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I'm not sure if Apple plans on using its own radio hardware, but the Intel chips sucked including being about 2-3 dBm worse reception. The front end design in the ten plus also had issues, which can be seen straight from the FCC filing (6-7 dBm underperformance in receive) making the modem lose signal where older Apple phones with Qualcomm chips still worked ok. It was around the same time Apple removed the test mode and all software access to actual received cellular signal strength and only lets you see bars. Hopefully Apple brings Qualcomm chips back, one of the main things people use a phone for is the ability to send voice/data - or not as modern phones would work far better with 90s style antennas and apparently that's not an option.

Except all of the ISP's have been buying up content companies left and right preparing for war. Combine that with the likelihood that Apple will require Apple hardware to access its service and you've cut your target market in half. I mean Amazon Prime works on Android but not Android TV because Amazon is mad at Alphabet. So Alphabet blocks the Echo Show from playing YouTube videos (painful workarounds notwithstanding). And Amazon has been providing your utopian service for a year now. It isn't any easier than having and app for each service on an Android TV , Fire, or Roku device.

That market is starting to really heat up, the choices are growing fast, take your pick, https://cars.usnews.com/cars-t... or https://www.tomsguide.com/us/p... or https://www.edmunds.com/electr....

The electric midsize SUV is the market place to be, both as buyer and seller and it is rapidly becoming much more competitive.

Now there is a real gamble in there, how long to hold onto your infernal combustion engine. As more electrics entire the market, so the prices will drop but as more electric vehicles enter the market so the resale of your infernal combustion engine will drop. So how long to hold on and when to sell, because that infernal combustion engine price drop will tend to be quite precipitous at the end.

Choose and perish, one way or the other, pay too much for the electric or lose too much on your old gas guzzler. Keep in mind people will be able to fill their electric tax free, from their home solar battery power system, so yeah, when the market goes into full speed, your gas guzzler investment is dead.

So does that mean of the 2000, that 200 were OK? Care to give us a list?

The answer to your questions, including the full list, are in the first link from the summary. Please, learn to use your left mousse button before posting on slashdot.

The good ones, according to the article from the second link, are:

Twenty-three apps did detect all malware samples AV-Comparatives threw at them, including Tom's Guide's top three picks: Bitdefender Mobile Security, Norton Mobile Security and Avast Mobile Security.

Our sixth-place pick, Psafe DFNDR, was also in the 100-percent category, although AV-Comparatives noted that DFNDR used Avast's antivirus engine and had not updated itself to run properly on Android 8 Oreo and later. Lookout Mobile Security, our No. 5 pick, was a little behind the others with 99.6 percent. (Google's own Play Protect antivirus software did poorly, with a detection rate of only 69 percent.

The chip sets are shipping, phones are being engineered and built, carriers are buying spectrum space, vendors are starting to ship the equipment and the marketing blitz is already on.

It doesn't matter if you are ready or not, it's going to happen unless there is some huge unforeseen world/national event that makes it financially impossible. It's happening, like it or not.

Where is it happening? 4g networks only partially qualify for the 4g defintion right now. 4g networks are supposed to be 10Mb minimum (OK we hit that), 100Mb typical with speeds up to 1Gb. The best downloads per tomshardware are 85Mb which is not enough to meet the average 4g defintion. Verizon's average is 53.3, which is half the 4g definition.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/b...

I make it a policy to never judge before seeing a device. Maybe it will be brilliant but I have my doubts based on what I've seen so far. If it's like Samsung Galaxy F or Royole Flexpai then they shouldn't bother. That form factor is impractical and doesn't appear to be very robust. (it looks terribly easy to break if you put it in a pocket) I think the basic idea of a device that can morph from a phone size to small tablet size is a solid concept but it will all be about the execution. I don't think the bendy screens will be the best way to get there but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

And $1500? It better be an AMAZING device to justify that price point.

I think dusting off the RAZR nameplate is idiotic. The device shares no heritage or design with the original and anyone who is nostalgic for the original RAZR never really had to live with one. It was fine for the day but was more flash than performance. Aside from the eye catching design it was an entirely unremarkable phone in a market full of equally unremarkable phones. Relying on the hope for nostalgia from a 20 year old dumb phone to market a (supposedly) cutting edge modern smartphone should result in some marketing idiot losing their job.

And apple crashes more
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/ios-and-android-reliability,news-23872.html

Fucking lying apple assholes

I'm playing with the idea of buying a new phone and found this when I was checking phones out online about a week ago.

