I think you've confused "smart phone" as being synonymous with "cell phone." My cell phone does none of those things, and I'm very happy with it -- especially since it costs very little to replace should something happen to it, costs much less per month to operate, has a removable battery, and can hold a charge for weeks at a time.

I have computers in my home, of course, but "OK Google" and Cortana are switched off. My Android tablet can take OK Google Commands -- but of course, only when I have it turned on.

The real question is -- when did everyone become sheep that were OK with spyware, adware, data-mining, and voice-activation that phones home crap. Talked to a friend the other day about Moviepass & how they hope to leverage their users habits and GPS data to make money... got a "so what? Every app spies on you these days and it doesn't really affect me." Baaaaa Sheep.

The EM drive does use fuel - just not a propellant. It also gives such a small amount of thrust, one can only measure it with a carefully controlled setup. This experiment basically proves the thrust is created from the charged craft interacting with Earth's magnetic field.... and the thrust doesn't go up much if any as the power on the craft goes from 5 watts to 50 watts. So, we're basically looking at motion powered by Earth's EM, not the craft's EM.

We have about as much of a chance of boosting a craft into low Earth orbit with this as we do using a compass.

Perhaps it'll be useful for something one day, but all I can come up with right now would be Back to the Future II style hoverboards, but for dust mites instead of people given what little thrust it gives -- also it is hard to steer given it tends to only move in alignment with Earth's magnetic field.

That's not my understanding of what happened. NVIDIA said that NVIDIA products needed their own brand that was separate from the AMD brand. Suppliers did have the option of creating a separate brand just for NVIDIA, but none did. Instead, they kept the gaming brand they already had and made it exclusively for NVIDIA while some created a second brand for AMD.

For instance, ASUS kept the ROG (Republic of Gamers) for NVIDIA, but created AREZ for AMD for graphics cards. There was nothing in the deal requiring that to happen. They could have kept ROG for AMD and made a separate brand for NVIDIA.

In practice, though -- everyone knows NVIDIA's cards are better for the most part on the high end, so of course the trusted high-end gaming brand goes to NVIDIA.

You know ASUS is likely unhappy about having to carry a second brand just for AMD. They have ROG motherboards and graphics cards and would like to just keep ROG for everything high-end and high-quality regardless of what's powering it. They will probably end the AREZ line soon now that the program is cancelled.

Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.

So, let me get this straight. He was selling (violation) copy-written works he'd copied (violation) to disks and distributed (violation) for a use not approved by the author of the work.

He's not allowed to copy anything without written permission, not allowed to sell a copyrighted work without written permission, and also not allowed to distribute a copyrighted work without permission.

No one disputes he was violating copyright law. The judge was sympathetic to what he was trying to do. The only thing people argued about was the value of the disks themselves in how they relate to damages to the copyright author. Microsoft wanted each disk to represent a potential lost license sale (as only they should be distributing restore disks and if people can't burn their own, they will have to buy a new license to have a functioning PC... or buy a new PC with a license), the defense wanted the disks to be worth zero or near zero. They ultimately were decided to be worth something in-between

That's odd. My cable modem runs on Linux. So does my wireless router. Oh, look! Even my Rokus run Linux. Strange how user-friendly each of these interfaces are. Rokus are extremely popular, and so easy to set up, I have family in their mid to late 60s setting them up by themselves with no help from their technically inclined family members.

Linux's failure on the desktop is due to many reasons, though I believe it's mostly due to lack of game support. Most people use their cell phones (Android is king here) for just about everything they need for personal use. Home desktops are mostly dead except for gamers. Average users have laptops or netbooks for things their phones can't do well.

So why is Linux failing in the laptop/netbook arena? Inertia. Chromebooks, Apple, and Microsoft pretty much have the market locked down. There's little incentive for manufacturers to use Linux over ChromeOS or Windows. In a world where people will gladly install spyware for free apps and games, using Linux has to have a selling point other than it being free or even mostly compatible. Ubuntu tried and failed to gain entry into the cell phone, tablet, netbook, and notebook arena. But, the fight isn't over. If/when STEAMOS gets perfected and/or Linux gets decent graphics drivers and game support, it'll finally be competitive on the desktop.

