First, everything I see presently on the front page of slashdot, including this article, are tech.
Slashdot seems to be relatively balanced to me, both in articles and in comments. You want to see a place that started out leftist and has turned into a complete sewer of ultra-left bias, see soylentnews. An echo chamber for cuckoos. Participation has dropped to critically low. And theregister is embarrassing themselves with their batshit-insaneTrump derangement.
OTOH, pipedot stayed virtually 100% pure tech, and has all but died. The truth is, the wonder age of tech is gone. There is no more telephone-book-size Computer Shopper, and never will be anything like it. All the mom and pop computer stores are long gone. Other former greats, like arstechnica, have turned all flashy and same-looking and have gone to the dogs.
That's because tech is no longer an isolated part of society. In the past, about the most high-tech stuff people used was a TV or camera. These days, tech is ubiquitous and everywhere, and everyone's using things with technology embedded in it. No longer is using a computer an isolated domain of the "system operator" or "computer programmer". The computer is everywhere in various forms and used by everyone.
Tech doesn't exist in isolation anymore - it's a part of the wider world and really, the big reason why/. survives is it is not pure tech, but it also covers the social implications of tech. How we interact with technology is at least as important as the tech itself. And yes, the social aspects of it not only include social networking, but also government spying and surveillance, business surveillance and data gathering.
Technology is a part of everyday life and no longer can you consider it alone, but it has to be considered in the wider social and political context of everyday life. People talk about the elections because they affect how we use technology (depending on who's in charge and their platform). People talk about spying the same way. Those aren't tech articles because they only involve using it, not talking about it. But they are important because our lives and technology are highly intertwined.
My Surface Pro 3 dynamically figures out the time left. It will show me how much time I have left if I continue to use the computer in the same way. Light work naturally will show more time left than playing a video game.
Therein lies the rub. What is "the same way"? Browsing the web can be tricky - some websites are nice and static and use little CPU and give plenty of battery life. Other websites have videos and sound and take more CPU and reduce the time. So "browsing the web" isn't the same way - I may go to YouTube all of a sudden and the battery life will have to drop.
And that's the issue - there's no point telling the user they have 5 hours of battery life because they'll think they have... 5 hours of battery life. Then they launch Netflix and watch a 2 hour movie, and expect 3 hours of battery life left, but get awfully surprised when they're down to 1 hour or less.
Time remaining works well for relatively constant loads - a camcorder recording video can display time remaining when recording because it's all it's going to do. If it says you can record for 2 hours, then it will last two hours regardless of what you're filming. It won't suddenly drop to 1 hour because a kid comes into frame and recording cuteness takes more power.
While I definitely support security research and responsible disclosure, it makes me a little uncomfortable that it appears this security firm could have chosen to target and test the PwC software because it is a competitor to software they produce.
This is standard in any competitive market - the competitors ALWAYS purchase and evaluate their competitor's products. Ford, GM and Chevy all buy each other's cars and trucks to evaluate and figure out what works, what doesn't work, what can be improved and that feedback goes into next year's model. Microsoft and other companies all buy Apple's products (and Apple probably has a huge collection of Android phones and PCs) for the same reason.
Everyone is constantly evaluating everyone else's product. And it's perfectly legal - if it's available for sale, one of the first customers in the lineup will be your competitor purchasing it.
There's a class of mutual funds you can buy at any financial institution called "ethical funds". These funds basically try to stay away from environment-harming or social harming companies, thus will not invest in oil and cigarette companies, for example. They will traditionally have lower returns than a traditional fund in the same category because well, face it, oil and tobacco make a lot of money.
These funds are surprisingly popular, because people know they get lower returns, but on the flip side, know they aren't investing in companies that pollute or earn money off other people suffering. And for them, earning money is but one part of the whole story - earning a dollar is important, but is not earning it by polluting or by human suffering.
Of course, not everyone is out to make a dollar by hook or by crook - some care about how that money was made
That's not Amazon's doing. They'd probably like nothing more than to offer a single Prime Video to the entire world.
It's the movie studios and their insistence on geographic market segregation which makes this impossible. The want the streamed version of a movie to come out no sooner than Dec 12 in the U.S., Dec 26 in the UK, Jan 4 in Germany, Feb 1 in Australia, March 1 in Japan, and May 1 in China. Multiply that by every movie and every country on Earth, and it becomes a logistical nightmare for any streaming service. They're forced to intentionally limit the number of countries where they provide service in order to have any level of confidence that they're complying with the studios' silly demands.
Except Amazon paid for the production of Grand Tour. They own the product, and they own the distribution rights.
Netflix's content they produce is available worldwide the same way - it's content Netflix produced and paid for and thus own all the rights to.
If it's third party content, yes you're correct, but this is first party content.
