I'm writting this as someone who would NEVER install a service like this, but it's quite clear that Geoffrey, the author of the piece, had already decided what to think of the service previous to reviewing it - very bad practice.
Out of all his complaints, the majority of it is due to early adopter grievances or unrelated crap. For instance, he complains about not getting the delivery on the day promised. This isn't due to Amazon Key, it's due to the delivery service itself being late. Would installing Key change the speed in which packages would come? Doesn't sound like so.
On another part he talks about his door not being appropriate, having trouble with installation, and the door almost locking delivery service outside. Honestly, I think this is something people should expect - not all doors are made equal, not all of them are in a good enough shape to install electronic locks, and not all of them will work perfectly outright - this is a problem most electronic key installations could have.
Then he goes on a complete tirade about walled gardens and whatnot which should be quite obvious to anyone purchasing something like this - of course you are increasing the likelihood of getting Amazon stuff if you are buying a system from them to get access into your home. Much like the Amazon Dash Buttons and whatnot, it's meant to make it more convenient to get stuff from them. More importantly though, since you can share the key to others, this should stop no one from getting services from another company and just sending a temporary key to them instead.
Anyways, like I said, I'd never get something like this even if it was available for me, because the ammount of convenience it'd give me is not enough to counterweight privacy worries plus the fact that I'd never install IoT devices in my home without very strong justification - it's yet another thing connected to the Internet that will obviously need constant updates, maintenance and whatnot.
But there are legitimate reasons to have something like this, and they were mildly covered in the piece. Homes with people with limited mobility. People who are never at home and already had purchases stolen from their front porches. People who were already hiding keys in places for delivery people to get in because they have no other option.
I don't think anyone has to like this thing, quite the opposite. It's a system I'd only recommend for people who has had an unsolvable problem regarding product delivery for years. But the review was kinda crap.
I can agree with almost everything that was presented on the argument, minus the conclusion extrapolation and title. Put simply, it's a one side analysis of costs that cryptocurrency has. Which I agree with - cryptocurrency mining and maintenance demands computational power.
Now, let's put this in perspective with the title claims: "Cost us our clean energy future". Here's the problem I personally have with this: cryptocurrency is there replacing something - a system, a service, a trade, the embodiment of a will... something, as it's an abstract concept. And I mean cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin, Ethereum or some other application of it.
Bitcoin mining can be seen as a side effect, or a component part of the application of the concept.
So, for such a claim, we'd need to imagine - without cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin, would we be using less power as a whole? What effects other than the draw in computer power did Bitcoin had? Because, you know, mining is just part of it. What is the future of it, and it's implications.
Personally, I don't know. It could be a complete waste of time, money and power, or the beginning of something that we'll be using in the future, perhaps not in it's current form. And it's a one sided analysis because it's not looking at the entire effect as a whole, which is admitedly hugely complicated to do. Let's pick another one sided aspect of it: Bitcoin basically fuels an entire black market economy in the dark web. What was the power consumption of the methods it replaced?
Which is to say, the title claim seems presumptuous. Most of the content is ok though.
Stretching some parallels here, but just to make myself clearer - is nuclear fusion research costing us our clean energy future too?
Look at the current administration. There is absolutely nothing there that would put something like the burden of universal basic income at the hands of the rich and powerful. Nothing. In fact, it's practically the opposite. Corporations are being given more leeway to do whatever they want, more incentives and more power. We're going the exact opposite way.
If a government comes that even suggests something like this, it would be overthrown. I'm not even putting this at the political debate level - this isn't about dems vs reps. It'd be way easier to come up with basic income via taxes, and that's saying a lot - because that's another thing that is pretty much impossible without something like a civil war. Well, at least in some western countries.
Here's the thing: if we can't pass a tax reform that removes tax incentives for the extremely rich and the biggest corporations, forces US corporations to pay their taxes here, and reduce tax burdens on mid to low class citizens, thinking about a universal basic income system is pretty much a joke. It will never happen.
People think that experiments in some european countries happened so there should be a way for it to also happen here, they don't realize how different the culture or political/economical system is.
We can always sideload, but for regular consumers, this means less Amazon Fire TV sales, less reasons to get an Echo Show, and more complaints thrown at both companies. I... just don't care. Saw this shit coming ages ago with Google's problems with making Windows Mobile apps. I also noticed inherent limitations of casting dongles and just decided to pull a cable from the desktop directly to the living room TV. As for Echo Show... heh, that's something I'll never buy, so.
