I also feel like it should be fairly obvious, if you take the time to think about it. What can these devices measure? Heart rate and motion, generally. Some will ask you what kind of exercise you're engaged in, but it rarely gets more specific than "running" or "cycling". There might be a GPS, in which case, the device can know roughly how much distance you cover.
So take each individually:
* Heart rate: Different things can effect your heart rate to different degrees, and there's not a direct/exact correlation between hear rate and calories burned.
* Motion: One of these things just knows how much your wrist is moving, which often won't tell you much. Sit still and shake your arm a little, and then run around for an equal amount of time. The watch can't tell the difference.
* Kind of exercise: You can't know how many calories you've burned simply from the information, "You were riding a bike for 10 minutes." Were you going up-hill or down-hill? How heavy is your bike? How well maintained is your bike? What gear were you in? How bumpy is the road?
* GPS: It knows you went from point "A" to point "B", which gives a distance and theoretically an altitude and speed. Were you in a car or on a bike? Were you carrying anything? Were you doing jumping jacks while your travelled? When you went up 10 meters in altitude, did you climb the stairs or ride and escalator?
So on their own, none of these things would get you to an accurate reading. Admittedly, you could try to combine these measurements to make the reading more accurate. For example, if the device knows you're riding a bike, it can use the GPS to determine how fast you're going, whether you're going up-hill or down. It can measure your wrist movements and heart rate to guess about how hard you might be pedaling. However, doing this kind of calculation would probably take some machine learning to figure out how to combine these things for each different kind of exercise, and even then it would probably change for different people in different circumstances, requiring some kind of calibration. And even then, it might be fooled or confused somehow.
So I think, reasonably, all we can expect with the current technology is a vague estimate. However, that's not useless. If I use my fitbit every day, and yesterday it says I burned 200 calories, and then today it says I burned 2,000 calories, that is likely a good indication that I was far more active today than yesterday. Did I actually burn precisely 2,000 calories today? Probably not. Did I actually burn 10 times the number of calories as yesterday? That might be a decent estimate (I think that'd be worth studying). Did I do a significant amount of additional exercise today, probably improving my health? I think that's a safe bet, and mostly that's what people really need to know. After all, the numbers of calories listed on food packaging is also an estimate. If you're trying to line up your calories burned to calories eaten, you're fooling yourself.
I would hope so. I'd love it if the USB-C/Thunderbolt port became the new standard port that's built into everything and is used for everything. For any device you have, you will only need to plug in a single cable to a port following a single standard (excepting when you need an additional power cable). I'd even like to see it used on servers. I could see a scenario where every server in a rack is plugged into a single Thunderbolt switch/hub that provides networking, DAS/NAS/SAN, KVM, lights-out management, everything.
Take down drones that endanger firefighting and prison operations, sure. The problems start when undefined weasel-words like "authorized protection of a person" are used and rights of citizens are curtailed or eliminated.
Yeah, and part of the reason this should be a concern is, I think firefighters and prisons already have some latitude to take action when lives are at risk or there's a serious security problem. If a firefighter breaks a window to rescue someone, I don't think they get charged with destruction of private property. If prison guards damage a helicopter that someone tries to land in a prison yard without approval, I doubt they'd be in legal trouble. Admittedly I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt that they've bothered to write laws for every possible piece of equipment that may be damaged or seized, in every permutation of all possible scenarios.
So I think the question is, what exactly does this law accomplish? Does it just make the legal powers of the government vague enough that they can hack any drone they like?
The Constitution itself doesn't say anything about the rights of citizens. The Bill of Rights (which are amendments, not in the Constitution proper) spells out a few rights that the founders thought should be particularly safeguarded, but was never meant to be an exhaustive list of human rights that citizens hold.
The real question should be, "What right does the government have to shoot down a citizen's drone?" It doesn't say anything about shooting down drones in the Constitution. Of course, it doesn't say anything about drones in the Constitution because drones weren't a thing in 1787. The Constitution doesn't say anything about a lot of things, e.g. the FBI, CIA, NSA, Air Force, Marines, nuclear weapons, spy satellites.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder why people don't generally use Usenet. I don't particularly remember why I stopped. Was it because the client software was crappy? Was it because it was overrun with trolls and pirates? Was it just because everyone else seemed to be leaving it, decimating the community?
It reminds me of Slack. Everyone I know went crazy when Slack was released, as though it was a new revolutionary product. My immediate impression was, "Oh, great. Someone made a new closed/proprietary IRC clone." Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? We keep taking decent solutions and reimplementing them in proprietary web applications that lock us into a specific vendor. How long until Google and Facebook convince everyone to give up email in favor of their proprietary messaging apps? Then how long until they get people to give up HTML in favor of a snazzy new markup language that only works in their walled gardens?
the time frame when we were 98% sure hillary was going to win. so lets not try and put this on trump.
That's not great logic. The article itself states that the trend started in the last month of the campaign, during which time the race was tightening. It's entirely possible that people were uneasy about visiting a country where Trump was a serious contender, and his violent and xenophobic followers were being frequently shown on the news.
If you want to pick apart this analysis, there are better things to point to. Let's start by looking just at the graph, which seems to be your inclination. Going by the graph alone, it show enough historical data on that graph to draw any real conclusion. There's a downward trend, but that might be related to the time of year, or just be a random fluctuation. We would need to compare it to data from previous years to determine normal trends at a given time of year. We would need to look at how volatile the market is to determine whether the trend is outside the normal range of fluctuations.
