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User: BradleyUffner

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  1. Re:Next up - no straws on McDonald's To Test Plastic-Straw Alternatives in US Later This Year (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    In theory, yes... but biodegradable wax coatings on straws can affect the taste of whatever you are drinking, giving it a slight bitter flavour. The types of coatings that are more inert tend to be less environmentally friendly.

    The paper cups that the straw goes in to are already coated in wax.

  2. Re:This has to be be lawsuit material... on The 'World's Worst' Smart Padlock Is Even Worse Than Previously Thought (sophos.com) · · Score: 1

    Incompetence doesn't protect you from all legal liability. Though it will sometime lessen then punishment over outright maliciousness.

  3. If it purchases more than it uses, how does it store or waste the excess?

    They sell it.

  4. Re:Steam's Real Problem Will Be Different on Valve Removes Steam Machines From Its Home Page (extremetech.com) · · Score: 1

    There are these thing called contracts and Valve makes you sign one before you can list games for sale on Steam and it will have all kinds of conditions you have to agree to

    That really only applies to software you have the legal right to distribute on Steam. One could theoretically get a game listed on Steam that you don't have distribution rights for by sneaking it past whatever controls they have in place for that kind of thing. I'm pretty sure people who purchase the game in that situation of just SOL.

  5. Re:autonomous vehicles 60 times worse than human on Police Chief: Uber Self-Driving Car 'Likely' Not At Fault In Fatal Crash (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    You can't make that argument with a single data-point.

  6. "Researchers don't believe this bug could be exploited for actual gains in the real world,"

    They forget that people are perfectly willing to do things for the "LOLZ", without direct personal gain.

  7. What's being deceived?

    Bots are using personally identifiable information of REAL people, without their consent, in order to "be" those people.

  8. Re:Should have said the brakes failed on Tesla Model S Plows Into a Fire Truck While Using Autopilot (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Even if it *was* on, the driver shouldn't be *relying* on a misleadingly named "autopilot" to not run in to solid objects.

  9. Didn't this already happen years ago?

  10. Re:Lawsuits on what grounds? on Nope, No Intel Chip Recall After Spectre and Meltdown, CEO Says (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    that is like your satnav giving you directions based on other cars movements.

    Like Waze does?

  11. Re:IMHO, HiQ is not doing anything wrong on The Brutal Fight To Mine Your Data and Sell It To Your Boss (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    So what information do the potential employees get about the employers in return? Pretty much zip. Basically what those employers choose to publish, which is mostly self-serving propaganda - and which is not checked for accuracy or even truth by anyone. Even items of obviously great importance to potential employees - such as salary data - are kept a closely guarded secret.

    How is that any different than the information the employee publishes?

  12. Re:So, Google, Apple, MS, Facebook... on The Brutal Fight To Mine Your Data and Sell It To Your Boss (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 2

    ...it kinda sucks when someone takes information you thought was yours alone and sells it to the highest bidder, eh?

    If you put information out on a public website, you shouldn't be shocked to learn that members of the public can read it.

  13. Re:Sounds like... on 37% of Netflix Subscribers Say They Binge-Watch While at Work (netflix.com) · · Score: 1

    Sounds like a whole lot of IT departments need to mind their own business. They are not there to police other employees but to ensure service stability.

    This is a management issue or employee issue, not an IT issue.

    If management wants it tracked and reported, it becomes an IT issue.

  14. Re: Can anyone say "monopoly"? on Amazon Discounts Other Sellers' Products as Retail Competition Stiffens (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Local shops may be shrinking, but I can buy a computer mouse at any 7-11 I stop at to get gas now.

  15. Re:Uh... "study finds"??? on Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Brain-Cell Communication, Study Finds (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    That's *great* that you knew it when you were 6 years old! How is the rate of mental performance correlated to the length of deprivation? At what stage of deprivation does decreased function become apparent? How long does it take to reverse the effects? Ohh, you don't know, because you didn't actually do a study?

    Those number are important; as a child genius, you should know that.

  16. Re: Can anyone say "monopoly"? on Amazon Discounts Other Sellers' Products as Retail Competition Stiffens (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    It's a near monopoly in the USA. We can expect the same kinds of games and tricks Microsoft pulled, such as taking a loss in Market A to gain market share in Market B to force out competition, forced bundling, ghost product announcements, and other tricks pioneered by the likes of Standard Oil and IBM.

