I have an Alcatel Go Flip with KaiOS. One reason I bought it is because it's *NOT* Google-infested. It's sorta luddite...
* real numeric keypad * user-replacable battery * user-replacable microSD (32 gigs) * media player, including a working FM radio * to listen to the FM radio, I plug in a stereo jack into the hole that they "didn't have the courage to remove" * selectable 2G / 3G / 4GLTE
The last item is important to me because the assholes behind https://www.alertready.ca/ have decided that all cellular alerts in Canada go out at "Presidential Alert" level, which cannot be turned off. Even if it's a custody dispute about a kid 16 hours drive away from me. Fortunately, the alert system only works on 4G/LTE. Dropping down to 3G gets me off the alert system, and I also get more bars signal, so the battery lasts longer.
> In the case of all existing car manufacturers, the real reason is sunk > costs in internal combustion engine manufacturing. Tesla doesn't > have to worry about abandoning billions of dollars in existing property > plant and equipment like the legacy manufacturers do.
Wrong...
1) Many manufacturers produce hybrids. That's already half-way there to pure-electric.
2) Manufacturers can produce disel and gasoline engines simultaneously, so it's not that difficult. And they are *SIGNIFICANTLY* different animals. Rather than designing new diesels from the ground up, GM cheated and tried to repurpose gasoline engines as diesel engines to save money in R&D and tooling 1978 to 1985. It was a fiasco. The right way to do it is to forget about the gasoline engine and design a diesel engine from square 1.
> The Oldsmobile diesel subsequently gained a reputation for > unreliability and anemic performance that damaged the North > American passenger diesel market for the next 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And one other "legacy component" for "existing car manufacturers" is the assembly lines and know-how to...
a) crank out hundreds of thousands of vehicles per week
b) assemble vehicles where the fit-and-finish isn't total shit.
> Have a look at Firefox Multi-Account Containers -- > https://support.mozilla.org/en... -- they allow you to run > Facebook, your shopping, etc. in separate contexts that > insulate all cookies, web data, etc. from one another.
You could always do that; it's called separate profiles, e.g.
> When I unplugged my cable box because I don't use it Comcast noticed. I figured > I'd save the power bill (dang thing gets warm). Comcast sent me a Letter in the > mail with instructions on how to turn it back on. They assumed I was confused and > wasn't using it, maybe even afraid to call for help. It is a nice gesture if I was > 80 years old and couldn't figure out technology. But they too missed me. They > wanted me to know about all of the Terrific Programming that I was missing.
They were actually more concerned about the fact that you weren't watching the extra commercials that they insert into the cable TV stream (Yes!!!). See this thread on DSLReports http://www.dslreports.com/foru... Fewer people watching their inserted ads means less extra revenue for them.
> And it's going to result in a bunch of sites currently with small market share explicitly > offering a no-fee linking license. Google, Facebook, etc. will link to those sites instead, > resulting in those sites gobbling up the market share currently owned by the sites > wanting to be paid. And everything will go right back to the way it is now. Except Google > et al will now have explicit permission to link for free. And the sites wanting to be > paid for linking will have disappeared into obscurity, hoisted by their own petard.
Spain tried to "solve that problem" by mandating that all websites be required to charge. I.e. nobody was allowed to give free links. Net result, Google threatened to stop linking to Spanish websites and the media websites went whining to the government begging them to force Google to do business with them https://search.slashdot.org/st...
With all the cord-cutting going on, imagine cablecos going to governments demanding legislation that all households be required to subscribe to cable.
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but even I can think of 20 years of charges... criminal trespass, break and enter, assault and battery, extortion, unlawful access to a computer account (think CFAA). Many jurisdictions also throw in extra prison tine if a gun is used in the commision of a crime.
> Like FB, USPS is paid to deliver political advertising. Does > USPS maintain this data and make it public? I don't think so.
The post office and the phone company are "common carriers" which gives them different rights and responsibilities. E.g. if a TV or radio station program falsely called you a pedophile, you could sue them. If A sends a letter to B saying Anonymous Coward is a pedophile, the post office cannot be sued for transmitting the letter. Ditto for the phone company not subject to lawsuits if someone phones your neighbour falsely telling them you're a pedophile.
A common carrier, by definition, *MUST* provide it's service to everybody, unless they have a good reason not to do so. E.g. an airline can refuse to carry fireworks in the cargo hold on a passenger flight.
