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  1. Why would they, when you can already avoid telemetry by getting an enterprise license? That has long been available with as little as five seats, and I think you can actually get just one now but don't quote me on that. (Unless it's actually possible and you're a reseller, in which case I'm curious, and could you give me a quote on that?)

    The problem here is that AFAIK, enterprise isn't available on conventional pre-installed PCs, which is what the vast majority of small to mid sized businesses actually order. And again, AFAIK, without going down a rabbit hole, it's also really difficult to buy PCs without Windows installed at all, so for SMBs it would mean buying PCs with Pro and then paying for another Windows license and installing it manually.

    I work in the SMB space and most of these clients push their desktops 3.5-5 years, sometimes longer in limited use cases for purely financial reasons. None of them are going to spend an additional $500 (or more factoring in labor) on enterprise licenses without some force majeure that compels them to, such as well-known auditors, insurers or widely-held legal opinion based on case law forcing them.

    Now, is MS setting them up for just that? That's a different question. It may be that this is a MS revenue strategy and they're looking to up the business cost of a Windows PC. MS may believe that in the near future, PC life cycles will stretch to 7-10 years based on performance peaking, which means less licensing revenue. So MS gradually increases the intensity of telemetry, forcing business users to buy enterprise to remain compliant with regulatory needs. So now business has to buy enterprise or face compliance risk. The users not buying enterprise are basically paying for the extra cost in the form of ads and data mining.

  2. Are there lawyers really telling their clients that using Windows 10 may open them to liability simply because of Win 10 telemetry?

    I'd be curious what the civil case law is on this. There may not be much, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some precedent of some kind on application phone home capabilities exposing (or being claimed to expose) sensitive data.

    IMHO, if there was a compelling legal reason that Win10 telemetry actually exposed business users to serious liability, MS wouldn't have put that feature in. If considered legal opinion is in the majority that does expose users to liability, I wonder if MS will backtrack somewhat and add in features that severely restrict telemetry

  3. Re:Natural outcome of high population on Google's Schmidt Drew Up Draft Plan For Clinton In 2014 (itwire.com) · · Score: 1

    I can think of a couple of contra examples.

    China is a fairly low diversity nation but with a high population density. Despite the low amount of diversity, China is a country obsessed with a need for a high amount of organizational structure and a high level of organization enforcement. Some of this may be a byproduct of totalitarian government, but I would argue that one of the reasons they have a totalitarian government is that the large population densities make organization and its enforcement appealing.

    Japan is another country with a high population density for its geographic size and extremely low diversity. While they lack a totalitarian government at present, Japan has a an extremely organized society. The lack of authoritarianism is mostly a function of losing WW II and the influence of United States occupation, not that its citizens would necessarily reject a more authoritarian government.

    I generally agree that diversity contributes to both organizational dysfunction and organizational control enforcement. Places with high population densities and low diversity tend to be high trust societies as you note, but this mostly leads to an internalization of a common organizational mindset, where top-down enforcement is less necessary. But usually these types of places have a broad array of unofficial organizational enforcement via social and cultural attitudes.

    Diversity disrupts self-enforcement of organization -- minority groups tend to find organizational compliance arbitrary and discriminatory, majority groups internalize the majority organizational priorities and believe greater force is necessary to obtain compliance.

  4. Natural outcome of high population on Google's Schmidt Drew Up Draft Plan For Clinton In 2014 (itwire.com) · · Score: 2

    I think this is ultimately the natural outcome of high populations.

    High populations create the need for ever more organized structures and ever more rigid discipline to enforce adherence to these structures. Resistance to these structures is also an inevitable outcome which feeds back into the increasing need for more more rigidity, surveillance and control features to prevent disruption to the organizational structure.

    Of course we've passed the point in many cases where the level of organization and organizational discipline is well-matched to human nature. Making matters worse, the organizational structures and discipline are used cynically for self-enrichment and power accumulation in addition to being applied unequally and unjustly among various groups, further increasing resistance, leading in turn, to more rigidity and discipline.

    I don't really see any way out of this long term without large reductions in population which reduce the amount of organizational structure needed.

  5. More RAM. I'd wager my iPad 1 would still be usable, even at an abandoned OS level, for stuff like web browsing if it had enough RAM to handle javascript bloated web pages instead of just crashing.

    I also wonder why no one has shipped a low end PC in tablet form factor. Out of the box, it's a tablet form factor but with HDMI and USB3 ports that boots direct to Android. Supply it with enough flash storage and the ability to boot to PC mode where a desktop OS could be installed. It would be a tablet if you wanted a tablet or a PC if you wanted a simple PC.