And the movie studios farmed out distribution to various exclusive distributors around the world - those distributors paid a lot of money for exclusivity. They know they could offer worldwide rights, but then the distributors will offer a lot less money - would you pay $1M for exclusive distribution of a movie? How much would you pay if you knew Netflix will have it too (i.e., non-exlcusive?). Probably a lot less. And the difference is big enough that geographic separation still exists. Perhaps if Netflix decided to be a big man and pay for world wide exclusivity...
This has caused some outrage among those who think spending ~$300 for a pair of ~$20 Chinese Crap, isn't nearly enough.
Actually, most places where you can get your glasses are actually owned by the same conglomerate. Even your optometrist's place is probably co-managed by the company.
The "designer" frames may have a name attached, but they really only cost a few dollars to make (even the license fee is only a few bucks). And the lenses? Well, they're mass-produced products, so they too cost very little to make. Even if they're the high quality lenses used in the most expensive camera lenses, as they are a single element, they're stupidly cheap (multi-element lenses are harder to make and have closer tolerances).
And plastic lenses are even cheaper - and they're so good we're at diffraction limit with them.
CSR has several "receive-and-forward-in-sync" chipsets available. Of course, Apple doesn't like CSR for iOS type devices (hence no AptX for iOS, but AptX for OSX). But then, if they used the proven, off-the-shelf solution they couldn't brag about their W1 chip (which apparently doesn't work as well as the existing solutions), so... Courage?
CSR was acquired by Qualcomm a little while ago. So Qualcomm has the chips, yes. And yes, Qualcomm showed off aptX HD earlier this year at CES. Of course, Qualcomm is using this to promote their SoCs which will come with aptX HD as a differentiator.
So Apple may have tried to negotiate licensing terms with Qualcomm and couldn't come to an agreement or an agreement for the chips. Especially since Apple started mixing Qualcomm and Intel chipsets for the cellular connectivity.
only 35 reported fires out of 3 million phones, those phones are MUCH more likely to be used for emergency comm than to catch fire.
35 before North American release (rest of world got it around 2 weeks prior).
By the time the CPSC got involved, it rose to 100 cases (a month later).
Then Samsung discovered the replacements were bad, too, with about 120 reports. Note the latter numbers are more US centric now and not worldwide figures.
There are plenty of "one-button" games that are better than Flappy Bird.
Jetpack Joyride is one of them, as is the recently updated Tiny Wings (after a couple of years...).
Both of which I paid the 99 cents for because they were highly enjoyable and fun. And yes, I bought Jetpack Joyride before it became free. And it still remains one of the better Freemium games where payment is not required at all (except for a couple of specific characters). But you don't need to pay to win and grinding to get the stuff isn't too bad either.
If you are prosecuted for a crime and found innocent the government doesn't pay your legal fees, ever. There is no cause of action in a criminal trial for compensation for costs by the defendant. These types of damages are only awarded in civil cases.
You have to bring a separate civil suit against the government for compensation. It's the whole criminal vs. civil trial thing - a criminal trial is one the state brings to you with you being free (not guilty) or jailed (guilty). A civil trial outcome is usually just monetary to make whole.
As we believe jailing an innocent is very bad, that's why a criminal trial standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" whereas a civil trial is either "preponderance of evidence" or "reasonable belief" (basically who made the more convincing argument)
But it's perfectly fine to bring a civil trial to get damages caused by a criminal trial. It's how OJ Simpson was both guilty and not-guilty.
I'd like to buy an IP camera, but I haven't been able to find any that are as open/secure/clearly* supported than a raspberry pi with a camera board (and motion software). I'd rather buy a complete solution than put it together myself though.
Check out the UBNT UniFi cameras. They can work standalone, but work much better when you connect them to their DVR software (which runs on Java, so works on Linux, Windows, OS X,etc). Better yet, all you use to view and configure it is... a web browser.
So the camera is the camera, and you can access its IP directly, but you can have your Pi run the DVR software and then extends it into a much more powerful surveillance system.
Now with PS4 being the winner of this generation, developer focus is primarily on them.
Problem is, Sony is reverting back to their previous ways.
Sony "lost" the previous generation which turned them into a leaner, meaner competitor this time around. Just like how Microsoft "won" and became complacent. Now that the roles have switched, Microsoft's offering has gotten better, while Sony's starting to rest on their laurels. (In fact, The xbone has begun outselling the ps4).
One of the biggest things was the incremental improvement called the PS4 Pro - yes 4K is a thing, but they then omit a 4K UHD drive (present in the much cheaper Xbone S units). Given how aggressive the movie studios are about pushing UHD, it's got really strong sales. (And the Zbone S is considered to be the reason why the standalone UHD players have plummeted from $500 on release early this year to $200 or so now given Microsoft's aggressive pricing).
Hell, PS Plus games have gotten pretty shitty the past year, while Xbox Games with Gold have tended to be fairly decent. PS Plus is really becoming a joke - it used to offer really good stuff, now it's really more of an afterthought. Heck, the PS Plus section has gone down the tubes.
