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Comment Re:nice, now for the real fight (Score 5, Insightful) 631

In an ideal world, the free market would step in and protect consumers in place of the government having to do so. The Republicans are right on that point (IMHO), but what they re missing, and this is big: broadband is NOT a free market! Municipal governments grant monopoly access to cable and phone companies who double as ISPs. 85% of the country has access to two or fewer choices, and that's at 4Mbps. Faster speeds offer even more pathetic "choice." For a party that decries government monopolies in other sectors, they don't seem to understand that monopolies of ALL kinds are dangerous in their own ways.

Comment Re:Oh bullshit! (Score 3, Insightful) 320

UPS recently paid $40 million dollars because they shipped fake drugs. Like they were supposed to open all the packages and verify the contents? FedEx is currently facing fines for up to $1.6 Billion for the same. This may be totally unrelated, but at the very least, they are likely not in the mood to go poking the government in the eye over a niche product.

Comment Re:Utah (Score 1) 81

Original statement: "Most towns in Utah ... [use addresses as a] ... position in yards relative to the nearest Mormon temple."
One county follows a system of naming streets relative to one temple. Not the nearest, and not most cities. Your own link betrays your lack of reading comprehension. At the time it was founded, it probably made sense for the people to number their streets off the most culturally significant feature of town. Every city in Utah outside Salt Lake County names their streets relative to their own Main Street (which rarely features a temple) which can run East-West or North-South, and Center Street (which, obviously, rune in the other direction).

Comment Re:Start of th End (Score 1) 196

Remember when Firefox was born as the stripped-down next-generation of the Mozilla Suite? When it was all about getting the code base to the bare minimum and letting the user decide which functions and features they wanted, and let them have those via extensions?
Yeah, me neither. Must have been a dream.

Comment Re:But surely... (Score 3, Interesting) 309

I agree that the summary of this summary (and other stories about this today) make it sound like that, but the more I think of it, that premise seems suspect. Basically, it would be almost constantly streaming audio back to HQ. Now multiply that by 10s (100s?) of thousands of sets across the world, and getting any usable data to improve voice recognition, or parsing which words are intended to be voice control vs. just random talk would take far more computing power and bandwidth than it's worth.
It seems more plausible to interpret the statement to say that while you are issuing voice commands, either via a keyword that can be recognized locally or by pressing a button, THEN any statements that may be unrelated to the functions of the set may be inadvertently picked up and sent to Samsung's (or partners') servers.
Still, even with a favorable interpretation, it seems like an unnecessary, risky, costly "feature" that has only a marginal benefit to customers. Are we so lazy that even pressing a series of buttons takes too much effort? As an accessibility feature, fine, it makes some sense, but it should be turned off by default.

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