    Tablet OSs struggle to be functional enough to be even a basic PC, they just don't have the PC functionality a PC OS has. PC OS does a crappy job of being a touch screen tablet.

  6. I'm puzzled why the left is so willing to genuflect to Native Americans every time they claim something is "sacred" to them. They regularly pillory Christian religions when they make a claim to some custom or place being sacred -- what makes a stone age religious practice carry more weight?

  7. Re:How do they solve the credibility problem? on Male Birth Control Shot Found Effective (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't know anyone who is a single parent who finds that lifestyle easy, even the ones with good educations who are "merely" divorced and have predictable and substantive child support.

    I know a woman who got pregnant her senior year in college, and even though she had child support from the father, it was a constant struggle for her to make ends meet. She managed to get her undergrad degree (in economics) but basically there was no serious career options for her with a young child to support, and she didn't really stabilize financially until her son was in junior high. She's been basically underemployed her whole life and only in her late 40s was she able to "start" on anything resembling a career.

    And that's largely a "success" story -- dependable child support, decent support from her family, not falling into drug or alcohol abuse, no child abuse, and so on. In so many ways it could have gone much worse.

  8. Re:How do they solve the credibility problem? on Male Birth Control Shot Found Effective (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    the same credibility problem that exist for the female pill? and a women has a choice if she gets pregnant, the man doesn't. If she doesn't want a baby she can have an abortion he can't prevent that, if she wants a baby and he doesn't he will have to pay child support for the next 18 years he can't get out of that

    Well, there's multiple levels of credibility happening here and a lot depends on the nature of the relationship.

    In hookup-type situations, how does a woman even know the details of the man she's having sex with are real? You have to have enough details/info about the person to go down the child support path. If it was a one-night-stand type situation, she may have a bogus name or no contact info.

    My sense is this pushes the risk factor for women to the point that "oh, I can just get child support" isn't really much of a risk amelioration and all but the craziest and most desperate women look at "oh, and child support makes up for the radical change in my life/future/plans and the fact that I will be a single mother" as something even remotely desirable.

    My sense is that there's no universe where even the best circumstances make an unplanned pregnancy worth the risk, except maybe married women, but from what I've seen even that is kind of minefield.

  9. Re:How do they solve the credibility problem? on Male Birth Control Shot Found Effective (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Depending on how serious you were about it, you could probably get a vasectomy and simply get judged sterile and solve the problem permanently. Even if an exam by a doctor turned up evidence of a vasectomy, I think privacy rules alone would prevent the woman from finding out.

    And I think males may be able to fake their orgasms, too. I dated a woman who related a previous boyfriend who was really anti-abortion. She was on the pill, but she said she was pretty certain he didn't orgasm most of the time and she thought maybe he was faking it because he was worried about the prospect of pregnancy/abortion.

  10. How do they solve the credibility problem? on Male Birth Control Shot Found Effective (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    So guy and girl are on their third date, they're on the cusp of sex and the girl says she's not on the pill and the guy says "It's OK, I'm on the shot".

    Does she believe him? I'm guessing no, she doesn't, and this is what kills a "male pill" from a usage perspective. It's the women who get pregnant and ultimately bear the risk of pregnancy so what will make them believe a guy is telling the truth?

    Some might say a vasectomy is the same thing, but most men don't get one until they're older and have had kids, so the verisimilitude of a 40-something guy saying he's had a vasectomy is much higher, especially if his partner is a woman of a similar background who may have been married.

  11. Re:Why is that possible in the first place? on 'Robocall Strike Force' Proposal Could Stop Caller ID Spoofing (onthewire.io) · · Score: 5, Informative

    The PBX predates caller ID.

    The PBX was fed with trunk lines which actually phone numbers, usually unrelated to the called number. When an inbound call was made to 555-1000, telco switched that call at the CO to one of the trunk lines. Outbound calls worked basically in reverse, the call went to the PBX which chose an open trunk and completed the call.

    Direct Inward Dial (DID) involved buying a block of numbers which had no physical line associated with them and these were programmed to be switched to a trunk at telco with signaling that passed the called party number to the PBX so it could complete the call to the internal extension.

    This system had to be adapted to caller ID. Early outbound calls often showed the trunk's phone number, but IIRC you could get telco to basically rewrite those calls to a customer specific number, usually the main number, if your switch lacked the software or signalling to pass the calling extension out.