Then there's how the data was collected: "Foursquare’s data comes from approximately 13 million users who opted to share their locations with the company." One question would be, how accurate is that? Further, if the data is based on location data, then even if a drop in tourism began at roughly the same time as Trump's election, that's not enough to indicate a cause. It would be a coincidence of events without any causal link.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that Trump's actions wouldn't have a dampening effect on voluntary travel to the US. He campaigned on the promise of getting rid of Mexicans and Muslims, assuming minorities are criminals, conducting trade wars, and putting immediate American economic interests above all else. He advocated torturing and killing innocent people if it might possibly make people feel that it would improve national security, even if it didn't actually improve it. His early actions included trying to revoke people's legal status and deport them to their country of origin (not necessarily the country they were traveling from, which makes this particularly dangerous).
What's more, I would almost expect Trump supporters to welcome the drop in international tourism. It means that there are fewer foreigners, and probably fewer minorities, entering our country. Sure, it's bad for the economy and probably a sign of greater problems, but it's not as though Trump followers are able to think deeply about indirect consequences.
I'm sure it's because of easy control of the display. If you want control over the size, position, color, and style of the subtitles, then storing text is insufficient. You'd need some kind of markup language. Then you risk running into issues where different manufacturers/developers have different implementations of the rendering code, and so different players show the subtitles differently.
Also, if you want to be able to control the font, you'd either need the whole world and all video players to standardize on a certain set of fonts, or you'd need to embed fonts in the movie file. Doing that is more complex both from a technical and a licensing standpoint, as opposed to just distributing pre-rendered images.
Having a rendering engine capable of parsing the markup language and rendering arbitrary fonts creates a system much more complex than rendering a simple bitmap. You have increased risk of bugs. If you're thinking is terms of physical media, you don't want there to be bugs in your DVD or DVD player, neither of which generally gets updates.
It means that patent troll companies which cannot manufacture a product and just carpet bomb with patents can have a business model.
You're still misidentifying the problem. Patent trolls aren't able to carpet bomb with patents simply because they don't have to manufacture a prototype. They're able to do it because the patent office is approving silly patents, i.e. patents that are obvious, not new, have prior art, or are general ideas rather than specific implementations.
For example, there was a patent a few years back for including a video cut-scene in a computer game. The patent troll then went around suing every major game developer. As far as I could tell from reading about it, the problem wasn't that the patent holder couldn't have slapped together a simple computer game with a video cut-scene. The problem is, that just shouldn't be something you can patent.
Well, I think the truth is not as simple as you're implying. First, though virus writers are more likely to target the OS with the largest install base (not necessarily the largest market share), that doesn't mean that some operating systems are not more secure than others. Windows, for example, used to have many many large security problems, due to the fact that it basically wasn't originally designed to be secure. However, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into securing Windows in recent years, and it's generally pretty secure.
Also, there are potential arguments as to why Windows is less likely to be secure. For example, some people have argued that unix-based systems were designed with security in mind, and Windows still hasn't caught up, at least partially due to their attempts to maintain backwards compatibility to a time when Windows was completely insecure. Many others have argued that open source products will generally tend to become more secure than closed source products over time, since security experts can access the code more freely and report/fix potential problems. I'm not sure those theories are borne out, and in any event, it certainly doesn't mean that open source products are immune to security threats.
And short of taking away admin/sudo access from users completely, malware can always social engineer it's way into administrative privileges during an installer or something similar.
That argument would hold a bit more relevance if this discussion weren't a worm that installed itself without user interaction. Also, it's possible that Linux users are less likely to install random unknown software, since it has package managers, and most of your software will come from a secure repo. Also, because you can get most of your software and updates from repos, it's more likely that you'll keep all of your software up to date. Finally, Linux security updates generally don't include forced advertising and completely unwanted changes to settings, so users and administrators are less likely to block and avoid them.
That's not to say that Windows isn't secure, or that Windows isn't still a better option for a lot of people. However, it's not true that the only reason Windows has a bad reputation is that they're a bigger target and therefore more heavily targeted. Windows has a bad reputation because they used to be horribly insecure, and they're slowly digging themselves out of that hole. In the meantime, there are a lot of things they could do to improve security, that they won't do because it doesn't serve their business interests.
It doesn't matter how secure you think your OS is, because there is *always* a way to compromise it... There is no such thing as perfect security.
I'm glad you put this. Although, my preferred way of saying it is, "security" is not the about making unauthorized access impossible. Short of completely and irrevocably destroying something, you can't make unauthorized access to it impossible. Security is about making unauthorized access difficult, dangerous, easily discovered, and otherwise unappealing.
If you want to get more precise (and don't mind a little complication) it's about achieving a favorable balance between "making it difficult for unauthorized people to gain access," and "making it easy for authorized people to gain access", that balance being determined by the sensitivity of the compromise and the sophistication of the likely attackers.
That is to say, if the information you're protecting is publicly available anyway, and the people likely to attack you are stupid, then you shouldn't devote a lot of resources to your security. It's not just "It's not worth the additional security", but rather, "tightening security would be a bad move". Tightening security unnecessarily almost inherently makes it more difficult for authorized users to gain access, which does a few bad things. First, it may create a false sense of security, which makes people more negligent toward security practices. On the other hand, your authorized users will be less likely to take security seriously, since they know that an inappropriate amount of security is being applied to something trivial. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that an authorized user will find a way to bypass your security entirely, in order to serve their own convenience (e.g. "They keep locking this door, which is annoying. I'll just prop the door open."). Bypassing security procedures in this way opens security holes that you won't be aware of.
So yes, there's no such thing as perfect security, but I just want to point out that it's not just, "However many barriers I put up, someone could theoretically tear them down." It's also, "If I put up too many barriers in the wrong places, I might accidentally make it harder for me to see an attacker coming."
To be honest, I don't think that's the big issue with patents. If you're patenting a specific method for doing something, then either that method works (in which case, it shouldn't matter whether you have a working prototype) or it doesn't (in which case, there's no real harm in patenting it because the implementation is useless).
