I've always heard that the dead have no right to privacy or at least they don't in the US am I understanding correctly that in germany even the dead have a right to privacy?
The dead might not have a right to privacy, but the living certainly do. The girl's friends and such may have corresponded with her in confidence and their conversations are still subject to privacy rights since they're still alive.
That's the real gist of the ruling - her conversations with friends who are still alive is still subject to protection.
I doubt the gang did the hacking. There is probably a person or group who figured out how to do this hack, then sold the info and devices with instructions to the gang who used it. It's a lot like hackers of old versus script kiddies today. A couple decades ago to hack a system normally meant the hacker had the skills and understanding, but today it is often just a person who knows how to run a program that someone else wrote.
Or they simply got an employee to do it for them. Dealers have access to the database for service purposes (in case you need to generate a replacement key). All they need is to get someone "on the inside" to do the lookup for them.
....myself voluntarily bugging my house as a tradeoff for some of these perceived benefits.
I have no inclination to help usher in the early precedents of the "telescreen" from 1984...
That's what makes this device all the more interesting. Remember, to differentiate itself from Google, Apple is on a privacy streak. They're offloading to the device anything that does not require the cloud. If they can run their vision systems offline, Apple is doing it (iPhoto does a lot of the computation on your Mac, which is why there are often different results for the same photo collection - iPhoto will not communicate with other instances using iCloud because of privacy reasons).
I suspect this device will also do all the voice recognition locally, or as much as possible in order to keep all the audio data local and off Apple's servers.
Apple has a self-interest in doing this - they don't monetize the user's data, so by not collecting data they don't need in order to operate, they keep that data away from the government. Far easier to deny a request with "we do not have that data on hand as we do not collect it" than to try to defend in court the right to not release information they have already collected.
Even Siri is doing less and less on Apple's servers and more locally.
Seriously? Shut down the internet for the entire country, *just for exams*?
In a lot of places, every student writes exams at the same time. Shutting down the internet for the 3-4 hours while every student writes exams is a cheap and easy way to keep them from cheating via Google.
It's not feasible in most Western nations because there's rarely a time where every single student is taking an exam, but a lot of places (especially places following the old British education system) every student has to sit down and write one massive end of year exam that basically counts for all the marks. Cheating is rampant because in the final years those exams dictate the next phase in your life - do you head off and become a common labourer, do you get a scholarship and get to attend university overseas, or do you get post-secondary education locally? And yes, suicide is also rampant - students who feel they failed their parents (i.e., did not live up to expectations, which are often "overseas university full scholarship") often feel they can't face the shame (or punishment) of getting anything less.
Hell, you know it's big when Amazon sells special "cheating watches" which are basically watches with an SD card slot - you load up the watch with your textbook and notes and such, and then wear it as a normal watch, but with the ability to skim through it like a mini eBook reader.
At that cost I'd just go to the theatre, or better yet just skip the movie altogether.
Because $50 is a trivial amount of money compared to the cost of going out. And if you're not going to see a movie, then you won't be spending $50 on the movie anyways.
But assuming you were going to see a movie, $50 doesn't go far - a few tickets and concessions and you've already spent that much money. More if you're driving to the theatre and include the costs of gas and all that in the trip. If you have kids, add in babysitter costs and that would probably eat up a good part of the $50 anyways.
Sure, if it's only you going, a theatre is cheaper. But most people generally treat it as a social event to get together, watch the movie, then discuss the heck out of it afterwards, to which $50 is a trivial amount of money to spend overall. And knowing my friends, the ability to start the movie when you want it rather than fixed screening times is a bonus for there's always someone either running late or something distracts us and makes us late.
Um no, that is not the solution, the solution is to air gap anything you cant afford to have break due to hacking, and hunt down criminal hackers around the world. Treat state sponsored hacking like an act of war, and make sure everyone knows you will respond with devastating force.
Air gapping critical infrastructure should be a federal law, because anything connected can eventually be hacked given enough time and resources.
Air-gapped networks have been hacked. You might have heard of Stuxnet, which was a VERY elaborate hack of an airgapped network.
The primary problem these days is a network is no longer static. It needs to be updated - you add devices, you remove devices, and the whole system needs reconfiguration. And that opens an avenue for infecting an airgapped network.
And yes, even critical infrastructure networks get updated - pumps get replaced, controllers die and need replacement and reconfiguration, etc. Even systems get upgraded - a water pumping plant might get a new pump that needs to be managed (this happens more often than you think).
Once the airgapped network is infected, you can open a two way communications channel using all sorts of mechanisms that work through the air. Sound is one obvious one to communicate with a device on the internet (presumably already infected and listening for an airgapped computer to communicate with it).
The real problem is the world has moved beyond simplistic solutions like airgapping, and it has to take defense in depth. Air-gaps work, but only as part of a comprehensive security plan. Saying you have an airgapped network is no longer sufficient for security, just like having a firewall is no longer a miracle device to keep you safe.
We've hit the point where the (depressingly high) percentage of the western world that's willing and able to pay for the privilege of being tracked 24/7 has already done so, so now it's time to pick up the stragglers by giving it away for free. The ones who still refuse will eventually be forced in as it gets increasingly difficult to participate in the modern world without internet access.
