That is not what the New York AG is investigating. The investigation is into whether or not the anti-network neutrality comments involved fraud.

Why waste time with that? FCC comments are not some official polling device nor some way to throw a wet finger in the air and see what way the wind is blowing.

The FCC public comment process is for information gathering purposes only, nobody tabulates the pro/con counts at the FCC. What matters is the unique information or novel perspectives being presented in these comments, not the number of comments. Also, in this case, I'm told that the FCC public comment process isn't required to *remove* a regulation anyway. The only time the process is required is when enacting new ones.

The NY AG is wasting their time and NY's money.... And we all KNOW the reason and it has nothing to do at all with the FCC actions here.

When time comes for me to buy a new TV, if I can't find a non-smart, non-camera equipped TV then I'll forgo the purchase.

Too much nonsense in modern TVs, too much crap I'm being asked to pay for that I don't want.

Ironically, from theology came medical care. Without God, the law survival of the fittest is taken to its most extreme interpretation, and there are no cripples, not for long anyway, until they are sacrificed or abandoned as unwanteds.

Medical care is sourced in empathy - a common trait in humans.

Many religions and ideas of God interpret the sick and disadvantage of being cursed by God as noted in the summary above. For example, the The Hindu's have their caste system and the Christians a notion of the "elect" and "reprobates".

I'll probably get modded down but there are two important questions he should of asked before he died:

* ALL the Laws of Physics just "magically" emerged from where again? Or

* They have ALWAYS existed???

That is, WHY is the speed of light 299,792,458 m / s. Has it ALWAYS been this? If so, WHY? If not, WHY?

Either way, that requires no more, or any less, faith then your standard theist. Atheists LOVE to pretend that their F word is Faith -- but faith is NOT a dirty word -- only blind faith is. EVERYONE has Faith -- otherwise what sustains your beliefs in the first place???

Sadly Hawkins got caught up in the Fallacy of Duality:

* Atheist, noun, a spiritual blind man arguing color doesn't exist,
* Theist, noun, a spiritual monochromatic man arguing that ONLY his color exists.

The fundamental problem is that Atheism is based on ignorance. i.e. I have no belief. Ergo, I have no knowledge. Great! How does this LACK of knowledge help you to live a better life??? How does it help you to have compassion for your fellow man or animal?

As a mystic I can say Hawkins was 100% wrong about The Source. He will find out just how ignorant he was about meta-reality when he realizes his consciousness is INDEPENDENT of his physical body -- which he could of learnt if he actually LISTENED to anyone who has had an OBE. Sadly, he COMPLETELY missed the point about religion. He should of ditched man-made religion and focused on transcendent spirituality instead.

i.e.

* Religion: one man preaching another what he SHOULD do to understand The Source,
* Spirituality: one man teaching another what he COULD do to understand The Source.

Hawkins also should have stuck to Physics where he can PROVE his claims otherwise he doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about W.R.T. Meta-Physics.

Scientist: Awesome work for making Science accessible to the public!
Atheist: Doesn't have a fucking clue about meta-reality.

--
The ENTIRE reason you even exist is to learn HOW to have better relationships.
There is nothing more important then them. Your character is the only thing you can take with you when you die.

Even though he's considered a renowned physicist I still wouldn't pay too much attention to his sentiments about AI. You know that's what science is: you don't opine about the things which are not even remotely related to your field of research unless you want to make a fool of yourself.

Also, during the past years of his life he kept fear mongering about AI to the point where you just couldn't take any longer. We still know what intelligence is; we don't know how close we are to inventing artificial intelligence; and our intelligence algorithms easily trip over after being fed terabytes of data. One thing is certain: that's not how natural intelligence works.

I'm a lot more interested in what Jeff Hawkins is about to reveal - and if it's not some bluff given that experts from DeepMind couldn't understand anything then we are on the verge of some significant breakthroughs.

Interesting that, if I recall correctly, his "Brief History of Time" and other published works mentioned that it allowed for the possibility of a God.

