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Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.

And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.

You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is.

Wow, someone on Slashdot admitting another poster has a point! Thank you!

Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.

Amen brother. I doubt you'll ever get money out of politics. At best, you and I can tell our representatives that we don't want them to "bring home the bacon", we want them to vote in the best interest of the city/state/country as a whole. And we can vote that way (which doesn't make much difference, not one vote, but get a million like thinking voters and now it's interesting).

OK, really off topic here. There's some actual science in Political Science. They can show how having winner-take-all, first-to-the-finish voting systems, like we tend to have in the US, basically guarantees we'll have two dominant and largely stable parties. So I can't agree more that we need to get rid of our intuitively obvious but flawed system of "one person, one vote, most votes wins, winner takes all". You think about it a bit and only something like a third of American voted for our current President, which means that minority gets a lot of power over the majority. How busted is that?

I live in California, a reliable Democratic state for the last 20 years. My vote in 2016 made absolutely no difference. No matter what I did, all our Electoral votes were going to Clinton. As a result, neither Trump nor Clinton had to give a rat's a** about anything Californians cared about, other than how it affected fund raising. I think it would be better for all Californians to divide our Electoral votes proportionally somehow (county by county, district by district, proportional to the popular vote state wide, there are many ways). That would be good for all Californians, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Pirate, whatever. The Democratic leadership, however, will never go for this, they'd be crucified by the national party. The Republicans could get behind this but they have no say in how the state is run. I don't know how to break the logjam.

I'd also love to have a system other than plurality voting. Instant runoffs, approval votin

Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.

You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is. Unfortunately, our congress is almost completely broken, and has been for years, decades even. https://www.realclearscience.c... Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.

False. When a tech site believes it is "supposed to deliver full self-driving", then I would proffer the majority would as well.

I wish there were some other way to short-circuit forum pedants who think they can score a point by reminding readers that devices locked down to run otherwise incompatible userlands happen to have the same kernel.

That's not what you really want to know, just say what you want to know rather than trying to come up with some short-hand that is ultimately confusing anyway because when you say GNU/Linux that includes things like webOS TVs too, you're just making it needlessly confusing out of laziness, as i point out below your requirement is literally 5 things and you're complaining about your inability to effectively communicate those 5 things as 2 instead.

"But they don't run Linux applications, or at least they self-destruct if you try."

No they dont "self destruct" if you do, don't be such a drama queen. And actually they will support non-chromeos applications officially soon.

The actual dependencies for my work flow are POSIX, Python, GNU Make, X Window System, and Wine. So how should I go about expressing that concisely without making the question too specific to my particular work flow?

It's one line, literally 5 things. Why does it need to be more concise? Who are you trying to communicate this to on such a regular basis that it needs to be more concise than that? It's not particularly verbose as it is.

Actual users don't care about that anyway, what they care about is whether there is a package available for their platform (be that linux-based or otherwise), a deb, rpm, msi, npm, spm, apk, etc... Which will do the dependency resolution for them, requiring anything beyond that for users is needlessly complicated. For developers those 5 things you listed is fine because they need to know the dependencies rather than the platform.

It's because Apple doesn't know how to test stuff. They do this over and over again, more so than any other 1st tier company.

This kind of flaw would have been discovered during routine testing of the keyboard at Lenovo out Dell. They would have aged it, blasted it with dust, tested it in 100% humidity and -10C, dropped all kinds of stuff on it...

I can only think that Apple is so desperate to keep stuff secret that they have to forgo this. They must have product engineers telling them they need to do it.

And now they have who knows how many defective keyboards, rivetted to the upper part of the case and battery so replacement is insanely expensive and labour intensive.

No. Apple "Doesn't know how to test stuff." No expertise in simulated real-world testing. Of course not.

Retard. Apple has its own destructive-testing facility:

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

The original report I saw also mentioned that they were stress-testing Macbook Pros, etc. in that facility.

The construction of this tunnel seems to be moving at an incredible pace. How is it going so fast?

Actually, it really wasn't that fast. The tunneling started about a year ago.

We already have the technology to synthesize voices using a short sample.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

What are you going to do when your voiceprint is hacked? Get a new voice?