How funny it is. When free WiFi came out over a decade ago everyone flocked it to for free internet access. I think Starbucks was one of the first pioneers of the idea. Then came demand for every other store and company to provide free WiFi access for their customers, which really took off during the iPhone revolution (2007). Then municipalities started getting involved and offering free WiFi inside places like libraries and such and some even blanketed their towns in it. Others offered small hot spots for it.
And now, whenever someone offers to create free WiFi areas, it's treated as a way to spy on users or people want to know what the limits are. Funny how speed or limits never really factored into it before.
ther than having an existing PS3 games library, is there any other reason to buy a new PS3 even after the PS4 came out?
Given the PS4 cannot play PS3 games, yes, you need a PS3 if you want to play a PS3 game. If you don't have a PS3, you need to buy a PS3. And that's either new or used. (The xbone can play some xbox360 games through emulation).
Or you sign up for Sony's "Playstation Now" service which is restricting access to PS4s and PCs only now and play remotely. But if you have a PS3 game that's not ported to PS4 or on PSNow, well, you need a PS3. And there can be a few of those.
I wonder why Google didn't fire Eric Schmitt when he stole the iphone as an apple board member
Because Eric didn't steal anything and gave it to Google. He may have been aware of the iPhone and its general look and feel, but he took no documents, no software, nothing and gave it to Google.
At best, all he took was in his head.
And Apple didn't really pursue it since Apple had the iPhone all tied up in patents (design and utility). Google was certainly aware of the patents and default Android was better for it as Google deftly avoided them. Android's app launcher has been redesigned a few times to avoid the "rounded corners" patent (a design patent consisting of many items. Android has always avoided copying it exactly.).
That's why Apple never went after Google - there is no reason to since stock Android did not violate any of Apple's patents. OEMs, however, (like Samsung's initial TouchWiz offerings) were vulnerable since they did copy the look and feel and overrode what Google did. It's why the Samsung Galaxy S was said to be an iPhone, yet no other Android device on the market was.
JSON is more compact than XML, making it faster for computers to transfer and parse, while making it easier for humans to read and write
I don't know about you, but I think there's something wrong if you're manually editing the XML or JSON files by hand everytime you post a new podcast. It might work for those once in a while podcasts that come around monthly or less, but I can't see someone actually not using a program to maintain the file, or having it automatically generated...
If some one made a smart phone that could go several days without charging under realistic usage conditions I might drop $699 on it. Lame duck garbage like this? No thanks, I'd rather spend 3 or 4 hundred on something that does everything I want it to do just as well (and I find that expense insulting even given how old the tech is now that meets my needs)
Is a phone with a 10,000mAH (10 AH!) big enough? It's certainly not very expensive and it's about to be released. Granted, the specs aren't terrific, but middle of the road which should help keep battery life measured in days. And since you didn't need fast processor and other fancy stuff, it should suit your needs well.
It's also a brick, both size wise and likely weight
1. Traditional Chinese medicine. There is hardly a plant or organic matter that is not used for one purpose or other in traditional Chinese medicine (Traditional Chinese medicine is akin to internet porn - if something exists there is a traditional Chinese medicine made from it). Plants make insane diversity of chemical compounds. Anyone will be hard pressed to find a naturally occurring plant compound that does not exist in at least one plant used by traditional Chinese medicine. While this claim may technically be true, it is completely meaningless.
The only thing about TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is that it's a label that separates it from Western Medicine. That's it. Western Medicine is what we're all familiar with - pop a pill for this ailment or other and you're cured, while TCM is more like drink a soup made from these plants.
Both are equally scientific in the end - while parts of TCM do contain a bit of silliness, a lot of it is based on sound science that consuming this plant does heal ailment X. TCM doesn't explain why like Western Medicine does, but it does see the cause and effect.
Not just that, the deal w/ custom silicon is that it has a specific i.e. limited use, and thereby a limited market. At best, one could put it on an FPGA and run w/ it. The time one goes from an FPGA to an ASIC is when one ramps up the volume to the point that a cost reduction is desperately needed. Otherwise, one has to run a minimum number of wafers on a fab to remain cost optimized. Not possible if one is running a product w/ such a limited scope & market
You keep forgetting Apple is fabless semiconductor company. They've been doing custom ASICs for nearly a decade now, starting with the Apple A4 SoC (it's an ASIC, even though it has a processor.). Now Apple has a whole lineup of custom silicon (this is different from rebadged silicon like the CODEC chips).
At the very least, this AI block will go into their next-gen SoC, and given they have to make probably near to 100 million of them, it well justifies the cost.
400 Hz would almost certainly work fine on any 60 Hz adapter. Possibly a transformer one may get rather hotter, but have you ever seen a transformer based USB charger?
Honestly, I'd really think it wasn't the iPhone or iPad, but the crappy cheap as crap adapter. As in, "Genuine" Apple chargers, like the ones Apple bought on Amazon only to find out none were actually made by Apple.
And the unfortunately reality is, crappy ass adapters are a safety hazard even at regular mains voltage. Who knows what happens when you use an oddball frequency like 400Hz?
