It is true... bluetooth still has some ways to go before it can satisfy the reliability, consistency and quality of most audiophiles. Bluetooth, in its current incarnations, is a convenience technology that is mostly aiming to be good enough for most people... much like MP3 did for audio and MP4 did for video.

In choosing a bluetooth headset, one weighs the convenience of wireless listening with the inconvenience of having to make sure that one's headset is always charged before use and balances all that with having a further reduction in audio quality and intermittent connectivity issues. For most people, there is a headset at a price-point at which the convenience balances with the hassles and the quality of the headset offering is at a bearable price that they can live with.

Enter Apple AirPods (and W1 Beats headsets) and now Google Pixel Buds... all promising to improve the basic bluetooth experience in every way... as long as you use their headsets with a compatible device that knows how to interface with the enhanced protocols (i.e. one made by themselves). Since this is a game that any OEM that has a large consumer device footprint can play, we can expect Samsung to also have a headset offering that layers proprietary protocols on top of the basic bluetooth stack soon.

Isn't Laurene Powell (Steve Jobs' wife) a significant Disney shareholder... she should pick up the phone and call somebody.

In the old days, Steve would have picked up the phone and called Bob Igor (current Disney CEO) to remind him what happened to Michael Eisner, the last Disney CEO who tried to stand up to him.

For those who do not remember, Eisner was fired when it looked like Jobs (then CEO of Pixar) and John Lasseter (CCO) were going to take their Pixar ball and go and play with someone else (Warner Bros); and Igor was brought in with one task: Do not lose Pixar. Disney's subsequent acquisition of Pixar made Jobs the largest single shareholder of Disney and gave him a seat on its board of directors - which is presumably now filled by Powell.

Anyway... Tim Cook, at Apple, should call Powell and ask her to call Igor, at Disney, and have a gentle conversation about the difficulty he might have in a few months when he submits his new streaming app for approval for the Apple iOS and tvOS app stores.

Definitely Russian hackers...

Probably Russian hackers... all the evidence points to this being the case...

It must be Russian hackers... who else could it be...

The Cyrillic character found in the code is proof that the Russians could have possibly did it... maybe... definitely...

The computer logs are obviously classified... and that proves that the Russians may have definitely had a hand in possibly directing the hackers that did it...

What more proof does anyone need... there is no doubt in my mind that the Russians directed this hacking group to bring the State Department email down...

All the evidence leads directly to the Kremlin... all the way to the top...

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I often turn off my phone's Wi-Fi support before plugging it in to charge at night, only to discover it has mysteriously turned on in the morning. After checking the Wi-Fi Control History on my S7, it appears as though the various cookie-cutter apps for these drones wake up to phone home in the night after they are opened, while the phone is charging.

How is this even possible!?

Although I have owned a few Android phones over the last few year, my primary smartphone has been an iPhone since the iPhone 3G. So, the idea that a third party app could turn on radios in my mobile device without my permission or knowledge is simply insane to me.

Besides just the loss of personal privacy and violation of confidentiality (depending on what the app is doing when it turns on the radio), many people still have capped or metered internet services, and this app could be draining that without the handset owner's permission!

Unbelievable... just unbelievable.

I get...

Your browser is not supported.
Unfortunately this browser does not support the web technology that powers
Firefox Send. You’ll need to try another browser. We recommend Firefox!

...when I try to access the service.

If Mozilla's strategy is to lure back old users with web based services like Send, they are going to have to ensure that the service works seamlessly for the people that I exchange files with, without trying to force them to change their browser first. Even if I eventually make the switch to Firefox, I can hardly expect everyone that I exchange files with to do the same in order to be able to receive the files that I send.

Many company's register their trade marks in adjacent industries, not just the classes that they operate in. This it to allow possible future expansion, as well as to prevent something like this from happening - a company in a different, but adjacent industry, having a similar mark as your own.

I headed up payments and collections innovation in a large major bank, and we defined adjacent industries quite broadly. Most people think of adjacent industries or sectors as being those related to what they do... but we defined it as being " ...where there is a strong likelihood of there being significant customer or enduser overlap with a small or negligible symmetric difference. "

I would guess that PayPal believes that there is a high overlap in Pandora's and PayPal's users, with a very small symmetric difference, making the likelihood that most of the people seeing the new Pandora logo will do so within a materially narrow time-space of having interacted with the PayPal logo - which would lead to both brand dilution as well as brand association, at least in the short term while people are getting used to the revised Pandora logo.