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/b...

Tom's has been around forever and as far as I know is still pretty reputable in regards to its recommendations.

Also their year-old phone is still much faster than this new Galaxy Note 9

https://downloads.tomsguide.co...

> the guy who recently admitted that the standard password policy recommendations (expire after 3 months and all that) were something he pulled out of his ass...

paywalled article...

The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d!
Bill Burr’s 2003 report recommended using numbers, obscure characters and capital letters and updating regularly—he regrets the error
By Robert McMillan
Aug. 7, 2017 12:41 p.m. ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/t...

via

https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

some other coverage from the time:

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/p...
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...

But Apple won't like the margins in the CPU space.

I dunno, sounds pretty much what they're used to

Does anyone remember when OnLive and the Ouya console were the "streaming game service" flavor du jour?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

The Internet advertising industry has exhibited, over the last two decades, a consistent pattern of complete, active and malevolent indifference to the well-being of yourself, your computing equipment and your data. "Malvertising" is a term because of their laxity. Their representatives equate using ad blocking software with racism combined with a direct attack on freedom of speech, and other editorials equate it to actively causing children to starve and stealing. Otherwise useful parts of JavaScript have had to be essentially obliterated because ads abuse them so very, very badly. They populate your screen with deceptive content, such as "diagnostic windows" and fake Download buttons in an attempt to entice you into downloading their shit.

Link to more information on how your ad blocker is racist censorship (according to ad firms)

A link to why they think you're a thief that steals food from children with ad blockers

Google's ad service being used for cryptocurrency mining on web browsers

It's too late for the Internet advertising industry. When trying to block out their crap has become an act of necessary self-defense, when they steal your processor cycles for their own gain for cryptocurrency, when they allow malware onto your machine, they've become an active hostile force. They are attacking you and consider you scum for defending yourself. Unfortunately there are just too many of the bad guys and not enough of the good guys here, and as such a potentially harmless way of keeping websites afloat is essentially doomed in its current form (although something like, say, the Brave browser's model might work).

Yes I'm pointing out that smartphones now only have 3 hours of useful battery life. Forget that standby time, that's an absolutely useless metric.

Many phones last much more. See here.

It's simple, they didn't want the users to know about it. It's planned obsolescence.They knew the Lithium batteries would deteriorate after a few hundred charge cycles, ~18-24 months and the software would slow down the phones.

The fact that it was NOT disclosed, tells you about their motive. Sell more hardware.

If that was the real motive, the "slowdown" would have been baked-into iOS 2 rather than iOS 10 or 11.

Instead, the timing of this (no pun) makes it OBVIOUS that the "current spike-spreading" code was added to iOS when Apple said they had a software-fix for the iPhone 6 "shutdown" problem. They just didn't take the infinity amount of time it would take to discover how that fix would affect every single iPhone on the planet, and thus, eventually, someone noticed. But what's clear is that Apple was DEFINITELY NOT "trying to sell new phones". New iPhones have been PLENTY faster year-over-year on their own!

https://www.iphonebenchmark.ne...

And lest you think that those recent performance figures are in any way ho-hum compared with the competition, read this:

https://www.cultofmac.com/4626...

http://appleinsider.com/articl...

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/i...

So, Apple doesn't HAVE to slow down their older phones to "make their new phones seem faster." They ARE faster (and also fastEST!)

At $1100, I just don't care. Its about $500 more than I've ever paid for any phone that I've ever owned, including my Galaxy S8, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything more or better. Actually if anything it seems worse in several areas. https://www.wired.com/story/ha...
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/p...

While OnePlus will provide fix for security issues, you have to play cat and mouse all the time... https://www.tomsguide.com/us/o...

Vizio TVs log your habits, and the others probably do too. I have a Vizio smartass TV but use it purely as a dumb display, primarily because:

• I trust Apple to respect my privacy way more than any TV manufacturer, and
• The TV's built-in apps were utter out-of-date shit with terrible UIs. The Amazon Prime app was too old to connect to Amazon for several months, for instance.
• A TV screen isn't obsolete until it dies or its technology is genuinely behind the times (e.g. an older 4:3 CRT). I upgrade and replace things connected to a TV regularly, but as long as the screen itself still looks good and supports modern hardware, there's little reason to upgrade it. I have a 10 year old LCD in my bedroom. Can you imagine how useless it'd be if it only supported services that existed in 2007?

I have zero incentive whatsoever to let me TV do anything more than display the output of other, better, more respectful devices. There's literally nothing a TV can do for me that requires a network connection of any sort.