For the most part, switching supplies usually use a simple single diode rectifier (a full bridge is rare), typically your bog-standard rectifier since 60Hz (or even 400Hz) is well within the "general purpose rectifier" category. Even at 400Hz it's a generally sinewave output which is nice and easy on the input rectifier. From then on it's high voltage DC, and the rest of the circuit doesn't care if it was 60Hz or 400Hz. And with proper design, like the Apple ones have with proper creepage and clearances, it's not an issue. The dodgy ones though? Well, who knows.
The other surprising thing is the cockpits don't come with USB outlets - they're actually becoming pretty standard in the GA world, and there are "blue bricks" that connect to aircraft power and give you straight USB power output. Especially modern avionics that sync up with iPads and iPhones and all the other stuff to do things like update databases (you could take the card out of the aircraft, go to a PC and update the card data on it, or you can have your tablet download the new data and have it update over WiFi - the card data is updated by either the app downloading it or being built into the app).
Given everyone's going to tablets for their flight bags, the companies should have retrofit USB ports when they added the mounts to the cockpit. Of course, who knows - it could've been a personal phone and tablet and they still haul around tons of paper.
But I guess the content mafia will give it a subtitle. "Piracy 101"
To do that requires violating the CC licensing rules. The book is CC BY-SA, which is a very liberal license - basically you can do what you want, as long as you give attribution and release what you did under the same license.
So to pirate it requires either locking it up (i.e., somehow slapping "All Rights Reserved" on it) or completely plagiarizing it. (Yes, in a similar fashion you can pirate GPL and other open source code as well - every time someone releases GPL'd software without source, it's technically a pirate copy).
And this is the true value of open-source and Creative Commons - in that copyright law is required, but instead of the license restricting even what you've been given legally, the license lets you either obey "All Rights Reserved" (you don't accept the open source license, or CC license), or you can get certain freedoms if you follow an alternate path.
This hack relies on the ability to rewrite specific pages in NAND flash. In fact, the attack is well known in NAND flash - read and write disturbs are documented issues with NAND flash since the beginning. Every NAND flash datasheet mentions how you can and cannot program it in order to minimize the probability of disturbs. It's why NAND flash has the "spare area" - because even following the recommendations (always program from page 0 through consecutive pages, never skip around and always program full pages at a time) you will encounter a disturb event eventually.
Now, this requires raw NAND access. But practically all flash memory your PC uses is managed. The SSD has a controller on it sitting between the SATA or PCIe bus and the raw NAND flash. Even memory cards are managed - CompactFlash, SD/MMC, Memory Stick are managed. Only the xD and SmartMedia actually are raw NAND (the controller is in the interface) formatted in special ways.
And managed memory means you can't access the raw media because the management controller is doing its very best to mitigate flash memory drawbacks (like limited program-erase cycles) and problems (like read/write disturbs) by using such fancy technology as wear-levelling. This way even if you write to the same sector always, it's actually walking around the physical media so no part of the actual flash chip is getting more worn out than the others.
And modern SSDs have so much state in them that knowing where your write actually goes in the physical storage array is impossible to know - you need to know the exact state of the array including the states of all the pages (good data, dirty data, ready to be erased, etc). because when it comes time to garbage collect and all that, all the previous state is important as it influences the new state. (And all this contributes to write amplification - where writing N bytes actually causes N+M bytes to be written because of flash management).
I'm not impressed with the findings, since I read all about them in a Toshiba (inventor of NAND flash) application note over a decade ago. It's exactly what Toshiba said would happen and why you need to follow the rules (which every managed controller does).
To be more impressed, they need to demonstrate the results using every day SSDs instead of special test and development boards that let them abuse the raw NAND.
Do you want to imply that vitaly challenged people should not be allowed to make themselves heard?
Well, if the dead want a voice in government, they need to do what everyone else does - vote!
And don't tell me they can't do that, because there are plenty of dead people who vote already. Either political party will give you lists of those dead people who voted in the last election.
I would believe the Kodi devs are the ones behind it, because the piracy box sellers are the main issue. As they have stated, these boxes cause nothing but problems for the developers - when the plugins stop working (as they promptly do), the customers then flood the Kodi forums with angry posts about their boxes that stop working.
Of course, the Kodi devs have nothing to do with it, other than banning all the posts But you can imagine the developers are highly annoyed by this behavior when they have nothing to do with it. It demoralizes the developers, and it tarnishes Kodi's name.
I'm already paying them so I can watch commercials almost half the time. That's just stupid. Program to commercial ratio seems to be about 60:40 these days, but I really should use a timer to verify. It feels more like 50:50, I'm trying to be objective. My wife won't agree to cut the cord because of local news and sports - two things I can get from the 'net or don't care about. There's got to be a good counter argument for that, between Roku, Netflix, Hulu, etc.. I've got killer Internet bandwidth right now at 200mb download speeds. (about 20mb up).
It's around 60-40 - the current for prime-time TV is 22 minutes of ads per hour.
As for news and sports, if you can simplify the experience for your wife, you can probably cut the cord. And by simplify, I mean simplify - she probably wants to turn on the TV and then watch the news by clicking on news or something at best. No "turn on the TV, then go to web browser, enter blah, click here, there everywhere and watch". Roku might be easiest, but it's still a click-fest nightmare at times (provided your local TV station has a Roku channel app).
