I think something like this only happens because people still cannot understand how much of their own stuff China manufactures.
I stlil see in threads like this a whole lot of racism and ignorance tied to a complete misunderstanding of the role China plays in the international market.
The relationship between US and China is of extreme dependancy, and imposing tariffs will only make both sides crash. This isn't a joke.
Most people who dismiss the importance of this trade think about iPhones, cheap badly made clones, about big finished products like cars, and about stuff that they might not be so dependant of, without realizing the hole is much deeper and wider than they might think.
It's not only about finished products - it's about industrial tools, specialized technology, parts of all sorts, components, stuff that you'll find inside almost everything your life depends on. Even for stuff that has the made in USA label, if it's an electronic part, this mostly means it was assembled in the US. Chances are, there are still components in there that were made in China. There is an estabilished limit of how much of the product was actually completely made in the country stated, and it's not 100%. Even worse, China holds dominance of a whole bunch of raw materials. There is no sector of the economy that will be left intact if a wide ranging tariff is imposed. When chinese labor isn't directly involved with production of whatever you are thinking about, it indirectly is - apart perhaps from few raw materials and base stuff. Even for basic things like food production it's likely that some machine with parts made in China is involved in the process. People have no clue.
If US were to completely cease commercial relationships with China, China would end up broken, no questions about it. The country would have to cut down the vast majority of production, re-route it to European, Latin american and Asian countries, and do a whole lot of restructuring. Companies would relocate, tons of lives and jobs would be lost, it'd be a huge step back. They'd be losing their biggest clients by far, and intellectual owners of several products made there. It could cause the country to turn into something closer to Africa, at least vast regions of it with tiny pockets of modern civilization.
But the US would find itself back into the middle ages. US would have to go after relationships with other cheap(er) labor countries... Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, India and whatnot. And even if they could keep relationships with all these countries - since a whole lot of them are also dependant on China, it would never get near to closing the gap of current supply and demand chain. Not even if current lawyers, doctors, celebrities, CEOs and whatnot started working in factory floors, which is a bit unlikely.
There is a reason why China is basically the factory of the world, and this has to do with cheap labor, but specially about manufacturing capacity. Lots of people don't seem to realize this, but a whole ton of advancements in tech on all areas are also being developed in China these days.
I don't know what Trump will really do regarding China, but it might be a good lesson for people who undererstimate China's role in the worldwide market. Nowadays, it's as important if not way more important than the US. I imagine that tons of big companies in the world would first severe ties with US rather than China, given the choice... because no company would want that. But you'd have to think about it... is it more work to find places to build your stuff relatively cheap and with a huge output capacity, or to find people willing to buy it?
It's a harsh reality no one wants to hear or admit. Those horrible conditions we had back in the industrial revolution never really went away. Welfare, cushy jobs, family planning, and all that sort of stuff happened because all the nasty parts of the industrial revolution era were simply relocated overseas. The reason why people have access to so ma
Well, at least they seem to be putting more effort into it than Microsoft did for mobile.:P We really don't need more proprietary competing platforms in the wearable, mobile and IoT market. I'd be all for Tizen if it was open source, but at this point it just sounds to me like the horrible crap software they put on smart tvs. They are all fast outdated, after developers put out the first stable version they never update the software anymore, and it's a horrible experience in comparison to almost anything else in the market.
I don't think Android is the solution for everything, but until we have more open source OSs for these devices (Linux is not catching up), I'd just rather have Android everywhere. Android TV, Android smartwatches, and the like.
In the very grand scheme of things, autonomous driving technology has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
The idea is that while autonomous driving can advance, become better and actually learn from past experience... human drivers cannot.
Things have been getting slightly better in recent years, but if you take overall statistics ranging from the 70s or 80s 'till today, the number is pretty constant. I mean, the number of accidents, and the number of deaths in crashes. Too many people die every year in car crashes, and a whole lot of them comes from problems we are tired of knowing about. Driving under the influence, speeding, not paying attention to road signs, underestimating the severity of handling a x tons metal box at high speeds. Ramping up fines, making it harder to get a license, educational efforts, changes in law, among several other measures might have helped a bit, but not enough. And there doesn't seem to be much better solutions for human drivers.
Autonomous driving has the potential to drastically reduce numbers when it eliminates the human factor. There will always be crashes, accidents will still happen, and I don't think autonomous driving can ever reach a point of perfection... but if done right, it could eliminate a whole lot of erratic and problematic behavior behind wheels.
But this is about the overall technology, not about Tesla in particular. It's a huge and drastic change, and if I'm honest about it, I think Tesla is rushing things out, not taking lots of stuff in consideration, and turning the whole thing into hype and selling point - with big risks of making it a step back instead. It doesn't take many car crashes while using the autonomous thing for people to start avoiding the technology altogether.
Tesla is selling it as if they had the complete solution already, but it's really the first steps into the technology, which is a really questionable strategy. It's skipping ahead using consumers as testers, quality assurance and research and development, instead of doing it like other manufacturers are doing it - in controlled environments, by employees.
So no, if a Tesla car crashes and kills the driver because the technology isn't working as it should, it's their responsibility. Nothing balances out. Saving the lives of others won't bring back the lives of those who were killed, it won't fix things for the families of those who were lost, and it's no excuse for putting out a technology prematurely. But the technology itself is worth investing and worth insisting on.
Reza Rahman is just right on this one. Oracle doesn't get to flail around and change what open source is just because they want to. Comes as a very weird statement to talk about Java being open source when Oracle keeps insisting on the lawsuit against Google/Android for copyright violations of the Java API. If Java really is open source, a lawsuit based on copyright violations of it's API doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even more when the original owners were and still are ok with it, the whole thing becoming an issue only after Oracle purchased it.
USB Type-C could've been awesome... a single standard to unify all platforms, eliminating version differences and stopping manufacturers from juicing up and modifying stuff to make their devices work better or something.
I just cannot understand how, after all bad examples that showed up with regular USB, the USB implementers forum didn't make it a hard standard. Or at least one with a handful of categories to absolutely be followed for approval.
Instead of solving previous problems, USB Type C made problems even worse. USB Type C is less reliable than regular USB, it has way more compatibility issues, and with the extra juice it can also lead to a single badly made cable absolutely destroying both devices connected to it.
You now have USB Type C hubs that will work in some devices while not working in others, you have cables that will work in some devices while destroying others, you have a horribly wide range of capabilities that may or may not work on your USB Type-C device depending on how it was implemented, and there is absolutely no way for the consumer to tell. It's a horrorshow.
I get it that this is mostly manufacturer's fault for not following the standard correctly, but there must be some way of making it certifiable without making it proprietary.
Sure, it's like hallucinations of self aggrandizement fueled by moronic tech upstart CEOs who apparently knows shit about politics and governing will magically solve all the problems that divided the US in this election and will make for a better world tomorrow for all american citizens and the rest of the world.
Look, I understand people are frustrated with Trump being elected. Worse, there are democrats and republicans frustrated by it... we don't even have a clear party line of supporters and non-supporters anymore.
But dividing the country further is just exactly the worst possible choice, and it can only come from megalomanic sociopath CEOs like this guy, who clearly thinks his state is superior (more like he is superior to everyone else of course) just because it aligned with his own ideology or political sense in a democratic election with two candidates that clearly had their own problems.
Sorry if it hurts your sensibilities, but if Trump being elected is to be seen as a bad thing, it's as much fault of it's supporters as it is the fault of Hillary supporters or Trump haters. You haven't done enough, Hillary couldn't fight off doubts and accusations, and this is just the end result. If you are going to cry and go running back to your house everytime a defeat like this happens, there is no future for a seceded California. No one would take a state like that seriously. And it's not only about the rest of the US that will look upon you like spoiled kids, it's also about the rest of the world.