Give us reasonably sized phones that have reasonably good displays and reasonably good performance with reasonably good cameras and with reasonably good quality at a reasonably good price.

They have already arrived: Moto G5S Plus and Huawei Honor 6X.

Give us reasonably sized phones that have reasonably good displays and reasonably good performance with reasonably good cameras and with reasonably good quality at a reasonably good price.

They have already arrived: Moto G5S Plus and Huawei Honor 6X.

Why does my phone need to identify objects and people on the photographs that I've stored on it? The fact that it's 'invisible' and causes people to be confused about battery drain means people don't even know their phone is doing it.

Yeah, I expect there's a real good reason why the phone needs to run face recognition on every photograph I have stored on my phone. Righto.

It's only "invisible" to paranoid idiots line you.

The rest of us watch Apple Keynote addresses and read OS "Feature" Pages, tutorials, TV commercials and other media reports, websites, reviews, etc, where these features are (gasp!) revealed, demonstrated, and openly discussed.

And BTW, you sick fuck, because Apple DOES respect your privacy, ALL of the face categorization process and data is done ON DEVICE (that's why it slows down your phone, you moron!).

https://goo.gl/images/ccjsMV

https://goo.gl/images/8osDNj

https://www.apple.com/ios/phot...

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

https://www.iphonetricks.org/1...

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/i...

https://www.cultofmac.com/4920...

https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/20...

Oh, and I found these links in about 5 minutes, using that secret, Dark-Web search tool, you probably haven't heard of it. It's called "Google".

I see a lot of folks on here complaining with the general tone of "The author should be as well-adjusted and capable as I am". Well they're not. Big whoop. Let's not whine and actually do something productive here.

1) I think the problem is getting worse. It used to just be email. Now it's email, phone, OS, websites and even my freakin' web browser itself that want to push notifications.
2) Yes, I'm well adjusted and adapted to this environment. I've spent the majority of my life interested in tech. It's no big surprise that other folks who merely use devices (instead of being passionate about devices) might get swamped by this.

Here are some helpful links:
A great guide for turning off different types of iPhone notifications:
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/t...

Another guide for both Android and iOS:
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

A guide for Windows 10:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...

And for Chrome (Including turning off sites asking permission, which I hate almost as much as actual notifications)
https://support.google.com/chr...

In tandem with all of this, I also recommend ad-blockers and paying for media services which eliminate advertisements (Pandora, Netflix, etc.). This helps provide a more distraction-free environment and helps maintain a low-distraction life.

It's also an easier term to coin while massaging sage scented beard oil into your soul patch while cruising along on a hover-board discussing the profound implications of embracing the semi-popular ideas..

But remember, hover-boards should not be used while consuming locally sourced craft beers!

Or using your iPhone to control them!

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/a...

A long time ago on USENET, people claimed that they could improve the signal/noise ratio of their CD's by painting the rims green with a magic marker. A pen called Balonium was the one that the "experts" recommended.

http://www.tomsguide.com/forum...

https://www.audio-forums.com/t...

"Do a web search for "Barry Ornitz" and "CD Optical Impedance
Matching Fluid" to find the origin of this substance.

Note especially that it was published on April 1st. "

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/be...

Let's take a look at the characteristics of a username:

• - They are not secret. Often, they consist of a person's name, email address or employee number.
• - Often, one and the same username is used for many systems.
• - Changing a username is unusual or even impossible.

And let's take a look at the characteristics of a password:

• - They should be kept secret.
• - You are strongly advised to use a different password for every system.
• - Every system must allow you to change your password.

Now, let's take a look at what a fingerprint or other biometric property is:

• - They are not secret. You leave your fingerprints everywhere and it's very well possible to have your iris scan taken by other people [1].
• - Because of the limited amount of biometric properties (ten fingers and two eyes), you will likely be using one biometric property for multiple systems.
• - You can't change a biometric property on demand.

Conclusion: biometric properies are more like usernames, not like passwords. So, use them for identification, not authentication. Any biometric system supplier telling you otherwise is just telling marketing nonsense.

[1]: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ph...

