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Why do I feel that this is the equivalent of Microsoft, mid-90s, deciding to merge Bob and Windows? In my mind there is little inertia behind Chrome OS, but a freight train with Android. Why bother? Why not just add extensions to Android to allow the display/window manager (or whatever they call it) to have the parts of an OS that keyboard-ists want? Off the top of my head adding a "start" menu, full libreoffice suite, control of things like firewall, etc. and easy root access would be all they need. Apps will adapt to the world of supporting keyboard/keyboard and touch/touch, or dwindle in obscurity behind those that do.

The cynic in me thinks it's important that Sony be beaten over the head with this thing until kingdom come. It's just a shame this story never spread far beyond tech circles.

The rootkit scandal isn't a small matter. It's a serious act of irresponsible anti-consumer behaviour, and not one to be forgotten. Ideally someone would have gone to prison for it, but no. It seems reasonable to at least continue to hold a grudge about it, even, yes, after 10 whole years.

YouTube has added support for Virtual Reality videos to its Android app.
YouTube made this announcement in its blog post which gives details about two new VR features of YouTube's Android app.
The first announcement is, YouTube now supports VR video-a brand new kind of video that makes you feel like you're actually there. Using the same tricks that we humans use to see the world, VR video gives you a sense of depth as you look around in every direction. Near things look near, far things look far. So if you were excited about 360° videos, this is pretty cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eUIEJoWSqI&list=PLK2ccNIJVPpAlYHL7UaTP5uUs6eux28ZG

A week ago I was reading about how Palestinian's were being unnecessarily being killed when they attacked soldiers and police. The key part about this was the weight given to how deadly the response was. I do not justify taking a person's life without very very good reasons. This video is the first I have seen which shows what is actually happening. Technology showing the truth of a single encounter. I used to be against all of the CCTV put up around cities. Now I support it.

forgot a second reference:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/06/the-fcc-says-it-cant-force-google-and-facebook-to-stop-tracking-their-users/

The first response of every techie exposed to the two is "hey, why don't they just combine..."

This has been too long coming. The best explanation I've heard for the ongoing split is a very Microsoft-like siloed set of development teams for the two pseudo-OSes...

Chrome is fairly sucky though, really, both as a browser and as a pretend OS. Getting Android more functional with a desktop/keyboard multi window environment would be the way to go in my opinion.

Thomas Hesse, President of Sony's Global Digital Business, literally said:

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Forget? Not in 1,000 years.

"UN plot to make the Internet a safe space" does a horrible job of covering the story but it's real and these people are VERY well connected politically to names like Ban Ki-Moon, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt. They want to make it illegal to disagree with a feminist online by calling it violent harassment and pressing charges under laws meant for death threats. Someone in Canada has already gone to court over this.

Or the powers that be can buy off the people running the centralized services like Twitter or take over democratic institutions like Wikipedia to remove people and information they want to suppress from the most popular venues. The less popular venues can be smeared in the press to discourage people from going there, filtered from mainstream sites, forced offline, etc.

If this farce continues Google may end up laying fibre in Aus. The government has put laws in to stop Australian ISPs from laying their own fibre so their pet FTTohbuggeritsomewherewithin300moftheithouseandputmorecopperinforthelastmile/FTTN (was FTTP). The strange part about this 180 is that the NBN was touted to replace the aging outdated highly expensive to maintain copper network. Help us Google Fibre! You are our only hope! (Except for iiNet and TPG of course who are raring to go to connect fibre)

Except for the lack of a root account by default (my! device! Fugoogle!) I quite like android as an OS. On a laptop? No. Too many ui issued which are easily forgiven on a phone, this year.

At least you have some idea of what's going on. In New Zealand, John Key announced that he would resign if it was discovered that we were under mass surveillance.
Well, it was discovered, but he redefined it as "mass data collection," which isn't the same thing in his mind, so he didn't have to resign.

A lot of us use a VPN now. We still do not know what our ISPs are logging or how much it will cost. The NBN is a joke - a new fibre network now being deployed in places with copper. Freedom? While being watched 24/7. No. Do not use us as a reference.

