I thought I read this pretentious garbage somewhere else before. It's bad enough when the stories are dupes, but, even worse, /. has declined so far that it's taken at least two stories for someone to inform you that LA is already built. Your suggestion to "build it better" is a hundred-odd years too late to be anything other than cock-stroking.

Unless your suggestion was actually to bulldoze everything and start over, now that you're around to plan things properly. It's not too late for that, but it really puts Musk's "arrogant" tunnel suggestion into perspective.

Let's assume you can still "opt out of the unmetered 1.5 Mbps shit to get full speed video." Go explain why it costs $25 extra for "unlimited HD" when you're already paying for a supposedly "unlimited" plan with "unlimited data."

I did that, so quit being an angsty fanboy. It's in their press release -- 480p video is unlimited, HD video is an extra $25 a month on top of your "unlimited" plan.

That makes sense.

I have no idea why T-Mobile has so many fanboys hearing only what they want to hear, but their press release isn't exactly ambiguous:

Ars has the same take on T-Mobile charging $25 extra for "HD."

According to this anon, they do string matching on host, content-type, and SNI fields, which is how they throttled HTTPS YouTube. If you wrote a proxy that rewrote those fields, you could escape Binge-On. Or apparently make Binge-On detect random shit as an approved streaming partner and zero-rate it for you.

I want 1080p YouTube videos on my phone. My phone has a 1080p screen, and even at native resolution it's already a pain in the ass to make out any text, captions, or fine details (mouse cursors, HP bars, wires and gauges, whathaveyou). Downscaling the video to <1.5Mbps 480p and blowing it back up again doesn't help legibility any.

If you nerds want to relive the 90s, nothing's stopping you from transcoding everything you watch to 64Kbps RealMedia(tm) first. I certainly wouldn't pay anyone to run a Minecraft filter on all my video, though, and I doubly wouldn't pay them again to unfuck it.

They use some form of DPI to detect video content, and throttle everything that matches--even non-streaming downloads of video files--to 1.5 Mbps. If your video provider of choice feels like sucking T-Mobile's cock, there's an API approved providers can implement to serve <1.5Mbps streams to the "Binge-On" customer instead.

If your video provider of choice has not written any T-Mobile-specific code, they better be able to dynamically degrade to a <1.5Mbps stream, or the video will buffer or not load at all. A VPN might be able to evade that, except a VPN would probably be detected as "hotspot" or "tethering" usage, which is throttled to 128Kbps on the new "unlimited" plans.

Anyone claiming the video throttling ("Binge-On") is optional or can be turned off hasn't read TFA or TFS. That used to be the case, and still is on the old plans, but it's mandatory on the new "unlimited" plans in order to prevent you from actually using any data.

Didn't even make it to the second sentence in the summary, did you? It's mandatory on the new "unlimited" plans, and "HD" (>480p) video will cost you an extra $25 a month.

The Facebook Rift is actually shipping now, but I'm partial to the Vive. You'll need to purchase Virtual Desktop to watch 3D videos on the latter.

Check out this, shot from a girl's PoV. You'd think looking down at your chest and having a girl's breasts would be weird--unless you are a grill, I s'pose (inb4 >slashdot), or unless your physique lends itself to man boobs.

But it was having a girl's arms that freaked me out.

I mean, I'm no Yao Ming, but I'm tall. I have large hands and long fingers, though I'm not used to thinking of them that way--they're just your hands, right? How much time do people in prohibitionist states spend really contemplating their hands? Outside of shopping for a pair of gloves that fit (they're all made by gnomes, for gnomes), or showing off with some Rachmaninoff, they're just hands, and you don't really think about their dimensions.

But that video dumps you into the perspective of a girl. A tiny girl. A tiny girl, with tiny arms, and tiny hands, and tiny, tiny wrists. And holy shit, is that weird.

I'm used to porn making me big, but that was the first time porn made me small! It was some real Alice in Wonderland shit.

I mean, are tiny people really that tiny? How do you tiny people do push-ups without your hands breaking right off? How do you reach the trigger on a rifle? Do your fingers not overhang computer mice by several inches, dragging along the tabletop every time you mouse?

Were people serious about the Xbox controller being large?

The whole experience has really changed my understanding of reality. It's not the kind of thing you can casually whip out at a VR party, though.