Just to give a whacky example, if I come up with a design for a new kind of nuclear reactor that should theoretically work, I think it's fine that I can patent it even if I don't have the resources and nuclear material to build it. If the design works, I deserve the patent for coming up with it. If the design doesn't work, then it doesn't really matter if I have a patent, because nobody is going to be implementing that design.
Or even if you disagree with that, I would still argue that this kind of situation isn't what's causing problems.
It seems to me that the issue with patents that is causing real problems is that patents are granted for things that shouldn't be patentable. You should only be able to patent specific methods and implementations, and not general ideas. So for example, patenting an bezel-free display should not be possible. In order to patent something like that, it should have to be a very specific design of how the screen would function without a bezel, or a specific manufacturing method. That method or implementation should also be novel and non-obvious. So if the design is very much the same as a design that existed before, you shouldn't be able to patent it. If the design is basically the first thing an engineer would come up with when trying to create a bezel-free display, then you should not be able to patent it.
It seems to me that those rules are already on the books, but they're just not being enforced. I'm not sure if it's because the patent office is corrupt, or the people granting the patents don't understand technology well enough, or because they just don't have the resources to review patents well enough. It seems like a lot of silly patents are slipping through, though.
1) Did Apple apply for the patent before their rivals started doing it?
2) Is the implementation they're patenting somehow different and novel, compared to what their rivals are doing?
The second question is something that people often forget about. Properly, a patent shouldn't be for an abstract idea like "make a phone screen without a bezel" or "have a fingerprint reader embedded in the screen of a phone". The patent should be for a specific and novel technical implementation of the idea. If Apple has come up with a new and useful way to have a bezel-free phone, then it's not unreasonable that they could patent that specific method.
Oh, I didn't know you could load Kodi on a Fire Stick. You mean you can replace the OS with Linux running Kodi? If the hardware is open enough to allow loading an alternate OS, that changes things quite a bit. Not that I'm a real tinkerer or would be likely to change the OS on a device like this, but having the option makes it much more likely that the device would continue to be useful in some way.
Sure, let's assume that they're going to give you Netflix. For now. What will happen in the next 6 months? 2 years? 5 years?
My general point is that it's not about exactly what they're offering now, or what specs their hardware is theoretically capable of supporting in 5 years. If you want to talk about future-proofing things, the question is, what will Amazon support in 5 years? What will Netflix support in 5 years? We don't know. Amazon could cut off Netflix support tomorrow, and the owners of this TV might have no control over that. That's the real issue in "future proofing". Whether the device has 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8GB of RAM is insignificant in comparison.
Whatever. You're full of it. You can't say that a small screen would be useless when you don't know what would be on it or how it would work. But you're complaining that you never have your laptop closed while also complaining that your laptop is always closed. You haven't thought anything through.
I don't see it, my laptop when closed is in a case or backpack pretty much instantly.
Huh? You *just said*:
My only complaint about the Touchbar is that I often use the laptop shut attached to an external monitor...
so I've gotta call bullshit here. Like I said, most functions that would be useful in an external display on a laptop would probably be better managed on a smart phone, but don't shoot down my admittedly flawed idea because "my laptop is never shut" when you just complained, "my laptop is always shut".
I think talking about "beefed up specs" kind of misses the real problem of a device like this. The problem with future proofing a device like this isn't about specs, it's about open source and open standards.
What I mean is, you buy a TV for Amazon's streaming, and then in a couple years, Amazon decides to kill their streaming service. Or their streaming service starts dropping in quality. Or they change the video format. Or they redesign their DRM. Or they just discontinue support for that product. Or whatever.
Suddenly, even if the TV isn't completely useless, a large percentage of the features stop working. It's not like you can just switch it to use Netflix or iTunes instead (unless Amazon builds it in). It's not like you can wipe the drive and install iOS or the Roku OS. You may not even be able to swap out the remote for a different model. Your stuck with whatever features and peripherals Amazon decides to support.
That's why, frankly, Smart TVs make no sense to me. The built-in features are always going to be poorly executed, and outdated after a year or two. I have a Sony SmartTV, and a lot of the built-in widgets and whatnot just don't work because Sony doesn't really update things. I don't care that much because I bought it more for the screen quality than the SmartTV features, and I basically use it as a dumb monitor for other devices. If we can't have openness in SmartTVs, then I think it's much better to get a dumb monitor, and then hook up whichever set-top device gives you the "smart" features you're looking for. That way, when that set-top device gets discontinued or it starts sucking, you can just get a new set-top device, instead of replacing your TV because the features are outdated.
And on a side note, why is 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage considered "beefed up"? For the size and price of a a TV, you should be able to squeeze in more than that.
That said, I'm not necessarily bashing this product. Maybe it's a good TV for the price. I just wouldn't bet on the SmartTV features being particularly "future proof".
there's no point converting mp3 to anything other than a smaller lossy format that retains the same quality.
Yes, if you can convert from MP3 to a format that retains all the quality at a smaller file size, that might be worthwhile. However, even if there's a more efficient audio codec that creates equivalent quality at a smaller file size, it's probably not a great idea to convert.
If that sounds confusing, I'm mostly pointing out that there's a difference between "a file format that can produce equivalent quality to an MP3 at a smaller file size" and "a file format that MP3s can be converted to without losing quality, resulting in a smaller file size". Basically, any lossy format saves space by throwing away some information somehow. If the MP3 format throws away one set of information, and FileFormatX is a superior file format that throws away different information, then the result of transcoding from MP3 to FileFormatX may produce something of poor quality.
