The summary's comment that this ruling is "giving Qualcomm momentum" strikes me as being rather clueless. This $31 million judgment is coming the day after a preliminary ruling against Qualcomm that says they owe Apple all $1 billion in rebates that they promised—but failed— to pay Apple. That's the case that matters. Suggesting this $31M ruling is giving them momentum in the $1B case that's already been ruled against them on a preliminary basis is like saying that a fly can change the course of a car by smashing into its windshield.
Moreover, Apple issued software updates months ago that worked around all of the claims. Qualcomm's experts even acknowledged in court that Apple wasn't still violating them, so they have no impact on Apple's future business, and they certainly don't have any impact on a case regarding whether Apple is owed the $1B that Qualcomm was contractually obligated to pay.
Or buy/frankencable a 2+*2+ matrix hdmi switch for $100 and send any input to any output that allows wired video input.
FTFY. Sadly, my laptops, phones, tablets, etc. (i.e. the screens I have available when I don't have access to the TV) don't support video input from wired sources, so wireless is the only way to go.
You can run a f2f HDMI cable through drywall pretty easily and pretty it up with a panel port. [...] run it through the HVAC.
Given that I need to account for the WAF, which means that maximum prettying up must take place, what you're suggesting is that instead of using my existing devices and some free software with no additional purchases and no additional labor, I can instead buy an incredibly long CL2 (or higher) rated HDMI cable, cut a hole in the wall where the panel will go, locate and then cut open the wall at the location(s) where we have horizontal brace(s) that are designed to stop the vertical spread of fire between studs, notch out the brace(s) so the cabling can run through, run the cabling up the wall, drill through the riser, cut into the HVAC conduit and run the cabling through, patch the hole(s) in the HVAC conduit to prevent air from escaping into the attic, insulate around the cabling in the wall to prevent fire from spreading through the notch(es) I made in the brace(s), insulate around the cabling in the riser to prevent air/fire from spreading through the new hole, close and patch the hole(s) in the wall at the brace(s), repaint the walls that we just got done painting, connect and install the new panel for the HDMI, and then repeat almost all of that for the other end of the cable as well.
I've actually considered doing all of that before, but in the end it simply wasn't worth it when it was both easier and cheaper to use wireless for anything other than the TV, and for the TV itself, I have a flat Ethernet cable that's carrying the HDMI signal simply running over the slab and under the carpet padding.
Also worth noting, HDMI doesn't exactly get very long cable runs before you need a powered signal booster. Modern cables are somewhat better, but a few years ago when I was checking, the general advice was that anyone interested in 4K needed to keep their runs at or under 25', which barely gets you across/around a room once you account for vertical changes or going around corners. If you're going to all of that work, you'll likely want to run Ethernet and use HDBaseT instead of running HDMI.
A 1" hole through a floor isnt too tough either, just check for electrical/plumbing
As you may have surmised, I'm on a concrete slab foundation. Running a cable through the floor would be even more onerous than the process I outlined above, given that step one would involve renting a jackhammer.
Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage than Dropbox. Alternatively, those of us around here should probably be switching to things like ownCloud or NextCloud*.
*Without stepping into the politics and history of what's gone on between the two, the short version is that NextCloud is a fork of ownCloud after ownCloud decided to switch to offering a free, open source version for personal use and a closed, paid version with more features for enterprise. Some of the ownCloud people didn't like that, so they forked it and started NextCloud. Both are regularly updated, and I have yet to actually use either so I can't recommend one, but I'm guessing I'll eventually set up NextCloud for myself.
Given that their current "unlimited" plans seem to cap out at 20GB of 4G LTE data before throttling you to 600 Kb/s for the remainder of the billing cycle, I don't think this is the disruption you were hoping for. At best, something like that plan may compete with rural WISPs or satellite, assuming the location even has 4G LTE coverage in the first place.
they are not republishing the pictures in any way, just using them to train models
Some of these companies are. I think the nVidia team might be using the same dataset for their work related to deep fakes/facial morphing/generating fake faces, and I recall scrolling last month through a Google Drive folder they had shared with 1 million photos in it that they used as their source material. Even so, the original license allowed them to do so, so these people don't really have much in the way of legal recourse.
Skepticism is good, but this question actually just serves to highlight why I said that people need to study basic physics and biology instead of believing whatever they read online, since you should have already known that, no, it isn't possible. For everyone with skin and a brain housed safely in their skull, we can dismiss the notion out of hand without needing to involve a neurologist because 5G signals don't penetrate skin.
Now, of course, that might make you wonder whether it's possible for your skin to resonate with 5G frequencies. Yup, it is! But it's not exactly something you or most people will ever need to worry about as a secret danger in the air around you, because if it ever happens to you it'll be REALLY obvious, as in, "my skin feels like it's literally on fire" levels of obvious. Moreover, you'd first need to make a series of life choices that would land you in the middle of a riot in a war zone, given that the technology is currently only deployed as part of the US military's non-lethal crowd control Active Denial System...which only works that way because these frequencies don't penetrate skin.
So, again, the nervous system thing? Not a concern. Skin feels like it's on fire? Reconsider your life choices.
Agreed. Several years back I found it lacking and switched back to Google, but I gave it another shot a year or two back and haven't stopped using it ever since. Plus, with bangs, which are easily one of its best features and something I sorely miss whenever I sit down at someone else's computer, a Google search is never more than a "!g" away if for some reason I think I need it, though that happens less and less with time. Between using bangs to jump immediately to a particular site, the ability to change DDG's appearance, and the significantly better privacy, sticking with it has been an easy decision.
Speaking of lag, I had something that seemed odd happen this week.
I recently hooked my gaming PC up to my TV (not my preference, but there are reasons), but I haven't had much chance to play around with it since doing so. And because TV time is something that needs to be shared with others, I had an interest in getting Moonlight up and running on my iPad so I could enjoy my PC games even if I didn't have access to the TV at any given time.
