One of the biggest draws of satellite/cable TV is the multitude of sports related channels available. If you "cut the cord" without first checking what you'd be missing, I guess your momma never told you to "look before you leap".
This is pretty much non-news. I hear there are places where you can go to watch sports. They even have snacks and refreshments available, too!
As others have stated, this is exactly how Apple's iCloud lock works. If the owner of the device remotely locks it or it is factory reset through iTunes, it will be useless except for displaying a screen prompting for the owner's Apple ID and password. So far, all it has really accomplished is giving some extra headache to businesses that accept phone trade-ins and slightly lowering the value of lost/stolen iDevices on eBay. We also already have a national IMEI blacklist, which mostly seems to have succeeded only in increasing the number of scam artists re-selling unusable phones to gullible people (in most cases, they're generally not stolen - the sleazy cell phone companies here in the US are happy to block a phone's serial number if the phone was associated with a service contract or handset financing plan and the previous owner defaulted on it).
Besides, what's to stop a thief from taking a page out of the trade-in services' books and simply demanding you turn off/sign out of your phone's remote kill switch feature? If they're threatening someone at gun/knife point, it's not exactly like the victim would have much choice in the matter.
If people are being robbed, your city has a crime problem that needs to be solved with good, old fashioned police work.
Seems like every day or so, Slashdot has to remind me how I severely underestimating the stupidity of people when I first found out about Bitcoin. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, who would actually be stupid enough to pay real money for digital coins?", I thought to myself.
Of course, a metric fuckton of people listen to Justin Bieber, too, so I should've realized a lot of people would fall for this moronic ponzi scam. I'm not sure of Bieber's popularity when Bitcoin was announced, so perhaps that's why it didn't dawn on me at the time.
But anyway, I'm not making the same mistake twice. I bet the Slashdot beta will be a fucking smash. No, not with the current crowd crowd of users, but with the Bitcoin loving, Justin Bieber listening crowd. Dice will make bank, I'm sure of it. Now, if only there was a way to cash in on this knowledge...
Oh, how I long for the days when the poll would be something Monty Python-esque or just completely absurd, like:
What's the best condiment?
Mayo
Mustard
Ketchup
Vinegar
Hot Sauce
Worcestershire Sauce
Cowboyneal's Secret Sauce
Once the most popular chat and dating site for gays and lesbians, gay.com launched a bad redesign to their site and their subscriber count never recovered. The redesign broke compatibility with all of the third party chat clients and the redesigned on-site chat was so unreliable when it launched that it sent most of their users running to competing chat/dating services. By the time most of the bugs were fixed, it was already too late - a fundamental paradigm shift had taken place, their users had switched to smartphone apps and no longer had much interest in sitting at home in front of a computer.
Had they brought the full functionality of their popular dating site to mobile devices, history may have played out differently. Instead, they launched a horribly broken desktop site and sealed their fate. Dice could learn a lot from this failure.
Slashdot has changed hands how many times over the years? This was bound to happen sooner or later. MySpace fell from grace in the eyes of their users and if that's the fate Dice has for Slashdot, so be it. One of the great things about the Internet has always been that a popular site's incompetence can easily be an up-and-coming site's opportunity. We don't search the web with Altavista and download music with Napster and the world isn't worse off for it. Slashdot has had a good run and if management doesn't want to listen, maybe it's just time to pass the torch...
What's worse is we push profitable drugs. I put myself on phenotropil (a high dose--people recognize the stimulant effect at 100mg, but reading ADHD
The "push" for any ADHD drugs comes from the medical community's belief that they may provide the opportunity for ADHD patients to lead a better life. The reality though, is that it's easier to push pills than accept the fact that someone with ADHD will learn differently, socialize differently and may not have the same range of employment opportunities as the majority of people in the first world. Of course, no one wants to hear something along the lines of "You're not cut out for college and should just take up a trade.", so the pills start a'popping.
Interestingly, some long term studies have shown that ADHD meds aren't exactly Felix Felicis. It seems your likelihood of being successful with ADHD is roughly the same, regardless of whether or not you take medication. Link
You might want to give some thought to what's wrong with a society that expects you to overclock your brain to keep up with it. Not everyone lives this way.
Since Google still seems to believe Glass has potential to be the "next big thing" and it's entirely voice controlled, it makes sense that they'd want a voice assistant that can respond more intelligently than "I don't have a clue what you're talking about, should I search the web?" Maybe this company's AI would be adaptable to something along those lines?
Personally, I'm not a big fan of talking to machines. Yeah, it looks awesome in sci-fi, but in real life it just makes you look like a hipster douchebag when you're out in public talking to the little robotic voice inside your mobile device.
Anyone think it's more than a little coincidental that Snowden seeks asylum in Russia and then some Russian hackers stole all that credit card data from Target? Knowledge of backdoors and security vulnerabilities is pretty much the NSA's mission statement. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if he sold some information - the guy's gotta eat.
First the Death Clock is stolen from Futurama (Metalocalypse). Now Bachelor Chow? Why did they cancel the show if everyone is getting so much influence from it?
If you believe the billboards in the show, Bachelor Chow was improved at some point with flavor. This is more like the stuff in The Matrix.
Okay, in reality, there's probably some old obscure sci-fi book that came up with this idea waaaaaay before it was ever in a movie or TV show.
Sure, the major labels may love all the money they're getting, but they've squeezed all the profit out of the streaming companies. Free/cheap streaming music may not be long for this world once the venture capital runs out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/business/media/a-stream-of-music-not-revenue.html
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible.
While bi-directional time travel to any point in history is likely impossible, there are more than a few organisms that can put themselves into stasis to essentially travel into the future. When we finally figure out how to do it with humans, time travel into the future will be quite possible - albeit a one way trip.
Apple basically threw away everything that made iOS look approachable and polished.
Second, you have the issue of "half a conversation" messing with your brain. Hearing another conversation isn't so bad, hearing only HALF the conversation (the guy on the phone) and your brain tries to piece together w t h they're talking about or what the person on the other-end-of-the-phone is saying. It's an automatic thing, so it adds to the annoyance.
It didn't seem to bother the millions who used Twitter prior to the addition of a "View conversation" feature.
Face it, being bothered by someone using a cell phone in public is pretty much just a sign that you're from an older generation. Just like how the older folks in the 60s felt that rock music was "evil". Yes, I'm old enough to remember when people sat down to dinner without constantly being distracted by Facebook/Twitter/texting. Younger millennials, however, grew up with this technology and don't feel like they're being rude because their peers are doing exactly the same thing.
Personally, the only times I've ever been genuinely annoyed with cell phone users were inconsiderate jerks who used Nextel PTT. Between the shrill chirping and the distorted loudspeaker, it seemed like those phones were intentionally designed to annoy everyone around you, so they'd have no doubt you were using Nextel. Of course, Sprint ran Nextel into the ground and the problem has since taken care of itself.
If they need a way to dispose of them after their unfortunate turbine encounter, I suggest to serve them up fried.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn
