To complicated. I'd rather just install some software...maybe someone has some software like that?
Run pihole in a Docker container? It took me about 3 minutes on Windows 10 to get up and running, despite having no previous experience using Docker or PowerShell.
I was going to suggest the same thing. We don’t need it to survive like we need blood, we produce it as a byproduct of going about our lives, any given sample won’t necessarily tell you much about the person as a whole and, we find it creepy if someone has an interest in collecting or studying it.
Is there some magical new high speed way for end users to cost effectively upload data to these satellites?
Rather than cost, isn't the uplink problem with geostationary satellites that they have to deal with so many users? Whether with TDMA and FMDA, you end up reserving part of your bandwidth (either as time or frequency) for each and every user to do their uploads. As the number of users increase, you necessarily need to divide your bandwidth into more and more pieces, each of which will be smaller than before, which basically means bad upload speeds for everyone.
I think that's the problem you're talking about?
But that problem is far less severe when you're talking about LEO instead of geostationary orbit. Because satellites need to maintain line of sight with their end users, and because being closer to the ground means you see far less ground, any given LEO satellite will see far fewer users than a geostationary one above it. As a result, any given LEO satellite will be responsible for far fewer users, which means that you're carving the available bandwidth into far fewer pieces than you were before. Taken together with the march of technological progress, it seems likely that the problem will be far less severe with this new round of constellations.
I could be wrong, and I'd welcome correction from anyone with better information (particularly with regards to expected performance for satellites going over major urban centers), but that's my understanding on the state of things.
This is actually what I was thinking. And even if Starlink fails for some reason, Samsung, OneWeb, Telesat, and others have all announced competing satellite constellations. Sometime in the next 0-3 years, it seems likely that anyone on earth will be capable of having high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet access from virtually anywhere.
It'll be interesting to see how repressive regimes adjust. After all, how will China maintain its Great Firewall when anyone can vault over it via satellite? I sincerely doubt that they'd resort to shooting down satellites, but even if they did, a new one would be coming into range every few minutes.
You claim DTS sounds "way better" and has "more fidelity", but what's the basis for that comparison? So far as I know, no albums have been mastered using DTS Surround (or DTS-HD Master Audio and the like), so you couldn't have done any A/B testing from the same material, which leads me to believe that you declared a winner after watching some random movies and listening to some random CDs. I imagine that's exactly the sort of quasi-religious nonsense that the OP was railing against.
To be fair, DTS Surround (i.e. what I assume you're talking about, since it's the standard DTS codec, as opposed to the extensive list of other DTS technologies that support 5.1 channels) does have better fidelity than an audio CD (24-bit at 48 kHz vs. 16-bit at 44.1 kHz), but the OP was saying—and as someone with decades of experience mixing sound (though not professionally, lest anyone think I'm an expert), I'm inclined to agree—that most people can't tell the difference. Blind tests have shown repeatedly that most people can't reliably pick the better one between lossless and a 128 kbps MP3, and among those that can, only a vanishingly small number can still pick the better one consistently once you bump it up to 192 kbps for the MP3. I'd wager that the number who could pick the better between DTS Surround and CD audio would be similarly small.
That doesn't mean people have defective ears; it just means there are limits to what we can perceive. Just as the printer dpi wars became meaningless once we got beyond the human eye's ability to perceive a difference, so too did the camera megapixel wars eventually become meaningless, so too did the display ppi wars become meaningless (despite ongoing marketing), and so too have these audio fidelity wars become meaningless.
I mean, seriously, where do you think that CDs are coming up short? They're already capable of a larger dynamic range (~90 dB) than what you can get in a concert hall (~80 dB), they already capture frequencies (0 Hz to 22.05 kHz) that are both below and above what people can hear (20 Hz to 20 kHz), and they already have enough detail that the vast majority of the population is incapable of picking the better audio at better than chance would allow.
You're welcome to have preferences, of course. A lot of people love pumping up the bass (see Beats headphones). Maybe you prefer the "warmer" sound that's popular among the audiophile crowd (hence why it's become known as the "audiophile" sound). Maybe you prefer a brighter or punchier sound. But with any of those preferences, you need to be aware that you're actually reducing the fidelity by moving away from what was originally there, in much the same way that adding cream or sugar takes you away from the original flavors in your tea or coffee. For my part, I've generally leaned towards a "reference" sound (i.e. as close to the original as possible), but I'm weird that way, since most people find it unpleasant to listen to and end up suffering ear fatigue as a result.
Yeah, because iOS is only available on apple phones.
The fact that someone else found a solution that doesn’t work for you doesn’t make your problem go away.
To typical end users, iOS is only available on Apple phones and Android is only available on Android phones. We know that to be an oversimplification, but the typical end user doesn’t care (or sometimes even know) about the difference between HTC, LG, or Samsung. All they know is that new features aren’t available on their Android phone, and they don’t know why. That’s the broken situation I was talking about.
You don’t need to make your own phones to fix that problem, but that is the tack that Apple took. It’s an approach that works. Google is going a different route, and I hope they succeed, since it’s in their customer’s best interests to have updates rapidly available.
Look, it’s great that updates are available sooner on “key devices”, but the fact that this is being cited as something praiseworthy is rather indicative of how broken the situation remains. It took 192 days on average for Nougat to even become available on a subset of devices. 170 for Oreo. 118 for Pie. Meanwhile, iOS has always taken 0 days: it was available to all compatible devices immediately upon its release.
