it's that it's harder to trace. In theory if you can keep your name from being associated with your wallet it's impossible to trace. But it doesn't need to be impossible. A locked car is harder to steal, not impossible to steal.
A car with doors welded shut would be close to impossible to steal. But eventually, for a car to be more useful than a giant paper weight, you need to be able to enter it and drive it. so instead you settle for merely locking door, which makes stealing the car deginitely possible.
Using crypto-wallet exclusively for shifting numbers between them would be pretty much impossible to trace. But eventually, for crypto-currencies to be more useful that a cryptographer play toay, you need to be able to order good delivered. So instead you settle for merely pseudonymity, knowing that a big player (government-level) will eventuall manage to make a link between your transaction in the blockchain and the drop-off points you ordered delivery too, getting step by step closer to de-anonymise you.
The main advantage of crypto currency protocol is no anonymity (they are merely pseudonymous). The main advantage is (theoretical) absence of central authority.
Just like you can hand out cash in person to anyone, crypto currencies enable you to send cryptocoin to anyone online without there being some "Bitcoin Inc" that can unilaterally decide to block your transaction or freeze your account (unlike credit cards). everyone can see it on the block chain (That the whole idea behind distributed trust), but there's no single entity that can prevent you.
(Well, in Theory. In practice, some large mining pools are dangerously close to becoming some kind of central authority).
...and the industry has evntually found a way to produce what it needs artificially at a much lower price than the crazy market.
it's just that most of their value (or perceived value, at least) is in their being a status symbol.
...and for some weird reasons, most of the people have been conditionned to see the status symbol only if that peculiar piece of diamond happens to have been dug out of the ground, despite having all the same atoms in the same position as what the industry grows in labs.
They're not inherently anonymous, but they can be anonymous if you can keep your wallet and all transactions made separated from anything that personally identifies you. Easier said than done, naturally, but those using them for nefarious purposes are motivated to do so and seem to have reasonable success.
Yes, you could be anonymous if the only single usage you do of crypto currency would be shifting numerical values around between crypto-wallet. Then yes, you could be even exchanging BTCs with known terrorists, child porno graphers, etc. and never be found out by the government.
But usually, the point of making transactions with other parties is that you want not only value shifting wallets, but also obtain something for it : You'd like to buy arms from an illegal arm dealer, you'd like to receive drugs, etc.
At that point there's a transaction happening on some block chain, that will be couple to some real-world event (some illegal packets getting shipped to your drop-off address).
At that point, a sufficiently motivated entity with enough ressources (basically, government-level entity) can manage to eventually track down the chain of event and de-anonymize you.
How did they actually manage to make this patentable ?
There have been countless variations of this "software is controlling the faces of the keys" since forever.
- Entire second touchscreens working as a keyboard.
- individual LCD, eInk or OLED screens behind every key (Art Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard was attracting lots of attention back in the days).
- whole LCDs/OLED screens behind the whole keyboard (what Art Lebedev eventually settled with to make it less expensive to produce than the earlier models)
- laser projecting a keyboard on any surface etc.
How the fuck did Apple manage to file a patent about a horse that has been beaten to death during the past 15 years ?
(Reads TFA,...)
Ah, okay. They have "improved" the technology by adding polarized filter, because glare can be a problem with the kind of glossy surface they use. Yay for innovation !
Eventually, as more missions on the moon happens, you'll have more data to send from the probes on the moon back to earth. It doesn't make sense economically to build every single last device with a high gain radio equipment able to beam it's own data directly to earth.
You'll eventually need an infrastructure of (relatively) high speed, high bandwidth local network (to communicate between the various probes/robots/landers/base station), and relays that uplink them to earth.
What are you going to do :
- Completely re-invent something from the ground up for the specific need of the mission ? (which actually is a valid strategy : that's the current situation on Mars with probe using sattelite relays)
- Try to see if you can deploy easly availble and widely tested already existing solution ? (which is the idea behind this project) Of course, as the whole purpose of this type of solution is to use cheap of-the-shelf elements, you're going to ask some current big players in the field to help deploy the current-day solution. And of course, the big players will seize the solution to spin it as publicity.
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Also, the Nokia 3310 is probably orbital-reentry-proof, and thus naturally the solution picked up by NASA as a Space-modem.:-P
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
Or, you know, you could realize that the "glowing box with moving pictures on it that dumbs you down" isn't an absolute requirement to fill your life. Watching series or movies, no matter where from (/HBO, Netflix, whatever) isn't the only form of entertainment available to humanity.
You could also go out more and do some outdoor activity. Yes, I know,/. and basement dwellers. But doing some outdoor exercise could be also good for your general health, extend a bit your life expectancy and even more increase your quality of life. (And there are a lot of simple out-door activities that costs a lot less than a gym/fitness membership, and certainly a lot less than any TV-media combination).
Yes, some people are replacing cable TV with an almost cable-TV-like situation, where the only advantage is to be less at the mercy of a single local monopolies, but a few competing companies with differing content. But other people just wax their skis and go to have fun on the snow in the Alps.
(DISCLAIMER: I live on the European side of the Atlantic pond, where cable didn't have such a huge success as in the US, and where there's even a significant choice of totally free TV/Radio media - either off-the-air (DVB-T), or (in bigger cities) relayed un-encrypted for free on you appartment's cable antenna connection port, even if you don't subscribe to any cable company at all. We aren't as much cable cutter as we didn't have that many cables to cut to begin with).
I suspect that's why manufacturers didn't initially include them, that and the additional cost.
Actually, back in the PDA era, long before the smartphone/selfie craze, one of the first PDA to feature a built-in camera - the Sony Clie - had a rotating camera.
(Of course the main reason back then wasn't as much privacy, as it was about the price of putting 2 cameras vs. one good quality camera that can be rotated either into photo or selfie position).
Even a few of the aftermarket SDIO camera did have rotating cameras (again, the main reason being that the camera could still be rotated into the desired position to capture the desired picutre no matter which esoteric position the SD card port was on your speficit non-standard PDA).
But due to it being easily breakable, manufacturer moved quickly out of it and started eventually proposing dual cameras.
Now I suspect that they going back to this partially for the same reasons : Now that we have reached "peak smartphone" and not everyone is rushing to replace their smartphone with the newest shiny every 6 months (because basically the old smartphone still does the job), the manufacturer are happy to re-introduce an easily breakable feature (phone not being extremely durable = people will eventually need to replace it), and market it by leveraging the people's interest in privacy.