1) At the beginning, item X (desktop PC, flatscreen TV, smartphone, whatever) is damn expensive and almost nobody except rich hipsters has one.
2) As R&D costs are amortized and production lines ramp up, prices drop, more people can afford item X, and sales increase.
3) Then really cheap Chinese knockoffs appear, and sales really take off.
4) Eventually, everybody that wants one, and can afford one, has one. At that point sales drop down to replacement levels for older ones that wear out, fall on the floor, are stolen, whatever.
A few years ago there was hoopla about "the end of the desktop PC". The PC market hasn't disappeared; it's matured and sales have stabilized at replacement levels. I expect the same to happen for smartphones.
20,000 years ago, most of Europe, northern Asia, Canada and the northern tier US states were covered by glaciers over a mile thick. CO2 was approx 200 ppm, and there were approximately one million homo sapiens sapiens on the entire planet. The cavemen were not running around in SUVs either. (Was Geico around to offer them cheap insurance?).
Anyhow, temperatures still shot up rapidly, and the glaciers rapidly melted and retreated to mountains in these locations. Only Antarctica and Greenland remain glacier-covered.
Care to explain that as being "manmade global warming", Mr. Richmond city lawyer? Yes, Antarctica and Greenland glaciers *CONTINUE* to melt. But that melt *STARTED WHEN CO2 WAS AT 200 PPM*.
> Never understood how birds are the only remaining dinosaurs... wonder what > made dinos so vulnerable to this event, where many other large species (crocs, > turtles, fish, etc) survive to this day. One might think that some ***SMALL DINOSAURS***, > or aquatic/marine species would have found a niche on some continent.
By "dinos", I assume you mean umpteen ton monstrosities. Most, if not all Cretaceous dinosaurs (even the large monstrosities) are now believd to have had feathers to maintain body tempearures. Birds == dinosaurs. It's not just the newer finds. Careful re-examination shows compsognathus == archeopteryx.
The big rock hits earth 65,000,000 years ago, and throws up a shower of debris out of the atmosphere. As the debris rains down all over planet earth, atmospheric friction heats up the incoming debris to several hundred degrees. This hail of red hot stones kills most large animals, and set most forests on fire.
Smaller particles remain in the atmosphere for a few years, blocking a lot of sunlight, and a "nuclear winter" happens. The bottom of the ecosystem (plants) gets greatly reduced. Forget large trees; you're down to hardy ferns Any large vegetarians that survived the initial "rain of fire" die of starvation, since they need a lot of plant matter every day to survive, let alone grow. When the remaining large vegetarians starve to death, there's no food for the large carnivores, so they starve to death.
Re your question about "small dinosaurs"... yes, some did survive. I repeat... birds == dinosaurs. The ones that survived were in the same size range as small mammals that survived. They occupied similar niches, and may have occupied burrows. If they couldn't dig burrows, they could chase out the small mammals who originally dug them. So when the big rock hit, small mammals and small dinosaurs (i.e. birds) that lived in burrows would've survived the initial "rain of fire". Burrows would be crucial for birds, because they lay eggs, rather than bearing their young via pregnancy.
Small dinosaurs ("birds") would compete in the same niches as small mammals, and we know that small mammals survived. Surviving birds at that time would probably be omnivores. They could eat small plants, with the occasional addition of meat in the form of insects and small mammals and even other birds.
This is not a recent development. Pluto's claim to planetary status has been doubtful since shortly after its discovery. Here's an article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... that ends with the quote... > So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest > planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.
In a way, it's very similar to the story of Ceres. A pint-sized "planet" was discovered, and proclaimed to be a planet. Then another one, and another one, etc etc. Eventually it became ridiculous According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... > As of 20 September 2013, the LINEAR system alone has discovered 138,393 asteroids.
Asteroids long ago stopped being called "planets".
Similarly, when Pluto was first discovered, it was called a "planet", but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... > In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) > since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known > KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000 > KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.
Again, you're looking at a gazillion "pint-size-planets" in similar orbits. You don't really expect kids to memorize a thousand plus planets in science class. And if you insist on forcing Pluto in, why not Eris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which is more massive than Pluto, even though Pluto is larger in size? And if you include Eris, then what about the slightly smaller ones like Quaoar and Sedna? And slightly smaller ones than them? You have to "draw a line in the sand" somewhere, or else you'll be calling every pea-sized fragement in orbit around the sun, a "planet".