And availability is just half the problem. If availability is staggered, you have a harder time encouraging people to update (or even making them aware of the update), which hampers the deployment rate. Improving the speed of deployment needs to be the end goal. Improving availability is just a necessary step towards clearing hurdles that are in the way.
Donnie Yen? I thought he was a great addition to it. Then again, I was a fan of him in the Ip Man franchise before I went to see Rogue One, so I'll admit my perspective with regards to him is colored by past experience. Either way, however, he didn't play a significant role in Rogue One, so it seems odd that he'd be a reason to hate the movie, even if you did find him cringeworthy in it.
The Last Jedi has the lowest user score on Rotten Tomatoes (45%) of any major Star Wars film. It's lower even than the prequel films (59%, 56%, 65%, respectively), it's lower than the less-than-stellar Solo (64%), and it's certainly less than the decently well-regarded Rogue One (86%). If you want to pin Solo's failure on anything other than itself, pin it franchise fatigue (too many movies, too fast) and more specifically on The Last Jedi, which utterly failed to connect with audiences and was still fresh on everyone's minds since it had come out just a few months prior.
As for Rogue One, I'll grant that it was a significant departure for the franchise, so it didn't feel like a Star Wars episode, but they never said it was supposed to be one. Quite the contrary, they made it clear that they were going for something different that was set in the same universe, and with that in mind, I'd say it was a smashing success, both critically and commercially. It was a good film in its own right, despite being disliked by a handful of people, such as yourself, who couldn't enjoy it for what it was.
Title nitpicking aside, you'd have a good argument if you had the scale of the malware problem in app stores correct. Which you didn't...you were at least a couple of orders of magnitude low:
I'm not seeing it. Quite the opposite, actually, since your links mention 7, 145, and "more than 50" instances of malware apps making it into the stores, all of which fall in line with my statement that out of the hundreds of thousands of apps that are submitted for review each year, there are "only a few hundred [instances of malware] most years". If anything, your links would suggest that I might have overstated that aspect of the malware problem by an order of magnitude.
That said, it seems like you may be under the impression that I'm denying the existence of outliers when it comes to the number of downloads, so let me be clear: I'm not. What I said was that when it comes to malware apps (emphasis added) "most never [get] more than a couple thousand downloads before [they're] dealt with", which your second link supports, given that among the 145 malware apps they mention, the biggest number they could claim was "more than 1,000 installations".
But outliers certainly do exist (e.g. your first and third links), which is why I also said that "[i]t's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is." Take your first link, for instance. It mentions "at least a million users" being affected, which sounds like a huge number until you realize that it correlates to just half of a tenth of a percent of active Android users. That's it. Again, it's more accurate to portray it as a splash of water in a sub that is quickly dealt with, rather than as a sub that's half-full.
(As for your third link, it's light on anything concrete. It mentions "600 million [WeChat] users", which, once again, sounds like a huge number until you realize that the actual number of affected users would have been a substantially smaller, since it was an iOS-specific issue that only occurred for people running a compatible version of the OS who happened to both update the WeChat app and use it during a narrow window of opportunity. The issue was quickly resolved before most users were even aware of it, let alone affected by it.)
I don't see how the existence of a huge amount of malware outside of the walled garden suggests that the inside is safe because it has less
I see you enjoy moving goalposts. After all, your original assertion (see: subject line) was that "the garden wall provides no safety"—none—which is a patently false claim, but now you're trying to argue that they don't provide enough safety, which is a subjective claim for which you provide no evidence, other than an unspecified but "enormous" amount of malware that is apparently still getting in, despite the links I just provided that seem to contradict that notion.
That's like saying that a submarine that's half full of water has a good functioning hull because it has a much lower percentage of water than the outside ocean.
Not even close. While there are an "enormous" number of apps being submitted for review each year (hundreds of thousands), there's a very small amount of malware actually getting through the wall (only a few hundred most years), most of which never gets more than a couple thousand downloads before it's dealt with. Instead of the sub being half-full, a more accurate analogy would be that of the thousand times someone opened the hatch in the last year, seawater only splashed in once, but it was wiped up quickly, before anyone had a chance to slip on it. Maybe once every few decades, someone slips on the water before it's wiped up.
Now, if you want to argue that someone slipping on water once every few decades is just as unsafe as being outside the sub, we can measure that claim, and you'd be wrong. End of story. If you want to argue that it isn't safe enough, I'll cordially disagree on the basis of the evidence we have available, but "safe enough" is an inherently subjective measure, so if your standard for "safe enough" means "0 instances", then you're welcome to think differently than I do, even though that standard would be a ridiculous one in my opinion.
While you're certainly espousing a popular sentiment, the facts don't bear out anything you've said.
Take a look at the mobilemalwarereports from the last few years and if you parse through the details you'll see two consistent trends:
1) Android accounts for the vast majority of malware—about 98% in 2013, rising to within a rounding error of 100% at this point—but that... 2) Nearly all Android malware is coming from sources outside the Google Play Store, mostly via stores in the Middle East and Asia.
Taken together, iOS and Android account for nearly the entire smartphone market, yet the number of threats within their walls (i.e. available in Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store) is less than 0.1% of what is outside their walls. As such, despite the baseless assertions of a random Slashdotter that "the garden wall provides no safety", there's actually a fairly meaningful and measurable amount of safety being provided by those walls. And even when there are leaks, they tend to be caught quickly. The malware mentioned in the summary affected 5,000 devices (at most) before it was removed, which is a drop in the bucket compared to 2+ billion Android devices that are in active use. It's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is.
