What's worse than the apps on an Apple watch?

A 2 hour podcast about the Apple watch.

Keep in mind that you're looking at people who spent hours upon hours writing blog posts speculating about the leather and alloys Apple would be using in their watch bands.

A 2 hour podcast about an actual shipping device seems comparatively reasonable.

This is a real issue as a notable percentage of long-term homeless tends to include individuals with mental illness, and in particular may be rationally or irrationally paranoid (from both previous experiences with government officials& law enforcement, and from the illness itself).

So identity card programs can be a tough sell, even ones meant purely to benefit the homeless themselves.

The reality of such a program unfortunately fits all too well into paranoid delusions that some homeless with mental illness suffer from.

Fine-grain, i.e. high precision, such as an actual raw GPS or Assisted-GPS reading for location, is not necessary for fraud detection to be effective, and is generally counter productive.

Geo-location associated with transactions is one of the simplest, most effective fraud detection methods, AFAIK, used in traditional (Point-of-Sales, credit cards, smart card and pin - aka card-and-pin) and online transactions done by financial companies.

For example: The Settle soccer mom who suddenly spends a few thousands dollars on jewellery in Nigera, without having a family member buying any airline tickets, generally sets off a red-flag that is verified or investigated.

I believe all online payment systems do some sort of geo-location based correlation, for fraud detection / reduction. It was common practice in 2000, I think I first experienced it in late 1990s, maybe 1998.

Yeah the MS junk won't be installed into CM just yet - but wait until that "Deep integration" Kirt McMaster keeps talking up starts happening - you're going to see architectural changes happen in CM designed solely to be beneficial to Microsoft.

Well... I'm less certain of that.

CM/Cyngn has to walk a fine line between making investors/partners happy and not pissing off the CM community. They don't make money from the community, but the community is a huge QA base and they'll have a lot of trouble developing and supporting Cyanogen OS without it.

If they ram through MS-specific stuff (versus just expanding the capabilities of the OS for everyone), a huge chunk of the community is going to bail on them.

I don't think they're quite stupid enough to do this. But I did say "Yet", because ... well, aside from their inability to muzzle their CEO, publicly fucking over a loyal customer with an international reach in favour of a regional exclusive was easily one of the most boneheaded things I've seen in a while. Short of changing the default boot animation to an android waving its dick around, I can't imagine a much more effective way to scare off potential Cyanogen OS customers...

So far that seems to be the major target market. As long as the carriers are heavily involved in choosing and customizing phone for consumers as they are in the US and Canada, I doubt you'll see a CM-based phone get much traction over here.

It maybe sucks for those who buy a phone with CM pre-installed, but they've already announced that there's no plan to install any MS junk into CyanogenMod, and it's highly unlikely that the community would stand for it if they tried.

So, not something to worry about terribly much. Yet.

That's probably because somewhere in the google complex, there are some crusty old bureaucrats that just cant let go of the notion that "Proprietary == Profit!", and that "Control" takes many forms other than just "Stop all competition at all costs!"

I think it's just as, if not more, likely that within the Google complex the general mindset is that any Google service in Android (or more generally, on the web) is going to so much better than any competing service that nobody in their right mind would care about that competing service.

Which isn't an entirely unreasonable opinion/bias if you think of it from their perspective. There's obvious counter-examples like Google+, but in the case of the core services like search, maps, their app store, etc, it's... well, I don't think it's the slam-dunk Google might think it is, but there's at least a rational basis for having that bias.

To some degree, that's where this EU action leaves a sour taste... there might be a basis for some action (scraping competitors websites for data to use in a shopping service *does* sound pretty dodgy), but the overall tone of it seems like the EU attempting to punish Google for sincerely believing that their own products are best of breed in their respective spaces.

Since the very reason given since the discussions began 15 or so years ago, Nvidia, and most of its competitors (Intel being a special exception for an unrelated reason) have always said that due to fears and concerns about reverse engineering, they - Nvidia and ATI, now AMD, have been slow and limited in making available any documentation or assistance that could directly or indirectly ease reverse engineering of its technology, its intellectual property (IP); not to Open Source / Free Software developers, but to potential and current 3D video card competitors.

Providing the direct firmware blobs, even if encrypted (to be decrypted in memory on the video card) does reduce the effort of a reverse engineering attempt. Perhaps legal or senior management has overruled the previous plan to make encrypted firmware blobs. I believe there was one or more blogs entries written about methodologies of bypassing the decryption of encrypted firmware blobs even when/if the decryption key(s) are secure stored in the Nvidia GPU, or at least recovering the decryption key which undoes a lot of work by Nvidia, and may cause violate terms of various patent / IP licensing agreements.

