Better than disabling the reboots is disabling the forced updates altogether.
Remember the whole travesty with the Windows 10 upgrade to begin with? The progression of "optional" updates that Microsoft sent out that did nothing for months then suddenly started popping up "Hey, wouldn't you like to upgrade your OS" notices, then "Hey, you need to upgrade your OS", then "We're going to upgrade your OS for you unless you cancel" and then "Hey we're now just going to do it whether you want to or not". I avoided that because I simply didn't install the update that did that. But now that I have a computer I was forced to accept Windows 10 on, I have to use a combination of Windows Update Blocker to disable a whole series of otherwise un-disableable services, and Windows Update MiniTool to give me back manual control of the update process. Thank heavens for those.
I own my computer and it will do what I tell it to do.
I find it troubling that people like the new system better. I suppose, in the narrowly worded "is Windows 10 update easier" it is true. Subservience is easier. Just give over control to someone else and let them decide what's good for me is easier. But I remember when just the suggestion of that sort of centralized control over the desktop would have gotten Microsoft crucified. We need to go back to that mentality.
I'd be happy if Microsoft stepped aside and let UNIX/linux become the primary platforms in DoD
Not that Microsoft has anything to do with it, but this is actually the case. I'm actually sitting in a warship as I write this on a port visit in New York. Most of the new combat management systems we've had installed use Linux rather than Windows. Older ones, like Link 11 management consoles, and a few civillian nav radar ARPA consoles are Windows based. But most new stuff that's coming out is Linux. It makes sense. The contractors that develop the systems would rather pocket the money than give it to Microsoft.
They want me to trust an Android phone to authenticate all my logins? Are they high?
Switch to KeePass and family. Create a database with a keyfile and a master password. Distribute the database using I switched to KeePass and family a couple years ago, and it was the best thing I ever did. Use a master-password plus a sneaker-net distributed keyfile to protect the database. You can share the database with something like SyncThing, that has end-to-end encryption you control just for added safety but really you could share the database publicly with complete safety at that point.
Don't get me wrong, I like Android. But Google has been in the NSA's back pocket from the beginning. Not that Assange is one of my favourite people, but he did make a compelling case for Google being essentially an arm of the US government. Which is one reason why China had it out with them (we may get on Huawei's case for back-doors, but we did it to them first with Google and Windows).
For too long, the company has had to go out of its way to remind the world that it's capable of being every bit as innovative as those better established brands
Well cry me a river. Perhaps if it wasn't a shill for the Chinese government to insert wideband listening devices into military installations then they would be a more trusted name in the western world.
As for the device, it's certainly blingy, but I think very few people will decide they need to spend that much money on such a device. I can't think of any time I've desperately wanted to take a tablet form factor device where I couldn't because I couldn't fit it. And my phone can connect to any TV I want, through its HDMI or by casting. High coolness factor, but not something I'd bet the farm on people shelling out that much money for.
What are you saying exactly? Which field do you believe he was going to leverage if not EM?
And another one who doesn't actually read the patent, my whole (admitedly partially bungled) post, or even do a basic google search on what Tesla was proposing. You're not alone though. Everyone nowadays just hears "wireless electrical transmission" and simply assumes this has just gotta mean by an electric field (a la mutual inductance) or by an electromagnetic field (a la radio).
To answer your question: Which field did he propose? No field!. At least, no more so by a field than electrons moving through a wire are using a "field" to directly conduct electricity. Patent 645,576 (I'm not going to link it again here since you didn't bother to click on it to read it before) describes a "System of Transmission of Electrical Energy" directly through the air. Or, since when you hear the word "transmission" you understand "radio transmission", how about if we use rename his patent "System of Conduction of Electrical Energy". He was going to transmit... err... conduct it directly through the air. Like a thunderstorm does. Like a (wait for it) "tesla coil" does. By arcing it up into the sky.
Tesla knew that rarefying air made it far more able to conduct electricity, and he knew that the atmosphere thinned as you proceeded up. So, he reasoned, if you broke down the ionization barrier from the surface and arced the electricity far enough up, that once up there it would continue to conduct fairly easily laterally. Tesla proposes in this patent to use giant transformers to force "electrical impulses of sufficiently-high electromotive force to render elevated air strata conducting, causing, thereby current impulses to pass, by conduction, through the air strata". He knew the voltages would be massive - he thought 20-50 megavolts. Where he got those numbers we don't know. But what we do know is that Tesla did more experimentation on what voltages at what frequencies it takes to arc electricity over large distances than anyone then or since.