I'd pay extra for a phone with real physical switches that interrupt current flow to things like the camera, microphone, GPS, radios, etc. Software based buttons can't be trusted.
Even something simple that prevents button presses while the phone is in my pocket would be welcome. Back in the day things like portable CD players had lock switches on the back of the device for exactly that reason.
another alternative to consider would be Sailfish OS from Jolla. (A full blown GNU/Linux, with a nice sleek QML based interface, and the commercial version supports Android 4.4 Kitkat apps).
Currently, they sell official installation images "Sailfish X" that you can install on select Sony devices part of their official "Open devices" efforts (currently : Xperia X, the Xperia XA2 is planned in the near future)
Their own venerable Jolla 1 smartphone from 2013 still gets the latest updates (and thanks to QML being much more lightweight, still manages to remain more or less fluid in native apps and a few android apps).
And they had to be delusional to think everyone would jump ship from established ecosystems.
Actually, they were not dellusional. They knew they would need to at least enable accessibility to one of the major ecosystem : They knew they needed to find a way to let users run Android apps.
They simply failed at implementing this succesfully. WSL - a.k.a. Bash in Windows - is what Microsoft managed to salvage out of the remnant of this failed attempt.
They managed to get support for a few key Linux APIs, the bare minimum to get console applications ELF working and a bit of networking (so enough to run Bash, some webserver to do tests on it, etc.) But way too many missing bits to get the full android stack up.
Can't blame them. Unlike other similar projects (Myriad's Alien-Dalvik that gives android apps support on Jolla's Sailfish OS) they can't rely on an actual Linux/Android kernel underneath.
In addition of testimony of other users about running Virtual Box and using VT-x CPUs extensions, keep in mind that TFS mentions *containers*.
i.e.: sort of super-chroots that uses in-kernel features (Cgroups) to partition more than just file system directories, but every other ressources too like CPU scheduling, etc. (unlike vanilla chroot. So they are a bit more secure)
Everything runs under the same kernel (so a bit less secure than full-blown emulators like qemu, virtualbox, etc.) there's no emulation at all, and a single kernel is responsible for scheduling all the resources among containers.
So basically, containers (e.g.: LXC, Docker, etc.) are as light-weight as a chroot. You can run a couple of them even on a Raspberry Pi. Any half decent chrome book would have no problems at all.
The only actual limits would be RAM depending on how much software will be running at the same time among all the containers.
O2 (an example of ISP I used during my stay in Germany) has currently offers of 25 or 20 GB per month. At currently simulated 490Mbps (roughly 60MB/s) it would take between 300s (5 min) to 400ms to max it out, around 10x more that the above 30s example. Also, once the limit is hit, the device isn't cut off internet, the speed is simply degraded to 1Mbps.
There are other countries in Europe where it's not even customary to have data limits : Switzerland is an example thereof (on most non-pre-paid-plans, only speed is limited (together with minimal guaranteed speed), not total download volume)
I'm too lazy to do a systematic check but lots of European countries are likely to be in similar situation.
And that's today's number. By the time 5G finishes getting deployed to customers, the various plans will be adapted to it (probably with data limits in the 100GB range and higher speed limits / minimal guarantee).
Meanwhile, US custommers will probably have their monthly limits increased from 1GB to 2GB.
TFS doesn't only mention San Francisco, but also Frankfurt, which is in Germany, which it self is here in Europe - i.e.: a continent where not all ISP put as absurd limitations on data bandwidth as you have to put up with your USAmerican Telcos.
I want better than "pretty stable" for my file system, I want stable. Pretty stable suggests not completely stable.
If you want "stable" - you only stick to the recommended features that are marked as stable. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
The rest works well enough to be used in production by multiple companies (Facebook, SUSE, etc.)
As a non omniscient-being, I can't vouch that there will never be some weird bug hidden in the darkness that will suddenly jump at you when you hit that weird corner xase that nobody has though about ever. But that's valid for any other part of the Linux kernel and any other piece of software in general. But enough people are pouring resources in and using it in the real world to keep the probability of such an event occurring extremely low, to the point that it seems acceptable to me.
A simple example is "btrfs balance". It is fundamentally impossible to do this safely without having to re-write all of the data, which means it's literally impossible to do with a drive more than 50% full.
Huh, no.
A "balance" is not literally rewriting a new copy of the whole drive in one single atomic step.
Even the large scale "rewrite everything" rebalancing usually works one allocation chunk at a time. So even that one is possible to do, as long as you have at least one free chunk.
The "usage" filters let you usually try to free allocation chunks by taking the least full chunk and appending it's content on allocation chunks that still have free room (that's what "-dusage=0" does). that enables you to balance when you con't even have a single allocation chunk free, and only have free-space equivalent to an allocation chunk spread all-over the remaining non-full chunks. That's how you can get yourself out of "stuck with enosp errors" situation. (That's also how opensuse's btrfs-maintenance and sailfish os' btrfs-balancer begin their work, and only then start increasing "usage" in steps).
Also all the data that is represented inside those allocation chunks is handled in a CoW fashion :
- new copy of the data is written over some new free space inisde the new allocation chunk
- pointers are updated
- the data from the old allocation chunk is marked as "free"
- repeat enough of the above and the whole old chunk is emptied and available again for chunk allocations (and can be signaled to be free through "fstrim" so the firmware on the SSD knows that it can claim back the erase-blocks that it allocated to that logical block address)
Basically, there isn't much difference between a normal (partial over-) write operation and a balance, except that :
- in case of balance, the newly written extents of data have the same content as the original extents of data.
- as you're sequentially running through all (or the part that is considered by the filters) data, the new data extents will be all stored nice and tidy in their new allocation chunks instead of being sparsely spread all-over the place, due to extents in between having been freed and/or moved around.
- an indirect result of the above : the free space gets "de-fragmented" and new space is available to be allocated for upcoming chunks.
There's no point in time in this procedure where you can't retrieve coherent data. A BTRFS balance interrupted by a reboot/hardware crash/whatever) can simply resume where it left of at the next boot. (and usually does this automatically).
I use it as my everyday FS on laptop (default for openSUSE), on smartphones (default for Sailfish OS), and on a few servers I take care of.