As I'm going through the setup process, I had the PC displaying on the TV via a wired connection as I worked on getting Moonlight working wirelessly on my iPad. After just a few minutes I had the same image on both screens, but as I moved the mouse around I realized that if I jiggled the cursor it stopped significantly sooner on the wirelessly-connected iPad than on the wired TV, to the tune of about 100-200ms. Enough that even my non-gaming wife commented on it without any prompting from me when I had her play a level of Bit.Trip Runner on the TV.
To be fair, my wired setup is rather convoluted. The PC's signal path is PC -> HDMI -> A/V Receiver -> HDMI -> HDBaseT Transmitter -> Ethernet -> HDBaseT Receiver -> HDMI -> TV. So there's plenty of room for latency to be introduced. Even so, it boggled my mind that a wireless video stream would be noticeably faster than the wired stream heading to my TV.
After a little fooling around, it turned out that the A/V receiver was the culprit. I had already set the PC's input channel to use "Game" mode on the AVR, which is supposed to reduce latency by removing most of the video processing, but apparently the processing for on-screen volume controls introduces quite a bit of latency. Switching the channel to use "Bypass"—which tells it to do no video processing at all—instantly eliminated the problem.
But to bring things back around to the subject at hand, as a gamer with a family I'm finding a lot of value in having the option to play any given game on a wide variety of screens, simply because you never know which ones you'll have access to at any given moment. TV got nabbed? Continue that PC/PS4 gaming session on the MacBook Pro. Wife wants to web surf on the MacBook while watching TV? Switch to the iPad. Time for the TV and speakers to go off as folks head to bed? Pull the Switch from its dock and keep playing.
Having options makes life a lot easier.
Side note: Moonlight is awesome and free. Highly recommended.
There's nothing new about this. These are the people who say they're allergic to WiFi. A practicing engineer I occasionally used to work with had a wife who was "allergic to the radio signals emitted by smart utility meters", so they moved their whole family to a rural town in Alabama to get away from the smart meters that were rolling out in Houston. There have been documented cases of communities formally complaining about ill effects from the signals emitted by newly constructed cell towers in their area, only for them to find out that the towers hadn't even been turned on yet. The national radio quiet zone in Virginia/West Virginia has become a haven for "RF-allergic" nutjobs in recent years.
The RF frequency might be different, but the complaints are the same. Might cause cancer...if you massively over-expose the subject for months at a time with no break. Might cause headaches, toothaches, backaches, or other aches...which seem to have nothing to do with whether the signal is actually present, but instead have more to do with when the person thinks the signal is present. Might cause fevers, rashes, or other reactions...which either continue regardless of the signal or else disappear once the person is given proper medication for their undiagnosed condition/moved to a controlled location away from the actual source of their problems.
The "research" these people are doing is in all the wrong places. They simply need to go back to textbooks and learn some basic statistics, physics, or biology, but instead they'll consult Facebook and "Doctor Google" for their answers.
Since the alternative source link in the summary appears to link to an article about stock prices, here's some alternative alternative links that actually contain more relevant information: - Boeing press release - Gizmodo - Washington Post
For anyone not familiar, the entire premise of the game is that you're in a post-apocalyptic world about 1000 years after our war robots went out of control, with exactly the sorts of results you'd expect. I found it interesting when, in a moment of self-awareness, the main character discovers a recording circa 2065 of an engineer who worked on the war robots lamenting the fact that they didn't pay attention to the warnings that were everywhere in the science fiction material of the day. More or less, we already had a good notion of how this would end, so why, oh why, did we go along with it?
Honestly, I do wonder how we can avoid a bad outcome. After all, if we don't build them, our opponents will (for whatever definition of "opponent" you want to pick), since taking the human out of the loopwill eventually confer a large tactical advantage. It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?
Exactly. Moreover, even the 3D mask attacks sound like they only work if you rig the system. The first (only?) 3D mask attack that I've actually seen demonstrated wasn't able to be reproduced by any other researchers (at the time; maybe things have changed since then?), and it was later determined to have only worked for those particular researchers because they inadvertently trained the phone on the mask*. When they attempted to prove their methodology's reproducibility by resetting everything and giving the phone a few days of use before introducing the mask (i.e. actually simulating real world conditions), their mask was never able to unlock the phone and they were never able to reproduce their own, original results.
*The iPhone is, by necessity, more tolerant of variations right after it's set up with FaceID, since it continues to refine its understanding of what the owner's face looks like under different conditions (e.g. glasses, stubble, hair cut, etc.). In the case of the successful attack, the owner's face was shown to the phone during setup, then never again, giving it no chance to refine and improve as it normally would during the first few days of typical use. Instead, they immediately started showing it a similar "face"—the mask—which it understood to be a variation on the owner's appearance, thus effectively training it that the owner's face was the mask.
I don't think you're taking a big enough view of the issue if you think Facebook bears no responsibility at all.
If a harmful bacteria randomly lands on your skin, it usually isn't able to do much because your skin is already colonized by beneficial bacteria that work hard to fight off any invaders. Those random encounters are generally harmless. But take that same harmful bacteria and put it in a Petri dish, where it has an ample supply of food and doesn't have to compete against other bacteria, and suddenly it'll thrive.
Likewise, harmful misinformation generally doesn't go very far on its own because it doesn't stand up to the casual scrutiny it receives when it's surrounded by competing ideas grounded in evidence and fact. But take that same misinformation and put it in an echo chamber, where it has an ample supply of susceptible minds in which to grow and doesn't have to compete against confounding facts or evidence that would typically stifle its growth, and suddenly it'll thrive.