Yeah... about that... be prepared for ads to come to Firefox in the next version.

Your forgot "and to serve you ads directly to your browser"

Please provide a link. I want to try the Raspberry Pi you recommend.

Only Raspberry Pi computers should connect to the internet? Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

Intel CPUs are not safe: Intel reportedly gears up to patch 8 Spectre Next Generation CPU flaws. (May 3, 2018)

Computers running Windows 10 with internet access are not safe. Some of the huge number of shockingly ugly problems with Windows 10:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.

7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you...

Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads.

Years of bugginess: Windows 10 bugs

Problems this year: Windows 10 problems 2018

Update problems this year: Windows 10 update problems 2018

I was just reading this earlier

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

used by south wales police (uk) it identified around 2500 people as persons of interests and around 450 arrests were made but only around 200 were actual matches

is this likely to be better?

I agree: "Just stop messing with the EXISTING stuff. STOP!" That is one more crazy issue with Windows 10.

Microsoft has become AMAZINGLY wacky. It seems that no one is in control, or even doing any coordinating. Apparently Microsoft wants Windows 10 to copy the abuse of Google's Android. The result is that Microsoft abuses customers and users.

Some of the huge number of stories:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.

7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you...

Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads

Years of bugginess: Windows 10 bugs

Problems, limited to this year: Windows 10 problems 2018

Update problems, limited to this year: Windows 10 update problems 2018

My opinion: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not capable of managing Microsoft.

Uh, the rest of the industry made what happen?

Fingerprint scanning through the screen. I would have thought that was obvious from the context.

Yeah, there clearly was a phone rushed to market to meet a deadline (CES) - and you just linked to it.

Uh, the rest of the industry made what happen?

Fingerprint scanning through the screen. I would have thought that was obvious from the context.

That's partly a reaction to browser implementation of Secure Contexts [pineight.com], a W3C spec that reserves certain web APIs for HTTPS sites.

I think it's more a reaction to browsers popping up security warnings on all non-HTTPS sites.

On the one hand, getting public websites to use HTTPS is almost inarguably a good thing. On the other hand, getting intranets to use HTTPS is nearly useless, and getting mDNS devices to use HTTPS is impossible. That last one is going to be a real problem, and I'm really not sure how the industry is going to solve it. The only way I can think of would be to:

• Define a new mDNS device name field in the certificate spec.
• Require that all browsers and devices that implement that field use key pinning in lieu of any guarantee of global uniqueness to the names.
• Require allowing multiple certs with the same name to be pinned with multiple keys (after issuing a stern warning that they are trusting a second device with the same name as an existing device).
• Possibly require browsers to ignore the expiration date for those certificates (because those devices may not be directly connected to the Internet, and thus might not be practical to re-cert).
• Possibly define a standard whereby a browser accessing a device with an old certificate can automatically obtain an updated certificate from the same registrar (or its designated replacement) and upload it to the device without user interaction.

Either way, I'm pretty sure it can't be done practically without making some sort of changes to the standards themselves. That said, I can't be certain of that, because contrary to security best practices, the people who designed the X.509 specification will not make the specification available to security researchers unless they pay $130. So I can only speculate on what the standards say. Aren't standards grand?

Which small ISPs were destroyed by Net Neutrality? Were they smaller than 100,000 subscribers?

I was curious why they would say that, since it should really help them. Here's what I found:

https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/smaller-isps-ask-pai-dispel-cloud-title-ii-165261

Basically, as soon as someone said "FCC regulation" investors started to pull out. There was actually nothing specific in the regulation that was causing a problem. Investors were afraid that the FCC would apply price fixing, or use some vague clause to punish small ISPs. Now that was back in April 2017, and a few months later ISPs are suddenly switching their story, asking for the regulations to be put back in place. Interestingly, they seem to be in favor of neutrality itself, saying:

WISPA agrees that ISPs should clearly disclose their terms of service, disclose their network management practices, and protect their customers’ private information; and our members do. All of this will continue under the FCC framework adopted today,

Many of these thousands of games on Steam are fake games, tossed together in a weekend using unmodified or barely modified parts from Unity's Asset Store in an attempt to make money from Steam trading cards. Some reviewers refer to these as asset flips.