Submitter here. There was so much more I wanted to put into the submission, but didn't have room for.
How would you feel if somebody took away your $100 or $1000 cellphone and gave you a dedicated pager that only worked for alerts? Pretty bad, right? The primary use cases for cellphones are
1) making/receiving phone calls (dohhh) 2) listening to built-in FM radio (if your model has one) 3) listening to music or podcasts in storage 4) listening to streaming internet music 5) receiving messages when at meetings
Given that the alert sound is *DAMN LOUD*, and cannot be turned off easily...
1) So you're in a phone call and holding the phone up to your ear, or using earphones/earbuds... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
2) FM radio requires earphones/earbuds, so that the wire can be used as an FM antenna... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
3) You're listening to pre-recorded music or podcasts... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
4) you're listening to streaming internet music... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
5) You're at a meeting, or at a movie, or at church, or whatever with your phone set to vibrate-only "meeting mode"... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
> Every day, we experience sound in our environment, such as the sounds from > television and radio, household appliances, and traffic. Normally, these > sounds are at safe levels that don't damage our hearing. But sounds can be > harmful when they are too loud, even for a brief time, or when they > are both loud and long-lasting. These sounds can damage sensitive > structures in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).
Fortunately, my phone has the option to be forced down to 3G-only. Since the Canadian alert system is LTE-only, that protects me. The other options are rooting the phone and/or flashing LineageOS on it.
And of course there's a city called "Vancouver" in Washington State approx 420 km (260 miles) almost due south of the more well known Vancouver, BC. It's on the north shore of the Columbia River, directly across from Portland, Oregon. The Columbia river is the boundary there.
It could confuse overseas tourists. For additional giggles, a Seattle radio station KOMO, in one of their jingles mentioned (deep announcer voice...) "From Vancouver to Vancouver, this is KOMO country"
Obama's "Cash-For-Clunkers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... program took an entire generation of affordable older cars oout of circulation. As per "supply and demand", artificially reducing the supply raised prices. What else did anyone expect?
> This is complicated by new anti-rape attitudes (not laws) proclaiming it's > okay for 17 year-old female to fuck a 19 year-old but not a 20-year-old. (Do > any US states claim a 17 year-old female can fuck, but only other 17 year-olds?)
Check with a lawyer. https://www.ageofconsent.net/ should not be considered an official source, regardless of how well-intentioned they are. There are some jurisdictions that have "close-in-age exemptions". This is also known as a "Romeo and Juliet clause". Both of the lead characters in that Shakespeare play were 14.
Other jurisdictions are "zero-tolerance" assholes, and *BOTH* participants can be charged with statutory rape, and listed on the sex-offender-registry if they're both under the age of consent when they have sex. Things are difficult in the USA in that you're potentailly looking at over 50 different sets of laws, including territorries (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc)
> If cable companies had ever offered the ability to get extra channels like Discovery, or > Lifetime as individual items instead of giant bundles, they could have been the ones transitioning > us all into streaming and being the natural gateway for quality streaming delivery.
It's the content-owners' fault. E.g. Disney owns ABC, multiple ESPN channels, and multiple Disney channels. They offer *ALL-OR-NOTHING*. I.e. if a cableco wants ABC and Disney channels, they *MUST* put ESPN on basic on 80% of their subscribers. A cable company would love to go "ESPN-free". But Disney knows that a cable service without ABC and Disney channels won't fly. Disney is the worst, but there are other groups that use the same forced-bundling tactics. See PDF file https://pmcvariety.files.wordp... for a display of who charges how much for what in 2016 and 2017.
I have an Alcatel Go Flip with KaiOS. It has a physical keypad and an internal MicroSD slot... under the user replaceable battery. It has a basic 1600x1200 camera, and a working FM radio, which I listen to by inserting the earphone plug into the jack that "they didn't have the courage to remove".
> I think it sounds really sad to have laws saying you cannot > have game items that players can trade with each other.
I know this is Slashdot, but it really helps if you RTFS. This involves trading items obtained from loot boxes, for goods/services in the real world. Let's compare...