Sports is a bit harder since most televised sporting events are NOT streamed, and thanks to various league rules, often times the streaming services omit local events.
If you're still addicted to cable, and she wants local news, I suggest investing in a good OTA antenna setup. You can get your local news and sports for free that way in a simple format. All for the investment of a couple hundred bucks for a good antenna and maybe half a day's work putting it on the roof.
As for those that download the shows, you should know how normal TV works. Stations air programming, and that programming comes with ads to pay for the station and producing the show, etc. Viewer numbers set the ad rates, which for prime-time generally average around $80K-$150K for a 30 second spot. By downloading the show, you lower the viewership numbers, and thus the amount of money made for that program. (The Neilsen numbers you see reported are the "free" ones that no one cares about. The numbers that set ad rates are the C numbers which is the number of viewers watching the ads.). Lowering the C numbers means the show is less popular and the networks will likely cancel it if they can find a show that performs better. And the shows they replace it with are ones that attract viewers, so if all the smart people download the shows they like, the networks will actually produce less of those shows (since they don't bring in the eyeballs) Which is why a lot of TV now is driven meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator - the programming everyone wants to see everyone downloads until the program gets cancelled.
That's the real killer - who wants to pay $50 for a movie; even if yo have a nice theatre setup? Sure, some people may but I doubt it will be enough to be profitable. Merely making the movie available at the same time doesn't replicate the theater experience.And before commenters get all snarky about people talking, texting, etc. in theaters do you think it will better at home?
First, this system's price is for those who already spent $30K+ on a theatre setup, so they are only targeting the few people who have a really nice set up already.
Second, $50 is not a lot of money to see a movie. With ticket prices already around $12 per person, that's only a little over 4 tickets (and most people who build theatres at home seat 6-8 in two rows). Add in parking, gas, snacks, etc, and you're looking at a good $60-80 for a night out with the family. If you have a few friends over for dinner and a movie, $50 is cheap to watch the latest movie as it hits the box office.
And yes, you get nice comfy seats as well.
And texting/chatting is far better when you know everyone and can shush them or chase them out of the theatre. Or pause the movie and then shame them in front of everyone. And if you're that guy that can't get rid of his FOMO and ruining the enjoyment of the movie for everyone else, you'll probably find yourself invited over to watch movies less and less.
Personally, I would love to get such a unit. But I don't have a dedicated theatre room, nor can I afford the unit itself
Netflix allows you to share your login with multiple people with certain plans. You are limited only by how many concurrent devices are actively using it. Wonder if this skews the survey results at all?
And you have to, otherwise you can't stream outside of a single network. Why might you do this? Well, if you're watching Netflix on your phone using the WWAN, your phone's got a unique IP address. And if you're travelling, well, if everyone's using their data connection, everyone's using a unique IP address.
Sure, Netflix could probably limit it to multiple logins from carrier IP addresses, but that's probably a lot more work than they want to do for what they'd gain. So really, they'd have to allow up to your account limit of streams as IP addresses, and whether it's streaming to phones or shared accounts, they don't care.
That doesn't sound right to me. An extra 2 calories per day for one year is 730 calories. Even eating an extra 1000 calories in a year isn't going to qualify someone as obese unless they are practically right at that line anyway.
It isn't. Just take it this way, an extra 10 calories a day means you gain just over a pound a year (1 lb of fat == 3500 calories). 50 calories a day, or roughly a tablespoon of mayo, can cause serious weight gain (5lbs). Just think - an extra spoon of mayo in your sandwich can cause you to gain 5 lbs in a year.
Blu Ray subtitles are still done with high resolution bitmaps to this day. As mentioned elsewhere, it lets the player be relatively stupid by punting the complexity of fonts/Unicode off to whoever's authoring the disc.
Well, yes. Because it's better that way.
First, you aren't limited to choice of fonts. You have to remember the Blu-Ray standard is over 10 years old by now. The number of characters available in Unicode has increased dramatically - additional languages, emojis, etc.
Second, you aren't limited to a choice of fonts. This time, we're talking actual fonts themselves. There's font shapes, font styles, sizes, etc. And special characters - sometimes they use a special style when there's a song playing, for example.
About the only way to ensure that future discs can be played back on the oldest standard players, you pretty much need to use rendered down images for the subtitles - everything changes too quickly. Even today visit the wrong web page on the wrong OS and instead of seeing text, you get squares as the font is missing Unicode codepoints.
Heck, I'm sure someone has found a creative use for subtitle overlay images in some custom project or another
What's the point of playing a game if you aren't going to try to beat it? I don't mean beat it by buying your way to success, I mean beat it by using your game skills to build what you need to beat it.
Because games are supposed to be fun, not work. If some idiot level designer makes a boss battle so unfair that after a few attempts I give up in frustration, then it's likely I'll put the game away and never to play it again. Maybe there's a good reward, but I do have a lot of other things to do with my life that the urge to complete the game must battle with the frustration of dying at the same spot for the Nth time.