People with DVRs aren't thiefs some how. Or people who mute their tv while ads are playing?
They aren't. People who skip ads simply are marked as not watching the ad. Not watching the ad reduces a programs "C" rating, which means the program's ad rates go down (less eyeballs == less money). Programming budget is a fraction of the ad money it makes so it has to adapt.
Ratings you see and hear on the news about a program are one of three - SD (same day), SD+3 (Same Day + 3 days later) or SD+7. These are basically the program and ad ratings averaged through the entire program. But TV networks don't care for these numbers - eyeballs watching programming is not considered important. So instead, they pay for the C numbers, also available in same day, +3 and +7 days. This is the ratings minus program ratings - so they simply take the ratings during the commercial breaks.
So if you don't watch the commercials, you don't contribute to the C numbers. Studios, TV networks and everyone else airing ad-paid programming use the C numbers to determine the show's budget, and whether it will see any more showings, whether it gets another season, and what timeslot it will get. So DVR users, downloaders, etc, they simply aren't counted in the end.
It's something to remember when your favorite show gets cancelled. Just because millions watch it, if most of them are downloads and very few are ad driven, the practical audience may be in the hundreds of thousands.
That's why DVR users aren't thieves - in the end, the programming they like gets cancelled, so in the end they just hurt themselves in the long run.
Smart move from Apple - even if it was to replace a previous dumb move.
Apple can do fine living in isolation developing hardware enclosures and user interfaces, but the world of AI is much bigger than Apple and it's where the majority of progress in the computing world is going to happen now.
I'm happy Apple has realised this. Apple vs "the rest of the world" in developing AI was not going to end well for them.
Well, Apple still has a handicap that's self-imposed - they may be able to do AI research, but they can't get at the data sets they need. Amazon and Google have no problems using information gathered for other purposes in furthering their AI products. Heck, Google even enabled full sharing of information among all of Alphabet's companies so your "OK Google" responses can now include all the webpages you visited with advertising. Or that you blocked DoubleClick's popups.
Apple prohibits that - information gathered for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose. So if you want to try to use Apple Maps location and search data for Siri, that's not allowed. You have to guess based on the current location of the user, because location searches are not allowed to be part of Siri's data set as they are covered under different privacy policies.
Apple can try to hire the best, but they'll need to start raping user data if they want to try to catch up with Google.
The final amount Samsung pays Apple will be far less than $1 billion. The amount that Apple already paid Samsung in higher part prices because of "unforeseen litigation" will continue to have been $1 billion. This is already a Pyrrhic victory for Apple, and will become more so when it goes back to the lower courts and the amount is reduced even more.
It's also getting rather silly, because the phones involved are no longer for sale, Samsung no longer uses the version of TouchWiz that looks like the iPhone (courtesy of Google and others that have made the Android UI more standardized across Android devices, so working like an iPhone makes things feel odd). I mean, even the phones themselves are probably sitting in drawers and landfills by now (Samsung Galaxy S2, anyone? I think that was the LATEST phone involved).
In the end, it will probably all end up for naught - though there may be regulatory changes for the worst - if a patent lawsuit takes years to resolve, by the time it is resolved, the infringement is no longer valid because the products are long obsolete. This may mean the way around it is to simply a war on attrition - violate the patent now, then just argue and argue until the whole issue is moot.
Heck, I think even the patent behind it has expired by now - (it's a design patent, which only have a short 5 year lifespan).
The fragmentation is intentional, on the part of the content owners. Believe me, everyone knows that a lot of people want a single streaming service with all content. It's just not what copyright owners and ISPs want.
Actually, it's because of monopsony. (Monopsony is the lesser-known opposite of monopoly. In a monopoly, there is one supplier that every customer has to buy from. In a monopsony, there are many suppliers, but one customer who will buy it. It's rarer, but it has happened before.
Most well known would be iTunes. The music industry feared Apple because they were the top dog in digital music sales. Apple enforced 99 cents per track (and I think $9.99 per album) regardless, the 30/70 split, etc. There was no other music store that could compete.
That is, until they were forced to swallow a bitter pill and that was DRM-free, which allowed Amazon to chip away at the monopsony and force Apple to offer flexible pricing (69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29) and better terms (to the record labels).
Movie and TV studios took note, and vowed they would never be controlled like that so they are ensuring that no one service will become dominant and be forced to acquiesce to whatever terms they provide.
In the end, it's why Netflix gets the older stuff (unlimited streaming, basically for a very low per-stream fee which is basically bonus cash), Hulu and Amazon get first cut, CinemaNow and others get early releases, etc.
As Donald would say "Wrong!!!" Apple borrows massively in the US to fund expansion as it is pretty US cash poor. All its Cash is sitting in Ireland waiting for a Tax Amnesty President to get elected so they can bring it back without paying taxes. Now that Donald's been elected Apple can bring back its 200 Billion.