The default options work perfectly well nowadays. (CoW has been able to get me out of very tricky situation like hardware crashes)
The thing that are considered still unstable are features that aren't enabled by default (namely: RAID5/6, there has been progress lately, but it's still not considered stable. Unlike ZFS's RAID-Z/Z2)
The "paint yourself in a corner CoW madness" that typically plague young CoW/Log FS ("enosp" while trying to delete files) has disappeared long ago.
Warning : another peculiarity of CoW/Log FS :
- DO NOT RUN "fsck" EVER. It doesn't make sense to fsck, better use the features of CoW / Log to roll back to an older version
(at least only use it as a desperate last resort, when all the CoW's / Log's feature have failed) (In BTRFS' case, that means first try to mount with "usebackuproot" (formely "recovery") option to use an older pre-corruption version, or use the "btrfs recovery" to read the files out of a corrupted filesystem/image. So basically by then you've already fixed your system before even reaching the point where you'd consider fsck. So don't run it.).
I would still recommend :
- big files that get tons of random write (e.g.: databases, virtual volumes, torrents), and that basically have their own integrity checking built-in (db's log journal, the checking/journaling of the filesystem inside the VM, etc.) can benefit if you mark then "not CoW" (chattr +C, usually done only on new files) to avoid excessive CoW fragmentation and redundance between CoW and their respective integrity checking. (I've read somewhere the ZFS can do this automatically detect such files for you. In BTRFS you need to manually tag these files with chattr)
- running "btrfs scrub" periodically to check data integrity and use btrfs' built-in checksum to detect bit rot (big feature of ZFS/BTRFS compared to oldschools FS such as EXT4). (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you)
- running "btrfs balance" with filters like "-musage=60 -dusage=60" to tidy up allocated chunks that are more or less empty. It helps to avoid running out of allocatable chunks. (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you, on sailfish "btrfs-balancer" can help automate this work and is used by the system updater to free allocatable chunks) (eventually it will be automated in the background by BTRFS).
- running "fstrim" after above-mentioned balance so the SSD's firmware knows the freed chunks can now be claimed back as free erase blocks for wear-leveling purpose. (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you)
That's just my personal recommendations, it's not mandatory.
And now the interesting parts :
- openSUSE provides a tool called "snapper" that will automate taking snapshots with BTRFS
- YaST interract with the above whenever you make an upgrade.
- the GRUB script they provide can conveniently setup an "advanced" boot menu entry that propose to directly boot into an older snapshot, circumventing any damage done by a botched upgrade.
For everyday use, BTRFS is actually pretty stable, and is used by default by openSUSE. (and used to be used by default by Jolla's Sailfish).
Some specific *features* (mainly : RAID5/6) aren't considered stable yet. (But that's the case of even XFS: they working to add CoW and snapshotting too)
But if you stick to default settings, it works perfectly.
EU (including other European countries like CH) have also banned those plastic bags.
Most shops have switched to :
- giving out bags made of *compostable bio-platics* (so you can use them to discard your usual compostable kitchen waste).
- selling (recycled) paper bags
- selling higher quality multi-use reusable bags (either fabric or recycled PET plastic).
Though not an actual ban yet, some places have switched away from plastic cups, etc. :
- some outdoor festival have switched to compostable cups/plates/cutlery (mostly special wooden/cardboard plates, and bio-plastic cups and cutlery)
Being cheap is only one of the attractive point of Uber's service. The other is ease of use.
In markets where Taxi are already cheap, Uber won't trying to compete on the price. They'll try to compete on the convenience (an app on your smartphone in your pocket, that makes hailing a vehicle easy, makes the payment automatic, etc.)
So their primary competition in these market arent' the local Taxis. But the local ride sharing apps (TFS mentions Ola and Grab) and the various "automatically pay with your phone" solution (I would suspect that Alipay should have some solution fitting similar usecases).
That doesn't mean Uber will succeed. Only that the specific price of Taxi in that region isn't relevant for the peculiar struggles of Uber in that market.
What relation is there with minors and the business of cobalt?
Explaining the joke: It's a black humour remark about the fact that child labor is still happening a lot in the mining business in developing countries.
Maybe life on our side of the Atlantic pond is a tiny bit different than in the US, but...
I'd prefer to take it to the anti-gun's conclusion: anytime something is used for evil, the entire industry must be destroyed.
...I see quite a bit of difference between gun and all the example you cite.
In the past couple of decade I've never been through any situation where I've been thinking I'm lucky/happy to have a gun because it really saved the situation, or thinking that I wish I could have had one. Guns don't seem fundamentally important and useful objects in everyday life. They mostly bring in a danger and useless risk without bringing much benefit.
DUI? Ban all cars,
Yup. Cars kill people (Well technically, irresponsible drivers do, whatever, bla bla...) But cars are tremendously useful, (even though our more densely populated city tend to enjoy better public transportations). Lots of services and people could not get their job done without one.
There are risks to car, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
drugs (including medicines).
Medecine can kill people (errors, side effects, addiction to prescription drugs, development of drugs-resisting microbes due to industrial over-use and over-prescription, etc.) Still, they save lives. A lot of them. Think the drastic reduction of death since the discovery and development of antibiotics.
There are risks to medecine, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
Assault with a baseball bat? Ban sports.
Do I really need to mention the health benefits of sports ? Every day, countless of times bats get swung, and most of the time it's to hit a ball as part of some healthy outdoor sport. (Then a tiny proportion is to hit a ball in front of a camera as part of a heavily corrupted televisual event in order to make money, and a couple of times it's on someone else head).
There are risks to sports equipment, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
Cyberbullying? Ban computers.
You're writing on one. I don't think I even need to explain how my above logic applies also to this of your examples...
Works for a lot of things!
Yup, works even for kitchen implements: knife kill people ! let's ban kitchen.
And again my argument works too: - How many time did someone got stabbed with a kitchen knife in your neighborhood ? - How many time did you yourself use your kitchen knife to make you a sandwich, cut some cheese, or any other common use to feed your self.
Yup, there are risks of having knife in your home. But the vast amount of time, they're mostly used to prepare food.
alcohol, and drugs
Here the situation is a bit different: - the usefulness is a lot lower (mainly entertainment, and some social use) - the risk aren't that great (there are long term risk on the health due to excessive use. But occasional and reasonable use isn't lethal).