He leaves stating there's no God to be published post-humously.

Hedging his bets? Or just avoiding controversy while alive?

Being an atheist is an evidence-based worldview. This obviously isn't your wheelhouse either, and nobody has perfected AI or even come anywhere close. Thanks for your boar tits though, tasty.

Being Agnostic is an evidence-based world view. You cannot prove a negative and therefore cannot prove that god does not exist. The most science has to say about god is that there is no scientific evidence for its existence. There also used to be no evidence for germs or atoms. The best we can say is that we don't know.

Whether or not we are living in a simulation is a hot topic today. If we are, it implies that there is a reality outside our own, and beings that inhabit it to run the simulation. Perhaps when we die here, we exit the simulation and re-enter the other reality. Well, does that sound familiar?

I'm not saying the God of the Bible is necessarily real or described accurately in that book. I am saying that foreclosing the possibility of a greater, unseen intelligence or consciousness existing outside of, or in concert with, our observed reality is not scientific.

EEA stands for European Economic Area, in case anyone [else] is curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, I know the EU says Google requiring vendors to use Google Play was an antitrust issue. The thing I never understood is Apple does not even allow it's operating system or "app store" to on other hardware (via license to other mfgs). To me, Apple is more guilty of antitrust than Google.

What am I missing?

Seems to me that Google is basically saying, "You don't like free?!? FINE! -- then we'll just charge you for everything!" and then sticking their middle finger up at the EU courts.

I mean, I'm not saying that Google is right necessarily... but that's certainly how their response reads, to my mind.

Dear Google: You don't get to change web standards randomly. The purpose of having a standard is there's a Stable Specification that developers write their applications against, and specifications stay the same and don't get willy-nilly changes until a new major version is ready, and the application sets a flag that it is ready to use the new version of the standard; your browser should be compliant and not suddenly change from developer expectations... stop coming up with random updates (planned or not) that make your browser start randomly doing weird stuff that breaks shit.

I'm all for muting annoying auto-plays, but you need to treat it like the PopUp blocker: Alert the user that your software has done something weird to stop a likely annoyance, and let the user easily override it for the site or disable AutoAudio blocking entirely.

Its May release of Chrome 66 muted sites that played sound automatically, saving internet users from the plague of annoying auto-playing videos

Muting them is a start, but not good enough.

Not downloading or playing the fecking things would be actually saving internet users from this shit.

Muting it still wastes my bandwidth, CPU, and time as I pause the damned thing.

And, no, I don't give a fuck about people who make shit with autoplay videos they think is useful, your autoplay garbage has no value to me, and I don't want my browser to show it.

What I really want is the ability to blacklist sites from which I never want to hear audio. CNN, I'm looking at you.

Fun part I recently ran into with Huawei phone that friend was using. You can't install VLC on them any more through play store. You have to get APK package from elsewhere.

Apparently, Huawei has some out of spec handling of battery management that interferes with many apps, and VLC folks just had enough. So keep that in mind if you want to get one:

https://www.androidcentral.com...

I base this guess off of nothing but an image and a headline that said something like "friend charging" that I didn't click on, but it might be the ability to charge one phone with another. So if you have 80% battery and your friend's phone is about to die, you can put them on top of one another and yours can charge his.

I hope manufacturers will start putting front-facing cameras behind the screen, roughly in the center of the phone or 2/3 of the way up. That way when (1) in video calls we'll be able to look at the people we're speaking with and they'll see our eyes actually looking at them, and (2) when we take selfie photos and are checking out how we look, our eyes will be looking at the camera.

I read about an Apple patent for this back in 2009 but it doesn't look like there's been any development since then. https://appleinsider.com/artic...

The new handsets are the first to take NM Card, a Huawei-made design that offers the capacity and performance of microSD in a card the size of a Nano SIM.