If Facebook was simply a passive platform on which bad behavior could thrive, you'd be right that we shouldn't blame them any more than we might blame the Petri manufacturer for a mad scientist abusing their dishes. Unfortunately, Facebook is anything but passive. Facebook recognized a long time ago that echo chambers—particularly ones focused on extreme topics—drive user engagement numbers up (i.e. sell more ads), so they built their entire platform around actively steering people into echo chambers that are bereft of contrary facts, evidence, and points of view...the things we as a society have developed as a form of immunity against the spread of misinformation. Put differently, they aren't merely a humble Petri dish manufacturer whose products are being abused: they decided to juice Petri sales by giving away weaponization kits and then dropping immunocompromised individuals in the middle of the contagion zones that inevitably resulted.
You'll excuse me if I think they deserve every bit of blame they get for the fallout that has resulted from them preying on the minds of the weak after purposefully stripping away the natural protections those people should have had.
I was able to backup a bit more than 8TB with Backblaze Personal ($5/mo. for unlimited storage) in about a week. That said, I'm backing up from a Windows box with a direct-attached RAID enclosure, just because I wanted to avoid issues like limitations on backing up network drives or client platforms. I know it's possible to backup a NAS on Backblaze Personal via iSCSI (since it appears to be a local drive to Backblaze), but the people I've heard who use iSCSI for that purpose don't seem to recommend it. Even so, it seems like you could toss a Windows VM together that'd let you do those backups.
I’m glad they didn’t limit it that low. I remember once being on a road trip where, for whatever reason, all of the cars on the road were doing 90 mph. It lasted for maybe 30 minutes as we were on I-10 between major cities on a flat, straight stretch with wide lanes with no other traffic in sight that entire time. It’s the fastest I’ve ever gone while simply keeping up with the speed of traffic, so it sticks out in my mind, to say the least.
I’ve never had reason to go that fast again, nor reason to go that fast prior to then, but I’m glad I had the option at the time. Putting the limit a bit north of that excludes any instances like mine.
Though a bit of an oversimplification, USB4 is basically just a rebranding of Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 already does 40Gbps and has been out now for a few years. I have yet to hear reports of cables spontaneously erupting in flame or whatnot, and though USB 3.x and TB3 cables are stiffer than USB 2 cables, I don't think they're swaddled in insulation to a crazy degree. If you're curious how this will work, look back over the documentation for TB3.
That is all there is. Sorry. Only usefulness. No absolute truth(TM).
I love it when people declare as an absolutism that there's no such thing as absolute truth. Rarely do you see anyone contradict themselves in so few words.
I actually do. Thankfully, those times aren't dead it. During those conversations today, it's not uncommon for a person pulling out their phone to be told, "Don't spoil it" or "If you're gonna cheat by looking it up, you need to put your pride on the line by staking a claim first". Either way, it prolongs the fun for the people enjoying it.
It's coming here right now. Just look at the deplatforming being done by Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon.
The one is nothing like the other. In one case, we're talking about a government deplatforming its people from all platforms, thus depriving its people of fundamental freedoms—the right to move, in this case—which are frequently exercised out of necessity, not convenience, due to factors outside of one's control. In the other case, we're talking about individual organizations deplatforming their own users from only their own platform, thus depriving those users of no rights or freedoms and not costing those users anything beyond what they knowingly and voluntarily elected to build on top of that platform.
Put differently, the only people who need Facebook and its ilk are the ones who made choices that put them in a position of dependence, but any person could need to fly or take a train at some point due to a death in the family, work, or other obligations forced on them. We can choose not to depend on Facebook (I certainly have), but good luck choosing not to depend on fast transportation when you need it. Moreover, given that nearly everyone's reaction to learning that I either don't have or don't use accounts at any of the sites you listed is (after an incredulous "Really?") something to the effect of "You're almost certainly better off for it", I'd say that even the heaviest of users recognizes that those platforms are an inessential part of their lives.
China is a country that regularly disappears people
This. So much this. A friend of mine who has been living in China (note the tense; they're leaving) was telling me a few weeks back about how a German national they know suddenly disappeared.
As my friend eventually came to find out, without having ever been approached or questioned before, this German was kidnapped off the street, taken to an interrogation room, told to unlock his phone, and required to hand over all of his contacts' information. When he did all of that they started demanding information that he didn't have (they seemed to incorrectly think he was a missionary?), so they locked him in a windowless cell with no bed, blanket, or change of clothes; provided him with only a bucket for relieving himself; deprived him of sleep for 96 hours by keeping the temperature bone-chillingly cold while blaring music day and night; and, at one point, closed the vents to his cell as they pumped smoke under the door, all while demanding more info from him. After four days they must have realized he didn't have anything more to give them, so they unceremoniously dumped him on a random street in his city and told him not to talk about what had happened, as well as that he had 72 hours to leave the country or he would be forcibly deported. Mind you, this is a man who was there legally, with a valid work visa, who was never charged with a crime, and who certainly wasn't convicted of one, yet he received a sort of mistreatment that I would have hoped was only common in fiction, then was given three days' notice to abandon his life of the past several years by uprooting and leaving behind his work, friends, family, and home.
As you suggested, stuff like this has been common among ethnic minorities in certain parts of the country (Uighurs in the northwest especially), but up until recently foreigners were largely exempt from such treatment, presumably out of concern for the PR damage locking up foreigners without cause could do. It sounds like the last few months have seen a rapid expansion of disappearances and mistreatment, since it's now including foreigners and it's not just in the northwest, but across much of the rest of the country. The German guy wasn't anywhere close to where that sort of stuff has traditionally been happening, and while he's the only one my friend knows personally who went through something like that, my friend rattled off a half-dozen other instances they had heard second-hand and said that incidents nearly identical to his are increasingly common among their extended circles of expat friends and colleagues.