Both USPS and UPS are big enough and both have a history of buying custom vehicles specially built for them. You would think that both organizations would already be fielding large scale prototype tests and that either existing or upstart suppliers could see big money replacing entire fleets.

USPS and UPS are both having electric fleets designed and built.

Yet strangely I don't see any of them doing this.

That is strange. You don't have access to Google?

Why would not count all of the people that voted on the bill instead of just in the Senate? According to:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17057754/sesta-fosta-passes-congress-cda-230-house-of-representatives

"The measure passed on a 388-25 vote, with 14 Republicans and 11 Democrats voting in opposition."

Yes they do. Cell phones have become bigger because people want a bigger display, but have bumped into the size limit of pocketability. The obvious solution is some sort of portable display technology, which would allow the processing bits of your mobile computer (your smartphone) to remain small enough to fit in your pocket, without sacrificing screen size. The pressure to increase smartphone screen size is so great that manufacturers have been clamoring to eliminate bezels, and use dead space to display additional info.

The advantage of putting the display in glasses is that it's not really the physical screen size which matters. It's the apparent screen size - a combination of physical size and viewing distance. By putting the display right next to the eye, you can create a display with a massive apparent size even though its physical size is tiny. You avoid the drawbacks of a large physical screen size (loss of portability, easier to break, greater battery consumption).

The only solutions I've seen to this problem are a foldable/rollable display, a projection display, or a display mounted close to your eye via glasses.

Back in February there was a decent write up on the Verge behind some of the tech. Intel was hoping "data is the new oil", aka data-mine-the-hell-out-of-people would pay off in the long run, along with practical applications.

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

âoeYouâ(TM)re in the kitchen, youâ(TM)re cooking. You can just go âAlexa, I need that recipe for cookies,â(TM) and bam, it appears in your glasses,â Vonshak says.

I am not an accountant, I know nothing about the internal workings of Amazon other than what I can read in public media, and I probably do not know what I am talking about. But, I can do some arithmetic.

1 - The summary states that the Amazon warehouse worker makes $24,300.

2 - Amazon is famous for foregoing profits during its first 15-20 years in favor of expansion of services.

3 - There is financial information at the following links:
Amazon revenues: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Amazon income: https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/...
Amazon employees: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Amazon profits: https://www.theverge.com/2016/...

Based on these numbers, Amazon's performance in 2017 was:
Revenue = $178b
Gross profit after cost of revenue = $66b
Income after operating expenses = $4b
Net income after taxes et al = $3b
Employment = 566,000

For prior years:
2016: $2.4b net on $136b revenue, 341,000 employees
2015: $0.6b net on $107b revenue, 231,000 employees

You can see the trend - Amazon is only recently profitable as employees expand with general revenue and profit.

I have no idea how many of the employees are warehouse or fulfillment center employees. I have seen reports that would place the number between 130k and 200k.
For the sake of this analysis, assume that other low skilled employees are included, and we will go with 200,000 bottom wage employees.

Assume that Amazon had a fit of good will toward its workers and payed them a liveable non-stressful wage.
If in 2017 the $24k current wage was upped to $34k, that is an extra $10k/person/annum x 200k workers = $2 billion extra in wages.
That is 2/3's of profit, so Amazon could have afforded it (at the expense of shareholder return).

In 2016, assume a pro rata fewer number of low wage employees, 341k/566k x 200k = 120k.
Then, $10k x 120k workers = $1.2 billion = 1/2 of profit, so it was affordable.
In 2015, estimate low wage workers at 231k/566k x 200k = 82k.
Then, $10k x 82k workers = $0.82 billion = 1/3 greater than profit, so it was not fully affordable.

Going back farther, there was less profit to fund higher wages.

I am not arguing for or against Amazon, nor for or against minimum wages or workers rights or any other sociopolitical point of view. Being in a human services profession, I tend to side with the workers, and it pains me to hear of such situations. However, I also buy from Amazon, and call me a hypocrite if you will, but so do you.