    Not even close. If I want to by something, let's just say a computer mouse, there are literally 20 different physical stores within a 10 minute drive of my house, and I don't live in huge metro area. There are (a quick google search later) hundreds of different online retailers that, do NOT go through Amazon, that I can order from ( https://www.google.com/search?... ).

    Claiming that Amazon is a monopoly is almost laughable.

  17. Wow that's quite a sweeping generality you're making there. You don't think people in modest houses and with modest cars ever buy nice electronics? I know in the area I live in, we all have generally same sized houses and same cars but some people have put their money into nice TVs/game consoles/stereos and some haven't. Furthermore, some people have alarm systems and some don't, also something that will become evident to the Amazon delivery guy.

    It may be a generalization, but the thieves are operating under those same types of generalizations also.

  18. Re:Training database seems skewed on NVIDIA-Powered Neural Network Produces Freakishly Natural Fake Human Photos (hothardware.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    The rendered images look strikingly like actual human photographs, I'll bet they could fool nearly everyone -- you'd have to have a reason to think they were fake.

    I'm wondering if their choice of celebrities as the training database somehow skews their results positive versus "ordinary" people. Celebrities almost seem too uniform in terms of facial features and general appearance. It makes me wonder if they tried with ordinary people if the algorithm woudln't produce freaks because it sees odd deviations among normal people.

    If you look at the full paper, this is capable of so much more than faces. There are dozens of pages of every-day objects they generated, from bedrooms, to wine bottles, to boats, and bicycles. A few of them of some pretty obvious warping and distortions, but the ones that don't look like real objects. It's mind blowing.

  19. Re:Do people care about Uber as a company? on Uber Faces Engineers' Lawsuit Alleging Gender, Race Bias (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Don't forget the fact that Uber seems to outright break the law, when they are not stretching it to the very limit, almost daily. Companies that have a prooven track record of being shady deserve to have more attention focused on them.

  20. Re:That's to say: on Why Xbox One Backward Compatibility Took So Long (ign.com) · · Score: 1

    As software goes, console games are architecturally horrible. This is mainly because of the legacy of 8- and 16-bit consoles where it was actually significant whether a program took a syscall (generally implemented as data-dependent branches), so optimizations like inlining are looked upon favourably even as they fix program to platform down to the hardware register. Those optimizations have been worthless since the race to half a gigahertz ended and RAM latency began to really get out of control, because since then syscall stubs (etc.) have been cacheable just like any hot-path thing, so doing a massive amount of them in a loop turns from an obstacle to effective utilization of hardware.

    The lesson here is that one can always trust Microsoft to code like an obsessive twentysomething.

    You have been watching too many Turboencabulator videos.

  21. Re:battery impact? on How Google's Pixel 2 'Now Playing' Song Identification Works (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 2

    Who really cares about how this is done. I'm much more interested in what the battery impact of such a useless feature is. Seriously, how often do most people use this feature, such that it would be useful having this run 24/7/365?

    Just don't turn it on if you care that much. It isn't on by default.

  22. Re:How big is an "acoustic fingerprint"? on How Google's Pixel 2 'Now Playing' Song Identification Works (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yet another lump of unremovable pre-installed stuff taking precious space on your phone.

    The Google spokesperson wouldn’t give us an exact size for the database file (which is not surprising, since it changes every week and is based on your country) but did say the whole feature should take up less than 500MB. Again, if you never turn the feature on, don’t worry — you won’t lose this space.

    If you don't turn it on, it doesn't ever download the fingerprint database.

  23. Re:Has anyone figured why they dropped support on Google Slashes Prices of Its USB-C Headphone Dongle Following Minor Outrage (mashable.com) · · Score: 1

    Because no one is willing to invest in creating headphones that use the new tech when they can just fall back to to the old classic. The won't create new quality headphones without demand for USB, and there will be no demand for USB until there are good quality headphones It's a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" problem. There needs to be a critical mass, and that's what eliminating the old port generates.

  24. Re:Has anyone figured why they dropped support on Google Slashes Prices of Its USB-C Headphone Dongle Following Minor Outrage (mashable.com) · · Score: 0

    To put the last nail in an old technology, expanding the marketplace for newer, better tech.

  25. Re:It was harmful... on Recordings of the Sounds Heard In the Cuban US Embassy Attacks Released (apnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Hackaday had an article that it could be a directed microwave weapon, and the audio is a hallucination.

    Seems more likely than the audio being the cause of memory loss, brain damage, etc...

    The motive is hard to imagine.

    If it was a hallucination, we wouldn't have an audio recording of it.