I want EV's to succeed as well, but as much as I respect SpaceX and some of Musk's other accomplishments, I don't see Tesla as furthering the progress of EV's. The poster who called them a dystopian surveillance vehicle wasn't wrong. Tesla knows where you are at all times. They can listen to you. They can push over the air updates to individual cars that you can't block or, potentially, even know about. Which means they can literally take over your vehicle at any time. This isn't tinfoil hat stuff. This is functionality they have publicly demonstrated. You aren't buying a car, you are paying them to give them your personal information and rent a ride.
These vehicles are the surveillance state's wet dream.
Your comment starts at assumptuous and arrogant and then moves to being just plain wrong.
Assumption:
EM radiation
You are just assuming he meant by EM radiation. Given his actual patents this is likely not the intended medium of transmission. Tesla's patent 645,576drops off according to the inverse square law
Tesla, as much of a "mad genius" as he may have been, was still a genius. I credit his intelligence more, I think, than yours. Even if the inverse square property wasn't known (more later) already, this would have been pretty obvious to him anyway. He had been electric field Geissler tube light induction for at least a decade prior to his tower proposal. I'm pretty sure that he figured out that the light dimmed and went out as per the square of the distance involved.
Just plain wrong:
This has been figured out in the time since Tesla.
Now, that being said, what about the actual question asked in the article. Could the towers have worked? Once electricity ionizes the channel, the air resistance is really quite low. If he could have figured out a way to ionize a channel high enough from multiple towers, it's actually conceivable it could work. No one, and I really mean no one at all, has done as much experimentation with the conduction of ultra-high voltage electricity as Tesla did. He knew what it took to create a path between two points. He knew the effect of distance. And he thought he could do it. I credit his knowledge and experience then more than any armchair (read Slashdot) critic today. Also remember this is before powered flight of any sort, so no one cared about what was going on in the sky. Using a tower to open an electrical path into the upper atmosphere wouldn't have been a hazard to anything. I suspect what he was going for was a sort of huge scale porcupine effect. Each tower creating a channel up into the sky up to an altitude where there is already sufficient ionization that the electricity could then be conducted laterally. The whole reason why the post I responded to wasn't alone in just assuming that Tesla must have been (errantly) trying for radio or electric field transfer is that the sheer scale of using "lightning" towers to transmit power directly up into the sky on that kind of scale is, well, at the mad genius level of unprecedented scale. The effects it would have on the RF spectrum, air navigation, electronic devices... renders it into a modern catastrophe more than a workable power transmission system. But back then none of that existed. The sky was just a huge open opportunity for him. He certainly thought big.
Google got banned from distributing iOS apps internally... The funny part isn't Google got banned. The funny part is that Google was distributing iOS apps internally.
Please explain to me the exact way that our current money system works and why it is better than crypto currency!
Sure. Our current currency system doesn't involve first intentionally wasting a valuable resource (electricity) for no better reason than to make the cost of issuing a unit of currency high enough that the world isn't flooded with them.
Whoever thought that was sustainable enough that they would make money on it deserves the crippling losses that have occurred and the rest that are coming.
This isn't such a bizarre notion. I mean, not what what was suggested, but this actually frightens me more than any amount of normal genetic engineering. This has the potential to make virulent strains of organisms that cannot possibly be targeted by the immune system. In general, antigens react to protein coats on bacteria and viruses. If those proteins are made in ways that aren't just novel, but are which outside our immune system's ability to even see as a protein, that can pose a large problem. It wouldn't be recognized as self, it wouldn't be recognized as foreign, it just wouldn't be recognized at all.
The unintended consequences here are astoundingly worrisome.
There you go! There was the loophole. You can do evil as long as you not acually are evil. I mean, who thinks "hey, I'm evil". No one. So, they leave the door open for any action as long as they don't self-identify as evil they're ok.