    PBX software eventually got the ability to pass an extension's DID to telco, so caller ID passed to the called party would see the number the call came from, even though it may have passed over an analog trunk with a completely different assigned phone number.

    Basically, caller ID has, for anything other than single POTS or cell lines where telco handled all the switching, been a kludge on a system that wasn't built for caller ID, and spoofing was a necessary feature.

    The problem all along has been lazy and/or greedy telcos who never bothered to implement sanity testing on spoofed calling party info and just accepted all of it rather than build in checks that the calling party info actually represented numbers assigned to the calling party.

    And I'm sure much of it was made worse by call centers, for whom number spoofing was a business feature -- doing business for a company who WANTED call center calls to come up as their numbers. And VOIP vendors who wanted to use IP networks to route calls and unload them onto POTS at the cheapest point, terminating a call from a DID block leased from telco A using circuits leased from carrier B.

  12. Re:Where's the smart panel? on Tesla Unveils Residential 'Solar Roof' With Updated Battery Storage System (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't think I could comprehend in what world you could consider a 14kWh system puny.

    My electric bill in July was 1900 kWh. 14 wouldn't get me 6 hours that month.

  13. Re:Where's the smart panel? on Tesla Unveils Residential 'Solar Roof' With Updated Battery Storage System (theverge.com) · · Score: 2

    You can't just cut the power to a dishwasher, there may be reasons why it needs to run, also if it is running and you cut the power well that's it, you end up with half dirty dishes and a system stopped mid cycle that needs to start again.

    You *can* just cut the dishwasher, because the worst thing that can happen is you have to run the cycle again. Medical equipment and some life safety equipment can't be cut and when the power goes down and there has to be a way to prioritize it over dirty dishes.

    I'm with you on the ideal view that all things electrical should be able to talk to a power manager and be shut down individually, but I guess I don't see that as entirely realistic, either. Not everything can/will/should have a programmable networked controller in them nor will a universal open protocol everything supports come about anytime soon (if ever), so the next best thing is disabling branch circuits. I'd rather swap 30-odd circuit breakers for remote controllable ones than swap out every possible electrical thing I own that runs off of mains power.

    Killing branch circuits is crude, but it's a pretty easy way to prioritize consumption to maximize battery capacity. And unless you want to dedicate your garage to a battery array, prioritization is critical if you want something like a puny 14 kWh battery to be useful. When these batteries start hitting 150 kWh and can run the whole house for 3 days, we can worry less about prioritization.

  14. Re:Where's the smart panel? on Tesla Unveils Residential 'Solar Roof' With Updated Battery Storage System (theverge.com) · · Score: 2

    He blamed it on his junior guy, but I saw it before the wallboard went up. I had two dedicated runs in the house and the "junior guy" flubbed both.

    He fixed both, but he didn't want to, "two lights and a mostly unused outlet won't consume much power". I finally had to tell him either it gets put the way I want it, or another electrician fixes it for him and that will be deducted from his bill.

  15. Where's the smart panel? on Tesla Unveils Residential 'Solar Roof' With Updated Battery Storage System (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the PowerWall would be most useful with a smart panel that allowed individual circuits to be prioritized in various ways when running off battery power to maximize run time.

    Like maybe the lights should be always on, the fridge given a high priority, the dishwasher not on, some circuits which could be cycled off to meet some other intermittent circuit's demand for power, and what order circuits could be killed off to maintain run time for the highest priority circuits.

    Of course, most houses aren't wired that sane. Even in parts of my house where new circuits were run from a new panel during remodeling, electricians are prone to tapping whatever's close for power. I demanded a 20A dedicated circuit for the entertainment center, but the junior guy didn't get the dedicated message and tapped it for two ceiling lights and a hallway outlet.

    I don't know how totally new construction is done, but I'm guessing its not done in a completely structured way except where code dictates dedicated circuits. But it would be great if there were individual circuits for lights by room, outlets by room, and then various specialty circuits for fridge or other items that should be addressed individually.

  16. Re:How does powerwall beat lead-acid? on Tesla Unveils Residential 'Solar Roof' With Updated Battery Storage System (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think lead acid isn't terrible if you have the space, but really to get the most life out of a lead acid battery you have to look at max discharge as about 60% even using absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries to get anything like long life cycles.

    So your 1 kWh battery is only really useful for about 400 Wh which means you need 35 of them.

    But it's more complicated than that, as you'd be better off driving an inverter at 48v and using something like 6v golf cart type batteries arranged in series/parallel strings to get to 48v and probably want some kind of more sophisticated charging/monitoring system to keep track of individual batteries and be able to isolate 48v groups if a unit failed. Usually more individual batteries gets you higher aggregate discharge rates since you pull less from any one battery.