What makes it more intriguing is that, just a few years ago, their terms of service permitted much of the behavior that is now being labeled as "piracy".
I signed up for the service sometime around or about 2007 when I was in grad school, and my younger brother working on his undergrad asked if I would share my account with him. Since I'm one of those oddballs who actually checks the terms to see if such things are allowed, I read through Netflix's terms to see what their stance was on such behavior, and I recall specifically reading that family members in your household were allowed to share your account, with the definition of household including geographically distant but closely related relatives. I even seem to recall them citing family members away at college as an example.
I re-read through the terms a year or two ago in researching a comment I was making on Slashdot, but I couldn't find that verbiage anywhere. So far as I can tell, they must've taken it out somewhere along the way without telling any of us that they were doing so.
That isn't true. The US government pays out settlements to between 500 and 2500 people each year that have "life changing" reactions to vaccines. This is just for overwhelmingly provable cases. The CDC's own statistics show that some years the people who get hurt by vacancies are more common and severe than the diseases they were trying to prevent.
Sheesh. Lying with statistics much? In fact, having now looked over the numbers, I'll say that you're just outright lying.
If you go back to the actual numbers, straight from the horse's mouth, you'll see on page 3 that over the 12-year period from 2006-01-01 to 2017-12-31, the US administered 3,454,269,356 vaccines. Resulting from those 3.4 billion vaccines, only 4,172 people were compensated due to harm, which—at just 348/year on average—falls well short of even the lower end of the range you were trying to assert. So what is the actual number of settlements per year? Page 7 shows us that the worst year on record had merely 697, not 2500, while the best year had just 9, not 500.
To ground all of this in terms that we may be more familiar with, that's an incidence rate of just 1.2 per 1 million vaccines administered in the US, or a meager 0.00012% chance that you'll experience a "life changing" reaction in response to a vaccine. All of which is to say, while vaccines are not 100% safe (aside: so far as I know, there's no such thing as a 100% safe medical intervention, which makes me question why anti-vaxxers bother with doctors at all), they are literally within a rounding error of 100% safe according to the metric you happened to choose to try and use against them.
As for "the CDC's own statistics", care to link these statistics you've supposedly seen? Because so far as I can find (and I've looked quite a bit), the CDC doesn't break out the statistics you claimed you've seen. Instead, they point the public to "The Health and Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine[,...] an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public". The HMD's numbers also happen to be what get used in the HRSA report I linked earlier. So, go back and look at those numbers from a few paragraphs back. There were 3.4 billion vaccines administered over that 12-year period. That's about 288 million per year. Since you're saying more than half the people had adverse effects in some years, you're claiming that the incidence rate topped out somewhere north of 144 million instances of adverse effects in a single year, or, put differently, that there was at least one year on record where a number of incidents roughly equal to half the population of the US resulted in adverse effects...and somehow we didn't all start rioting over it.
Actually, there's a possibility that's true, though if it is, it's likely because the far-and-away most common adverse effect monitored by the CDC—with "up to 8 out of 10" patients suffering from it—is that they became "fussy or irritable" after the shot was administered. Mind you, this is a shot typically given to infants, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that they cry after being given a shot, and yet that's logged as an adverse effect counting towards your statistics. No one cares about that. Nor do we generally care that the next closest effects are that 1 in 3 people experience a mild fever or see some redness at the injection spot within a few days of the vaccine. And once we get past the handful of common adverse effects like those, none of which are serious, the odds drop off rapidly, with things like anaphylaxis or worse coming in at 1 i
This guy should be in prison. But they won't do that. Because he's rich. Filthy rich.
So, you're in favor of jailing innocent people?
After all, Mark Begor was not the CEO when the leak happened (that would be Richard Smith), nor was he even the CEO who handled most of the aftermath (that would be Paulino do Rego Barros Jr.). Mr. Begor only started as CEO in April 2018, nearly a year after the leaks were first discovered. He may be as slimy as the rest for all I know, but he wasn't a part of what happened back then. So far as I can see, he's simply the guy trying to clean up the mess.
It's fine if you don't like the guy (I don't either), but it's comments like yours that make me VERY glad we have a justice system that doesn't mete out punishment according to the rule of mob.
First off, no, Apple does not have a monopoly. They have lock-in, which is far from being the same thing. I'm not saying that lock-in is fine, but we need to stop misusing "monopoly" if we're going to have a rational discussion on the topic.
Second, even if they had a monopoly, a monopoly in and of itself does not necessarily mean action need be taken by regulators. It's when companies abuse their monopolies to gain an anticompetitive advantage that it becomes a problem (e.g. leveraging their monopoly in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another). I'm not aware of any legitimate arguments suggesting Apple has done so with their perceived monopoly.
Third, vendors are under no obligation to eliminate lock-in/make things interoperable unless there are other anticompetitive issues at play, such as what may happen if the vendor happens to also be a monopoly. That's why, for example, AT&T was forced to interoperate with other phone companies several decades back. The fact that Android commands a significantly larger market share than iOS, both in the US and abroad, suggests that Apple neither has a monopoly nor is in a position to abuse their market share for anticompetitive gain. As such, while some here may suggest that they are shooting themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of significant competitive and PR gains that could be made (not to mention the advantages for consumers), there doesn't seem to be a basis to obligate them to make their App Store open. It's their choice if they want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Consumers don't always like lock-in, but lock-in is rarely a problem necessitating regulatory intervention.
Agreed, but there's a big difference between official reviews and off-the-cuff remarks. I'd expect the latter to speak more to how they themselves enjoyed it as a watcher.