And yes, I know I'm no good at games. I play on easy mode for that reason - it gives me the best chance of getting through the game. Especially since a lot of games seem to rely on "cheap deaths" or "if you don't hit the button at the exact millisecond, you're too late".
And no, I don't give up easily, but when my time is limited, I expect to make progress. If you have a hard boss battle, OK, but I do expect to see some progress - perhaps I die a little later a few rounds later after figuring out the right moves, and maybe I get all the way so it's at 1% health and die. That's progress. But then if I get stuck at that 1% for the entire hour of my next session, then it's frustrating and I may decide to put it down and do something else - nothing sucks more than spending 5 minutes dodging around and all that only to get screwed over at the end and have to repeat the same old same old over and over again.
Of course, I also find buying my way to victory distasteful and have ranked a lot of freemium games as "don't play as you MUST spend money". But luckily, there are a number of games where money is completely optional - if you have determination you can progress and earn your gold or diamonds and get your way through. Funny enough how the latter games generally are better and have added replay value.
We are talking about a single product here and bananas tend to be loss leaders at supermarkets anyway. 1.7million in a about 18 months thus around $100K per month. A lb is about 2 bananas at a cost of 0.50 per lb -> around $25K/month in sales of bananas potentially taken out of local economy.
It's less about the free bananas and more about unintended side effects.
First, Amazon gives away free bananas. Great for everyone. But it also means local shops won't want to carry them - why woiuld people buy them if they can get them for free?
This has a follow on effect - local shops can't buy bananas. Presumably, Amazon is only giving them to people, and if you want to buy 10 bunches for the day's usage as an ingredient, you can't. This, coupled with the first point means local shops cannot buy the bananas they need without having to shop outside the local area or finding a non-local distributor (local distributors, noting the lack of banana demand, also stop carrying bananas).
Generally speaking, the non-local distributor will charge more, so either the shop charges more for banana-containing products, or stops carrying them.
And the end result is a lot of shops simply stopped carrying them. Where once you could add a banana to your smoothie, it's not an option anymore. Or if you wanted a banana split,. also gone off the menu unless you pay up.
That's the real problem - it distorts the local market and now everyone got screwed over. All for a simple banana.
As for bottled water, most people are too stupid to realize it's just bottled tap water, or they assume because they bottle it, they "process" it in some way. (Granted, there are a few that aren't bottled tap water - Evian, Perrier and the like actually do come from the sources and are imported. They also cost a lot more, unsurprisingly).
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The dead might not have a right to privacy, but the living certainly do. The girl's friends and such may have corresponded with her in confidence and their conversations are still subject to privacy rights since they're still alive.
That's the real gist of the ruling - her conversations with friends who are still alive is still subject to protection.
Or they simply got an employee to do it for them. Dealers have access to the database for service purposes (in case you need to generate a replacement key). All they need is to get someone "on the inside" to do the lookup for them.
That's what makes this device all the more interesting. Remember, to differentiate itself from Google, Apple is on a privacy streak. They're offloading to the device anything that does not require the cloud. If they can run their vision systems offline, Apple is doing it (iPhoto does a lot of the computation on your Mac, which is why there are often different results for the same photo collection - iPhoto will not communicate with other instances using iCloud because of privacy reasons).
I suspect this device will also do all the voice recognition locally, or as much as possible in order to keep all the audio data local and off Apple's servers.
Apple has a self-interest in doing this - they don't monetize the user's data, so by not collecting data they don't need in order to operate, they keep that data away from the government. Far easier to deny a request with "we do not have that data on hand as we do not collect it" than to try to defend in court the right to not release information they have already collected.
Even Siri is doing less and less on Apple's servers and more locally.
In a lot of places, every student writes exams at the same time. Shutting down the internet for the 3-4 hours while every student writes exams is a cheap and easy way to keep them from cheating via Google.
It's not feasible in most Western nations because there's rarely a time where every single student is taking an exam, but a lot of places (especially places following the old British education system) every student has to sit down and write one massive end of year exam that basically counts for all the marks. Cheating is rampant because in the final years those exams dictate the next phase in your life - do you head off and become a common labourer, do you get a scholarship and get to attend university overseas, or do you get post-secondary education locally? And yes, suicide is also rampant - students who feel they failed their parents (i.e., did not live up to expectations, which are often "overseas university full scholarship") often feel they can't face the shame (or punishment) of getting anything less.
Hell, you know it's big when Amazon sells special "cheating watches" which are basically watches with an SD card slot - you load up the watch with your textbook and notes and such, and then wear it as a normal watch, but with the ability to skim through it like a mini eBook reader.
Because $50 is a trivial amount of money compared to the cost of going out. And if you're not going to see a movie, then you won't be spending $50 on the movie anyways.
But assuming you were going to see a movie, $50 doesn't go far - a few tickets and concessions and you've already spent that much money. More if you're driving to the theatre and include the costs of gas and all that in the trip. If you have kids, add in babysitter costs and that would probably eat up a good part of the $50 anyways.
Sure, if it's only you going, a theatre is cheaper. But most people generally treat it as a social event to get together, watch the movie, then discuss the heck out of it afterwards, to which $50 is a trivial amount of money to spend overall. And knowing my friends, the ability to start the movie when you want it rather than fixed screening times is a bonus for there's always someone either running late or something distracts us and makes us late.
