Recent Comments

I'll just add that browsing on most mobile devices doesn't afford the user "mouse-over" with the ease with you obviously enjoy with your mouse. Additionally, screen readers for visually challenged users like myself don't typically read out URL targets by default... try to imagine the noise that would be most of the time.

i thought the piece was quite insightful ;D

spam

Same difference considering the royalties paid over the last century?

The old site never showed domains in the articles, only in comments. Anyhow it's not very useful, as any browser shows the domain when you mouse-over or long press any link, and there are plenty of short url and redirection services that'll foil it.

This submission was sitting in the Pipe for a couple days. That would have been the place to critique & suggest fixes for it (or even submit a better write-up).

I didn't understand how that was related to the topic at first. Thinking that it was a comment that belonged on a story that discussed ad blocking. Maybe Pipedot should include the domain as part of the link like that other dot site used to, like

aborigines may have faced the large predator [ibtimes.com]

Either way, it was about time. Holding up copyright expiration (1976 and 1998) on recent works is bad enough. Somehow claiming they have an exclusive hold on a tune from 1893 is appalling.

The judge found that Warner/Chappell do not hold copyright to the song. It's not that it was released, it's that it was never really held.

ibtimes has ads that play sound by default.

Quiet link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150923134114.htm

So a competitor to Google with a national market share >50% accused Google via phone makers of being anti-competitve. It's like Microsoft complaining that Apple doesn't pre-install Windows on Macs.

However, Apple does allow the end user to install Windows on a Mac, and Google allows you to side load apps and app stores. Yandex could pull an Amazon, fork and install their own apps. Perhaps they have seen how well that worked for Amazon and thought they would go complain to Mother Russia that an evil American company wasn't playing fair.

As I remember it, the vendor can't install appstore unless the device conforms to Google's standards. This includes installing a lot of things Google wants them to. I don't know whether Google Maps is one of the mandatory packages. I think only the base OS is open source, linux and the java libraries. The rest, like the keyboard app etc. are closed source.

To play devils advocate:

These are government allowed monopolies, with some real regulations and restrictions about things like price increases. They're already artificially limited in maximizing their profits by the government, doesn't it make sense to artificially limit the minimum as well?

I saw a brief mention on another site about some problem with the agreements between Google and the manufacturers. But there really isn't much detail about this ruling anywhere.

Help me out. Google doesn't ship phones, right? And Android is open source, so whoever ships phones could use Yandex if the wanted, couldn't they?

While this one singles out cheap natural gas, power companies across the board are struggling with distributed solar. In political actions funded by the Koch brothers, they're coming up with every off-the-wall plan they can. Scare tactics about their death spiral, aimed at convincing regulatory agencies to allow them to stop net-metering, add an extra fee for solar-power-producing homes, or otherwise asking the government to guarantee them a fixed amount of revenue, even as they provide less and less power:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/utilities-sensing-threat-put-squeeze-on-booming-solar-roof-industry/2015/03/07/2d916f88-c1c9-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html

http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/07/30/missouri-regulators-looking-into-decoupling-utility-revenues-and-profits/

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/03/374737086/utilities-fight-for-revenue-lost-to-solar-power

This mess looks to play out like Bank Bailout... Semi-governmental private corporations, who give the profits they make to their investors, yet can expect the government to protect them from any losses when things go the other way.

To their credit, state regulators have been overwhelmingly rejecting their proposals pretty universally thus far, and not allowing them to essentially print their own money.

There is some indication that the death sprial is a myth, and this will all just mean slightly lower profits than they've come to expect:

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/24/will-renewable-energy-cause-utility-death-spiral/

and in The Matrix

I kind of doubt that solar will be able to immediately take over if the price of gas spikes rapidly ( which it has done in the past). Especially in Ohio.

I'd use a carrot and a stick approach here. Yes you get some subsidies to stay afloat with coal but only for x years with a predictable scale down. while at the same time, incentives for renewables ramps up. If you want to stay off solar

FirstEnergy also warns that natural gas prices will not remain low forever. Years from now, they say, their coal plants and nuclear operations will be more economical and consumers will be thanking them for keeping them open.