You quote statistic that is 6-8 years old. Things got worse in the meantime. For example, scroll down to the list of countries, specifically to the US:
" Internet access by individuals in the US is not subject to technical censorship, but can be penalized by law for violating the rights of others. As in other countries, the potential for legal liability for civil violations, including defamation and copyright, constrains the publishers of Internet content in the United States. This can have a "chilling effect" and lead to self-censorship of lawful online content and conduct. Content-control software is sometimes used by businesses, libraries, schools, and government offices to limit access to specific types of content.^[117]
In 2014, the United States was added to Reporters Without Borders's (RWB's) list of "Enemies of the Internet", a category of countries with the highest level of Internet censorship and surveillance. RWB stated that the U.S. ""¦ has undermined confidence in the Internet and its own standards of security" and that "U.S. surveillance practices and decryption activities are a direct threat to investigative journalists, especially those who work with sensitive sources for whom confidentiality is paramount and who are already under pressure."^[2]"

Some more interesting parts from the main article about the US censorship:
"The strong protections for freedom of speech and expression against federal, state, and local government censorship are rooted in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. These protections extend to the Internet and as a result very little government mandated technical filtering occurs in the U.S. Nevertheless, the Internet in the United States is highly regulated, supported by a complex set of legally binding and privately mediated mechanisms."

"Significant public resistance to proposed content restriction policies have prevented the more extreme measures used in some other countries from taking hold in the U.S"

"Public dialogue, legislative debate, and judicial review have produced filtering strategies in the United States that are different from those found in most of the rest of the world. Many government-mandated attempts to regulate content have been barred on First Amendment grounds, often after lengthy legal battles.^[3] However, the government has been able to exert pressure indirectly where it cannot directly censor. With the exception of child pornography, content restrictions tend to rely more on the removal of content than blocking; most often these controls rely upon the involvement of private parties, backed by state encouragement or the threat of legal action.^[4] In contrast to much of the rest of the world, where ISPs are subject to state mandates, most content regulation in the United States occurs at the private or voluntary level."

And so on... it is not direct as in other parts of the world but it is there.

I don't see where you got that, as I found your source saying precisely the opposite:

"Of the 41 separate countries classified in these two years, seven were found to show no evidence of filtering (Egypt, France, Germany, India, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States),"

Reporters Without Borders flagged the United States for their SURVEILLANCE of internet users, NOT censorship.

The parts of the quote in the last paragraph are quite contradictory to the ONI (OpenNet Initiative) classifications, see here. Some of the "nice" countries are not that "nice":

• US is classified as "enemy of internet" with pervasive censorship.
• Australia is "changing".... definitely for worse.

And let's not forget about Internet surveillance with a nice analogy:
- the door is closed in the censorship countries
- the door is open in the non-censorship countries.However, be prepared to bend over as the "big brother" will be watching. And here come US and Australia again...

Developing countries following US and AU is probably not the best idea.

10 years? Isn't that about what I would get if I did the very same thing?

I would never down-vote an article only because I it is of no interest to me. Down-voting is solely for crap.

I think the main problems are:

1. they did it on purpose
2. they got barely a slap on the wrist for it
3. they would do it again

**something different.

So is YouTube, so we shouldn't discuss their involvement either? Might as well just post generic topics and talk about different.

10 years is a long time. Get get get get, get over it. People spend too much of their lives holding grudges.

You're quite welcome to down-vote anything that doesn't interest you.

I can vote in a few hrs. Did not do it because I am not much interested in this article... Non-American here. :-)

This must be brought out every decade and rubbed in their noses.

Submitted to the pipe on Thursday, waited there all this time for three up-votes.

The other (Google fiber) story I submitted around the same time is still waiting...

Yes please ask them why. Is the performance good enough that they don't miss the Mac environment?

On tuesday...

For what it's worth, at work, some people have to do real-time audio processing (guitar effects, sound distortion, additive or subtractive synthesis, you name it. Those who run Linux use Pure Data for such thing as an open source replacement to the OSX + Max/MSP pair).

When Ubuntu Studio was released they all gave it a try, but they didn't stick with it for more than one or two release cycles and are all back on bare Ubuntu. I'll try to ask them why.

Thanks for showing solidarity by including a typo in your own subject line...

I think it is 'Ubuntu Studio'. :-)

The movies are great and all, but a TV series is better in every way.

You say "Five comments and not one mentioning ESPN," right after pointing out that "ESPN is big enough to look after itself."

Pretty sure you've answered your own point.

ESPN is big enough to look after itself. They will either renegotiate their distribution rights or go elsewhere. Maybe they'll pay to distribute it themselves.

YouTube is big enough to look after itself. They have calculated the risk and are willing to lose some content (temporarily?) to launch YouTube Red.

People are (hopefully) smart enough to look after themselves. If they want to watch the videos they'll find a way.

Not that I would pay for YouTube or watch ESPN so what do I know.