If that doesn't make sense, try this experiment: Find a high quality image. Convert it into a highly compressed JPEG (let's say 10% image quality). Take the same image and convert it into a 8-color GIF. Look at how bad it looks in each case. Now, convert the JPEG into an 8-color GIF and convert the 8-color GIF into a highly compressed JPEG. Going Original -> GIF -> JPEG is going to look far worse than the original or the GIF. Going Original -> JPEG -> GIF is going to look worse than either the original or the JPEG. It's not about whether GIF is better than JPEG or vice versa. The issue is that the two formats compress the data differently.
And that's often the case for lossy formats. Transcoding from one lossy format to another is to be avoided whenever possible.
you can set your Touch Bar to always display brightness and volume keys, exactly as you had on your older MacBook Pro. Or to always show F-keys. Or to show either when your press the Fn key.
I could still see a complaint that, being touch sensitive, those controls are a little too easy to trigger accidentally. Also, if you use function keys frequently, having a touch screen doesn't let you feel the separation between keys, which hinders touch-typists.
See, I'm actually a bit surprised that Apple did a touchbar at the top of the keyboard. I think a couple other options might have been smarter:
1) A small screen on the outside of the laptop so that notifications can be seen while closed. New Macs have a feature called "Power Nap" which allows the Mac to do limited things while asleep (e.g. check email). It might be handy to be able to see if you've received PowerNap enabled controls and notifications without opening your laptop. On the other hand, I'm not sure there are many uses for this that wouldn't be better handled on a smartphone.
2) Turn the trackpad into a touchscreen. It's basically already a fairly large glass touchscreen that you're used to performing gestures on. All they'd have to do is put a display behind the glass. Then you could enable apps to assign functions to specific gestures to specific areas of the touchscreen.
To replace some of the keyboard buttons with a touchscreen, however, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Power users are generally going to be accustomed to touch typing, so forcing them to look at the keyboard for some of those keyboard functions seems counter-productive.
Sure, but then... you really should have maintenance with the vendor, and the vendor should be keeping the software product up to date so that it works with the latest Windows patches.
I'll admit it's not that easy. Sometimes you're stuck with some weird application that nobody supports anymore, but you need to keep it going. However, there's a part of me that wants to point out that, to some extent, it's the fault of whoever purchased that application. What I mean is, I've seen companies that are still running on some product that was purchased 20 years ago, and they just haven't updated. I've seen companies that rely completely on some application that a company built in-house before firing their development staff, leaving nobody who knows how the code works. To some extent, if you base your business around some random janky application that nobody is supporting, it's kind of your own fault. Businesses should anticipate that, for any business-critical application, they should have a support contract with developers capable of patching/fixing/updating that application. If you can't find someone to do that, then find a different application. If you can't do that (or can't afford it), then your business just isn't sustainable. Sorry.
Personally, I think it's the wrong approach to try to compel Microsoft to support old operating systems. It's a substantial burden for them, and makes it harder for them to move forward and innovate.
Instead, I think we should try to compel Microsoft to open the source of Windows XP. If there's a large enough number of people who want continued support, they would then be able to fund it somehow. Plus, it would push Microsoft to innovate, since they would have to make sure that Windows 10 did useful things that Windows XP doesn't do (that people actually want).
I may be a bit radical here, but I personally think that, in order to attain copyright protection, software developers should be required to provide their source code to the Library of Congress (or some other governmental organization). Then, when the software is no longer being sold or supported, the source code should be made public domain.
According to Steve Jones, a distinguished professor of communications at University of Illinois at Chicago, the absence of digital booklets can be attributed to two things. First, given all of the different platforms on which people consume digital music, juggling the different template standards for each can be cumbersome. Second, people aren’t looking at digital booklets because we aren’t listening to albums like we used to. “You don’t bring it home in a container and listen to it and look at the sleeve, read the liner notes, et cetera,” said Jones. “You buy your music or stream it instantaneously, usually while you’re doing something else. The space in which one would have looked at the visuals has gone by the wayside.”
I think these are good points, but there are a couple of other things we can point to. For one, the any creative effort or marketing money that would have gone into making booklets has most likely moved to crafting a social networking presence. Social networking is probably a more obvious method for connecting with fans and sharing information.
However, I would guess that part of the problem is that early attempts at digital booklets were so poorly executed that it has poisoned the well. I remember a time shortly before MP3s really took off, and they had started putting this kind of information on a data section of the music CD. That is, if you bought a music CD and put it into a computer, it would show up as a data CD with a terrible Flash application that would auto-play. The apps were poorly thought-out, annoying, and often didn't even include the information that would be in the liner notes (e.g. lyrics). It often seemed like the booklets were only put in there so that the disc would be recognized as a data disc, making it harder to rip the disc and convert them to MP3s. (This was when the record industry was trying to prevent MP3s from becoming mainstream, arguing that it was illegal to rip CDs.)
Over the years, I've only seen one attempt at this sort of thing that didn't seem horribly designed and stupid. A few years back, there was an iOS app for Bob Dylan that was meant to accompany a recently released anthology. It came with some free information, and then for each Bob Dylan album it detected on your device, it would unlock information about that album (or something like that). I don't think it's even available anymore, but I found a video of it.
It wasn't perfect. The interface was still a little wonky in places, and it wasn't in some kind of universal format that you could view on any device. However, it was clear that someone had put in the effort to collect a bunch of photos and information, including various interviews and new content created for the app. They'd at least made an attempt to make an interesting design, and have it somehow connect with the music (e.g. you could listen to the music and it would show you the lyrics currently being played). At the very least, it was interesting enough, and had good enough content, that a fan might find it worthwhile enough to spend some time exploring. I haven't seen anything before or since that seemed like the people who made it had any interest in making it good.
Slashdot Mirror
I also feel like it should be fairly obvious, if you take the time to think about it. What can these devices measure? Heart rate and motion, generally. Some will ask you what kind of exercise you're engaged in, but it rarely gets more specific than "running" or "cycling". There might be a GPS, in which case, the device can know roughly how much distance you cover.