Or consider it this way. Tax laws are such that it is CHEAPER TO BORROW MONEY than to repatriate the cash.
Borrowing billions of dollars at 5% costs LESS than bringing in a billion dollars.
That's why they want the tax holiday. The real debate though is whether or not a tax holiday will bring benefit to the US - will Apple and others be using the new-found cash to spend inside the US or just horde it?
Door lock doesn't make any difference if the car is in water. You cannot open the door against the water pressure, locked or not.
That's why, if you're in a car that falls into water it's essential that you open the windows before the electrics short out
No, it's essential to open the window before water pressure holds the window shut (the same that holds the door shut). It doesn't matter if it's electric or manual - once water reaches the window, if you don't open it, you're not opening it. Doesn't matter that the electrics don't short out - water pressure alone will hold the windows shut.
Folks, we live in an age where programmers declare integers that are going to count from 1...10 as LONG INTEGERS, eating 8 bytes of RAM, where only 1 byte is needed.
Well, does it matter? On a modern system, RAM is allocated in chunks of 4kiB in most architectures. Your variable is going to be either on the stack or BSS section, and really, unless you're really using that page up, using 1 byte or 8 bytes is going to matter not at all because you're really using 4096 bytes and if you're not using it all, it makes zilch of a difference. Loading 1 byte of 8 bytes from RAM to registers still causes a cache line of bytes to be read (16 bytes on a lot of architectures) and fitted into a while 8-byte wide register in the end.
Depending on your needs, using a 64-bit variable to hold 4 bits of data may be more efficient if using 1 byte access causes significant slowdowns because of misalignment.
Hell, the most constrained I've been was using an ARM microcnotroller. It's quite a strange feeling working with 8K of RAM and 16k of flash and yet having full 32-bit pointers and integers
(1) You're getting on a 6am flight, so you're going through security at 5am and haven't had a cup of coffee yet because the TSA won't allow you to carry one. So you're just in a "haze."
(2) You have small children or are accompanying a person who can't take care of their own stuff for some reason, so you're juggling a huge number of bins and bags and trying not to forget anything, while also trying not to hold up the line.
For (1), you realize you should be at the airport around 2 hours ahead of the flight (domestic) or 3 hours ahead (international) to make time. If you need a coffee to be awake, you make sure you get one before reaching the airport. Yes, it this means a 6AM flight has you waking up at 2AM or so so you can get your coffee, shower, check out, taxi, etc and make it to the airport at 4AM. If you can't do it, book a later flight. International flights would basically mean midnight wakeup.
For (2), you hold up the line. No matter what they say, you take your time getting y ourself sorted. Now, you move to the end of the ramp and onto the tables if you can, but you sort yourself out and make sure all those bins are empty before putting them back.
Which brings me to my #1 pet peeve. Why don't they have longer ramps both before and after security? A lot of the places, you have to be the next in line for the scanner before you can pick up a tote and start unpacking your laptop and tablet and all the other stuff, which holds up the line. Let 4-5 people in line get their totes and start getting themselves sorted out so by the time they reach the head of the line they're all ready.
Likewise, have long ramps so lots of people can pack themselves up after scanning. What holds up the security line is not the scanning, it's all the preparation you have to do. So let people do it while they wait in line rather than force a mad scramble. Hell, the line would probably move faster too.
Question 1: Why would anyone who thought that they might not be paying all their US taxes use an exchange based in the USA? Is it something to do with needing to convert the Bitcoins to Dollars so that you can actually spend them?
Question 2: Given that one of the main selling points of Bitcoin is anonymity, why would someone operating an exchange keep any but the barest records? I appreciate that they can't destroy the information now they have been asked for it, but I am trying to grasp why they would put themselves at risk of being in that position by retaining it in the first place? Flag as Inappropriate
Easy, Coinbase is one of the least sketchiest exchanges around. Given the amount of personal information required (see below) you generally want one that won't go bankrupt overnight (like a certain Magic the Gathering Online Exchange).
Also, they are one of the easier ones to use.
As for your second question - well, you need quite a bit of personal information - at least a name and address if you want to be able to pay someone, banking information if you want to electronically transfer funds. And I believe you can even use debit to buy bitcoins, which requires a bit more information to ensure it isn't fraudulent.
A company produced and sold a product that a considerable number of those who purchased it found to be substantially different to what they thought they were buying. Maybe some jumped on the bandwagon. Maybe some fooled themselves. That happens with a lot of games. This was on a different scale.
The problem is, the only thing they can go after is what is represented and what is actually available.
They were told the Steam Store Page of the game was misleading.
Chance are, it wasn't - it represents the game as it exists now, give that's what was sold.