Air-gapped networks have been hacked. You might have heard of Stuxnet, which was a VERY elaborate hack of an airgapped network.
The primary problem these days is a network is no longer static. It needs to be updated - you add devices, you remove devices, and the whole system needs reconfiguration. And that opens an avenue for infecting an airgapped network.
And yes, even critical infrastructure networks get updated - pumps get replaced, controllers die and need replacement and reconfiguration, etc. Even systems get upgraded - a water pumping plant might get a new pump that needs to be managed (this happens more often than you think).
Once the airgapped network is infected, you can open a two way communications channel using all sorts of mechanisms that work through the air. Sound is one obvious one to communicate with a device on the internet (presumably already infected and listening for an airgapped computer to communicate with it).
The real problem is the world has moved beyond simplistic solutions like airgapping, and it has to take defense in depth. Air-gaps work, but only as part of a comprehensive security plan. Saying you have an airgapped network is no longer sufficient for security, just like having a firewall is no longer a miracle device to keep you safe.
How funny it is. When free WiFi came out over a decade ago everyone flocked it to for free internet access. I think Starbucks was one of the first pioneers of the idea. Then came demand for every other store and company to provide free WiFi access for their customers, which really took off during the iPhone revolution (2007). Then municipalities started getting involved and offering free WiFi inside places like libraries and such and some even blanketed their towns in it. Others offered small hot spots for it.
And now, whenever someone offers to create free WiFi areas, it's treated as a way to spy on users or people want to know what the limits are. Funny how speed or limits never really factored into it before.
What a society we live in today/
Given the PS4 cannot play PS3 games, yes, you need a PS3 if you want to play a PS3 game. If you don't have a PS3, you need to buy a PS3. And that's either new or used. (The xbone can play some xbox360 games through emulation).
Or you sign up for Sony's "Playstation Now" service which is restricting access to PS4s and PCs only now and play remotely. But if you have a PS3 game that's not ported to PS4 or on PSNow, well, you need a PS3. And there can be a few of those.
Because Eric didn't steal anything and gave it to Google. He may have been aware of the iPhone and its general look and feel, but he took no documents, no software, nothing and gave it to Google.
At best, all he took was in his head.
And Apple didn't really pursue it since Apple had the iPhone all tied up in patents (design and utility). Google was certainly aware of the patents and default Android was better for it as Google deftly avoided them. Android's app launcher has been redesigned a few times to avoid the "rounded corners" patent (a design patent consisting of many items. Android has always avoided copying it exactly.).
That's why Apple never went after Google - there is no reason to since stock Android did not violate any of Apple's patents. OEMs, however, (like Samsung's initial TouchWiz offerings) were vulnerable since they did copy the look and feel and overrode what Google did. It's why the Samsung Galaxy S was said to be an iPhone, yet no other Android device on the market was.
I don't know about you, but I think there's something wrong if you're manually editing the XML or JSON files by hand everytime you post a new podcast. It might work for those once in a while podcasts that come around monthly or less, but I can't see someone actually not using a program to maintain the file, or having it automatically generated...
Is a phone with a 10,000mAH (10 AH!) big enough? It's certainly not very expensive and it's about to be released. Granted, the specs aren't terrific, but middle of the road which should help keep battery life measured in days. And since you didn't need fast processor and other fancy stuff, it should suit your needs well.
It's also a brick, both size wise and likely weight
The only thing about TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is that it's a label that separates it from Western Medicine. That's it. Western Medicine is what we're all familiar with - pop a pill for this ailment or other and you're cured, while TCM is more like drink a soup made from these plants.
Both are equally scientific in the end - while parts of TCM do contain a bit of silliness, a lot of it is based on sound science that consuming this plant does heal ailment X. TCM doesn't explain why like Western Medicine does, but it does see the cause and effect.
You keep forgetting Apple is fabless semiconductor company. They've been doing custom ASICs for nearly a decade now, starting with the Apple A4 SoC (it's an ASIC, even though it has a processor.). Now Apple has a whole lineup of custom silicon (this is different from rebadged silicon like the CODEC chips).
At the very least, this AI block will go into their next-gen SoC, and given they have to make probably near to 100 million of them, it well justifies the cost.
Honestly, I'd really think it wasn't the iPhone or iPad, but the crappy cheap as crap adapter. As in, "Genuine" Apple chargers, like the ones Apple bought on Amazon only to find out none were actually made by Apple.
And the unfortunately reality is, crappy ass adapters are a safety hazard even at regular mains voltage. Who knows what happens when you use an oddball frequency like 400Hz?
For the most part, switching supplies usually use a simple single diode rectifier (a full bridge is rare), typically your bog-standard rectifier since 60Hz (or even 400Hz) is well within the "general purpose rectifier" category. Even at 400Hz it's a generally sinewave output which is nice and easy on the input rectifier. From then on it's high voltage DC, and the rest of the circuit doesn't care if it was 60Hz or 400Hz. And with proper design, like the Apple ones have with proper creepage and clearances, it's not an issue. The dodgy ones though? Well, who knows.