So take each individually:
* Heart rate: Different things can effect your heart rate to different degrees, and there's not a direct/exact correlation between hear rate and calories burned.
* Motion: One of these things just knows how much your wrist is moving, which often won't tell you much. Sit still and shake your arm a little, and then run around for an equal amount of time. The watch can't tell the difference.
* Kind of exercise: You can't know how many calories you've burned simply from the information, "You were riding a bike for 10 minutes." Were you going up-hill or down-hill? How heavy is your bike? How well maintained is your bike? What gear were you in? How bumpy is the road?
* GPS: It knows you went from point "A" to point "B", which gives a distance and theoretically an altitude and speed. Were you in a car or on a bike? Were you carrying anything? Were you doing jumping jacks while your travelled? When you went up 10 meters in altitude, did you climb the stairs or ride and escalator?
So on their own, none of these things would get you to an accurate reading. Admittedly, you could try to combine these measurements to make the reading more accurate. For example, if the device knows you're riding a bike, it can use the GPS to determine how fast you're going, whether you're going up-hill or down. It can measure your wrist movements and heart rate to guess about how hard you might be pedaling. However, doing this kind of calculation would probably take some machine learning to figure out how to combine these things for each different kind of exercise, and even then it would probably change for different people in different circumstances, requiring some kind of calibration. And even then, it might be fooled or confused somehow.
So I think, reasonably, all we can expect with the current technology is a vague estimate. However, that's not useless. If I use my fitbit every day, and yesterday it says I burned 200 calories, and then today it says I burned 2,000 calories, that is likely a good indication that I was far more active today than yesterday. Did I actually burn precisely 2,000 calories today? Probably not. Did I actually burn 10 times the number of calories as yesterday? That might be a decent estimate (I think that'd be worth studying). Did I do a significant amount of additional exercise today, probably improving my health? I think that's a safe bet, and mostly that's what people really need to know. After all, the numbers of calories listed on food packaging is also an estimate. If you're trying to line up your calories burned to calories eaten, you're fooling yourself.
I would hope so. I'd love it if the USB-C/Thunderbolt port became the new standard port that's built into everything and is used for everything. For any device you have, you will only need to plug in a single cable to a port following a single standard (excepting when you need an additional power cable). I'd even like to see it used on servers. I could see a scenario where every server in a rack is plugged into a single Thunderbolt switch/hub that provides networking, DAS/NAS/SAN, KVM, lights-out management, everything.
Take down drones that endanger firefighting and prison operations, sure. The problems start when undefined weasel-words like "authorized protection of a person" are used and rights of citizens are curtailed or eliminated.
Yeah, and part of the reason this should be a concern is, I think firefighters and prisons already have some latitude to take action when lives are at risk or there's a serious security problem. If a firefighter breaks a window to rescue someone, I don't think they get charged with destruction of private property. If prison guards damage a helicopter that someone tries to land in a prison yard without approval, I doubt they'd be in legal trouble. Admittedly I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt that they've bothered to write laws for every possible piece of equipment that may be damaged or seized, in every permutation of all possible scenarios.
So I think the question is, what exactly does this law accomplish? Does it just make the legal powers of the government vague enough that they can hack any drone they like?
The Constitution itself doesn't say anything about the rights of citizens. The Bill of Rights (which are amendments, not in the Constitution proper) spells out a few rights that the founders thought should be particularly safeguarded, but was never meant to be an exhaustive list of human rights that citizens hold.
The real question should be, "What right does the government have to shoot down a citizen's drone?" It doesn't say anything about shooting down drones in the Constitution. Of course, it doesn't say anything about drones in the Constitution because drones weren't a thing in 1787. The Constitution doesn't say anything about a lot of things, e.g. the FBI, CIA, NSA, Air Force, Marines, nuclear weapons, spy satellites.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder why people don't generally use Usenet. I don't particularly remember why I stopped. Was it because the client software was crappy? Was it because it was overrun with trolls and pirates? Was it just because everyone else seemed to be leaving it, decimating the community?
It reminds me of Slack. Everyone I know went crazy when Slack was released, as though it was a new revolutionary product. My immediate impression was, "Oh, great. Someone made a new closed/proprietary IRC clone." Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? We keep taking decent solutions and reimplementing them in proprietary web applications that lock us into a specific vendor. How long until Google and Facebook convince everyone to give up email in favor of their proprietary messaging apps? Then how long until they get people to give up HTML in favor of a snazzy new markup language that only works in their walled gardens?
the time frame when we were 98% sure hillary was going to win. so lets not try and put this on trump.
That's not great logic. The article itself states that the trend started in the last month of the campaign, during which time the race was tightening. It's entirely possible that people were uneasy about visiting a country where Trump was a serious contender, and his violent and xenophobic followers were being frequently shown on the news.
If you want to pick apart this analysis, there are better things to point to. Let's start by looking just at the graph, which seems to be your inclination. Going by the graph alone, it show enough historical data on that graph to draw any real conclusion. There's a downward trend, but that might be related to the time of year, or just be a random fluctuation. We would need to compare it to data from previous years to determine normal trends at a given time of year. We would need to look at how volatile the market is to determine whether the trend is outside the normal range of fluctuations.
Then there's how the data was collected: "Foursquare’s data comes from approximately 13 million users who opted to share their locations with the company." One question would be, how accurate is that? Further, if the data is based on location data, then even if a drop in tourism began at roughly the same time as Trump's election, that's not enough to indicate a cause. It would be a coincidence of events without any causal link.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that Trump's actions wouldn't have a dampening effect on voluntary travel to the US. He campaigned on the promise of getting rid of Mexicans and Muslims, assuming minorities are criminals, conducting trade wars, and putting immediate American economic interests above all else. He advocated torturing and killing innocent people if it might possibly make people feel that it would improve national security, even if it didn't actually improve it. His early actions included trying to revoke people's legal status and deport them to their country of origin (not necessarily the country they were traveling from, which makes this particularly dangerous).