I'm not arguing that this is a great predictor either way. I'm just saying that I've seen some positive indications, which was honestly more than I was expecting. Whether they bear out in practice remains to be seen, and I certainly wouldn't bet on it either way.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary's comment that this ruling is "giving Qualcomm momentum" strikes me as being rather clueless. This $31 million judgment is coming the day after a preliminary ruling against Qualcomm that says they owe Apple all $1 billion in rebates that they promised—but failed— to pay Apple. That's the case that matters. Suggesting this $31M ruling is giving them momentum in the $1B case that's already been ruled against them on a preliminary basis is like saying that a fly can change the course of a car by smashing into its windshield.
Moreover, Apple issued software updates months ago that worked around all of the claims. Qualcomm's experts even acknowledged in court that Apple wasn't still violating them, so they have no impact on Apple's future business, and they certainly don't have any impact on a case regarding whether Apple is owed the $1B that Qualcomm was contractually obligated to pay.
Or buy/frankencable a 2+*2+ matrix hdmi switch for $100 and send any input to any output that allows wired video input.
FTFY. Sadly, my laptops, phones, tablets, etc. (i.e. the screens I have available when I don't have access to the TV) don't support video input from wired sources, so wireless is the only way to go.
You can run a f2f HDMI cable through drywall pretty easily and pretty it up with a panel port. [...] run it through the HVAC.
Given that I need to account for the WAF, which means that maximum prettying up must take place, what you're suggesting is that instead of using my existing devices and some free software with no additional purchases and no additional labor, I can instead buy an incredibly long CL2 (or higher) rated HDMI cable, cut a hole in the wall where the panel will go, locate and then cut open the wall at the location(s) where we have horizontal brace(s) that are designed to stop the vertical spread of fire between studs, notch out the brace(s) so the cabling can run through, run the cabling up the wall, drill through the riser, cut into the HVAC conduit and run the cabling through, patch the hole(s) in the HVAC conduit to prevent air from escaping into the attic, insulate around the cabling in the wall to prevent fire from spreading through the notch(es) I made in the brace(s), insulate around the cabling in the riser to prevent air/fire from spreading through the new hole, close and patch the hole(s) in the wall at the brace(s), repaint the walls that we just got done painting, connect and install the new panel for the HDMI, and then repeat almost all of that for the other end of the cable as well.
I've actually considered doing all of that before, but in the end it simply wasn't worth it when it was both easier and cheaper to use wireless for anything other than the TV, and for the TV itself, I have a flat Ethernet cable that's carrying the HDMI signal simply running over the slab and under the carpet padding.
Also worth noting, HDMI doesn't exactly get very long cable runs before you need a powered signal booster. Modern cables are somewhat better, but a few years ago when I was checking, the general advice was that anyone interested in 4K needed to keep their runs at or under 25', which barely gets you across/around a room once you account for vertical changes or going around corners. If you're going to all of that work, you'll likely want to run Ethernet and use HDBaseT instead of running HDMI.
A 1" hole through a floor isnt too tough either, just check for electrical/plumbing
As you may have surmised, I'm on a concrete slab foundation. Running a cable through the floor would be even more onerous than the process I outlined above, given that step one would involve renting a jackhammer.
Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage than Dropbox. Alternatively, those of us around here should probably be switching to things like ownCloud or NextCloud*.
*Without stepping into the politics and history of what's gone on between the two, the short version is that NextCloud is a fork of ownCloud after ownCloud decided to switch to offering a free, open source version for personal use and a closed, paid version with more features for enterprise. Some of the ownCloud people didn't like that, so they forked it and started NextCloud. Both are regularly updated, and I have yet to actually use either so I can't recommend one, but I'm guessing I'll eventually set up NextCloud for myself.
Given that their current "unlimited" plans seem to cap out at 20GB of 4G LTE data before throttling you to 600 Kb/s for the remainder of the billing cycle, I don't think this is the disruption you were hoping for. At best, something like that plan may compete with rural WISPs or satellite, assuming the location even has 4G LTE coverage in the first place.
they are not republishing the pictures in any way, just using them to train models
Some of these companies are. I think the nVidia team might be using the same dataset for their work related to deep fakes/facial morphing/generating fake faces, and I recall scrolling last month through a Google Drive folder they had shared with 1 million photos in it that they used as their source material. Even so, the original license allowed them to do so, so these people don't really have much in the way of legal recourse.
Doesn't it seem possible [...]?
Skepticism is good, but this question actually just serves to highlight why I said that people need to study basic physics and biology instead of believing whatever they read online, since you should have already known that, no, it isn't possible. For everyone with skin and a brain housed safely in their skull, we can dismiss the notion out of hand without needing to involve a neurologist because 5G signals don't penetrate skin.
Now, of course, that might make you wonder whether it's possible for your skin to resonate with 5G frequencies. Yup, it is! But it's not exactly something you or most people will ever need to worry about as a secret danger in the air around you, because if it ever happens to you it'll be REALLY obvious, as in, "my skin feels like it's literally on fire" levels of obvious. Moreover, you'd first need to make a series of life choices that would land you in the middle of a riot in a war zone, given that the technology is currently only deployed as part of the US military's non-lethal crowd control Active Denial System...which only works that way because these frequencies don't penetrate skin.
So, again, the nervous system thing? Not a concern. Skin feels like it's on fire? Reconsider your life choices.
Agreed. Several years back I found it lacking and switched back to Google, but I gave it another shot a year or two back and haven't stopped using it ever since. Plus, with bangs, which are easily one of its best features and something I sorely miss whenever I sit down at someone else's computer, a Google search is never more than a "!g" away if for some reason I think I need it, though that happens less and less with time. Between using bangs to jump immediately to a particular site, the ability to change DDG's appearance, and the significantly better privacy, sticking with it has been an easy decision.
Speaking of lag, I had something that seemed odd happen this week.
