California, the second-largest U.S. hydroelectric producer, set goals for renewable energy sources in 2002 and 2011... But the state set a limit on the inclusion of hydropower. It allows utilities to count only the hydropower produced by smaller hydropower projects—those capable of producing 30 megawatts or less—toward the renewable mandate.
Yep, only tiny hydro installs (typically private, on private land - good luck getting a permit to make your own hydro plant and flood some land deemed valuable to someone) count. The big hydro we have installed in California - about 99% of all of it - is NOT renewable per the State. So yeah - no hydro for us!
Large hydro plants typically come with huge amounts of environmental destruction - while today it would be unthinkable to flood Yosemite valley to use as a source of water and electricity, Hetch Hetchy Valley is said to rival Yosemite in beauty, yet it was flooded 100 years to to build O’Shaughnessy Dam.
Smaller hydro projects can be built with less (or no) environmental destruction.
Keep in mind that medicine in the US is another industry that suffers from extreme price distortion due to various sorts of government intervention (such as excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing, and so on).
So you agree that coal leads to health problems, and you don't have a problem with that, you only have a problem with the way health costs are accounted? A 6 year with asthma is fine as long as the cost to treat him is accounted for properly?
The US President has zero impact on moving technologies from the white board to real products and services. It is the legislative branch that create regulations or intrusive government meddling in technological advancements. If people would only redirect their complaints from the President towards Congress they my see some problems solved.
So many people complained to their GOPcongressmen that they've cancelled town hall meetings to avoid meeting with their constituents.
Complaining to congress has as much effect as as complaining about the president.
One example of Congressional maleficence and public idiocy would be the DACA program. The DACA program was created by the previous administration by executive order. There is some controversy about the legality of the executive order that created the DACA program . Trump didn't cancel the program. He just sent the entire matter to Congress to be approve and codify by into law. But all you hear are people telling sob stories about being deported because of Trumps decision.
While democrats overwhelmingly support the DACA program, even 40% of republicans don't believe it should be disbanded. Only 15% of the country thinks the DACA immigrants should be deported.
And really how callous do you have to be to think that the right thing to do is to deport children that had no choice in the matter and were illegally brought to this country by their parents -- some have lived in the USA their entire lives and have no friends/family back in their home country, yet people still want to send them back "home". It seems akin to putting a child in jail because he was in the back seat of the getaway car when his dad robbed a bank.
Looks like there is competition at $5 online. So this is a non story.
Where is this FDB approved Niacin supplement available online?
Doctors prescribe the prescription version when a person's health is on the line since they can be assured that it contains the labeled amount of Niacin, while OTC products are not well regulated and can contain varying amounts of the vitamins as well as other fillers.
Except it will not catch just inmate calls. It will catch calls from guards, staff, contractors, visitors, possibly even people driving by and that would be illegal wire tapping.
Unless, of course, they get a secret warrant (in the USA) allowing it, then the police can run a Stingray to intercept calls.
Or, they can have the cellular company's install a microcell on-site, then ask for call records from that cell (which they can generally get without a warrant), subtract out all of the known employee numbers, tell visitors that cell phones are banned, then any remaining number is suspicious and they can get a wire tap order for it.
If you allow people to rent places with disclosed cameras or microphones, every host will install them for safety. "Don't like it: sleep on the street."
Has AirBNB become the only way to book a room? If you don't like AirBNB's policies, book through someone else -- if enough people do that, then AirBNB will change their policies. If many people don't leave because of that policy, then I guess it wasn't so unpopular after all.
Presumably though cell phones have a power constraint, the battery. If it were constantly sending full audio and video back to the mothership battery life would nose-dive.
Plugged in smart hubs though? Buying one is probably considered opting in to full time surveillance.
1984 seems so quaint now. Relatedly, I'm pretty sure GIFs are the 21st century Newspeak.
You're not paranoid enough -- "they" have always been collecting audio from cell phones, so battery life is just accepted as the best it can be.
Which probably goes along way to explaining why my tiny razr flip phone lasted for a week on batter, but my smart phone barely makes it 18 hours. Now it all makes sense!
The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.
It hardly seems shocking to discover that when you give people free access to content they don't care so much about, they'll still use Bittorent to find the content they really want to see.