The best people who absolutely hate Trump can do right now is monitor his actions and the government from now on, and make sure it stays in line. You wanna see a scenario even worse than it already is, you just secede your state and wait for the next major crisis... specially with stuff like Hyperloop and Uber that are relatively new and dependant on international relationships. I'd like to see Hyperloop failing and not going anywhere just to see what this moron would do. Things will go down hard and fast, and coming back begging to be a part of the rest of the US won't look good afterwards.
It just seems that every country apparently has to have their own share of idiots like this guy. Here in Brazil it's people from Southern states blaming all the problems of the country on northern states, as if most of the corruption schemes that are currently plaguing the country didn't originate in southern states. Man the f*ck up, admit that your country voted for the wrong guy if that's what you believe, and work for it not to affect the country too much, and do better on the next election.
If you can't live in a country where people have different opinions than yours, and you can't be bothered to fight the government back when it decides to pass something you don't think is fair, go live in a cave by yourself in some isolated island. You'll do both yourself and society a favor.
Well, of course the MacBoook Pro "outsold" all other laptops this year... it's the only line of laptops with MacOS that was updated after an extremely long time, versus a huge number of options that are constantly being updated with Windows 7,8,10 or any flavor of Linux. It'll obviously outsell any other single brand as long as it keeps it's ecosystem enclosed into a walled garden giving anything from a single option to a handful for desperate users needing an upgrade.
Wanna get a new Windows 10 laptop? Well, here's a huge choice of options you have to fit whatever needs you have, coming out every single month, with all sorts of prices and specs, from a huge list of brands you can choose whichever is more reliable for you.
Wanna get a new MacBook? Well, I guess Apple could perhaps release a new revision to replace it's 4 year old Macbook Pro, I'm not sure how much better it'll be since the company has been giving a shit about professional customers anymore, with specs that could be kinda underpowered and outdated, but it's still guaranteed to be Apple priced. It`s your only option though, so you better kneel down and pray to our lord Jobs.
People who are invested, used to, like and/or have the money to be into the Apple ecosystem will buy a new MacBook Pro - if only for the hardware upgrade and because they have no other option. Not everyone hated the lack of ports, but even those who did just have no other option.
Nothing new under the sun. MacOS is still around the 10% mark which it has been keeping for around 2 to 3 years now, with different versions of Windows going somewhere between 60% to 80% when added up. There's the plain hard truth of this game: the whole OS preference has been pretty much fixed for quite a while now. And despite Microsoft making some very horrible decisions for Windows 10, I also don't see much incentive for people to go MacOS either.
There is no "double standard" you fucktard. When you sign up to Google, Facebook and others, you know what sort of data you are sharing and that they'll be leveraging that to make the service profitable. Those services are driven by ad revenue, so it's clear that being free of charge in direct monetary sense, they'll have to do something to continue providing it. And even then, neither Facebook nor Google are free of scrutiny and complaints on sharing user data. Some of the biggest scandals both companies were involved with had something to do with sharing too much user information.
We already have to pay absurd prices monthly to get telcos mostly horrible service, and now you want to surreptiously sell client data outside contractual obligations to turn even more of a profit? Go f*ck yourself. How about offering free unlimited plans for your clients as long as they are willing to share anonymized data? That would be on par with Google and Facebook.
I wasn't on Slashdot when all the hyperloop craze started and died, so I guess I'll just post the question I posted at multiple blogs and communities back at the time: Why are people so hyped about this? Why? What's the point?
The whole thing is unpractical, unproven, dependant on technology that does not exist, and it's barely bettter at some aspects to existing technology while being so incredibly worse in several other aspects that I don't even know how this whole thing even started and didn't end up as a Simpson's monorail joke to be long forgotten.
And tech blogs and magazines keep bringing this up every now and then. It was completely ridiculous the level of hype for this on blogs like Gizmodo and several big tech publications. Tech reporters specially seem so fascinated by the whole ridiculous idea that I always feel that I must me missing something. But up to this point, no one explained it to me, so there you go.
For the original hyperloop concept you'd need a near vacuum tube running all of it's extention as well as some braking mechanism that has not been divised just yet, closer to how pneumatic tubes for mail worked in the past. The project has now been adapted to use maglev technology (by some of the companies developing it), but the near vacuum tube is still in research.
The tech can only work in an efficient way to traverse very long stretches of flat land without any interruptions. You need to reach theoretical top speeds for it to make sense over other ideas.
In almost all proposed scenarios I've seen to date it just makes way more sense to just adopt any of the currently available maglev train technology... japanese, chinese, european, doesn't matter. The tech is ready, it works well, it's efficient and proven. So, why the heck are so many people putting money and attention to research into something that even at the best scenario, will have several disadvantages over Maglev, and will be far more limited than it? Wouldn't it be far better to use all this money to fund the construction of a maglev rail in the US or wherever?
I've heard all sorts of justifications so far, but none of them made any sense to me just yet.
Oh, for maglev you need to have uninterruptible flat land which generates lots of land disputes and whatnot. How the f* is hyperloop any better? It also needs tracks just the same, even more, it needs tracks that have to be powered in regular intervals to keep the semi-vacuum state, and the tracks have to be enclosed. It's far worse than MagLev. From the projects I've seen so far, it's a transparent vacuum tube suspended by concrete towers that generates semi-vacuum somehow... wind power with windmills, or solar power, both highly unlikely. It cannot possibly be cheaper to build a suspended transparent robust vacuum tube over concrete pilons in comparison to plain maglev tracks over land. Unless aliens do it. I guess not having to build train stations cheapens the deal, but obviously, this is a flaw, not an advantage. A maglev train that goes from point A to point B without stops would still be cheaper.
It could get faster than MagLev. Sure, this is theoretical, but also at the huge disadvantage of not being able to have several stops, and being limited to the size of whatever diameter the tubes will have. And then there's the matter of acceleration and desceleration. If you are using maglev tracks anyways for hyperloop, it'll just be the same. If it's a vacuum tube alone, it'd depend on the braking system, but my guess would be that you'd still need a good distant to both accelerate and descelerate in a way that is comfortable for people, which kinda defeats the purpose.
It could be great for cargo! Still doesn't make sense. MagLev would probably also be better for cargo, being able to make stops and not being limited to an enclosed space.
I just.... I just don't know. I can imagine there is some advantage to it, but not enough to justify adopting any other readily available technology.
This is the sort of thing that happens when a company that had malware and rootkits on it's BIOS reported multiple times don't get enough of a financial backlash to get a hint. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/n...
Protip guys: DON'T BUY STUFF FROM LENOVO. Just don't buy. It's simple. Lenovo is not an option, period.
They couldn't care less about clients protests, as long as they keep selling their crap filled laptops. If you buy stuff from them, you'll get what you deserve.
There have been enough warnings already. This here is a drop in the bucket.
This is pretty awesome, and something I wish I could do.... just far too complex and involved for me.
I just kinda gave up, have plans to use an offline Android tablet, but for online stuff falling back to laptops with something like Qubes, Tails and whatnot.
I know there are some alternatives out there, but they are usually either very expensive or hard to get, and you end up in the same situation where you have to trust the guys who did it (stuff like Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet, Copperhead OS, BlackPhone 2).
Well, as long as those drones will be filled with gunpowder in them and explode into the night, then I guess it could be done. A drone light show, no matter how advanced and interesting it might be, will never replace fireworks. It's just a different category of attraction.