I recently hooked my gaming PC up to my TV (not my preference, but there are reasons), but I haven't had much chance to play around with it since doing so. And because TV time is something that needs to be shared with others, I had an interest in getting Moonlight up and running on my iPad so I could enjoy my PC games even if I didn't have access to the TV at any given time.
As I'm going through the setup process, I had the PC displaying on the TV via a wired connection as I worked on getting Moonlight working wirelessly on my iPad. After just a few minutes I had the same image on both screens, but as I moved the mouse around I realized that if I jiggled the cursor it stopped significantly sooner on the wirelessly-connected iPad than on the wired TV, to the tune of about 100-200ms. Enough that even my non-gaming wife commented on it without any prompting from me when I had her play a level of Bit.Trip Runner on the TV.
To be fair, my wired setup is rather convoluted. The PC's signal path is PC -> HDMI -> A/V Receiver -> HDMI -> HDBaseT Transmitter -> Ethernet -> HDBaseT Receiver -> HDMI -> TV. So there's plenty of room for latency to be introduced. Even so, it boggled my mind that a wireless video stream would be noticeably faster than the wired stream heading to my TV.
After a little fooling around, it turned out that the A/V receiver was the culprit. I had already set the PC's input channel to use "Game" mode on the AVR, which is supposed to reduce latency by removing most of the video processing, but apparently the processing for on-screen volume controls introduces quite a bit of latency. Switching the channel to use "Bypass"—which tells it to do no video processing at all—instantly eliminated the problem.
But to bring things back around to the subject at hand, as a gamer with a family I'm finding a lot of value in having the option to play any given game on a wide variety of screens, simply because you never know which ones you'll have access to at any given moment. TV got nabbed? Continue that PC/PS4 gaming session on the MacBook Pro. Wife wants to web surf on the MacBook while watching TV? Switch to the iPad. Time for the TV and speakers to go off as folks head to bed? Pull the Switch from its dock and keep playing.
Having options makes life a lot easier.
Side note: Moonlight is awesome and free. Highly recommended.
There's nothing new about this. These are the people who say they're allergic to WiFi. A practicing engineer I occasionally used to work with had a wife who was "allergic to the radio signals emitted by smart utility meters", so they moved their whole family to a rural town in Alabama to get away from the smart meters that were rolling out in Houston. There have been documented cases of communities formally complaining about ill effects from the signals emitted by newly constructed cell towers in their area, only for them to find out that the towers hadn't even been turned on yet. The national radio quiet zone in Virginia/West Virginia has become a haven for "RF-allergic" nutjobs in recent years.
The RF frequency might be different, but the complaints are the same. Might cause cancer...if you massively over-expose the subject for months at a time with no break. Might cause headaches, toothaches, backaches, or other aches...which seem to have nothing to do with whether the signal is actually present, but instead have more to do with when the person thinks the signal is present. Might cause fevers, rashes, or other reactions...which either continue regardless of the signal or else disappear once the person is given proper medication for their undiagnosed condition/moved to a controlled location away from the actual source of their problems.
The "research" these people are doing is in all the wrong places. They simply need to go back to textbooks and learn some basic statistics, physics, or biology, but instead they'll consult Facebook and "Doctor Google" for their answers.
Since the alternative source link in the summary appears to link to an article about stock prices, here's some alternative alternative links that actually contain more relevant information:
- Boeing press release
- Gizmodo
- Washington Post
For anyone not familiar, the entire premise of the game is that you're in a post-apocalyptic world about 1000 years after our war robots went out of control, with exactly the sorts of results you'd expect. I found it interesting when, in a moment of self-awareness, the main character discovers a recording circa 2065 of an engineer who worked on the war robots lamenting the fact that they didn't pay attention to the warnings that were everywhere in the science fiction material of the day. More or less, we already had a good notion of how this would end, so why, oh why, did we go along with it?
Honestly, I do wonder how we can avoid a bad outcome. After all, if we don't build them, our opponents will (for whatever definition of "opponent" you want to pick), since taking the human out of the loopwill eventually confer a large tactical advantage. It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?
Exactly. Moreover, even the 3D mask attacks sound like they only work if you rig the system. The first (only?) 3D mask attack that I've actually seen demonstrated wasn't able to be reproduced by any other researchers (at the time; maybe things have changed since then?), and it was later determined to have only worked for those particular researchers because they inadvertently trained the phone on the mask*. When they attempted to prove their methodology's reproducibility by resetting everything and giving the phone a few days of use before introducing the mask (i.e. actually simulating real world conditions), their mask was never able to unlock the phone and they were never able to reproduce their own, original results.
*The iPhone is, by necessity, more tolerant of variations right after it's set up with FaceID, since it continues to refine its understanding of what the owner's face looks like under different conditions (e.g. glasses, stubble, hair cut, etc.). In the case of the successful attack, the owner's face was shown to the phone during setup, then never again, giving it no chance to refine and improve as it normally would during the first few days of typical use. Instead, they immediately started showing it a similar "face"—the mask—which it understood to be a variation on the owner's appearance, thus effectively training it that the owner's face was the mask.
I don't think you're taking a big enough view of the issue if you think Facebook bears no responsibility at all.
If a harmful bacteria randomly lands on your skin, it usually isn't able to do much because your skin is already colonized by beneficial bacteria that work hard to fight off any invaders. Those random encounters are generally harmless. But take that same harmful bacteria and put it in a Petri dish, where it has an ample supply of food and doesn't have to compete against other bacteria, and suddenly it'll thrive.
Likewise, harmful misinformation generally doesn't go very far on its own because it doesn't stand up to the casual scrutiny it receives when it's surrounded by competing ideas grounded in evidence and fact. But take that same misinformation and put it in an echo chamber, where it has an ample supply of susceptible minds in which to grow and doesn't have to compete against confounding facts or evidence that would typically stifle its growth, and suddenly it'll thrive.