I used to think that Netflix was going to stop movie piracy, then the studios decided that they didn't want one streaming provider to have access to everything, so to really watch everything I want to see, I need to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, HBO, Starz, Disney's upcoming streaming service and more.
While I *could* track down all of the services I need to use and subscribe to them, why bother when with a few clicks, Bittorrent has the content for free?
This is exactly why I always set up an SSID named "No Bomb On Board" when I fly -- so no one will worry about a bomb on board.
Though now I see an easy way to disrupt global air travel -- hide an ESP8266 on board multiple airplanes that can broadcast a "Bomb On Board" SSD at a particular time on all of the airplanes, and watch global air travel come to a halt while they try to track them done. For bonus points, have them turn on and off randomly to make them harder to find.
I'm blown away at how stupid people are. It's a phone. No matter how much you want it to be something else. It isn't. Your sold by the flashy gimmicky crap. The only real value in a modern smart phone 1. instant messaging apps like Riot/Telegram 2. crypto currencies 3. Videos. Everything else? Who cares.
Why do you say "It's a phone" if none of the things of value it can do include using it as a phone?
Having a border around the screen protects it (generally the most expensive/fragile part of a phone) from damage better. And makes it easier to design a case that protects the phone.
"Edge-to-edge" is code for planned obsolescence in my book.
"Smartphone" is another codeword for planned obsolescence.
Because reading text projected at 854x480 at 14 ppi with a max brightness of a paltry 50 lumens is pleasant to do? And they have he audacity to sell such a piece of junk for $300 beyond the cost of the phone? They’re insane...
It's not meant to be a substitute for a computer monitor, it's to share your own videos and pictures with others so they don't have to huddle around a phone or pass it around the table.
Sure, there are other pocket projectors that are cheaper, smaller or have better illumination, but not all 3 at the same time.
Or: there's a treatment in R&D which appears safe but you can't get it before you die, but it's relatively simple to do and there's a fully-certified biohacker
Ah yes, the old '100 mpg carburetor' argument.
Sure, 'simple' breakthrough that Big Pharma doesn't want to pursue for some reason or doesn't know about. But your neighborhood biohacker understands.
Sorry, not buying it.
Or: there's a treatment in R&D which appears safe but you can't get it before you die, but it's relatively simple to do and there's a fully-certified biohacker
Ah yes, the old '100 mpg carburetor' argument.
Sure, 'simple' breakthrough that Big Pharma doesn't want to pursue for some reason or doesn't know about. But your neighborhood biohacker understands.
Sorry, not buying it.
The pharmaceutical industry is not the same as the automotive industry.
The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars to bring a treatment to market -- if there are only a few hundred or even a few thousand people that need that treatment, then there's no way to recoup their costs at a price that most people are willing or able to pay.
Existing gene therapy treatments can easily reach into the $500K range or more - insurance companies may not cover it and few people can cover it themselves. But if a backyard chemist could do the same treatment for $1K (because he doesn't have all of the regulatory hurdles (and yes, safety standards) to follow, then it opens the treatment to many more people.
Is the risk better than the reward? I dunno, ask someone who's dying and can't afford the treatment if he'd be willing to use an experimental treatment by a backyard biochemist that has only a 25% chance of success.
Would you allow someone without a medical license to operate on you? I think the biohacker morons are likely the ones to face charges in this scenario, not the person injecting themselves.
Depends on the circumstances.
If I was facing a fatal degenerative disorder with no real treatment, then I might be willing to experiment a little.
In that situation, I might be willing to take some mystery pill that might cure me (or might kill me faster) versus a known fate of becoming bedridden as my body slowly dies over the next year. I can't count on a pharmaceutical company investing millions (or billions) of dollars to come up with a treatment for my disorder, so I have little to lose from going with a risky experimental treatment. Slowly dying in a hospital bed isn't really appealing.
They can't stop it, but just like drugs, they can drive it underground so people that choose to do this will be unable to seek medical attention without fear of being arrested.
Letâ(TM)s say Jimmy is shopping on Walmartâ(TM)s website. Heâ(TM)s shopping there because he doesnâ(TM)t want to go to a brink-n-mortar. He sees the price difference and thinks to himself âoeDang! Itâ(TM)s almost $1.00 cheaper in the store. I wonder what Amazonâ(TM)s price would be? Wow. Amazon is.50 cents cheaper online, and plus I wonâ(TM)t have to go to the store. Iâ(TM)ll just order from Amazon.â
Is Jimmy really comparison shopping on a $4 box of macaroni, or is he only shopping around for expensive things?
