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Submission + - CCIA lobby Trump to use tariffs agaist social media regulatation (abc.net.au)

Submitted by Dinjay
Dinjay writes: The CCIA is lobbying the Trump administration to use tariffs as a bargaining tool against the Australian government's planned scheme to force large social media and search companies to pay news outlets for news content, according to the Australian ABC article.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) represents big tech companies including X, Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon.

Comment Re:Neither surprising nor alarming (Score 1) 15

The last few sentences from the article you quoted:
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"What we should take from this is the reef – the world’s largest living structure – is currently still able to recover from repeated shocks. But these shocks are getting worse and arriving more often, and future recovery is not guaranteed.

This is the rollercoaster ride the reef faces at just 1.1C of warming. The pattern of disturbance and recovery is shifting – and not in the Reef’s favour."
----------

Even the Paris Agreement was for 1.5C and below 2C, which is looking

Submission + - Micrometeoroid noticeably damaged one of Webb scope's mirror segments (space.com) 2

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: A micrometeoroid struck the James Webb Space Telescope between May 22 and 24, impacting one of the observatory's 18 hexagonal golden mirrors. NASA had disclosed the micrometeoroid strike in June and noted that the debris was more sizeable than pre-launch modeling had accounted for. Now, scientists on the mission have shared an image that drives home the severity of the blow in a report(opens in new tab) released July 12 describing what scientists on the mission learned about using the observatory during its first six months in space.

Happily, in this case the overall effect on Webb was small...

[The] first six strikes met pre-launch expectations of rate as they came in at a rate of once per month, the report stated. Moreover, some of the resulting deformations are correctable through mirror realignments. But it's the magnitude of one of these six strikes that caused more concern, the paper noted, as it caused a significant blemish to a segment known as C3. The strike in late May "caused significant uncorrectable change in the overall figure of that segment," the report stated.

In this case, however, the overall impact to the mission is small "because only a small portion of the telescope area was affected." Seventeen [of 18] mirror segments remain unblemished and engineers were able to realign Webb's segments to account for most of the damage.

 

Comment Re:The painful part (Score 1) 209

Could you please share links to your info sources?

I am not knowledgeable about the issue of oil drilling in the US. From a quick read, it seems that you're right in that Obama did approve old drilling in 2015, but he then seems to have reversed that decision and mostly banned oil drilling in 2016.

Comment UI Baby duck syndrome (Score 1) 246

by Dinjay (#60892104) Attached to: Mozilla Is Working On a Firefox Design Refresh

This seems like the baby duck syndrome for UIs. Users 'imprint' in the first system they learn and then compare it with each new UI and reacts negatively if there are significant changes.

Technologies change, use cases change, standards change, so UIs must also change or be left behind.

I too find it annoying when the Firefox UI changes and I have to relearn my most used application by far. I have been using Firefox over many devices for a very long time and I would like to continue to depend on it into the future, so I will bear with UI changes. On occasion, I might even like the change - like when the address bar was moved to the bottom in FF mobile.

Comment Re:Netflix says they are following industry conven (Score 2) 69

The reasoning seems to be to track intentional views. In that sense, I guess 2min does make sense. Given that Netflix is not ad-supported or pay-per-view, intentional views seems as relevant for them as any other. It would be good if they also published full episode views as well.

Here is the text for anyone too lazy to click the link above:
--
"Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths--from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes), we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70% of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense. We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title (Chose to watch and did watch for at least 2 minutes--long enough to indicate the choice was intentional--is the precise definition)."
--

Comment Re:Snowden pardon (Score 1) 373

A President can't pardon someone until they are convicted of a crime. And due to that, a pardon in effect confirms the party is indeed guilty of the crime they were pardoned for

I don't believe that is correct. From this Slate article

". Perhaps the most famous presidential pardon of all time occurred before any charges were filed. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon absolved the former president of “all offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” between the date of his inauguration in 1969 and his resignation in August 1974."

Comment Re:The dirty tricks seem to come from one side (Score 1) 78

by Dinjay (#60681982) Attached to: Election Hoax Spreading Through Text Messages In Michigan

Right, because it's those dastardly Republicans refusing to allow certified poll watchers into the polling places in Pennsylvania. Wait... no... those are Democrats.

Could you please post a link? I googled and found this article.