Ok, let's start with the obvious - predicted revenue "lost to piracy" is just bullshit. You start the article with that kinda crap I already see it as leaning to some agenda. Let's put this clearly out there: there is absolutely no reason to believe that even a fraction of people pirating content would pay for everything they get if there was no other option. It's as absurd as claiming an open party with all expenses paid would attract as many people as if you charged everyone 50 bucks for entrance.
Moving on - for people who already knows and have a routine for pirating, it's just that more convenient. Changing habits will be just as hard, there's no way around this. Othe reasons: I dunno exactly what they used, but for instance, I pay for services like Crunchyroll yet I often have to pirate the content that is streaming there, getting content slower than the streaming service offers and oftenly at lower quality... because even though I'm on fiber, with very fast speeds that most of my country don't have access to, the reality of it is that if I try watching it using the service itself, I'm stuck with buffering issues and whatnot. It's on their side, not mine. So I pay for it yet I never use, and have complained multiple time to no avail. And I imagine Netflix, Hulu and other services have similar problems. I mean, it can work perfectly for americans, for europeans and whatnot, but what people have to get is that not all countries have optimal service, or even libraries of content. Which is understandable for the most part - streaming backend is ultra hard, specially if you have a huge audience, and content is bound to the contracts made in the country. But those are things that gets overstepped by piracy. P2P systems and whatnot will take care of this in an almost impossible to beat way, specially for new content. Not to mention that once you get it, it's there to watch offline and whatnot - which I do know is something that some streaming services are offering nowadays for part of their content.
I keep repeating this all the time, but let's just put this out once more: for the most part, piracy didn't come up because the vast majority of people are ok with stealing the hard work of others, not compensating directors, actors and whatnot, or worse, profiting at the cost of others. Yes, there are some people who would definitely go that route, but it isn't the majority of people. Most people just want some convenient system that works. And the industry has been slowly getting better at providing exactly this - I've been saying this long before iTunes or Netflix came into existence. And studios, industries and whatnot are not only victims of this: piracy played a huge role in spreading out content to places that it would never get to otherwise. This is evidenced by the growth in all entertainment and software industries over the years. If piracy was killing anything, all of those industries would be dead by now. The marketing effect is something that will be left unexplored and unmeasured, thanks to the interests in hiding it. But on the industry side, there's still a whole ton of catch up to do. Systems that in one way or another supports piracy has matured a whole ton over the years, and it got to a technological performance that is unmatched by proprietary commercial systems. And it breached barriers that commercial systems can't. So, if you think piracy will die just because there has been some changes in how industries commecialize their stuff online... fat chance. Because even those changes have been marred by old industry practices. Just look at what Steam did for game piracy, and look at the differences between a system like Hulu or Netflix, and Steam. The clues are there.
Another idiot who doesn't understand the tech proclaiming that it'll replace a tried and true standard when he doesn't really understand the scenarios where his product works or not. Join the masses of idiots who said biometrics are going to replace passwords, among others.
Should've ignored it. Here's the red flag: "the geeks are working on it right now"
Erm... to all the people saying this should be built into the OS - it is. This app makes visualization easier I guess, but if you are on Android, you can go into Settings -> Data usage -> (hamburger menu) Data usage control. From there you can choose what apps can and cannot use mobile data. In fact, you have 4 options: Allow - Wi-fi + mobile Forbidden - none Wi-fi only Data only (mobile only) Unless this is something that's available only on Oxygen OS (which I don't think it is), there you go.
...of turning this into a fanboy war, which isn't the intention here, let me ask something which I didn't see asked anywhere: If Google "bypassed" iOS privacy settings, why isn't Apple doing anything about it, how was it done, and why is there a lawsuit from Apple costumers against Google, but nothing against Apple?
Wouldn't it be Apple's responsibility to enforce such privacy settings?
What's the extension of responsibility here since it's Google software operating on Apple devices?
Sorry dude, it's way past the point it was profitable to use computer downtime for it. At this point, the ammount you'd get from it wouldn't pay the extra electricity cost, much less wear and tear of hardware.
Years ago, even before the value reached 2000 bucks, it was already only profitable for chinese farms running extremely barebones on junk parts inside warehouses using stolen electricity. You can imagine how it is now.
Well, unless you go for something other than Bitcoin I guess. Plenty hard to choose what will be the next successful blockchain currency though, there are just too many out there.