Five comments and not one mentioning ESPN. Come on pipedot I thought better of you. I do agree it's a terrible name though, what's wrong with premium or something in that vein?

Test results in real-world driving always have been different from artificial tests, for all types of ICE.
No surprises there.

The only clean ICE is the one that doesn't get built.

Discussed here: http://pipedot.org/2T88

Artsy's Richard Prince page.

Do try the |. RSS reader. It rocks. Btw, what built in client?

The current SSL cert system is a corrupt money grab (although, I suppose we can thank them for indirectly funding Ubuntu.) There is just no reason why they need to charge hundreds of dollars a year to sign a certificate.

The site still gets an "A" from the SSL Labs testing page. A year ago, when I made the certificate, Google still accepted SHA1 signatures. Their new warning (in Chrome based browsers) is just a warning (and, in my opinion, a bit premature.). That being said, the next time I renew the cert, I'll make sure that I switch to a provider with SHA2 certs down the entire chain, as well as one that allows a working SSL stapling setup.

I just have to ask...

Why do users need all three of /feed/ /stream/ & /reader/ ? Seems an awful lot of replication of almost the same functionality. And that's in addition to the site-wide versions. And this is all in-addition to (and separate from) the stories on the front page.

I'm pretty happy with the (native, offline) feed reader on my phone, so I can't imagine I'll be switching to (browser based, online) Pipedot's feed reader, but it does still seem confusingly almost-redundant, and doesn't really integrate together within the site (at least not yet).

I was chuckling about that earlier, thinking that RedTube are going to get a large number of rather surprised visitors. It has the potential for hilarity.

I'm not sure if this is a play by Google to distance itself from Red Tube [nsfw] by hoping people associate "red" as part of YouTube, or if they're hoping people get them confused so more people end up on YouTube instead; a sort of self-promoting search engine optimization if you will. I would think really any name other than "YouTube Red" would have been more appropriate.

I don't know that I would agree that downloaded content has no watch time. I would assign it the watch time of the video length as a first iteration. In any case any deal without specifics, isn't meant to be taken as the final word or anything other than a first draft.

If it were me designing it, I'd have a multiplier on the video time for each download based on the number of shares/likes and rewatch factor of the video in question. If the average viewer re-views a video online 3 times and shares it, then each download would count as three complete views plus a fudge factor of maybe two for the shares that are potentially lost? Its complicated, but not impossible for youtube.

Please update your SSL certificate and settings :)

Time for a new mod type: +1 SystemDSucks

From http://gizmodo.com/youtubers-are-up-in-arms-about-youtube-red-1738022087

"the company says it will give YouTube Red partners a majority of the subscription revenue they bring in. YouTube hasn't specified the exact amount, but it will be based on your watch time."

Reading this literally -- downloaded content has no "watch time" ... and therefore would not garner payment for the content creators.

I was searching roundwhen youtube red ads I foundThe jokes write themselves.

So, really it's not about a greater placebo effect in the US, but longer trials that change the placebo response.

No, it definitely IS about the placebo effect. Longer trials are only one of several possible explanations as to why the effect is significant in the US. An alternative theory as to the cause is the "direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs - allowed only in the United States and New Zealand".

A third option is that this study may simply be wrong: "I don't think that controlling the placebo response will increase the number of successful trials. What drug companies have to do is to find more effective drugs." -Fabrizio Benedetti, who studies placebo responses at the University of Turin, Italy.

http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-painkiller-trials-1.18511

The FDA's standards for response above placebo are very, very low.

"more than 90% of potential drugs for treatment of neuropathic and cancer pain have failed at advanced phases of clinical trials"

It should be harder to make new drugs that solve the same problem as existing ones: if it's not better, why should people have to pay higher prices for it (new drugs get new patents)?

While new drugs get new patents, the old drugs remain just as cheap. If you don't have a good reason to use the newer one... don't!

But new drugs are still important. Some people have bad reactions to components of certain drugs, but do fine with others. Different drugs have different side effects. The effectiveness of new drug may be significantly better than the existing drug on specific stages of illness (e.g. diagnosis too late-stage for the cheaper medication to be effective). Of all the problems that exist in pharmaceuticals, too-many good & effective drugs isn't one of significant concern.

haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
refrigerator

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/lists/7-hilarious-haiku

Ad blockers these days have subscription lists specifically because just blocking a domain or a pattern was never sufficient. While 1st party ads with non-obvious names will require much more effort, they're still easily blockable. And considering the huge amount of money Adblock Plus has flowing in, they're very much in a position to police it.