Walmart is absolutely clueless.
Walmart may be a lot of things, but "clueless" is not one of them -- they probably have the best understanding of their customers than any other retailer -- they've been amassing customer information and analyzing way longer than almost any other customer - they were processing Big Data before Big Data was a buzzword.
The average user doesn't care about tree style tabs, won't notice a performance difference, doesn't know what memory is and doesn't even know Firefox exists. Or Chrome, for that matter. It's just "the icon on the desktop that opens Facebook",
Isn't performance pretty much the *only* thing the average user will notice? (Well, that, and whether or the browser works on Facebook).
You spend a couple of minutes wandering through the menus to find the Wifi diagnostics page and see if it got an IP address. Unless you think that there are two wifi cards in the TV with one connecting completely hidden from you.
If you really want to prevent it ever getting an address by accident if an open AP wanders into range, set the mode to static, set the address to 127.1.2.3/31 and watch it trying to arp a non-existent gateway.
And then you come to a screen that says:
"Unable to reach the internet using your network settings, we have defaulted to our XfinityFree connection to give you an enhanced viewing experience. This service is completely free to you and cannot be disabled"
Why? Your ISP is a company that actually has access to your data. And if you trust your WiFi, then why are you worried about WiFi systems that your TV won't connect to? Do you really believe that Comcast has hacked into your TV to program it to always seek a Comcast WiFi router in preference to the best signal -- from your own, trusted router?
No, as I said before -- why would they need to hack into the TV when they can just pay Samsung to offer it as a "feature" -- "We'll pay you $xx for every TV to install our content monitoring software, as an added bonus, your customers that already have XFinity wifi won't even need to manually connect it to our network, it will happen automatically! And we'll share the data we collect with you!"
It's a win-win for Samsung & Xfinity, they get valuable data about their customers, and customers get easy access to online features in the TV.
there's nothing stopping my TV from seeing the half dozen XFinity nearby Wifi networks from my neighbors.
Other than the fact that it would connect to yours first (strongest signal), distance, and your failure to wrap it in tinfoil. If you are so scared that Comcast is spying on what movies you watch, why haven't you put a Faraday cage around your TV?
Why would a TV that's programmed to connect to an Xfinity wifi network try to connect to my network, which has a completely separate name?
You think your wifi router may be a trojan horse, a deliberate attack by a hostile party whose job is to exfiltrate data from you. This is your opinion, not mine (though I think you might be right). WTF ARE YOU DOING, LETTING THAT THING ON YOUR NETWORK?/
I trust my ISP and my Wifi router+firewall. However, since my house is not a Faraday cage, there's nothing stopping my TV from seeing the half dozen XFinity nearby Wifi networks from my neighbors.
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
Non-sequitor. If you don't watch broadcast TV, then your "smart TV" isn't going to be hearing anything from broadcast TV and won't be able to collect data about what OTA TV you are watching. If you want the fact that you watch movies on your TV to be secret, don't tell us. We are notoriously bad at keeping your secrets.
You missed my point -- obviously the TV can't report broadcast shows that I've watched if I'm not watching them, but the TV can still report on movies... and it can further report on movies that were played without industry approved HDCP DRM on the HDMI input, which surely means that I must have pirated them.
Who cares if your affordable 60" panel is also a smart TV? You don't need to tell it your wifi password in order to watch movies.
How do I know Xfinity hasn't whitelisted it (for "convenience") on their network so it can automatically connect to any nearby Xfinity Wifi network, no password required?
Slashdot Mirror
The State of California does not consider hydro as a renewable resource:
California, the second-largest U.S. hydroelectric producer, set goals for renewable energy sources in 2002 and 2011... But the state set a limit on the inclusion of hydropower. It allows utilities to count only the hydropower produced by smaller hydropower projects—those capable of producing 30 megawatts or less—toward the renewable mandate.