Facebook CEO Called Trusting Users Dumb Fucks

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

On USB-C durability, only time will tell. They're still too new. Present day regular USB ports suck. I tell people to plug in hubs to wear them out instead of the ones soldered to the board Even on my own machine it's a fight to get a connection, push the connector in, nothing happens, gotta pull it out a tiny bit, wiggle it just right to get it to work. Bump into the cable and whoops... And, going back to my original post, I will always insist that removing the MagSafe (and headphone on the iPhone) was a dick move, totally bogus. As for the others, they could remove them after the market for them dies off a bit. This is just part of their eternal upgrade treadmill. Every time sales drop off they just give Malibu Stacy a new hat. We don't want your damn adapters. Whatever, MacOS is on its way out too. This is the future.

networkworld
tomsguide

How have you not heard of VIZIO? They're extremely well reviewed, inexpensive and carried by all the major big box stores.

If you've never heard of VIZIO then I'm guessing you haven't shopped for TVs in about 10 years.

The problem is that they designed the Apple Watch as a crippled device. They didn't want it to cannibalize iPhone sales, so it's basically a remote control for the phone in your pocket. If they make a watch that can make calls, people will buy them. It could be the iPod Shuffle for the iPhone line. But they don't seem to understand this.

No, you don't understand physics.

How long do you think the battery-life of such a watch would be? Conversely, how THICK are you prepared for your watch to be, to fit in a cellphone-sized battery capacity? How large to be able to have a meaningful cell antenna system?

It has NOTHING to do with "cannibalizing" iPhone sales. They are just using the iPhone to do the "heavy lifting" of cell communications. Nothing else is practical in a watch, until some SERIOUS advances in battery technology happen. Yes, there have reportedly been "autonomous" smartwatches; but none of them seem to gain any traction, and most don't even seem to make it to being "real products", possibly because their relatively miniscule batteries give relatively miniscule running-times.

So, here is a review of one of the most "promising" of the "autonomous" (which is actually only semi-autonomous at best) Smartwatches. Not only is it over a half-inch thick ("like strapping on an ankle monitor") and HEAV-Y (THREE times as heavy as the Apple Watch!), and not only is it too dim to be seen in sunlight and too quiet to be used on the street as a phone, and not only is it buggy as all get-out, and not only is it only semi-autonomous at best; but for all this, the battery life is abysmal.

So, all-in-all, I would say that Apple is doing the best that can PRACTICALLY be done, given the laws of physics.

If you're on Android Marshmallow, you can deny these permissions on a per-app basis. So give your GPS and fitness app permission to use your location, give your camera app access to the camera, but prohibit Facebook. If your phone hasn't yet gotten Marshmallow, this is probably the biggest reason you want to pester your carrier about hurrying up and releasing that update. It's been available to developers for over a year now, and unless you've got a very old handset it's inexcusable that a carrier hasn't rolled it out yet. (In an ideal world carriers wouldn't be allowed to sell phones, so we'd have competition to force phone makers to roll out these updates promptly. Most have within a month or two, it's the carriers who are dragging their feet - because they have no competition within their network they feel no urgency to roll out these things.)

Some apps crash if you prohibit certain permissions. But that's probably a good sign that you should uninstall that app (the developer isn't doing basic error handling). The only permission Marshmallow doesn't allow you to block is network access. But if you're rooted, it's trivial to install a firewall and block specific apps from using your data and/or wifi connection.

To be honest, the "I think any free-tiered service is not fair." quote gives the game away here; it's not stolen content Reznor is concerned about, it's free content.

Get out of here, dude. It's just coincidence.

No....I'm not really a fan of Trump, but he pretty much seems to be an open book.

If so, then he's one of those fake Amazon books where the first few pages are prose written to look lucid enough to get past spam filters, followed by 3,000 pages of randomly generated text, designed specifically to scam money off of Amazon's $-per-page author pool.

Smartphones are dealing with a problem that PC's had to conquer. I haven't felt like a PC I run has bloat for ages. (True, I mostly run Linux and Mac, but even Windows 7 and 10 have felt responsive).

Contrast that with Samsung and it's night and day. I've held off upgraded because despite the faster processor and more ram, reviews (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/137991/20160302/samsung-galaxy-s7-bloatware-takes-up-massive-8-gb-of-internal-storage-from-the-get-go.htm, http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sa...). These can't be uninstalled without going above and beyond what a user should have to. If our PC's pulled shit like this we'd riot. So it's no wonder the upgrades fail to impress.

It is also no wonder we don't see radical innovation - obviously the companies are content to push the same shit over and over because we buy it over and over.

Beats me, but my sister ordered a book off amazon once something about comedians; she knew I liked Jon Stewart etc.

The "book" was nothing but a verbatim cut and paste articles from Wikipedia. No chapters. No organization. No value add over the wikipedia content. And one of the entire later sections was about 30-40 pages of nothing but random garbage (that looked like a corrupt PDF file).