Well, if it's a choice between F-Droid and Google Play, F-Droid has had exactly zero cases of malware slipping into its repository. How many has Google had?
Now, what I would just looooove to know are statistics on what proportion of malware got onto Android phones via Google Play versus side-loading. That would be an interesting statistic to see.
I trust Google about as far as I trust the NSA to protect my interests. I have a tougher vetting process for Google Play apps that I go through than I do for F-Droid. And for good reason. And so should you.
Well, if this were Apple, and going through their app store was the only legitimate way I could get an app onto my phone, then I would be upset at the high handedness of it. As it is, Android is still an open platform. People can get apps onto their phone other ways besides Google Play. So, if Google wants to start putting limits on what apps can have what permissions in order to appear in a store they own, go ahead. This particular permission is one that would be sought by apps used by more savvy people anyway. If Google wants to drive some of their more capable customers to other app repositories and stores, that bothers me none. I am, at the moment, happy with anything Google does to incentivize people to exert the activation energy required to move to more open app repositories.
If (maybe I should say "when" here) Google moves to make Android a walled garden with a sole-source on Google Play for apps, then you will see me become far more activist. But at the moment, Google is really only shooting themselves in the foot.
I honestly don't care where my apps are hosted. I use F-Droid more than Google Play anyway. I suspect someone wanting to use SMS to trigger a phone location are savvy enough to sort out alternate methods of getting the app.
Google can pull the ban hammer all they want, but until they also pull the walled garden hammer, people are going to be able to use the fact that it's still an open-ish platform to get the apps they want.
combine it with Firefox, with tracking limiting controls enabled
Sure, but what does tracking limiting do? According to their blog it simply limits cookies identified by Mozilla as tracking cookies. Are Google ones included, considering that Google is still a major funder of Mozilla? Somehow I doubt it. Is the HTTP referrer scrubbed? Doesn't appear to be when I tested it.
So Google still gets all the same information, maybe with a limitation on some cookies, which I never factored into my original analysis anyway. They get the following information from the 75% of sites that use Google analytics and/or advertising: 1) They know they served up web site X as part of search results they sent to startpage.com, and they know the search terms 2) Depending on how they are hooked into the end web site, they may (probably) get the referrer information from where you came from, and Firefox's tracking protection does not appear to block the referrer 3) They definitely get your IP address on the end page visit 4) They know other responding variables like the ranking of the sites they serve up in the search results, they know when you click on "next page" on startpage.com for more results, and most importantly, they know the know the length of time between 1 and 3
No amount of tracking blocking can eliminate 1, 3, or 4 above. They have to get the search terms from startpage.com, they know what results they serve up, and they have to get the IP addresses of people who visit the end site on any site they have hooks into. No amount of cookie filtering can stop that information flow. And that is enough to link the search terms to visitors, especially if you click more than one link to more than one destination Google has hooks into. Which means, the more you use Startpage.com, the easier it is for Google to link your search terms with your IP. You do a search and suddenly one IP shows up at three sites they have hooks into that all just appeared on search results they already served up? Then they serve up new search results and that same IP shows up at one of those sites. Sorry, but regular use of startpage.com is no better than using Google itself.
I don't trust Google with 100% of my search traffic. I prefer to keep them as a secondary resource - I don't trust that startpage.com can have zero tracking by Google and here's why. About 75% of web sites have some sort of traffic monitoring aid or ad source that relates in some way back to Google. However Startpage.com munges Google's results, when I click on one of their links and end up on a page that has any Google presence, Google knows two things. It knows that it served up search results through Startpage.com that included that page I clicked on, it may know the referrer information (depending on how deeply Google's hooks are into that site), but it certainly knows that I ended up on that site and what my IP address is. It's not a stretch for Google's servers to piece together the exact search that took you there from start to finish. Given that it's Google's bread and butter to do this, I think it's a stretch to think they don't. So if I end up on one of the 75% of web sites where Google has some presence, then I might as well have gone to google.com and typed in the search there, since they will know just as much about me.
Using startpage as my secondary resource rather than Google is a possibility. I'll have to give that some thought. It will never be my primary search choice, though.
