heard this alarmist stuff over a decade ago, that it would be happening now... but it didn't

meanwhile we have "near record" heat waves....that were surpassed decades ago.

I have an LG V20 that I'm apparently never going to let go because it's the last phone to have both SD card and replaceable battery. It has a respectable set of cameras and I often use it to take video, an area where it excels while my both my DSLR and Micro 4/3rds camera are less capable.

i know the state of the industry suggests that consumers would rather have waterproofing and of course removable storage leads to uneven user experiences because cards fail or people buy slow cards, but surely somebody has to realize that removable batteries make a lot more sense that tethering to an external battery, and swapping storage cards makes a lot more sense than buying phones with a half-terabyte or more of internal storage.

I can't be the only one who wants those things, especially not both at the same time.

Four cores running at 2Ghz? Is this what kids are calling underpowered these days?

Perhaps making your app suck less might bring it more users.

I with the standard iOS podcast app for a long time after it launched - I didn’t need a lot of flashy features, and it did the basics reasonably well. But with each iOS iteration it seemed to actually got worse (sorta like Siri, actually). Then, with iOS 11, they're removed a basic feature - the default ability to easily play a bunch of the same podcasts in order. This meant you’d have to manually add individual podcasts to a playlist, which is really annoying for a bunch of 1-2 minute episodes of something like Stardate. So, I dropped that app and moved on.

“Exclusive content” isn’t gonna save your sucky podcast app, Apple. Not to mention that podcast exclusives are pretty much the antithesis of what podcasts are all about anyway.

If it is not on an RSS feed then they can go screw themselves. Walled gardens are for slaves.

Probably have a cheap chip in that meter. Welsh has been known to fry processors, due to the extreme consonant/vowel ratio.

Are they sure it's actually in Welsh? Seems to me just as likely that it's English rot13.

Not to belittle Welsh, but if the meters in the UK all defaulted to English and switching the language from English to Welsh required reading the instruction manual and/or spending 5-20 minutes of time, how many people in Wales would genuinely care enough to spend the time and change the language from the default English to Welsh?

I mean, seriously. Most people in countries like Germany don't bother to change the language if it defaults to English & changing it would take more than ~30 seconds of effort. And people in Wales are LITERALLY surrounded by English everywhere.

They absolutely do, but titanium.. man.

Titanium has a long record of failures in the rocket business. It's a particularly reactive metal, and also sucks to try and machine or weld. You have an extremely small temperature and time window to work in. Go read Ignition! and check out some of the stories of disasters with Ti.

Apparently, the burst discs that will replace the faulty valves aren't reusable. There's time pressure to maintain their schedule, but hopefully a more elegant fix will be forthcoming.

This one line says it all: no one expected that "NTO driven into a titanium component would cause such a violent reaction".

I used to do a lot of work with various metals at high temperatures in oxidizing environments. The self-ignition of many alloys (such as titanium) is well known and should be respected under conditions of high temperature, pressure, and exposure to oxidants. Since NTO is an excellent oxidizer, they should have investigated this. Alas.

Apparently, the burst discs that will replace the faulty valves aren't reusable. There's time pressure to maintain their schedule, but hopefully a more elegant fix will be forthcoming.

After NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing the SuperDracos are there just for the abort system so on missions that go according to plan they wouldn't be used at all. So they'll be looking into whether just going to space means they need to be replaced between missions or not, obviously if the abort system fires they're not reusable but then nobody's going to reuse anything anyway. So it might very well become the permanent solution.

So, Verizon only has to reach 40% of the rural population to make $18.5 million, or roughly $6k per customer, plus another $4.5-5mil per year from that 40% while the remaining 60% still can't get access or develop their own networks. Let's not kid ourselves, that 60% wont see a connection. We've seen this game being played before, they'll bring service to a couple of outskirt subdivisions while ignoring those poor schmucks that happen to live 1/2 or more miles between each other, call it coverage, and walk away with the money. It's like the American people who are in the worst positions keep voting against themselves and paying for it 10x over. If the FCC wanted to really get people covered, they'd open the funds up to any contractor willing to lay the groundwork for 100% coverage with payments happening incrementally based on actual completion obligations, but then those FCC board members likely would be unemployed at the next administration change instead of taking jobs back at the same people they were supposed to be regulating.