End result ? These are heavily regulated. Not everyone is allowed to acquire these (e.g.: minor aren't) etc.
And now let's look at the gun: like knifes they can be used to kill people. But unlike knives, we're not in the situations (at least in our corner of the world) where everyday million of rounds are fired and thus making the life of everyone much easier. There's no tremendous benefit in everyone of the population happily shooting each other.
Again, I've reached my current point in life without ever being in a situation where a gun was necessary, unlike any other of your example. It seems to me that there are no obvious everyday use for guns for the vast majority of the population.
Thus in my opinion, it should go the same route as drugs: it should be regulated.
If he would be trying to *sell* the parts for a profit on some eBay-liexpress-mazon website : Yes, he would be probably infringing some patents and/or trademarks. That's not different from current chinese crappy-cheap knock offs sold on the same site. Except that the guy is probably located in a jurisdiction where enforcing IP rights would be easier for Porsche.
If he is building them himself to use them : Nope fat chance. In most sane jurisdiction, 3D printing his own parts to repair a car would fall under the same situation as making some elements out of acrylic/plywood/moldign them himself/cutting the metal, etc. As long as the vehicle still passes inspection and is considered streetworthy, it's okay.
The laws would need to be changed.
- trying to bring some new **AA-like laws to make home printing illegal. (But goodluck enforcing it, short of passing a law making mandatory to register every single 3D printer, including self-made ones). <- I still see this as a probability, but coming more with "Think of the children !" hysteria regarding home printing of weapons.
- trying to make "streetworthiness criteria" much more stringent and to refuse any part that isn't provided (3d printed or not) by the original manufacturer. <- this looks to me as a liekly scenario, specially in IP lawsuit happy jurisdictions like the US.
There is no secret to making "cola" {...} The Chinese did not learn to make cola by "stealing" Coke's "secret recipe".
What the above poster is trying to tell about is not the actual recipe of Coke's own spin on cola-based caffeined drinks. (The recipe isn't actually that much a secret. e.g.: In several markets, local food and beverage law require the content to be explicitly stated on the label).
What is the key matter is that the Chinese owners of the outsourced manufacturing plant will analyse the *process* of manufacturing - i.e.: the methodology used by Coke to produce their drinks at industrial scale. And that's the thing they can better : making a manufacturing plant better and more efficient at producing soda drinks.
To quote the relevant part:
The Chinese company then spent 10 years studying Cocoa Cola's products, workflow, supply chain, and so on until they understood it better than Cocoa Cola.
To make a much beloved/. car analogy : they didn't copy the general concept of making a metal can box with 4 wheels and a motor on it. they looked at how Ford's specific own-invented Ford process to mass-produce cars, they'll look into the basic feature sets that seem to interest customers and that manufacturer seem to concentrate on (everyone wants extra features like radio and cup holders) then they'll get good at making not so bad knock-offs at a smaller price and craptastic "only in shape" copies, that sell at a fraction of the price but still somehow hold together long enough for the customer to buy them and only break down later on the way home.
And actually quite successful test :
- It didn't destroy the launchpad
- It didn't even blow up during the launch
- As a bonus, even 2 out of the 3 core managed to land back safely.
Yes, everything didn't work out as planned (they planned to recovery the 3rd core, but it crashed). Still, everything that is needed to launch payload is already working.
Basically, to be useful, the Falcon Heavy just needs not to blow up until it has successfully delivered it's payload at the targeted orbit. Then even the 3 cores could be blowing up, it won't hamper the launch mission.
In other words, even if it performs exactly as the test including the destruction of the third core, the Falcon Heavy will be able to successfully launch the couple of sattelites that are planned on its next launch / first commercial mission.
this is one of those "we have to do it to see... and we might not even get it right the second... or third... or fourth time."
Now the best part it that Falcon Heavy is functional enough that they can keep doing these times, while at the same time being paid to launch satellites. Again, for now, for SpaceX, the commercially important part is what happens until the payload has been delivered (satellite has been placed into orbit, or some next stage is able to propel some NASA experiment to transfer to Mars' orbit, etc.). Everything that happens afterward (including the landing of the reusable cores) is "added bonus".
In the long term, once the re-use will be as successful as with Falcon 9 rocket, that is going to help SpaceX reduce the costs of launches (their whole idea of "Slightly cheaper flights thanks to parts reuse") (in addition of the all the useful engineering knowledge that they can gain by analyzing the returned vehicle) But for now Falcon Heavy is already 100% usable for commercial flights even in non-fully recovered way.
Modern "Skype for Linux" version 8.x is just Web Skype, packaged together with Chromium, thanks to Electron framework. (Unlike older versions 4.y which were a Qt port of an older Windows native application). The most recent version has moved away from binary plugins for the Audio/Video and/or from Microsoft's own NIH syndrom. And transitioned to WebRTC + HTML5 Video.
But you don't even actually need to install this piece of crap.
- You can browse to http://webskype.com/ with Chromium and mostly get the same result. (But without installed binary plugin, only relying on Chromium's WebRTC)
- You can also browse it with Firefox (last time I checked, Audio/Video wasn't supported, saddly)
- You can even install the SkypeWeb Purple plugin and use it from within Pidgin/Adium
You can basically use Skype without executing a single binary opcode written by Microsoft (well directly, anway. Depending on your Javascript enginge, it's going to JIT the Javascript on Skype's website if you use Chromium/Firefox. Pidgin isn't affected).
There is a single big difference between Yeti and all the other Silicon Valley startups that came before :
Google. And their datacenters.
Currently, Google has already datacenters all over the world: there's always a Google server within 5 ms of ping time within reach of any of your internet-enabled gadgets. Currently, Google has also tons of GPUs in those datacenter, mostly used for their deep neural net AIs and/or to help compressing video that user upload on Youtube (specially for codec that don't have a lot of compression hardware (like latest AV-1 experiments).
In other words : google has a giant low-latency infrastructure that they can harness for Yeti, whereas any former startup had to build their infrastructure from the ground up (meaning not enough server, most at a too long ping-time distance from your chormecast HDMI stick).
Slashdot Mirror
it's that it's harder to trace. In theory if you can keep your name from being associated with your wallet it's impossible to trace. But it doesn't need to be impossible. A locked car is harder to steal, not impossible to steal.
A car with doors welded shut would be close to impossible to steal.
