devx

By Google's Adam Langley. Nice. I know he's been a big supporter of DJB's curves.

All Snapdragon 800-based phones, and there are quite a few of them, and there will be more in the coming months (and of course later even more chips doing the same). Right now it's the one you said, LG G2, Sony Xperia Z1, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and soon the Nexus 5.

Now I'm not 100 percent sure if every single one of them has that as a user-centric feature (maybe they didn't enable it), but the chip supports 4k video recording.

Yes, I get why they wait the first 2 months before they even send the money (Google waits 23 days), but it takes at least as much afterwards with the sending and processing of the check, which has nothing to do with Amazon. They get nothing out of that in terms of cashflow, since they've already sent the money after 2 months. But as I said, it takes another 2-3 months, before I can actually have that money (on top of Amazon's first 2 months).

So why can't they just send them to my credit card or bank account, like normal companies do, after those 2 months in which they hold the money? At least it would only take a week or a few days to get the money after that.

I just don't see what Amazon has to gain by not partnering up with credit card companies. It's certainly a terrible deal for their affiliates. Not only do you get the money 2-3 months after Amazon sends it, but it's also like 10 percent fee, when the credit card company gets only like 3 percent. So yeah, I really don't get them here, and I think they're just being lazy, and used to the status quo.

98 percent false positives...that seems a little high.

Wait, how is UK taking down .com domains? Are these registrars registered in UK as businesses? But even then this method sounds very suspicious. Can the UK government suspend Google.com, if Google's registrar is based in UK, too?

Can Amazon develop a "21st century" payment system for its associate affiliates that doesn't involve receiving checks 4 months later? It's such a ridiculously obsolete system for one of the biggest web/digital companies.

Good TED talk for why that shouldn't happen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

Chrome OS "gets out of the way", and it's very easy for most people to use, since it's just a browser. Steve Jobs would've appreciated it.

Strange that Samsung hasn't released their new ARM Chromebook yet, but this looks pretty good either way. I would've expected a quad core A15, bigger battery, and 4 GB of RAM at this point, though, for that price. Hopefully next year we can see some 1080p IPS panels, in there, too, for sub $300.

Not until they implement real end to end encryption, like OTR.

I sure hope so. Whoever does security right has a competitive advantage in my book.

Wow, I remember seeing this project start up a few years ago, about how they wanted to make a "sun" on Earth. It seems it only took them 5 years to achieve this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3981697/Scie...

In a way, it reminds of Spiderman, too, but let's hope things don't go as badly as in the movie, once we start to make that "sun" big enough to provide a ton of energy.

> Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission.

That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??

Couldn't this work on RetroShare's "forums", too?

http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/retroshare-fo...

Can we end oil subsidies yet? Or have the oil companies not made enough trillions of dollars in profit since they started receiving subsidies a century ago?

I'm all for subsidies to accelerate an emerging market or technology, especially if it's "the future", but for 5-10 years at most, until it becomes mature enough to handle itself. Subsidizing highly profitable companies for a century is beyond stupid, because it also means those companies can be a lot more wasteful, knowing the taxpayers will cover the difference.

I'd ask for an end to Middle East oil-wars, too, but that seems even less likely to happen, so I'll happily take the ending of subsidies for now.

Too little too late?

I would've missed it myself, if I didn't see the video. I never knew Samsung's YOUM display used graphene. It just thought they finally got around to making flexible OLED displays, since everyone was saying early on that one of the qualities of OLED is that it can be made flexible.

I don't know if it's a cost cutting thing for them, though, at least not in the short term, with small batches of them. It might be why the initial flexible displays will only be 720p, instead of 1080p, which I think one of the rumors is saying (on the LG side).

Either way, it will definitely be used as a marketing tool. I'm not sure if some other form factor other than flat will be appealing to consumers (unless it could be expanded into a tablet somehow?), but I think the biggest benefit to consumers initially will be that it's virtually unbreakable. It shouldn't shatter like all the other touchscreen displays do.

The video says Samsung is using it in its YOUM flexible display, that was demoed at CES this year. Rumors are both Samsung and LG will release phones with such displays within the next 6 months or so.

EDIT: This one just appeared:

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/samsung-galaxy-round-tipped-...