Hell, the only reason why these sorts of lapses are still newsworthy is because the walled gardens have been so successful at keeping their users safe.
I actually read Apple's terms of service a few years back (they're a surprisingly easy read compared to most I've read), and I don't recall anything resembling the sort of verbiage you're talking about. Could you cite it please?
Just off the top of my head, check your network traffic if you have a fresh install of Windows 10. I recall reading on Slashdot a few years back that Google's servers are being sent some form of telemetry data from fresh installs. Oh, and what about the personalized ads that show up in Windows and Xbox? How do you think that happened? Then there's LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, which is quite obviously in the business of selling access to user data.
I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here, but yes, Microsoft sells access to the data they collect off of their users.
All big tech companies harvest data, but Apple relies on it far less than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
They don't just rely on it less: they collect less, and they've done so all along.
Moreover, Apple could have walked down the same path that Google, Microsoft, and others have gone down by collecting and monetizing more data on their customers, but they voluntarily chose not to do so when presented with that opportunity. Instead, they chose to align their business interests with those of their customers. That decision cost them opportunities at the time and has been suggested to have set them back technologically when it comes to mapping, voice assistants, and other areas, but it's starting to pay off now that people are slowly waking up to just what it is that they've been giving away all along.
So, yes, it's self-serving of them to hammer their competitors on privacy, but they only have the ability to hammer their competitors on privacy because they chose to NOT follow their competitors down the path of literally selling out users. That decision was a forward-thinking one at the time, and it's coming back to pay dividends now.
So unless they fingerprint my browser, not much data collection can happen.
That's like saying, "So unless robbers do what robbers do, not much will be stolen."
Of course they're fingerprinting your browser. Hell, Google was just fined a few years ago for exploiting a bug in Safari that allowed them to track private Safari users like you. The bug was fixed and Google isn't allowed to exploit bugs like that any longer, but there's nothing stopping them from using the other, "legitimate" tools available to them to track you.
Just off the top of my head and depending on how careful you are, you can likely still be identified between sessions thanks to the fonts you have installed; your user agent string and browser properties; "supercookies" in canvas elements, local storage, Flash, or header properties injected by your ISP and/or VPN (have you actually checked your VPN's terms to confirm that they protect your privacy? Many of them are just as bad as traditional ISPs); local storage communication between tabs (e.g. you ever wonder how other tabs know when to refresh after you log into Google in a different tab? Local storage is how); your mouse movements; the style of your prose; your typing cadence; your search terms; your pattern of activity during the day; and the list goes on and on.
You're not nearly as anonymous as you think. They may not know your IP, but who cares when they still know it's you?
If you'd prefer to use OSM, you should check your settings in DuckDuckGo. You can change your "Direction Source" (i.e. map provider) between Apple, Bing, HERE, Google, and OpenStreetMap. I have no idea who HERE is, but the rest should be self-explanatory.
People in developed countries do not need sunlight for their Vitamin D.
They may not need it for Vitamin D, but they do need it. The largest, most extensive study on Vitamin D supplements was just concluded a few months ago, and despite the fact that we know from prior research that people with better Vitamin D levels are significantly healthier (e.g. heart, cancer, etc.), the study found that there was no discernible benefit to consuming additional Vitamin D (i.e. Vitamin D levels did not correlate to better health among people taking Vitamin D supplements). The findings seem to be pointing to the notion that Vitamin D is not itself the cause of the benefits we're seeing among people who are healthier, but rather an effect of whatever the actual cause is...presumably appropriate sun exposure. Whatever that actual cause is, that's what's providing the health benefits, not Vitamin D itself.
Completely agree. I have no idea what the basis for this ruling is.
From what the article says, the judge is suggesting that because both a passcode and biometric key can be used to the same ends, they should both be treated the same, which is utterly nonsensical. That's no different than saying that if you have a combination lock with a backup key, the cops can't compel you to turn over the backup key because they can't compel you to turn over the combination number. But a number is nothing like a physical key. One is testimonial, the other is physical. The act of collecting testimonial evidence speaks to your knowledge of the subject, hence why it cannot be compelled. Collecting physical evidence merely speaks to the facts of the case, such as whether it is in your possession or not. That evidence can be linked to other evidence that incriminates the perpetrator is the whole point of evidence.
According to the logic I see a lot of people on Slashdot espousing, collecting biometric keys shouldn't be allowed because they can be used to unlock the phone, which may incriminate you, ipso facto: self-incrimination. The problem with that logic is that it disqualifies virtually any collection of physical evidence that originates from the suspect. After all, if they can't compel me to use my fingerprint to unlock a phone that would incriminate me, what's their basis for collecting my fingerprint to see if it matches one at the scene of a crime? I'd be incriminating myself, wouldn't I? For that matter, I don't think I should have to show my face in court, since I'd be "incriminating myself" by allowing a witness to recognize me. Likewise, how can they show security footage that may use my own image against me? Self-incrimination! And what's their legal basis for compelling me to provide a blood sample for a BAC test after allegations of drunk driving, given that they'd be using my own blood to incriminate me? The 5th Amendment protects me from having to provide a blood sample that they can use against me, doesn't it?
Well, no, it doesn't. The fact that you have physical evidence in your possession that can be used to incriminate you does NOT mean that it's self-incrimination to provide it. That's not what the 5th Amendment protects you against. Not at all.
