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Comment Re:Happened in Japan (Score 1) 74

Whatâ(TM)s interesting is that there was a report in Japan recently on tv about young people preferring to see movies after hearing spoilers. Apparently, Japanese youth donâ(TM)t like the excitement and thrills of plot twists and prefer to enjoy the fun of the storytelling without the pressure of having to wait for the unknown. You can chalk that up to the TikTok generation if you want, but its very probable that people are watching these summaries before watching the film proper. Studios will always claim lost sales and revenue, but I would be interested in knowing if these summary videos may have actually increased revenues.

Comment Finally! (Score 4, Insightful) 157

I've been wishing and waiting for this touch screen fad to come to and end and hopefully this is the beginning. I'm in the market for a new car and everywhere we go EVERYTHING is touch controls. How can that not be a safety hazard? My car is over 10 years old and the only touch panel is the navigation screen. I've driven cars with touch panel climate controls and I find them infuriating. It takes too long to search for what you need when driving and without sensory feedback you have to look every time. As a kid I wanted to live in a Star Trek universe with touch screens and controls, but now having experienced it to a certain degree, I'm ready to go back to old fashioned analog controls. At least then you can feel when you've changed something instead of wondering whether your touch responded or not.
The Internet

Are America's Big Telecom Companies Suppressing Fiber? (salon.com) 446

Salon just published a new interview with Susan Crawford, the author of "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution -- And Why America Might Miss It." Crawford has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure... This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future...

"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."

"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
United States

US Secret Service Warns ID Thieves are Abusing USPS's Mail Scanning Service (krebsonsecurity.com) 80

Brian Krebs reports: A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that "Informed Delivery," a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and made it easier for people to opt out. This week, the U.S. Secret Service issued an internal alert warning that many of its field offices have reported crooks are indeed using Informed Delivery to commit various identity theft and credit card fraud schemes.

The internal alert -- sent by the Secret Service on Nov. 6 to its law enforcement partners nationwide -- references a recent case in Michigan in which seven people were arrested for allegedly stealing credit cards from resident mailboxes after signing up as those victims at the USPS's Web site. According to the Secret Service alert, the accused used the Informed Delivery feature "to identify and intercept mail, and to further their identity theft fraud schemes."

Open Source

Linus Torvalds Officially Announces the Release of Linux Kernel 4.8 (softpedia.com) 95

Slashdot reader prisoninmate brings news from Softpedia: Today, Linus Torvalds proudly announced the release and availability for download of the Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now the latest stable and most advanced one. Linux kernel 4.8 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than eight Release Candidate testing versions that early adopters were able to compile and install on their GNU/Linux operating system to test various hardware components or simply report bugs...

A lot of things have been fixed since last week's RC8 milestone, among which we can mention lots of updated drivers, in particular for GPU, networking, and Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM), a bunch of improvements to the ARM, MIPS, SPARC, and x86 hardware architectures, updates to the networking stack, as well as to a few filesystem, and some minor changes to cgroup and vm.

The kernel now supports the Raspberry Pi 3 SoC as well as the Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen.
Science

Even In the Wild Mice Run In Wheels 122

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Scientists have found that if they place a running wheel outside, wild animals will flock to it. The researchers observed more than 200,000 mice, rats, and even frogs using the apparatus over a three year period. The findings suggest that like (some) humans, mice and other animals may simply exercise because they like to. Figuring out why certain strains of mice are more sedentary than others could help shed light on genetic differences between more active and sedentary people."

Comment Re:So says the religious guy. (Score 1) 1237

I remember trying to come to grips with the timeline story (everything created in 6 days vs the billions of years science gives us) as a child sitting in sunday school, and now when I think of it, I'm reminded of a joke I heard a long time ago:

[Average] Joe is having a conversation with God and asks, "What's a million years like to you?"

God answers, "A million years is like a minute."

Then Joe asks, "What's a million dollars to you?"

God says, "A million dollars is like a penny."

Joe thinks for a moment, then asks, "God, can I have a penny?"

God replies, "In a minute."

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