Emotional or political or social points of view aside, it can be seen that Amazon's push to expand did not permit unfettered generous wages during periods of unprofitability.
Of course, the counter argument must be made that the higher paid employees, which are greater than half the workforce, could have had reduced wages and bonuses for a more equitable pay scale.

Now that Amazon is coming into the black, the righteous thing to do would be to raise wages. Even better, given how long they operated in the red, and were famously proud to do so, they could do so for another year or two and turn their profits into stock or cash bonuses for the low paid employees, to thank them for their sacrifice during the formative years.

The press didn't like it, and do you have any proof that people WANTED Apple to remove the number one means of connecting headphones to cell phones?

It's not MY postulate to prove nor disprove, genius.

The press didn't like it, and do you have any proof that people WANTED Apple to remove the number one means of connecting headphones to cell phones?

FOSTA requires INTENT

Oh?

The bill would make websites criminally liable for hosting ads and other content linked to a sex-trafficking enterprise. The result would be a major exception to existing Safe Harbor provisions, and has been opposed by groups like the EFF and ACLU

Well, the EFF and ACLU have staff lawyers. Are you an attorney? No? I'll trust their interpretation, then.

Level 4 vehicles (fully self-driving, no human attendant, but geofenced to a specific area) are already here, working in real life, and have been all year. Hundreds of these are already ferrying the public around Phoenix, and they now have a licence for full commercial operation.

Expect to see thousands more real self-driving robotaxis in service in the 25 cities they're being tested in today.

Eric Schmidt: Google TV on 'majority' of new TVs by summer 2012 - I bet Apple would like successes like that for change instead of failures like Home Pod.

In July 2017, Musk promised to make 5000 Model 3s weekly in December 2017. We've not seen a sustained 2K/week yet - and it's nearly 4 months late. Producing 3800 in March is around 900 per week - less than 20% of where they were supposed to be last December.

Is that the same RSA that took $10 million dollars from the NSA to intentionally weaken its encryption algorithm so that one of its software products could be backdoored?

I think so.

Even Google stopped supporting their Pixel phones, when almost their only selling point was getting proper updates.

Google guarantees 3 years of updates (OS updates, not just patches) on the Pixel 2, and the Pixel 1 is guaranteed 3 years of patches (but I think only 2 years of OS updates):
  https://www.theverge.com/circu...

People die while driving to work. Using your argument, no one would ever get into a car.

Yes, Tesla's Autopilot isn't perfect, and its capabilities may be exaggerated, but I believe that, overall, drivers using Autopilot are less likely to get into an accident. Isn't that the real measure?

Tesla's crash rate dropped 40 percent after Autopilot was installed, Feds say

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

After having a quick look at this I am wondering if this is not a good way to get Facebook to give more in campaign contributions, as it says they have spent $7 million over the last 12 years, which sounds like almost nothing.
It could be seen as "We will make your life uncomfortable regularly unless we get more of that sweet, sweet cash".
After all, the way Facebook runs its business is none of congress' business.

Facebook pays a shitload of money to Apple, for example, to get their login information as one of the defaults on iOS. Same with Twitter.

Nice try, Hater. You're an idiot.

Apple REMOVED Facebook and Twitter Integration from iOS 11.

Do try to keep up.

https://www.axios.com/apple-re...

While we're on the subject, Tim Cook's little "we don't steal your private data" thing he's on right now, is hilariously hypocritical. They do not have a-user-for-sale-to-advertisers model, true, but absolutely have a history of selling the user's experience and likelihood to interact with such models to the highest bidder, e.g. their switch from Google to Bing, the etc. This is super recent as of iOS 11: https://www.theverge.com/2017/... [theverge.com]

Your linked Verge article was about Apple REMOVING Facebook and Twitter Integration from iOS 11, much like my linked Axios article, above. How in the FUCK does that prove your argument?!?

Idiot moron Apple Hater.

Go the FUCK away.

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

Because the exact opposite happened to microsofts AI in less than 24 hours on twitter. I'm not sure forcing an "AI" algorithm to stare into the forsaken gaping abyss of human social media is really going to end well.

You can't really compare software written by a long lost behemoth like Microsoft to any modern software company.

On the other hand, I have no faith in Facebook or Google to do things much better.

