AFAIK iOS has a per App option to allow the App to access location always, never, or if the App is running. In the latter case quitting the App saves battery power if it is the only App using location because the phone no longer tries to determine it's location. Now, I could be wrong and this could be new information, maybe the phone always knows it's location and it is only passed to the App if the correct setting is selected. My own experience though is that setting Apps to only use location if running and quitting those apps does save power.

" the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars."

An interesting unit of measurement for an equivalent to tons of methane. Is that emissions per year, month, weeks or day? I'm guessing year but that's a guess because I can't be bothered to work it out.

The only thing that stopped this sort of thing being scary was the tether! All the time that the guy was pushing around with the hockey stick I kept thinking "just don't piss it off!!".

What we need is a wall, a big wall, with a big door. We'll keep the people on one side and the robots on the other. Only the people will be able to go through the door, and the robots that aren't scary and enter legally.

Typo "Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of spending money."

should be...

"Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of making money."

It seems to me that if you but a voice activated TV then you would expect it to listen to what you say. The issue here is where and how the translation of voice into command is done. I suspect the TV is too dumb to do accurate voice recognition on it's own so a sound bite is sent to a server somewhere. The server does the conversion and then either sends the command back to the TV or communicates with another server to stream the requested content. There has to be a certain amount of anonymity because the source of the sound bite isn't (I hope) tagged with the name and address of the source but some numerical identifier. I also suspect/hope that the sound is translated by machine and once that is done it is immediately discarded, also I would also think that anything that doesn't fall into the limited vocabulary that the server understands is immediately discarded and a "huh what was that?" returned to the user. Any other method of doing it makes no sense because Samsung expect to sell millions of the things. Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of spending money.

I suspect that someone at Samsung got a lawyer involved who said you have to disclose that the thing records sound and sends it to a third party. In the perfect storm where the sound is kept, and a human has access to it, and the same human can figure out who the speaker is, and the human cares, then it's an issue.

A lawyer would write "knives are sharp and can cause personal injury even death" but that doesn't mean I'm going to clear them out of the kitchen.

I forgot to add that with four people living in the house we would have to pay the $20 international plan fee per cellphone, so $80 per month. Much more convenient for whoever wants to make an international call to pick up the landline.

Yep, these are exactly the reasons why we have a landline. There is this concept of "a family" and it is useful to have a phone number that represents the family unit rather than the individual.

One reason you missed out was that international calls to/from a cellphone often cost quite a bit more than the same call made from a landline. I have family in the UK and live in the USA. To call them from my cellphone I would have to have an international calling plan at $20 per month. The landline calls are billed per minute and typically I make less than $20 worth of calls to the UK in a month.

I wonder if it was spelt wrong? It made perfect sense to me, grate as in "make an unpleasant sound".

It is a secret where I work and I'm not doing anything as spooky as the FBI or DHS. There are a good many reasons that a company don't want an employee directory publishing:

1) For people with unusual names someone can figure out where you live and target you at home where security is weaker.

2) Phishing using info from the directory to seem legit. "Hi Joe, this is Tom from shipping. Fred from accounting asked me to call you..."

3) Hacking attempts, people's usernames may well be the username part of the email address.

etc..

I don't know which is worse, that outfits like the DHS and FBI have such lousy cyber security that this can happen or that someone thinks that publishing this stuff is helping their cause.

I was tempted to agree with you because I am a very attentive driver and have managed to survive by keeping an eye on everything that's happening and anticipating events but... you knew there was going to be a but... In thirty years of driving I have been in two accidents, both times my car was completely stationary. In the first one I was in stopped traffic when someone four or five cars back hit the queue of stopped cars at 60 mph. The front and back of my car were smashed but I was OK inside but things got progressively worse as you worked backwards towards the rear of the line. In the second occasion I stopped at a traffic light and the car behind me didn't, I had been stopped for a while when I was hit so it wasn't as though I braked hard or something. The other driver claimed to have not seen me, despite being in a bright red car stopped at a red traffic light in broad daylight. There were cars crossing the junction in front of me a stopped car to my left and right so nowhere to go.

Then again, you did write "it's very, very rare that an accident 100% absolutely can't be avoided", maybe twice in thirty years of driving almost every day counts as very, very rare.

When I was a little kid I wrote "When I grow up I want to be a scientist and work in a lavatory". I did grow up to be a scientist but, fortunately, I work in a laboratory.

No

damned spell corrector (messer upper) fun should be fuss...

I went through one of these in August. I didn't want to and the TSA staff there gave me no option. I could have kicked up a fun but I'd stood in line for twenty minutes to get to the front and everyone behind me was well and truly pissed enough. Not to mention that my son was with me and having dad lead off in irons wasn't an image I wanted to leave behind. Also, I was on the way home after my own father's funeral.

For thirty years I was a frequent traveller, my family lives in the UK and I live in the USA. I am also a US government contractor so I flew to Europe and Asia yearly on business. Since the mid 2000's I've almost stopped flying at all. Sad really since I missed the last years of dad's life. Stupidly, despite my ticket being paid for by the US government and travelling on government business I was often selected for "extra screening", before anyone thinks "profiling" I am a white and of European descent. The whole thing just pissed me off. So don't say "didn't care enough to opt out" more like blackmailed and shamed into it.