Speaking as someone who receives his income in dollars, I hope US defaults. Maybe then people in US will finally start to give a second thought on the US military expansion all over the world, and the trillions of dollars it's spending on weaponry. There are a lot of domestic programs are that very wasteful, too - not just the police militarization ones, but also social ones.

Maybe this will make them look at every program from sub 100,000 in funding to the hundreds of billions of dollars. Almost $4 trillion in spending a year with a little over $2 trillion a year as income is simply unsustainable, no matter how you cut it. I think everyone can see that. As others mention, the default will happen eventually. It's just a matter of time, and the more it's delayed, the bigger the impact will be.

What worries me most, though, is that if an imminent collapse of the dollar will happen in the future because countries start dropping the dollar, out of desperation, US will start becoming a lot more aggressive in its bullying, and possibly even take military action against them for "hurting their economy", or at the very least use NSA surveillance to blackmail them into not doing so (my guess is that's already happening, though), and it's part of their "diplomacy" with those countries.

They are not really the same thing. We'll always need search, and unless Google falls behind, we'll keep using Google if their search results are the best. Or unless everyone decides en mass that they can live with less good results, if the new ones offers 10x more privacy, and in a world where NSA/governments run rampant with the data collection and abuse it. Right now that's pretty much the only thing I could see Google dying from. That and laziness, but that's less likely to happen.

Communications and social platform, while they can have some pretty strong network effects, are not as important, even if they keep improving them,. A new generation of users might switch from Facebook to Snapchat, and it's irrelevant if Facebook adds the same kind of features. A new generation of users won't switch from Google to Bing, or something else, unless, as I said, Google stops providing the best results.

Whatsapp is used by more than 300 million users right now, more than Twitter. Do you think Whatsapp will still be as relevant 10 years down the road? The chances are pretty small, I think.

I'm sure NSA is working on this as we speak.

This movie made me think that in the future they should try to make movies as optimized for VR as possible, and let you "be" in the main character's place throughout the whole experience. That's also what will probably kill cinemas, since you'll finally be able to get a better experience at home.

Just because your neighbor murders someone, doesn't mean you should, too.

When you've already built the infrastructure for mass spying, it's very easy to find excuses and opportunities for using it. It's too irresistible for the government not to use it.

This is what you get when you let Google track you with ads - less privacy for all:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57606178-83/nsa-tracks-goog...

I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened in US more. There has to be more to that story than just retailers not wanting Ubuntu on laptops, when they could save their customers at least $100 on the machines. It's also strange that in many other countries retailers would still sell you machines with FreeDOS (to save customers money), but not with Ubuntu or other Linux distros, since FreeDOS is all but useless.

My guess is Microsoft is coercing both OEM's and retailers somehow, and if they really have to sell the machines without Windows, then they want them to at least sell them without a real OS on them, that their customers might actually begin to use as it is.

I've always thought Google would want to buy some Watsons to help their search engine. I'm surprised they haven't yet.

That being said, I wonder if they're more interested in how their D-wave quantum computer will turn out.

I wonder, do the Rust guys have any intention of supporting AMD's HSA or Mantle API in any way? I know Mozilla wants to make Rust take full advantage of multi-core systems, and AMD is doing that, too, so I wonder if there can be some synergy there, or if that's outside of their goals for Rust.

So in this case letting Google analyze the data really is wiretapping [1].

I understand there can be tremendous benefits in letting companies analyze all sorts of data on us, and then letting them spit back useful services for us. However, if we're going to go along with all of this, then we'd better have some very strong national and international laws to protect us against government abuses in simply lifting data of millions of people at a time, or simply targetting various people, whether nationally or internationally, without very strong oversight and a clear record of what happened, who did it, and why they did it.

Otherwise, companies like Google, by collecting so much data on us and keeping it for so long, are just making it extremely easy and trivial for governments to abuse their power.

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-...

They wouldn't have needed this expensive hardware if they went with the same or similar AMD hardware as in PS4/X1 and take advantage of their Mantle API, which basically makes the system as lean and efficient as a console. Not to mention it would be trivial to port the same highly-optimized console games to the Steam Machines. Carmack thinks Mantle could help Steam Machines with AAA titles a lot, too:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one-pla...