How do you call VP9 royalty-free in the same article as the rest of this info.

There is not currently a patent pool for VP9. That doesn't mean it's in a better position than HEVC, given there could be a "freelance" patent pool for VP9 any day now.

Any standard which becomes successful attracts leeches. VP9 is no exception.

And the government created that too. And the government decided eventually that confining the internet to just academia (as the NSFNET was) didn't make sense so they closed down the NSFNET and the main links changed to be commercial instead of government paid.

This period you speak of where the ARPANET was the backbone for a network that was generally used never existed. The NSFNET started out around 1987 and you didn't see any real commercial use of the internet until the early 90s. Even CIX (ANS) came in 1991 with the help of the NSF. After Congress (including Al Gore) passed legislation pushing the NSF to repeal its restrictions on commercial use you saw significant commercial uses take off.

Today's internet is in no way an unintended consequence. It may not have been paid for by the government, but they did design and develop it and were well aware of the possibilities beyond academia.

Delphi already said the car will only self-drive portions of the trip. Long portions of the trip, but only some portions nonetheless.

"When it’s not on the highway, one of the humans inside will take the wheel."

The Chinese government officially recognizes both knock-offs and counterfeits. Counterfeits are illegal. Knock-offs, which merely look at lot like the other item but do not try to pretend to be it, are legal.

These are knock-offs and are legal. The fake Rolexes you speak of are counterfeits and are illegal even in China. Of course, the law is unevenly enforced there.

I'm not quite sure how some people delude themselves as much as you do.

The maker of this watch has too much to lose by making fakes in their factories. They would be killing the golden goose.

I'm sure there are some counterfeits which are really just "night production". But to assume this is the case in all cases and here is a failure to really put much thought into it.

Have you read the reviews of the fakes?

http://mashable.com/2015/01/08...

It's clear they don't have the same parts. It doesn't even have the same screen or knob. One of the knockoffs doesn't even have a touchscreen!

They were available weeks ago actually. Didn't slashdot already host a link to a review of one even?

I can't see why. You can get an ATMEL microcontroller at least as powerful (or more) than that one for $3 to $7 (depending on how capable you want it to be) in small quantities (qty 10). That's the SAM D21 CPUs ($3) and the SAM 3N or SAM 3S for $7.

I have to imagine the enclosure and such is more expensive than they thought.

The hardware seems pretty basic. I could make a prototype version from the CPU I just bought in a week. Yes, that includes sound triggering, opto triggering, etc.

Their AUX port seems HORRIBLY designed. They say it is powered, but you also can input signals? How? It's an RCA crown. It either can provide voltage and ground and look for a low resistance (short) across it, or it can receive voltages on it. If you really want to run active circuitry off it and receive a signal, you should use a 1/8" stereo jack and output power and ground and receive a signal in return. Then if you want to just use a short (like dry contacts) to trigger, you can ignore the power output, but if you want active circuitry you can do that too. Using the ADC to trigger is weird, even the $3 chip above has an analog comparator that interrupts you when a signal rises or falls and it can reference to things other than the 1.1V bandgap.

I just get the feeling they weren't nearly as good as they thought as what they are doing.

Why does anyone find it surprising?

If you register for a developer program you'll be able to (for a fee) compile and develop apps and sign them for your device. If you want others to be able to run them you'll submit them to MS' store and they'll approve them or not.

And yes, just like for iOS you'll be able to do development and testing on the device.

It's been done before by Apple and by MS (for Windows and Windows Phone). I'm not sure what is the shock that it's going to happen again.

They're going to be Windows apps and they'll likely run in the Xbox dashboard, not "beside it" like the disc-base games do. Snap-ins, etc.

iBeacon helps your phone find itself and thus you. It doesn't let others map your phone.

A merchant could make a system which finds you using iBeacon by self reporting. That is your phone finds itself and then an app on your phone tells the merchant. So if you want to find yourself, you can using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't. If you want the retailer to know where you are, you run their app which reports your location using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't.

The other kinds of systems which track your WiFi signal around the store, where you are tracked without opting in, those are more likely to create privacy issues. Target already uses these kinds of systems.

And it's not like NBC killed the show. They just changed hosts.

I don't see how that amounts to Comcast wrecking NBC's ability to do real news.

"when it was revealed that the NSA had actually, and pretty amazingly, undermined hardware random number generators on widely available chips"

Such a thing was never revealed.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

"I have no idea if the NSA convinced Intel to do this with the hardware random number generator it embedded into its CPU chips, but I do know that it could." (could meaning it is conceivable here, he doesn't investigate anything about feasibility)

No one ever showed that the NSA did this. No one even tried.

It's really frustrating to see speculation reported as truth from a person who seems very careful to try to be sensible and not just ring alarm bells to get notice.

There's no Macintosh 100.

There were two Mac Portables before the MacBook 100/140/170 came out.

Indeed both were enormous, each even had a lead-acid battery! The first one didn't even have a backlight.

The Sony-designed MacBook 100 was actually designed to just be a smaller version of the original Macintosh Portables, which is why it also was based upon the much slower 68000 processor (the 140/170 used 68030 processors).

The Powerbook 100 was well designed and small, but it wasn't really a big seller. The PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170 took most of the sales. The later Powerbooks (145b, 160, 180, etc.) were all nearly identical to the 140/170 and not Sony's 100. This seemed to show that Apple didn't really take all that much from Sony's PowerBook 100.

Under a claimed threat of extradition to the US.

There's no actual evidence of it and in fact extradition from Sweden is harder than from the UK.

Let's not forget that Assange is where he is by choice. He says he fears extradition to the US, but there's a lot of other possibilities too. He may just simply fear conviction.