The problem, you might have surmised, is that you're buying what's currently a vendor-exclusive technology. You can't just run to any store and pick up an NM Card when your built-in storage fills up. It's unclear how Huawei will price these cards, for that matter. And however reasonable the price might be, you're likely locking yourself into using Huawei phones if you want to use that extra storage with any future phones.

Sorry, don't subscribe to the arguments supporting the ability to work around this design flaw.

It's not hard to keep, it's really not ruining phones keeping it. I will not purchase a phone without it.

Period

I think you mean my boss doesn't want slack because it doesn't have end to end encryption... We recently switched from Jabber to Skype because Jabber keeps IM history and that is considered a security risk. So instead we get to deal with hit or miss desktop sharing and file transfers, and often not being able to properly connect to the servers any given morning. I think the issue is mostly with our IT, not Skype, but I do know Jabber was dead stable for years. ...not biased at all.

It's not trivial, but I don't buy that unencrypted communications are the alternative for the reasons they state.

The client-server communications are encrypted. The reason it isn't end-to-end encryption is the server decrypts the messages before encrypting them for the recipient's connection and sending them on.

Basically, they do what you propose. But that isn't end-to-end because the server (aka "centalizing their archival") can read the contents of the messages.

Alternatively, you could realize not having end-to-end encryption is not the same as not having encryption.

The client-server communications are encrypted. You just can't send a DM that the server can not read. At least, not directly through Slack.

There is a huge difference between "bosses around the world don't want it," and "it wasn't something paying customers cared about." (emphasis added for clarity) The former implies (as observed in the quoted summary in the parent thread) that bosses may be actively seeking to eavesdrop; the latter implies that bosses don't care either way, as long as they don't have to pay extra for encryption.

Clearly, the concerns of the actual end-users is that perhaps the former is more likely the case... which probably tends to drive those end-users to other platforms (those which do enable encryption) for any of their more casual interactions. And obviously, when you default to an "unofficial" platform in this fashion, you're not particularly likely to bother going back to the "official" platform just to conduct business with those same people -- except when you're forced. And we all know what happens when you try to force someone to do something that they don't want to do; they pretend to do it, or they only do it just barely enough to get the boss off of their back.

End result: ironically, those "paying" customers may stop paying, if Slack can't actually convince the end-users to use the tool properly... which I would suggest makes this a potentially self-defeating scenario.

Where blockchain really shines is when you want a system whereby no individual parties are trusted.

That makes sense then - no-one trusts Sony, after all.

But that makes zero sense. If they wanted, if there is real incentive, it is going to be trivial for some pirates to spin up a ton of servers to quickly perform a 51% attack. Or do you think sony is just going to spend millions of dollars having hash farms sitting there hashing away just in case a pirate attacks?

And more importantly, in the event the pirates successfully pull off a 51% attack, then what? Is everyone just going to roll over and say "well, the majority of hashing power has voted" and just give up on the ? No, they are going to say "well, that's not really valid anymore, so lets just ignore it and go with what sony says is legit". And now you've just invalidated the entire point of having a blockchain. "We can't trust anyone, so we'll trust the blockchain collectively...until we decide we can't trust the blockchain, at which point we'll just trust the entity we didn't want to simply trust at the beginning".

If you give up on your principles as soon as they are inconvenient, they weren't really principles to begin with. Likewise if you can stop trusting the blockchain as soon as you think it is compromised, it was never really trusted to begin with.

It is very hard to stop pirating. Pirating and boot legging is rampant in India. One film director was bemoaning that he got a congratulatory call from Dubai on his new movie on the day of the release. The company had not even begun movie distribution talks with any Dubai distributor at that time. But Bollywood thrives, they know they are going to get the money in the first week and that is all. Then the content is essentially public domain. People take clips and interpolate with some politician's speech and create funny sequences. They play the sound track and record themselves lip synching (called dub-mash) and redistribute. No one pays any royalty or digital rights. Even if a dub-mash goes viral it does not top the charts because it gets immediately boot legged into hundred you tube videos and the viewer count gets fragmented.