But eventually, for a car to be more useful than a giant paper weight, you need to be able to enter it and drive it.
so instead you settle for merely locking door, which makes stealing the car deginitely possible.
Using crypto-wallet exclusively for shifting numbers between them would be pretty much impossible to trace.
But eventually, for crypto-currencies to be more useful that a cryptographer play toay, you need to be able to order good delivered.
So instead you settle for merely pseudonymity, knowing that a big player (government-level) will eventuall manage to make a link between your transaction in the blockchain and the drop-off points you ordered delivery too, getting step by step closer to de-anonymise you.
The main advantage of crypto currency protocol is no anonymity (they are merely pseudonymous).
The main advantage is (theoretical) absence of central authority.
Just like you can hand out cash in person to anyone,
crypto currencies enable you to send cryptocoin to anyone online without there being some "Bitcoin Inc" that can unilaterally decide to block your transaction or freeze your account (unlike credit cards).
everyone can see it on the block chain (That the whole idea behind distributed trust), but there's no single entity that can prevent you.
(Well, in Theory. In practice, some large mining pools are dangerously close to becoming some kind of central authority).
Diamonds can be useful too
...and the industry has evntually found a way to produce what it needs artificially at a much lower price than the crazy market.
it's just that most of their value (or perceived value, at least) is in their being a status symbol.
...and for some weird reasons, most of the people have been conditionned to see the status symbol only if that peculiar piece of diamond happens to have been dug out of the ground, despite having all the same atoms in the same position as what the industry grows in labs.
They're not inherently anonymous, but they can be anonymous if you can keep your wallet and all transactions made separated from anything that personally identifies you. Easier said than done, naturally, but those using them for nefarious purposes are motivated to do so and seem to have reasonable success.
Yes, you could be anonymous if the only single usage you do of crypto currency would be shifting numerical values around between crypto-wallet.
Then yes, you could be even exchanging BTCs with known terrorists, child porno graphers, etc. and never be found out by the government.
But usually, the point of making transactions with other parties is that you want not only value shifting wallets, but also obtain something for it :
You'd like to buy arms from an illegal arm dealer, you'd like to receive drugs, etc.
At that point there's a transaction happening on some block chain, that will be couple to some real-world event (some illegal packets getting shipped to your drop-off address).
At that point, a sufficiently motivated entity with enough ressources (basically, government-level entity) can manage to eventually track down the chain of event and de-anonymize you.
How did they actually manage to make this patentable ?
There have been countless variations of this "software is controlling the faces of the keys" since forever.
- Entire second touchscreens working as a keyboard.
- individual LCD, eInk or OLED screens behind every key (Art Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard was attracting lots of attention back in the days).
- whole LCDs/OLED screens behind the whole keyboard (what Art Lebedev eventually settled with to make it less expensive to produce than the earlier models)
- laser projecting a keyboard on any surface
etc.
How the fuck did Apple manage to file a patent about a horse that has been beaten to death during the past 15 years ?
(Reads TFA,...)
Ah, okay. They have "improved" the technology by adding polarized filter, because glare can be a problem with the kind of glossy surface they use.
Yay for innovation !
Scratch past the PR stunt, name droping, etc.
Eventually, as more missions on the moon happens, you'll have more data to send from the probes on the moon back to earth.
It doesn't make sense economically to build every single last device with a high gain radio equipment able to beam it's own data directly to earth.
You'll eventually need an infrastructure of (relatively) high speed, high bandwidth local network (to communicate between the various probes/robots/landers/base station), and relays that uplink them to earth.
What are you going to do :
- Completely re-invent something from the ground up for the specific need of the mission ?
(which actually is a valid strategy : that's the current situation on Mars with probe using sattelite relays)
- Try to see if you can deploy easly availble and widely tested already existing solution ?
(which is the idea behind this project)
Of course, as the whole purpose of this type of solution is to use cheap of-the-shelf elements, you're going to ask some current big players in the field to help deploy the current-day solution. And of course, the big players will seize the solution to spin it as publicity.
---
Also, the Nokia 3310 is probably orbital-reentry-proof, and thus naturally the solution picked up by NASA as a Space-modem. :-P
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
Or, you know, you could realize that the "glowing box with moving pictures on it that dumbs you down" isn't an absolute requirement to fill your life.
Watching series or movies, no matter where from (/HBO, Netflix, whatever) isn't the only form of entertainment available to humanity.
You could also go out more and do some outdoor activity. /. and basement dwellers.
Yes, I know,
But doing some outdoor exercise could be also good for your general health, extend a bit your life expectancy and even more increase your quality of life.
(And there are a lot of simple out-door activities that costs a lot less than a gym/fitness membership, and certainly a lot less than any TV-media combination).
Yes, some people are replacing cable TV with an almost cable-TV-like situation, where the only advantage is to be less at the mercy of a single local monopolies, but a few competing companies with differing content.
But other people just wax their skis and go to have fun on the snow in the Alps.
(DISCLAIMER: I live on the European side of the Atlantic pond, where cable didn't have such a huge success as in the US, and where there's even a significant choice of totally free TV/Radio media - either off-the-air (DVB-T), or (in bigger cities) relayed un-encrypted for free on you appartment's cable antenna connection port, even if you don't subscribe to any cable company at all.
We aren't as much cable cutter as we didn't have that many cables to cut to begin with).
I suspect that's why manufacturers didn't initially include them, that and the additional cost.
Actually, back in the PDA era, long before the smartphone/selfie craze,
one of the first PDA to feature a built-in camera - the Sony Clie - had a rotating camera.
(Of course the main reason back then wasn't as much privacy, as it was about the price of putting 2 cameras vs. one good quality camera that can be rotated either into photo or selfie position).
Even a few of the aftermarket SDIO camera did have rotating cameras (again, the main reason being that the camera could still be rotated into the desired position to capture the desired picutre no matter which esoteric position the SD card port was on your speficit non-standard PDA).
But due to it being easily breakable, manufacturer moved quickly out of it and started eventually proposing dual cameras.
Now I suspect that they going back to this partially for the same reasons :
Now that we have reached "peak smartphone" and not everyone is rushing to replace their smartphone with the newest shiny every 6 months (because basically the old smartphone still does the job), the manufacturer are happy to re-introduce an easily breakable feature (phone not being extremely durable = people will eventually need to replace it), and market it by leveraging the people's interest in privacy.