If Facebook was simply a passive platform on which bad behavior could thrive, you'd be right that we shouldn't blame them any more than we might blame the Petri manufacturer for a mad scientist abusing their dishes. Unfortunately, Facebook is anything but passive. Facebook recognized a long time ago that echo chambers—particularly ones focused on extreme topics—drive user engagement numbers up (i.e. sell more ads), so they built their entire platform around actively steering people into echo chambers that are bereft of contrary facts, evidence, and points of view...the things we as a society have developed as a form of immunity against the spread of misinformation. Put differently, they aren't merely a humble Petri dish manufacturer whose products are being abused: they decided to juice Petri sales by giving away weaponization kits and then dropping immunocompromised individuals in the middle of the contagion zones that inevitably resulted.
You'll excuse me if I think they deserve every bit of blame they get for the fallout that has resulted from them preying on the minds of the weak after purposefully stripping away the natural protections those people should have had.
I was able to backup a bit more than 8TB with Backblaze Personal ($5/mo. for unlimited storage) in about a week. That said, I'm backing up from a Windows box with a direct-attached RAID enclosure, just because I wanted to avoid issues like limitations on backing up network drives or client platforms. I know it's possible to backup a NAS on Backblaze Personal via iSCSI (since it appears to be a local drive to Backblaze), but the people I've heard who use iSCSI for that purpose don't seem to recommend it. Even so, it seems like you could toss a Windows VM together that'd let you do those backups.
I’m glad they didn’t limit it that low. I remember once being on a road trip where, for whatever reason, all of the cars on the road were doing 90 mph. It lasted for maybe 30 minutes as we were on I-10 between major cities on a flat, straight stretch with wide lanes with no other traffic in sight that entire time. It’s the fastest I’ve ever gone while simply keeping up with the speed of traffic, so it sticks out in my mind, to say the least.
I’ve never had reason to go that fast again, nor reason to go that fast prior to then, but I’m glad I had the option at the time. Putting the limit a bit north of that excludes any instances like mine.
Though a bit of an oversimplification, USB4 is basically just a rebranding of Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 already does 40Gbps and has been out now for a few years. I have yet to hear reports of cables spontaneously erupting in flame or whatnot, and though USB 3.x and TB3 cables are stiffer than USB 2 cables, I don't think they're swaddled in insulation to a crazy degree. If you're curious how this will work, look back over the documentation for TB3.
That is all there is. Sorry.
Only usefulness. No absolute truth(TM).
I love it when people declare as an absolutism that there's no such thing as absolute truth. Rarely do you see anyone contradict themselves in so few words.
I actually do. Thankfully, those times aren't dead it. During those conversations today, it's not uncommon for a person pulling out their phone to be told, "Don't spoil it" or "If you're gonna cheat by looking it up, you need to put your pride on the line by staking a claim first". Either way, it prolongs the fun for the people enjoying it.
It's coming here right now. Just look at the deplatforming being done by Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon.
The one is nothing like the other. In one case, we're talking about a government deplatforming its people from all platforms, thus depriving its people of fundamental freedoms—the right to move, in this case—which are frequently exercised out of necessity, not convenience, due to factors outside of one's control. In the other case, we're talking about individual organizations deplatforming their own users from only their own platform, thus depriving those users of no rights or freedoms and not costing those users anything beyond what they knowingly and voluntarily elected to build on top of that platform.
Put differently, the only people who need Facebook and its ilk are the ones who made choices that put them in a position of dependence, but any person could need to fly or take a train at some point due to a death in the family, work, or other obligations forced on them. We can choose not to depend on Facebook (I certainly have), but good luck choosing not to depend on fast transportation when you need it. Moreover, given that nearly everyone's reaction to learning that I either don't have or don't use accounts at any of the sites you listed is (after an incredulous "Really?") something to the effect of "You're almost certainly better off for it", I'd say that even the heaviest of users recognizes that those platforms are an inessential part of their lives.
China is a country that regularly disappears people
This. So much this. A friend of mine who has been living in China (note the tense; they're leaving) was telling me a few weeks back about how a German national they know suddenly disappeared.
As my friend eventually came to find out, without having ever been approached or questioned before, this German was kidnapped off the street, taken to an interrogation room, told to unlock his phone, and required to hand over all of his contacts' information. When he did all of that they started demanding information that he didn't have (they seemed to incorrectly think he was a missionary?), so they locked him in a windowless cell with no bed, blanket, or change of clothes; provided him with only a bucket for relieving himself; deprived him of sleep for 96 hours by keeping the temperature bone-chillingly cold while blaring music day and night; and, at one point, closed the vents to his cell as they pumped smoke under the door, all while demanding more info from him. After four days they must have realized he didn't have anything more to give them, so they unceremoniously dumped him on a random street in his city and told him not to talk about what had happened, as well as that he had 72 hours to leave the country or he would be forcibly deported. Mind you, this is a man who was there legally, with a valid work visa, who was never charged with a crime, and who certainly wasn't convicted of one, yet he received a sort of mistreatment that I would have hoped was only common in fiction, then was given three days' notice to abandon his life of the past several years by uprooting and leaving behind his work, friends, family, and home.
As you suggested, stuff like this has been common among ethnic minorities in certain parts of the country (Uighurs in the northwest especially), but up until recently foreigners were largely exempt from such treatment, presumably out of concern for the PR damage locking up foreigners without cause could do. It sounds like the last few months have seen a rapid expansion of disappearances and mistreatment, since it's now including foreigners and it's not just in the northwest, but across much of the rest of the country. The German guy wasn't anywhere close to where that sort of stuff has traditionally been happening, and while he's the only one my friend knows personally who went through something like that, my friend rattled off a half-dozen other instances they had heard second-hand and said that incidents nearly identical to his are increasingly common among their extended circles of expat friends and colleagues.