People hardly notice that I have a Linux machine -- because I have Gnome set to look like Windows & I can launch Chrome and check g-mail or watch Netflix or Youtube or Twitch. Most everything I run regularly on my Windows box can be run on my Linux box just as easily -- except games. I hate using WINE, so until gaming is where it should be, I'll be keeping my windows installs.

There's way too many factors for me to judge. I'll wait to see what the Uber tech's say.

As you mentioned, the Uber might have seen her on LIDAR, and hey... she had a bike -- maybe the Uber thought she was riding the bike in her lane and never predicted she might move in front of the UBER. Or, maybe the UBER had a glitch (it happens... that's what the driver is there for.).

The driver certainly wasn't paying as much attention to the road as he/she should have. Some states have laws against distracted driving, and I would hope Uber would want their backup drivers to be alert with both hands on the wheel at all times.

Maybe the driver could have averted this collision if they had been paying more attention and were better prepared to turn the wheel and/or hit the brakes, but we may never know.

As for the pedestrian, some reports have surfaced that she may have been a habitual drug user. If those reports are accurate -- and I don't mean to disparage her in any way -- but, if they are accurate, it's possible she may have been using drugs and may not have been thinking clearly about her decision to cross the multi-lane road that far from a crosswalk with oncoming traffic.

In any case, it's a horrible accident that probably could have been prevented if the two humans involved had been more careful.

I think it would be more important that one prove that any such illegal content can be purged from the network. If files, programs, or data unrelated to the use of the crypto currency as a currency and distributed ledger can be inserted, then there needs to be a way to remove it to prevent further distribution of potentially illegal content.

If any extraneous data cannot be removed, then ban the currency (hopefully merely leading to a fork that is compliant.)

If dangerous top secret information were to be disseminated via Bitcoin blockchain tech, that'd be a serious national security issue & we'd ban it immediately. It's the designer's fault for including a feature without thinking through nefarious uses and a way to isolate the damage and purge the corruption of the system.

In your example, one can at least delete a corrupted file or destroy an encrypted disk. How does one delete this included data from the Bitcoin network without destroying the currency or the transaction network? Maybe it can be done, but I haven't read anything yet on how to purge these unwanted files yet.

You do know that "Nexus" devices weren't manufactured by Google, right? My Nexus 7 (2013 model) was made by ASUS. Just because they slapped the Nexus or Pixel name on someone else's product and put plain stock android on them didn't make them any easier to support. They weren't granted the IP to their internals.

Also, Google has been pretty straightforward about their crappy support. Nexus and Pixel lines at least got pretty immediate upgrades while other brands waited years sometimes to update Android (and they were the lucky ones -- some NEVER got a newer OS!)

I'm hoping Lineage OS takes over where Android drops the ball.... but I've yet to see anything but perpetual betas from them.

I think you misunderstand capitalism. There have always been products that have reached peak innovation and have become ubiquitous, cheap, and offered by many suppliers at prices very near to their cost. They are called commodities.

A great example of commodities are foods in the produce aisle. Sure, people grow and sell specialty cultivars (sometimes even with patents! -- especially the GMOs), but by and large... they're commodities.

Screws, nails, hinges, bolts, nuts, pine wood, and many other things used in construction are commodities.

The cell phone has a long way to go before it becomes a commodity unencumbered by patents, but its product life cycle will eventually be extended -- just like desktop PCs and laptops have gone from 2 year cycles to 3 year cycles... to 5 year and now 7 year cycles or longer. If/when Moore's Law prevents further die shrinks, we'll probably see some architecture changes that will keep things chugging along for a while..... and new battery technologies as well. But, sooner or later, after we've gotten the right architecture on the smallest sized chip with the best possible battery running on the fastest speed (5G or faster), and the patents run out on the hardware and the license restrictions on software are gone -- boom. Cell phone becomes a commodity with little to no change and cheap price.