You could put a million of drones with very strong led lights in them, make them dance around, build some interesting images, formations and whatnot... it would be plenty awesome I guess. But fireworks are all about explosions, fire, the smell, power, crescendo, how fast and furious, kinda dangerous everything is.
I pitty the pets, I really do, but you just can't replace it. I could argue though that a drone light show could be used in some occasions where fireworks are not all that much required though.
You can hate Facebook and Zuckerberg all you want, but this particular idea won't do anyone favors... I mean, if something like this passes, next will be YouTube, Google in general, Reddit, Twitter, Steam, almost any other social network, forum, or virtual space where people gather to comment.
The problem here is not about hate speech, but about defining what exactly is an acceptable time frame for removing offending content on portals that have millions to billions of users. It's a technical limitation. No company is big enough or has enough money to hire an unimaginable number of people to keep a watchful eye towards all the content being published on the platform in a daily basis, and we all know that even modern AI automated systems have their own limitations. An attorney cannot demand that a company produces something out of nowhere that will solve such technical issues. But of course, these lawsuits usually comes from people who have zero understanding of how these things work.
Push an automated system too hard, you have protests like the one Facebook just faced with removal of the Napalm Girl image. I'm pretty sure they'd also have lawsuits thrown at them regarding freedom of speech and whatnot should they start removing any comment that fell in some category of hate speech.
And in the end, this solves nothing. People who use the internet to spread hate speech and harass others are still there. The solution, much in the same way, is to pursue those people and apply heavy penalties against them. Put laws in place that enable individuals to go against abusers and detractors, not try to put all the burden into the platforms itself. But oh, the justice system doesn't have enough people to work on that, and the police can't go after every case that happens. Yep. It goes both ways.
You see, even when Apple is taking a step back and recognizing a necessity for professionals, they still have to act like cocky condenscendent f*ckers that do not understand the needs for the category. Just further confirms what I see wrong with Apple these days.
There is nothing f*cking "legacy" about these connectors. The company is bonkers and delusional. Professionals don't need help making any transition, and Apple does not offer a professional solution for most of the connectors they eliminated. No one wants to make a transition to a more primitive time when every company had their own proprietary connectors. This is bullshit.
It's just absolutely crazy. Does Apple really think now that ports not approved by the company are automatically legacy? This god complex of them is what's going wrong in recent years. Not only they stopped caring about what professionals really need, now they think they can tell what professionals should need, even though they seem to have no idea of what professional works composes outside their own headquarters. How about taking a walk on the real world every now and then to see what's really happening around? No one cares if you think removing a headphone jack is a corageous move.
Yes, professional cameras still uses memory cards. And a whole bunch of them don't have good wireless connection, when they even have wireless at all. Yes, most clients and 3rd parties still deliver content to be used in production with external HDDs and pendrives. No, most peripherals are not using USB Type-C and we don't expect this to change fast, even more when the standard has so many conflicting configurations. Most equipment on the music production and audio side are still on regular USB.
The rest of PCs, electronics and professional gear overall - which composes the vast majority btw - will keep using universal standards. And those standards will keep improving. Professional work couldn't care less about what Apple thinks of ports, they'll be used as demanded.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having multiple different ports inside laptops with dedicated hardware to work with them. Close to even gaming laptops, with all their glaring looks and "look, I'm a gamer" designs, the Macbook Pro looks like a kid's toy.
Professionals needs ports to connect external drives, sd card readers to transfer content and backup from multiple devices, ethernet ports to transfer files fast and in a reliable way, graphics cards that are on the higher end, HDMI connectors because that's the type of connector they will find in any situation, expandable RAM for fast renders and multitasking among a host of other stuff. Outside very few businesses, there is no Apple-only workflow.
There's nothing Pro about the new Macbooks. It's ok for regular use, but in the vast majority of jobs involving content creation you will need multiple dongles to handle demand. Macbook Pros basically degraded into Ultrabook territory. Yes, they are still plenty fine for a huge category of users, but other than the core spec upgrade, I'm not seeing many benefits for professionals. They should just be honest about it and remove the Pro from the title altogether. These are nice all-rounder machines, but a severe downgrade in philosophy for people who intend to use these laptops for content creation.
Whatever happens, it's already a loss. If Brexit gets blocked, there will be protests and an image that the process wasn't democratic. Furthermore, it will be seen as kind of a spineless move... country basically threatened leaving EU only to fall back when it realized it was going to be too damaging. No matter how many people regretted making the choice, or not voting at all, it looks bad that after all the fuzz, things didn't go forward. On the other hand, if Brexit does happen... well, there has already been plenty of analysis on that.
The key thing is for this decision to come fast. The more time it's kept at a limbo, the more uncertainty it provokes.
The same excuse for removing the headphone jack, which will be the next sacrifice on the next Macbook Pro revision - mark my words.
Apple fans will do whatever they want, but the roadmap for the company is getting all common universal standards, making a proprietary version that works better with Apple products, and limiting all their hardware to those. TV without competing channels, proprietary wireless technology (it's already done for audio), and the list keeps growing.
I have no doubts that they'd design their own cameras, audio recorders, file formats, storage devices, and all sorts of electronics to lock people further in. Depending on Apple's next target, it could be limiting AirPort Express to Apple devices, locking up their implementation of USB Type-C to Apple devices, or a bunch of other things... they have all the cards, they play how they want.
The inconvenient and outdated excuse will always work because universal standards always have to sacrifice something in order to work across multiple brands being platform agnostic. The only reason why the new wireless audio standard from Apple can connect so easily to Apple products is just that: because it can only connect to Apple devices. Bluetooth has to go through pairing process because it needs to identify the platform it's connecting to.
I personally want no part in that shit. We've been there. Back a few decades ago, every cellphone had it's own proprietary connector. Every accessory was expensive, worked like crap, and could not talk to other brands. It was far more difficult to find a charger and a pair of headphones that would work with your particular brand of phone. Transfering files from your cellphone to a computer was a hellish process... you needed to install proprietary drivers and software, the whole thing worked like crap, and you never knew how much you could do. Kinda similar to iTunes or iCloud on Windows.
Yes, there are advantages to that type of approach, but there's a reason why universal standards exists, and people will soon be re-learning once again the problems of all these proprietary crap, and removal of choice from costumers to lock them further in a walled garden of sorts.
There a whole mix of stuff being talked about there, and one is not equal the other.
For instance, Google Pixel cannot be generalized to the overall Android experience, not by far. It's probably not even the 0.0001% of Android devices. The reality of Android as a whole is that it's extremely fragmented, and the absolute majority of it is not on Nougat, let alone being the same as Google Pixel.
As device encryption remains an optional step for most of these devices, most of them are not using it, so threat models be damned. Not to mention how the vast majority of Android devices uses all sorts of custom versions coming from all sorts of companies in all possible states of vulnerabilities and expected update dates. Even Windows is better than that. Android pretty much represents one of the worst possible fragmentation scenarios.
You have all sorts of cheap generic tablets that I'm almost certain comes from factory with included malware, vulnerabilities, rootkits and backdoors installed. This is serious. I tested a cheap generic tablet just a few months ago (Multilaser was the brand on top of it if I'm not mistaken, but you can find the exact same tablet with several other brand names) that had very suspicious stuff pre-installed. It was impossible to uninstall it, so I rooted the damn thing to do it. And then the device factory reseted itself when I managed to remove the offending apps, everytime.
In general, there's still far more chances of you finding an Android phone/tablet that is either completely open or easy to crack because it has an outdated system or has not been properly locked by it's owner, in comparison with iPhone in general.
And sure, Android has the advantage of being an open os versus the extremely closed iOS - the standard defense for open source software which I do understand. But hoping that this will somehow count as a huge security advantage for the future of Android is quite frankly naive and kinda stupid in itself, specially for cases like Android vs iOS.