1) You walk into a store that sells lottery tickets, plunk down cash, and buy a lottery ticket. It gives you the chance to win some unknown variable amount of money, which you can use in the real world.
2) You play a game, in which you can plunk down cash (credit/debit/whatever) and buy a loot box (i.e. lottery ticket) with an unknown amount of assets. You can trade these assets in real life for goods/services.
See the difference... neither do I. There is no problem per se with "in-game purchases" of objects of known value. But when you plunk down reals cash, for unknown items, which you can trade for real cash later on, it's effectively a lottery.
World War I - Germany engages in a multi-front war against British Empire, France, Russian Empire (pre-USSR), and USA. Predicatbly, they lose. Rather than accepting the fact that Germany lost because they were outnumbered, Hitlere convinced Germans that they were "stabbed in the back by the Jews", when victory was within reach. The repercussions of that delusion were ugly.
Election USA 2016 - Democrats put up unpopular candidate, who won primaries only because of an initial surge of support from "super-delgates" that gave her momentum going into the primaries. She's married to a former president who pushed through NAFTA (Bush negotiated it, but couldn't push it through), and was fully supporting TPP, until Sanders and Trump came out against it. She was the one who called blacks "super predators", stood up in a coal-mining state and said that she was going to shut down more coal mines, never bothered to show up and campaign in some of her crucial "Blue Wall States", illegally ran a private email server, deleted several thousand emails with "bit-bleach" when subpeona'd, lied about "coming under fire" at Benghazi, etc, etc, etc. Rather than admitting that they shot themselves in the foot by running the most awful candidate they could, the only one who could conceivably lose to Donald Trump... they claim that they were "stabbed in the back by Facebook".
What will the ugly repercussions of this delusion be?
Slashdot Mirror
If it was travelling at half the speed of light, doppler effect could make red lights look green... oops.
I have an Alcatel Go Flip with KaiOS. One reason I bought it is because it's *NOT* Google-infested. It's sorta luddite...
* real numeric keypad
* user-replacable battery
* user-replacable microSD (32 gigs)
* media player, including a working FM radio
* to listen to the FM radio, I plug in a stereo jack into the hole that they "didn't have the courage to remove"
* selectable 2G / 3G / 4GLTE
The last item is important to me because the assholes behind https://www.alertready.ca/ have decided that all cellular alerts in Canada go out at "Presidential Alert" level, which cannot be turned off. Even if it's a custody dispute about a kid 16 hours drive away from me. Fortunately, the alert system only works on 4G/LTE. Dropping down to 3G gets me off the alert system, and I also get more bars signal, so the battery lasts longer.
> In the case of all existing car manufacturers, the real reason is sunk
> costs in internal combustion engine manufacturing. Tesla doesn't
> have to worry about abandoning billions of dollars in existing property
> plant and equipment like the legacy manufacturers do.
Wrong...
1) Many manufacturers produce hybrids. That's already half-way there to pure-electric.
2) Manufacturers can produce disel and gasoline engines simultaneously, so it's not that difficult. And they are *SIGNIFICANTLY* different animals. Rather than designing new diesels from the ground up, GM cheated and tried to repurpose gasoline engines as diesel engines to save money in R&D and tooling 1978 to 1985. It was a fiasco. The right way to do it is to forget about the gasoline engine and design a diesel engine from square 1.
> The Oldsmobile diesel subsequently gained a reputation for
> unreliability and anemic performance that damaged the North
> American passenger diesel market for the next 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And one other "legacy component" for "existing car manufacturers" is the assembly lines and know-how to...
a) crank out hundreds of thousands of vehicles per week
b) assemble vehicles where the fit-and-finish isn't total shit.
> Have a look at Firefox Multi-Account Containers --
> https://support.mozilla.org/en... -- they allow you to run
> Facebook, your shopping, etc. in separate contexts that
> insulate all cookies, web data, etc. from one another.
You could always do that; it's called separate profiles, e.g.
firefox -no-remote -P facebook
firefox -no-remote -P youtube
No need for add-ons or extra code in the browser. This also works with Pale Moon.
> When I unplugged my cable box because I don't use it Comcast noticed. I figured
> I'd save the power bill (dang thing gets warm). Comcast sent me a Letter in the
> mail with instructions on how to turn it back on. They assumed I was confused and
> wasn't using it, maybe even afraid to call for help. It is a nice gesture if I was
> 80 years old and couldn't figure out technology. But they too missed me. They
> wanted me to know about all of the Terrific Programming that I was missing.