What drives the market is the exchange of goods and services. People are always going to need things they can't reasonably make/grow for themselves and have time and/or money to trade for those things. Capitalism doesn't live and die by computer/cell phone technology innovations. It's been around since long before computers existed. Plenty of other things to make and improve -- lots of new areas that need innovation as well. But, even if we become hyper advanced to where everything that could be invented has been and we have no new applications for that technology... people will still need stuff & still be willing to work or trade with others for that stuff in exchange for stuff that their trading partners want in return. That's the core of capitalism.

Yep.

MPEG is from the pre-internet era of media. Back when content was purchased on disk, it made sense to have a licensed standard for MPEG, MPEG2, and even MP3. MPEG4 for Blu-Ray was really the last gasp.

Now, everything is streamed online. While Hollywood was fine paying a few cents on the dollar for encryption and compression on disks, streaming media sites are looking to cut costs.

Netflix, Hulu, Google/Youtube, and others are big enough to make their own standards and cut out the MPEG group entirely. They even have different goals as there are different methods to adjust quality over live streams vs a pre-compressed file.

I can't say I'll be sad to see MPEG go -- they were vicious in protecting their licensing and downright bullying in their negotiations, and the lack of alternatives held back progress for years. Now that real alternatives are here, they want to change... ha. good luck w/ that.

I tend to agree. Meltdown had an obvious path to exploit -- run an unauthorized branch of code to access something one shouldn't, then make sure another bit of code read that unauthorized data before it was flagged and wiped. Spectre.... it's just snooping on random processes hoping to find something interesting at the same user-level access.

In a jewelry store theft comparison:

Meltdown -- walk in as a celebrity, ask the jeweler if you can view a specific priceless ring that only celebrities could afford, and then you bolt for the door as soon as the ring is on your finger. You got exactly what you wanted.

Spectre -- walk in, try to grab any ring an average customer is presently inspecting... assuming there are any customers and any of them are viewing any rings during your visit. You have no idea what you're going to get, if anything.... but whatever you DO get, it won't be the specific ring in Meltdown you could have gotten.

No. Apparently, you don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Biology is an emergent property of chemistry which is an emergent property of physics.
There are lots of examples of physical properties of materials that are emergent properties.

Emergent behavior and processes are all around us and are studied by actual scientists in various fields specifically created to study emergent behavior -- many with the goal of learning how that behavior emerges from the underlying physics so that one can predict new properties of future materials.

This.

Especially since by using an ISP for government entities, they'd want to ensure that their own ISP would adhere to NN principles not only for themselves, but for citizens and employees throughout the state to be able to access their services with certain reasonable expectations (such as those defined by NN).

The state has a vested interest in ensuring timely, affordable public and employee access to their services unbarred by ISP interference.

holy jumpin' speculation, Batman!

16.04 is an LTS release. Most servers run the LTS version of Ubuntu. So, while your average Joe is fine with upgrading every 6 months, there are a massive number of production servers running an almost two year old LTS about to upgrade to this, and their sysadmin concerns have to be taken into account before this is released. It's going to have to keep them happy for another two years 'til the next release as well.

Ubuntu is smart enough to keep that backwards compatibility upon upgrade or replacement for this specific release for those sysadmins. It's a small concession to leave X.org as the default upon login to keep them happy for the next two years.

I wouldn't be surprised if 16.10 flips the options to make Wayland the default as it wouldn't affect those remaining on LTS & it gives developers more time to shift to Wayland. Most of the programs I use have partial Wayland support, but it's improving -- VLC, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium... and Nvidia is slowly coming around with Wayland compatible drivers. But, it's not there yet -- I wouldn't want Wayland as the default for an LTS version either w/ it's current state. It's not polished, but it's good enough for average users not running production LTS servers.

That's some really good data. Thank you!