Per Rice's web site, $46,600 is the tuition for this year. With fees and room and board the total cost of going to Rice is almost $60k, which is still below the elite schools but it is 6 times what it was when I went there starting in 1989.

There are one or two scammers calling just about every American phone number more-or-less weekly, way more than the 97 million calls this guy is alleged to have made. They always spoof the source number into something the same as yours except for the last 4 digits, which are selected randomly, in an attempt to make the call appear to come from one of your neighbors, in the misguided belief that people still use phone numbers which were assigned to landlines sequentially throughout neighborhoods decades ago. It probably works for them because Granny who's had the same phone number for 40 years is the kind of person they are trying to prey upon. [This also has the side-effect of making it difficult to blacklist all the calling numbers, which drives the hatred seen elsewhere in the thread.]

When I ignore the call on my cell phone, the robocaller, who doesn't understand answering machines or voicemail, just starts talking anyway as soon as it hears voice and then the voice stops, and leaves a long rambling message (the first few words of which is cut off) about one of two scams: Either "you qualified for a free trip based on your previous stay at one of our resorts" or "there is a problem with your account", both of them being very vague (the resorts or account in question are never specified) and trying to social-engineer actual information out of the victim.

Of course, those of you with phones have probably already heard these calls enough times to learn to ignore them immediately.

Unless the flaw in the gift card system they were exploiting was by checking the balances on Lowe's gift cards they didn't own, but had determined the sequence of numbers for, and spending other people's balances as soon as they saw the cards had value. Or they found some way to recharge a gift card without paying money. Or some similar glitch in the gift card system.

The original exploit worked up to Windows 8. The "security researcher" updated it to work with newer Windows versions, but not Windows 10, apparently. So he updated it to work against Windows 8.1, and maybe Windows Server 2016 if it somehow works there but not on Windows 10.

Everybody knows most job applications just get thrown in the trash anyway. McD's has automated this by using a service that automatically throws away applications after somebody views them once.

Your argument makes sense, except that Verizon DSL is still 3 to 7 meg in most places, so the 25 meg minimum tier on FiOS is not equivalent. And yes, this shows how far behind Verizon's infrastructure is in the dense northeast US, where it should be easier to provide good networking.

The people who took jobs at this place should have known what they were in for when the only description they could get of the company was a comparison to a shady web site, somehow operating within another web site where it makes no sense at all for them to be.

The intent was that they would be picked up by the camera, making this option prevent using the camera at all. But you have exactly the right idea; people will use a film that filters out that IR frequency while being transparent to visible light.

And anyway, that was already thought of in 1869 and completed in 1870.

But it's 5 million rupees, or about 75,000 US dollars. If that's all the fine is then Facebook will just pay it and move ahead with their Net non-Neutral program.

From the article:

Ericsson predict that 5G's latency will be around one millisecond - unperceivable to a human and about 50 times faster than 4G.

Love to see how that's going to work when your destination is on the other side of the planet. The speed of light is only 300,000 km/s or 300 km/millisecond.

Yes. They introduced a thing several months (maybe a year now) ago which gives you five inboxes instead of one. There's one for Social that catches all the stupid emails social networking things send you. There's one for Promotions that catches commercial email (at least, whatever isn't spam-boxed instead). There's one poorly defined one called Updates which is supposed to be for receipts, statements, bills, and confirmations - email related to stuff you bought or business you are involved in, as opposed to Store X's weekly email which is in promotions. And one for Forums is meant to be email from mailing lists. There is also the Primary inbox for everything else, which is meant to be just the real email from friends and such after everything else goes into the other boxes.

This never worked well. The social filter is pretty good. But I am on one mailing list which ends up in Promotions about 2/3 of the time, despite my repeatedly telling GMail to deliver it to Forums instead, and despite the mailing list having no commercial content whatsoever. The filter for Updates is really whacked; anything can end up in here, and the stuff that should go here can end up in Forums, Promotions, or Primary instead.

The new thing sounds similar, but on steroids. More like using labels (which are GMail's equivalent of folders to file email into, except that emails can have more than one label and so the folders aren't exclusive), but letting Google determine the labels by itself. We'll see how good that works.

The first story about "on a computer" patents getting invalidated is a good thing. But the second story is perhaps even more important. People are taking notice that patent examiners are not doing their jobs. Too many of them are just working one day a week/month/whatever and just rubberstamping their quota of patents, allowing anything whatsoever through the system, and falsely reporting that they worked full time and even overtime, because there is a corrupt culture that lets them get away with it. Exposing this could lead to mass firings, and some sort of system to ensure real accountability.

It's a problem, though, because there's no simple metric to determine whether patent examiners are doing a good job. Using number of patents reviewed as that metric encourages examiners to do a shoddy job actually examining the patents (i.e. what has actually been happening). If they are expected to pass only a certain fraction of patents, this is slightly better since it forces them to actually come up with reasons to reject some patents, but what fraction should they use? Two examiners doing perfect jobs may have very different fractions of accepted patents simply because one got better patents to review than the other, especially if they have different focus areas. Does the patent office even know the fraction of submitted patents in various areas which are good? A better metric would be whether accepted patents survive in the courts, but this depends on somebody actually challenging the patents and takes years after the fact. It might help now throw out some of the patent examiners who clearly haven't been doing their jobs in the past.

I'm not sure what the right solution is. Blind peer review and multiple review? Assign each patent to 2 or 3 different reviewers and call to carpet the ones who most consistently differ from others? Does that even work if half your patent examiners are shirking?

About 4 or 5 years ago, all the broadcast TV in the US changed over to a digital format, and the digital format includes HDTV broadcasts. If you have an HDTV and an antenna, and you live in a place where you can receive the signals, you can get the HDTV of all the broadcast networks over the air (OTA) with no cable.

It has been reported that Comcast re-compresses the digital HDTV streams, cramming them into a smaller digital channel in their cable system, in order to fit more channels in. This leads to reduced quality in the picture you view on Comcast compared to the OTA HDTV broadcast. I don't know about other cable systems. Here is one such report, though it seems to be specifically about other non-OTA HD channels (where the FIOS broadcast was used for comparison).

Not sure how this brief blurb with no link got posted, but here is a link to an actual story.