What's more, I would almost expect Trump supporters to welcome the drop in international tourism. It means that there are fewer foreigners, and probably fewer minorities, entering our country. Sure, it's bad for the economy and probably a sign of greater problems, but it's not as though Trump followers are able to think deeply about indirect consequences.
I'm sure it's because of easy control of the display. If you want control over the size, position, color, and style of the subtitles, then storing text is insufficient. You'd need some kind of markup language. Then you risk running into issues where different manufacturers/developers have different implementations of the rendering code, and so different players show the subtitles differently.
Also, if you want to be able to control the font, you'd either need the whole world and all video players to standardize on a certain set of fonts, or you'd need to embed fonts in the movie file. Doing that is more complex both from a technical and a licensing standpoint, as opposed to just distributing pre-rendered images.
Having a rendering engine capable of parsing the markup language and rendering arbitrary fonts creates a system much more complex than rendering a simple bitmap. You have increased risk of bugs. If you're thinking is terms of physical media, you don't want there to be bugs in your DVD or DVD player, neither of which generally gets updates.
Oh, I think we found the snowflake with hurt feelings. Jimmies have been rustled. Quick, where's the safe space?
It means that patent troll companies which cannot manufacture a product and just carpet bomb with patents can have a business model.
You're still misidentifying the problem. Patent trolls aren't able to carpet bomb with patents simply because they don't have to manufacture a prototype. They're able to do it because the patent office is approving silly patents, i.e. patents that are obvious, not new, have prior art, or are general ideas rather than specific implementations.
For example, there was a patent a few years back for including a video cut-scene in a computer game. The patent troll then went around suing every major game developer. As far as I could tell from reading about it, the problem wasn't that the patent holder couldn't have slapped together a simple computer game with a video cut-scene. The problem is, that just shouldn't be something you can patent.
Well, I think the truth is not as simple as you're implying. First, though virus writers are more likely to target the OS with the largest install base (not necessarily the largest market share), that doesn't mean that some operating systems are not more secure than others. Windows, for example, used to have many many large security problems, due to the fact that it basically wasn't originally designed to be secure. However, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into securing Windows in recent years, and it's generally pretty secure.
Also, there are potential arguments as to why Windows is less likely to be secure. For example, some people have argued that unix-based systems were designed with security in mind, and Windows still hasn't caught up, at least partially due to their attempts to maintain backwards compatibility to a time when Windows was completely insecure. Many others have argued that open source products will generally tend to become more secure than closed source products over time, since security experts can access the code more freely and report/fix potential problems. I'm not sure those theories are borne out, and in any event, it certainly doesn't mean that open source products are immune to security threats.
And short of taking away admin/sudo access from users completely, malware can always social engineer it's way into administrative privileges during an installer or something similar.
That argument would hold a bit more relevance if this discussion weren't a worm that installed itself without user interaction. Also, it's possible that Linux users are less likely to install random unknown software, since it has package managers, and most of your software will come from a secure repo. Also, because you can get most of your software and updates from repos, it's more likely that you'll keep all of your software up to date. Finally, Linux security updates generally don't include forced advertising and completely unwanted changes to settings, so users and administrators are less likely to block and avoid them.
That's not to say that Windows isn't secure, or that Windows isn't still a better option for a lot of people. However, it's not true that the only reason Windows has a bad reputation is that they're a bigger target and therefore more heavily targeted. Windows has a bad reputation because they used to be horribly insecure, and they're slowly digging themselves out of that hole. In the meantime, there are a lot of things they could do to improve security, that they won't do because it doesn't serve their business interests.
It doesn't matter how secure you think your OS is, because there is *always* a way to compromise it... There is no such thing as perfect security.
I'm glad you put this. Although, my preferred way of saying it is, "security" is not the about making unauthorized access impossible. Short of completely and irrevocably destroying something, you can't make unauthorized access to it impossible. Security is about making unauthorized access difficult, dangerous, easily discovered, and otherwise unappealing.
If you want to get more precise (and don't mind a little complication) it's about achieving a favorable balance between "making it difficult for unauthorized people to gain access," and "making it easy for authorized people to gain access", that balance being determined by the sensitivity of the compromise and the sophistication of the likely attackers.
That is to say, if the information you're protecting is publicly available anyway, and the people likely to attack you are stupid, then you shouldn't devote a lot of resources to your security. It's not just "It's not worth the additional security", but rather, "tightening security would be a bad move". Tightening security unnecessarily almost inherently makes it more difficult for authorized users to gain access, which does a few bad things. First, it may create a false sense of security, which makes people more negligent toward security practices. On the other hand, your authorized users will be less likely to take security seriously, since they know that an inappropriate amount of security is being applied to something trivial. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that an authorized user will find a way to bypass your security entirely, in order to serve their own convenience (e.g. "They keep locking this door, which is annoying. I'll just prop the door open."). Bypassing security procedures in this way opens security holes that you won't be aware of.
So yes, there's no such thing as perfect security, but I just want to point out that it's not just, "However many barriers I put up, someone could theoretically tear them down." It's also, "If I put up too many barriers in the wrong places, I might accidentally make it harder for me to see an attacker coming."
Perhaps if we can emit VLF radiation at very high frequency
If we emit Very Low Frequency radiation at very high frequency it won't be very low frequency any more.
Hmmm... Ok. So we can't increase the frequency, but what if we just took this Very Low Frequency radiation and shortened the wavelength?
