Posts by Dinanziame 1150 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The point is that currently, you need to notice that you have a poor connection, that a public WiFi is available, and you need to tell your phone to connect to that WiFi (at least the first time). This proposal would make it happen automatically for you, and it would let WiFi owners earn some money, which makes it more likely that stores will have a free (for you) WiFi sponsored by the phone companies.
Well, as noted the article, this might well mean you'll end up downloading a 10 MB GIF animation every time — because some web sites are that shitty.
That said, Google should implement a slider with five settings: autoplay everything; only autoplay muted; only autoplay muted on whitelisted sites; no video autoplay; no animation whatever gif included.
I'm glad that we will get a new season of my favourite reality show. It's a bit difficult to follow the current game of chicken between the EU and the UK government, each holding onto the fishing rights/common standards and refusing to let go while the abyss beckons, but it is sure to end up in a grand finale in December, and if history is any judge, we will get a sequel next year.
However monopolies do set the market price, as there's no alternative.
In the case of Amazon, maybe; but not for Google. Amazon sets prices for whatever it sells, but ads sold by Google don't have a fixed price list; they're auctioned off, and so they are sold at what the customers are willing to pay. (Google also sells cloud services at fixed prices, but it's not much compared to Ads). If every company buying ads in UK keeps having exactly the same budget, it should change very little to which and how many ads are shown, since they're all competing at comparatively the same price.
an independent arbitrator would choose which of the two parties’ final offer is the most reasonable
That's a very interesting idea. I'm not sure how "reasonable" can be defined — reasonably — in a legal way, but it is a very effective way to force each side to present an offer. Facebook and Google's offer so far has always been "How about nothing? Does nothing work for you?" and the publishers have always been forced to accept. But this rule automatically implies that the giants paying nothing at all is unreasonable, and so any proposal by the publishers would logically be more reasonable by default. And so, Facebook has to give a feasible proposal which would pay publishers some amount — because not doing so amounts to giving a blank check to publishers for whatever they ask.
I think it's a bit shaky from a legal point of view, but I'm looking forward to applying this "choose the most reasonable" rule the next time my children are squabbling.
It's because the cost of living isn't the same everywhere.
Yes, but up to now the place where you lived was tied with where you worked. Working at a certain office forced you to live nearby. When everybody is working from home anyway, it means you're telling your company "I like to live in New York, and so you should pay me more than this guy who prefers to live in Austin".
I hope they have the balls to offer Fortnite on a third-party app store for Android, and nothing for iOS. I could see this catching on; after all, it's useful to be on official app stores to become famous, but apps with over 100M players, angry birds and the like, can probably convince the vast majority of their players to download the app from their website.
If the most successful apps leave iOS, maybe then Apple will change its practices...?
That's the most interesting disconnect I've met between people from mainland China and the rest of the world. You do expect differences of opinions about Beijing or Tibet, but it's more surprising that if you ask them if Taiwan is a country, they answer "of course not". And they are just as surprised to learn that in the rest of the world, the vast majority of people consider that Taiwan is of course a country, since it has its own laws, it own government and its own army.
Each side has only half of the story. People from mainland China know that Taiwan is not officially recognised by almost any country — not by the US, not any European country, not the UN. People outside of mainland China know that for all practical purposes, their country has relations with Taiwan like any other country, with a not-an-embassy led by a not-an-ambassador handling visas and trade relations, etc.
Mandatory XKCD.
If I create a website with a message board, I am completely allowed to decide in any way I want which messages to remove and which to keep. I can ban people, filter opinions, prevent access from countries. Users in turn have the choice whether to use my site or not. If Facebook was owned and operated by the government, that would be illegal. However, it is not.
Maybe it's just timing. Flutter was announced in 2015, Kotlin released for the first time one year later. It was probably too late to turn the ship around. Then again, designing a language to be multiplatform and designing it to improve on Java might well mean fundamentally different life choices that you cannot easily reconcile.
legal to pick up transmission to and from a drone in order to track or monitor it [...] likely illegal to record, decode, capture or store those transmissions.