The proper course of action would be to view that as an investment opportunity, which will pay off in the future, and invest in keeping those coal and nuclear plants serviceable until then. But I guess asking the government for a handout looks better in quarterly reviews.

What legal obligations would this funding place upon them? I suspect that's the reason they turned the funding down.

I watched it. It was terrible, I don't know why so many people think it's great.

I think that is one of the strongest shows I've seen. Each week, I waited for it to appear on the torrent sites so I could download it. I'd wait until my partner went to bed so I could watch it undisturbed, and I found myself completely absorbed in the show. No spoilers follow:

A couple of episodes in, I did wonder if Christian Slater. (Those who've seen it will know.) I didn't realise that the guy in the finale was from the hard drive shop.

Of course, there was a movie from a few years ago (one that nobody talks about) that has the same premise.

There are a decent number of phones with microHDMI output.

Good question - I'm afraid I have no idea, nor do I know how well it works.

Of course, for some applications, you could avoid tethering by other means. For Netflix, say: play Netflix on your phone using the Android app, point a camera at the phone, and upsize it across to your TV. You'll lose some quality, sure, but I suspect it could be made to work pretty well.

What an astoundingly bad looking movie.

while extraordinary hacks are hard to depict, they finally got things right in the 2015 US series named Mr. Robot. sure it took 20 years but that's a hell of a lot better than the wimpy depiction of nuclear explosions in media.

there is no reason to keep them going, so shut them down. if the price of natural gas goes up, great! it will be a great reason to move to solar.

FIOS is actually pretty awesome. Unfortunately the idiot that runs FIOS is that guy from wireless that missed out on the iPhone back when Verizon wireless had no good phones. He thinks wireless Internet(LOL) is the future..along with liberal data caps of ~6GB/month or so, that is.

The main problem is they mostly stopped doing buildouts since they believe wireless is the future so you either have it, or don't. New communities may get it if their builder is intelligent, however the rural unconnected crowd is screwed.

Agreed - |. gets high points for usability.

Once broadband networks have been built they can be opened up for third partied to use for services. See the NBN for a bad example of how this could be done.

From everything I've heard about Verizon FIOS, these rural (or semi-rural) cities really dodged a bullet. Towns should work with proven contractors to deploy and manage city-run/city-sponsored broadband. I used to live in a city that tried multiple times to do it on their own, and that was a special kind of disaster (that 10 years later, they're still paying for), but there are many communities that make it work, and any new deployments will have huge resources to look to for what to do and what not to because of the successes and failures of other cities.

How do they detect tethering? Use a vpn to bypass dpi?

Disallow automated notices. Require all notices to be sent by snail mail. On the bright side this may keep postoffices around the world propped up.

Got a little farther with them last night, I actually got to the "real" company behind them by pretending to anxious and concerned that I wouldn't qualify for their service. So maybe that will help the FCC. I was pretty polite this time, even when I got to the real manager. Everything he told me was a complete lie, sadly. I almost started to think for a bit that they might actually be providing a service that would be valued by some customers. But no, they are a scam company. Nothing makes a scam company more eager to seal the deal than when you pretend to be be their ideal customer mark, that wants more than what they initially offered to provide.

I wonder if that's how I'm on some terrible lists of scam artist phone guys. Which is terrible, they won't fall for any of my counter scams. I tried selling an extended warranty company a list of names and phone numbers, but they didn't bite. I've tried to slow play them several times, pretended to be interested ask a number of questions, some relevant, some absurd. I've been really tempted to to take extra legal action to shut them down, but obviously that would be illegal. Two wrongs don't make a right and what not. So the fcc complaint dept is pretty familiar with me.

Sorry, I'm currently reworking how orphan comments are counted and should have a fix soon. More information can be found here: http://bugs.pipedot.org/view.php?id=62

Sure. I'm not sure if you're supporting my points or disagreeing, but yes, you've given some good examples of when offline playback is (and, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) the only real option.

I believe Spotify also caches whatever you stream, so if you listen to the same song twice, Spotify will only do the download once, saving you (and Spotify, and your ISP) from needless traffic. Google Play Music does the same thing.