Duckduckgo doesn't do their own web indexing. They purchase web indexing from many sources. Most of Duckduckgo's results are actually purchased through Bing, some is from Google. Many smaller search engines purchase and offer search results from larger entities. The fact that Google, Bing, or anyone else is selling them raw data doesn't mean that Duckduckgo is collecting information for them. None of what you are searching for makes it to Google or Bing that way.
A bang, of which "!g" is just one (!w for wikipedia, !r is reddit, etc) is something different. It's just a quick way of getting results directly from somewhere else - a way that you can have Duckduckgo as your home page but get quick results from other places directly. Of course, when you use one and are redirected, you have no guarantees what the target site is doing with that search data. But if you are coming up dry with the results from Duckduckgo, then !g is one way to try the query to see what Google makes of it.
My personal assessment of Duckduckgo is this. I use it directly for about 95% of my search, and for normal to moderately difficult queries, it works great. For more advanced searches, searches where there might be less signal and more noise (searches with key words that are common jargon but in the context of the search it's not the jargon I'm looking for), then I do find that Google is slightly superior at parsing the search and returning what I want to see. At times like that, when getting the result is more important to me than watching my privacy, then I'll use a !g and try Google if I come up dry on Duckduckgo. Though I find that Duckduckgo is getting better, and there have even been cases where I've gone directly to Google with something I didn't expect would work well on DDG and where I came up dry there and where DDG found me what I wanted.
That's exactly how digital sampling works. It's just not the apparent way it worked in that video because he took a single simple sine wave. It reproduced on the other side because the D->A in question plotted a smooth curve through all the sampled points. Fair enough, this is one way to do D->A. But now repeat the gentleman's experiment but with the input as a square wave. At many samples per frequency, the square wave will be approximated. The higher you get to that "half the sampling frequency", with the same D->A that was used in the video, the closer the input square wave will start to produce an output sine wave. Which means you are losing all the harmonics.
Also, the issue with beat frequencies near but not on a fundamental harmonic of the sampling frequency are not addressed in that video at all. This is a real effect and one you can see on your computer. Pump out a square wave from a function generator at 11995 Hz and record it through your computer sampling at 48 KHz, or output a 11023 Hz signal recorded at 44.1 KHz. Take the recording and look at it on Audacity and you'll see the harmonic distortion and the sampling beat. Play the recording and you'll hear it.
This is why people can hear the difference. Complex sound gets smoothed out. Beat frequencies and harmonic distortion gets added.
With a sufficiently high sampling rate and a sufficient number of bits per sample, you'd might be right. Though there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion. At those harmonics, sine waves of certain frequencies can be sampled into square waves. Square waves are a mix of a large number of harmonics, so overall it sounds like someone is running a ring modulator on the sound as those frequencies go in and out of phase with the sampling rate. But at extremely high sampling rates, you're right, it may be impossible to tell the difference.
At the current standard of 48KHz, where at the upper frequencies you are getting 2-4 samples per wavelength, I guarantee you that you're 100% wrong. I can tell the difference between a direct-to-vinyl analog recording and a digital one with an accuracy approaching unity and I'm not the only one. For those with a good ear, it's like the audible difference between artificial vanilla and natural vanilla (incidentally, did you know that "vanilla" only became a synonym for "plain" after the invention of artificial vanilla?).
Cassette tape, I would have to agree with you there. There is no real redeeming feature to cassette besides nostalgia. But vinyl, well, there is another story.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime. Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that. I have a 1963 Philips Capella Reverbio B7X43A, one of the last tube radios and one of the only tube radios to have FM stereo reception in addition to stereo on the line in. I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced. And sure, I've rigged it for bluetooth. Respectfully, though, because there is no way I will make any permanent mods to this work of art. But still I can play my phone through it. And, like everyone else, I'll pump MP3s (or preferably OGGs) through it, because perceptual compression really is good technology and while you are listening to a bunch of MP3's then at the time it seems good enough. When you are munching on popcorn, you hardly worry that it's not prime rib.
But I would be devastated if I had to munch popcorn for the rest of my life. A direct-to-vinyl recording on my turntable put through my tube sound system is a perfectly cooked prime rib dinner with delicate au jus and a fine wine. It's an experience. Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor done this way still makes my heart beat faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Better than disabling the reboots is disabling the forced updates altogether.
