Seems to me that "outing users", in the form of leaking their personal info without consent, is what got Lenovo in trouble in the first place.

Well, heck. Now that we've mastered that pesky matter of grafting severed spinal cords, surely the optic nerve and other lesser bundles should be a piece of cake. So why not just do a brain transplant?

Anubis? Is that you?

Sounds a bit reminiscent of the Eschaton...

That can't possibly be accurate. Here's a paper reporting that total consumption of fully-refined silicon for chip manufacture in 1988 was 750 metric tons. I don't think increasing process efficiencies would have reduced that figure by four orders of magnitude since then...

The cost of the raw materials is completely dwarfed by the cost of processing. Even a very large chip (2 cm x 2cm by .5mm thick) masses less than a gram. It's also likely that these high-performance III-V chips will be built on a cheaper substrate, meaning the thickness of the expensive stuff will be much, much smaller.

Come on, Dice. It's the first sentence of the summary.

I was sort of expecting a post addressing today's, erm, "issue".

Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device. So, these devices digitize your voice (OMG recording!), ship it off to a server farm for interpretation, and receive the results. Because voice recognition is still a challenge, it's usually farmed out to one of a few firms (Nuance comes to mind) that do this as a third-party service. These firms can "retain" that information in the sense that it trains their voice-recognition algorithms, but they probably aren't building a huge dossier of your private conversations.

I'd certainly like to know if Samsung retains the voice information it collects. I'd even more urgently like to know if they sell it to other "third parties" besides whoever's doing the voice recognition. The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed, but Samsung definitely has to get out in front of it. If they can't -- if they can't provide a simple, clear explanation of what they are and aren't doing -- it's going to cost them.

What, you don't like exclamation points?!!!!!! What did you expect from Medium.com?!!!!!!!!

Okay, actually, 100 microns (0.1mm) is a reasonable diameter for a human hair. So, kudos for the phrasing!

It was bad enough when the VoIP startup I worked for tried to make us use our own softswitch for phone calls in the office...

...or under the keister of anyone who doesn't double-check the correct spelling of a word, even though the existing spell-checker flags the correct spelling as wrong as well.

Guess it wasn't German-derived.

If only one of these languages would let me write a spell-checker that puts a red underline beneath words that are misspelled, and a 5KV pulse under the kiester of any "editor" who passes the wrong homophone...

It's property and lives, and, yes, facing risks on our behalf is pretty much what we ask firefighters to do every single day.

That's not to say, of course, that we should make them guinea pigs for inadequately tested compounds, or stooges for suppliers trying to cut corners on cost and safety.

If that were driving a large part of the change, it should only take a moment's work with the raw statistics to tease it out. I'd say "since they don't say that, it's probably not what's happening" -- but that would be making some possibly-unjustified assumptions about the motives of those publishing these results.