But everyone is butthurt over the fact that the game wasn't as it was hyped to be over the past 3 years. But guess what? None of that counts because the game wasn't for sale then.
And that's the real thing - what was hyped and what is actually offered for sale can differ. If your must-have feature was hyped 2 years ago and isn't listed on the steam page, guess what? It means the game doesn't have your feature, and there's no fault in its omission because its sales page lacks any representation of it.
At best maybe you can go after the bullshots, but even then that can be a stretch unless it's obvious you're using pre-rendered FMVs for your screenshots instead of actual gameplay.
I really can't see EVs catching on. Early car pioneers carried cans of spare fuel but you can't do that with a pure EV. And 30 mins to charge? And how long is the queue for the charge point even if you manage to find one? I've read reports of UK public chargers being unreliable.
EVs are probably a good thing but range anxiety will take a lot of overcoming.
Tesla owners seem pretty happy going cross country. 20 minutes to 80% isn't that bad when you realize two things - a rest stop takes around 20 minutes anyways (more if you have kids/pets). And Tesla often situates the charging stations around locations where people spend a little time anyways so often park for much longer than 20 minutes.
Long range EVs suit a lot of typical use cases. The only ones they don't are those marathoners who will do a 20+ hour car trip driving straight through only stopping for gas. Most other people typically run into bladder limits or muscle fatigue that require them to stop and stretch out. 200 miles is generally a good interval - around 3 hours or so.
if it didn't affect any servers or payment systems - and how would they know - why shutdown the payments systems?
sounds like they don't even know what was compromised, really, or what the workstations were for either.
Well, if you're under attack, you shut down everything to try to halt the attack. If the system is clean and shut down, it won't get infected. If it's infected, it won't spread.
So you shut it all down just as a precaution. Even if it compromised user data, if the system is off, that user data is staying on the system. Given it looks like it might have gotten into critical systems, this was probably the best course of action to prevent the spread.
Now, the interesting thing is - they had backups and have actually restored the critical systems from backups, which apparently pissed off the group to no end - they expected them to pay the $70K and apparently the messaging is getting more and more threatening as they bring up systems from backup. They actually are threatening to release the data, but no idea if it's a bluff or not.
I'm guessing the user workstations will just be reimaged and everything else restored, with a mandatory change in system passwords.
The hackers might have simply gotten too greedy - and attacked a target who not only not had the money to pay, but probably had enough skill and resources to do proper backups and thus it was cheaper to not pay and do the disaster plan than to pay. Even the worst attacks were only asking $20K or so which would shift the balance to "just pay it as it's going to cost more to recover it" to asking $70k which shifts the equation to "screw it, we're starting over as it's cheaper even if we have to give people free rides"
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That's because tech is no longer an isolated part of society. In the past, about the most high-tech stuff people used was a TV or camera. These days, tech is ubiquitous and everywhere, and everyone's using things with technology embedded in it. No longer is using a computer an isolated domain of the "system operator" or "computer programmer". The computer is everywhere in various forms and used by everyone.
Tech doesn't exist in isolation anymore - it's a part of the wider world and really, the big reason why /. survives is it is not pure tech, but it also covers the social implications of tech. How we interact with technology is at least as important as the tech itself. And yes, the social aspects of it not only include social networking, but also government spying and surveillance, business surveillance and data gathering.
Technology is a part of everyday life and no longer can you consider it alone, but it has to be considered in the wider social and political context of everyday life. People talk about the elections because they affect how we use technology (depending on who's in charge and their platform). People talk about spying the same way. Those aren't tech articles because they only involve using it, not talking about it. But they are important because our lives and technology are highly intertwined.
Therein lies the rub. What is "the same way"? Browsing the web can be tricky - some websites are nice and static and use little CPU and give plenty of battery life. Other websites have videos and sound and take more CPU and reduce the time. So "browsing the web" isn't the same way - I may go to YouTube all of a sudden and the battery life will have to drop.
And that's the issue - there's no point telling the user they have 5 hours of battery life because they'll think they have ... 5 hours of battery life. Then they launch Netflix and watch a 2 hour movie, and expect 3 hours of battery life left, but get awfully surprised when they're down to 1 hour or less.
Time remaining works well for relatively constant loads - a camcorder recording video can display time remaining when recording because it's all it's going to do. If it says you can record for 2 hours, then it will last two hours regardless of what you're filming. It won't suddenly drop to 1 hour because a kid comes into frame and recording cuteness takes more power.
This is standard in any competitive market - the competitors ALWAYS purchase and evaluate their competitor's products. Ford, GM and Chevy all buy each other's cars and trucks to evaluate and figure out what works, what doesn't work, what can be improved and that feedback goes into next year's model. Microsoft and other companies all buy Apple's products (and Apple probably has a huge collection of Android phones and PCs) for the same reason.
Everyone is constantly evaluating everyone else's product. And it's perfectly legal - if it's available for sale, one of the first customers in the lineup will be your competitor purchasing it.