All this money does is go into some exec's bonus.
The major ISPs pound their pud a bit until the money's gone.
And NOTHING is ever done.

I haven't been keeping up, but is this a rare case of Pai doing something that isn't completely moustache-twiddling evil?

You can't be seriously suggesting that all the buzz around block chain was merely hype with no substance.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you.

As someone "asked" by management to review how blockchain could be used to improve our supply chain (it was a mercifully brief fad a year or two ago), I quickly came to the conclusion that blockchain is basically nothing more than an answer in search, desperately, of a problem it can solve (with the generous application of $300/ hour consultants, of course.

It's an ideology based on the premise that some ill-defined notion called "decentralization" is both inherently superior to "centralization", and more fantastically, can be made perpetually self-sustaining merely by applying layer upon layer of mechanical incentive judo. The technology itself is an implementation detail that attempts to reiffy this simplistic belief system, but never quite succeeds because the problem it attempts to solve (the tendency for the complex feedback loops that form value settlement systems to converge on centralized solutions over time) is not inherently a problem in and of itself, and is ultimately a phenomenon that emerges from instincts that are deeply rooted in human nature.

Blockchainism amounts to a modern-day hermetic belief that competition can be transmuted into cooperation, and like the alchemists and epicyclists before them, the proponents mistakenly believe that success is only a matter of constructing the right apparatus to perform this magnum opus. And likewise again, failures are blamed on insufficiently refined formulas, rather than on insufficiently examined premises.

"Western Tech Brands Are Recognized in China, But Their Products Are Rarely Used"...However, less than half (48%) of the respondents said they used Apple products

Wait a second, how is 48% "rare"???

I actually thought the percent of Apple users in China was lower than that, 48% is pretty amazing considering the range of more native options they have in China.

Really interesting that Facebook use is so low there (17%) though that's a lot more expected as they have hyper-advanced social networks there. But that was the lowest one, the others (Google/Amazon) had percentages that didn't seem all that rare either (and again with Amazon, 32% usage is higher than I would have thought).

I can't keep up.

Anyway the article says that Google has a mere 45% "usage rate" whatever that means.

45% of China is more than twice of 100% in the USA. How can they fail so badly?

Microsoft is touting the success of giving away a/the flagship Office Product on another OS (without a competing OS of their own)?

What's the upside for this for Microsoft, other than bragging rights, here? Word compatible text processors have been available from other vendors for years but I always thought that Office was something that Microsoft saw as a revenue stream.

Now that they're giving it away, what is Microsoft's business case?

I'd presume because the vast majority of Word and other Office documents are created on a PC (which still dominates business), where you still have to pay for MS Office. This is just helping to ensure that it stays dominant by ensuring that those documents can be accessed on mobile devices. They don't want their customers having to look elsewhere for better cross-platform solutions.

I think it's a smart move by Microsoft. I kind of doubt it would have been a big revenue generator on mobile, but if it's free, a lot of people will just install it for the convenience of being able to look at work documents on the go.

By Giving away their flagship Office Product which will only work for 30 days until you pay MS monthly fee, is hardly a bad business move.
While MS has lost the Mobile OS market. Having Android and iOS versions of Office, still really keeps them in the game.

They're not giving it away.

Word for Android is only free if you use it on a small screen device, I forget the cut-off, but it's so small you wouldn't use it for actually composing Word documents, maybe - at a pinch - making a last minute modification, but mostly you'd use it to preview or access something from your Office 365 account.

For larger screen devices, Word for Android requires an Office 365 subscription.