Through it all it some how thrives and makes some money for the creators.

It's more about transactional integrity. Blockchain is more trivial to code and execute than you might think.

If one takes a vetted (!!) inventory of music and film and media and whatever, and wants to bank it among a group of producers, artists, media companies, and consumers, this method can work to achieve a transaction history of who owns what with what stipulations, and it's wickedly difficult to game.

Not that DRM works. Rather, this is transactional integrity for the lawyers and apps that will be used to assert "rights".

IMHO, it's folly and a waste of money, but rights protection is a mantra in the media business. I allows Wall Street to believe that there is asset protection, therefore stock value and price. In actuality, that's the real "customer" for this blockchain effort. And that's the charade's target: share price.

I guess the idea is media creators could create a public blockchain describing their works and every playerID or userCode license that has an authorization to disseminate their work. The description of a work could actually contain enough information about various watermarks and identifying features of their works to identify both legitimate copies and Identify decent-quality rogue copies containing an identical picture or more than 30 seconds or so of audio or video: then in order to disseminate ANY work, a compliant playing device would be required to maintain an online connection and take steps to identify what work is being played --- then in order to play a work identified as matching a protected one: the player would be required to login, userId, and apply for a player hardware Id Lease containing the player hardwareId and the manufacturer+hardware IDs of the monitor and every device in the viewing chain (May require submitting a payment); wait for a short-lived Play authorization to appear on the blockchain, and maintain an internet connection to (1) Verify every 60 seconds that the play authorization is still valid for this content, and (2) The player has to transmit all the blockchain records to the HDCP display monitor, digital sound, and every device in the chain, so.... (3) The HDCP monitor also verifies the "play authorization".

The DRM could be combined with a proprietary audo/video encoding package: which would be protected by a patent,
and in order to enforce the DRM policies -- licensing the patent to decode would require that all decoders made available
be only "Compliant players". After every 3 or 4 years, there would be a new encoding/decoding package with a new patent,
and a mandatory online instant update for Compliant Players to remain compliant and be able to continue playing content
that involves removing the hardware's capability to decode media packages that are more than 2 versions behind --
and media leases can no longer be issued for older versions of the media to ensure by the time patent expires - nothing in consumers' hands can play that format anymore.

We're talking a device which when it malfunctions, kills (or could kill) someone. And still the manufacturer didn't get the basics of security correct: using signed software updates.

How can we believe that IoT devices, which are manufactured with much less profit overhead, will be more secure? (Unless somehow regulated -- which also didn't for for those FDA-approved pacemakers).

The original company stops making updates available.
Before that, a hacker could impersonate the update server (probably using a MITM attack) so the device received a hacked firmware, not the legit one. But if no hacking occurs, the device receives a legit update.
After the change, if a hacker impersonates the (unavailable) update server, the device can only find the hacked firmware, never the legit one.
How is this exactly improving security?

China is an oppressive dictatorship that uses censorship to control its people. America is a democracy that values free and open information. Google values free and open information. Who is that Google wants to help and who is it that Google refuses to help?

This is f'd up.

"Hans ... are we the baddies?"

Presumably DDG pays Google for the use of their search API anyway.

No, they actually don't.

DDG's business model is to sell ads on its platform, so you have to trust that they won't use those to spy on you or infect your machine with malware. Unfortunately they seem to be using the Bing and Amazon ad networks.

They use bing, and curate the ads served. Something fundamentally different, remember when companies had their own ad hosts and only allowed specific ads? Yeah...those were the days before giant ad networks spewing malware. Oh, the other way is via affiliate links aka you click on a product they get a cut. They also don't follow you around the internet like a crazy ex that just can't seem to let go.

