Starting today, our second generation of laptops (based on the 6th gen Intel Skylake platform) will now come with the Intel Management Engine neutralized and disabled by default. Users who already received their orders can also update their flash to disable the ME on their machines

First of all neutralized, then disabled. The next step is to completely remove it.

I have an Samsung set, bought back in 2007 (IIRR), that at the time was supposed to have some "smart" features, but I never made any use of them.

Now, I have a Raspberry Pi running Kodi and a PS4 connected to it using HDMI cables, and I use the remote controller for the TV to select files on my NAS (Kodi) or to select content from Netflix and Amazon Prime (PS4), to play, jump forward and back, and to pause streams.

I think that this shows that the TV is receiving a signal from the remote controller and is sending that signal through the HDMI to the streaming device.

Or with the three Bs: Be pure, Be vigilant, Behave!

Yeah, right.

Brazil: superpower of the future.

Always was, always will be.

If the government sues the requester and loses (same effect as previous case, in regards to the records in question), the government is NOT liable for the requester's legal fees.

So party A can attack party B in a court of law and if party A loses, then party B is not defrayed the cost of defence? Wow. That means that any party with sufficiently deep pockets can attack any relatively poor party, safe in the knowledge that it can bankrupt the other...

I say that when the proportion reaches 98%, it means you took your eyes off the ball long ago.

This was my thought, too.

Why does the phone company get to say "phone X cannot connect to my network; phone Y is welcome"? Surely if both phones are approved by the regulatory body, they should both be permitted to connect.

I moved away from the US back in 2012, and I seem to remember that while I was there I ran into some weird contracts with conditions like "you can only use a smartphone on our network if you sign up to a $60 a month data contract"...

I had no problem running my Nokia XM5800 on Cingular, though, with a cheapskate contract. But that was more like a smartphone than what passes for one these days.

• On-board maps and route-planning for the GPS (no network needed)
• On-board voice recognition (no network needed)

Nowadays, the phone is a camera, phone and display terminal for a load of processing done elsewhere ("in the cloud"), requiring either a WiFi or (more commonly) phone-network data connection.

The XM5800 was a great phone; it's such a pity that Nokia dropped the ball by not providing a proper app-store eco-system.

This was reported on French mainstream radio back in March and April, and in the Figaro newspaper back in 2015.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2015/10/13/20005-20151013ARTFIG00016-qarnot-computing-des-radiateurs-tres-calculateurs.php

The only "news" in this report is the use of Ryzen CPUs.

I'm also not in the US, but I was following the announcements in the run-up to the eclipse, and discussing it with family and friends over there.

I didn't know anything about the sub-standard glasses, or about the recall, until reading about it in El Reg this morning.

Recently, I went on a trip to Portugal for a week; no cellphone service and wifi for an hour each morning and each evening when I was in my rented accommodation. It's easy, even over here in densely populated Europe, to drop off the internet for a seek or two. If I'd decided to go out into a sparsely populated bit of the US to watch an eclipse away from the light pollution of the cities, it would certainly have been easy to miss a recall.