The open nature of Android might allow for better scrutiny of it in some stances, but much more, it allows for all sorts of shady companies to make their own Android versions however they feel like doing it... and as more shady businesses adopt that strategy to spy and take advantage of less knowledgeable costumers, the more difficult it gets for a conscious community to take note of it.
As long as Apple keeps getting as much money as they do from regular users to the loyal fanbase, they can just spend that much more money to close security holes and whatnot. One company developing both software and hardware while keeping a stance on security and privacy also makes it much more reliable. Things would have to change quite drastically for Android to ever be as secure and private as iOS. It's just the reality of it.
You only have to think about it a bit more. Apple will always be able to push updates faster, they will always be able to implement security functions for most of their userbase in a timely manner (excluding those with devices that are too old), they are always better able to convince more users to buy their latest devices. Community wise, you will always have more reach... if one knowledgeable costumers finds a security hole, it'll affect almost the entire userbase, so it just makes far more sense for Apple to fix it. In grand scheme of security and privacy stuff, again for this particular case, the open source argument is minor in comparison to the whole.
And I'm talking all this while being an Android user, not wanting to touch an iPhone with a 10 foot pole. It is what it is. See, this doesn't mean that I'm switching to iOS anytime soon. But to say Android as a whole is anywhere near as secure as iPhones is just delusional.
This is what I say to everyone. I don't even bother trying to explain anymore, for most people it's just better to understand Amazon that way. Specially for people who never bought there and still have this image that everything sold at Amazon comes directly from Amazon and are all guaranteed by the company.
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit. The difference between Amazon and eBay is that Amazon used to be it's own store, and it still sells their own products. eBay always was about providing a venue for people to make business. It's well understood that you are not buying anything directly from eBay.
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors. Selected as in who pays a bigger part of their scam, I imagine.
Here's the funny thing: in the past 4 years or so that I've been shopping on eBay, I've never had a single problem with the products, including external batteries, lots of electronics with LiPo batteries in them, and whatnot. And just in case it happens, I also got a fireproof pouch from eBay to keep stuff in it. xD
Amazon, on the other hand, I had problems with fake SD cards, they now have implemented some weird system of pre-charging import taxes that are often waaay above the actual value. Sometimes they return a small percentage of it (like 3 months after the fact), often times they simply don't. And most of the products still cannot be sent to my country anyways, so there's that.
The only advantage Amazon offers to people living in my country is that their products arrive generally faster than stuff bought from chinese stores on eBay... but that's only because they use companies like Fedex, UPS, DHL and the like that are all basically running a scam here in Brazil. They will rip you off here when it comes to charging tax, extra costs, and storage fees you never asked for. They basically hold your products hostage. On average, I'll pay 1.5x to 2x the tax costs, which usually sums up to 110%+ the product value plus shipping, when a product comes from Amazon. It arrives in a week or so. From eBay, it comes via regular mail, so I pay whatever the government actually charges, which ranges from 60% to 100%. It can take anywhere from a month to 6 months because it depends on the goodwill of governmental agencies, but it gets here, and there's no extra bullshit charges.
And this is why I haven't been buying anything from Amazon. The last thing they had going for them was reliability for countries like mine.
Of course, Amazon couldn't care less about the little money coming from countries like Brazil... it's cheap change for them and they have demonstrated it well enough with their horrible policies regarding overseas shipping. But yeah, the way Amazon incorporated marketplace into their main store and started selling all these products that seem to have an even worse quality control than eBay, it's quite telling.
We're talking about Canada, where Blackberry not long ago has given encryption keys to the Canadian Mounted Police that gave access to ALL messages from non enterprise users, and this case seems all but forgotten with the company releasing new phones supposed to be the most secure phones ever.
So yeah, to me it kinda sounds like a slippery slope. But nothing in comparison to what was already done.
The fact that Blackberry is still alive and well (as much as the company can be on their own merits), never had a public outcry after what they did, and that the case seems to be forgotten with tons of people still using and praising the company for their efforts... even after the CEO explicitly supported the idea with a vague public comment... I think it's pretty clear that something like what was described in this post would be pretty ok.
Having access to numbers located in the immediate vicinity of a crime isn't all that much in comparison to having access to the messaging content of an indiscriminate list of costumers of a certain class from a certain brand of phones.
Would I be ok with this? No, I wouldn't... like I said, slippery slope. At least this case was handled properly with a court order and all, and a message to respond is not that much of a bother, but anyone can see how actions like that can go wrong pretty fast. In a way, it's still relatively indiscriminate based on mobile location - it doesn't mean by any stretch of the mind that a person is suspect of anything, but they are still being targeted.
These days, it doesn't sound like that much of a jump going from requiring a court order to do that and doing it without one, doesn't sound that much of a jump from getting phone numbers to getting private content, and it might not be that much of a jump going from sending messages asking for cooperation to outright pre-emptively arresting people. Sure, hard to imagine the police and judges making such a jump and being this irresponsible - but then again, we have enough proof how overreaching they can become.
I know lots of people won't get the base concept, but essencially mobile companies are revealing private information - for a good cause, yes, and at a minor level in this case, yes. But let's say that in the list is someone who does not want his or her location disclosed at the time of the crime, not being involved with it, for some reason. This is one problem with indiscriminate targeting.
I would be ok with helping the course of an investigation, I would not be ok with mobile companies logging and releasing private information. As for Blackberry, of course, the company is dead to me. Has been for quite a while now. But it's ridiculous how people still defend it.
Oh boy, if there's anything the big porn portals can do other than providing porn of course, is to bring some laughs for the most random piece of current news. That and host content that is being banned everywhere else.
We don't have the elections we need, we have the election we deserve. Of course this whole shit started because some stupid celebrity was charged of doing that.
The idea is extremely simple, and I think everybody should have learned about this in school. Voting needs to be secret not as an option, but as an obligation to keep it as fair as possible. It became a law for a reason, not out of a whim or something.
The moment selfies in ballots become legal is the moment a bunch of candidates will start trying to rig the system. I'll give you this or pay you this much, but only if you vote for me. If you don't vote for me your boss will fire you. You go there, vote for me, take a selfie, publish it, and then we'll be ok.
If people think stuff like that won't happen, they are delusional. It's in the history of every democractic country. It's why the law is there in the first place. It's also ridiculous that someone would imply that political expression on social networks is dependant on such a frivolous idiotic thing.
Yeah, you took a fucking stupid selfie in front of a ballot, how politically engaged you are. Now go save some african children from starvation and poverty by giving some likes. Powerful form of political expression my ass. This is the weakest most lazy form of political expression I've ever heard about.
Sure thing Tim... the cash on your wallet and on Apple's safes perhaps. Just keep going with this stint of minor improvements at high prices with anti consumer stuff for some more years. Nothing against the company and it's products but every keynote or event from the past couple of years or so I see an increasing number of Apple fans talking about switching to either Android or Microsoft. And on the reverse, every Microsoft event and in several Android phone launches I hear Apple fans thinking about giving a chance to the "dark side".:P
And yes, I know you, loyal Apple fanboy and Microsoft/Android hater will never switch. But I'm obviously not talking about you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think something like this only happens because people still cannot understand how much of their own stuff China manufactures.
I stlil see in threads like this a whole lot of racism and ignorance tied to a complete misunderstanding of the role China plays in the international market.
The relationship between US and China is of extreme dependancy, and imposing tariffs will only make both sides crash. This isn't a joke.
Most people who dismiss the importance of this trade think about iPhones, cheap badly made clones, about big finished products like cars, and about stuff that they might not be so dependant of, without realizing the hole is much deeper and wider than they might think.