To be honest, I don't think that's the big issue with patents. If you're patenting a specific method for doing something, then either that method works (in which case, it shouldn't matter whether you have a working prototype) or it doesn't (in which case, there's no real harm in patenting it because the implementation is useless).
Just to give a whacky example, if I come up with a design for a new kind of nuclear reactor that should theoretically work, I think it's fine that I can patent it even if I don't have the resources and nuclear material to build it. If the design works, I deserve the patent for coming up with it. If the design doesn't work, then it doesn't really matter if I have a patent, because nobody is going to be implementing that design.
Or even if you disagree with that, I would still argue that this kind of situation isn't what's causing problems.
It seems to me that the issue with patents that is causing real problems is that patents are granted for things that shouldn't be patentable. You should only be able to patent specific methods and implementations, and not general ideas. So for example, patenting an bezel-free display should not be possible. In order to patent something like that, it should have to be a very specific design of how the screen would function without a bezel, or a specific manufacturing method. That method or implementation should also be novel and non-obvious. So if the design is very much the same as a design that existed before, you shouldn't be able to patent it. If the design is basically the first thing an engineer would come up with when trying to create a bezel-free display, then you should not be able to patent it.
It seems to me that those rules are already on the books, but they're just not being enforced. I'm not sure if it's because the patent office is corrupt, or the people granting the patents don't understand technology well enough, or because they just don't have the resources to review patents well enough. It seems like a lot of silly patents are slipping through, though.
Well there are two questions there:
1) Did Apple apply for the patent before their rivals started doing it?
2) Is the implementation they're patenting somehow different and novel, compared to what their rivals are doing?
The second question is something that people often forget about. Properly, a patent shouldn't be for an abstract idea like "make a phone screen without a bezel" or "have a fingerprint reader embedded in the screen of a phone". The patent should be for a specific and novel technical implementation of the idea. If Apple has come up with a new and useful way to have a bezel-free phone, then it's not unreasonable that they could patent that specific method.
Oh, I didn't know you could load Kodi on a Fire Stick. You mean you can replace the OS with Linux running Kodi? If the hardware is open enough to allow loading an alternate OS, that changes things quite a bit. Not that I'm a real tinkerer or would be likely to change the OS on a device like this, but having the option makes it much more likely that the device would continue to be useful in some way.
Sure, let's assume that they're going to give you Netflix. For now. What will happen in the next 6 months? 2 years? 5 years?
My general point is that it's not about exactly what they're offering now, or what specs their hardware is theoretically capable of supporting in 5 years. If you want to talk about future-proofing things, the question is, what will Amazon support in 5 years? What will Netflix support in 5 years? We don't know. Amazon could cut off Netflix support tomorrow, and the owners of this TV might have no control over that. That's the real issue in "future proofing". Whether the device has 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8GB of RAM is insignificant in comparison.
Whatever. You're full of it. You can't say that a small screen would be useless when you don't know what would be on it or how it would work. But you're complaining that you never have your laptop closed while also complaining that your laptop is always closed. You haven't thought anything through.
I don't see it, my laptop when closed is in a case or backpack pretty much instantly.
Huh? You *just said*:
My only complaint about the Touchbar is that I often use the laptop shut attached to an external monitor...
so I've gotta call bullshit here. Like I said, most functions that would be useful in an external display on a laptop would probably be better managed on a smart phone, but don't shoot down my admittedly flawed idea because "my laptop is never shut" when you just complained, "my laptop is always shut".
I think talking about "beefed up specs" kind of misses the real problem of a device like this. The problem with future proofing a device like this isn't about specs, it's about open source and open standards.
What I mean is, you buy a TV for Amazon's streaming, and then in a couple years, Amazon decides to kill their streaming service. Or their streaming service starts dropping in quality. Or they change the video format. Or they redesign their DRM. Or they just discontinue support for that product. Or whatever.
Suddenly, even if the TV isn't completely useless, a large percentage of the features stop working. It's not like you can just switch it to use Netflix or iTunes instead (unless Amazon builds it in). It's not like you can wipe the drive and install iOS or the Roku OS. You may not even be able to swap out the remote for a different model. Your stuck with whatever features and peripherals Amazon decides to support.
That's why, frankly, Smart TVs make no sense to me. The built-in features are always going to be poorly executed, and outdated after a year or two. I have a Sony SmartTV, and a lot of the built-in widgets and whatnot just don't work because Sony doesn't really update things. I don't care that much because I bought it more for the screen quality than the SmartTV features, and I basically use it as a dumb monitor for other devices. If we can't have openness in SmartTVs, then I think it's much better to get a dumb monitor, and then hook up whichever set-top device gives you the "smart" features you're looking for. That way, when that set-top device gets discontinued or it starts sucking, you can just get a new set-top device, instead of replacing your TV because the features are outdated.
And on a side note, why is 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage considered "beefed up"? For the size and price of a a TV, you should be able to squeeze in more than that.
That said, I'm not necessarily bashing this product. Maybe it's a good TV for the price. I just wouldn't bet on the SmartTV features being particularly "future proof".
there's no point converting mp3 to anything other than a smaller lossy format that retains the same quality.
Yes, if you can convert from MP3 to a format that retains all the quality at a smaller file size, that might be worthwhile. However, even if there's a more efficient audio codec that creates equivalent quality at a smaller file size, it's probably not a great idea to convert.
If that sounds confusing, I'm mostly pointing out that there's a difference between "a file format that can produce equivalent quality to an MP3 at a smaller file size" and "a file format that MP3s can be converted to without losing quality, resulting in a smaller file size". Basically, any lossy format saves space by throwing away some information somehow. If the MP3 format throws away one set of information, and FileFormatX is a superior file format that throws away different information, then the result of transcoding from MP3 to FileFormatX may produce something of poor quality.