Here's an article on the subject...
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Am...

3x as fast

Really?

Popular news: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/lg...

Geek news: https://hackaday.com/2013/11/2... (also consider the blog entry linked in that story http://doctorbeet.blogspot.co.... )

And this is only about that particular company's products, other smart tvs from other companies spy as well.

I couldn't find any other news sites that had published anything about this. Also, NHK has shortened the article for some reason since I first saw it.

However another good source of info is:

How to Remove Lenovo's Alleged 'Bootkit' Software

and also:

Windows 10 Privacy Checklist mentions this issue

I just deployed an Intel NUC5i5RYK with 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3L @ 1600MHz memory and a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 running CentOS 7 as my new living room PC. The on-board Intel HD Graphics 6000 adapter is supported by Xorg's latest driver and the on-board WiFi chip is recognized. I initially tried installed FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT, but the WiFi chip wasn't supported.

Normal usage consists of web browsing with Chrome. Spotify and Netflix's web players both work 100%. I use VLC for watching saved content as well as streams from my SiliconDust HDHomeRun Plus OTA/cable box and my Foscam IP cameras. Even with multiple VLC windows open, I'm typically running about 60% idle and the SSD is always less than 1% busy. I've only been able to get the SSD up to 10% busy while copying files to an external drive over USB 3.0. The RAM is also overkill, but the Intel graphics adapter will take advantage of some of it if it sees 16 GB installed.

I was going to list some more specs, but the following article does a better job. I've been very happy with the new machine so far.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/intel-broadwell-nuc-mini-pc,review-2688.html

I love that article. 5 seconds of Googling shows that Elop didn't actually become CEO of Nokia until the end of 2010, but for some reason the article decides to start half a year earlier, with the sales record of the previous CEO, who was forced out for poor performance. You're reading an article that's more concerned with being a hit piece than the truth.

Another 10 seconds of Googling shows that at the beginning of 2011, Android was the top smartphone OS: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/an...

Elop talked about all this at the beginning of his infamous "burning platform" memo.

Realistically, how would a CEO completely tank a phone OS in like two months? Steve Jobs needed a few years at Apple before his ideas really went from concept to production.

This is what happened with a high up BlackBerry employee that jumped ship to Apple. It was shown to negotiate in bad faith as he negotiated position and raise over 3 month period with BlackBerry while in negotiations with Apple. BlackBerry won the 6 month injunction preventing him from starting at Apple until over. This was in Canadian court, IIRC. Too lazy to track down source.

If you had, you'd seen it was Motorola, not Apple http://www.tomsguide.com/us/RIM-Sues-Motorola,news-3241.html - but maybe you did remember that ...

I didn't see this mentioned by anyone else, but there is also a phenomenon called creep corrosion (and other things, the only common word is creep that I've seen) that applies to a lot of situations that PCB's are also subject to. It can cause solder joints and traces in close proximity become shorted. I think temperature has an affect, but I think it can also happen at close to room temperature in low-temperature solder situations. This would most likely spell death for the majority of our PCB based technology (it not others as well). It could cause a system running continuously to fail eventually or I think even dormant non-powered electronics to fail even if not stored improperly. There was an article here recently about a darpa program for self healing software http://www.tomsguide.com/us/da... that was interesting, but I feel like we would have to design more redundant hardware to avoid problems like this or potentially metals that aren't subject to these problems that could run long after we are gone. It wouldn't be economical though since so much hardware outlives its usefulness in our fast paced economy. Here are some pictures of creep in action: https://www.google.com/search?...

Not only is it outrageous and unconstitutional, it's totally valueless. The Feds can't even stand in the way of people for whom they have good information that they might be interested in doing harm, let alone find anything new. The real purpose of a program that is so ineffective, can only be to retroactively find dirt on political outcasts and then put them in prison.

Citations:

• Feds warned about Boston bombers: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
• The Feds monitored one of the Texas shooters, and he spent time in jail: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/p...
• Uselessness of the mass surveillance program:
  http://www.tomsguide.com/us/rs...
  http://articles.chicagotribune...

Ah, I see, you're talking about training. Apologies, I didn't quite catch that.

I wasn't exactly talking about that necessarily. I was talking about the tendency of people (programmers like myself in particular) to ask "what cool stuff can we do with this?" first, long before anyone considers the question "what bad stuff could also be done with this?" as well.