Physical evidence is factual. It's evidence that exists, independent of your awareness, will, or participation. It just is, and officers with proper warrants are entitled to collect physical evidence in whatever way the warrant specifies, including collecting it via the sensors used in a device/evidence in their possession and/or comparing it to other evidence in their possession. If physical evidence you provide incriminates you in a crime, once again, that's NOT self-incrimination. That's simply incriminating evidence in your possession, no different than them finding stolen goods in your home or that your fingerprints match those at the scene of the crime.
And for Slashdotters who don't like the fact that every other lower court case with this same ruling (e.g. in Illinois, as the article mentioned) has already been overturned by higher courts, then don't secure your devices using biometrics. Simple as that.
And really, even if their stuff never comes back to Netflix, I doubt I'd care. For many people, the lack of X on Netflix is seen as a major problem, but instead of getting annoyed that X wasn't available on Netflix, I came to realize that Netflix carries plenty of other stuff that's just as good, that scratches the same itch, and that I can derive just as much enjoyment from viewing. I don't need X to be entertained, because there's Y and Z that I never would have considered otherwise (e.g. I just watched Hugo Weaving in 1998's The Interview (not to be confused with 2014's The Interview) on a lark last night after Netflix recommended it to me, and it was great). Put differently, Netflix taught me to treat most media as fungible entertainment, since there's very little that's actually "must-have". I pay Netflix for access to a constantly rotating, seemingly endless stream of content that I want to watch once, without much care for what that content actually is, so long as it's entertaining enough.
But for those films and shows that are actually must-have, they are, by definition, worth having. As such—and because I have qualms with piracy—I'm fine paying my one-time fee to buy them on DVD or blu-ray and then rip them into Plex so that I can watch them anywhere. Plex doesn't care whether the data I feed it came from a new or used copy, in a sleeve or the original packaging, so it's incredibly easy to legally fill out one's collection for cheap, thanks to eBay and Amazon.
Moreover, even if we wanted to own every major release from the Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and other Disney franchises (i.e. the things we'd sign up for their streaming service to watch), we're still talking about less than one theatrical release per month, which we can almost certainly pick up used for less than what the monthly subscription is likely to cost. As such, even if everything they were making was must-have content, why would we pay them over and over again ad infinitum to maintain our access to that content when we could instead pay them a smaller fee just once to have an even better level of access that could never be taken away?
...although I'm surprised this is the case here....
You're not well acquainted with the aerospace industry, are you.
I did three internships in the space industry. For two of those summers the guys I was working with had been on that exact same project for at least 20 years. They said the project had changed hands through six companies and about half as many managers, but the project trudged on and the jobs persisted, with no end in sight. By the time of my third internship, those contracts had changed hands again and I ended up working with a different group...which had likewise already lasted through at least a few changes of corporate overlords, though admittedly not as many as that first group.
If that was ever funny, it stopped being so long ago.
The only thing that's funny is the revisionist history I've seen people like you engaging in, given that he did say that Mexico would pay for the wall, he did so numerous times, and he even explicitly said that Mexico would pay for it in a "one-time payment". To his credit, he was walking the rhetoric back even before his inauguration, and I think it's a good thing when people (politicians or otherwise) change their minds after realizing that they were wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for the things they said. As such, what I'm not okay with is a politician attempting to gaslight an entire nation by lying about what was said when it's inconvenient for him to be held accountable for those words later. There's no denying—at least among honest people—that he made the claim that Mexico would pay for the wall and that they'd do so via a lump payment, rather than the tariffs, taxes, or whatever other reimbursements he's now trying to claim he meant all along.
As an aside, I don't have any "favored politicians". The party I'm registered with stopped representing my interests a long time ago, and none of the others do any better by me.
Exactly this. Switching to cash is a useful psychological trick to help get out of control spending back under control, but if your actual spending already matches your planned/intended spending (i.e. you're setting and keeping to a budget), there's no need for such tricks in the first place. Feeling the money physically leaving our pockets wouldn't change our minds one bit with regards to how much we spend on groceries, since we set the money aside specifically to pay for those expenses before we ever got to the store, so we have no guilt about spending it on them.
The only ones awaiting this are those who have been saying it was "coming soon" for the last decade.
Agreed. I’m fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem, but I don’t know anyone clamoring for an Apple TV service.
3, 5, or 10 years ago? Sure, it would have been great to snap the cable industry’s back with something different. These days, however? They’re already falling apart. They’re hemorrhaging customers by the millions every year. Earlier this week, in less than an hour, with no prior experience, and without looking up any guides or manuals, I put up an antenna in our attic and had it working with our Plex server. We can now stream live TV to any of our devices or record it for later, no subscription to any service necessary.
The options available today are cheap and easy. The cable industry lock-in is gone. There’s no need for an Apple solution, nor am I convinced that they have anything to bring to the table. I doubt that any of their original content will actually be worth viewing in the immediate future, and the user experience for much of this stuff is already more than good enough.
I can remotely access a Windows box from my iPad... when will you release an app that let's me access a Mac the same way?
Apple already baked VNC into macOS and there are dozens of VNC clients on the App Store. There’s no need for them to release something that we’ve already been able to do for years. The only reason Microsoft needs to do this is because Microsoft uses a proprietary standard, so it’s up to them to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
To complicated. I'd rather just install some software...maybe someone has some software like that?