They were actually more concerned about the fact that you weren't watching the extra commercials that they insert into the cable TV stream (Yes!!!). See this thread on DSLReports http://www.dslreports.com/foru... Fewer people watching their inserted ads means less extra revenue for them.
> And it's going to result in a bunch of sites currently with small market share explicitly
> offering a no-fee linking license. Google, Facebook, etc. will link to those sites instead,
> resulting in those sites gobbling up the market share currently owned by the sites
> wanting to be paid. And everything will go right back to the way it is now. Except Google
> et al will now have explicit permission to link for free. And the sites wanting to be
> paid for linking will have disappeared into obscurity, hoisted by their own petard.
That happened in Belgium https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... and Germany https://search.slashdot.org/st...
Spain tried to "solve that problem" by mandating that all websites be required to charge. I.e. nobody was allowed to give free links. Net result, Google threatened to stop linking to Spanish websites and the media websites went whining to the government begging them to force Google to do business with them https://search.slashdot.org/st...
With all the cord-cutting going on, imagine cablecos going to governments demanding legislation that all households be required to subscribe to cable.
Ever heard of the De Havilland Mosquito? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but even I can think of 20 years of charges... criminal trespass, break and enter, assault and battery, extortion, unlawful access to a computer account (think CFAA). Many jurisdictions also throw in extra prison tine if a gun is used in the commision of a crime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Don't laugh, she has experience as a mail-server admin... "the most qualified candidate for the position", etc.
> Like FB, USPS is paid to deliver political advertising. Does
> USPS maintain this data and make it public? I don't think so.
The post office and the phone company are "common carriers" which gives them different rights and responsibilities. E.g. if a TV or radio station program falsely called you a pedophile, you could sue them. If A sends a letter to B saying Anonymous Coward is a pedophile, the post office cannot be sued for transmitting the letter. Ditto for the phone company not subject to lawsuits if someone phones your neighbour falsely telling them you're a pedophile.
A common carrier, by definition, *MUST* provide it's service to everybody, unless they have a good reason not to do so. E.g. an airline can refuse to carry fireworks in the cargo hold on a passenger flight.
1) At the beginning, item X (desktop PC, flatscreen TV, smartphone, whatever) is damn expensive and almost nobody except rich hipsters has one.
2) As R&D costs are amortized and production lines ramp up, prices drop, more people can afford item X, and sales increase.
3) Then really cheap Chinese knockoffs appear, and sales really take off.
4) Eventually, everybody that wants one, and can afford one, has one. At that point sales drop down to replacement levels for older ones that wear out, fall on the floor, are stolen, whatever.
A few years ago there was hoopla about "the end of the desktop PC". The PC market hasn't disappeared; it's matured and sales have stabilized at replacement levels. I expect the same to happen for smartphones.
Ditto for Presto Cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in southern Ontario for several regional transit systems.
20,000 years ago, most of Europe, northern Asia, Canada and the northern tier US states were covered by glaciers over a mile thick. CO2 was approx 200 ppm, and there were approximately one million homo sapiens sapiens on the entire planet. The cavemen were not running around in SUVs either. (Was Geico around to offer them cheap insurance?).
Anyhow, temperatures still shot up rapidly, and the glaciers rapidly melted and retreated to mountains in these locations. Only Antarctica and Greenland remain glacier-covered.
Care to explain that as being "manmade global warming", Mr. Richmond city lawyer? Yes, Antarctica and Greenland glaciers *CONTINUE* to melt. But that melt *STARTED WHEN CO2 WAS AT 200 PPM*.
> Never understood how birds are the only remaining dinosaurs... wonder what
> made dinos so vulnerable to this event, where many other large species (crocs,
> turtles, fish, etc) survive to this day. One might think that some ***SMALL DINOSAURS***,
> or aquatic/marine species would have found a niche on some continent.
By "dinos", I assume you mean umpteen ton monstrosities. Most, if not all Cretaceous dinosaurs (even the large monstrosities) are now believd to have had feathers to maintain body tempearures. Birds == dinosaurs. It's not just the newer finds. Careful re-examination shows compsognathus == archeopteryx.
