On one hand, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/. We have competing standards, so let's make a new one to compete with them.

On the other, a proper patent-free standard would be nice.

Well, really, I think it depends how the law is implemented whether it's shitty. Simple pay-to-link is inherently stupid and is a footgun that will guarantee less traffic by banning free word-of-mouth promotion. But if linking is free but reproducing the headline, snippet and picture is what they have to pay for, that's all most people read and therefore takes away the pageview from the news site. It's also reproducing copyrighted material without permission.

You can't refuse the upgrade without root, at least on Galaxy S7. You can push "later" for a while, but then the choice disappears, leaving "update now" and "update tonight".

Can it write a proper ' yet, and not write Ã(TM) instead?

Agreed, he's a jackass and he's cancer, but he has as much right to free speech as anyone.

No, companies like Google aren't required to give him a platform. But we had a wonderful free speech platform with the internet, and this is another step away from that. We're moving more toward an internet where a relatively small group of content creators who are approved of by the major tech companies produce all the content, and you consume it.

Do we really need to make another cable TV? Is this what people really want?

Page taking forever to load? Annoying autoplay videos? Newsletter beg? Click the back button. If enough of us do this, the designers will eventually get the hint.

5 stars doesn't necessarily mean perfect. Price plays a large role. A $100 phone that performs like a $200 one could easily be 5 stars. But a $1000 phone had better be absolutely flawless to get 5 stars.

See, that's a proper desktop OS that uses machine code for apps and draws things in a normal, sensible way. Google only invests in embedded systems that choose ridiculous bloated ways of doing things, like using Java or HTML5 so that even the simplest apps can obliterate your battery.

No, the 4chan /gif/ board, which is short video clips containing primarily memes. It traditionally used the gif format, but today it's mostly webm.

Whether or not you enable GPS or even have a GPS receiver, the cell network can triangulate the signal from your phone. Depending on the technology used, all cell phones can be located through this technology built into the network, or have GPS that can be activated remotely with no option to override. This is legally required, so that 911 operators can see where you are if you call in and can't talk to them or don't know where you are.

I don't see why this technology is being taken in the direction it is. Where you see a robocall bot, I see a valuable accessibility technology.

Think something like Stephen Hawking's robot voice synthesizer thing, but realistic sounding and trained to your speech patterns. That way you can control it with shortcuts instead of typing out every word you want to say, and it'll autopilot between the keywords or concepts you pick. This could be a huge boon to people who can't speak.

A similar technology could be also the next smartphone keyboard app. Write a few keywords and it turns it into a sentence.

And how would you prevent this sort of thing in a way that won't interfere with legit Javascript apps or be easily defeated? If it were that easy we'd have it as an extension or core feature by now. Instead we have things like uMatrix that generally work but are really fiddly.

Firefox definitely has its downsides. It gradually eats RAM until it gets too slow to use and needs to be restarted. That's why I use Chromium for most browsing - its memory leaks are mostly per tab-process and reset when you close a tab. I keep it around for things like YouTube where Chromium and its extensions can't block obnoxious ads. And on Android Firefox wins hands-down since Chrome/ium have no extension support, very basic options, and even no way to back out of a site that pollutes your history to trap you.

Of course I long for the Firefox 2.x days, where you could browse with fifty tabs on a Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM and not have problems until XP ran out of window handles. But that wasn't the same stupidly Javascript-heavy web we have today, where a single page load couldn't fit on a floppy and basic news sites pull shenanigans to defeat no-autoplay settings and make an unwanted streaming video follow you down the page while you attempt to read.

Then we block *.gif.