Also Word for Android sucks. It can't even show embedded fonts, or use fonts outside of a limited list of supported fonts. It doesn't support all the features of Desktop Word. It's literally just a stripped down "good enough" viewer for Word for when you're away from a real computer.

And for those wondering, "developers" are "programmers", and "programmers" are "that one unemployed kid we hired to fork the other coin we're copying".

Reading this it seems to imply that Facebook is not taking privacy seriously? I don't think a company with such a sterling reputation would simply pay lip service to privacy -- would they?

Why does /. keep posting articles with such obvious negative bias towards one of the most innovative companies IN THE WORLD?

You Americans - I just can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or try to forget all about you.

Long ago your "government" was hijacked by corporate criminals.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/...

Yet year after year you persist in arguing which of the two masks the same criminals wear is responsible for your troubles.

Listen: they are all in it together! This is not news. Decades ago, Gore Vidal - sent to you by God as a great prophet, and like all great prophets ignored in his own land - explained it in simple words.

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties".

Nothing important has changed since he wrote that. For anyone who cares, here is a little more detail.

"By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy...

"Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citizens’ views reasonably well. But the interest-group system as a whole does not. Overall, net interest-group alignments are not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential, business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes...

"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it".

- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
https://www.cambridge.org/core...

We have an Ticknado!

This type of work is illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention ratified by the US.

BWC was signed in 1972, and TFS says they're interested in happenings between 1950 and 1975, so most of what they're looking for wouldn't be covered by it.

Who cares about ticks being weaponized? The real question is, did they cross ebola with the common cold virus? That would be a terrible, terrible thing.

On Saturday night in New York City a power outage struck Midtown Manhattan, hitting Hell's Kitchen.

I bet Gordon Ramsay was pissed.

I bet Gordon Ramsay was pissed.

Has he ever not been pissed?

That transformer fire may have been the first problem. But what caused the widespread aspect of the blackout were overly-sensitive protection circuits that, ironically, are supposed to prevent the spread of the problem to other areas. At least, that is what ConEd said last night.

And this is correct. Blackouts are not usually caused by a lack of generation capacity in the system, but by an imbalance in how the power is moving around in the system. The problem with the control systems is that this is NOT something you can monitor and decide (in real time) how to manage, especially when the system has transmission resources which are heavily loaded start going offline. It's not usually the initial failure, but the cascading series of events caused by the flow of power overloading transmission resources around the original failure that causes the outages to spread. More and more transmission resources overload and snap offline, putting more and more customers in the dark.

The solution is expensive, but simple. You build out extra capacity in all your transmission and generating resources. You design a system where the failure of any one resource cannot lead to a cascading failure, by adding margin to everything and never operating above that margin on a regular basis. This is easy to describe, but hard to do. We expect our electric utilities to deliver power at low cost and high reliability. We complain about our electric bills, but don't bat an eye when cranking up the HVAC equipment, drying our clothes and cooking on electric stoves or taking hot showers heated by electricity. We squeeze profits out of the system by our political views and competition all the while forcing transmission companies to be more efficient, push their design margins lower until something bad happens like this.

As a rule 911 shouldn't be instructing people who aren't trained to perform CPR to do so. Most of the time it is more likely to result in injury even if done correctly and shouldn't be attempted by someone who isn't properly trained. Also, it opens the individual up to liability for that injury in many states. Of course the liability issue is worse for trained medical professionals, in many cases a doctor is both obligated to help by ethics rules AND liable for anything that goes wrong. People attempting to save someone's life or help in an emergency should be immune to liability for their efforts imho but not every state legislature agrees.

Outside of evidence in court I can't see any reason for a 911 calls to ever be made public. Most of them are pretty routine calls, and the others can be pretty significant. The live recording of someone being murdered or something of the like. Other than in court I don't see any reason this information needs to be public where some fucktard can post it to youtube for the family of the victims to come across over and over.

Note to self, add fucktard to user dictionary. You have been using it a lot.