It's not only about finished products - it's about industrial tools, specialized technology, parts of all sorts, components, stuff that you'll find inside almost everything your life depends on. Even for stuff that has the made in USA label, if it's an electronic part, this mostly means it was assembled in the US. Chances are, there are still components in there that were made in China. There is an estabilished limit of how much of the product was actually completely made in the country stated, and it's not 100%. Even worse, China holds dominance of a whole bunch of raw materials. There is no sector of the economy that will be left intact if a wide ranging tariff is imposed. When chinese labor isn't directly involved with production of whatever you are thinking about, it indirectly is - apart perhaps from few raw materials and base stuff. Even for basic things like food production it's likely that some machine with parts made in China is involved in the process. People have no clue.
If US were to completely cease commercial relationships with China, China would end up broken, no questions about it. The country would have to cut down the vast majority of production, re-route it to European, Latin american and Asian countries, and do a whole lot of restructuring. Companies would relocate, tons of lives and jobs would be lost, it'd be a huge step back. They'd be losing their biggest clients by far, and intellectual owners of several products made there. It could cause the country to turn into something closer to Africa, at least vast regions of it with tiny pockets of modern civilization.
But the US would find itself back into the middle ages. US would have to go after relationships with other cheap(er) labor countries... Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, India and whatnot. And even if they could keep relationships with all these countries - since a whole lot of them are also dependant on China, it would never get near to closing the gap of current supply and demand chain. Not even if current lawyers, doctors, celebrities, CEOs and whatnot started working in factory floors, which is a bit unlikely.
There is a reason why China is basically the factory of the world, and this has to do with cheap labor, but specially about manufacturing capacity. Lots of people don't seem to realize this, but a whole ton of advancements in tech on all areas are also being developed in China these days.
I don't know what Trump will really do regarding China, but it might be a good lesson for people who undererstimate China's role in the worldwide market. Nowadays, it's as important if not way more important than the US. I imagine that tons of big companies in the world would first severe ties with US rather than China, given the choice... because no company would want that. But you'd have to think about it... is it more work to find places to build your stuff relatively cheap and with a huge output capacity, or to find people willing to buy it?
It's a harsh reality no one wants to hear or admit. Those horrible conditions we had back in the industrial revolution never really went away. Welfare, cushy jobs, family planning, and all that sort of stuff happened because all the nasty parts of the industrial revolution era were simply relocated overseas. The reason why people have access to so ma
Well, at least they seem to be putting more effort into it than Microsoft did for mobile. :P
We really don't need more proprietary competing platforms in the wearable, mobile and IoT market.
I'd be all for Tizen if it was open source, but at this point it just sounds to me like the horrible crap software they put on smart tvs.
They are all fast outdated, after developers put out the first stable version they never update the software anymore, and it's a horrible experience in comparison to almost anything else in the market.
I don't think Android is the solution for everything, but until we have more open source OSs for these devices (Linux is not catching up), I'd just rather have Android everywhere. Android TV, Android smartwatches, and the like.
In the very grand scheme of things, autonomous driving technology has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
The idea is that while autonomous driving can advance, become better and actually learn from past experience... human drivers cannot.
Things have been getting slightly better in recent years, but if you take overall statistics ranging from the 70s or 80s 'till today, the number is pretty constant. I mean, the number of accidents, and the number of deaths in crashes. Too many people die every year in car crashes, and a whole lot of them comes from problems we are tired of knowing about. Driving under the influence, speeding, not paying attention to road signs, underestimating the severity of handling a x tons metal box at high speeds. Ramping up fines, making it harder to get a license, educational efforts, changes in law, among several other measures might have helped a bit, but not enough. And there doesn't seem to be much better solutions for human drivers.
Autonomous driving has the potential to drastically reduce numbers when it eliminates the human factor. There will always be crashes, accidents will still happen, and I don't think autonomous driving can ever reach a point of perfection... but if done right, it could eliminate a whole lot of erratic and problematic behavior behind wheels.
But this is about the overall technology, not about Tesla in particular. It's a huge and drastic change, and if I'm honest about it, I think Tesla is rushing things out, not taking lots of stuff in consideration, and turning the whole thing into hype and selling point - with big risks of making it a step back instead. It doesn't take many car crashes while using the autonomous thing for people to start avoiding the technology altogether.
Tesla is selling it as if they had the complete solution already, but it's really the first steps into the technology, which is a really questionable strategy. It's skipping ahead using consumers as testers, quality assurance and research and development, instead of doing it like other manufacturers are doing it - in controlled environments, by employees.
So no, if a Tesla car crashes and kills the driver because the technology isn't working as it should, it's their responsibility. Nothing balances out. Saving the lives of others won't bring back the lives of those who were killed, it won't fix things for the families of those who were lost, and it's no excuse for putting out a technology prematurely. But the technology itself is worth investing and worth insisting on.
Reza Rahman is just right on this one. Oracle doesn't get to flail around and change what open source is just because they want to.
Comes as a very weird statement to talk about Java being open source when Oracle keeps insisting on the lawsuit against Google/Android for copyright violations of the Java API. If Java really is open source, a lawsuit based on copyright violations of it's API doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Even more when the original owners were and still are ok with it, the whole thing becoming an issue only after Oracle purchased it.
Zoltrix 14.4kbps with BananaCom, downloading all those sweet .mod files after midnight, chatting around with friends in telecomference rooms...
USB Type-C could've been awesome... a single standard to unify all platforms, eliminating version differences and stopping manufacturers from juicing up and modifying stuff to make their devices work better or something.
I just cannot understand how, after all bad examples that showed up with regular USB, the USB implementers forum didn't make it a hard standard. Or at least one with a handful of categories to absolutely be followed for approval.
Instead of solving previous problems, USB Type C made problems even worse. USB Type C is less reliable than regular USB, it has way more compatibility issues, and with the extra juice it can also lead to a single badly made cable absolutely destroying both devices connected to it.
You now have USB Type C hubs that will work in some devices while not working in others, you have cables that will work in some devices while destroying others, you have a horribly wide range of capabilities that may or may not work on your USB Type-C device depending on how it was implemented, and there is absolutely no way for the consumer to tell. It's a horrorshow.
I get it that this is mostly manufacturer's fault for not following the standard correctly, but there must be some way of making it certifiable without making it proprietary.
Sure, it's like hallucinations of self aggrandizement fueled by moronic tech upstart CEOs who apparently knows shit about politics and governing will magically solve all the problems that divided the US in this election and will make for a better world tomorrow for all american citizens and the rest of the world.
Look, I understand people are frustrated with Trump being elected. Worse, there are democrats and republicans frustrated by it... we don't even have a clear party line of supporters and non-supporters anymore.
But dividing the country further is just exactly the worst possible choice, and it can only come from megalomanic sociopath CEOs like this guy, who clearly thinks his state is superior (more like he is superior to everyone else of course) just because it aligned with his own ideology or political sense in a democratic election with two candidates that clearly had their own problems.
Sorry if it hurts your sensibilities, but if Trump being elected is to be seen as a bad thing, it's as much fault of it's supporters as it is the fault of Hillary supporters or Trump haters. You haven't done enough, Hillary couldn't fight off doubts and accusations, and this is just the end result.
If you are going to cry and go running back to your house everytime a defeat like this happens, there is no future for a seceded California. No one would take a state like that seriously. And it's not only about the rest of the US that will look upon you like spoiled kids, it's also about the rest of the world.
The best people who absolutely hate Trump can do right now is monitor his actions and the government from now on, and make sure it stays in line.