The other surprising thing is the cockpits don't come with USB outlets - they're actually becoming pretty standard in the GA world, and there are "blue bricks" that connect to aircraft power and give you straight USB power output. Especially modern avionics that sync up with iPads and iPhones and all the other stuff to do things like update databases (you could take the card out of the aircraft, go to a PC and update the card data on it, or you can have your tablet download the new data and have it update over WiFi - the card data is updated by either the app downloading it or being built into the app).
Given everyone's going to tablets for their flight bags, the companies should have retrofit USB ports when they added the mounts to the cockpit. Of course, who knows - it could've been a personal phone and tablet and they still haul around tons of paper.
To do that requires violating the CC licensing rules. The book is CC BY-SA, which is a very liberal license - basically you can do what you want, as long as you give attribution and release what you did under the same license.
So to pirate it requires either locking it up (i.e., somehow slapping "All Rights Reserved" on it) or completely plagiarizing it. (Yes, in a similar fashion you can pirate GPL and other open source code as well - every time someone releases GPL'd software without source, it's technically a pirate copy).
And this is the true value of open-source and Creative Commons - in that copyright law is required, but instead of the license restricting even what you've been given legally, the license lets you either obey "All Rights Reserved" (you don't accept the open source license, or CC license), or you can get certain freedoms if you follow an alternate path.
There is no real world practical worry for this.
This hack relies on the ability to rewrite specific pages in NAND flash. In fact, the attack is well known in NAND flash - read and write disturbs are documented issues with NAND flash since the beginning. Every NAND flash datasheet mentions how you can and cannot program it in order to minimize the probability of disturbs. It's why NAND flash has the "spare area" - because even following the recommendations (always program from page 0 through consecutive pages, never skip around and always program full pages at a time) you will encounter a disturb event eventually.
Now, this requires raw NAND access. But practically all flash memory your PC uses is managed. The SSD has a controller on it sitting between the SATA or PCIe bus and the raw NAND flash. Even memory cards are managed - CompactFlash, SD/MMC, Memory Stick are managed. Only the xD and SmartMedia actually are raw NAND (the controller is in the interface) formatted in special ways.
And managed memory means you can't access the raw media because the management controller is doing its very best to mitigate flash memory drawbacks (like limited program-erase cycles) and problems (like read/write disturbs) by using such fancy technology as wear-levelling. This way even if you write to the same sector always, it's actually walking around the physical media so no part of the actual flash chip is getting more worn out than the others.
And modern SSDs have so much state in them that knowing where your write actually goes in the physical storage array is impossible to know - you need to know the exact state of the array including the states of all the pages (good data, dirty data, ready to be erased, etc). because when it comes time to garbage collect and all that, all the previous state is important as it influences the new state. (And all this contributes to write amplification - where writing N bytes actually causes N+M bytes to be written because of flash management).
I'm not impressed with the findings, since I read all about them in a Toshiba (inventor of NAND flash) application note over a decade ago. It's exactly what Toshiba said would happen and why you need to follow the rules (which every managed controller does).
To be more impressed, they need to demonstrate the results using every day SSDs instead of special test and development boards that let them abuse the raw NAND.
Well, if the dead want a voice in government, they need to do what everyone else does - vote!
And don't tell me they can't do that, because there are plenty of dead people who vote already. Either political party will give you lists of those dead people who voted in the last election.
I would believe the Kodi devs are the ones behind it, because the piracy box sellers are the main issue. As they have stated, these boxes cause nothing but problems for the developers - when the plugins stop working (as they promptly do), the customers then flood the Kodi forums with angry posts about their boxes that stop working.
Of course, the Kodi devs have nothing to do with it, other than banning all the posts But you can imagine the developers are highly annoyed by this behavior when they have nothing to do with it. It demoralizes the developers, and it tarnishes Kodi's name.
It's around 60-40 - the current for prime-time TV is 22 minutes of ads per hour.
As for news and sports, if you can simplify the experience for your wife, you can probably cut the cord. And by simplify, I mean simplify - she probably wants to turn on the TV and then watch the news by clicking on news or something at best. No "turn on the TV, then go to web browser, enter blah, click here, there everywhere and watch". Roku might be easiest, but it's still a click-fest nightmare at times (provided your local TV station has a Roku channel app).
Sports is a bit harder since most televised sporting events are NOT streamed, and thanks to various league rules, often times the streaming services omit local events.
If you're still addicted to cable, and she wants local news, I suggest investing in a good OTA antenna setup. You can get your local news and sports for free that way in a simple format. All for the investment of a couple hundred bucks for a good antenna and maybe half a day's work putting it on the roof.
As for those that download the shows, you should know how normal TV works. Stations air programming, and that programming comes with ads to pay for the station and producing the show, etc. Viewer numbers set the ad rates, which for prime-time generally average around $80K-$150K for a 30 second spot. By downloading the show, you lower the viewership numbers, and thus the amount of money made for that program. (The Neilsen numbers you see reported are the "free" ones that no one cares about. The numbers that set ad rates are the C numbers which is the number of viewers watching the ads.). Lowering the C numbers means the show is less popular and the networks will likely cancel it if they can find a show that performs better. And the shows they replace it with are ones that attract viewers, so if all the smart people download the shows they like, the networks will actually produce less of those shows (since they don't bring in the eyeballs) Which is why a lot of TV now is driven meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator - the programming everyone wants to see everyone downloads until the program gets cancelled.
