Let's be fair, Ixodes Polites is endemic to the entire planet.

Unless they've figured out a revolutionary new method of manufacture, they appear to be trying to drive the honest labs out of business so that people come back to the natural diamonds.

So guys, that synthetic diamond may be a good price, but when she finds out, you'll be loosing brownie points!

So just tell her upfront? "Yeah... I don't like supporting slavery, so this is a lab diamond instead." (Still requires not buying from DeBeers. Get your lab diamond somewhere else.) If she'd rather have a natural diamond in the face of that, I'd suggest reviewing how well you know her.

I sincerely hope it stays a joke.

I would point out that unlike windows updates, hearing aid batteries can be replaced on a schedule the wearer controls. If you don't want to risk it going dead at a bad time, just replace the battery a few days early.

Likewise the times when it's taken off would make good times for an update, but M$ doesn't care about scheduling. Go into the settings and tell it to install updates at 2AM? It's a coin flip whether it will respect that or not.

Yes, assistive devices have occasional failures, but this one is going to have regular failures.

Sounds like a great idea. Right up until a forced update gets someone killed because their hololens stopped talking to them at a bad time.

In order for the measures to work, you actually need to hold both the manufacturer and the consumer liable. It doesn't matter if the producer has a facility that can recycle their products with 95% yield, if the consumer throws it in the trash instead of the recycle bin it's still going to end up in a landfill.

I live in Colorado. Before disabling Amber Alerts on my phone I regularly received them from Tampa Florida. That's an 1800-2000 mile trip (depending on where in CO you start), so the Amber alert system in the US is no better.

Why is it so hard to get the location for the alerts down to something narrow enough to be useful? I like the idea of the system, but the implementation is so bad that it's useless.

There are three boxes to be used in the defense of liberty.
We've already tried the soapbox.
The ISPs bought the ballot box out from underneath us.
Only one left to try is the ammo box.

The fine print probably lets them get their pound of flesh some other way, or maybe it lets them weasel out of paying if you were driving distracted. "Use of a cellphone while driving suspends coverage of this policy for the following thirty days." Or something.

I do the same thing. It's NOT my job, that's not why I do it. It's an "Up yours!" to the distracted driver.

I didn't interact with facebook at all during the election. I have it listed as an untrusted domain.

The core problem with the idea of DRM is that it assumes a false premise. It assumes you can somehow provide software to the user in such a way that they simultaneously both can and cannot read it.

Encryption is the art of getting information from Alice to Bob such that Charlie can't read it.

DRM is the art of getting information from Alice to Bob such that Charlie can't read it, Except with the further constraint that Bob IS Charlie.

As one of the "I don't use iPhones" crowd, the contents of the announcement are almost certainly irrelevant to me. I dislike iOS, so unless the new iPhone natively supports dual boot to android, I won't be getting one. (If it does, I'd consider getting one just for how useful that would be when developing and testing mobile apps.)

Same here. I might take a rift if they literally paid me to take it, but it would spend its life on a shelf. Any mandatory associated software would live in a VM, and be fed fake data.

Besides, I already bought a Vive. The Vive II won't happen if the Vive I flops, and I keep my cost of living fairly low, so I can afford to be an early adopter of a few things.

Growing up I remember there being a pair of intersections along a major road in my home town, one had green over red, the other had red over green. Every time I was near there, I wondered "How many people have gotten hurt because a colorblind driver thought a red light was green?"

Shouldn't the lights at least always be in the same order so that colorblind can just know "the top one is red" (or "the bottom one is red")