my next phone to last for 4-5 years.

https://www.theverge.com/circu...

So it's kind of funny that there is actually a reasonable hardware-based upgrade that manufacturers could be putting into their phones this year, to give people a reason to upgrade, but yet practically no-one has.

From https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
(cited in the previous story)

"According to the report, Google was under no obligation to offer such an enormous sum to Rubin or any of the other executives that the Times says received separation agreements after leaving the company over sexual misconduct allegations. They could’ve all been fired, but were instead protected by the company and given millions. In Rubin’s case, the deal prevented him from working for any of the company’s rivals or publicly disparaging Google."

That sounds very much like Rubin was handed a "golden parachute" to make him leave.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10...

http://fortune.com/2018/10/28/...

There are four stories from four separate outlets about that Nazi shithole being "banned" from the Internet.

what about if an ISP site has your address has it but it turns that it really does then the ISP must pay the cost to built it out.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/...

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

https://consumerist.com/2015/0...