mtgx

Probably by far the biggest and most positive thing the EU could do to ensure EU startups come anywhere close to US startups in growth is to mandate English as the second official language for all EU members.

The language barrier is a HUGE problem for EU businesses. It's the main reason why online services grow 100x slower in the "European Union" compared to the same service being offered in the US, where a "state's language" makes no difference, because it's the same everywhere.

Because there isn't such "high scalability potential" as it is in the US, due to the language barrier, you also don't see as many investors throwing millions of euro at "ideas with potential".

> I moved all my money to "value" stocks last week

Why not something that has less of a chance to fall in a recession, like gold?

This thing where Facebook collects a lot of data in ways to which most people would object for years and years, and then when they get caught they claim it was a "bug", is getting really old.

To make matters worse, they usually tend to re-introduce the "bug" as some kind of feature a few years later, as their way of saying "yes, we really do thing our users are that stupid to not realize what we've done, why do you ask?!"

She only became president because Merkel forced the issue.

I think Frans Timmermans (an excellent option!) had a chance to win it before that, as well as Vestager (the antitrust champion in the previous EC). They gave Vestager the VP job to pacify her and her allies.

Also, somehow, Vera Jourova, which has been absolutely terrible in her job in the previous EC, especially with the terrible Privacy Shield she negotiated with the US gov (which has now been invalidated - again - by the CJEU) got the VP role, too, in the new EC.

Germans need to get rid of Merkel already. She's been terrible in the past 2 mandates, even doing stuff like protecting the coal industry as as well the diesel/gasoline car industry against new EU pollution norms. She also continued to push for new mass surveillance laws, even as the previous ones were being declared unconstitutional by the German courts.

I'm almost convinced the only reason she won again last time was because the US/global media kept propping her up as the "world's savior against Trump" - whatever that means. So I'm sure that had an effect at home, too, possibly giving her the edge. I know she was starting to be hated due to the all the local immigration issues prior to that.

Self-certifications of any kind are such a scam.

What did they think was going to happen when Google bought the largest mobile ad network by far for both Android and iOS a decade ago? (AdMob)

Antitrust agencies and governments in general need to set more pro-active ground rules that attempt to prevent monopolies from even happening in the first place.

Punishing them after the fact is both ineffective and too disruptive. I'd rather they didn't allow Google to buy AdMob instead of forcing them to spin it off now. I mean, sure, I'll take it. Still better than nothing. But this shouldn't have been needed because AdMob should have remained a competitor to Google in the mobile ads space, not a division of it.

If large corporations think they have made so much money from their core market that now it's time to spread to new markets, then they must also have the money to start their own competitor in that market from scratch. They shouldn't be allowed to just buy everyone up from that new market.

I think we'd have WAY healthier "free markets" - and more importantly, high competition - if this one thing was implemented.

They did, and failed:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-to-licence-GPU-technolo...

My guess is they failed because Geforce at the time was too much of a "desktop architecture", and my guess is that it still is. But now that they own Arm they can just tell all Mali customers "take it or leave it."

Couldn't Arm publicly ignore that seal of authority? Kind of like when a certificate expires and you revoke it?

I don't understand how the guy controls anything. Even if say he has all the designs copied in China, Arm Global could just declare those are stolen designs and anyone that uses it without paying the global company directly would be in violation of that and could be sued (in other countries, if not China).

I think the only reason this comical and absurd situation continues is only because - like many tech companies before it - Arm continues to hope for bread crumbs in the "huge Chinese market" and accept being at the mercy of the CCP, even though this has proven to be a disastrous strategy for most other companies that thought like this. In the end, the government just gives your tech to the local companies, that end up dominating there, and maybe even globally later on, with your tech.

Exactly. Apple takes a lot from you, then gives you some crumbs back, and everyone praises it for how "generous" it is.

Imagine if Microsoft decided to take 30% of all online transactions that happen on Windows PCs...Pretty ridiculous thought, right?

That stuff Apple has gotten away with and continues to get away with is beyond absurd.

The fact that Tesla can use the car logs AGAINST drivers when an accident happens, but the owners/drivers themselves don't get access to the same data to defend themselves should have been clue #1 years ago.

The explanation could be that Google would prefer to use the excuse that "it's our objective algorithm that downranked our competitors, not us!"

And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments.

Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.

Brave, run by - wait for it - Mozilla's old CEO, is the best alternative right now.

It's a shame this is happening at Mozilla. I was also quite shocked by their recent article to "safely return to shared memory between tabs", which I immediately thought was a bad idea.

Lo and behold, a mere week after that update, I found that Firefox was eating up my entire memory and making the PC perform poorly.

Shared memory is what made the old Firefox hang so much - I can't believe they thought it was a good idea. I've always believed Chrome's per process tab idea was brilliant, even if it uses a little more memory on average.

I still prefer the security benefits and stability of that architecture over Firefox randomly hanging and peaking in memory use due to memory leaks even if it can use slightly less memory on average.

This PDF might help, it explains the differences with other ISAs

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p...

Kind of puts the trolley problem in a new perspective -- forget about saving five people or only one, it's more about whether or not you'd save five people or buy that long-range upgrade for your Tesla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

More studies referenced here, also showing ~55 ng/ml being optimum for maximum health benefits. The current recommendations are way below that. Well worth to watch the whole video:

https://youtu.be/v3pK0dccQ38?t=4105

All other chip architectures should adopt Arm's SVE2 or something similar.

https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b...