Remember the whole travesty with the Windows 10 upgrade to begin with? The progression of "optional" updates that Microsoft sent out that did nothing for months then suddenly started popping up "Hey, wouldn't you like to upgrade your OS" notices, then "Hey, you need to upgrade your OS", then "We're going to upgrade your OS for you unless you cancel" and then "Hey we're now just going to do it whether you want to or not". I avoided that because I simply didn't install the update that did that. But now that I have a computer I was forced to accept Windows 10 on, I have to use a combination of Windows Update Blocker to disable a whole series of otherwise un-disableable services, and Windows Update MiniTool to give me back manual control of the update process. Thank heavens for those.
I own my computer and it will do what I tell it to do.
I find it troubling that people like the new system better. I suppose, in the narrowly worded "is Windows 10 update easier" it is true. Subservience is easier. Just give over control to someone else and let them decide what's good for me is easier. But I remember when just the suggestion of that sort of centralized control over the desktop would have gotten Microsoft crucified. We need to go back to that mentality.
YABBA DABBA DO
Ya Another Bloody Blockchain Article
Didn't Ask But Blockchain Aficionado Drafted One
Please God, make them stop.
Not that Microsoft has anything to do with it, but this is actually the case. I'm actually sitting in a warship as I write this on a port visit in New York. Most of the new combat management systems we've had installed use Linux rather than Windows. Older ones, like Link 11 management consoles, and a few civillian nav radar ARPA consoles are Windows based. But most new stuff that's coming out is Linux. It makes sense. The contractors that develop the systems would rather pocket the money than give it to Microsoft.
They want me to trust an Android phone to authenticate all my logins? Are they high?
Switch to KeePass and family. Create a database with a keyfile and a master password. Distribute the database using I switched to KeePass and family a couple years ago, and it was the best thing I ever did. Use a master-password plus a sneaker-net distributed keyfile to protect the database. You can share the database with something like SyncThing, that has end-to-end encryption you control just for added safety but really you could share the database publicly with complete safety at that point.
Don't get me wrong, I like Android. But Google has been in the NSA's back pocket from the beginning. Not that Assange is one of my favourite people, but he did make a compelling case for Google being essentially an arm of the US government. Which is one reason why China had it out with them (we may get on Huawei's case for back-doors, but we did it to them first with Google and Windows).
Well cry me a river. Perhaps if it wasn't a shill for the Chinese government to insert wideband listening devices into military installations then they would be a more trusted name in the western world.
As for the device, it's certainly blingy, but I think very few people will decide they need to spend that much money on such a device. I can't think of any time I've desperately wanted to take a tablet form factor device where I couldn't because I couldn't fit it. And my phone can connect to any TV I want, through its HDMI or by casting. High coolness factor, but not something I'd bet the farm on people shelling out that much money for.
What are you saying exactly? Which field do you believe he was going to leverage if not EM?
And another one who doesn't actually read the patent, my whole (admitedly partially bungled) post, or even do a basic google search on what Tesla was proposing. You're not alone though. Everyone nowadays just hears "wireless electrical transmission" and simply assumes this has just gotta mean by an electric field (a la mutual inductance) or by an electromagnetic field (a la radio).
To answer your question: Which field did he propose? No field!. At least, no more so by a field than electrons moving through a wire are using a "field" to directly conduct electricity. Patent 645,576 (I'm not going to link it again here since you didn't bother to click on it to read it before) describes a "System of Transmission of Electrical Energy" directly through the air. Or, since when you hear the word "transmission" you understand "radio transmission", how about if we use rename his patent "System of Conduction of Electrical Energy". He was going to transmit... err... conduct it directly through the air. Like a thunderstorm does. Like a (wait for it) "tesla coil" does. By arcing it up into the sky.
Tesla knew that rarefying air made it far more able to conduct electricity, and he knew that the atmosphere thinned as you proceeded up. So, he reasoned, if you broke down the ionization barrier from the surface and arced the electricity far enough up, that once up there it would continue to conduct fairly easily laterally. Tesla proposes in this patent to use giant transformers to force "electrical impulses of sufficiently-high electromotive force to render elevated air strata conducting, causing, thereby current impulses to pass, by conduction, through the air strata". He knew the voltages would be massive - he thought 20-50 megavolts. Where he got those numbers we don't know. But what we do know is that Tesla did more experimentation on what voltages at what frequencies it takes to arc electricity over large distances than anyone then or since.