Yep, only tiny hydro installs (typically private, on private land - good luck getting a permit to make your own hydro plant and flood some land deemed valuable to someone) count. The big hydro we have installed in California - about 99% of all of it - is NOT renewable per the State. So yeah - no hydro for us!
Large hydro plants typically come with huge amounts of environmental destruction - while today it would be unthinkable to flood Yosemite valley to use as a source of water and electricity, Hetch Hetchy Valley is said to rival Yosemite in beauty, yet it was flooded 100 years to to build O’Shaughnessy Dam.
Smaller hydro projects can be built with less (or no) environmental destruction.
Keep in mind that medicine in the US is another industry that suffers from extreme price distortion due to various sorts of government intervention (such as excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing, and so on).
So you agree that coal leads to health problems, and you don't have a problem with that, you only have a problem with the way health costs are accounted? A 6 year with asthma is fine as long as the cost to treat him is accounted for properly?
The US President has zero impact on moving technologies from the white board to real products and services. It is the legislative branch that create regulations or intrusive government meddling in technological advancements. If people would only redirect their complaints from the President towards Congress they my see some problems solved.
So many people complained to their GOPcongressmen that they've cancelled town hall meetings to avoid meeting with their constituents.
Complaining to congress has as much effect as as complaining about the president.
One example of Congressional maleficence and public idiocy would be the DACA program. The DACA program was created by the previous administration by executive order. There is some controversy about the legality of the executive order that created the DACA program . Trump didn't cancel the program. He just sent the entire matter to Congress to be approve and codify by into law. But all you hear are people telling sob stories about being deported because of Trumps decision.
While democrats overwhelmingly support the DACA program, even 40% of republicans don't believe it should be disbanded. Only 15% of the country thinks the DACA immigrants should be deported.
And really how callous do you have to be to think that the right thing to do is to deport children that had no choice in the matter and were illegally brought to this country by their parents -- some have lived in the USA their entire lives and have no friends/family back in their home country, yet people still want to send them back "home". It seems akin to putting a child in jail because he was in the back seat of the getaway car when his dad robbed a bank.
Looks like there is competition at $5 online. So this is a non story.
Where is this FDB approved Niacin supplement available online?
Doctors prescribe the prescription version when a person's health is on the line since they can be assured that it contains the labeled amount of Niacin, while OTC products are not well regulated and can contain varying amounts of the vitamins as well as other fillers.
The words aren't banned, we just warned staff not to use those words or we may not get funding and the staff will suffer the consequences.
Except it will not catch just inmate calls. It will catch calls from guards, staff, contractors, visitors, possibly even people driving by and that would be illegal wire tapping.
Unless, of course, they get a secret warrant (in the USA) allowing it, then the police can run a Stingray to intercept calls.
Or, they can have the cellular company's install a microcell on-site, then ask for call records from that cell (which they can generally get without a warrant), subtract out all of the known employee numbers, tell visitors that cell phones are banned, then any remaining number is suspicious and they can get a wire tap order for it.
Trump says he will build a wall. He does. Bitching ensues.
Trump says he will reduce regulation. He adds one. Bitching ensues.
People that hate him are giving him every reason to do whatever he pleases without concern for consequences.
It's almost as if people don't like what he's doing whether he pre-announced (well, pre-tweeted) it or not.
Technically he didn't fulfill his promise on the wall since he promised that Mexico was going to pay for it.
If you allow people to rent places with disclosed cameras or microphones, every host will install them for safety. "Don't like it: sleep on the street."
Has AirBNB become the only way to book a room? If you don't like AirBNB's policies, book through someone else -- if enough people do that, then AirBNB will change their policies. If many people don't leave because of that policy, then I guess it wasn't so unpopular after all.
Presumably though cell phones have a power constraint, the battery. If it were constantly sending full audio and video back to the mothership battery life would nose-dive.
Plugged in smart hubs though? Buying one is probably considered opting in to full time surveillance.
1984 seems so quaint now. Relatedly, I'm pretty sure GIFs are the 21st century Newspeak.
You're not paranoid enough -- "they" have always been collecting audio from cell phones, so battery life is just accepted as the best it can be.
Which probably goes along way to explaining why my tiny razr flip phone lasted for a week on batter, but my smart phone barely makes it 18 hours. Now it all makes sense!
The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.
