There is one thing missing in the article : people who buy the "consumer" version of the quest 2 are likely to buy games from the oculus store, which includes a part for Facebook.

So, when you're buying that "consumer" version, you get a discounted price, like when you buy a PS or XBox, which takes in account the revenues linked to the games that you'll buy.

When you buy the professional version, you won't buy any game... so you get to pay the full price.

The difference is not the value of your data... it's mostly the "facebook tax" on the game that you'll buy. A 30€ game means 9€ for Facebook... and you've to take in account the DLC and other that you'll also buy...

Or the idea that some SJW could say something else that non-sense while feeling superior...

There is one big flaw in that reasonning...

When you take a picture of someone, there is much more than the skin tone involved. You've to get the hair and the cloth look good too or your picture is garbage.
And I really doubt that "Shirley" was bald and nude...
Pictures of caucasian people need to accomodate a large palette of color for the hair, from back to white.

OTOH, African people usually have both dark skin and dark hair... that don't bring much contrast to the picture...

SJW and Woke like to call "racism" again and again... but here, the fact is that the Shirley card had a large palette of tones to manage. This lead to good results for many other things (objects, plants, food, landscapes, ...). Using the picture of a black (wo)man to calibrate would have led to crappy picture for everything which would not have been black people...

The former argentic cameras had the same problem... And they didn't have any software...

The fact is that most pictures are taken from CLEAR subjects... plants, animals, landscapes, ... are usually well balanced on our cameras... The only thing that is badly balanced is blacks faces...

Also, a darker picture means less light = less energy = more electronic noise... it's a physic limitation, nothing to do with software.

You didn't fix anything... Physic"s laws can't be fixed for political correctness...

Black people are racist because they accuse white people other of voluntary degrading images of their faces when it's only the result of physic's laws...

The Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard, meant to replace SMS and MMS, is standardized by GSM-A and embraced by more and more operator worldwide.

That standard supports the same things than iMessage... except that it's the recognized standard and, as such, will have eventually to be supported by Apple...

The iMessage service is completely obsolete and is doomed to disappear...

(I know that RCS has been pushed by Google... but it has been embraced by GSM-A which is now managing the standard)

Basically, if algorithms have some troubles identifying black people, it's because their pictures lacks many details...

The picture is based on the light received from the light reflected by the photographied subject. The darker the subject, the less light is reflected.

So basically, we have

Face recognition is racist because it fails to identify black faces
Algorithms fails to identify black faces because of poor quality pictures (lacks of details
Picture is of poor quality because there is not enough light reflection from the face

Hence Light is racist...

Apache USED to be great... but it looks like things are changing...

First place as a web browser has been lost to nginx... While Apache used to be more than 60% of the web browsers, it's more like 25% now...
OpenOffice is clearly being forgotted, people going to LibreOffice (including many major linux distributions)...
Subversion is being taken over by GIT

Now, they are ousting the creator from another project to please to some whiner SJW... angering other people in the process...

Maybe the fall is nearer than we think... When you look at the future planned by Apache, it's not about getting more experienced developpers, it's all about bringing minorities in the project... Favoring political non-sense over skill... Maybe it's time to get interrested in alternatives to Apache, Tomcat, ...

I think that it's more broken :

In our occidental world, the "Human Rights" is transcribed in our own laws... So basically, going against them is already illegal.

But islamic countries DON'T accept the Human Rights... They have even written their own sharia-compatible human rights...

Which means that that "ethical" licence is essentially barring all islamic countries from the related software... which is plain discrimination and forbidden by the same Human Laws that they want to enforce...

TLDR, what they are complaining is that they are not matched against complete newbies where they can show off by mass killing...

But it also means that the newbies will be protected from the pro and have the chance to play games where they actually have some chance to win...

What they are asking is to let pro soccer players play against kids who play during the pause at school... and utterly crush the kids... I just hope that their whining will be rejected... They wanted to go pro, now, they have to assume...

Apple boast about being able to do better than "the other things"...

- comparing iPhone brand new processor to 10 month old processors found on android (Snapdragon 865 launched on Q4 2019)
- comparing their M1 GPU with a 6+ year old GPU (nVidia 1050)
- comparing CPU performances to CPU that are several génération older (i7 9XXX and older when we have 10XXX CPU's easily available now and intel is already speaking of 11th gen)

comparing M1 GPU with nVidia 1050 is like comparing the ZX Spectrum with a 80486 PC... in other word, irrelevant.

People should really understand that what's we call (incorrectly) "Moore Law" is still true (previsions say that it'll still be true until 2025) and that 9 months means nearly 42% more computing power, 18 months means 100% more computing power.

Apple like to use superlative and act as if people were retards... And seeing how it works, maybe people are really retards ...

A Chinese study prepublished on biorxiv explained that the SARS-CoV-2's ORF8 part of the genome was blocking the MHC-I molecules.

MHC-I are responsible to "flag" the cell as a target for the immune system... Several other viruses also block the expression of MHC-I, including HIV and Herpes (which explains why the immune system can't clean all the infected cells and why these stay "for life" in the body).

If that study proves to be true, T-Cell immunity could be "useless" and the marker which points the cells to be targetted may be prevented to reach the surface of the cell... The comments around that study was that it explained the several cases of healed patients who sudently went back to positive without having been reinfected.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm just reporting what I saw in a medical article, written by people who knows better than me... The study was in "pre-publication" when I read it which means that it need to be confirmed by other scientists...

With iOS 14, Apple basically screwed up a lot of things that were supposed to be "standard" is the name of a pseudo-privacy protection.

They generate random MAC addresses when these are meant to be 1) fixed (as in "never changing") 2) no duplicate (how can you guarantee that with random MAC ?)... and that brings lots of headaches to businesses who used the MAC to identify a device (as in granting specific rights)

They change the way contacts to the internet is done, remove some tracking (be sure that there will be workarounds) and hope that everyone will say "OK, let's do as Apple say" ?

Youtube was clear : you're not meant to use the video in background (for background music for example) unless you pay YT Premium... That PiP mode is a "workaround" around that... as such, it could even be said to be a way to "defeat copyright-control" and be liable for a DCMA trial !!! YT just fixed that loophole...

On the other hand, the added value is not worth the 30%.

If you look at Steam, they ask 30% but they provide
- massive downloading/storage (we are talking about programs that weight several Gb)
- community forums for each game
- achievement system
- cloud save
- DRM
- Developments that support game creators ...

But in the Android/iPhone space, applications are small and there is little or no added value... And for extra-services (news paper subscription for example), no extra service at all... which means that their service is not worth the price...

Game companies are using Steam because it's cost effective... they don't have to master DVD for their game, to look for distribution logistic, ... They still have the choice of using their own service (Origin, Blizzard, Epic,...) or distribute their games through standard CD/DVD retail.

Same is true with Android... Chinese phone don't use Google Play (they just can't) but local chinese stores, you've alternate stores like Amazon, you may use a link or a QR-Code to download the APK and install it, ...

But with Apple, they simply don't have the choice... which means that the inflated charge is only possible because of an artificially created monopoly on the Apple platform...

You may say that you are not forced to use iPhone... But contents is also platform-locked which means that switching is losing whatever contents you've bought for your phone...

Would Apple dare to remove Facebook from it's store ? It could be very fun to watch :-) that'd really be shooting oneself in the foot...

Alternate in-app market would also store payment data and manage the bill issue

The app download/update/... has nothing to do with in-app purchases whch usually don't need an app-update to be accepted.

And the search engine is not concerned by in-app purchages

So, it's nearly zero service... and clearly don't justify the 30% cut.