It'll be interesting to see what the overall impact is on the cost of Blizzard titles.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

I am sure you know this and are just trying to shit on the editors, as one does on /.; but here, use this in case you didn't know: https://xcancel.com/_lyraaaa_/...

$1199 for the iphone 18 Pro. After the initial flurry of people who will just buy anything new from Apple, I'll be curious to see how these sell at that price point. I'm guessing the plain Jane iPhone 18 will come later on.

Pity the poor Europeans, crying out without the bot slop occupying the top half of the results. I wonder what Google is going to do to ensure that the 'degraded' results aren't universally preferred to the alternative?

Given the price point of these TV's I suspect 4G or 5G service is going to be prohibitively expensive to enable. I suppose if they thought the total lifetime revenue they'd be able to earn by snagging your data exceeded the cost to gather it, they'd do it.

Personally, I just don't allow TV's to talk to my local network at all. If for some reason I felt the need to do so, they'd be on a separate vlan with no access to a gateway to the outside world.

Google and Amazon are already doing the same thing along with your mobile providers so it's an arms race to limit the phoning home only to services that you want to enable. I doubt the government plans to intervene at all as some of that profit from trafficking your data trickles down to politicians.

Blackhole most (all?) of the ads and trackers so the browser and your network doesn't spend any significant resources on those requests. I have pihole in front of everything on my home network and it makes a noticeable difference in the perceived performance of browsing and also allows me to easily have a throttle (or not) for content I don't want my young kids to consume.

https://pi-hole.net/

It's easy to setup and even a dated raspberry pi has more than enough oomph to do the work within a very small power envelope.

Roku does suck. Personally, I just use it as a front-end to play my home media on the various TV's in the house (using Jellyfin as the back-end) along with occasional content from Amazon Prime. I've deleted all the junk channels they try to foist on customers. Yes, the hardware does kinda suck, but it's just "good enough" to excrete a 4k hdmi signal, pass through the audio to my receiver where needed, and the interface is "good enough" for my family to use it. I've also neutered most of the "phone home" traffic with Pihole. Before that, they were easily the chattiest devices on the network, whether they were being used or not.

I have zero interest in consuming AI generated content or advertisements of any sort.

If Fox breaks it any further, I'll just go back to rolling my own endpoints out of raspberry pi or similar devices. I stopped doing that a few years ago as it was just less hassle to pick up the cheap roku boxes, but that worked fine too....it was just a bit more work.

Because they want to use it too.

I suspect that the relationship is not linear in a case like this: cancer tends to be a big issue for otherwise healthy-ish people because a lot of varieties of it take some time to develop; either chronic exposure to whatever the carcinogen of concern is or some time after the exposure when your luck with the mechanisms that suppress abnormal cell division eventually fails, or both.

There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.

https://www.flocksafety.com/bl...

From a recent investment round announcement:

Flock is thrilled to announce our fundraise of $275 million, bringing our valuation to $7.5 billion. This investment will allow our team to continue to drive innovation in safety technology, expand research and development, and support U.S.-based manufacturing.

The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated. This builds on a year of rapid expansion where Flock surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue — reflecting a 70% year-over-year increase.

that anyone thought for an instant this data wouldn't be misused. Follow the money.

If you'd seen some of the aftermath images of car accidents in China that I've seen first hand, you'd question the safety of cars manufactured in China. Perhaps things have improved, but I saw first hand where there were fatalities in car accidents at speeds that shouldn't have caused anything more than minor injuries in countries with strong safety regulations for auto manufacturers in place.

Test them out on Canada first. :) If they can pass rigorous safety tests, I don't have any real problem with them competing in the auto marketplace in the US. Domestic manufacturers will have to compete or find a better use for that industrial capacity. That's assuming there's a level playing field without significant government subsidies that enable predatory pricing (on both sides).

How good is their game-streaming at cutting out the various 'filler' time(loading screens, startup animations telling you that Nvidia is the way it's meant to be played) and does it have some sort of 'suspend' state to handle cases where you would pause a game if it either doesn't have save on demand anywhere or takes a little while to load from save?

I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.

Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.

Given that they already purchased Activision Blizzard King, including the "King" part of it, they clearly already have a considerable interest in casual players.

What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.

It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.