You wanna see a scenario even worse than it already is, you just secede your state and wait for the next major crisis... specially with stuff like Hyperloop and Uber that are relatively new and dependant on international relationships. I'd like to see Hyperloop failing and not going anywhere just to see what this moron would do.
Things will go down hard and fast, and coming back begging to be a part of the rest of the US won't look good afterwards.
It just seems that every country apparently has to have their own share of idiots like this guy. Here in Brazil it's people from Southern states blaming all the problems of the country on northern states, as if most of the corruption schemes that are currently plaguing the country didn't originate in southern states. Man the f*ck up, admit that your country voted for the wrong guy if that's what you believe, and work for it not to affect the country too much, and do better on the next election.
If you can't live in a country where people have different opinions than yours, and you can't be bothered to fight the government back when it decides to pass something you don't think is fair, go live in a cave by yourself in some isolated island. You'll do both yourself and society a favor.
Well, of course the MacBoook Pro "outsold" all other laptops this year... it's the only line of laptops with MacOS that was updated after an extremely long time, versus a huge number of options that are constantly being updated with Windows 7,8,10 or any flavor of Linux. It'll obviously outsell any other single brand as long as it keeps it's ecosystem enclosed into a walled garden giving anything from a single option to a handful for desperate users needing an upgrade.
Wanna get a new Windows 10 laptop? Well, here's a huge choice of options you have to fit whatever needs you have, coming out every single month, with all sorts of prices and specs, from a huge list of brands you can choose whichever is more reliable for you.
Wanna get a new MacBook? Well, I guess Apple could perhaps release a new revision to replace it's 4 year old Macbook Pro, I'm not sure how much better it'll be since the company has been giving a shit about professional customers anymore, with specs that could be kinda underpowered and outdated, but it's still guaranteed to be Apple priced. It`s your only option though, so you better kneel down and pray to our lord Jobs.
People who are invested, used to, like and/or have the money to be into the Apple ecosystem will buy a new MacBook Pro - if only for the hardware upgrade and because they have no other option. Not everyone hated the lack of ports, but even those who did just have no other option.
But hey smart guy, want some statistics? There:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.statista.com/stati...
http://www.w3schools.com/brows...
https://www.netmarketshare.com...
Nothing new under the sun. MacOS is still around the 10% mark which it has been keeping for around 2 to 3 years now, with different versions of Windows going somewhere between 60% to 80% when added up. There's the plain hard truth of this game: the whole OS preference has been pretty much fixed for quite a while now. And despite Microsoft making some very horrible decisions for Windows 10, I also don't see much incentive for people to go MacOS either.
There is no "double standard" you fucktard. When you sign up to Google, Facebook and others, you know what sort of data you are sharing and that they'll be leveraging that to make the service profitable. Those services are driven by ad revenue, so it's clear that being free of charge in direct monetary sense, they'll have to do something to continue providing it.
And even then, neither Facebook nor Google are free of scrutiny and complaints on sharing user data. Some of the biggest scandals both companies were involved with had something to do with sharing too much user information.
We already have to pay absurd prices monthly to get telcos mostly horrible service, and now you want to surreptiously sell client data outside contractual obligations to turn even more of a profit? Go f*ck yourself. How about offering free unlimited plans for your clients as long as they are willing to share anonymized data? That would be on par with Google and Facebook.
I wasn't on Slashdot when all the hyperloop craze started and died, so I guess I'll just post the question I posted at multiple blogs and communities back at the time:
Why are people so hyped about this? Why? What's the point?
The whole thing is unpractical, unproven, dependant on technology that does not exist, and it's barely bettter at some aspects to existing technology while being so incredibly worse in several other aspects that I don't even know how this whole thing even started and didn't end up as a Simpson's monorail joke to be long forgotten.
And tech blogs and magazines keep bringing this up every now and then. It was completely ridiculous the level of hype for this on blogs like Gizmodo and several big tech publications. Tech reporters specially seem so fascinated by the whole ridiculous idea that I always feel that I must me missing something. But up to this point, no one explained it to me, so there you go.
For the original hyperloop concept you'd need a near vacuum tube running all of it's extention as well as some braking mechanism that has not been divised just yet, closer to how pneumatic tubes for mail worked in the past.
The project has now been adapted to use maglev technology (by some of the companies developing it), but the near vacuum tube is still in research.
The tech can only work in an efficient way to traverse very long stretches of flat land without any interruptions. You need to reach theoretical top speeds for it to make sense over other ideas.
In almost all proposed scenarios I've seen to date it just makes way more sense to just adopt any of the currently available maglev train technology... japanese, chinese, european, doesn't matter. The tech is ready, it works well, it's efficient and proven.
So, why the heck are so many people putting money and attention to research into something that even at the best scenario, will have several disadvantages over Maglev, and will be far more limited than it? Wouldn't it be far better to use all this money to fund the construction of a maglev rail in the US or wherever?
I've heard all sorts of justifications so far, but none of them made any sense to me just yet.
Oh, for maglev you need to have uninterruptible flat land which generates lots of land disputes and whatnot. How the f* is hyperloop any better? It also needs tracks just the same, even more, it needs tracks that have to be powered in regular intervals to keep the semi-vacuum state, and the tracks have to be enclosed. It's far worse than MagLev. From the projects I've seen so far, it's a transparent vacuum tube suspended by concrete towers that generates semi-vacuum somehow... wind power with windmills, or solar power, both highly unlikely. It cannot possibly be cheaper to build a suspended transparent robust vacuum tube over concrete pilons in comparison to plain maglev tracks over land. Unless aliens do it. I guess not having to build train stations cheapens the deal, but obviously, this is a flaw, not an advantage. A maglev train that goes from point A to point B without stops would still be cheaper.
It could get faster than MagLev. Sure, this is theoretical, but also at the huge disadvantage of not being able to have several stops, and being limited to the size of whatever diameter the tubes will have. And then there's the matter of acceleration and desceleration. If you are using maglev tracks anyways for hyperloop, it'll just be the same. If it's a vacuum tube alone, it'd depend on the braking system, but my guess would be that you'd still need a good distant to both accelerate and descelerate in a way that is comfortable for people, which kinda defeats the purpose.
It could be great for cargo! Still doesn't make sense. MagLev would probably also be better for cargo, being able to make stops and not being limited to an enclosed space.
I just.... I just don't know. I can imagine there is some advantage to it, but not enough to justify adopting any other readily available technology.
This is the sort of thing that happens when a company that had malware and rootkits on it's BIOS reported multiple times don't get enough of a financial backlash to get a hint.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/n...
Protip guys: DON'T BUY STUFF FROM LENOVO.
Just don't buy. It's simple. Lenovo is not an option, period.
They couldn't care less about clients protests, as long as they keep selling their crap filled laptops.
If you buy stuff from them, you'll get what you deserve.
There have been enough warnings already. This here is a drop in the bucket.
This is pretty awesome, and something I wish I could do.... just far too complex and involved for me.
I just kinda gave up, have plans to use an offline Android tablet, but for online stuff falling back to laptops with something like Qubes, Tails and whatnot.
I know there are some alternatives out there, but they are usually either very expensive or hard to get, and you end up in the same situation where you have to trust the guys who did it (stuff like Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet, Copperhead OS, BlackPhone 2).
In any case, kudos to ttsiodras(?).
Next, pastafarians and the church of the flying spaghetti monster.
Well, as long as those drones will be filled with gunpowder in them and explode into the night, then I guess it could be done.
A drone light show, no matter how advanced and interesting it might be, will never replace fireworks.
It's just a different category of attraction.
You could put a million of drones with very strong led lights in them, make them dance around, build some interesting images, formations and whatnot... it would be plenty awesome I guess. But fireworks are all about explosions, fire, the smell, power, crescendo, how fast and furious, kinda dangerous everything is.