According to that article, those were not certified poll watchers and this happened more than a month before polling day, so they weren't polling places yet.

there were several reasons why elections staff did not allow members of the public to arbitrarily enter their offices. The Trump campaign has no poll watchers approved to work in Philadelphia at the moment. There are no actual polling places open in the city right now. And elections officials are following coronavirus safety regulations, such as those limiting the number of people indoors.

Do you have more recent information?

Comment Re:I'm just a small town-lawyer.. (Score 1) 55

by Dinjay (#59232660) Attached to: Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha Has a Display On the Front, Sides, and Back

The images in the article indicate that the phone seems to detect which side is facing up when in a horizontal position and only light up that side.

The real smarts would be when the phone whether the phone would be able to detect which side to light up when in a vertical position. This is conceivably doable using face detection and/or hand orientation detection, but it might be tricky to get it right.

Submission + - Retired Georgia Tech Professor Suing Uber & Lyft for Patent Infringement (bizjournals.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the way in which Uber operates its business."

In a complaint filed May 31 in federal court [https://media.bizj.us/view/img/11336639/rideapp-vs-uber.pdf], Stephen Dickerson charges that Uber Technologies Inc. is infringing on a patent he won in 2004 [https://media.bizj.us/view/img/11336637/united-states-patent-6697730.pdf] for a "communications and computing based urban transit system."

"The core of Uber's business and technical platforms for its rideshare, bikeshare, and scooter sharing services practice the transportation system of Professor Dickerson's invention; without that system, Uber literally cannot operate. Throughout its existence, Uber has egregiously infringed [Dickerson's] patent without paying any compensation for such use," Dickerson's lawsuit alleges.

Last July, Dickerson sued Lyft Inc. in federal court in New York [https://media.bizj.us/view/img/11336699/rideapp-vs-lyft.pdf] , making the same allegations he is making against Uber. In a court filing, Lyft denies it infringed on Dickerson's technology. [https://media.bizj.us/view/img/11336778/rideapp-vs-lyft-answer.pdf] The lawsuit is continuing.

Comment CPAP Lock-in (Score 3, Informative) 154

by Dinjay (#57653056) Attached to: Why Sleep Apnea Patients Rely On a Lone, DRM-Breaking CPAP Machine Hacker

The data from each CPAP manufacturer is locked-in to their ecosystem. Often the only way for users access their data is upload it to the manufacturer's system. This means that if you change manufacturer, then you can't take your old data with you. Even worse, sometimes the manufacturer also lock-in the user to their agent where the user needs to visit the agent to get a detailed report to provide to the sleep physician.

Submission + - It's Not Your Imagination: Smartphone Battery Life is Getting Worse (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the last few weeks, I’ve been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s top models underperformed last year’s. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year’s iPhone X. Google’s Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2. Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, including more-efficient processors, low-power modes and artificial intelligence to manage app drain. Yet my results, and tests by other reviewers I spoke with, reveal an open secret in the industry: the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can’t keep up.

“Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 percent per year,” says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimize batteries. “But phone power consumption is growing up faster than 5 percent.” Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the darn phone down. Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time — and the risk of explosion if they’re damaged or improperly disposed. And the phone power situation is likely about to get worse. New ultrafast wireless technology called 5G, coming to the U.S. neighborhoods soon, will make even greater demands on our beleaguered batteries.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Happened To The Prank Apps That Used To Be Popular?

Submitted by OpenSourceAllTheWay
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Back when PCs were more boxy looking than today and people used floppy disks to store stuff there were a bunch of prank apps around that one could put on a DOS or Windows computer to annoy the hell out of siblings, classmates, coworkers and others. (Here is a listing of some older prank apps: https://www.prank-ideas-centra... and some more recent Android prank apps https://www.androidheadlines.c... ) Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down. Some would make the mouse pointer move in strange ways or make it give you the middle finger. Some would cause you to hit the right keyboard key and still mistype a word. Some would play an audio file in the background every now and then that gave the impression of your computer making strange noises for unknown reasons, even turning the OS volume up before the sound, and then down again, making it impossible to make the sounds stop. There are many more computer users today than there were back then. Yet there doesn't seem to be much new in the way of prank apps — at least for Windows. Why is that? Did Windows 8 cause PC users to lose their humor?

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