Because the exact opposite happened to microsofts AI in less than 24 hours on twitter. I'm not sure forcing an "AI" algorithm to stare into the forsaken gaping abyss of human social media is really going to end well.

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

Rewriting history. Elon said the problem was easy to solve in 2015, and that he would let his car drive him coast to coast before the end of 2017.
Basically he was saying Tesla had an autonomous vehicle technology that was just around the corner.

I'm with you that they never said that this technology was implemented in their current cars.

With The Culture model you are assuming a hyper intelligent benevolent dictator. The trouble is that what we're far more likely to get is an omni-present utterly inflexible jobs-worth of a petty bureaucrat. The sort that can't cut anyone any slack, because those are the rules, no matter if doing so would result in a better outcome for everyone. The sort that enforces the rules, even when the rules are wrong because the development team made a mistake. The sort that ends up making poor inferences and becoming incredibly racist.

Simply put; we as humans are still figuring out what we want society to be - what we want life to be - and any decent developer knows: You don't automate a system until you understand what the system is meant to do!

AvitarX reminisced:

I'm pretty sure I saw a video of a Google car out on its own.

Beginning on April 2nd of this year, California's DMV has issued licenses to 50 autonomous vehicle makers allowing them to operate without a human driver aboard ...

Congress extended the same data-gathering practices of tech companies like Google and Facebook to internet providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

Why on earth would it behoove Congress, outside of the campaign contribution factor, to ease the path for other internet providers to evolve into top flight data collection outfits?

Perhaps campaign contributions are but the penultimate incentive, and government exploitation of the collected data is the end game.

The CLOUD Act was snuck into a must pass omnibus budget bill and not left on its own legs to be debated. But the biggest issue is that it makes it a international diplomatic affair to deal with what can best be described as a local law enforcement issue.

Now, I don't know about you, but I would rather my government concentrate on the bigger issues when doing international diplomacy and not having to constantly ring up someone in the ambassador chain of command in order to get a sign-off on this sort of thing. Analogy time: It's one thing to ask to borrow a cup of sugar or an egg from time to time of your neighbor. You know you're going to do it for them and probably have in the past. It's another thing to ask for 10 grams of sugar every hour. The first isn't a big deal, the latter can really put a strain on your relationship with them. To the point that they might tell you to go away.

And unless the point was to otherwise accelerate the international isolation of the US, then this was a poorly written piece whose authors knew it. Which is why it got attached as an amendment to a must-pass piece of legislation.

I'm curious as to how Google plans to prevent trolling on the part of people like 4chan that just love to abuse AI systems. I can easily see someone uploading photos of dicks in response to every photo request or adding racist translations among other mischief.

Copy-paste the link to the iphone X news item with a photo that shows you the level of insanity known as the notch; prepare to look away

https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

proper html link to same article

AI driving cars. Using RISC. https://www.theverge.com/2017/... I bet Space-X is also using RISC for a lot of their control software. Last I worked on anti-lock train brakes, we were using 68k... Your ignorance of how things really move is sad...

Grow up, snowflakes.

I share your criticism of Facebook employees, but at what point do they cry about being special and unique, warranting a "snowflake" insult? Your pejorative loses meaning when you don't even attempt to use it in context.

Well when I read that many Facebook employees seem to think that the company should step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more “integrity” I had to laugh. Apparently the business practices are not the problem; what they want are more colleagues who "don't ask, don't tell".

Too late, recall PRISM.
Information was leaked by CitizenFour showing that Apple, amongst others was on the dole from the Feds selling access to its user base.

Seifert D. (2013, June 6). Secret program gives NSA, FBI backdoor access to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft data.

That was likely a fake/forgery. Notice on the 4th "Powerpoint Slide", Apple is by itself WAY off to the side, and doesn't just show a date, like the rest of the entries. It looks to me like someone was desperately trying to "convince" the reader that this was "True".

Too late, recall PRISM. Information was leaked by CitizenFour showing that Apple, amongst others was on the dole from the Feds selling access to its user base. Seifert D. (2013, June 6). Secret program gives NSA, FBI backdoor access to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft data.