There's a class of mutual funds you can buy at any financial institution called "ethical funds". These funds basically try to stay away from environment-harming or social harming companies, thus will not invest in oil and cigarette companies, for example. They will traditionally have lower returns than a traditional fund in the same category because well, face it, oil and tobacco make a lot of money.
These funds are surprisingly popular, because people know they get lower returns, but on the flip side, know they aren't investing in companies that pollute or earn money off other people suffering. And for them, earning money is but one part of the whole story - earning a dollar is important, but is not earning it by polluting or by human suffering.
Of course, not everyone is out to make a dollar by hook or by crook - some care about how that money was made
Except Amazon paid for the production of Grand Tour. They own the product, and they own the distribution rights.
Netflix's content they produce is available worldwide the same way - it's content Netflix produced and paid for and thus own all the rights to.
If it's third party content, yes you're correct, but this is first party content.
And the movie studios farmed out distribution to various exclusive distributors around the world - those distributors paid a lot of money for exclusivity. They know they could offer worldwide rights, but then the distributors will offer a lot less money - would you pay $1M for exclusive distribution of a movie? How much would you pay if you knew Netflix will have it too (i.e., non-exlcusive?). Probably a lot less. And the difference is big enough that geographic separation still exists. Perhaps if Netflix decided to be a big man and pay for world wide exclusivity...
Actually, most places where you can get your glasses are actually owned by the same conglomerate. Even your optometrist's place is probably co-managed by the company.
The "designer" frames may have a name attached, but they really only cost a few dollars to make (even the license fee is only a few bucks). And the lenses? Well, they're mass-produced products, so they too cost very little to make. Even if they're the high quality lenses used in the most expensive camera lenses, as they are a single element, they're stupidly cheap (multi-element lenses are harder to make and have closer tolerances).
And plastic lenses are even cheaper - and they're so good we're at diffraction limit with them.
CSR was acquired by Qualcomm a little while ago. So Qualcomm has the chips, yes. And yes, Qualcomm showed off aptX HD earlier this year at CES. Of course, Qualcomm is using this to promote their SoCs which will come with aptX HD as a differentiator.
So Apple may have tried to negotiate licensing terms with Qualcomm and couldn't come to an agreement or an agreement for the chips. Especially since Apple started mixing Qualcomm and Intel chipsets for the cellular connectivity.
35 before North American release (rest of world got it around 2 weeks prior).
By the time the CPSC got involved, it rose to 100 cases (a month later).
Then Samsung discovered the replacements were bad, too, with about 120 reports. Note the latter numbers are more US centric now and not worldwide figures.
There are plenty of "one-button" games that are better than Flappy Bird.
Jetpack Joyride is one of them, as is the recently updated Tiny Wings (after a couple of years ...).
Both of which I paid the 99 cents for because they were highly enjoyable and fun. And yes, I bought Jetpack Joyride before it became free. And it still remains one of the better Freemium games where payment is not required at all (except for a couple of specific characters). But you don't need to pay to win and grinding to get the stuff isn't too bad either.
You have to bring a separate civil suit against the government for compensation. It's the whole criminal vs. civil trial thing - a criminal trial is one the state brings to you with you being free (not guilty) or jailed (guilty). A civil trial outcome is usually just monetary to make whole.
As we believe jailing an innocent is very bad, that's why a criminal trial standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" whereas a civil trial is either "preponderance of evidence" or "reasonable belief" (basically who made the more convincing argument)
But it's perfectly fine to bring a civil trial to get damages caused by a criminal trial. It's how OJ Simpson was both guilty and not-guilty.
Check out the UBNT UniFi cameras. They can work standalone, but work much better when you connect them to their DVR software (which runs on Java, so works on Linux, Windows, OS X ,etc). Better yet, all you use to view and configure it is... a web browser.
So the camera is the camera, and you can access its IP directly, but you can have your Pi run the DVR software and then extends it into a much more powerful surveillance system.
Problem is, Sony is reverting back to their previous ways.
Sony "lost" the previous generation which turned them into a leaner, meaner competitor this time around. Just like how Microsoft "won" and became complacent. Now that the roles have switched, Microsoft's offering has gotten better, while Sony's starting to rest on their laurels. (In fact, The xbone has begun outselling the ps4).
One of the biggest things was the incremental improvement called the PS4 Pro - yes 4K is a thing, but they then omit a 4K UHD drive (present in the much cheaper Xbone S units). Given how aggressive the movie studios are about pushing UHD, it's got really strong sales. (And the Zbone S is considered to be the reason why the standalone UHD players have plummeted from $500 on release early this year to $200 or so now given Microsoft's aggressive pricing).
