The White House’s purge of Barack Obama-era federal appointees has taken a few more turns with the termination of all remaining 16 members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDs, allegedly via a FedEx letter that offered no explanation, the Washington Blade reported this week.
Source: Gizmodo – White House Fires Entirety of HIV/AIDS Advisory Council Via FedEx
Yesterday, Apple officially apologized for slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. In a letter to customers, Apple said, “We apologize,” offering anyone with an iPhone 6 or later a battery replacement for $29 starting in late January through December 2018 — a discount of $50 from the unusual replacement cost. They’re also promising to add features to iOS that provide more information about the battery health in early 2018.
Apple’s response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, “Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy,” writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Slashdot Asks: How Should Apple Have Responded To the Battery Controversy?
‘Tis the season for ominous, intrusive internet promotional campaigns. Netflix has spooked users on a Turkish equivalent to Reddit, Ekşi Sözlük, by sending them promotional direct messages meant to hype up the debut of Black Mirror’s fourt…
Source: Engadget – Maybe private ‘Black Mirror’ messages weren’t a good idea, Netflix
This is a very interesting worklog that is chronicled over at OCInside in English, if you are into the whole retro-gaming thing. The hardware to build this type of arcade machine is abundant so the whole DIY path is blank slate for your imagination. Maybe a full size cabinet?
No matter if you decide for a Raspberry Pi with Retropie or Recalbox software or if you build a small ITX PC or a fully grown full size ATX PC with a Windows or Linux based Mame emulator, at the end you need the right ROM download to play Frogger, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Popey, Arkanoid, Centipede, Star Wars Triology, Mario Kart Arcade, 1945, 1942, Gyrus, Zaxxon or all the other great arcade games. Unfortunately, there is a legal problem right here, because even the most beautiful retro games are copyrighted, but our own copy of a ROM board is, in our opinion, at least a legal gray area.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – DIY Retro-Arcade Machine with Raspberry Pi
Since time immemorial, humans have had a knack for being complete and utter dicks to the other animals we share our planet with. Often, we even manage to screw things up for other species without meaning to. A study published earlier this month in the journal of Emerging Infectious Disease has retroactively uncovered…
Source: Gizmodo – A 2-Year-Old Chimp Named Betty Died From Common Cold Virus We Didn’t Even Know Chimps Could Catch
Everybody poops. I don’t care how rarely you hydrate. You poop. It is a fundamental aspect of human biology. And since the aliens we’ve seen in the Arrowverse seem to consume matter, we can assume they poop too. In fact, the only people on Earth who do not appear to poop are the CW set designers responsible for the…
Source: Gizmodo – Where Do the CW’s Supervillains Poop? An Investigation
2018 is going to be a pretty busy year for most moviegoers, what with all the superhero films and summer blockbusters guaranteed to blow out your eardrums while you guzzle soda. You might love the movies, paying close to $50 for a pair of tickets and some popcorn isn’t exactly built into most people’s monthly budgets.…
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s How MoviePass Stacks Up to its Competitors
Enlarge / Wichita Police. (credit: Wichita Police)
A 28-year-old Wichita, Kansas man was killed last night by police who were responding to a tip falsely reporting a hostage situation at the man’s house. And rumors are swirling in the Call of Duty community that the death was the result of a “swatting” attack gone horribly wrong.
“I heard my son scream, I got up, and then I heard a shot,” said Lisa Finch, the mother of shooting victim Andrew Finch, in a video interview with the Wichita Eagle. Police then took Lisa Finch outside, along with “my roommate and my granddaughter, who witnessed the shooting and had to step over her dying uncle’s body,” handcuffed them all, placed everyone into separate police cars, and took them downtown for interviews.
Lisa Finch said her son was unarmed and that no guns were found in the house.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – “They call it swatting,” says grieving Wichita mother after son killed by police
Online dating is largely a succession of misery and humiliation, which is why so many of us are willing to pay an algorithm to find us the perfect match. The newest entré to the arena of apps that promise to help you find love: Pheramor, a Houston-based startup that claims to use DNA as the basis for its matchmaking…
Source: Gizmodo – Please, Do Not Send Your Spit to This DNA Dating App
Prior to Christmas, AT&T and DirecTV gave layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country. “It is not clear if the firings relate to the pending AT&T and Time Warner acquisition, or how it specifically relates to the announcement that the company was giving $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 employees in commemoration of the tax overhaul signed just before Christmas,” reports Apple Insider. Slashdot reader deadwill69 writes: Just more doublespeak after they announced their bonus program to justify the tax cuts. Seems they really didn’t mean it after all. “Technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies, and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we’re adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business,” AT&T said in a statement to the Chicago Tribune. “Many of the affected employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they’ll be offered another job with the company, and we’ll work to find other jobs for as many of them as possible.” Let’s hope they keep that promise. On a bright note: their service really couldn’t get much worse?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – AT&T Sheds Thousands of Employees After Touting GOP Tax Plan, Giving Out Bonuses
FirstNet, the nationwide broadband network for first responders, will be the official public safety network for all 50 US states. The network has been a very long time coming. Having been initially proposed following the 9/11 attacks, the FCC approve…
Source: Engadget – All 50 states opt in to AT&T’s FirstNet public safety network
This is a short video of a little toy train that goes off the rails (because there aren’t any more) and uses a wall to get itself back on track. You know, I do something very similar after I’ve been drinking. “Use walls to get around?” Yeah, I pretty much just bounce off of them like a pinball. Whoa, sick — somebody puked over here! “Yes, you did.” Oh boy. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I clearly have some New Year’s resolutions to make.
