does that mean they'll continue to manufacture the same old models for the US market, which will possibly become less secure over time due to advanced hacking techniques applied to the same old well known hardware? Will it then result in a net loss in security over time?

It might resemble Cuba with their 1950s automobiles, frozen in time. I do agree that there is concern about backdoors and surreptitious identifying data sent to servers under control of China. Would it be better to allow new models, but require them to be completely torn down and reverse engineered by teams inside the FCC, or for their firmware source code to be handed over for inspection? (there's still room for nefarious business....hand over one set of code and install a slightly different set, or install a backdoor with a firmware update....)

I feel there's a legitimate concern here, and there always has been. What's a better solution, if any? Or is this the right solution for digital sovereignty?

Since I'm still using windows 10, I can just lean back and chuckle. It's been a hell of a shit show to watch over the years. Glad I'm not in it.

...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've watched that market try to take off since the 80s and there's just not a compelling use for it. I thought they were mad for going down that road yet again. Maybe that day will come, but it was super obvious from the start that Meta plowing billions of dollars into it and changing their company name wasn't going to make it happen. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the pitch about the metaverse inside Facebook. Techbros deluding themselves. I think they were just scrambling to place a bet on whatever the next hot thing would be after the initial round of social media companies and they lost horribly. In the mean time, their original product, despite being enshittified repeatedly, remains somewhat useful and popular. (just install SocialFixer and ad blockers before you touch it, don't use their app....)

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Of course, I'm still happily using Outlook 2019 on a bought and paid for standalone office license. I see no reason to 'upgrade'.

Monster sure had a great run convincing everyone otherwise. It became something of a joke in the early 2000s. They definitely took from P.T. Barnum's playbook. A sucker born every minute.

Agree with another commenter, overall system noise becomes more critical at the amplification stage. Most cheap stereos in the 90s had a modicum of white noise in the silence when you turned it way up. But one day a roomate got an -amazing- setup and it was so clean, and had so much dynamic range, it blew my mind. Was just great to put on a well engineered CD and listen to it with your eyes closed. With CDs you had the best possible input for consumer grade audio, and if you fed it through something that kept it clean, it was just pristine and fantastic. I haven't heard anything like it in a long time. These days my Bose noise cancelling headsets deliver really excellent sound, but my hearing isn't what it used to be. Tinnitus and a little bit of high frequency hearing loss all around prevent me from appreciating that last 10% in quality, so for me to pursue a setup like that now would be kind of wasted money. But I'm glad I got to hear it when I could appreciate it.

I own a Mazda with the center console scrollwheel. It is completely awesome. No reaching whatsoever, and very easy to navigate. It should be a model for everyone else. It got high praises when first introduced. Nothing has changed. This sounds like they just want to lower the cost of the car by getting rid of the wheel, button and associated wiring. I'm planning on a replacing my current Mazda with a slightly used one anyhow, which will still have the scroll wheel. Unbelievable. So dissapointed at Mazda.

...that it can mimic a lenticular stereo display? If it can do eye tracking and adjust every other column of pixels to every other eye, it might be able to do that.

Yea I feel like they got super cheap in both build quality and processing. They used to make really nice DVD players (and VHS and S-VHS players for that matter.) At some point they became commodity items and no one wanted to pay a lot of money for them anymore. China ate their lunch.

The very first BRD players, while better build quality, also had awlwful start and load times. They never really got great, but there was a time when the 2nd and 3rd gen machines were OK.

I haven't touched my BRD recorder in years. I used to sell videos I made on BD-R and DVD-R, until I started monetizing my YouTube channel, which brings in far more viewers and income with zero work once the video is uploaded. I used to buy printable BRD discs, jewel cases, print an insert for the jewel case, mail the disc...it was a lot of work for not much return. Late 2000's.

YouTube has democratized the distribution of independent videos. Their revenue split for ads is still the best deal out there. I just don't know how there is enough drive space in the world to accommodate the amount of video that is uploaded every minute to that service. One source says every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YT. I just can't see where that all goes. Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives? Will the whole thing collapse under its own weight? They don't seem to delete anything except videos that run into policy violations or copyright claims.

Fun story: I was at NAB (The National Association of Broadcaster's conference) in Las Vegas when the winner of the two dueling HD disc formats was picked. It was down to BluRay Disc championed by Sony, and HD-DVD by Toshiba. The studios decided to throw their weight at the BluRay Consortium during that show, and instantly the HD-DVD booth become a rather sad ghost town. BluRay wasn't great for independent producers, there were clauses that stated that for commercial discs you HAD to include encryption, even if you didn't want to, making doing a production run at a disc facility very expensive. It was a licensing scheme designed to make money for the consortium. So I stuck to making BRDs myself as a work around, since my numbers were so small. BRD works for the major labels but it was a terrible format for us small time folk. It was easier to make VHS tapes, you just sent a master to a dupe facility and they cranked them out. Of course, VHS was complete garbage as a format, but it was what we had. Fun times, and now ancient history, thank god.

If you already have the physical book, why would you want to suddenly jump to an audio version of it? I can't see that market being huge. The only scenario I can think of is if you are reading the book, and you want to continue 'listening' to it when you can't read it (driving in a car, etc.) Most people I know (including myself) are kind of one way or another, they either like reading real books, or listening to audio books. I'm a real book person, but I do listen to a number of podcasts by authors of books (The rest is History, Empire, etc.) and the sale of books would at least be good for them as they could have direct-purchase buttons for books they've referenced in their shows, including their own.

Light passenger rail is ideal for batteries. With lightweight trains and low rolling resistance, coupled with regenerative braking, it should be pretty easy on the batteries. The only issue would be the batteries catching fire underground...might be better for surface transport.

I hope it reminds everyone that every interaction they have with non-local AI is logged and available to the next hacker in line. If you're typing anything into an online service of any kind (or into a document stored in the cloud) assume that it could be leaked and behave appropriately. Do you want the thing you are asking about to become public?

No one wanted to be intensely surveilled while shopping? Never would have thought. Sure, grocery stores today have tons of cameras (look up!) but typically they only use the footage when they need it as evidence to convict a shoplifter.