For instance, when e-mail programs first allowed any file to be added as an attachment, it seems no one thought about the fact that it would be trivial to send a computer virus that way. Or in more modern terms, did no one ever stop to consider that it's trivial to transmit malicious code through a website with 3rd party advertisements that can use scripting? Time after time, we see programmers racing ahead with new technology without stopping to first consider the security aspects. I think it's fairly natural, because most people don't think like a criminal, so it's not in their nature to ask "How could I use this for malicious purposes?" It's hard enough to build things that simply work.

Recently, we keep hearing about huge organizations who keep losing the keys to the kingdom time after time after time. If the "professionals" can't seem to keep hackers out, what chance do ordinary shlubs have? Frankly, that's why I don't connect anything unnecessary to the internet.

If you are a fan of typing, I highly recommend the mechanical keyboards.in general red cherry buttons are for faster operations, and can improve your words per minute in a typing test. however the rate at which you will make mistakes also improves in this case as its very easy to missclick. these type of keyboards also tend to be cheaper if you are looking for a silent version which is desirable for mechanical keyboards. http://gaming.logitech.com/en-... this is a brown cherry key which is a midway option between red and blue. so its a balanced keyboard which is relatively silent for a mechanical keyboard.i personally used one of these for three years, but the lack of cleaning options is a real problem from logitech keyboards. recently i bought a Gigabye Aivia which was great with a key designated for cleaning. Blue cherry keys are usually best for reaching 100% correct input during a typing test, so where accuracy is important. Recently companies started making their own mechanical switches which makes it difficult to compare them directly. (find Razer BlackWidow Chroma for example) I guess heres a nice review of the more recent keyboards: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/be...

Hereâ(TM)s what a robot has to do.

Very close solution already:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
All but picking up dirty clothes, taking them to the washer, and putting them in. Heck, it was folding mixed clean clothes from the dryer five years ago. :-)

Find the pile of dirty laundry, distinguishing it from other clutter that might be in the room.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
* But note: It IS the daily mail so grain of salt. Lol.
This is possible now. But.. an easy mitigation is to require throwing the laundry into a basket or into a laundry hole.
        Pick up each item in the pile. (Uncertainty: itâ(TM)s unclear how many objects the robot will have to pick up.)
http://www.hammacher.com/Produ...
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Ro...

        Put each item in a laundry basket.
        Navigate to the washing machine. (Because of where the robot has to hold the laundry basket, it can obstruct some of the its sensors which means it receives less information and cannot adjust its movements as precisely.)
        Depending on the type of machine, pull or lift the door to open it.
        Transfer clothes into the machine.
        Add detergent and/or fabric softener.
What is this "fabric softener stuff"?
Preloaded "push button" dispenser detergent has been around for 50 years.
        Close the washing machine door.
Trivial. Especially with the internet of theme providing a clear "door is fully closed"
        Choose the appropriate wash cycle (Delicate, Permanent Press, Heavy Duty) and start the wash.
        Remove the clothes from the washing machine and transfer to the dryer. (Uncertainty: the robot doesnâ(TM)t know beforehand how many times it will need to reach in, grab the clothes, and remove them in order to get them all.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
        Choose the type of drying cycle and start it.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...

        Remove clothing from the dryer. (Uncertainty: how many times will it have to grab the clothes to get them out? Is there a sock still clinging to the inside of the machine?)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
        Fold items depending on the type of apparel.
http://research.universityofca...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...
        Puts garments away in a dresser or closet.
Can't find this-- but it's reasonable that everything "alike" could be put together on the table or hung so a human could finish the job easily. At a minimum- you'd probably have to tag the laundry in some way to identify it's target drawer or closet.

It looks like the solution is a quarter million dollars now. So 10-20 years before it's down to under five grand.

There's a lot of people saying Microsoft Security Essentials or Windows Defender. That was a great answer a few years ago, it's not now. It's near the bottom of of the lists in rankings on most tests. For those saying don't use any AV, stop posting please. You're not impressing anyone by trying to be l33t prosauce internet surfer. http://www.av-comparatives.org... http://www.av-test.org/en/anti... https://www.virusbtn.com/vb100... http://www.tomsguide.com/us/be... http://www.lifehacker.co.uk/20... Nowhere on ay of those links will you find someone saying that MSE/Defender is a good choice.

A StingRay detector for some rooted Androids exists: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/an...

So, I could see crowdsourcing StingRay mapping. Rooted Android + SnoopSnitch + IOIO board + interface application + Google maps + web site. If enough snoops were deployed, you could have a real time map of all StingRays in operation.