I want EVs to succeed, and he's helped that..
I want EV's to succeed as well, but as much as I respect SpaceX and some of Musk's other accomplishments, I don't see Tesla as furthering the progress of EV's. The poster who called them a dystopian surveillance vehicle wasn't wrong. Tesla knows where you are at all times. They can listen to you. They can push over the air updates to individual cars that you can't block or, potentially, even know about. Which means they can literally take over your vehicle at any time. This isn't tinfoil hat stuff. This is functionality they have publicly demonstrated. You aren't buying a car, you are paying them to give them your personal information and rent a ride.
These vehicles are the surveillance state's wet dream.
It's not big pharma that are profiting after the addiction has started, though. So it's hardly in their best interest to create an addict.
Maybe fentanyl isn't all bad. Turns it into a self-solving problem, hmmm?
Sorry, a bit of a mis-edit there after I linked in the patent, but I think you get the idea.
Your comment starts at assumptuous and arrogant and then moves to being just plain wrong.
Assumption:
You are just assuming he meant by EM radiation. Given his actual patents this is likely not the intended medium of transmission. Tesla's patent 645,576drops off according to the inverse square law
Tesla, as much of a "mad genius" as he may have been, was still a genius. I credit his intelligence more, I think, than yours. Even if the inverse square property wasn't known (more later) already, this would have been pretty obvious to him anyway. He had been electric field Geissler tube light induction for at least a decade prior to his tower proposal. I'm pretty sure that he figured out that the light dimmed and went out as per the square of the distance involved.
Just plain wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell's_equations
Now, that being said, what about the actual question asked in the article. Could the towers have worked? Once electricity ionizes the channel, the air resistance is really quite low. If he could have figured out a way to ionize a channel high enough from multiple towers, it's actually conceivable it could work. No one, and I really mean no one at all, has done as much experimentation with the conduction of ultra-high voltage electricity as Tesla did. He knew what it took to create a path between two points. He knew the effect of distance. And he thought he could do it. I credit his knowledge and experience then more than any armchair (read Slashdot) critic today. Also remember this is before powered flight of any sort, so no one cared about what was going on in the sky. Using a tower to open an electrical path into the upper atmosphere wouldn't have been a hazard to anything. I suspect what he was going for was a sort of huge scale porcupine effect. Each tower creating a channel up into the sky up to an altitude where there is already sufficient ionization that the electricity could then be conducted laterally. The whole reason why the post I responded to wasn't alone in just assuming that Tesla must have been (errantly) trying for radio or electric field transfer is that the sheer scale of using "lightning" towers to transmit power directly up into the sky on that kind of scale is, well, at the mad genius level of unprecedented scale. The effects it would have on the RF spectrum, air navigation, electronic devices... renders it into a modern catastrophe more than a workable power transmission system. But back then none of that existed. The sky was just a huge open opportunity for him. He certainly thought big.
Google got banned from distributing iOS apps internally...
The funny part isn't Google got banned.
The funny part is that Google was distributing iOS apps internally.
Sure. Our current currency system doesn't involve first intentionally wasting a valuable resource (electricity) for no better reason than to make the cost of issuing a unit of currency high enough that the world isn't flooded with them.
Whoever thought that was sustainable enough that they would make money on it deserves the crippling losses that have occurred and the rest that are coming.
This isn't such a bizarre notion. I mean, not what what was suggested, but this actually frightens me more than any amount of normal genetic engineering. This has the potential to make virulent strains of organisms that cannot possibly be targeted by the immune system. In general, antigens react to protein coats on bacteria and viruses. If those proteins are made in ways that aren't just novel, but are which outside our immune system's ability to even see as a protein, that can pose a large problem. It wouldn't be recognized as self, it wouldn't be recognized as foreign, it just wouldn't be recognized at all.
The unintended consequences here are astoundingly worrisome.
...I care about why they started.
There you go! There was the loophole. You can do evil as long as you not acually are evil. I mean, who thinks "hey, I'm evil". No one. So, they leave the door open for any action as long as they don't self-identify as evil they're ok.