What does that have to do with anything? I swear these politician assholes these days all keep trying to preach the same repeated sermon to their choir in the hopes none of their followers notices his wrongdoings.
Here's the thing: I must've heard of a new revolutionary battery technology at least once a month for the past 5 years or so. The problem is always mass production. Can Samsung churn out batteries with graphene balls for all devices that currently use Li-po batteries at similar costs and similar speeds? If not, then it won't be replacing anything. And this story is yet another one for the archives.
BananaCom, ICQ, Powwow, The Palace, Tsunami, connecting to BBSs after midnight to download.mod songs, Dr. Sbaitso, Fantavision.... I could go on and on
And HP was finally getting better on the design department... seriously, for all the crap I've thrown against HP laptops in the past, the current line looks a whole lot better design wise. But of course it'd be one of the companies to also force the telemetry crap against users, because at it's core I guess it never changes. Anyways, another one into the blacklist.
Motorola is pretty much the last of the three I'd go for, if anything because Lenovo is behind it, the company that gave you malware on firmware but people are still buying it for some reason. But really, the mods are a joke. They were overpriced and underperformed for the most part, launched with ridiculous price and now that Motorola realized no one if getting them, they are trying to offload as many as possible by throwing them together. That Essencial Phone thing will suffer the same fate.
The only recent development I like from Motorola is the Android One phone, but given price and specs (internationally I mean), I opted for a Xiaomi Mi A1 instead. Specs are overall better and price is lower, again, international market.
This is not a solution, this is paying more for a new unproven service with an opportunistic ad.
First of all, Netflix or other services joining it is just wishful thinking. Come back when you have the vast majority of them already paying for it. This isn't how things works out there, throwing low prices thinking these companies will fish - you have to go directly at them and make a business proposition. If you didn't bother to even do that, how can you think people will buy it? Pay us and the services will come. Heh, fat chance.
They can claim they have better tech and whatnot, plus an Ethernet box, but it's still a middleman that you have to trust. They'll be assigning the addresses, controlling what goes on behind the scenes, maintaining service. You know, the stuff we already pay ISPs for.
Net Neutrality is about not having extra middlemen interference.
Doesn't matter if they made it easier by assembling routers or switches, this is not something the vast majority of people will pay for. Heck, this is not something most people that are already paying for VPNs will pay for.
Blah blah they can see the traffic they won't be able to throttle. Again, this isn't how it works. Ever heard of whitelisting? Yep. It's not only the idea that ISPs might block or throttle speeds on specific services, it's the idea that they'll throttle everything and dedicate free fast lanes to their own. Throttling everything is plenty practical, they already do it.
This sounds like a crowdfunding pitch. Oh wait, it is exactly that, isn't it... left out this little detail not to show what this really is: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
I don't know why people keep trying to mix things up, but that's not the point of fighting for net neutrality. It's not about making Internet services more "neutral" or anything like that. It's not about keeping the situation great (which it already isn't), it's about not making it worse.
And let's be honest here. One thing is people choosing to use Google instead of Bing, DuckDuckGo, *gasp* Yahoo and a few others that are out there (I personally use DuckDuckGo as default). One thing is people using Facebook instead of several social networks that showed up over the years or you know, none. One thing is people choosing Gmail instead of ProtonMail, a local webserver, among others. One thing is people using Facebook Messenger for convenience instead of some different service like Viber, Signal and others. There's choice. If people don't take them, that's their problem. We don't really need to discuss here on Slashdot how using these services can be bad, I think most people here knows about this. But it's still people's choice to use them, be it for convenience, familiarity, ease of use, or just because everyone around them are using it.
Yes, Google and Facebook have an effective hold in several areas that makes them close to monopolies, but there's still choice and competition. People can't deny that. For the vast majority of americans, there is NO option to one or two ISPs where they live. None. Ziltch. Nada. Nothing. The alternative is not using the Internet, and this is all Net Neutrality is about. Access to it has become a basic need, which is why there needs to be some regulation to it. When you as a costumer don't have any choice, that's a true monopoly. And since there is no option, without any sort of regulation of course given time they will only get worse in nick and dime schemes, in tiered plans, in forcing their own brands and services to costumers while making it hard for anyone else to compete and whatnot. Because that's exactly what they do. That's why they have been lobbying for such a long time to kill Net Neutrality once and for all.