Hell, PS Plus games have gotten pretty shitty the past year, while Xbox Games with Gold have tended to be fairly decent. PS Plus is really becoming a joke - it used to offer really good stuff, now it's really more of an afterthought. Heck, the PS Plus section has gone down the tubes.
That, and the fact the price has gone up ...
They aren't. People who skip ads simply are marked as not watching the ad. Not watching the ad reduces a programs "C" rating, which means the program's ad rates go down (less eyeballs == less money). Programming budget is a fraction of the ad money it makes so it has to adapt.
Ratings you see and hear on the news about a program are one of three - SD (same day), SD+3 (Same Day + 3 days later) or SD+7. These are basically the program and ad ratings averaged through the entire program. But TV networks don't care for these numbers - eyeballs watching programming is not considered important. So instead, they pay for the C numbers, also available in same day, +3 and +7 days. This is the ratings minus program ratings - so they simply take the ratings during the commercial breaks.
So if you don't watch the commercials, you don't contribute to the C numbers. Studios, TV networks and everyone else airing ad-paid programming use the C numbers to determine the show's budget, and whether it will see any more showings, whether it gets another season, and what timeslot it will get. So DVR users, downloaders, etc, they simply aren't counted in the end.
It's something to remember when your favorite show gets cancelled. Just because millions watch it, if most of them are downloads and very few are ad driven, the practical audience may be in the hundreds of thousands.
That's why DVR users aren't thieves - in the end, the programming they like gets cancelled, so in the end they just hurt themselves in the long run.
Well, Apple still has a handicap that's self-imposed - they may be able to do AI research, but they can't get at the data sets they need. Amazon and Google have no problems using information gathered for other purposes in furthering their AI products. Heck, Google even enabled full sharing of information among all of Alphabet's companies so your "OK Google" responses can now include all the webpages you visited with advertising. Or that you blocked DoubleClick's popups.
Apple prohibits that - information gathered for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose. So if you want to try to use Apple Maps location and search data for Siri, that's not allowed. You have to guess based on the current location of the user, because location searches are not allowed to be part of Siri's data set as they are covered under different privacy policies.
Apple can try to hire the best, but they'll need to start raping user data if they want to try to catch up with Google.
It's also getting rather silly, because the phones involved are no longer for sale, Samsung no longer uses the version of TouchWiz that looks like the iPhone (courtesy of Google and others that have made the Android UI more standardized across Android devices, so working like an iPhone makes things feel odd). I mean, even the phones themselves are probably sitting in drawers and landfills by now (Samsung Galaxy S2, anyone? I think that was the LATEST phone involved).
In the end, it will probably all end up for naught - though there may be regulatory changes for the worst - if a patent lawsuit takes years to resolve, by the time it is resolved, the infringement is no longer valid because the products are long obsolete. This may mean the way around it is to simply a war on attrition - violate the patent now, then just argue and argue until the whole issue is moot.
Heck, I think even the patent behind it has expired by now - (it's a design patent, which only have a short 5 year lifespan).
Actually, it's because of monopsony. (Monopsony is the lesser-known opposite of monopoly. In a monopoly, there is one supplier that every customer has to buy from. In a monopsony, there are many suppliers, but one customer who will buy it. It's rarer, but it has happened before.
Most well known would be iTunes. The music industry feared Apple because they were the top dog in digital music sales. Apple enforced 99 cents per track (and I think $9.99 per album) regardless, the 30/70 split, etc. There was no other music store that could compete.
That is, until they were forced to swallow a bitter pill and that was DRM-free, which allowed Amazon to chip away at the monopsony and force Apple to offer flexible pricing (69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29) and better terms (to the record labels).
Movie and TV studios took note, and vowed they would never be controlled like that so they are ensuring that no one service will become dominant and be forced to acquiesce to whatever terms they provide.
In the end, it's why Netflix gets the older stuff (unlimited streaming, basically for a very low per-stream fee which is basically bonus cash), Hulu and Amazon get first cut, CinemaNow and others get early releases, etc.
Or consider it this way. Tax laws are such that it is CHEAPER TO BORROW MONEY than to repatriate the cash.
Borrowing billions of dollars at 5% costs LESS than bringing in a billion dollars.
That's why they want the tax holiday. The real debate though is whether or not a tax holiday will bring benefit to the US - will Apple and others be using the new-found cash to spend inside the US or just horde it?
Making America Great! No More American's in the "Internet Slow Lane"!*
* - Pesky FCC demanding 25Mbps. We'll make it so 1Mbps is fast, thus everyone with 1Mbps or better is in the "fast lane"! #FIrst100Days
(Yes, this post is sarcasm, and completely made up)
No, it's essential to open the window before water pressure holds the window shut (the same that holds the door shut). It doesn't matter if it's electric or manual - once water reaches the window, if you don't open it, you're not opening it. Doesn't matter that the electrics don't short out - water pressure alone will hold the windows shut.