    I don't think it's impossible to built a decent setup, but doing it right will end up being more expensive than you'd think and will end up sucking a ton of space.

    I think the half assed compromise is probably 4x 8D AGM 12v batteries in a 24v series/parallel combination, which would get you close to 14 kWh. But the batteries alone are $2k and then the inverter more yet.

  17. Just what is the power consumption? on New MacBook Pros Max Out At 16GB RAM Due To Battery Life Concerns (macrumors.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is the consumption of 16 GB, 32 GB and so forth? Is it linear growth or something more extreme?

    I can't (with half-serious googling) find actual wattage figures for LPDDR3 RAM,

    I'd wager for some reason 32 GB is more than double 16 GB in power consumption, but not like 10x or anything, and I have a hard time believing the consumption would enough to have more than 15 minutes of battery impact over the device's useful battery life.

    I'd also expect it be actually offset demands for disk I/O through caching and reduced paging, which would reduce its negative impact, although I think the use PCI-E SSDs really would decrease the user perception of paging delays for all but the most extreme use cases.

  18. Re: Shut up, indeed. on Google's AI Created Its Own Form of Encryption (engadget.com) · · Score: 2

    I think intelligence is too broad of a word and implies too many assumptions and is probably a poor word for "artificial intelligence" becomes it implies a lot of things, such as agency, autonomy, understanding, infinite scope, and human-like communication and personality.

    I think the human-like part is partly what keeps people from seeing other forms of AI; they don't stop to think about intelligences that may not look, communicate or act like people or necessarily be coherent platforms or systems.

  19. Re:Bitcoin to bypass unfavorable exchange rates? on Bitcoin Can Be Bought With Cash At Swiss Railway Ticket Machines (techweekeurope.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Switzerland has recently had problems with its currency being very highly valued. I'm not entirely sure how BitCoin solves this, but maybe consumer-level currency exchangers in neighboring countries have been charging very high rates to exchange it to Euros.

  20. Re:Shut up, indeed. on Google's AI Created Its Own Form of Encryption (engadget.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is Slashdot, where AI is only AI if it is self-aware, science fiction AI. Anything other than that is just software and there is no scoped or functionally limited AI.

  21. When you read descriptions of it, I can't help but think its a synonym for prima donna -- someone who wants influence over writing, production and direction but doesn't want to be burdened with the details of those jobs unless it fits into whatever creative impulse they're having that moment.

  22. Does this plan involve inventing Mr. Fusion reactors?

    What known power source exists capable of running an electric VTOL aircraft? The only thing I can think of is gas turbine driving a generator, at which point it's not really electric and efficiency wise you might as well just use that as shaft power. Certainly no current battery technology is capable of the power density required to drive a VTOL aircraft.

  23. Why didn't it blow up in the heteros? on New Study Shows HIV Epidemic Started Spreading In New York In 1970, Clears the Name of 'Patient Zero' (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why didn't AIDS become as big in the hetero community -- or did it, and the media has never reported it that way? I know its a problem in Africa, but I'm most interested in the US.

    Female-to-male spread harder? Lower frequency sex in heteros? Lower sex partner churn in heteros?

    I came of age in the 1980s when AIDS was a big deal and frankly, almost never was it something I found my female partners to be concerned with. They worried about pregnancy, although even that was often not taken too seriously.

  24. How granular is "real time" and will TSA care? on Delta Now Lets You Track Your Baggage In Real-Time (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will you literally be able to track your bag accurately through the airport or will it be generic "stations" like "ticketing, tram loading, tarmac, plane"?

    Either way, I'm curious about what TSA thinks about this. In theory this gives parties with ill intent some kind of idea where bags go and when and could used for nefarious purposes.

    On the up side, if your bag stalls it may be a sign you're being robbed or TSA is detailing the contents (or both!).

  25. And project Ara was doomed to failure? on In China, Some Apple Users Opt For iPhone Makeover Rather Than Buy New (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    It sure seems like some people would be into a modular phone, considering what they're willing to invest in cosmetic-only upgrades with no functional purpose.

    Maybe the Ara project approached it wrong -- rather than looking at phone upgrades from a purely geek-centric perspective of specific hardware improvement modularity, maybe they should have considered the "trend" factor would be a driving force -- ie, people would be willing to buy modules that weren't really an upgrade, but instead were popular or had some other trend factor.