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Comment When a sh!tty law has a good unintended outcome (Score 2) 93

Well, really, I think it depends how the law is implemented whether it's shitty. Simple pay-to-link is inherently stupid and is a footgun that will guarantee less traffic by banning free word-of-mouth promotion. But if linking is free but reproducing the headline, snippet and picture is what they have to pay for, that's all most people read and therefore takes away the pageview from the news site. It's also reproducing copyrighted material without permission.

Comment Re: Not going to happen (Score 1) 86

Agreed, he's a jackass and he's cancer, but he has as much right to free speech as anyone.

No, companies like Google aren't required to give him a platform. But we had a wonderful free speech platform with the internet, and this is another step away from that. We're moving more toward an internet where a relatively small group of content creators who are approved of by the major tech companies produce all the content, and you consume it.

Do we really need to make another cable TV? Is this what people really want?

Comment Re: Google invests a $20 Google Play Coupon in OS/ (Score 1) 28

See, that's a proper desktop OS that uses machine code for apps and draws things in a normal, sensible way. Google only invests in embedded systems that choose ridiculous bloated ways of doing things, like using Java or HTML5 so that even the simplest apps can obliterate your battery.

Comment Re:We need a new class of IP protections for perso (Score 1) 146

Whether or not you enable GPS or even have a GPS receiver, the cell network can triangulate the signal from your phone. Depending on the technology used, all cell phones can be located through this technology built into the network, or have GPS that can be activated remotely with no option to override. This is legally required, so that 911 operators can see where you are if you call in and can't talk to them or don't know where you are.

Comment Accessibility tool (Score 1) 205

I don't see why this technology is being taken in the direction it is. Where you see a robocall bot, I see a valuable accessibility technology.

Think something like Stephen Hawking's robot voice synthesizer thing, but realistic sounding and trained to your speech patterns. That way you can control it with shortcuts instead of typing out every word you want to say, and it'll autopilot between the keywords or concepts you pick. This could be a huge boon to people who can't speak.

A similar technology could be also the next smartphone keyboard app. Write a few keywords and it turns it into a sentence.

Comment Re: Firefox is fucking awful (Score 2) 50

And how would you prevent this sort of thing in a way that won't interfere with legit Javascript apps or be easily defeated? If it were that easy we'd have it as an extension or core feature by now. Instead we have things like uMatrix that generally work but are really fiddly.

Firefox definitely has its downsides. It gradually eats RAM until it gets too slow to use and needs to be restarted. That's why I use Chromium for most browsing - its memory leaks are mostly per tab-process and reset when you close a tab. I keep it around for things like YouTube where Chromium and its extensions can't block obnoxious ads. And on Android Firefox wins hands-down since Chrome/ium have no extension support, very basic options, and even no way to back out of a site that pollutes your history to trap you.

Of course I long for the Firefox 2.x days, where you could browse with fifty tabs on a Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM and not have problems until XP ran out of window handles. But that wasn't the same stupidly Javascript-heavy web we have today, where a single page load couldn't fit on a floppy and basic news sites pull shenanigans to defeat no-autoplay settings and make an unwanted streaming video follow you down the page while you attempt to read.

Comment Re: Microsoft jettisons telemetry code to reduce s (Score 1) 142

A USB floppy drive doesn't use floppy drivers and doesn't appear to the BIOS as a standard floppy. It has a lot more in common with a USB flash reader. The floppy driver Win10 removes is the standard AT floppy controller one; USB floppy drives should still work normally.

Comment Re: Long overdue and very needed for niche devices (Score 1) 142

Tip: You can move an application folder to the SD card and then use mklink /d to create a directory symlink to the new location at the old one. The program won't see any difference unless it knows to look for it. Alternately you could give your SD card a mount point inside of C:, thus fooling most installers.

I picked up a convertible laptop with 64 GB eMMC and 4 GB RAM for $200 and used this trick to force Dropbox to put my files on my 200 GB SD card.

Comment Re: Good (Score 5, Insightful) 351

Another point is I don't trust the government to keep my escrowed key safe. Leaks happen, hacks happen. The more places my secrets are stored, the more danger there is of them being stolen. And when it happens, I won't know, and even if I find out I have no recourse other than throwing away my device and going back to a normal PC where I can install proper, non key escrow encryption software.

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