Run pihole in a Docker container? It took me about 3 minutes on Windows 10 to get up and running, despite having no previous experience using Docker or PowerShell.
(and yes, “whooosh” for me)
I'd tend to argue data is more like human feces.
I was going to suggest the same thing. We don’t need it to survive like we need blood, we produce it as a byproduct of going about our lives, any given sample won’t necessarily tell you much about the person as a whole and, we find it creepy if someone has an interest in collecting or studying it.
Is there some magical new high speed way for end users to cost effectively upload data to these satellites?
Rather than cost, isn't the uplink problem with geostationary satellites that they have to deal with so many users? Whether with TDMA and FMDA, you end up reserving part of your bandwidth (either as time or frequency) for each and every user to do their uploads. As the number of users increase, you necessarily need to divide your bandwidth into more and more pieces, each of which will be smaller than before, which basically means bad upload speeds for everyone.
I think that's the problem you're talking about?
But that problem is far less severe when you're talking about LEO instead of geostationary orbit. Because satellites need to maintain line of sight with their end users, and because being closer to the ground means you see far less ground, any given LEO satellite will see far fewer users than a geostationary one above it. As a result, any given LEO satellite will be responsible for far fewer users, which means that you're carving the available bandwidth into far fewer pieces than you were before. Taken together with the march of technological progress, it seems likely that the problem will be far less severe with this new round of constellations.
I could be wrong, and I'd welcome correction from anyone with better information (particularly with regards to expected performance for satellites going over major urban centers), but that's my understanding on the state of things.
This is actually what I was thinking. And even if Starlink fails for some reason, Samsung, OneWeb, Telesat, and others have all announced competing satellite constellations. Sometime in the next 0-3 years, it seems likely that anyone on earth will be capable of having high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet access from virtually anywhere.
It'll be interesting to see how repressive regimes adjust. After all, how will China maintain its Great Firewall when anyone can vault over it via satellite? I sincerely doubt that they'd resort to shooting down satellites, but even if they did, a new one would be coming into range every few minutes.
You claim DTS sounds "way better" and has "more fidelity", but what's the basis for that comparison? So far as I know, no albums have been mastered using DTS Surround (or DTS-HD Master Audio and the like), so you couldn't have done any A/B testing from the same material, which leads me to believe that you declared a winner after watching some random movies and listening to some random CDs. I imagine that's exactly the sort of quasi-religious nonsense that the OP was railing against.
To be fair, DTS Surround (i.e. what I assume you're talking about, since it's the standard DTS codec, as opposed to the extensive list of other DTS technologies that support 5.1 channels) does have better fidelity than an audio CD (24-bit at 48 kHz vs. 16-bit at 44.1 kHz), but the OP was saying—and as someone with decades of experience mixing sound (though not professionally, lest anyone think I'm an expert), I'm inclined to agree—that most people can't tell the difference. Blind tests have shown repeatedly that most people can't reliably pick the better one between lossless and a 128 kbps MP3, and among those that can, only a vanishingly small number can still pick the better one consistently once you bump it up to 192 kbps for the MP3. I'd wager that the number who could pick the better between DTS Surround and CD audio would be similarly small.
That doesn't mean people have defective ears; it just means there are limits to what we can perceive. Just as the printer dpi wars became meaningless once we got beyond the human eye's ability to perceive a difference, so too did the camera megapixel wars eventually become meaningless, so too did the display ppi wars become meaningless (despite ongoing marketing), and so too have these audio fidelity wars become meaningless.
I mean, seriously, where do you think that CDs are coming up short? They're already capable of a larger dynamic range (~90 dB) than what you can get in a concert hall (~80 dB), they already capture frequencies (0 Hz to 22.05 kHz) that are both below and above what people can hear (20 Hz to 20 kHz), and they already have enough detail that the vast majority of the population is incapable of picking the better audio at better than chance would allow.
You're welcome to have preferences, of course. A lot of people love pumping up the bass (see Beats headphones). Maybe you prefer the "warmer" sound that's popular among the audiophile crowd (hence why it's become known as the "audiophile" sound). Maybe you prefer a brighter or punchier sound. But with any of those preferences, you need to be aware that you're actually reducing the fidelity by moving away from what was originally there, in much the same way that adding cream or sugar takes you away from the original flavors in your tea or coffee. For my part, I've generally leaned towards a "reference" sound (i.e. as close to the original as possible), but I'm weird that way, since most people find it unpleasant to listen to and end up suffering ear fatigue as a result.
Yeah, because iOS is only available on apple phones.
The fact that someone else found a solution that doesn’t work for you doesn’t make your problem go away.
To typical end users, iOS is only available on Apple phones and Android is only available on Android phones. We know that to be an oversimplification, but the typical end user doesn’t care (or sometimes even know) about the difference between HTC, LG, or Samsung. All they know is that new features aren’t available on their Android phone, and they don’t know why. That’s the broken situation I was talking about.
You don’t need to make your own phones to fix that problem, but that is the tack that Apple took. It’s an approach that works. Google is going a different route, and I hope they succeed, since it’s in their customer’s best interests to have updates rapidly available.
Look, it’s great that updates are available sooner on “key devices”, but the fact that this is being cited as something praiseworthy is rather indicative of how broken the situation remains. It took 192 days on average for Nougat to even become available on a subset of devices. 170 for Oreo. 118 for Pie. Meanwhile, iOS has always taken 0 days: it was available to all compatible devices immediately upon its release.