"Do no evil"
Well, if it's a choice between F-Droid and Google Play, F-Droid has had exactly zero cases of malware slipping into its repository. How many has Google had?
Now, what I would just looooove to know are statistics on what proportion of malware got onto Android phones via Google Play versus side-loading. That would be an interesting statistic to see.
I trust Google about as far as I trust the NSA to protect my interests. I have a tougher vetting process for Google Play apps that I go through than I do for F-Droid. And for good reason. And so should you.
Well, if this were Apple, and going through their app store was the only legitimate way I could get an app onto my phone, then I would be upset at the high handedness of it. As it is, Android is still an open platform. People can get apps onto their phone other ways besides Google Play. So, if Google wants to start putting limits on what apps can have what permissions in order to appear in a store they own, go ahead. This particular permission is one that would be sought by apps used by more savvy people anyway. If Google wants to drive some of their more capable customers to other app repositories and stores, that bothers me none. I am, at the moment, happy with anything Google does to incentivize people to exert the activation energy required to move to more open app repositories.
If (maybe I should say "when" here) Google moves to make Android a walled garden with a sole-source on Google Play for apps, then you will see me become far more activist. But at the moment, Google is really only shooting themselves in the foot.
So, by all means, please carry on.
I honestly don't care where my apps are hosted. I use F-Droid more than Google Play anyway. I suspect someone wanting to use SMS to trigger a phone location are savvy enough to sort out alternate methods of getting the app.
Google can pull the ban hammer all they want, but until they also pull the walled garden hammer, people are going to be able to use the fact that it's still an open-ish platform to get the apps they want.
Sure, but what does tracking limiting do? According to their blog it simply limits cookies identified by Mozilla as tracking cookies. Are Google ones included, considering that Google is still a major funder of Mozilla? Somehow I doubt it. Is the HTTP referrer scrubbed? Doesn't appear to be when I tested it.
So Google still gets all the same information, maybe with a limitation on some cookies, which I never factored into my original analysis anyway. They get the following information from the 75% of sites that use Google analytics and/or advertising:
1) They know they served up web site X as part of search results they sent to startpage.com, and they know the search terms
2) Depending on how they are hooked into the end web site, they may (probably) get the referrer information from where you came from, and Firefox's tracking protection does not appear to block the referrer
3) They definitely get your IP address on the end page visit
4) They know other responding variables like the ranking of the sites they serve up in the search results, they know when you click on "next page" on startpage.com for more results, and most importantly, they know the know the length of time between 1 and 3
No amount of tracking blocking can eliminate 1, 3, or 4 above. They have to get the search terms from startpage.com, they know what results they serve up, and they have to get the IP addresses of people who visit the end site on any site they have hooks into. No amount of cookie filtering can stop that information flow. And that is enough to link the search terms to visitors, especially if you click more than one link to more than one destination Google has hooks into. Which means, the more you use Startpage.com, the easier it is for Google to link your search terms with your IP. You do a search and suddenly one IP shows up at three sites they have hooks into that all just appeared on search results they already served up? Then they serve up new search results and that same IP shows up at one of those sites. Sorry, but regular use of startpage.com is no better than using Google itself.
I don't trust Google with 100% of my search traffic. I prefer to keep them as a secondary resource - I don't trust that startpage.com can have zero tracking by Google and here's why. About 75% of web sites have some sort of traffic monitoring aid or ad source that relates in some way back to Google. However Startpage.com munges Google's results, when I click on one of their links and end up on a page that has any Google presence, Google knows two things. It knows that it served up search results through Startpage.com that included that page I clicked on, it may know the referrer information (depending on how deeply Google's hooks are into that site), but it certainly knows that I ended up on that site and what my IP address is. It's not a stretch for Google's servers to piece together the exact search that took you there from start to finish. Given that it's Google's bread and butter to do this, I think it's a stretch to think they don't. So if I end up on one of the 75% of web sites where Google has some presence, then I might as well have gone to google.com and typed in the search there, since they will know just as much about me.
Using startpage as my secondary resource rather than Google is a possibility. I'll have to give that some thought. It will never be my primary search choice, though.