It also doesn't mean that they didn't do this in the past, ISPs always finds a way to profit more over their clients. It just means that now they have no regulation to prevent them from doing anything, and that it'll become even easier for abusive practices to pass.
This is like arguing Amazon is non-neutral. Sure it is. It's slowly killing all alternatives. People are flocking to shop there for all sorts of reasons, and they are effectively closing down smaller competing stores and services. But it's something people are choosing for themselves. Amazon doesn't hire goons to beat you up if you go to the local market, they aren't making you sign a contract that you'll only shop there for a year if you buy one product, they aren't saying you can only use their mass storage servers in order to make an account there. There are limits as to what they can do, and this is what Net Neutrality is about. Having at least some limits on what ISPs can do. The more you give in, the worse it'll become.
For starters, guns only have one purpose. It's a tool for killing. Doesn't matter if some people see it as self defense, the only real purpose the tool has is to shoot lead at fast speeds to hurt or kill the target.
Torrent is a platform for peer to peer data transfer. Like said, lots of people use for piracy, but a whole ton of people use it for legitimate purposes. Most services offering big files, specially on the open source community, will provide a torrent link.
If you wanna make the analogy, it's probably closer to something like bots on social networks or mass mail... it might be used majorly for spam, but there are some legitimate uses that cannot and should not be blocked indiscriminately.
Apple is not obliged to put their stores in places chosen by anyone else other than themselves, this is pure speculation based on spurrious correlation, and it's just plain stupid to think they have anything else other than money on strategic placement of stores. And I'm not a fan of the company myself, but if you are gonna write some hitpiece article, you are gonna have to do better than this crap.
This is the kind of stupid shit article that makes people create terms like SJWs and use it in a derrogatory manner. You are not contributing to the discussion here. Unless you found some internal memo stating that the construction of Apple stores needs to avoid black neighborhoods specifically or something like that, this is just bullshit. It's pure sensationalist use of statistics to bend the company image with some lame ass weak and indirect libel.
I'd avoid posting anything from the source of this crap in the future, as it's no different than Breitbart pulling crap out of their asses. Fucking shame to put such piece of garbage here, I thought Slashdot was better than that.
Ubuntu Touch kinda failed, smaller distro options are very hard to get and I don't really know the status of those (like Purism and whatnot)... anyone knows of non-Android Linux fully functional smartphones and tablets? I just burned my 3rd attempt of installing a Linux distro on yet another chinese tablet that won't work well enough and has some weird lock in place to prevent people from changing the OS, I'm honestly tired of trying at this point. And I can't spend much on this, seems all ready made options are both hard to find and too pricey for what they are offering.
It has just been revealed all sorts of crap that my current brand of smartphone (OnePlus) goes to collect data plus stupidly insert root access into their devices eschewing any sort of good security practice. And now this.
Getting harder and harder to escape big brother these days.
I'll just repost my comment from Gizmodo here, some info to kill some potential myths.
It’s bad, and it’ll probably take a long time to be solved... ultimately getting to some point similar to Chernobyl. Not in the same scale I mean, but like years from now they’ll just encase the whole thing in concrete and abandon it there because there’s not much else to do.
Let me tell something about this for people that might be reading and getting a wrong picture out of it, because I also did and just learned recently about some stuff. People should know that for the vast majority of Fukushima prefecture, life remains going like normal. The area affected that people had to evacuate was a radius of around 20 to 30km (12 to 18 miles), which is of course still a lot, but just a small fraction of Fukushima as a whole, which has almost 750 square kms (288 square miles).
It’s nothing to laugh about, but I think some people imagine something like the entire prefecture, or half of Japan being a radiation infested zone or something. Fukushima is the 20th out of 47 prefectures in terms of population, 3rd in area, the capital city wasn’t affected.
I was watching a channel that made a tour around major onsen cities in Fukushima, awesome stuff. Radiation wasn’t a concern, even when they went to a coastal city about an hour away from the power plant.
Again, it’s not to diminish how serious the disaster is, but the thing is, we get a whole lot of reports talking only about the disaster zone, so much that it seems that it’s a huge area that is unlivable. It’s not.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm writting this as someone who would NEVER install a service like this, but it's quite clear that Geoffrey, the author of the piece, had already decided what to think of the service previous to reviewing it - very bad practice.
Out of all his complaints, the majority of it is due to early adopter grievances or unrelated crap.
For instance, he complains about not getting the delivery on the day promised. This isn't due to Amazon Key, it's due to the delivery service itself being late. Would installing Key change the speed in which packages would come? Doesn't sound like so.