What makes it more intriguing is that, just a few years ago, their terms of service permitted much of the behavior that is now being labeled as "piracy".
I signed up for the service sometime around or about 2007 when I was in grad school, and my younger brother working on his undergrad asked if I would share my account with him. Since I'm one of those oddballs who actually checks the terms to see if such things are allowed, I read through Netflix's terms to see what their stance was on such behavior, and I recall specifically reading that family members in your household were allowed to share your account, with the definition of household including geographically distant but closely related relatives. I even seem to recall them citing family members away at college as an example.
I re-read through the terms a year or two ago in researching a comment I was making on Slashdot, but I couldn't find that verbiage anywhere. So far as I can tell, they must've taken it out somewhere along the way without telling any of us that they were doing so.
That isn't true. The US government pays out settlements to between 500 and 2500 people each year that have "life changing" reactions to vaccines. This is just for overwhelmingly provable cases. The CDC's own statistics show that some years the people who get hurt by vacancies are more common and severe than the diseases they were trying to prevent.
Sheesh. Lying with statistics much? In fact, having now looked over the numbers, I'll say that you're just outright lying.
If you go back to the actual numbers, straight from the horse's mouth, you'll see on page 3 that over the 12-year period from 2006-01-01 to 2017-12-31, the US administered 3,454,269,356 vaccines. Resulting from those 3.4 billion vaccines, only 4,172 people were compensated due to harm, which—at just 348/year on average—falls well short of even the lower end of the range you were trying to assert. So what is the actual number of settlements per year? Page 7 shows us that the worst year on record had merely 697, not 2500, while the best year had just 9, not 500.
To ground all of this in terms that we may be more familiar with, that's an incidence rate of just 1.2 per 1 million vaccines administered in the US, or a meager 0.00012% chance that you'll experience a "life changing" reaction in response to a vaccine. All of which is to say, while vaccines are not 100% safe (aside: so far as I know, there's no such thing as a 100% safe medical intervention, which makes me question why anti-vaxxers bother with doctors at all), they are literally within a rounding error of 100% safe according to the metric you happened to choose to try and use against them.
As for "the CDC's own statistics", care to link these statistics you've supposedly seen? Because so far as I can find (and I've looked quite a bit), the CDC doesn't break out the statistics you claimed you've seen. Instead, they point the public to "The Health and Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine[, ...] an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public". The HMD's numbers also happen to be what get used in the HRSA report I linked earlier. So, go back and look at those numbers from a few paragraphs back. There were 3.4 billion vaccines administered over that 12-year period. That's about 288 million per year. Since you're saying more than half the people had adverse effects in some years, you're claiming that the incidence rate topped out somewhere north of 144 million instances of adverse effects in a single year, or, put differently, that there was at least one year on record where a number of incidents roughly equal to half the population of the US resulted in adverse effects...and somehow we didn't all start rioting over it.
Actually, there's a possibility that's true, though if it is, it's likely because the far-and-away most common adverse effect monitored by the CDC—with "up to 8 out of 10" patients suffering from it—is that they became "fussy or irritable" after the shot was administered. Mind you, this is a shot typically given to infants, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that they cry after being given a shot, and yet that's logged as an adverse effect counting towards your statistics. No one cares about that. Nor do we generally care that the next closest effects are that 1 in 3 people experience a mild fever or see some redness at the injection spot within a few days of the vaccine. And once we get past the handful of common adverse effects like those, none of which are serious, the odds drop off rapidly, with things like anaphylaxis or worse coming in at 1 i
This guy should be in prison. But they won't do that. Because he's rich. Filthy rich.
So, you're in favor of jailing innocent people?
After all, Mark Begor was not the CEO when the leak happened (that would be Richard Smith), nor was he even the CEO who handled most of the aftermath (that would be Paulino do Rego Barros Jr.). Mr. Begor only started as CEO in April 2018, nearly a year after the leaks were first discovered. He may be as slimy as the rest for all I know, but he wasn't a part of what happened back then. So far as I can see, he's simply the guy trying to clean up the mess.
It's fine if you don't like the guy (I don't either), but it's comments like yours that make me VERY glad we have a justice system that doesn't mete out punishment according to the rule of mob.
First off, no, Apple does not have a monopoly. They have lock-in, which is far from being the same thing. I'm not saying that lock-in is fine, but we need to stop misusing "monopoly" if we're going to have a rational discussion on the topic.
Second, even if they had a monopoly, a monopoly in and of itself does not necessarily mean action need be taken by regulators. It's when companies abuse their monopolies to gain an anticompetitive advantage that it becomes a problem (e.g. leveraging their monopoly in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another). I'm not aware of any legitimate arguments suggesting Apple has done so with their perceived monopoly.
Third, vendors are under no obligation to eliminate lock-in/make things interoperable unless there are other anticompetitive issues at play, such as what may happen if the vendor happens to also be a monopoly. That's why, for example, AT&T was forced to interoperate with other phone companies several decades back. The fact that Android commands a significantly larger market share than iOS, both in the US and abroad, suggests that Apple neither has a monopoly nor is in a position to abuse their market share for anticompetitive gain. As such, while some here may suggest that they are shooting themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of significant competitive and PR gains that could be made (not to mention the advantages for consumers), there doesn't seem to be a basis to obligate them to make their App Store open. It's their choice if they want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Consumers don't always like lock-in, but lock-in is rarely a problem necessitating regulatory intervention.
Agreed, but there's a big difference between official reviews and off-the-cuff remarks. I'd expect the latter to speak more to how they themselves enjoyed it as a watcher.
I'm not arguing that this is a great predictor either way. I'm just saying that I've seen some positive indications, which was honestly more than I was expecting. Whether they bear out in practice remains to be seen, and I certainly wouldn't bet on it either way.