Just being a standard doesn't stop obsoletion. Wireless shows you that. Within days of actually being ratified as a standard, the next wireless standard is in the works and people start pushing our pre-N or pre-AC products.

Yet you can still configure an -AC AP to allow -b devices to connect to it. B-only devices were last made in, what, 2001? It's limiting, and sometimes not the default, but real standards usually try to incorporate backwards-compatibility if they can.

Can you imagine the uproar if older HDTV tuners suddenly stopped working with new broadcasts?

Odds are some "smart" TV's are losing YouTube, or will with the next change. By the end of their 20-year life-expectancy, most of those things will only be able to play HDTV and HDMI. The ones that aren't bricked by malicious malware by then, anyway.

There might even be some that lose functions before the warranty runs out - is the manufacturer liable for firmware updates to maintain functionality?

Google's clearly going to externalize all the costs of reacquisition and recycling - it's not established what obligations, if any, they have when they offer a product and refuse to support it for a "reasonable" time. I'm just surprised with that with a Google of money, it's not worth it to them to hire a guy to keep the old API working, so that those eyeballs don't migrate to other services. If Youtube fails and Hulu keeps working, it would be an error to assume that people will just go buy a new TV to keep up with YouTube - they will substitute other services in most cases.

There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of.

Seriously? A good chunk of the existing phone base can't even do 4G - prepaid is still largely 3G-only phones, which are still sold new today. It would be very rare to have 4G-only coverage areas in a town.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.

The article states that the earlier figure was incorrect; the Baltimore police actually used it 4,300 times, not 25,000 times.

It's still a big enough number that they must have full-time staff dedicated to these illegal searches. No wonder B'more has so many problems with dropped calls.

Wannabe central planners think they have all the answers.

Here's a crazy idea - stop artificial price fixing of water and let the stupid uses become unprofitable through millions of decisions by people who know about their own business.

"Oh, no," they say, "we know better. Even though they created this mess with that attitude.

Remember, Slate's entire business model is to find fault where there is none and assign blame. Keep this in mind when you read their next inflammatory article and you'll see the pattern.

Open is nice, but the Cyanogen people need to pay the bills.

There's no point to CM if it's not secure. If they're installing Microsoft blobs by default, it's not secure. We know Microsoft openly cooperates with the NSA on eavesdropping technology - I even wonder if this is a subtle warrant canary.

Assuming the least-bad possbility, then if they want to offer an easy-to-use tool to install a tested Microsoft bundle from the CM servers, then fantastic - for people who want to make that trade-off.

fuel needed for the landing is inefficient compared to a splashdown parachute recovery

The barge/ocean is just a temporary measure. The vision is twenty rockets launching a day and returning to the launch site to prep for the next launch.

There were about 120 rocket launches last year. SpaceX's mission statement is to reduce the cost of launches by 100x, and utilization rates go up as costs fall, so it's not just 100x more launches - twenty a day is probably very conservative if they hit their price targets.

Queue the folks who can't imagine what anybody would do with more than 640 launches a year.

But it appeared they could come down slowly. Pretty close to hover.

Yeah, I think that's the inevitable end-game - there is plenty of time to make small adjustments right up until the point of contact with the solid parts of the planet. AIUI, they're so close to empty on the fuel tank after the burnback that they're trying to get it down on the pad ASAP. They can only attempt these landings for now on launches that don't require as much fuel as others - supposedly the next iteration can hold more fuel.

I would be kind of surprised if it was generally noticable

Amazon reviews are quite positive.

Assange is just a SWATing early adopter.

Disinfo is the oldest game in the book. Assange is stuck in a hole in London due to the oldest. :sigh:

It could be a good opportunity to repair relations with an ally.

Yep - let's hope he's a smart enough opportunist to leverage the situation. Remember, the USG thought the Bolivia scenario was plausible enough to take extreme illegal action. So that confirms a willingness.

By the way, has Bolivia asked for (and gotten) an apology from any of those countries?

According to reports, yes.

Assurances they'll never do such a thing again? Hardly. Violate the treaty and send the Ambassador to apologize.

Assange is an ass, and he may have lied, but the stuff that was done to divert the Bolivian presidents plane was flat out illegal according to diplomatic rules.

Assange was at the controls of the F22 that had a RADAR lock on the President's plane.

Created danger. Doncha know. All his fault.

To admit that the leaders of Turkey of the past, were involved might call into question the legitimacy of Turkey today

The past leaders of many countries have been involved in genocides. Heck, current US Law is that racial interment is legal and the wars against the previous nations here are thoroughly documented.

But say that and most Americans will say, "what assholes" (or conversely "Happy Columbus Day!") but the scimitars will remain sheathed. I seems like an awful case of fragile identity. Weird jingoistic nonsense.

Then again, most Americans don't even care that the legitimacy of the governments are called into question every time they violate their operating agreements.