Nvidia could possibly go out of business if they were barred from obtaining necessary licenses allowing them to implement video codecs in hardware in their future products.

I suspect this, or some benign reason (Nvidia's Linux developer were simply busy with in-house development, or on holiday) is the culprit.

* Unrelated pure speculation:

My pet theory about why Intel has been so open with their open source driver support for Linux, is that it is intended to be a) to support their APU processors and b) to try to help AMD in its secondary market (video GPUs) rather than their primary market (x86 compatible processors) which Intel knowns AMD needs to keep being a viable option, as AMD's x86 processors alone the past few years could of easily drove it out of business.

To avoid more anti-trust violations / investigations Intel needs at least one viable x86 competitor to remain alive. Preferably neither too far ahead nor behind, so that Intel continues to dominate the CPU manufacturing sector, it has at least something that is realistically a potential threat to their business. Just not a strong potential threat. But by possibly supporting AMD's secondary product line by providing an open book to their GPU's documentation and interface via their driver source code, Intel can provide a subtle nod to technologies, or other solutions that AMD could re-implement to improve their (AMD's) video card offerings.

In summary Intel can stand to help AMD in their video cards to keep AMD alive, which serves a critical purpose to Intel, as Intel needs someone that can be seen as potentially a rival CPU manufacturer.

Regarding Intel's domination of microprocessors:

While ARM processors have shipped in record numbers the past few years, they are manufactured by various companies who pay ARM a royalty (per unit made AFAIK), so Intel remains the single largest designer and manufacturer of CPUs. Although ARM Inc. has experienced explosive growth and tremendous profitability, it is still a tiny company in relative terms, such as market capitalization (a common benchmark) compared to Intel.

Someone needs to come out with a diagram of how, what, and who gets paid in the music business.

Risky. On one hand, you might just end up with a diagram telling you where the buck stops. On the other hand, you might end up summoning the Elder Gods.

... something like this:

int is_troll( const char* username ) {
      if( !whitelisted(username) ) {
            return 1;
      }
}

What I've seen is that american brands have had trouble penetrating that market because preference goes to the incumbent local company.

There's a certain amount of truth there. But there are also counter-examples. Walmart, in particular, destroyed quite a bit of the competition (Woolco, K-Mart, Zellers, etc).

And then there's cross-border shopping...

Target is struggling to gain acceptance

Well, not anymore. The best I can determine is that Target's approach to the Canadian market was to push brand recognition, but their supply chain, pricing, and how they ran their stores was jarringly different from how they ran them in the US, and enough Canadians knew the difference that once the word got out, the impression was they were trying to milk Canadians without bringing anything new to the table.

Canadian Tire is still the go-to

Canadian Tire hits a real sweet spot in terms of locations, pricing and selection. I can't really think of any other competition which covers quite the same ground.

even major e-tailers like Newegg have trouble over the other Canadian e-tailers

True. I think ncix.com was solidly established well before Newegg opened a Canadian store.

The problem for these companies is that their .ca sites routinely offer less to Canadians at usually substantially higher prices than their .com's, and while there may be legit business reasons, nobody likes being treated as a second-class citizen. So there's always a bit of resentment.

Hell, Sears seems to have won mindshare by having a little maple leaf in their Canadian logo.

I think Sears won mindshare in Canada from catalog sales. There are Sears mail-order outlets in every stinking little town across the country, and Canada has a lot of stinking little towns; up until maybe 10-15 years ago when e-commerce took off they were the household name for remote purchasing. But they're no longer the only game in town, and their supply chain is still stuck in the 90's; I can buy Craftsman parts directly from China faster and more reliably than I can get them from the local Sears parts store. I'd be very surprised to see them last another five years.

I shopped more at Best Buy than FutureShop because Best Buy sales reps were not on commission while FutureShop sales reps were (and, as a result, tended to be very pushy).

It might be a local thing, but I've found that the Future Shop employees generally leave... sorry, left me alone unless I hunted one down and asked questions. The few times I bothered with Best Buy I either couldn't find an employee willing to answer questions or couldn't find the product I needed.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was requirement like that... maybe 5 years on the outside. But 14 years?!? That's eons by corporate standards.

I'd say they were a mob front ... except they're owned by Bell Canada these days.

s/except/because/ strikes me as more accurate.