On another part he talks about his door not being appropriate, having trouble with installation, and the door almost locking delivery service outside. Honestly, I think this is something people should expect - not all doors are made equal, not all of them are in a good enough shape to install electronic locks, and not all of them will work perfectly outright - this is a problem most electronic key installations could have.
Then he goes on a complete tirade about walled gardens and whatnot which should be quite obvious to anyone purchasing something like this - of course you are increasing the likelihood of getting Amazon stuff if you are buying a system from them to get access into your home. Much like the Amazon Dash Buttons and whatnot, it's meant to make it more convenient to get stuff from them. More importantly though, since you can share the key to others, this should stop no one from getting services from another company and just sending a temporary key to them instead.
Anyways, like I said, I'd never get something like this even if it was available for me, because the ammount of convenience it'd give me is not enough to counterweight privacy worries plus the fact that I'd never install IoT devices in my home without very strong justification - it's yet another thing connected to the Internet that will obviously need constant updates, maintenance and whatnot.
But there are legitimate reasons to have something like this, and they were mildly covered in the piece. Homes with people with limited mobility. People who are never at home and already had purchases stolen from their front porches. People who were already hiding keys in places for delivery people to get in because they have no other option.
I don't think anyone has to like this thing, quite the opposite. It's a system I'd only recommend for people who has had an unsolvable problem regarding product delivery for years. But the review was kinda crap.
I can agree with almost everything that was presented on the argument, minus the conclusion extrapolation and title.
Put simply, it's a one side analysis of costs that cryptocurrency has. Which I agree with - cryptocurrency mining and maintenance demands computational power.
Now, let's put this in perspective with the title claims: "Cost us our clean energy future".
Here's the problem I personally have with this: cryptocurrency is there replacing something - a system, a service, a trade, the embodiment of a will... something, as it's an abstract concept. And I mean cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin, Ethereum or some other application of it.
Bitcoin mining can be seen as a side effect, or a component part of the application of the concept.
So, for such a claim, we'd need to imagine - without cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin, would we be using less power as a whole? What effects other than the draw in computer power did Bitcoin had? Because, you know, mining is just part of it. What is the future of it, and it's implications.
Personally, I don't know. It could be a complete waste of time, money and power, or the beginning of something that we'll be using in the future, perhaps not in it's current form.
And it's a one sided analysis because it's not looking at the entire effect as a whole, which is admitedly hugely complicated to do. Let's pick another one sided aspect of it: Bitcoin basically fuels an entire black market economy in the dark web. What was the power consumption of the methods it replaced?
Which is to say, the title claim seems presumptuous. Most of the content is ok though.
Stretching some parallels here, but just to make myself clearer - is nuclear fusion research costing us our clean energy future too?
This is very unproductive.
Look at the current administration. There is absolutely nothing there that would put something like the burden of universal basic income at the hands of the rich and powerful. Nothing.
In fact, it's practically the opposite. Corporations are being given more leeway to do whatever they want, more incentives and more power. We're going the exact opposite way.
If a government comes that even suggests something like this, it would be overthrown. I'm not even putting this at the political debate level - this isn't about dems vs reps.
It'd be way easier to come up with basic income via taxes, and that's saying a lot - because that's another thing that is pretty much impossible without something like a civil war.
Well, at least in some western countries.
Here's the thing: if we can't pass a tax reform that removes tax incentives for the extremely rich and the biggest corporations, forces US corporations to pay their taxes here, and reduce tax burdens on mid to low class citizens, thinking about a universal basic income system is pretty much a joke. It will never happen.
People think that experiments in some european countries happened so there should be a way for it to also happen here, they don't realize how different the culture or political/economical system is.
We can always sideload, but for regular consumers, this means less Amazon Fire TV sales, less reasons to get an Echo Show, and more complaints thrown at both companies.
I... just don't care. Saw this shit coming ages ago with Google's problems with making Windows Mobile apps. I also noticed inherent limitations of casting dongles and just decided to pull a cable from the desktop directly to the living room TV.
As for Echo Show... heh, that's something I'll never buy, so.
Ok, let's start with the obvious - predicted revenue "lost to piracy" is just bullshit. You start the article with that kinda crap I already see it as leaning to some agenda.