Holy shit, you weren't kidding. Quoting selected bugs:

• The appliance ships with UDP port 8812 allowed through the firewall. The port correlates to an internal service that routes messages between backend processes. To authenticate access to this service, all messages must be encrypted with a secret key [...] These two default keys are 123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0 and 0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF.
• One of the applications that is exposed through the port 8812 message routing service executes a system command without sanitizing the arguments provided by the requesting application. This allows arbitrary commands to be executed on the appliance. Combined with Issue #1, this allows remote, unauthenticated command execution on the appliance as the "soggycat" user, which is root equivalent
• The secure shell daemon is running by default and the system is configured with static passwords for a number of root-equivalent accounts. The "soggycat" user account [...] also has two SSH keys configured for passwordless login. These keys were generated over eight years ago.
• All internal services communicate through UDP services bound to the 0.0.0.0 address. This exposes the internal workings of the appliance to an attacker with network access to the system. For example, a local user account without administrative rights would still be able to escalate privileges by communicating with these internal services.
• The rsync daemon allows read/write access to the "soggycat" home directory. Since this user account is root-equivalent, any attacker than talk to the rsync daemon can take full control of the appliance.

This is amateur hour, though still better than what runs our power grid and water treatment plants.

I'll give it a shot.

No. They are, however, funding and marketing games, and getting them on store shelves and Steam/Origin/UPlay/et al. I assume they're doing this for the same reason Netflix is making original content--to make sure they're not dependent on third-party content to keep their shelves stocked.

I'm also guessing they don't see much of a future in retail, so they're trying to pivot into the publishing business before they die off, which is probably more profitable anyway.

You probably don't, unless you're a game studio looking for someone to finance your next game. In that case, you probably do, especially if you're not big enough to get the time of day out of one of the AAA publishers, or if "we do not involve ourselves in the creative process" sounds appealing.

In the abstract, you should probably care a little because more publishers funding games means more games get made, and GameStop has the potential (the potential) to fill an interesting middle ground between too-big-to-fails like Call of Battlefield Eleventy and no-budget, bottom-of-the-barrel, I-compiled-this-with-two-pirated-rubber-bands-and-kickstarter "indie" games. As in, budgets small enough to be able to take interesting creative risks without worrying about a twenty-brazillion dollar screw-up tanking the company, yet not so small that you have to resort to gimmicky pixel-art shit to get a hipster/10 rating on your Steam Greenlight.

And if nothing else, it's unusual for a large company to see the writing on the wall ahead of time, and actually try to do something about it before plowing head-on into the iceberg. This is kind of a man-bites-dog moment--we're witnessing the incumbent horse-buggy manufacturer trying their hand at self-driving cars.

You're bitching about an OS with mandatory access controls, DEP, ASLR, virtualized filesystem access, application whitelists, secure boot, and that runs its own authentication daemon in a VM so that not even the kernel itself can directly manage password hashes. You're doing this bitching in an article about a tool they maintain so you can harden and sandbox third-party programs, even when those programs weren't built with stack smashing or ASLR or all those neat Visual Studio canaries in mind.

They bundle anti-malware software with the OS. They're, clearly, very concerned about not destroying all that filthy McAfee lucre.

Japan is on the edge of a demographics crisis. 25% of their population is over 65, compared with 59% that work. Having only ~2.36 people paying into public healthcare and social insurance for each person drawing out is not a good ratio, and with their notoriously low birth rates, is only going to worsen as time goes on.

In the meanwhile, Japan's racking up shittons of debt, and has to import nearly all of their energy.

So, what does this mean? It means productivity is really fucking important. If your aging population has fewer than 2 workers to cover each retiree, those workers better be really fucking productive or those healthcare costs are going to be an incredible burden. If you need to import 94% of your energy at great expense, you better put that energy to really fucking good use--i.e., be productive--or otherwise you're spending everything on coal and petrodollars instead of your own people. If your government debt is skyrocketing, but has fewer and fewer taxpayers to pay it down, those people better be really fucking productive or you're not going to have a government.

That latter point is especially important. Japan can get away with its debt load because of Japan's famously high savings rate--lots of people (or banks using people's savings) buying savings bonds means you can issue those bonds really cheaply. But, when people retire, they by necessity stop saving and start drawing on their savings instead. The government has double their yearly income in what's essentially an adjustable-rate mortgage, and the interest rates are going to skyrocket right as fewer people are there to pay it down.

Odds are I wrote the software that gave you that bill, you insufferable mong. Your anecdote sure is compelling, though.