Duckduckgo doesn't do their own web indexing. They purchase web indexing from many sources. Most of Duckduckgo's results are actually purchased through Bing, some is from Google. Many smaller search engines purchase and offer search results from larger entities. The fact that Google, Bing, or anyone else is selling them raw data doesn't mean that Duckduckgo is collecting information for them. None of what you are searching for makes it to Google or Bing that way.
A bang, of which "!g" is just one (!w for wikipedia, !r is reddit, etc) is something different. It's just a quick way of getting results directly from somewhere else - a way that you can have Duckduckgo as your home page but get quick results from other places directly. Of course, when you use one and are redirected, you have no guarantees what the target site is doing with that search data. But if you are coming up dry with the results from Duckduckgo, then !g is one way to try the query to see what Google makes of it.
My personal assessment of Duckduckgo is this. I use it directly for about 95% of my search, and for normal to moderately difficult queries, it works great. For more advanced searches, searches where there might be less signal and more noise (searches with key words that are common jargon but in the context of the search it's not the jargon I'm looking for), then I do find that Google is slightly superior at parsing the search and returning what I want to see. At times like that, when getting the result is more important to me than watching my privacy, then I'll use a !g and try Google if I come up dry on Duckduckgo. Though I find that Duckduckgo is getting better, and there have even been cases where I've gone directly to Google with something I didn't expect would work well on DDG and where I came up dry there and where DDG found me what I wanted.
That's exactly how digital sampling works. It's just not the apparent way it worked in that video because he took a single simple sine wave. It reproduced on the other side because the D->A in question plotted a smooth curve through all the sampled points. Fair enough, this is one way to do D->A. But now repeat the gentleman's experiment but with the input as a square wave. At many samples per frequency, the square wave will be approximated. The higher you get to that "half the sampling frequency", with the same D->A that was used in the video, the closer the input square wave will start to produce an output sine wave. Which means you are losing all the harmonics.
Also, the issue with beat frequencies near but not on a fundamental harmonic of the sampling frequency are not addressed in that video at all. This is a real effect and one you can see on your computer. Pump out a square wave from a function generator at 11995 Hz and record it through your computer sampling at 48 KHz, or output a 11023 Hz signal recorded at 44.1 KHz. Take the recording and look at it on Audacity and you'll see the harmonic distortion and the sampling beat. Play the recording and you'll hear it.
This is why people can hear the difference. Complex sound gets smoothed out. Beat frequencies and harmonic distortion gets added.
With a sufficiently high sampling rate and a sufficient number of bits per sample, you'd might be right. Though there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion. At those harmonics, sine waves of certain frequencies can be sampled into square waves. Square waves are a mix of a large number of harmonics, so overall it sounds like someone is running a ring modulator on the sound as those frequencies go in and out of phase with the sampling rate. But at extremely high sampling rates, you're right, it may be impossible to tell the difference.
At the current standard of 48KHz, where at the upper frequencies you are getting 2-4 samples per wavelength, I guarantee you that you're 100% wrong. I can tell the difference between a direct-to-vinyl analog recording and a digital one with an accuracy approaching unity and I'm not the only one. For those with a good ear, it's like the audible difference between artificial vanilla and natural vanilla (incidentally, did you know that "vanilla" only became a synonym for "plain" after the invention of artificial vanilla?).
Cassette tape, I would have to agree with you there. There is no real redeeming feature to cassette besides nostalgia. But vinyl, well, there is another story.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime. Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that. I have a 1963 Philips Capella Reverbio B7X43A, one of the last tube radios and one of the only tube radios to have FM stereo reception in addition to stereo on the line in. I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced. And sure, I've rigged it for bluetooth. Respectfully, though, because there is no way I will make any permanent mods to this work of art. But still I can play my phone through it. And, like everyone else, I'll pump MP3s (or preferably OGGs) through it, because perceptual compression really is good technology and while you are listening to a bunch of MP3's then at the time it seems good enough. When you are munching on popcorn, you hardly worry that it's not prime rib.
But I would be devastated if I had to munch popcorn for the rest of my life. A direct-to-vinyl recording on my turntable put through my tube sound system is a perfectly cooked prime rib dinner with delicate au jus and a fine wine. It's an experience. Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor done this way still makes my heart beat faster.