Let's put this clearly out there: there is absolutely no reason to believe that even a fraction of people pirating content would pay for everything they get if there was no other option. It's as absurd as claiming an open party with all expenses paid would attract as many people as if you charged everyone 50 bucks for entrance.
Moving on - for people who already knows and have a routine for pirating, it's just that more convenient. Changing habits will be just as hard, there's no way around this.
Othe reasons: I dunno exactly what they used, but for instance, I pay for services like Crunchyroll yet I often have to pirate the content that is streaming there, getting content slower than the streaming service offers and oftenly at lower quality... because even though I'm on fiber, with very fast speeds that most of my country don't have access to, the reality of it is that if I try watching it using the service itself, I'm stuck with buffering issues and whatnot. It's on their side, not mine. So I pay for it yet I never use, and have complained multiple time to no avail.
And I imagine Netflix, Hulu and other services have similar problems. I mean, it can work perfectly for americans, for europeans and whatnot, but what people have to get is that not all countries have optimal service, or even libraries of content.
Which is understandable for the most part - streaming backend is ultra hard, specially if you have a huge audience, and content is bound to the contracts made in the country.
But those are things that gets overstepped by piracy. P2P systems and whatnot will take care of this in an almost impossible to beat way, specially for new content. Not to mention that once you get it, it's there to watch offline and whatnot - which I do know is something that some streaming services are offering nowadays for part of their content.
I keep repeating this all the time, but let's just put this out once more: for the most part, piracy didn't come up because the vast majority of people are ok with stealing the hard work of others, not compensating directors, actors and whatnot, or worse, profiting at the cost of others. Yes, there are some people who would definitely go that route, but it isn't the majority of people. Most people just want some convenient system that works. And the industry has been slowly getting better at providing exactly this - I've been saying this long before iTunes or Netflix came into existence. And studios, industries and whatnot are not only victims of this: piracy played a huge role in spreading out content to places that it would never get to otherwise. This is evidenced by the growth in all entertainment and software industries over the years. If piracy was killing anything, all of those industries would be dead by now. The marketing effect is something that will be left unexplored and unmeasured, thanks to the interests in hiding it.
But on the industry side, there's still a whole ton of catch up to do. Systems that in one way or another supports piracy has matured a whole ton over the years, and it got to a technological performance that is unmatched by proprietary commercial systems. And it breached barriers that commercial systems can't. So, if you think piracy will die just because there has been some changes in how industries commecialize their stuff online... fat chance. Because even those changes have been marred by old industry practices.
Just look at what Steam did for game piracy, and look at the differences between a system like Hulu or Netflix, and Steam. The clues are there.
Another idiot who doesn't understand the tech proclaiming that it'll replace a tried and true standard when he doesn't really understand the scenarios where his product works or not.
Join the masses of idiots who said biometrics are going to replace passwords, among others.
Should've ignored it. Here's the red flag: "the geeks are working on it right now"
"Verizon Will Launch" "Real competition"
Does not compute
Erm... to all the people saying this should be built into the OS - it is.
This app makes visualization easier I guess, but if you are on Android, you can go into Settings -> Data usage -> (hamburger menu) Data usage control.
From there you can choose what apps can and cannot use mobile data. In fact, you have 4 options:
Allow - Wi-fi + mobile
Forbidden - none
Wi-fi only
Data only (mobile only)
Unless this is something that's available only on Oxygen OS (which I don't think it is), there you go.
...of turning this into a fanboy war, which isn't the intention here, let me ask something which I didn't see asked anywhere:
If Google "bypassed" iOS privacy settings, why isn't Apple doing anything about it, how was it done, and why is there a lawsuit from Apple costumers against Google, but nothing against Apple?
Wouldn't it be Apple's responsibility to enforce such privacy settings?
What's the extension of responsibility here since it's Google software operating on Apple devices?
Sorry dude, it's way past the point it was profitable to use computer downtime for it. At this point, the ammount you'd get from it wouldn't pay the extra electricity cost, much less wear and tear of hardware.
Years ago, even before the value reached 2000 bucks, it was already only profitable for chinese farms running extremely barebones on junk parts inside warehouses using stolen electricity. You can imagine how it is now.
Well, unless you go for something other than Bitcoin I guess. Plenty hard to choose what will be the next successful blockchain currency though, there are just too many out there.
What does that have to do with anything? I swear these politician assholes these days all keep trying to preach the same repeated sermon to their choir in the hopes none of their followers notices his wrongdoings.