I pitty the pets, I really do, but you just can't replace it. I could argue though that a drone light show could be used in some occasions where fireworks are not all that much required though.
You can hate Facebook and Zuckerberg all you want, but this particular idea won't do anyone favors...
I mean, if something like this passes, next will be YouTube, Google in general, Reddit, Twitter, Steam, almost any other social network, forum, or virtual space where people gather to comment.
The problem here is not about hate speech, but about defining what exactly is an acceptable time frame for removing offending content on portals that have millions to billions of users. It's a technical limitation. No company is big enough or has enough money to hire an unimaginable number of people to keep a watchful eye towards all the content being published on the platform in a daily basis, and we all know that even modern AI automated systems have their own limitations. An attorney cannot demand that a company produces something out of nowhere that will solve such technical issues. But of course, these lawsuits usually comes from people who have zero understanding of how these things work.
Push an automated system too hard, you have protests like the one Facebook just faced with removal of the Napalm Girl image. I'm pretty sure they'd also have lawsuits thrown at them regarding freedom of speech and whatnot should they start removing any comment that fell in some category of hate speech.
And in the end, this solves nothing. People who use the internet to spread hate speech and harass others are still there. The solution, much in the same way, is to pursue those people and apply heavy penalties against them. Put laws in place that enable individuals to go against abusers and detractors, not try to put all the burden into the platforms itself. But oh, the justice system doesn't have enough people to work on that, and the police can't go after every case that happens. Yep. It goes both ways.
You see, even when Apple is taking a step back and recognizing a necessity for professionals, they still have to act like cocky condenscendent f*ckers that do not understand the needs for the category. Just further confirms what I see wrong with Apple these days.
There is nothing f*cking "legacy" about these connectors. The company is bonkers and delusional. Professionals don't need help making any transition, and Apple does not offer a professional solution for most of the connectors they eliminated. No one wants to make a transition to a more primitive time when every company had their own proprietary connectors. This is bullshit.
It's just absolutely crazy. Does Apple really think now that ports not approved by the company are automatically legacy? This god complex of them is what's going wrong in recent years. Not only they stopped caring about what professionals really need, now they think they can tell what professionals should need, even though they seem to have no idea of what professional works composes outside their own headquarters. How about taking a walk on the real world every now and then to see what's really happening around? No one cares if you think removing a headphone jack is a corageous move.
Yes, professional cameras still uses memory cards. And a whole bunch of them don't have good wireless connection, when they even have wireless at all. Yes, most clients and 3rd parties still deliver content to be used in production with external HDDs and pendrives. No, most peripherals are not using USB Type-C and we don't expect this to change fast, even more when the standard has so many conflicting configurations. Most equipment on the music production and audio side are still on regular USB.
The rest of PCs, electronics and professional gear overall - which composes the vast majority btw - will keep using universal standards.
And those standards will keep improving. Professional work couldn't care less about what Apple thinks of ports, they'll be used as demanded.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having multiple different ports inside laptops with dedicated hardware to work with them.
Close to even gaming laptops, with all their glaring looks and "look, I'm a gamer" designs, the Macbook Pro looks like a kid's toy.
Professionals needs ports to connect external drives, sd card readers to transfer content and backup from multiple devices, ethernet ports to transfer files fast and in a reliable way, graphics cards that are on the higher end, HDMI connectors because that's the type of connector they will find in any situation, expandable RAM for fast renders and multitasking among a host of other stuff. Outside very few businesses, there is no Apple-only workflow.
There's nothing Pro about the new Macbooks. It's ok for regular use, but in the vast majority of jobs involving content creation you will need multiple dongles to handle demand. Macbook Pros basically degraded into Ultrabook territory. Yes, they are still plenty fine for a huge category of users, but other than the core spec upgrade, I'm not seeing many benefits for professionals. They should just be honest about it and remove the Pro from the title altogether. These are nice all-rounder machines, but a severe downgrade in philosophy for people who intend to use these laptops for content creation.
Whatever happens, it's already a loss.
If Brexit gets blocked, there will be protests and an image that the process wasn't democratic. Furthermore, it will be seen as kind of a spineless move... country basically threatened leaving EU only to fall back when it realized it was going to be too damaging.
No matter how many people regretted making the choice, or not voting at all, it looks bad that after all the fuzz, things didn't go forward.
On the other hand, if Brexit does happen... well, there has already been plenty of analysis on that.
The key thing is for this decision to come fast. The more time it's kept at a limbo, the more uncertainty it provokes.
The same excuse for removing the headphone jack, which will be the next sacrifice on the next Macbook Pro revision - mark my words.
Apple fans will do whatever they want, but the roadmap for the company is getting all common universal standards, making a proprietary version that works better with Apple products, and limiting all their hardware to those. TV without competing channels, proprietary wireless technology (it's already done for audio), and the list keeps growing.
I have no doubts that they'd design their own cameras, audio recorders, file formats, storage devices, and all sorts of electronics to lock people further in.
Depending on Apple's next target, it could be limiting AirPort Express to Apple devices, locking up their implementation of USB Type-C to Apple devices, or a bunch of other things... they have all the cards, they play how they want.
The inconvenient and outdated excuse will always work because universal standards always have to sacrifice something in order to work across multiple brands being platform agnostic. The only reason why the new wireless audio standard from Apple can connect so easily to Apple products is just that: because it can only connect to Apple devices. Bluetooth has to go through pairing process because it needs to identify the platform it's connecting to.
I personally want no part in that shit. We've been there. Back a few decades ago, every cellphone had it's own proprietary connector. Every accessory was expensive, worked like crap, and could not talk to other brands. It was far more difficult to find a charger and a pair of headphones that would work with your particular brand of phone. Transfering files from your cellphone to a computer was a hellish process... you needed to install proprietary drivers and software, the whole thing worked like crap, and you never knew how much you could do. Kinda similar to iTunes or iCloud on Windows.
Yes, there are advantages to that type of approach, but there's a reason why universal standards exists, and people will soon be re-learning once again the problems of all these proprietary crap, and removal of choice from costumers to lock them further in a walled garden of sorts.
There a whole mix of stuff being talked about there, and one is not equal the other.
For instance, Google Pixel cannot be generalized to the overall Android experience, not by far. It's probably not even the 0.0001% of Android devices.
The reality of Android as a whole is that it's extremely fragmented, and the absolute majority of it is not on Nougat, let alone being the same as Google Pixel.
As device encryption remains an optional step for most of these devices, most of them are not using it, so threat models be damned.
Not to mention how the vast majority of Android devices uses all sorts of custom versions coming from all sorts of companies in all possible states of vulnerabilities and expected update dates. Even Windows is better than that. Android pretty much represents one of the worst possible fragmentation scenarios.
You have all sorts of cheap generic tablets that I'm almost certain comes from factory with included malware, vulnerabilities, rootkits and backdoors installed. This is serious. I tested a cheap generic tablet just a few months ago (Multilaser was the brand on top of it if I'm not mistaken, but you can find the exact same tablet with several other brand names) that had very suspicious stuff pre-installed. It was impossible to uninstall it, so I rooted the damn thing to do it. And then the device factory reseted itself when I managed to remove the offending apps, everytime.
In general, there's still far more chances of you finding an Android phone/tablet that is either completely open or easy to crack because it has an outdated system or has not been properly locked by it's owner, in comparison with iPhone in general.
And sure, Android has the advantage of being an open os versus the extremely closed iOS - the standard defense for open source software which I do understand. But hoping that this will somehow count as a huge security advantage for the future of Android is quite frankly naive and kinda stupid in itself, specially for cases like Android vs iOS.