It hardly seems shocking to discover that when you give people free access to content they don't care so much about, they'll still use Bittorent to find the content they really want to see.
I used to think that Netflix was going to stop movie piracy, then the studios decided that they didn't want one streaming provider to have access to everything, so to really watch everything I want to see, I need to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, HBO, Starz, Disney's upcoming streaming service and more.
While I *could* track down all of the services I need to use and subscribe to them, why bother when with a few clicks, Bittorrent has the content for free?
This is exactly why I always set up an SSID named "No Bomb On Board" when I fly -- so no one will worry about a bomb on board.
Though now I see an easy way to disrupt global air travel -- hide an ESP8266 on board multiple airplanes that can broadcast a "Bomb On Board" SSD at a particular time on all of the airplanes, and watch global air travel come to a halt while they try to track them done. For bonus points, have them turn on and off randomly to make them harder to find.
I'm blown away at how stupid people are. It's a phone. No matter how much you want it to be something else. It isn't. Your sold by the flashy gimmicky crap. The only real value in a modern smart phone 1. instant messaging apps like Riot/Telegram 2. crypto currencies 3. Videos. Everything else? Who cares.
Why do you say "It's a phone" if none of the things of value it can do include using it as a phone?
Having a border around the screen protects it (generally the most expensive/fragile part of a phone) from damage better. And makes it easier to design a case that protects the phone.
"Edge-to-edge" is code for planned obsolescence in my book.
"Smartphone" is another codeword for planned obsolescence.
Because reading text projected at 854x480 at 14 ppi with a max brightness of a paltry 50 lumens is pleasant to do? And they have he audacity to sell such a piece of junk for $300 beyond the cost of the phone? They’re insane...
It's not meant to be a substitute for a computer monitor, it's to share your own videos and pictures with others so they don't have to huddle around a phone or pass it around the table.
Sure, there are other pocket projectors that are cheaper, smaller or have better illumination, but not all 3 at the same time.
Or: there's a treatment in R&D which appears safe but you can't get it before you die, but it's relatively simple to do and there's a fully-certified biohacker
Ah yes, the old '100 mpg carburetor' argument.
Sure, 'simple' breakthrough that Big Pharma doesn't want to pursue for some reason or doesn't know about. But your neighborhood biohacker understands.
Sorry, not buying it.
Or: there's a treatment in R&D which appears safe but you can't get it before you die, but it's relatively simple to do and there's a fully-certified biohacker
Ah yes, the old '100 mpg carburetor' argument.
Sure, 'simple' breakthrough that Big Pharma doesn't want to pursue for some reason or doesn't know about. But your neighborhood biohacker understands.
Sorry, not buying it.
The pharmaceutical industry is not the same as the automotive industry.
The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars to bring a treatment to market -- if there are only a few hundred or even a few thousand people that need that treatment, then there's no way to recoup their costs at a price that most people are willing or able to pay.
Existing gene therapy treatments can easily reach into the $500K range or more - insurance companies may not cover it and few people can cover it themselves. But if a backyard chemist could do the same treatment for $1K (because he doesn't have all of the regulatory hurdles (and yes, safety standards) to follow, then it opens the treatment to many more people.
Is the risk better than the reward? I dunno, ask someone who's dying and can't afford the treatment if he'd be willing to use an experimental treatment by a backyard biochemist that has only a 25% chance of success.
Would you allow someone without a medical license to operate on you? I think the biohacker morons are likely the ones to face charges in this scenario, not the person injecting themselves.
Depends on the circumstances.
If I was facing a fatal degenerative disorder with no real treatment, then I might be willing to experiment a little.
In that situation, I might be willing to take some mystery pill that might cure me (or might kill me faster) versus a known fate of becoming bedridden as my body slowly dies over the next year. I can't count on a pharmaceutical company investing millions (or billions) of dollars to come up with a treatment for my disorder, so I have little to lose from going with a risky experimental treatment. Slowly dying in a hospital bed isn't really appealing.
They can't stop it, but just like drugs, they can drive it underground so people that choose to do this will be unable to seek medical attention without fear of being arrested.
Verizon: Meeting the needs of yesterday... tomorrow!
While a 180GB data cap *might* be reasonable today, I regularly exceed that with regular Netflix streaming.