Here's the thing: I must've heard of a new revolutionary battery technology at least once a month for the past 5 years or so.
The problem is always mass production.
Can Samsung churn out batteries with graphene balls for all devices that currently use Li-po batteries at similar costs and similar speeds?
If not, then it won't be replacing anything. And this story is yet another one for the archives.
BananaCom, ICQ, Powwow, The Palace, Tsunami, connecting to BBSs after midnight to download .mod songs, Dr. Sbaitso, Fantavision.... I could go on and on
And HP was finally getting better on the design department... seriously, for all the crap I've thrown against HP laptops in the past, the current line looks a whole lot better design wise.
But of course it'd be one of the companies to also force the telemetry crap against users, because at it's core I guess it never changes.
Anyways, another one into the blacklist.
Motorola is pretty much the last of the three I'd go for, if anything because Lenovo is behind it, the company that gave you malware on firmware but people are still buying it for some reason.
But really, the mods are a joke. They were overpriced and underperformed for the most part, launched with ridiculous price and now that Motorola realized no one if getting them, they are trying to offload as many as possible by throwing them together. That Essencial Phone thing will suffer the same fate.
The only recent development I like from Motorola is the Android One phone, but given price and specs (internationally I mean), I opted for a Xiaomi Mi A1 instead. Specs are overall better and price is lower, again, international market.
This is not a solution, this is paying more for a new unproven service with an opportunistic ad.
First of all, Netflix or other services joining it is just wishful thinking. Come back when you have the vast majority of them already paying for it. This isn't how things works out there, throwing low prices thinking these companies will fish - you have to go directly at them and make a business proposition. If you didn't bother to even do that, how can you think people will buy it?
Pay us and the services will come. Heh, fat chance.
They can claim they have better tech and whatnot, plus an Ethernet box, but it's still a middleman that you have to trust. They'll be assigning the addresses, controlling what goes on behind the scenes, maintaining service. You know, the stuff we already pay ISPs for.
Net Neutrality is about not having extra middlemen interference.
Doesn't matter if they made it easier by assembling routers or switches, this is not something the vast majority of people will pay for. Heck, this is not something most people that are already paying for VPNs will pay for.
Blah blah they can see the traffic they won't be able to throttle. Again, this isn't how it works. Ever heard of whitelisting? Yep. It's not only the idea that ISPs might block or throttle speeds on specific services, it's the idea that they'll throttle everything and dedicate free fast lanes to their own. Throttling everything is plenty practical, they already do it.
This sounds like a crowdfunding pitch. Oh wait, it is exactly that, isn't it... left out this little detail not to show what this really is:
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Yep.
I don't know why people keep trying to mix things up, but that's not the point of fighting for net neutrality. It's not about making Internet services more "neutral" or anything like that.
It's not about keeping the situation great (which it already isn't), it's about not making it worse.
And let's be honest here. One thing is people choosing to use Google instead of Bing, DuckDuckGo, *gasp* Yahoo and a few others that are out there (I personally use DuckDuckGo as default). One thing is people using Facebook instead of several social networks that showed up over the years or you know, none. One thing is people choosing Gmail instead of ProtonMail, a local webserver, among others. One thing is people using Facebook Messenger for convenience instead of some different service like Viber, Signal and others. There's choice. If people don't take them, that's their problem. We don't really need to discuss here on Slashdot how using these services can be bad, I think most people here knows about this. But it's still people's choice to use them, be it for convenience, familiarity, ease of use, or just because everyone around them are using it.
Yes, Google and Facebook have an effective hold in several areas that makes them close to monopolies, but there's still choice and competition. People can't deny that. For the vast majority of americans, there is NO option to one or two ISPs where they live. None. Ziltch. Nada. Nothing. The alternative is not using the Internet, and this is all Net Neutrality is about. Access to it has become a basic need, which is why there needs to be some regulation to it.
When you as a costumer don't have any choice, that's a true monopoly. And since there is no option, without any sort of regulation of course given time they will only get worse in nick and dime schemes, in tiered plans, in forcing their own brands and services to costumers while making it hard for anyone else to compete and whatnot.
Because that's exactly what they do. That's why they have been lobbying for such a long time to kill Net Neutrality once and for all.
It also doesn't mean that they didn't do this in the past, ISPs always finds a way to profit more over their clients. It just means that now they have no regulation to prevent them from doing anything, and that it'll become even easier for abusive practices to pass.
