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Comment Re:15 years in the embassy (Score 2) 262

No, he's not. Otherwise he wouldn't be in the UK in the first place, because the UK, too, has an extradition treaty with the US. He didn't enter the embassy until June 2012. That's well over a year AFTER he had leaked documents and pissed off the US government. If he had been worried about extradition, he'd never have gone to the UK in the first place, and certainly wouldn't have handed himself over to the British police.

Comment Too little, too late (Score 1, Insightful) 193

I should have been a no-brainer for Microsoft to sell an XBOX One to. I bought the original XBOX shortly after it came out; I followed up with an XBOX 360 purchase as well. I'd never purchased any other console brand, and had been a faithful XBOX user from day one. But Microsoft XBoned its launch with a bunch of boneheaded, anti-customer moves like over-the-top DRM, always-required internet access and a refusal to provide backwards-compatibility, requiring extra shelf space and an extra input on my TV just to keep my existing games.

Sure, they have backpedaled on all of this by now, but it's far too little, too late. I haven't forgotten how Microsoft made clear to me that they saw me with disdain, and they've lost me for good. This promise of backwards-compatibility comes only out of desperation because they're being outsold more than two to one by Sony. There is zero chance I will ever consider an XBone, and the chances of me even considering their next next-gen console are slim to none unless Sony does something even more boneheaded.

They've lost the battle *and* the war, and yet now they've decided to actually put up a fight once it's already too late. It's laughable, really...

Comment Yes, but for how many minutes (Score 3, Insightful) 204

Arguably a far, FAR more important metric than performance for the majority of users, given that tablets are used mostly for media consumption, is battery life. I have a feeling that the Surface Pro 3 will trail the field badly here. (I don't know what the iPad series can manage these days, but a good Android tablet can manage close to 20 hours of screen-on time at a brightness of 170cd/m2.

Comment Re:I still want one (Score 4, Informative) 172

If it extends the battery life by only 10%, it is almost certainly *not* worth it. Priced at $2.50, it's appearance suggests a relatively flimsy product that's unlikely to last very long before you break it. Looking at the most popular AA batteries on Amazon, price per cell is just 24 cents.

That means a 10% increase in battery life is saving you 2.4 cents per cell, so you'd have to run 104+ cells through each Batterizer you need to buy before you first break even. (And most products, in my experience, use at least two cells, suggesting that you'll need multiple Batterizers and will have to run multiple hundreds of cells through them before you break even.)

Add in the fact that despite Batterizer's claims, the deeper you drain a battery, by far the more likely it is to leak, coupled with the fact that the kinds of things that are likely to leave any significant power in the cells in my experience tend to be those which drain power very slowly, and the chances of you saving any money with Batterizer are zip. This is a product for morons who lack the ability to think critically: No more, no less.

Comment Re:Debunking the debunker (Score 4, Informative) 172

I've routinely tested my batteries for years, and only a handful of kids toys died at 1.3 to 1.35V, but they were in the extreme minority. And the summary is wrong, anyway -- Batterizer didn't claim 1.3 volts, they claimed 1.35 to 1.4 volts, which is utter nonsense. I've never seen a single product I own that died at 1.4 volts. (And the Batterizer PR folks didn't say "some" products, they said "most" or even all, which is a bald-faced lie.)

Comment Re:For me, the uninformed (Score 1) 160

Except I'm not American. I am British by descent, and have lived and worked on three continents. But your point is irrelevant anyway: The term is commonly used outside the USA as well. For example:

UK:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gamin...
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news...
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/...

CA:
http://circanews.com/news/cord...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/n...
http://www.chathamdailynews.ca...
http://www.canadiancordcutting...
http://shayne.tablotvweb.nomad...

AU:
http://www.computerworld.com.a...
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/co...
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/...

Just because you're ignorant of its usage, that doesn't mean the term isn't broadly used around the world in countries with large English-speaking populations.

Comment Re:NO! (Score 1) 88

Tell you what, if Slashdot gets any more videocentric, I'll just take my clicks elsewhere. I'm certainly not forced to watch anything, and indeed I don't watch Slashdot's videos. The transcript beneath, rather bizarrely hidden to try and get me to watch the video instead, told me I wasn't missing anything in all of about five seconds. ;-)

Comment Re:Reasons to be skeptical (Score 1) 235

sideslash: 3. Obviously the demo uses phrases that work. I guarantee you an ordinary person will often get "Sorry, I didn't understand the question" or whatever SoundHound's equivalent is.

Got it in one. That should also have been obvious to the idiot "reviewer" when...

"We tried pinging Google Now with the same query and were directed to a list of Google search results, which showed a bunch of entries for Hound."

Ever stop to consider why you might get a bunch of entries for Hound when you search for the expression using Google Now, Paul Lilly of Hothardware? I can tell you why. Because you're using stock expressions provided by the PR guy for Soundhound. Try making up similarly complex phrases of your own that DON'T follow the the precise structure provided by the PR guy, and I guarantee the results will suddenly look much, much less impressive.

I mourn for the days of real journalism using critical thinking, rather than hyped up press release copy.

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