Well, does it matter? On a modern system, RAM is allocated in chunks of 4kiB in most architectures. Your variable is going to be either on the stack or BSS section, and really, unless you're really using that page up, using 1 byte or 8 bytes is going to matter not at all because you're really using 4096 bytes and if you're not using it all, it makes zilch of a difference. Loading 1 byte of 8 bytes from RAM to registers still causes a cache line of bytes to be read (16 bytes on a lot of architectures) and fitted into a while 8-byte wide register in the end.
Depending on your needs, using a 64-bit variable to hold 4 bits of data may be more efficient if using 1 byte access causes significant slowdowns because of misalignment.
Hell, the most constrained I've been was using an ARM microcnotroller. It's quite a strange feeling working with 8K of RAM and 16k of flash and yet having full 32-bit pointers and integers
For (1), you realize you should be at the airport around 2 hours ahead of the flight (domestic) or 3 hours ahead (international) to make time. If you need a coffee to be awake, you make sure you get one before reaching the airport. Yes, it this means a 6AM flight has you waking up at 2AM or so so you can get your coffee, shower, check out, taxi, etc and make it to the airport at 4AM. If you can't do it, book a later flight. International flights would basically mean midnight wakeup.
For (2), you hold up the line. No matter what they say, you take your time getting y ourself sorted. Now, you move to the end of the ramp and onto the tables if you can, but you sort yourself out and make sure all those bins are empty before putting them back.
Which brings me to my #1 pet peeve. Why don't they have longer ramps both before and after security? A lot of the places, you have to be the next in line for the scanner before you can pick up a tote and start unpacking your laptop and tablet and all the other stuff, which holds up the line. Let 4-5 people in line get their totes and start getting themselves sorted out so by the time they reach the head of the line they're all ready.
Likewise, have long ramps so lots of people can pack themselves up after scanning. What holds up the security line is not the scanning, it's all the preparation you have to do. So let people do it while they wait in line rather than force a mad scramble. Hell, the line would probably move faster too.
Easy, Coinbase is one of the least sketchiest exchanges around. Given the amount of personal information required (see below) you generally want one that won't go bankrupt overnight (like a certain Magic the Gathering Online Exchange).
Also, they are one of the easier ones to use.
As for your second question - well, you need quite a bit of personal information - at least a name and address if you want to be able to pay someone, banking information if you want to electronically transfer funds. And I believe you can even use debit to buy bitcoins, which requires a bit more information to ensure it isn't fraudulent.
The problem is, the only thing they can go after is what is represented and what is actually available.
They were told the Steam Store Page of the game was misleading.
Chance are, it wasn't - it represents the game as it exists now, give that's what was sold.
But everyone is butthurt over the fact that the game wasn't as it was hyped to be over the past 3 years. But guess what? None of that counts because the game wasn't for sale then.
And that's the real thing - what was hyped and what is actually offered for sale can differ. If your must-have feature was hyped 2 years ago and isn't listed on the steam page, guess what? It means the game doesn't have your feature, and there's no fault in its omission because its sales page lacks any representation of it.
At best maybe you can go after the bullshots, but even then that can be a stretch unless it's obvious you're using pre-rendered FMVs for your screenshots instead of actual gameplay.
Tesla owners seem pretty happy going cross country. 20 minutes to 80% isn't that bad when you realize two things - a rest stop takes around 20 minutes anyways (more if you have kids/pets). And Tesla often situates the charging stations around locations where people spend a little time anyways so often park for much longer than 20 minutes.
Long range EVs suit a lot of typical use cases. The only ones they don't are those marathoners who will do a 20+ hour car trip driving straight through only stopping for gas. Most other people typically run into bladder limits or muscle fatigue that require them to stop and stretch out. 200 miles is generally a good interval - around 3 hours or so.
Well, if you're under attack, you shut down everything to try to halt the attack. If the system is clean and shut down, it won't get infected. If it's infected, it won't spread.
So you shut it all down just as a precaution. Even if it compromised user data, if the system is off, that user data is staying on the system. Given it looks like it might have gotten into critical systems, this was probably the best course of action to prevent the spread.
Now, the interesting thing is - they had backups and have actually restored the critical systems from backups, which apparently pissed off the group to no end - they expected them to pay the $70K and apparently the messaging is getting more and more threatening as they bring up systems from backup. They actually are threatening to release the data, but no idea if it's a bluff or not.
I'm guessing the user workstations will just be reimaged and everything else restored, with a mandatory change in system passwords.
The hackers might have simply gotten too greedy - and attacked a target who not only not had the money to pay, but probably had enough skill and resources to do proper backups and thus it was cheaper to not pay and do the disaster plan than to pay. Even the worst attacks were only asking $20K or so which would shift the balance to "just pay it as it's going to cost more to recover it" to asking $70k which shifts the equation to "screw it, we're starting over as it's cheaper even if we have to give people free rides"