I'd pay extra for a phone with real physical switches that interrupt current flow to things like the camera, microphone, GPS, radios, etc. Software based buttons can't be trusted.
Even something simple that prevents button presses while the phone is in my pocket would be welcome. Back in the day things like portable CD players had lock switches on the back of the device for exactly that reason.
another alternative to consider would be Sailfish OS from Jolla.
(A full blown GNU/Linux, with a nice sleek QML based interface, and the commercial version supports Android 4.4 Kitkat apps).
Currently, they sell official installation images "Sailfish X" that you can install on select Sony devices part of their official "Open devices" efforts (currently : Xperia X, the Xperia XA2 is planned in the near future)
Their own venerable Jolla 1 smartphone from 2013 still gets the latest updates (and thanks to QML being much more lightweight, still manages to remain more or less fluid in native apps and a few android apps).
And they had to be delusional to think everyone would jump ship from established ecosystems.
Actually, they were not dellusional.
They knew they would need to at least enable accessibility to one of the major ecosystem : They knew they needed to find a way to let users run Android apps.
They simply failed at implementing this succesfully.
WSL - a.k.a. Bash in Windows - is what Microsoft managed to salvage out of the remnant of this failed attempt.
They managed to get support for a few key Linux APIs, the bare minimum to get console applications ELF working and a bit of networking (so enough to run Bash, some webserver to do tests on it, etc.)
But way too many missing bits to get the full android stack up.
Can't blame them. Unlike other similar projects (Myriad's Alien-Dalvik that gives android apps support on Jolla's Sailfish OS) they can't rely on an actual Linux/Android kernel underneath.
In addition of testimony of other users about running Virtual Box and using VT-x CPUs extensions,
keep in mind that TFS mentions *containers*.
i.e.: sort of super-chroots that uses in-kernel features (Cgroups) to partition more than just file system directories, but every other ressources too like CPU scheduling, etc. (unlike vanilla chroot. So they are a bit more secure)
Everything runs under the same kernel (so a bit less secure than full-blown emulators like qemu, virtualbox, etc.) there's no emulation at all, and a single kernel is responsible for scheduling all the resources among containers.
So basically, containers (e.g.: LXC, Docker, etc.) are as light-weight as a chroot. You can run a couple of them even on a Raspberry Pi. Any half decent chrome book would have no problems at all.
The only actual limits would be RAM depending on how much software will be running at the same time among all the containers.
addendum:
O2 (an example of ISP I used during my stay in Germany) has currently offers of 25 or 20 GB per month.
At currently simulated 490Mbps (roughly 60MB/s) it would take between 300s (5 min) to 400ms to max it out, around 10x more that the above 30s example.
Also, once the limit is hit, the device isn't cut off internet, the speed is simply degraded to 1Mbps.
There are other countries in Europe where it's not even customary to have data limits : Switzerland is an example thereof (on most non-pre-paid-plans, only speed is limited (together with minimal guaranteed speed), not total download volume)
I'm too lazy to do a systematic check but lots of European countries are likely to be in similar situation.
And that's today's number. By the time 5G finishes getting deployed to customers, the various plans will be adapted to it (probably with data limits in the 100GB range and higher speed limits / minimal guarantee).
Meanwhile, US custommers will probably have their monthly limits increased from 1GB to 2GB.
TFS doesn't only mention San Francisco, but also Frankfurt, which is in Germany, which it self is here in Europe - i.e.: a continent where not all ISP put as absurd limitations on data bandwidth as you have to put up with your USAmerican Telcos.
I want better than "pretty stable" for my file system, I want stable. Pretty stable suggests not completely stable.
If you want "stable" - you only stick to the recommended features that are marked as stable.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.
The rest works well enough to be used in production by multiple companies (Facebook, SUSE, etc.)
As a non omniscient-being, I can't vouch that there will never be some weird bug hidden in the darkness that will suddenly jump at you when you hit that weird corner xase that nobody has though about ever. But that's valid for any other part of the Linux kernel and any other piece of software in general.
But enough people are pouring resources in and using it in the real world to keep the probability of such an event occurring extremely low, to the point that it seems acceptable to me.
A simple example is "btrfs balance". It is fundamentally impossible to do this safely without having to re-write all of the data, which means it's literally impossible to do with a drive more than 50% full.
Huh, no.
A "balance" is not literally rewriting a new copy of the whole drive in one single atomic step.
Even the large scale "rewrite everything" rebalancing usually works one allocation chunk at a time. So even that one is possible to do, as long as you have at least one free chunk.
The "usage" filters let you usually try to free allocation chunks by taking the least full chunk and appending it's content on allocation chunks that still have free room (that's what "-dusage=0" does).
that enables you to balance when you con't even have a single allocation chunk free, and only have free-space equivalent to an allocation chunk spread all-over the remaining non-full chunks.
That's how you can get yourself out of "stuck with enosp errors" situation. (That's also how opensuse's btrfs-maintenance and sailfish os' btrfs-balancer begin their work, and only then start increasing "usage" in steps).
Also all the data that is represented inside those allocation chunks is handled in a CoW fashion :
- new copy of the data is written over some new free space inisde the new allocation chunk
- pointers are updated
- the data from the old allocation chunk is marked as "free"
- repeat enough of the above and the whole old chunk is emptied and available again for chunk allocations (and can be signaled to be free through "fstrim" so the firmware on the SSD knows that it can claim back the erase-blocks that it allocated to that logical block address)
Basically, there isn't much difference between a normal (partial over-) write operation and a balance, except that :
- in case of balance, the newly written extents of data have the same content as the original extents of data.
- as you're sequentially running through all (or the part that is considered by the filters) data, the new data extents will be all stored nice and tidy in their new allocation chunks instead of being sparsely spread all-over the place, due to extents in between having been freed and/or moved around.
- an indirect result of the above : the free space gets "de-fragmented" and new space is available to be allocated for upcoming chunks.
There's no point in time in this procedure where you can't retrieve coherent data.
A BTRFS balance interrupted by a reboot/hardware crash/whatever) can simply resume where it left of at the next boot.
(and usually does this automatically).
How stable is btrfs?
I use it as my everyday FS on laptop (default for openSUSE), on smartphones (default for Sailfish OS), and on a few servers I take care of.