I tried their example of searching for "car", which they claim does not track you. I can't post the URL of the advert as plain text due to the lameness filter, so you will have to hover over the following:

ad link

So we have a bounce through yahoo.com, who do track you, "dartsearch.net" which is part of the DoubleClick network, a unique "ad_provider" ID and what looks like a number of other IDs. Also, it's HTTP, not even HTTPS, so now your ISP/employer has that data too.

Finally, the link that you claim says they curate ads actually says

By default, when you sign up for a Bing Ads account, your ads should automatically enter rotation into all of Bing's distribution channels including DuckDuckGo.

In other words they throw up whatever Bing deems to be okay.

Not really. Those doctors will be frankly terrified by the news. Maybe you'll understand why, maybe not. If you don't, and are interested, ask. If you aren't interested, I can't help.

However, expect people including people you know and care about to die of malaria and other tropical diseases in higher latitudes in very large numbers over the coming decades.

And that's not good news.
I

So what's different this time? I mean, the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period - all were hotter and longer than the current burst.

Well, the evidence suggests that you're probably wrong about the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period being hotter and longer than the current warming.

I guess modern insects and mammals are just too wimpy...

Or, I guess you could ignore the evidence and invent your own explanations...

what idiots, jumping on the "it's all climate change" bandwagon.

destroying forests for farmland with pesticides and herbicides is the cause.

No need to worry CLIMATE CHANGE can do everything!

Lost your car keys? CLIMATE CHANGE!

Icy roads on the way to work CLIMATE CHANGE!

Hurricane in Florida Cli...oh sorry that was SUPER TRUMP!

You can easily complain about CC (I do) without fabricating things like cost.

I pay $10/month (not $99) and that includes 100GB of storage along with access to the photographic apps (photography plan).

Even for the Full CC suite of apps PLUS Adobe Stock, you are only talking $83/month.

Of course, to me that storage seems so laughably small I would only use it for projects I would then move out of the adobe cloud again. But it's not $100/month as you are absurdly claiming.

Quite a few artists work on tablets. Most of the ones I know use a Surface, but some use an iPad with other drawing apps.

The advantage of a tablet is that they can hold it any which way, in any comfortable position to draw in. They use the versions with a proper stylus, with thousands of levels of pressure sensitivity.

They get basically the same functionality as a Wacom Cintiq at lower total cost, and it's much more portable.

*gasp* You said the 'W' word!

Wacom is still the industry standard for this type of stuff. And I think Apple is going to try and close the gap.

Start off with an iPad version to get the kinks out. Then go full steam ahead and come out with a line of touch screen monitors to directly compete with Wacom.

Several years ago an Apple patent was released for a touch screen monitor. And the design made it so you could slide your iPad into the back of the monitor for recharging and syncing.

> I have been told laser printers make inferior picture prints.

As someone who has BOTH a color laser printer and inkjet that is indeed TRUE.

* Laser printers are awesome for text but OK for photographs,
* Inkjet printers are OK for text (slightly blurry) but phenomenal for portraits, and HDR photographs.

One of the many standard "litmus test images" are the ones listed on the defunct Outback Print

From 3+ feet away you can't tell the difference between an inkjet and color laser on "natural" images. (i.e. non test patterns.) But closer then 3 feet and you start to notice the flaws of color laser printers -- especially gradients that have artifacts. Not Mach Banding but error dot diffusion patterns due to the small size of toner color laser printers basically "print" in a halftone pattern.

> I doubt professional industry-grade printing firms print their photos on inkjet printers.

That's because they care more about cost then quality.

> see no reason why laser printer pigments would have to be inferior.

I take it you don't do much (any?) printing of HDR photos. Here is a primer (pardon the pun.)

First, color laser printers only have the standard 4 color CYMK toners. This means the gamut is not quite as large as inkjets's dyes and pigments.

Second, in Canon printers the large black "PGI" cartridge are pigments which is used when printing text. The remaining color tanks may be dye based inks which tend to have smaller particles than the pigment based inks. See Canon PGI vs CLI for more details.