The bar is already pretty low in the US. The FBI has trained cops to hide the use of stingrays from judges, so who really knows how many times these were illegally used to incriminate someone while telling judges they got anonymous tips or whatever.

Battery capacity continues to be disappointing with most Google phones. They always seem to choose them on the lower-end side compared to the competition.

The phone is a good value overall, but 3,100 mAh will hardly last you one day and be almost empty by night. I prefer phones with more generous batteries, so that there's never a risk of running out by the end of the day.

Hopefully Pixel 5a will come with 4,500-5,000 mAh next year, as many low-end $200-$300 phones have these days.

Does it support the Keystone Enclave? Or is SiFive Shield an alternative to that?

https://keystone-enclave.org/

Do they know where from exactly? Something that costs a lot and isn't looking very profitable right now could be critical for Intel in a few years.

WSJ: Surprise ruling is a victory for privacy activists

This wasn't a surprise at all. It was very predictable from the beginning for one simple reason: the US doesn't have strong privacy laws and the US government's surveillance apparatus doesn't account for whatever privacy laws exist either. All the gag orders (up to half of all total order requests according to Microsoft 2 years ago), all the tapping of internet cables and "partnerships" with the carriers, all the "fusion centers" with all agencies getting people's data, and so on.

Oh, and best of all, the Privacy Shield said that it was up to the US DOJ to ensure US companies followed EU law. What a joke.

The EU Charter of Fundamental rights prohibits data from being stored in countries that don't provide equivalent privacy protections as in the EU. If you follow this logic, it's obvious Privacy Shield was bound to fail.

An article from 2018: https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/07/26/us-surveillance-makes-pr...

I mean, would you rather be overweight and not sensitive to quickly storing even more fat through carbs, or thin/regular and more sensitive to gaining weight quickly through carbs?

The body adapted to storing carbs over a long period of time. Chances are that you need to give it at least as much to "un-adapt" from that.

> but that is also arguably true of patent cabals like MPEG (you just hope that the cabal is big enough that there aren't any patentholders lurking outside)

Apparently, they aren't. There are at least 2 other patent pools that claim patents for HEVC, and I think I saw 3 in some other article before:

https://streaminglearningcenter.com/codecs/hevc-ip-mess-wors...

What you're looking for is the AV1 codec, which finalized a year and a half ago and will likely see much wider adoption, simply because none of the members want to pay royalties.

https://aomedia.org/av1/

https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

AV1 decoding has already been in Chrome and Firefox since at least a year ago. We're just waiting for hardware decoding and encoding support now, which should start appearing this year.

The next version of Chrome will also support the AV1-based AVIF image format this month:

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/22...

YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon/Twitch are also likely to not support VVC (and some of them don't support h.265 either) for their streaming services.

> Prior to the Release of Android 10 we announced a new constrained sandbox for software codecs. We’re really pleased with the results. Thus far, Android 10 is the first Android release since the infamous stagefright vulnerabilities in Android 5.0 with zero critical-severity vulnerabilities in the media frameworks.

It wasn't mediatized, but there must have been like a new stagefright-like media library bug every 2-3 months since stagefright was first publicized. Glad to see this news.

Also, how are they enabling memory tagging if it's an Arm v8.5 feature and new Arm CPUs, except for Apple's own chips, don't seem to support newer than Arm v8.2? Is it just the software version of memory tagging (with some expected performance penalty)?

Yubico has said from the very beginning that they will stick to NFC because Bluetooth is not secure.

Bluetooth is a 3000+ pages spec that's a mess and will likely always remain a mess. Maybe it's time for something better?

I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on the page, or a combination of all of those and more.

If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never reach its true potential.

It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much better.

It may be ignorance for most of the politicians that support the bill, but it's not ignorance for those creating and co-sponsoring the bill, but pure maliciousness. They want to give the government the power to read every single thing you say online, any consequences (or constitutionality) be damned.

Feinstein, Burr, and others like them haven't been champions of mass surveillance powers extensions for the past 20 years out of "ignorance". They know exactly what they're doing.

I still remember a video from the Senate floor showing how ruthlessly and in bad faith Feinstein argued FOR FISA 702 extension back in 2012 using lazy fearmongering about terrorists - the same kind of bad faith fearmongering used to allow the Iraq war, etc.

It boggles my mind that Feinstein has remained a senator for so long in California, but I suspect it may have something to do with the electronic voting machines there. I mean, you could say she has more than enough friends that could help her out with that, especially if she continues doing what she's been doing in the Senate.

It's like asking "is mass surveillance that different from targeted surveillance"?

Yes, of course it is. Orders of magnitude more people could be negatively and undeservedly affected this for no other reason than the fact that it's now cheap enough and easy enough to use by the authorities.

Just to give one example I came up with right now, in the future the police could stop you, take your picture and automatically have it go through its facial recognition database. Kind of like "stop and scan".

Or if the street cameras get powerful enough (and they will), they could take your picture automatically while driving and then stop you.

Think of it like a "TSA system for the roads". A lot more people will be "randomly picked" by these systems from the roads.

Also a king in efficiency:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/11/22/arm-supercomputer-ca...