Keep going for the whole Twitter video.
Source: Geekologie – I Think I Can, I Think I Can: Toy Train Goes Off Track, Uses Wall To Get Back On Rails
You’re not the only one who has noticed an uptick in annoying robocalls seemingly coming from your same area code.
Source: Gizmodo – FTC Report Reveals Just How Awful Robocalls Got This Year
The ancestor to pretty much all boning and photosynthesizing organisms might have been fossilized in Canadian rock. The only trouble is that scientists aren’t sure how old that fossil is.
Source: Gizmodo – This Could Be the Oldest Photosynthesizing, Sex-Having Organism
All guys, all day, all night! Right here on PCPer TV! Riveting questions this week. At least Shrout saved this week…his face this time.
PC Perspective’s weekly Q&A series where Ryan and the team answer YOUR questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – PCPer Male Bag #24
The World Health Organization is adding ‘gaming disorder’ to their Classification of Diseases guidelines. They say this is becoming a significant health concern in many countries. If you place gaming ahead of normal daily activities and continue to do so even when it causes negative consequences this characterizes a gaming disorder. This has been talked about before, but now the WHO wants to label it and hopefully figure out some way to treat it. Are you suffering from this disorder?
The guidelines form the basis for identification of health trends and statistics globally and are the international standard for reporting diseases and health conditions. They are used by medical practitioners, including doctors and nurses in the 100 countries were WHO is recognised, to diagnose conditions and by researchers to categorize conditions. The inclusion of a disorder can shape national healthcare budgets and insurance policies.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – WHO to Designate Gaming Disorder as Mental Health Condition
Enlarge (credit: Toyota)
In 2015, battery-electric vehicles in Japan, the UK, California, and Texas were slightly cheaper than traditional gas or diesel vehicles—as long as you’re comparing all these vehicles using their total cost of ownership (TCO).
Although low-emissions vehicles are often more expensive by sticker price than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, low-emission vehicles become more cost-effective over time if you’re counting the fuel costs you’ve avoided along with any tax breaks and incentives. A group of researchers from the University of Leeds tracked the TCO of low-emissions vehicles between 1997 and 2015 in Japan, the UK, California, and Texas. In 2015 in particular, fuel costs and subsidies in all four regions were high enough that battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) were on the whole cheaper than internal combustion vehicles by a small margin.
The TCO for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) was still higher than that of traditional vehicles in all regions, because those cars receive fewer subsidies and still require fuel, unlike fully electric vehicles. Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) were more expensive than any kind of vehicle in all regions except Japan, where generous subsidies bring down the price significantly.
Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Does a lower “total cost of ownership” boost electric car sales?
Thousands of sailors perished in stormy seas throughout the Caribbean in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Surely they would never have guessed that their terrifying ends would help scientists in the future. But creative researchers have found a link between historic Spanish shipwrecks, hurricanes, and the climate.
Source: Gizmodo – Ancient Shipwrecks Are a Treasure Trove of Climate Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: If you’re a fan of Easter eggs hidden in source code, this is a pretty good one. Apparently, as Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham observed on Twitter, some Trump administration and GOP websites have a portion of code with a joke that throws shade at Obama’s golf habits, the irony nowhere to be found. We checked the source code and sure enough the line “Oops! Something went wrong. Unlike Obama, we are working to fix the problem and not on the golf course” appears on action.donaldjtrump.com sites, like the one hosting this surely statistically sound, Obama-obsessed “Inaugural Year Approval Poll,” but not on donaldjtrump.com pages. As Ingraham pointed out, it’s also present on some official GOP sites, including the GOP.com homepage. In both instances, the Obama dig is paired with a 404 error message that states “What do Hillary Clinton and this link have in common? They’re both dead broke.” To top it off, the code itself is apparently itself broken, swapping a single equal sign where there should be two. An honest mistake? Or perhaps the world was never meant to be gifted with these very good jokes at all?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Trump’s Website Is Coded With a Broken Server Error Message That Blames Obama
2017 was a year like no other for cybersecurity. It was the year we found out the horrid truths at Uber and Equifax, and border security took our passwords. A year of WannaCry and Kaspersky, VPNs and blockchains going mainstream, healthcare hacking,…
Source: Engadget – 2017’s biggest cybersecurity facepalms