What's the distinction between all those terms? If I pick up transmissions, am I not capturing them? For that matter, what's the difference between record and store? I appreciate the fact this is deemed likely illegal, since as per the silly common law practice, it is impossible to know if what you're doing is legal or illegal until somebody sues and it is decided by the Supreme Court.
prodded by a reporter who mentioned Alibaba and Alibaba only, he said: “Well, yeah. We’re looking at other things, yes we are”.
I'm starting to wonder how many of "Trump declarations" are the result of a journalist asking a precise question on something he knows nothing about, and getting a vague answer that "we're looking into it".
Google offering a Desktop client? Unlikely. You're supposed to use the music.youtube.com website, or the phone app.
Indeed. I took some very nice pictures of fishes with my Pixel 2 while diving in tropical seas. The touch screen doesn't work underwater, but double-press the power button turns on the camera, and then the volume button snaps a pic. However, the contacts have refused to accept random chargers ever since.
I think their purpose is to give off a "you're being watched, so don't try anything" vibe
Consultant: I think this message can be made much more friendly, by removing the second part of the sentence, which sounds accusatory. Also, rather than using the passive voice, rather use the active voice, with a subject indicating both closeness and a protective stance:
"Big brother is watching you"
There, much nicer now!
Seriously. I understand that domain registration is something you should lose unless you pay for it; but when I forget to pay my rent in time, I'm not kicked out the next second. And changing flats would be arguably much less disruptive for me than changing domain names for some businesses.
Of course, it's easy to laugh and point the finger at the morons who forgot to renew their registration, but this is even a security issue — users trust that the website with that address is the same as the one from yesterday. Maybe it's time to introduce some mandatory protections?
Did any of these apps reach an adoption rate of even 30%? It seems an exercise in futility.
And even if it worked as intended, and people learnt that they have been in contact with an infected person, what does it change? If you have symptoms, you get checked. If you don't have symptoms, you can't get checked (not enough testing kits). What the app tells you is essentially irrelevant.
However, this type of situations often include the victim not being able to stand up to the abusive treatment, and having to obey orders. So short of making it impossible foranybody to install a tracing app — not even the victim — I'm not sure what technological solution there is.
As the authors themselves note, there are legitimate uses, and no good way to make distinctions.
They might as well ask video camera makers what they do to protect the privacy of people.
As far as I know, Teslas don't have a lidar. They say it's not necessary, because anyway the car needs to solve optical recognition, so a lidar is redundant. And as everybody knows, you don't need redundancy for safety systems. Ahem.
Which I translate to: "Our cars are already expensive, Lidars would add on to of that. Also, they don't look cool."
I'm going to be my cranky annoying self, but I really feel it's a mistake to pull tricks like these on people you might need to rely on when you have a real problem.
Personally, in such circumstances, I might decide it's exactly the moment for me to go for a cuppa, and let you flounder...
Ah but see, the cookies are informed consent — that's why we have all the pop-ups saying "this website uses cookies". So that's technically legal... Maybe?
This article is a pretty neat example how a simple "don't track me" sentence can be muddied with "but we don't know who you are" and "you can change it at any time" and probably "you gave your informed consent on page 153 of the T&C's"
What I miss most is the ability to talk directly to people. It's not only about social contacts, it's just easier to ask a quick question or discuss a situation for five minutes when you can walk over, rather than send a text, or ask for a VC.
The second thing I miss most is the coffee machine.
If I offended you, tough shit - the world owes you nothing
James Damore undoubtedly thought so, too.
More seriously, if you make one single person angry, it could well be that they're oversensitive and illogical. But as the number of persons you make angry grows, eventually comes the moment where you should ask yourself who's to blame. Preferably before you lose your job...
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