The big rock hits earth 65,000,000 years ago, and throws up a shower of debris out of the atmosphere. As the debris rains down all over planet earth, atmospheric friction heats up the incoming debris to several hundred degrees. This hail of red hot stones kills most large animals, and set most forests on fire.
Smaller particles remain in the atmosphere for a few years, blocking a lot of sunlight, and a "nuclear winter" happens. The bottom of the ecosystem (plants) gets greatly reduced. Forget large trees; you're down to hardy ferns Any large vegetarians that survived the initial "rain of fire" die of starvation, since they need a lot of plant matter every day to survive, let alone grow. When the remaining large vegetarians starve to death, there's no food for the large carnivores, so they starve to death.
Re your question about "small dinosaurs"... yes, some did survive. I repeat... birds == dinosaurs. The ones that survived were in the same size range as small mammals that survived. They occupied similar niches, and may have occupied burrows. If they couldn't dig burrows, they could chase out the small mammals who originally dug them. So when the big rock hit, small mammals and small dinosaurs (i.e. birds) that lived in burrows would've survived the initial "rain of fire". Burrows would be crucial for birds, because they lay eggs, rather than bearing their young via pregnancy.
Small dinosaurs ("birds") would compete in the same niches as small mammals, and we know that small mammals survived. Surviving birds at that time would probably be omnivores. They could eat small plants, with the occasional addition of meat in the form of insects and small mammals and even other birds.
This is not a recent development. Pluto's claim to planetary status has been doubtful since shortly after its discovery. Here's an article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... that ends with the quote...
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest
> planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.
In a way, it's very similar to the story of Ceres. A pint-sized "planet" was discovered, and proclaimed to be a planet. Then another one, and another one, etc etc. Eventually it became ridiculous According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> As of 20 September 2013, the LINEAR system alone has discovered 138,393 asteroids.
Asteroids long ago stopped being called "planets".
Similarly, when Pluto was first discovered, it was called a "planet", but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO)
> since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known
> KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000
> KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.
Again, you're looking at a gazillion "pint-size-planets" in similar orbits. You don't really expect kids to memorize a thousand plus planets in science class. And if you insist on forcing Pluto in, why not Eris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which is more massive than Pluto, even though Pluto is larger in size? And if you include Eris, then what about the slightly smaller ones like Quaoar and Sedna? And slightly smaller ones than them? You have to "draw a line in the sand" somewhere, or else you'll be calling every pea-sized fragement in orbit around the sun, a "planet".
Submitter here. There was so much more I wanted to put into the submission, but didn't have room for.
How would you feel if somebody took away your $100 or $1000 cellphone and gave you a dedicated pager that only worked for alerts? Pretty bad, right? The primary use cases for cellphones are
1) making/receiving phone calls (dohhh)
2) listening to built-in FM radio (if your model has one)
3) listening to music or podcasts in storage
4) listening to streaming internet music
5) receiving messages when at meetings
Given that the alert sound is *DAMN LOUD*, and cannot be turned off easily...
1) So you're in a phone call and holding the phone up to your ear, or using earphones/earbuds... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
2) FM radio requires earphones/earbuds, so that the wire can be used as an FM antenna... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
3) You're listening to pre-recorded music or podcasts... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
4) you're listening to streaming internet music... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
5) You're at a meeting, or at a movie, or at church, or whatever with your phone set to vibrate-only "meeting mode"... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
From https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/heal...
> What is noise-induced hearing loss?
> Every day, we experience sound in our environment, such as the sounds from
> television and radio, household appliances, and traffic. Normally, these
> sounds are at safe levels that don't damage our hearing. But sounds can be
> harmful when they are too loud, even for a brief time, or when they
> are both loud and long-lasting. These sounds can damage sensitive
> structures in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).
Fortunately, my phone has the option to be forced down to 3G-only. Since the Canadian alert system is LTE-only, that protects me. The other options are rooting the phone and/or flashing LineageOS on it.
And of course there's a city called "Vancouver" in Washington State approx 420 km (260 miles) almost due south of the more well known Vancouver, BC. It's on the north shore of the Columbia River, directly across from Portland, Oregon. The Columbia river is the boundary there.
It could confuse overseas tourists. For additional giggles, a Seattle radio station KOMO, in one of their jingles mentioned (deep announcer voice...) "From Vancouver to Vancouver, this is KOMO country"
Obama's "Cash-For-Clunkers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... program took an entire generation of affordable older cars oout of circulation. As per "supply and demand", artificially reducing the supply raised prices. What else did anyone expect?