And availability is just half the problem. If availability is staggered, you have a harder time encouraging people to update (or even making them aware of the update), which hampers the deployment rate. Improving the speed of deployment needs to be the end goal. Improving availability is just a necessary step towards clearing hurdles that are in the way.
Donnie Yen? I thought he was a great addition to it. Then again, I was a fan of him in the Ip Man franchise before I went to see Rogue One, so I'll admit my perspective with regards to him is colored by past experience. Either way, however, he didn't play a significant role in Rogue One, so it seems odd that he'd be a reason to hate the movie, even if you did find him cringeworthy in it.
The Last Jedi has the lowest user score on Rotten Tomatoes (45%) of any major Star Wars film. It's lower even than the prequel films (59%, 56%, 65%, respectively), it's lower than the less-than-stellar Solo (64%), and it's certainly less than the decently well-regarded Rogue One (86%). If you want to pin Solo's failure on anything other than itself, pin it franchise fatigue (too many movies, too fast) and more specifically on The Last Jedi, which utterly failed to connect with audiences and was still fresh on everyone's minds since it had come out just a few months prior.
As for Rogue One, I'll grant that it was a significant departure for the franchise, so it didn't feel like a Star Wars episode, but they never said it was supposed to be one. Quite the contrary, they made it clear that they were going for something different that was set in the same universe, and with that in mind, I'd say it was a smashing success, both critically and commercially. It was a good film in its own right, despite being disliked by a handful of people, such as yourself, who couldn't enjoy it for what it was.
Title nitpicking aside, you'd have a good argument if you had the scale of the malware problem in app stores correct. Which you didn't...you were at least a couple of orders of magnitude low:
I'm not seeing it. Quite the opposite, actually, since your links mention 7, 145, and "more than 50" instances of malware apps making it into the stores, all of which fall in line with my statement that out of the hundreds of thousands of apps that are submitted for review each year, there are "only a few hundred [instances of malware] most years". If anything, your links would suggest that I might have overstated that aspect of the malware problem by an order of magnitude.
That said, it seems like you may be under the impression that I'm denying the existence of outliers when it comes to the number of downloads, so let me be clear: I'm not. What I said was that when it comes to malware apps (emphasis added) "most never [get] more than a couple thousand downloads before [they're] dealt with", which your second link supports, given that among the 145 malware apps they mention, the biggest number they could claim was "more than 1,000 installations".
But outliers certainly do exist (e.g. your first and third links), which is why I also said that "[i]t's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is." Take your first link, for instance. It mentions "at least a million users" being affected, which sounds like a huge number until you realize that it correlates to just half of a tenth of a percent of active Android users. That's it. Again, it's more accurate to portray it as a splash of water in a sub that is quickly dealt with, rather than as a sub that's half-full.
(As for your third link, it's light on anything concrete. It mentions "600 million [WeChat] users", which, once again, sounds like a huge number until you realize that the actual number of affected users would have been a substantially smaller, since it was an iOS-specific issue that only occurred for people running a compatible version of the OS who happened to both update the WeChat app and use it during a narrow window of opportunity. The issue was quickly resolved before most users were even aware of it, let alone affected by it.)
I don't see how the existence of a huge amount of malware outside of the walled garden suggests that the inside is safe because it has less
I see you enjoy moving goalposts. After all, your original assertion (see: subject line) was that "the garden wall provides no safety"—none—which is a patently false claim, but now you're trying to argue that they don't provide enough safety, which is a subjective claim for which you provide no evidence, other than an unspecified but "enormous" amount of malware that is apparently still getting in, despite the links I just provided that seem to contradict that notion.
That's like saying that a submarine that's half full of water has a good functioning hull because it has a much lower percentage of water than the outside ocean.
Not even close. While there are an "enormous" number of apps being submitted for review each year (hundreds of thousands), there's a very small amount of malware actually getting through the wall (only a few hundred most years), most of which never gets more than a couple thousand downloads before it's dealt with. Instead of the sub being half-full, a more accurate analogy would be that of the thousand times someone opened the hatch in the last year, seawater only splashed in once, but it was wiped up quickly, before anyone had a chance to slip on it. Maybe once every few decades, someone slips on the water before it's wiped up.
Now, if you want to argue that someone slipping on water once every few decades is just as unsafe as being outside the sub, we can measure that claim, and you'd be wrong. End of story. If you want to argue that it isn't safe enough, I'll cordially disagree on the basis of the evidence we have available, but "safe enough" is an inherently subjective measure, so if your standard for "safe enough" means "0 instances", then you're welcome to think differently than I do, even though that standard would be a ridiculous one in my opinion.
While you're certainly espousing a popular sentiment, the facts don't bear out anything you've said.
Take a look at the mobile malware reports from the last few years and if you parse through the details you'll see two consistent trends:
1) Android accounts for the vast majority of malware—about 98% in 2013, rising to within a rounding error of 100% at this point—but that...
2) Nearly all Android malware is coming from sources outside the Google Play Store, mostly via stores in the Middle East and Asia.
Taken together, iOS and Android account for nearly the entire smartphone market, yet the number of threats within their walls (i.e. available in Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store) is less than 0.1% of what is outside their walls. As such, despite the baseless assertions of a random Slashdotter that "the garden wall provides no safety", there's actually a fairly meaningful and measurable amount of safety being provided by those walls. And even when there are leaks, they tend to be caught quickly. The malware mentioned in the summary affected 5,000 devices (at most) before it was removed, which is a drop in the bucket compared to 2+ billion Android devices that are in active use. It's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is.