A 4K stream uses around 7 - 10GB/hour, so 180GB means 18 hours of streaming/month, or around a half hour a day.
8K TV's are already available, and they'll use at least twice the bandwidth.
Letâ(TM)s say Jimmy is shopping on Walmartâ(TM)s website. Heâ(TM)s shopping there because he doesnâ(TM)t want to go to a brink-n-mortar. He sees the price difference and thinks to himself âoeDang! Itâ(TM)s almost $1.00 cheaper in the store. I wonder what Amazonâ(TM)s price would be? Wow. Amazon is .50 cents cheaper online, and plus I wonâ(TM)t have to go to the store. Iâ(TM)ll just order from Amazon.â
Is Jimmy really comparison shopping on a $4 box of macaroni, or is he only shopping around for expensive things?
Walmart is absolutely clueless.
Walmart may be a lot of things, but "clueless" is not one of them -- they probably have the best understanding of their customers than any other retailer -- they've been amassing customer information and analyzing way longer than almost any other customer - they were processing Big Data before Big Data was a buzzword.
The average user doesn't care about tree style tabs, won't notice a performance difference, doesn't know what memory is and doesn't even know Firefox exists. Or Chrome, for that matter. It's just "the icon on the desktop that opens Facebook",
Isn't performance pretty much the *only* thing the average user will notice? (Well, that, and whether or the browser works on Facebook).
You spend a couple of minutes wandering through the menus to find the Wifi diagnostics page and see if it got an IP address. Unless you think that there are two wifi cards in the TV with one connecting completely hidden from you.
If you really want to prevent it ever getting an address by accident if an open AP wanders into range, set the mode to static, set the address to 127.1.2.3/31 and watch it trying to arp a non-existent gateway.
And then you come to a screen that says:
"Unable to reach the internet using your network settings, we have defaulted to our XfinityFree connection to give you an enhanced viewing experience. This service is completely free to you and cannot be disabled"
I trust my ISP and my Wifi router+firewall.
Why? Your ISP is a company that actually has access to your data. And if you trust your WiFi, then why are you worried about WiFi systems that your TV won't connect to? Do you really believe that Comcast has hacked into your TV to program it to always seek a Comcast WiFi router in preference to the best signal -- from your own, trusted router?
No, as I said before -- why would they need to hack into the TV when they can just pay Samsung to offer it as a "feature" -- "We'll pay you $xx for every TV to install our content monitoring software, as an added bonus, your customers that already have XFinity wifi won't even need to manually connect it to our network, it will happen automatically! And we'll share the data we collect with you!"
It's a win-win for Samsung & Xfinity, they get valuable data about their customers, and customers get easy access to online features in the TV.
there's nothing stopping my TV from seeing the half dozen XFinity nearby Wifi networks from my neighbors.
Other than the fact that it would connect to yours first (strongest signal), distance, and your failure to wrap it in tinfoil. If you are so scared that Comcast is spying on what movies you watch, why haven't you put a Faraday cage around your TV?
Why would a TV that's programmed to connect to an Xfinity wifi network try to connect to my network, which has a completely separate name?
You think your wifi router may be a trojan horse, a deliberate attack by a hostile party whose job is to exfiltrate data from you. This is your opinion, not mine (though I think you might be right). WTF ARE YOU DOING, LETTING THAT THING ON YOUR NETWORK?/
I trust my ISP and my Wifi router+firewall. However, since my house is not a Faraday cage, there's nothing stopping my TV from seeing the half dozen XFinity nearby Wifi networks from my neighbors.
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
Non-sequitor. If you don't watch broadcast TV, then your "smart TV" isn't going to be hearing anything from broadcast TV and won't be able to collect data about what OTA TV you are watching. If you want the fact that you watch movies on your TV to be secret, don't tell us. We are notoriously bad at keeping your secrets.
You missed my point -- obviously the TV can't report broadcast shows that I've watched if I'm not watching them, but the TV can still report on movies... and it can further report on movies that were played without industry approved HDCP DRM on the HDMI input, which surely means that I must have pirated them.
Who cares if your affordable 60" panel is also a smart TV? You don't need to tell it your wifi password in order to watch movies.
How do I know Xfinity hasn't whitelisted it (for "convenience") on their network so it can automatically connect to any nearby Xfinity Wifi network, no password required?