First, this system's price is for those who already spent $30K+ on a theatre setup, so they are only targeting the few people who have a really nice set up already.
Second, $50 is not a lot of money to see a movie. With ticket prices already around $12 per person, that's only a little over 4 tickets (and most people who build theatres at home seat 6-8 in two rows). Add in parking, gas, snacks, etc, and you're looking at a good $60-80 for a night out with the family. If you have a few friends over for dinner and a movie, $50 is cheap to watch the latest movie as it hits the box office.
And yes, you get nice comfy seats as well.
And texting/chatting is far better when you know everyone and can shush them or chase them out of the theatre. Or pause the movie and then shame them in front of everyone. And if you're that guy that can't get rid of his FOMO and ruining the enjoyment of the movie for everyone else, you'll probably find yourself invited over to watch movies less and less.
Personally, I would love to get such a unit. But I don't have a dedicated theatre room, nor can I afford the unit itself
And you have to, otherwise you can't stream outside of a single network. Why might you do this? Well, if you're watching Netflix on your phone using the WWAN, your phone's got a unique IP address. And if you're travelling, well, if everyone's using their data connection, everyone's using a unique IP address.
Sure, Netflix could probably limit it to multiple logins from carrier IP addresses, but that's probably a lot more work than they want to do for what they'd gain. So really, they'd have to allow up to your account limit of streams as IP addresses, and whether it's streaming to phones or shared accounts, they don't care.
It isn't. Just take it this way, an extra 10 calories a day means you gain just over a pound a year (1 lb of fat == 3500 calories). 50 calories a day, or roughly a tablespoon of mayo, can cause serious weight gain (5lbs). Just think - an extra spoon of mayo in your sandwich can cause you to gain 5 lbs in a year.
Well, yes. Because it's better that way.
First, you aren't limited to choice of fonts. You have to remember the Blu-Ray standard is over 10 years old by now. The number of characters available in Unicode has increased dramatically - additional languages, emojis, etc.
Second, you aren't limited to a choice of fonts. This time, we're talking actual fonts themselves. There's font shapes, font styles, sizes, etc. And special characters - sometimes they use a special style when there's a song playing, for example.
About the only way to ensure that future discs can be played back on the oldest standard players, you pretty much need to use rendered down images for the subtitles - everything changes too quickly. Even today visit the wrong web page on the wrong OS and instead of seeing text, you get squares as the font is missing Unicode codepoints.
Heck, I'm sure someone has found a creative use for subtitle overlay images in some custom project or another
Because games are supposed to be fun, not work. If some idiot level designer makes a boss battle so unfair that after a few attempts I give up in frustration, then it's likely I'll put the game away and never to play it again. Maybe there's a good reward, but I do have a lot of other things to do with my life that the urge to complete the game must battle with the frustration of dying at the same spot for the Nth time.
And yes, I know I'm no good at games. I play on easy mode for that reason - it gives me the best chance of getting through the game. Especially since a lot of games seem to rely on "cheap deaths" or "if you don't hit the button at the exact millisecond, you're too late".
And no, I don't give up easily, but when my time is limited, I expect to make progress. If you have a hard boss battle, OK, but I do expect to see some progress - perhaps I die a little later a few rounds later after figuring out the right moves, and maybe I get all the way so it's at 1% health and die. That's progress. But then if I get stuck at that 1% for the entire hour of my next session, then it's frustrating and I may decide to put it down and do something else - nothing sucks more than spending 5 minutes dodging around and all that only to get screwed over at the end and have to repeat the same old same old over and over again.
Of course, I also find buying my way to victory distasteful and have ranked a lot of freemium games as "don't play as you MUST spend money". But luckily, there are a number of games where money is completely optional - if you have determination you can progress and earn your gold or diamonds and get your way through. Funny enough how the latter games generally are better and have added replay value.
It's less about the free bananas and more about unintended side effects.
First, Amazon gives away free bananas. Great for everyone. But it also means local shops won't want to carry them - why woiuld people buy them if they can get them for free?
This has a follow on effect - local shops can't buy bananas. Presumably, Amazon is only giving them to people, and if you want to buy 10 bunches for the day's usage as an ingredient, you can't. This, coupled with the first point means local shops cannot buy the bananas they need without having to shop outside the local area or finding a non-local distributor (local distributors, noting the lack of banana demand, also stop carrying bananas).
Generally speaking, the non-local distributor will charge more, so either the shop charges more for banana-containing products, or stops carrying them.
And the end result is a lot of shops simply stopped carrying them. Where once you could add a banana to your smoothie, it's not an option anymore. Or if you wanted a banana split,. also gone off the menu unless you pay up.
That's the real problem - it distorts the local market and now everyone got screwed over. All for a simple banana.
As for bottled water, most people are too stupid to realize it's just bottled tap water, or they assume because they bottle it, they "process" it in some way. (Granted, there are a few that aren't bottled tap water - Evian, Perrier and the like actually do come from the sources and are imported. They also cost a lot more, unsurprisingly).