It's no surprise that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch... But managing to sell more copies than consoles that can actually play it? That's what's happened in the U.S., amazingly -- Nintendo just announced that it sold 906,000 Switch consoles in March along with 925,000 copies of Breath of the Wild.

Many people around the world buy their games from US based online stores when that game is not readily available from their local game store... These sales will have been recorded as US sales, even if the product might have ultimately been shipped overseas.

The iPhone exhibited a similar phenomenon during 2007-2009 when it was not yet readily available around the world. Apple reported significantly higher US unit sales than AT&T was reporting new subscribers - even though the phone was network locked to AT&T in the US - that was because many iPhones were being purchased in the US for use on other (often overseas) networks (after being jailbroken).

Intel hasn't given us specific information about the specs and speeds of its first Compute Cards, but you can expect the fastest ones to approach the performance of high-end fanless laptops like Apple's MacBooks.

As impressive a feat as this might appear, at first, one must remember that Apple devices running last year's A9X are already faster than the Apple MacBook running Intel's equivalent processor, according to the latest GeekBench numbers - http://wccftech.com/apple-a9xi.... So, I fully expect that newer devices running Apple's A10 or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 (that are slightly larger than a credit card due to some additional features that Intel's compute cards lack, such as a touch screen, gyro, motion, barometric, gps, cdma, gsm, lte, wifi, dsp, hsm, etc.) to already be a lot faster than Intel's fastest Compute Cards (assuming that the MacBook remains the benchmark performance).

I think that what Intel's Compute Cards will have going for them will be accessibility, programability, price and the ease of interfacing them to custom devices for developers... That is what Intel should be emphasizing. Vending machines, signage displays, self service kiosks, home automation hubs, assembly line robots, etc. do not need lots of computing power... but they need reliability, availability and dependability with minimal human intervention in some of the harshest environments, every single day of the year.

"For people who choose to integrate ride sharing apps with iOS Maps, location data must be shared in order for you to request a ride inside the Maps app..."

I wonder if all the other apps that use the Apple Maps integration, such as Lyft, OpenTable, and Yelp, also exhibit the same behaviour of changing the location tracking setting from "While using the app" to "Always"? Furthermore, if Siri integration can pass the location information to the ride hailing app just in time as it is invoked, why can't Maps integration accomplish the same feat? Finally, while I understand why Apple Maps would need location tracking to be set to be "Always" to accomplish some of its magic, why isn't this being reported as such... instead of misreporting it as being the app using Apple Maps integration that has its location tracking setting to "Always"

This is not true... as the article clearly states:

Swedish hardware hacker Ulf Frisk has created a device that can extract Mac FileVault2 (Apple's disk encryption utility) passwords from a device's memory before macOS boots and anti-DMA protections kick in.

Therefore simply leaving your laptop unattended is not going to automagically disable the built-in anti-DMA protections that kick in during the boot up process and enable a passerby with PCILeech to steal your password and access your encrypted disk.

To gain access to your MacBook, the attacker needs to have the PCILeech plugged into a Thunderbolt 2 port when the computer is first switched on to perform a cold boot and you need to be running an unpatched pre-16C63a build of macOS and you need to login with your password at that very moment while it is plugged in. The prototype PCILeech is much bulkier than a spy camera and has to be plugged into the computer (and its own power source) while you are logging in in order to extract the password from memory... so it is highly unlikely that you are not going to notice this big external hard disk-like looking device plugged into your computer when you return from a bathroom break.

However, immunity from the PCILeech hack is free and easy... just upgrade to macOS 10.12.2

From the Article:

"The solution Apple decided upon and rolled out is a complete one. At least to the extent that I have been able to confirm," Frisk said. "It is no longer possible to access memory prior to macOS boot. The Mac is now one of the most secure platforms with regards to this specific attack vector."

Far-Right, New-Right, Tea-Party, Alt-Right, Hard-Right... What's Next: Neo-Right!?