Hell, the only reason why these sorts of lapses are still newsworthy is because the walled gardens have been so successful at keeping their users safe.
I actually read Apple's terms of service a few years back (they're a surprisingly easy read compared to most I've read), and I don't recall anything resembling the sort of verbiage you're talking about. Could you cite it please?
I'll wait.
Just off the top of my head, check your network traffic if you have a fresh install of Windows 10. I recall reading on Slashdot a few years back that Google's servers are being sent some form of telemetry data from fresh installs. Oh, and what about the personalized ads that show up in Windows and Xbox? How do you think that happened? Then there's LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, which is quite obviously in the business of selling access to user data.
I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here, but yes, Microsoft sells access to the data they collect off of their users.
All big tech companies harvest data, but Apple relies on it far less than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
They don't just rely on it less: they collect less, and they've done so all along.
Moreover, Apple could have walked down the same path that Google, Microsoft, and others have gone down by collecting and monetizing more data on their customers, but they voluntarily chose not to do so when presented with that opportunity. Instead, they chose to align their business interests with those of their customers. That decision cost them opportunities at the time and has been suggested to have set them back technologically when it comes to mapping, voice assistants, and other areas, but it's starting to pay off now that people are slowly waking up to just what it is that they've been giving away all along.
So, yes, it's self-serving of them to hammer their competitors on privacy, but they only have the ability to hammer their competitors on privacy because they chose to NOT follow their competitors down the path of literally selling out users. That decision was a forward-thinking one at the time, and it's coming back to pay dividends now.
So unless they fingerprint my browser, not much data collection can happen.
That's like saying, "So unless robbers do what robbers do, not much will be stolen."
Of course they're fingerprinting your browser. Hell, Google was just fined a few years ago for exploiting a bug in Safari that allowed them to track private Safari users like you. The bug was fixed and Google isn't allowed to exploit bugs like that any longer, but there's nothing stopping them from using the other, "legitimate" tools available to them to track you.
Just off the top of my head and depending on how careful you are, you can likely still be identified between sessions thanks to the fonts you have installed; your user agent string and browser properties; "supercookies" in canvas elements, local storage, Flash, or header properties injected by your ISP and/or VPN (have you actually checked your VPN's terms to confirm that they protect your privacy? Many of them are just as bad as traditional ISPs); local storage communication between tabs (e.g. you ever wonder how other tabs know when to refresh after you log into Google in a different tab? Local storage is how); your mouse movements; the style of your prose; your typing cadence; your search terms; your pattern of activity during the day; and the list goes on and on.
You're not nearly as anonymous as you think. They may not know your IP, but who cares when they still know it's you?
If you'd prefer to use OSM, you should check your settings in DuckDuckGo. You can change your "Direction Source" (i.e. map provider) between Apple, Bing, HERE, Google, and OpenStreetMap. I have no idea who HERE is, but the rest should be self-explanatory.
People in developed countries do not need sunlight for their Vitamin D.
They may not need it for Vitamin D, but they do need it. The largest, most extensive study on Vitamin D supplements was just concluded a few months ago, and despite the fact that we know from prior research that people with better Vitamin D levels are significantly healthier (e.g. heart, cancer, etc.), the study found that there was no discernible benefit to consuming additional Vitamin D (i.e. Vitamin D levels did not correlate to better health among people taking Vitamin D supplements). The findings seem to be pointing to the notion that Vitamin D is not itself the cause of the benefits we're seeing among people who are healthier, but rather an effect of whatever the actual cause is...presumably appropriate sun exposure. Whatever that actual cause is, that's what's providing the health benefits, not Vitamin D itself.
Completely agree. I have no idea what the basis for this ruling is.
From what the article says, the judge is suggesting that because both a passcode and biometric key can be used to the same ends, they should both be treated the same, which is utterly nonsensical. That's no different than saying that if you have a combination lock with a backup key, the cops can't compel you to turn over the backup key because they can't compel you to turn over the combination number. But a number is nothing like a physical key. One is testimonial, the other is physical. The act of collecting testimonial evidence speaks to your knowledge of the subject, hence why it cannot be compelled. Collecting physical evidence merely speaks to the facts of the case, such as whether it is in your possession or not. That evidence can be linked to other evidence that incriminates the perpetrator is the whole point of evidence.
According to the logic I see a lot of people on Slashdot espousing, collecting biometric keys shouldn't be allowed because they can be used to unlock the phone, which may incriminate you, ipso facto: self-incrimination. The problem with that logic is that it disqualifies virtually any collection of physical evidence that originates from the suspect. After all, if they can't compel me to use my fingerprint to unlock a phone that would incriminate me, what's their basis for collecting my fingerprint to see if it matches one at the scene of a crime? I'd be incriminating myself, wouldn't I? For that matter, I don't think I should have to show my face in court, since I'd be "incriminating myself" by allowing a witness to recognize me. Likewise, how can they show security footage that may use my own image against me? Self-incrimination! And what's their legal basis for compelling me to provide a blood sample for a BAC test after allegations of drunk driving, given that they'd be using my own blood to incriminate me? The 5th Amendment protects me from having to provide a blood sample that they can use against me, doesn't it?
Well, no, it doesn't. The fact that you have physical evidence in your possession that can be used to incriminate you does NOT mean that it's self-incrimination to provide it. That's not what the 5th Amendment protects you against. Not at all.