The default options work perfectly well nowadays. (CoW has been able to get me out of very tricky situation like hardware crashes)
The thing that are considered still unstable are features that aren't enabled by default (namely: RAID5/6, there has been progress lately, but it's still not considered stable. Unlike ZFS's RAID-Z/Z2)
The "paint yourself in a corner CoW madness" that typically plague young CoW/Log FS ("enosp" while trying to delete files) has disappeared long ago.
Warning : another peculiarity of CoW /Log FS :
- DO NOT RUN "fsck" EVER. It doesn't make sense to fsck, better use the features of CoW / Log to roll back to an older version
(at least only use it as a desperate last resort, when all the CoW's / Log's feature have failed)
(In BTRFS' case, that means first try to mount with "usebackuproot" (formely "recovery") option to use an older pre-corruption version, or use the "btrfs recovery" to read the files out of a corrupted filesystem/image. So basically by then you've already fixed your system before even reaching the point where you'd consider fsck. So don't run it.).
I would still recommend :
- big files that get tons of random write (e.g.: databases, virtual volumes, torrents), and that basically have their own integrity checking built-in (db's log journal, the checking/journaling of the filesystem inside the VM, etc.) can benefit if you mark then "not CoW" (chattr +C, usually done only on new files) to avoid excessive CoW fragmentation and redundance between CoW and their respective integrity checking.
(I've read somewhere the ZFS can do this automatically detect such files for you. In BTRFS you need to manually tag these files with chattr)
- running "btrfs scrub" periodically to check data integrity and use btrfs' built-in checksum to detect bit rot (big feature of ZFS/BTRFS compared to oldschools FS such as EXT4). (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you)
- running "btrfs balance" with filters like "-musage=60 -dusage=60" to tidy up allocated chunks that are more or less empty. It helps to avoid running out of allocatable chunks. (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you, on sailfish "btrfs-balancer" can help automate this work and is used by the system updater to free allocatable chunks) (eventually it will be automated in the background by BTRFS).
- running "fstrim" after above-mentioned balance so the SSD's firmware knows the freed chunks can now be claimed back as free erase blocks for wear-leveling purpose. (on openSUSE look for package "btrfs-maintenance" that can setup cronjobs for you)
That's just my personal recommendations, it's not mandatory.
And now the interesting parts :
- openSUSE provides a tool called "snapper" that will automate taking snapshots with BTRFS
- YaST interract with the above whenever you make an upgrade.
- the GRUB script they provide can conveniently setup an "advanced" boot menu entry that propose to directly boot into an older snapshot, circumventing any damage done by a botched upgrade.
For everyday use, BTRFS is actually pretty stable, and is used by default by openSUSE.
(and used to be used by default by Jolla's Sailfish).
Some specific *features* (mainly : RAID5/6) aren't considered stable yet.
(But that's the case of even XFS: they working to add CoW and snapshotting too)
But if you stick to default settings, it works perfectly.
EU (including other European countries like CH) have also banned those plastic bags.
Most shops have switched to :
- giving out bags made of *compostable bio-platics* (so you can use them to discard your usual compostable kitchen waste).
- selling (recycled) paper bags
- selling higher quality multi-use reusable bags (either fabric or recycled PET plastic).
Though not an actual ban yet, some places have switched away from plastic cups, etc. :
- some outdoor festival have switched to compostable cups/plates/cutlery (mostly special wooden/cardboard plates, and bio-plastic cups and cutlery)
Being cheap is only one of the attractive point of Uber's service.
The other is ease of use.
In markets where Taxi are already cheap, Uber won't trying to compete on the price.
They'll try to compete on the convenience (an app on your smartphone in your pocket, that makes hailing a vehicle easy, makes the payment automatic, etc.)
So their primary competition in these market arent' the local Taxis.
But the local ride sharing apps (TFS mentions Ola and Grab) and the various "automatically pay with your phone" solution (I would suspect that Alipay should have some solution fitting similar usecases).
That doesn't mean Uber will succeed.
Only that the specific price of Taxi in that region isn't relevant for the peculiar struggles of Uber in that market.
What relation is there with minors and the business of cobalt?
Explaining the joke:
It's a black humour remark about the fact that child labor is still happening a lot in the mining business in developing countries.
Maybe life on our side of the Atlantic pond is a tiny bit different than in the US, but...
I'd prefer to take it to the anti-gun's conclusion: anytime something is used for evil, the entire industry must be destroyed.
...I see quite a bit of difference between gun and all the example you cite.
In the past couple of decade I've never been through any situation where I've been thinking I'm lucky/happy to have a gun because it really saved the situation, or thinking that I wish I could have had one.
Guns don't seem fundamentally important and useful objects in everyday life. They mostly bring in a danger and useless risk without bringing much benefit.
DUI? Ban all cars,
Yup. Cars kill people (Well technically, irresponsible drivers do, whatever, bla bla...)
But cars are tremendously useful, (even though our more densely populated city tend to enjoy better public transportations).
Lots of services and people could not get their job done without one.
There are risks to car, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
drugs (including medicines).
Medecine can kill people (errors, side effects, addiction to prescription drugs, development of drugs-resisting microbes due to industrial over-use and over-prescription, etc.)
Still, they save lives. A lot of them. Think the drastic reduction of death since the discovery and development of antibiotics.
There are risks to medecine, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
Assault with a baseball bat? Ban sports.
Do I really need to mention the health benefits of sports ?
Every day, countless of times bats get swung, and most of the time it's to hit a ball as part of some healthy outdoor sport.
(Then a tiny proportion is to hit a ball in front of a camera as part of a heavily corrupted televisual event in order to make money,
and a couple of times it's on someone else head).
There are risks to sports equipment, but the huge amount of benefits largely outweigh them.
Cyberbullying? Ban computers.
You're writing on one. I don't think I even need to explain how my above logic applies also to this of your examples...
Works for a lot of things!
Yup, works even for kitchen implements:
knife kill people ! let's ban kitchen.
And again my argument works too :
- How many time did someone got stabbed with a kitchen knife in your neighborhood ?
- How many time did you yourself use your kitchen knife to make you a sandwich, cut some cheese, or any other common use to feed your self.
Yup, there are risks of having knife in your home. But the vast amount of time, they're mostly used to prepare food.
alcohol, and drugs
Here the situation is a bit different :
- the usefulness is a lot lower (mainly entertainment, and some social use)
- the risk aren't that great (there are long term risk on the health due to excessive use. But occasional and reasonable use isn't lethal).