Bloomberg reports that hard-right groups are lining up to back misleading websites and fake journalists who attack Musk's business empire.

Throughout history, the English world has referred to political or social groups that espouse populist ultraconservative and extreme nationalist ideologies as far-right groups or parties. But, recently I have observed an explosion of new terminology being invented to try to distinguish the multitude of far-right groups - all of which share the same ultraconservative, ultranationalist rejection of modern egalitarianism. It is almost as if far-right groups are jostling for position to see who can pronounce themselves to be at the furthest right of the left-right socio-political ideological spectrum.

It may be that if one splits hairs, one may identify unique characteristics that distinguish the different groups' neoreactionary philosophies - and many people will point these out to confused detractors like myself. Far-right groups have as much right to exist and espouse their ideological views as any other socio-political group... but, for the sake of clarity, lets stop inventing completely new terminology to describe how much further to the right one group may be than the ones that came before it.

Never since the formalisation of the struggles for independence, self determination and emancipation by the long suffering subjects of British, French and Portuguese colonies have we seen the emergence of so many political and social "movements" as we have seen in recent far-right politics of America. Calling one's social, political or pressure group a movement, no matter how well funded it is, does not automatically bestow upon it a mark of legitimacy if it is not borne out of the organisation of legitimate grass-root and civil societal formations that will sustain it as a movement long after the big cheques stop flowing because the socio-economic issues that are the fuel of real movements very rarely follow the ebb and flow of the electoral cycle. So, enough already with the "it's a movement" when referring to the shiny new vehicle a particular group may be using to rally its supporters behind its latest socio-political ideological project.

Okay... I'll get off my soapbox now and shut up.

1,440 articles, videos and other pieces of content would be too much for any one person to try to read or watch in a single day.

It is also highly unlikely that any one person could be interested in all the articles, videos and other pieces of content, in all the categories and sub-categories offered by the Washington Post. So the real number of articles, videos and other pieces of content published that one would want to read would probably be mush much smaller

I don't think that it matters... we are talking about innocent people who were later found to have done nothing to deserve death, rather than people who the police had legitimate cause to seek to apprehend... people who did not seek a violent confrontation with the police, but got one nevertheless.

I think that what you are getting at is something that my mother used to say to me when I was a kid... the friends one associates with, the way one presents themselves through dress, demeanour, etc., the neighbourhood that one hangs out at and more, all go towards other people's characterisation of you as an individual. If you hang out with your friends who sell drugs in a crime ridden neighbourhood, you are going to have more encounters with the police, regardless of race. The question is: is there a greater likelihood that one of those encounters might spiral into a violent and possibly fatal encounter because of one's race.

This is the problem with selecting a single element of detail out of a body of data and using it to make an argument that completely ignores the rest of the data.

If you look at the data in its entirety you will realise that no race, sex, or whatever is immune to being killed by the police... especially if you charge at the police with a knife or point something that may look like a firearm at them... the police will shoot you no matter who or what you are - this is just Darwin's theory of natural selection in action - weeding out the stupid gene so that it hopefully does not multiply, regardless of race.

However, if you look at all the data... not just the part that support the argument that you have already decided you want to make... all of the data... you will see that from time to time innocent men and women, black, white and everything in between, are sometimes killed needlessly by police. Sometimes it is an error - a civilian crossing the street in the middle of a shoot out with criminals - sometimes it is a cop who has had a bad week and that innocent person just happened to in the wrong place at the wrong time when the police officer lost control of their faculties. Regardless of the reasons, if you look deeper into the data... once again all of the data at the same time, not individual strands separated from the rest of the data... you will see that all too often, when this happens... when an innocent person is killed by the police... there is a disproportionate probability that that innocent person is going to be a black male than any other race or sex.

This is not a point of view to be debated... this is a matter of fact as evidenced by the publicly available data - we can debate why this might be the case, but not whether or not it is happening... that would be disrespectful to all he innocent people, of all races, whose deaths at the hands of the police make up the data we are discussing.

Now lets go out and celebrate one more gangster, murderer, rapist, etc who was stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with the police... and is now six feet under pushing daisies. We should not forget that sometimes the officers may not have had an alternative option that would safeguard life and property at the time or may have already exhausted non-lethal options at the time they took the lethal action.... sometimes.