Physical evidence is factual. It's evidence that exists, independent of your awareness, will, or participation. It just is, and officers with proper warrants are entitled to collect physical evidence in whatever way the warrant specifies, including collecting it via the sensors used in a device/evidence in their possession and/or comparing it to other evidence in their possession. If physical evidence you provide incriminates you in a crime, once again, that's NOT self-incrimination. That's simply incriminating evidence in your possession, no different than them finding stolen goods in your home or that your fingerprints match those at the scene of the crime.
And for Slashdotters who don't like the fact that every other lower court case with this same ruling (e.g. in Illinois, as the article mentioned) has already been overturned by higher courts, then don't secure your devices using biometrics. Simple as that.
Exactly this.
And really, even if their stuff never comes back to Netflix, I doubt I'd care. For many people, the lack of X on Netflix is seen as a major problem, but instead of getting annoyed that X wasn't available on Netflix, I came to realize that Netflix carries plenty of other stuff that's just as good, that scratches the same itch, and that I can derive just as much enjoyment from viewing. I don't need X to be entertained, because there's Y and Z that I never would have considered otherwise (e.g. I just watched Hugo Weaving in 1998's The Interview (not to be confused with 2014's The Interview) on a lark last night after Netflix recommended it to me, and it was great). Put differently, Netflix taught me to treat most media as fungible entertainment, since there's very little that's actually "must-have". I pay Netflix for access to a constantly rotating, seemingly endless stream of content that I want to watch once, without much care for what that content actually is, so long as it's entertaining enough.
But for those films and shows that are actually must-have, they are, by definition, worth having. As such—and because I have qualms with piracy—I'm fine paying my one-time fee to buy them on DVD or blu-ray and then rip them into Plex so that I can watch them anywhere. Plex doesn't care whether the data I feed it came from a new or used copy, in a sleeve or the original packaging, so it's incredibly easy to legally fill out one's collection for cheap, thanks to eBay and Amazon.
Moreover, even if we wanted to own every major release from the Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and other Disney franchises (i.e. the things we'd sign up for their streaming service to watch), we're still talking about less than one theatrical release per month, which we can almost certainly pick up used for less than what the monthly subscription is likely to cost. As such, even if everything they were making was must-have content, why would we pay them over and over again ad infinitum to maintain our access to that content when we could instead pay them a smaller fee just once to have an even better level of access that could never be taken away?
...although I'm surprised this is the case here....
You're not well acquainted with the aerospace industry, are you.
I did three internships in the space industry. For two of those summers the guys I was working with had been on that exact same project for at least 20 years. They said the project had changed hands through six companies and about half as many managers, but the project trudged on and the jobs persisted, with no end in sight. By the time of my third internship, those contracts had changed hands again and I ended up working with a different group...which had likewise already lasted through at least a few changes of corporate overlords, though admittedly not as many as that first group.
PS: Wasn't Mexico going to pay for this?
If that was ever funny, it stopped being so long ago.
The only thing that's funny is the revisionist history I've seen people like you engaging in, given that he did say that Mexico would pay for the wall, he did so numerous times, and he even explicitly said that Mexico would pay for it in a "one-time payment". To his credit, he was walking the rhetoric back even before his inauguration, and I think it's a good thing when people (politicians or otherwise) change their minds after realizing that they were wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for the things they said. As such, what I'm not okay with is a politician attempting to gaslight an entire nation by lying about what was said when it's inconvenient for him to be held accountable for those words later. There's no denying—at least among honest people—that he made the claim that Mexico would pay for the wall and that they'd do so via a lump payment, rather than the tariffs, taxes, or whatever other reimbursements he's now trying to claim he meant all along.
As an aside, I don't have any "favored politicians". The party I'm registered with stopped representing my interests a long time ago, and none of the others do any better by me.
Exactly this. Switching to cash is a useful psychological trick to help get out of control spending back under control, but if your actual spending already matches your planned/intended spending (i.e. you're setting and keeping to a budget), there's no need for such tricks in the first place. Feeling the money physically leaving our pockets wouldn't change our minds one bit with regards to how much we spend on groceries, since we set the money aside specifically to pay for those expenses before we ever got to the store, so we have no guilt about spending it on them.
The only ones awaiting this are those who have been saying it was "coming soon" for the last decade.
Agreed. I’m fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem, but I don’t know anyone clamoring for an Apple TV service.
3, 5, or 10 years ago? Sure, it would have been great to snap the cable industry’s back with something different. These days, however? They’re already falling apart. They’re hemorrhaging customers by the millions every year. Earlier this week, in less than an hour, with no prior experience, and without looking up any guides or manuals, I put up an antenna in our attic and had it working with our Plex server. We can now stream live TV to any of our devices or record it for later, no subscription to any service necessary.
The options available today are cheap and easy. The cable industry lock-in is gone. There’s no need for an Apple solution, nor am I convinced that they have anything to bring to the table. I doubt that any of their original content will actually be worth viewing in the immediate future, and the user experience for much of this stuff is already more than good enough.
I can remotely access a Windows box from my iPad... when will you release an app that let's me access a Mac the same way?
Apple already baked VNC into macOS and there are dozens of VNC clients on the App Store. There’s no need for them to release something that we’ve already been able to do for years. The only reason Microsoft needs to do this is because Microsoft uses a proprietary standard, so it’s up to them to support it.