The open nature of Android might allow for better scrutiny of it in some stances, but much more, it allows for all sorts of shady companies to make their own Android versions however they feel like doing it... and as more shady businesses adopt that strategy to spy and take advantage of less knowledgeable costumers, the more difficult it gets for a conscious community to take note of it.
As long as Apple keeps getting as much money as they do from regular users to the loyal fanbase, they can just spend that much more money to close security holes and whatnot. One company developing both software and hardware while keeping a stance on security and privacy also makes it much more reliable. Things would have to change quite drastically for Android to ever be as secure and private as iOS. It's just the reality of it.
You only have to think about it a bit more. Apple will always be able to push updates faster, they will always be able to implement security functions for most of their userbase in a timely manner (excluding those with devices that are too old), they are always better able to convince more users to buy their latest devices. Community wise, you will always have more reach... if one knowledgeable costumers finds a security hole, it'll affect almost the entire userbase, so it just makes far more sense for Apple to fix it.
In grand scheme of security and privacy stuff, again for this particular case, the open source argument is minor in comparison to the whole.
And I'm talking all this while being an Android user, not wanting to touch an iPhone with a 10 foot pole. It is what it is.
See, this doesn't mean that I'm switching to iOS anytime soon. But to say Android as a whole is anywhere near as secure as iPhones is just delusional.
Amazon = eBay, only sometimes even worse.
This is what I say to everyone. I don't even bother trying to explain anymore, for most people it's just better to understand Amazon that way. Specially for people who never bought there and still have this image that everything sold at Amazon comes directly from Amazon and are all guaranteed by the company.
Of course, if Amazon wanted to stay away from all these shitty products, they would've created the Marketplace as a separate thing. But it's obvious that they wanted people not to notice the difference. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit. The difference between Amazon and eBay is that Amazon used to be it's own store, and it still sells their own products. eBay always was about providing a venue for people to make business. It's well understood that you are not buying anything directly from eBay.
And Amazon also does a shit job of letting costumers know about the reputation and quality of products sold by their shitty selected vendors. Selected as in who pays a bigger part of their scam, I imagine.
Here's the funny thing: in the past 4 years or so that I've been shopping on eBay, I've never had a single problem with the products, including external batteries, lots of electronics with LiPo batteries in them, and whatnot. And just in case it happens, I also got a fireproof pouch from eBay to keep stuff in it. xD
Amazon, on the other hand, I had problems with fake SD cards, they now have implemented some weird system of pre-charging import taxes that are often waaay above the actual value. Sometimes they return a small percentage of it (like 3 months after the fact), often times they simply don't. And most of the products still cannot be sent to my country anyways, so there's that.
The only advantage Amazon offers to people living in my country is that their products arrive generally faster than stuff bought from chinese stores on eBay... but that's only because they use companies like Fedex, UPS, DHL and the like that are all basically running a scam here in Brazil. They will rip you off here when it comes to charging tax, extra costs, and storage fees you never asked for. They basically hold your products hostage. On average, I'll pay 1.5x to 2x the tax costs, which usually sums up to 110%+ the product value plus shipping, when a product comes from Amazon. It arrives in a week or so. From eBay, it comes via regular mail, so I pay whatever the government actually charges, which ranges from 60% to 100%. It can take anywhere from a month to 6 months because it depends on the goodwill of governmental agencies, but it gets here, and there's no extra bullshit charges.
And this is why I haven't been buying anything from Amazon. The last thing they had going for them was reliability for countries like mine.
Of course, Amazon couldn't care less about the little money coming from countries like Brazil... it's cheap change for them and they have demonstrated it well enough with their horrible policies regarding overseas shipping. But yeah, the way Amazon incorporated marketplace into their main store and started selling all these products that seem to have an even worse quality control than eBay, it's quite telling.
We're talking about Canada, where Blackberry not long ago has given encryption keys to the Canadian Mounted Police that gave access to ALL messages from non enterprise users, and this case seems all but forgotten with the company releasing new phones supposed to be the most secure phones ever.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...
So yeah, to me it kinda sounds like a slippery slope. But nothing in comparison to what was already done.
The fact that Blackberry is still alive and well (as much as the company can be on their own merits), never had a public outcry after what they did, and that the case seems to be forgotten with tons of people still using and praising the company for their efforts... even after the CEO explicitly supported the idea with a vague public comment... I think it's pretty clear that something like what was described in this post would be pretty ok.
http://blogs.blackberry.com/20...
Having access to numbers located in the immediate vicinity of a crime isn't all that much in comparison to having access to the messaging content of an indiscriminate list of costumers of a certain class from a certain brand of phones.
Would I be ok with this? No, I wouldn't... like I said, slippery slope. At least this case was handled properly with a court order and all, and a message to respond is not that much of a bother, but anyone can see how actions like that can go wrong pretty fast. In a way, it's still relatively indiscriminate based on mobile location - it doesn't mean by any stretch of the mind that a person is suspect of anything, but they are still being targeted.
These days, it doesn't sound like that much of a jump going from requiring a court order to do that and doing it without one, doesn't sound that much of a jump from getting phone numbers to getting private content, and it might not be that much of a jump going from sending messages asking for cooperation to outright pre-emptively arresting people. Sure, hard to imagine the police and judges making such a jump and being this irresponsible - but then again, we have enough proof how overreaching they can become.
I know lots of people won't get the base concept, but essencially mobile companies are revealing private information - for a good cause, yes, and at a minor level in this case, yes. But let's say that in the list is someone who does not want his or her location disclosed at the time of the crime, not being involved with it, for some reason. This is one problem with indiscriminate targeting.
I would be ok with helping the course of an investigation, I would not be ok with mobile companies logging and releasing private information. As for Blackberry, of course, the company is dead to me. Has been for quite a while now. But it's ridiculous how people still defend it.
Oh boy, if there's anything the big porn portals can do other than providing porn of course, is to bring some laughs for the most random piece of current news. That and host content that is being banned everywhere else.
We don't have the elections we need, we have the election we deserve.
Of course this whole shit started because some stupid celebrity was charged of doing that.
The idea is extremely simple, and I think everybody should have learned about this in school. Voting needs to be secret not as an option, but as an obligation to keep it as fair as possible. It became a law for a reason, not out of a whim or something.
The moment selfies in ballots become legal is the moment a bunch of candidates will start trying to rig the system.
I'll give you this or pay you this much, but only if you vote for me. If you don't vote for me your boss will fire you. You go there, vote for me, take a selfie, publish it, and then we'll be ok.
If people think stuff like that won't happen, they are delusional. It's in the history of every democractic country. It's why the law is there in the first place.
It's also ridiculous that someone would imply that political expression on social networks is dependant on such a frivolous idiotic thing.
Yeah, you took a fucking stupid selfie in front of a ballot, how politically engaged you are. Now go save some african children from starvation and poverty by giving some likes. Powerful form of political expression my ass. This is the weakest most lazy form of political expression I've ever heard about.
Sure thing Tim... the cash on your wallet and on Apple's safes perhaps. :P
Just keep going with this stint of minor improvements at high prices with anti consumer stuff for some more years.
Nothing against the company and it's products but every keynote or event from the past couple of years or so I see an increasing number of Apple fans talking about switching to either Android or Microsoft. And on the reverse, every Microsoft event and in several Android phone launches I hear Apple fans thinking about giving a chance to the "dark side".
And yes, I know you, loyal Apple fanboy and Microsoft/Android hater will never switch. But I'm obviously not talking about you.
"Because it takes courage to take a fall"
- Tim Cook, 2016
Yes, I'm joking.