How many hours of an Asian font designer'(s) time can you buy for $20k? It'd be funny, if it turns out that firing the font company pays off in less than a year.

Not with a tattoo gun, but yes, microneedle delivery is a new experimental way to deliver vaccines. It's less like a tattoo gun and more like a nicotine patch or a bandaid, though.

And you bet people will be waiting in line on day one to buy it...

There is zero value in some big scary climate risk number also being disclosed, because A that risk accounted for if you are studying the details anyway and does not help you make a rational decision, because it literally does not affect you beyond the places where it is already baked into the numbers.

If you don't care why the insurance is so expensive or unavailable (e.g. high risk of flooding) then maybe you also don't care about why the house's price is so high (e.g. nice location, good construction, etc). No need to even look at the house. Just treat the whole damn thing as an abstract exercise in numbers.

OTOH, some people might actually care about details. Maybe because they're considering living there?

Okay. Thanks for all but admitting that exactly none of those needs are actually solved by the feature we're talking about.

You don't have a need. You just don't want your routine to be disrupted by a company taking away a feature that works for you. And it's entirely okay to feel that way. But it's not really a good reason to have designed such an overly complex and, at least in the real world, frequently under-performing protocol in the first place.

Keep telling yourself that I'm the one who doesn't understand the tech if it helps you sleep at night.

Then neither will casting, because casting by definition requires the TV to have Internet. It's a handoff process whereby the TV itself retrieves the content from the Netflix servers, and all your phone does is handle the authentication and key delivery plus playback controls.

You can do screen mirroring with a non-Internet-capable or disconnected TV, but not you can't use the ridiculously designed feature that I'm talking about.

So everything I'm saying is useless is useless for you, too.

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

Not really, no. If I wanted to use the TV to do all of the networking and playback, I would have just used the TV's app to do it. The number of hotels I've seen where the TV supported Chromecast or AirPlay streaming but did not have a built-in Netflix app are literally zero.

From my perspective, casting is a complete disaster by its very nature. It relies on the display device having full Internet access, which isn't a given. Literally every time I've wanted to do casting, it has been because the TV set's Netflix app wasn't working because of a network problem, and it couldn't get access to the Internet, so I was trying to use the phone's network connection. By shifting the network connectivity back to the TV set, it makes the entire system completely worthless, because the exact situations where it could be useful are the exact situations where it isn't.

Once again, Open Source is embarrassed and left behind.

mplayer and mpv still, after all these years, don't have a way to prevent things from working if the content origin happens to be Netflix. It just plays on, stupidly Just Working, instead of breaking the way that Netflix realized their users want it to break.

To be fair your link does say "designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions", so it sounds like SSH, work VPNs, banking etc. don't count because they aren't designed to get around the porn filters.

You make sense, but there is nothing that is "designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions" more than SSH and VPNs bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions, is there? Why would anyone ever design a tool to get around filtering and restrictions, when they can already do that with established mainstream tools such as SSH or VPNs?

I can't believe the bill is intended to never be applied to anything. If we do think it's written in such a way that it never applies, I don't think it'll be litigated that way. Once it's enacted, they're going to say it applies to something, and that something is going to be anything that is secure.

You didn't read the bill very closely.

I think I read it much more closely than you did.

Sec 2(a):

"Circumvention tools" means any software, hardware, or service designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions including virtual private networks, proxy servers, and encrypted tunneling methods to evade content restrictions.

This is either intended to apply to something or never apply to anything. Do we agree that the text is intended to do something, to somehow cover some possible situation which might realistically come up? You don't think they just put this in there, but with the begrudging admission that it could not ever possibly apply, do you?

Assuming you're still with me there, please give an example of what kind of tool this defines as a circumvention tool. Surely you have something in mind.

The bill is about outlawing the distribution of p0rn, and a VPN is merely listed as an unlawful circumvention tool.

That might have possibly been the original intent several years of editing ago, but I do not see anything in the definition of "circumvention tools" which even tangentially relates to porn. Do you? I think porn is 100% irrelevant in this discussion.

What I'm getting at, is that there isn't a "porn version" of Wireguard or SSH or HTTPS. They're all the same, content-neutral. The bill either bans them all, or doesn't ban anything. If you take my above bolded challenge to name a circumvention tool that this bill does address, I'm going to take all of your arguments that you give for why the law does apply to your circumvention tool example, and I am going to successfully apply them to SSH and HTTPS. And I'll be exactly as correct as you.

The only way this bill doesn't restrict SSH and HTTPS, is if it doesn't restrict anything at all. Don't agree? Then name something it does restrict.

This isn't a partisan issue

Sorry, but no one can ever really say something like that these days, and be believable. While it's true there's no classical left/right split on this issue, our classical left/right days are long over.

If Trump decides he opposes this, then you're going to see 90% of Republicans suddenly oppose it, and it'll become partisan.

So, before you tell me this is non-partisan, please explain how regulating AI will help criminals steal, preferably from the US Treasury. Because if this does not aid crime, then Republicans will be against it. They might not be against it now, but they're going to be.

The figures can be entirely correct and still the answer can be "no". Why? Because Android might use the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux distro in any meaningful sense of the word. And Steam Deck and Chromebooks *can* have some reasonable facsimile of a Linux development environment, but I'd expect maybe 0.1% of users to actually turn it on.

So most of those folks are Linux "users" in much the same way that TiVo owners were linux "users", i.e. they are using a device that deep down, at a level that the user is unaware of, runs some small subset of what a Linux distro typically contains, with a bunch of stuff on top that they mostly aren't in control over.

It's like calling Mac users UNIX users. It's technically correct — the best kind of correct — but grossly misleading.

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