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Comment Re:Canada doesn't have the same luxury (Score 1) 63

The GP is not talking about LTE, they're talking about "voice over LTE" (VoLTE). The Bell compatibility checker they linked to seems like a fairly comprehensive list of phones that support it. Very old phones, like the iPhone 4 or original Pixel don't support it because the standard didn't exist when they were manufactured.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 63

This article almost sounds like an ad to get people to buy things to keep the economy rolling rather than a serious discussion.

You've answered your question. "Productivity" in this case is GDP / capita. If an American buys something with American parts from an American retailer then they increase the GDP, which increases the productivity. It doesn't have to increase their personal productivity.

Comment Re:Liberals had their "insurrection" first. (Score -1) 263

Q Shaman. Not only walked around peacefully, but was escorted by cops who thanked them for doing their jobs. Vast. Majority. Were. Entirely. Peacful.

Which is why many of them were literally charged with "illegal parading", BlueAnon clown. Now do the The Great Liberal Insurrection that happened years earlier without participants being smeared as seditionists or sent to years for prison, including people who weren't even there.

Comment Re:Can't Help But Think (Score 4, Informative) 23

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

Comment Re:Its going to happen whether we want it to or no (Score 0, Troll) 114

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

Comment Re:Windows is NOT a professional operating system. (Score 1) 103

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 258

Generally the "even engineer dads can't make heads nor tails of it" objection is that the engineer dads didn't spend a couple minutes reading the helpfully coloured highlight box in the textbook. There has been a push in math to develop teaching methods that emphasize understanding rather than memorization. Thus 5x3 becomes 5x5x5 or 3x3x3x3x3 instead of "STFU and memorize your times tables."

A better example, also from Internet memes, is a procedure where you add or multiply a pair of larger numbers by breaking them down into component problems. 37 + 55 becomes (30 + 50) + (7 + 5) and some "parent" on Reddit or Facebook with add a comment like "why can't they just do addition like we learned??" Someone sensible will usually point out that people who are good at arithmetic will often use decomposition on harder problems if they're doing them in their head.

The teaching algorithms are pedagogical tools used to increase understanding or illustrate problems from different perspectives, not the final here's-the-algorithm-you-should-always-use".

I said that the 5x3 answer being marked wrong was likely due to a poorly educated teacher. No, primary school children probably won't be multiplying anything non-commutative soon. That was a joke. However, it is important not to instill, and then spend years reinforcing, incorrect facts. You shouldn't tell students things like "multiplication is defined as commutative" because that kind of thing will eventually screw someone up.

Comment Bringing the Pain? (Score 1) 104

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

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