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Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 211

Does Facetime actually bring anything useful to the table?

Yes, as a matter of fact it does.

It works.

Unlike the "System Formerly Known as Lync".

I don't think skype and lync are really related. Lync was a copycat product made by Microsoft just as facetime is a copycat product made by Apple. Neither of them brought anything interesting to the table. If "it's better than LYNC" is all that Facetime has going for it... that doesn't bode well for the future of facetime on platforms where users have a choice.

Comment Huh? (Score 2) 211

"A Skype-killing video chat service that worked on Mac, iOS *and* Windows, Android and the open web? That's something I bet companies would be happy to pay for, too."

Why would anyone think that facetime would kill the market leader if they ever stepped it up and delivered almost what compteitors were already delivering. Skype already works on Windows, UWP, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, WatchOS, Windows Phone, HoloLens, Xbox One... It does hd video, hd group video, audio, messaging... I mean I understand the need for competition but we've already got that in spades. Does Facetime actually bring anything useful to the table? I was under the impression that it was just a "me too" videoconference app that is limited to apple only so that Apple could continue to have their walled garden. Does it actually have some valuable and unique feature that I should be coveting?

Submission + - Slashdot spams users despite offering feature to disable advertising 1

kelemvor4 writes: For years, slashdot.org has offered users with good karma the ability to disable advertising. This is no more! Recently slashvertisements have moved to a new low in the form of "a href=http://www.kellyphotos.org/ForumPics/spam.png"sponsored content" that cannot be disabled. It is the end of an era for one of the oldest websites on the internet.

Comment Re: Hunger games? (Score 1) 174

Battle Royale is the genre term but it pretty much got its idea from the hunger games

If you're talking about the movies, the setup was just a basic 24 man team deathmatch with two man teams. I think we had that back in the Quake 2 (maybe 1, but I can't remember) days. I've never heard PUBG/Fortnite equated with hunger games myself. "battle royale" seems to be the new term for 100 person FFA.

Comment Re:Cockroach Milk (Score 1) 254

I've seen Temple of Doom. EVERYONE at that table was HINDU.

I would rather have the chilled monkey brains.

Wouldn't milking cockroaches be the ultimate labor-intensive job? I suppose we could make it a task for prisoners.

Dude, monkey brains are delicious. If you haven't tried them then you're missing out!

Comment Re:Won't happen (Score 1) 174

They won't be able to build windfarms that close to Marthas Vineyard. If you have ever been there, you know why.

I'm honestly surprised it's legal. In my home city, wind power is illegal. What little information I found on the subject when I looked into it pointed to lobbying by special interest groups interested in protecting birds.

Comment It's really no surprise (Score 4, Insightful) 272

I'm really not one of those people who fear new technology or anything of the sort. However, how can it not eventually go horribly wrong when you plant recording devices in your own house that are designed specifically record and send the audio offsite. Eventually, there will be mistakes made with the audio or a hack, or something you said will violate some law "forcing" the company who has the recording to do some particular thing with it.

I'm all for new technology, but these things should have bad idea written all over them in bold print.... and I don't mean that to be specific to Amazon, either. Apple and Google's take on the things are just as bad.

More people should make an effort to understand what their personal electronics actually do before purchasing. We (as a society) need to incorporate classes on this sort of thing into primary education classes.

Comment Re:Amazing (Score 0) 446

Sure, but maybe we should be more careful with deployment than Tesla and Uber. See Waymo (or I am sure there are others) for example, I don't know of any fatal incident there. Also studies comparing accidents of driver-less/normal cars would be useful.

Why? Fast deployment by Uber and Tesla is still going to make the roads safer than they are today. Even though their track record isn't perfect, it's orders of magnitude better than that of human driven vehicles. We should be pushing for subsidies on self driven cars and perhaps an added tax on human driven ones to dissuade customers from buying them.

Comment Ha Ha Ha (Score 1) 277

Californians get to suffer a little more because of their legal stupidity. I hope manufacturers will be good enough to use stickers or make California specific packaging (or just stop selling in California) rather than subjecting the rest of us to this lunacy. Personally, I think if it's such a problem then California should just ban Coffee outright. ;)

Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 186

Twitter will be censoring certain users and accounts from appearing prominently in any feeds, unless explicitly searched for.

Which is fine, I'm all for stepping on the trolls, but then I remembered, censorship is bad, even in this situation. Who decides what gets published and what gets buried? That's what bothers me.

If it's an algorithm, then I gotta ask, who wrote the algorithm? Explain it to us, in all the gritty details, because otherwise, it's just censorship based on some unknown criteria. Censorship is bad enough, but censorship without an obvious target? Scary.

Twitter's been censoring the site for quite some time. Probably since its inception. It's notorious for censoring accounts that share opinions the management disagrees with. When it comes up in the news, they label the censored account some nasty thing and smile.

Comment Re:A stronger "silicon valley" ideological bubble (Score 1) 186

Twitters new group think reinforcement feature!

Seriously. Silcon valley liberals think silencing non-politicallycorrect non-leftist posts will help their side? They will just reinforce their leftist bubble of estrangement from the rest of the country and this will possibly lead to even greater election defeats. Prior to the 2016 election I had some arguments with friends in that bubble. Trying to explain to them that the "blue wall" of the industrial states was nonsense. That many blue collar "democrats" are moderate non-ideologues who are not necessary loyal to the party, they have a certain independence. All things being equal a democratic candidate may have an advantage but if a republican candidate can deliver a "better" message to them they will consider voting for the republican candidate. Ex: the "Reagan Democrats". But no, to the silicon valley types the blue wall was impenetrable, no one could ever vote for a republican, no one could ever let economic fears and concerns be their deciding factor. And on election day they learned how wrong they were. This twitter feature will just silence those outside the bubble, and those inside the bubble will hear fewer "warnings" from outside and have an even deeper sense of false security in the future.

I never found twitter useful personally, but for those that do there are several alternatives. Maybe one will come up as the popular replacement. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/twitter-alternative-social-networks

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