This is like arguing Amazon is non-neutral. Sure it is. It's slowly killing all alternatives. People are flocking to shop there for all sorts of reasons, and they are effectively closing down smaller competing stores and services. But it's something people are choosing for themselves. Amazon doesn't hire goons to beat you up if you go to the local market, they aren't making you sign a contract that you'll only shop there for a year if you buy one product, they aren't saying you can only use their mass storage servers in order to make an account there. There are limits as to what they can do, and this is what Net Neutrality is about. Having at least some limits on what ISPs can do. The more you give in, the worse it'll become.
Statistically speaking, we could solve a big part of the climate change problem if we just killed off half of the world's population.
Policies and decision making cannot be based on statistics alone professor.
Guile theme rolling
For starters, guns only have one purpose. It's a tool for killing. Doesn't matter if some people see it as self defense, the only real purpose the tool has is to shoot lead at fast speeds to hurt or kill the target.
Torrent is a platform for peer to peer data transfer. Like said, lots of people use for piracy, but a whole ton of people use it for legitimate purposes. Most services offering big files, specially on the open source community, will provide a torrent link.
If you wanna make the analogy, it's probably closer to something like bots on social networks or mass mail... it might be used majorly for spam, but there are some legitimate uses that cannot and should not be blocked indiscriminately.
Hey, I heard this company called Macromedia has a pretty nifty dev platform called Coldfusion that might help build something for that.
xD
Apple is not obliged to put their stores in places chosen by anyone else other than themselves, this is pure speculation based on spurrious correlation, and it's just plain stupid to think they have anything else other than money on strategic placement of stores.
And I'm not a fan of the company myself, but if you are gonna write some hitpiece article, you are gonna have to do better than this crap.
This is the kind of stupid shit article that makes people create terms like SJWs and use it in a derrogatory manner.
You are not contributing to the discussion here. Unless you found some internal memo stating that the construction of Apple stores needs to avoid black neighborhoods specifically or something like that, this is just bullshit. It's pure sensationalist use of statistics to bend the company image with some lame ass weak and indirect libel.
I'd avoid posting anything from the source of this crap in the future, as it's no different than Breitbart pulling crap out of their asses.
Fucking shame to put such piece of garbage here, I thought Slashdot was better than that.
Ubuntu Touch kinda failed, smaller distro options are very hard to get and I don't really know the status of those (like Purism and whatnot)... anyone knows of non-Android Linux fully functional smartphones and tablets?
I just burned my 3rd attempt of installing a Linux distro on yet another chinese tablet that won't work well enough and has some weird lock in place to prevent people from changing the OS, I'm honestly tired of trying at this point. And I can't spend much on this, seems all ready made options are both hard to find and too pricey for what they are offering.
It has just been revealed all sorts of crap that my current brand of smartphone (OnePlus) goes to collect data plus stupidly insert root access into their devices eschewing any sort of good security practice. And now this.
Getting harder and harder to escape big brother these days.
I'll just repost my comment from Gizmodo here, some info to kill some potential myths.
It’s bad, and it’ll probably take a long time to be solved... ultimately getting to some point similar to Chernobyl. Not in the same scale I mean, but like years from now they’ll just encase the whole thing in concrete and abandon it there because there’s not much else to do.
Let me tell something about this for people that might be reading and getting a wrong picture out of it, because I also did and just learned recently about some stuff. People should know that for the vast majority of Fukushima prefecture, life remains going like normal. The area affected that people had to evacuate was a radius of around 20 to 30km (12 to 18 miles), which is of course still a lot, but just a small fraction of Fukushima as a whole, which has almost 750 square kms (288 square miles).
It’s nothing to laugh about, but I think some people imagine something like the entire prefecture, or half of Japan being a radiation infested zone or something. Fukushima is the 20th out of 47 prefectures in terms of population, 3rd in area, the capital city wasn’t affected.
I was watching a channel that made a tour around major onsen cities in Fukushima, awesome stuff. Radiation wasn’t a concern, even when they went to a coastal city about an hour away from the power plant.
Again, it’s not to diminish how serious the disaster is, but the thing is, we get a whole lot of reports talking only about the disaster zone, so much that it seems that it’s a huge area that is unlivable. It’s not.
I was just considering a DJI Spark. Not anymore. Another business to add to my blacklist.
I bet you minor talks about this will happen, and in less then a month everyone will have forgotten about it.
Just like OnePlus, just like Lenovo, just like Blackberry.