If that doesn't make sense, try this experiment: Find a high quality image. Convert it into a highly compressed JPEG (let's say 10% image quality). Take the same image and convert it into a 8-color GIF. Look at how bad it looks in each case. Now, convert the JPEG into an 8-color GIF and convert the 8-color GIF into a highly compressed JPEG. Going Original -> GIF -> JPEG is going to look far worse than the original or the GIF. Going Original -> JPEG -> GIF is going to look worse than either the original or the JPEG. It's not about whether GIF is better than JPEG or vice versa. The issue is that the two formats compress the data differently.
And that's often the case for lossy formats. Transcoding from one lossy format to another is to be avoided whenever possible.
you can set your Touch Bar to always display brightness and volume keys, exactly as you had on your older MacBook Pro. Or to always show F-keys. Or to show either when your press the Fn key.
I could still see a complaint that, being touch sensitive, those controls are a little too easy to trigger accidentally. Also, if you use function keys frequently, having a touch screen doesn't let you feel the separation between keys, which hinders touch-typists.
See, I'm actually a bit surprised that Apple did a touchbar at the top of the keyboard. I think a couple other options might have been smarter:
1) A small screen on the outside of the laptop so that notifications can be seen while closed. New Macs have a feature called "Power Nap" which allows the Mac to do limited things while asleep (e.g. check email). It might be handy to be able to see if you've received PowerNap enabled controls and notifications without opening your laptop. On the other hand, I'm not sure there are many uses for this that wouldn't be better handled on a smartphone.
2) Turn the trackpad into a touchscreen. It's basically already a fairly large glass touchscreen that you're used to performing gestures on. All they'd have to do is put a display behind the glass. Then you could enable apps to assign functions to specific gestures to specific areas of the touchscreen.
To replace some of the keyboard buttons with a touchscreen, however, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Power users are generally going to be accustomed to touch typing, so forcing them to look at the keyboard for some of those keyboard functions seems counter-productive.
Sure, but then... you really should have maintenance with the vendor, and the vendor should be keeping the software product up to date so that it works with the latest Windows patches.
I'll admit it's not that easy. Sometimes you're stuck with some weird application that nobody supports anymore, but you need to keep it going. However, there's a part of me that wants to point out that, to some extent, it's the fault of whoever purchased that application. What I mean is, I've seen companies that are still running on some product that was purchased 20 years ago, and they just haven't updated. I've seen companies that rely completely on some application that a company built in-house before firing their development staff, leaving nobody who knows how the code works. To some extent, if you base your business around some random janky application that nobody is supporting, it's kind of your own fault. Businesses should anticipate that, for any business-critical application, they should have a support contract with developers capable of patching/fixing/updating that application. If you can't find someone to do that, then find a different application. If you can't do that (or can't afford it), then your business just isn't sustainable. Sorry.
Personally, I think it's the wrong approach to try to compel Microsoft to support old operating systems. It's a substantial burden for them, and makes it harder for them to move forward and innovate.
Instead, I think we should try to compel Microsoft to open the source of Windows XP. If there's a large enough number of people who want continued support, they would then be able to fund it somehow. Plus, it would push Microsoft to innovate, since they would have to make sure that Windows 10 did useful things that Windows XP doesn't do (that people actually want).
I may be a bit radical here, but I personally think that, in order to attain copyright protection, software developers should be required to provide their source code to the Library of Congress (or some other governmental organization). Then, when the software is no longer being sold or supported, the source code should be made public domain.
According to Steve Jones, a distinguished professor of communications at University of Illinois at Chicago, the absence of digital booklets can be attributed to two things. First, given all of the different platforms on which people consume digital music, juggling the different template standards for each can be cumbersome. Second, people aren’t looking at digital booklets because we aren’t listening to albums like we used to. “You don’t bring it home in a container and listen to it and look at the sleeve, read the liner notes, et cetera,” said Jones. “You buy your music or stream it instantaneously, usually while you’re doing something else. The space in which one would have looked at the visuals has gone by the wayside.”
I think these are good points, but there are a couple of other things we can point to. For one, the any creative effort or marketing money that would have gone into making booklets has most likely moved to crafting a social networking presence. Social networking is probably a more obvious method for connecting with fans and sharing information.
However, I would guess that part of the problem is that early attempts at digital booklets were so poorly executed that it has poisoned the well. I remember a time shortly before MP3s really took off, and they had started putting this kind of information on a data section of the music CD. That is, if you bought a music CD and put it into a computer, it would show up as a data CD with a terrible Flash application that would auto-play. The apps were poorly thought-out, annoying, and often didn't even include the information that would be in the liner notes (e.g. lyrics). It often seemed like the booklets were only put in there so that the disc would be recognized as a data disc, making it harder to rip the disc and convert them to MP3s. (This was when the record industry was trying to prevent MP3s from becoming mainstream, arguing that it was illegal to rip CDs.)
Over the years, I've only seen one attempt at this sort of thing that didn't seem horribly designed and stupid. A few years back, there was an iOS app for Bob Dylan that was meant to accompany a recently released anthology. It came with some free information, and then for each Bob Dylan album it detected on your device, it would unlock information about that album (or something like that). I don't think it's even available anymore, but I found a video of it.
It wasn't perfect. The interface was still a little wonky in places, and it wasn't in some kind of universal format that you could view on any device. However, it was clear that someone had put in the effort to collect a bunch of photos and information, including various interviews and new content created for the app. They'd at least made an attempt to make an interesting design, and have it somehow connect with the music (e.g. you could listen to the music and it would show you the lyrics currently being played). At the very least, it was interesting enough, and had good enough content, that a fan might find it worthwhile enough to spend some time exploring. I haven't seen anything before or since that seemed like the people who made it had any interest in making it good.