End result ? These are heavily regulated.
Not everyone is allowed to acquire these (e.g.: minor aren't)
etc.
And now let's look at the gun :
like knifes they can be used to kill people.
But unlike knives, we're not in the situations (at least in our corner of the world) where everyday million of rounds are fired and thus making the life of everyone much easier.
There's no tremendous benefit in everyone of the population happily shooting each other.
Again, I've reached my current point in life without ever being in a situation where a gun was necessary, unlike any other of your example.
It seems to me that there are no obvious everyday use for guns for the vast majority of the population.
Thus in my opinion, it should go the same route as drugs :
it should be regulated.
Some professions (police enforcement) might n
Depends.
If he would be trying to *sell* the parts for a profit on some eBay-liexpress-mazon website :
Yes, he would be probably infringing some patents and/or trademarks.
That's not different from current chinese crappy-cheap knock offs sold on the same site.
Except that the guy is probably located in a jurisdiction where enforcing IP rights would be easier for Porsche.
If he is building them himself to use them :
Nope fat chance. In most sane jurisdiction, 3D printing his own parts to repair a car would fall under the same situation as making some elements out of acrylic/plywood/moldign them himself/cutting the metal, etc.
As long as the vehicle still passes inspection and is considered streetworthy, it's okay.
The laws would need to be changed.
- trying to bring some new **AA-like laws to make home printing illegal. (But goodluck enforcing it, short of passing a law making mandatory to register every single 3D printer, including self-made ones). <- I still see this as a probability, but coming more with "Think of the children !" hysteria regarding home printing of weapons.
- trying to make "streetworthiness criteria" much more stringent and to refuse any part that isn't provided (3d printed or not) by the original manufacturer. <- this looks to me as a liekly scenario, specially in IP lawsuit happy jurisdictions like the US.
There is no secret to making "cola" {...} The Chinese did not learn to make cola by "stealing" Coke's "secret recipe".
What the above poster is trying to tell about is not the actual recipe of Coke's own spin on cola-based caffeined drinks.
(The recipe isn't actually that much a secret. e.g.: In several markets, local food and beverage law require the content to be explicitly stated on the label).
What is the key matter is that the Chinese owners of the outsourced manufacturing plant will analyse the *process* of manufacturing - i.e.: the methodology used by Coke to produce their drinks at industrial scale.
And that's the thing they can better : making a manufacturing plant better and more efficient at producing soda drinks.
To quote the relevant part :
The Chinese company then spent 10 years studying Cocoa Cola's products, workflow, supply chain, and so on until they understood it better than Cocoa Cola.
To make a much beloved /. car analogy :
they didn't copy the general concept of making a metal can box with 4 wheels and a motor on it.
they looked at how Ford's specific own-invented Ford process to mass-produce cars, they'll look into the basic feature sets that seem to interest customers and that manufacturer seem to concentrate on (everyone wants extra features like radio and cup holders)
then they'll get good at making not so bad knock-offs at a smaller price and craptastic "only in shape" copies, that sell at a fraction of the price but still somehow hold together long enough for the customer to buy them and only break down later on the way home.
It was a test flight.
And actually quite successful test :
- It didn't destroy the launchpad
- It didn't even blow up during the launch
- As a bonus, even 2 out of the 3 core managed to land back safely.
Yes, everything didn't work out as planned (they planned to recovery the 3rd core, but it crashed).
Still, everything that is needed to launch payload is already working.
Basically, to be useful, the Falcon Heavy just needs not to blow up until it has successfully delivered it's payload at the targeted orbit.
Then even the 3 cores could be blowing up, it won't hamper the launch mission.
In other words, even if it performs exactly as the test including the destruction of the third core, the Falcon Heavy will be able to successfully launch the couple of sattelites that are planned on its next launch / first commercial mission.
this is one of those "we have to do it to see... and we might not even get it right the second... or third... or fourth time."
Now the best part it that Falcon Heavy is functional enough that they can keep doing these times, while at the same time being paid to launch satellites.
Again, for now, for SpaceX, the commercially important part is what happens until the payload has been delivered (satellite has been placed into orbit, or some next stage is able to propel some NASA experiment to transfer to Mars' orbit, etc.).
Everything that happens afterward (including the landing of the reusable cores) is "added bonus".
In the long term, once the re-use will be as successful as with Falcon 9 rocket, that is going to help SpaceX reduce the costs of launches (their whole idea of "Slightly cheaper flights thanks to parts reuse") (in addition of the all the useful engineering knowledge that they can gain by analyzing the returned vehicle)
But for now Falcon Heavy is already 100% usable for commercial flights even in non-fully recovered way.
Modern Skype is mostly Web Skype.
Modern "Skype for Linux" version 8.x is just Web Skype, packaged together with Chromium, thanks to Electron framework.
(Unlike older versions 4.y which were a Qt port of an older Windows native application).
The most recent version has moved away from binary plugins for the Audio/Video and/or from Microsoft's own NIH syndrom.
And transitioned to WebRTC + HTML5 Video.
But you don't even actually need to install this piece of crap.
- You can browse to http://webskype.com/ with Chromium and mostly get the same result. (But without installed binary plugin, only relying on Chromium's WebRTC)
- You can also browse it with Firefox (last time I checked, Audio/Video wasn't supported, saddly)
- You can even install the SkypeWeb Purple plugin and use it from within Pidgin/Adium
You can basically use Skype without executing a single binary opcode written by Microsoft
(well directly, anway. Depending on your Javascript enginge, it's going to JIT the Javascript on Skype's website if you use Chromium/Firefox. Pidgin isn't affected).
There is a single big difference between Yeti and all the other Silicon Valley startups that came before :
Google.
And their datacenters.
Currently, Google has already datacenters all over the world: there's always a Google server within 5 ms of ping time within reach of any of your internet-enabled gadgets.
Currently, Google has also tons of GPUs in those datacenter, mostly used for their deep neural net AIs and/or to help compressing video that user upload on Youtube (specially for codec that don't have a lot of compression hardware (like latest AV-1 experiments).
In other words : google has a giant low-latency infrastructure that they can harness for Yeti, whereas any former startup had to build their infrastructure from the ground up (meaning not enough server, most at a too long ping-time distance from your chormecast HDMI stick).