I guess even that is just too confusing for Netflix's apparently-moronic customers, huh.

That's a good point, the 'Unlimited data' plans seem generally to be getting less and less common.

Here in the UK, Three still offer unlimited data, but tethering is forbidden (unlike with their capped plan).

If we ignore the unlimited plans, I think the price-per-gig is generally going down. £30/month can buy you 25GB of 4G (tethering is permitted) with EE. Not a bad broadband substitute if you're travelling or moving house.

It's a way to differentiate

I rarely listen to music at home, just radio stations (which play music)

However on the move I often listen. On today's train the signal is poor and intermittent. Tonight's boat will have wifi apparently, not convinced it will be much good off shore. Tomorrow I'll be data roaming in the Netherlands in the morning before a flight to Denmark in the evening which will have wifi albeit with in air caveats. Tuesday night I'm on a flight to Doha and then onto Singapore, which sometimes has phone signal but nothing stream able.

Through this it means a lot of playing from my own local music library and a couple of downloaded films. We do have Netflix - was watching it last night at home, but being able to watch a film on a plane is an important feature.

if you want to threaten people i will gladly forward your posts to the police.

get over it, get a real job. this is not an acceptable way of communicating. (and probably to the root of why you are only a law-grad and not a lawyer - too dumb to realize all your posts are still here, not deleted)

As our Internet connections get faster and faster, and data-caps go up, the question of offline playback is of ever-decreasing importance. This would've meant a lot more to me five years ago than now.

Ironically, 5 years ago you could still get an "Unlimited Data" plan from AT&T and Verizon... Today, you can't.
- http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2013/05/05/pegoraro-unlimited-data-plans/2132895/

And it was only last year that Boost/Virgin quietly switched from unlimited data, to throttled after 2.5GB.
- http://www.phonearena.com/news/Report-Virgin-Mobile-and-Boost-Mobile-to-lower-throttled-data-speeds-starting-in-May_id54094

And T-Mobile just announced they're dropping their heaviest use customers from their unlimited plan.
- http://pipedot.org/K8AY

It seems that prices on mobile data are going UP, not down. That being the case, I've gone with the flow and downgraded to just 500MB and I stay well under that, thanks to wifi. I pay about 30% less, too.

Sorry, my question was answered in another thread -- I turned on "show spam" (whatever that check box is called) and now see all the posts.
I was mistaken, setting to -1 isn't enough to see *everything*.

To really clarify things, perhaps the blue status line could read something like:
4 comments, 2 new, 2 marked as spam

The tire companies will love you -- after a bit of drifting you will have to buy a new set of tires...

More to the point, estimating the tire-road sliding friction in advance is very difficult. The parking spot might have some oil leaked by previous cars. The last bit of that beautiful drift, into the parallel parking spot, will end by slamming up against the curb and breaking your car.

This story is followed by the line (blue) "4 comments".
But I only see 2. ...

I logged out and then back in and it stayed the same.

I like that this issue is getting some attention, but there's nothing particularly new here: Netflix have, for some time, given bullshit answers to this question.

And we can be pretty certain that people do want offline playback. Wuaki managed it, and it's now a selling-point for them.

The strangest thing about all this is the way it's happening now. As our Internet connections get faster and faster, and data-caps go up, the question of offline playback is of ever-decreasing importance. This would've meant a lot more to me five years ago than now.

As I understand it, on average it is much better than you: you're not as good as you think.

Equally though, you could say that the other parties involved have an interest in pressing ahead to make additional profit at the potential expense of the established technology in the 5GHz spectrum. Since that also includes every private user with a modern WiFi router and it would be impossible for there to be no interference, I'd be more inclined to wait and see just how bad it is before pressing ahead and damn the torpedos.

Excellent! Thank you!

That looks pretty good, certainly a huge improvement. EXCEPT when I click "dismiss" I get an error message:
* "record not found - table [notification] id [1]"
Similar to the error when modding a comment as spam. Perhaps that's only from a direct comment link?

Now if you could just fix the problem of low readership. Maybe you could spring for an ad on /. telling them |. doesn't have such annoying ads. ;-)