Third, inkjets tend to have more dyes then just the standard 4 color CYMK inks. For example, the Canon Pixma PRO-1 is a 12 pigment system. Why 12?

5 are dedicated for black and white printing:
* LGY (Light Gray)
* GY (Grey)
* DGY (Dark Grey)
* MBK (Matte Black)
* PBK (Photo Black)

Remaining 7 are for colors:
* C (Cyan)
* Y (Yellow)
* M (Magenta)
* R (Red)
* PC (Photo Cyan)
* PM (Phtoto Magenta)
* CO (Chroma Optimizer)

If you want the best quality the type of printer inkjet vs color laser matters due to printing technology. i.e. For every day use a color laser printer is more then good enough but if you want quality portraits nothing beats an inkjet.

> For mothers and mothers-in-law, I recommend mid-level color laser printers.

As someone who has BOTH a color laser printer and inkjet I'll second that.

Canon's color laser printer, the imageCLASS LBP612CDW at $184, is more then "good enough" for most people.

From 3+ feet away you probably can't tell the difference between an inkjet and color laser on "natural" images. (i.e. non test patterns.) But closer then 3 feet and you start to notice the flaws of color laser printers -- especially gradients that have artifacts. If you are printing portraits or HDR photography then the inkjet produces the superior quality -- no contest.

i.e. One of the many standard "litmus test images" are the ones listed on the defunct Outback Print such as this PrinterEvaluationImage_V002_aRGB.jpg

> NO REASON TO OWN A DAMNED DYE-BASED PRINTER

For 99% of people, yeah, they probably don't need their own inkjet but for the other 1% I wouldn't agree with that statement at all.

e.g. If you have a 10-bit/channel color monitor then you probably care about color consistency / correction across the entire pipeline. Especially with Canon's printers having 8, 10, and 12 ink systems now.

It all depends on the quality you want and at what price point.

Perhaps you should read about how a laser printer works. The laser never hits the toner.
It's used to dissipate the static charge on the drum so it only picks up toner in the correct place to print the image.
The only heating that occurs is the drum that fuses the toner to the paper. That only melts the toner, it doesn't vaporise it.

Ink jet printers on the other do vaporise ink in some types.
HP used to brag that the instantaneous temperature inside the print head heats up hotter than the surface of the Sun. It's called "thermal drop-on-demand" . Canon, HP and Lexmark use it.

This is exactly right. For the few documents I actually infrequently need to print, I have a brother color laser printer I got off of Amazon for ~$300. It's bulky, but the toner isn't going anywhere, it connects via wifi, and doubles as a copier/scanner.

In the event I need photos printed and they have to look nice, I'll just use Costco/Walgreens/CVS, they probably have better printers than I would have anyway.

Exactly. I use the color laser at work for things that need a splash of color. My home printer is black and white,, and it serves me just fine. The only time I needed to print photos, I used a photo printing service.

And the likes of Costco and such don't use crappy inkjet printers. No, they use real photo printers on real photo paper. Basically the same kind of machine that used to generate prints from 35mm film has been adapted for the digital world (they have a very high resolution CRT screen that images the photo paper).

For photos, they are simply stunning and come with your pick of matte or gloss photo paper. And photo paper means it doesn't run at the slightest hint of water.

Inkjet printers are junk. I wouldn't print photos on them - it costs under 50 cents for a 4x6 print from the store. Better than paying $30 for a pack of 10 inkjet printer photo paper and all the special inks.

is needed which mandates display of: (a) ability to use third party parts; (b) ability to use third party repair shops. This should apply to any product that has an expected life of more than one month. The minimum prominence of the display (size, positioning, etc) should be specified. This should also apply to marketing, including web sites.

Once consumers start to notice this they will start to make buying decisions on this information. This will make manufacturers change. It might mean that it costs more to buy a printer, but cost over a few years should go down.

IT product review/comparison web sites could help with the problem today: Include these 2 data points in every review/comparison.

What the printer manufacturers are doing is just the same as John Deere does with tractors.