> According to reports a man could be heard yelling the phrase "Alexa
> open the front door" shortly before the TV was noticed missing.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> This is complicated by new anti-rape attitudes (not laws) proclaiming it's
> okay for 17 year-old female to fuck a 19 year-old but not a 20-year-old. (Do
> any US states claim a 17 year-old female can fuck, but only other 17 year-olds?)
Check with a lawyer. https://www.ageofconsent.net/ should not be considered an official source, regardless of how well-intentioned they are. There are some jurisdictions that have "close-in-age exemptions". This is also known as a "Romeo and Juliet clause". Both of the lead characters in that Shakespeare play were 14.
Other jurisdictions are "zero-tolerance" assholes, and *BOTH* participants can be charged with statutory rape, and listed on the sex-offender-registry if they're both under the age of consent when they have sex. Things are difficult in the USA in that you're potentailly looking at over 50 different sets of laws, including territorries (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc)
> If cable companies had ever offered the ability to get extra channels like Discovery, or
> Lifetime as individual items instead of giant bundles, they could have been the ones transitioning
> us all into streaming and being the natural gateway for quality streaming delivery.
It's the content-owners' fault. E.g. Disney owns ABC, multiple ESPN channels, and multiple Disney channels. They offer *ALL-OR-NOTHING*. I.e. if a cableco wants ABC and Disney channels, they *MUST* put ESPN on basic on 80% of their subscribers. A cable company would love to go "ESPN-free". But Disney knows that a cable service without ABC and Disney channels won't fly. Disney is the worst, but there are other groups that use the same forced-bundling tactics. See PDF file https://pmcvariety.files.wordp... for a display of who charges how much for what in 2016 and 2017.
I have an Alcatel Go Flip with KaiOS. It has a physical keypad and an internal MicroSD slot... under the user replaceable battery. It has a basic 1600x1200 camera, and a working FM radio, which I listen to by inserting the earphone plug into the jack that "they didn't have the courage to remove".
> I think it sounds really sad to have laws saying you cannot
> have game items that players can trade with each other.
I know this is Slashdot, but it really helps if you RTFS. This involves trading items obtained from loot boxes, for goods/services in the real world. Let's compare...
1) You walk into a store that sells lottery tickets, plunk down cash, and buy a lottery ticket. It gives you the chance to win some unknown variable amount of money, which you can use in the real world.
2) You play a game, in which you can plunk down cash (credit/debit/whatever) and buy a loot box (i.e. lottery ticket) with an unknown amount of assets. You can trade these assets in real life for goods/services.
See the difference... neither do I. There is no problem per se with "in-game purchases" of objects of known value. But when you plunk down reals cash, for unknown items, which you can trade for real cash later on, it's effectively a lottery.
World War I - Germany engages in a multi-front war against British Empire, France, Russian Empire (pre-USSR), and USA. Predicatbly, they lose. Rather than accepting the fact that Germany lost because they were outnumbered, Hitlere convinced Germans that they were "stabbed in the back by the Jews", when victory was within reach. The repercussions of that delusion were ugly.
Election USA 2016 - Democrats put up unpopular candidate, who won primaries only because of an initial surge of support from "super-delgates" that gave her momentum going into the primaries. She's married to a former president who pushed through NAFTA (Bush negotiated it, but couldn't push it through), and was fully supporting TPP, until Sanders and Trump came out against it. She was the one who called blacks "super predators", stood up in a coal-mining state and said that she was going to shut down more coal mines, never bothered to show up and campaign in some of her crucial "Blue Wall States", illegally ran a private email server, deleted several thousand emails with "bit-bleach" when subpeona'd, lied about "coming under fire" at Benghazi, etc, etc, etc. Rather than admitting that they shot themselves in the foot by running the most awful candidate they could, the only one who could conceivably lose to Donald Trump... they claim that they were "stabbed in the back by Facebook".
What will the ugly repercussions of this delusion be?
> what about palemoon?
Two entries in "about:config". Set
media.autoplay.allowscripted to false
media.autoplay.enabled to false
The only downside is that sometimes I have to click 2 or 3 times to get a Youtube (or other HTML5) video to actually play.