Even if that kind of client side compression went totally unnoticed, and petabyte level use of cell and satellite services also went unnoticed, and even supposing we are only talking about a billion calls a day (unlikely given the population of the US alone, before even adding the rest of North America, Europe, and wherever else they want to spy), what are they going to do with all that data? It’s not a training source and any AI they unleashed to sort it would be subject to hallucinations and attack from people who know their conversations are being recorded.

I find it much more likely that they will target individuals directly for that level of surveillance. Hacking one journalist’s cell is going to be far easier than trying to find their recordings in the vault, assuming the targets have a new Chinese car.

They are much more useful as scouts for mapping things just like Google has been doing with their street view cars for decades now and as the other commenter pointed out, with a kill switch just like OnStar uses for stolen cars, as a first attack wave gumming up transport and evacuation options.

This is not the main problem with Chinese EVs. As far as privacy goes I would be much more concerned with what they are slurping up about where I am than what I am talking about. For instance all the SSIDs and Bluetooth device around the car. I also kinda doubt they have the bandwidth and storage space to ingest billions of phone call recordings.

It’s that they are being subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese labor markets. Their aim is to put other countries’ automakers out of business and then exploit their monopoly. Pretty much the only thing that could make American transit worse is having no domestic manufacturing capability, Europe at least has decent public transit.

I understand where you are coming from. But I am a standard transmission kinda person.

Okay, but writing a .desktop file takes like 10 seconds.

So deal with Reddit style mods and hoops and maybe you can do exactly what you are already doing? No thank you.

I have severe adult adhd and this has never been the case for me.

If you are in any way handy then, usually, the hardest part is getting the old sink out without fucking up the countertop, at least in my experience.

Often patents like this are for the manufacturing process or physical construction rather than what the device does, this one appears to be on the construction. Specifically on a new method for making it smaller.

Lots of Windows 95 machines made a big todo about supporting VCD around that same time. But I never remember seeing any in person at a store. I do remember burning VCDs to watch in the DVD player in the living room before we had a DVD burner.

Sony also bought Columbia TriStar following the failure of Beta and their lesser known failed music format DAT (Digital Audio Tape, looked like a cassette acted like a CD that needed to be rewound, not to be confused with Phillips’ follow up to the cassette the DCC or Digital Compact Cassette). Sony really wanted to charge licensing fees for their formats and that is largely why Beta and DAT failed* compared to the freely available formats from Toshiba and Phillips (CD, VHS, and DVD). Sony flooding the market with Columbia’s back catalogue is what really defeated the HDDVD format being pushed by Toshiba. Toshiba was also working with Microsoft on the Zune at that time and created a HDDVD add-on for the Xbox 360. HDDVDs used a version of Silverlight which was made by MS where the Blu-ray stack was written in Java, a language that MS notoriously hates.

UMDs that PSPs used, though similar in appearance, are not minidiscs. They use a completely different method of reading and writing the information. Minidiscs are magneto-optical where UMDs are just optical like CD, DVDs, and Blu-ray’s. Magneto-optical discs use a laser to heat up a small area of the platter and then, in very laymen terms, flips a magnet in that spot to be either south down or north down. This creates a slight optical variation along the track that can be read back by a lower power laser in much the same way (but at a different angle and wavelength) to CDs. While they did have mastered minidiscs that you could buy in a store, you mostly bought blank ones to write yourself, and they were rewritable years before CD burners became ubiquitous.

* Failed at the consumer level; DATs were wildly popular in the radio and recording industry because its failure gave it a built in copy protection through obscurity. Betas had a higher quality than VHS and were heavily used in the local broadcast and syndicated TV industries. In fact the last blank Beta was made after the last blank VHS.

Tel Aviv, Israel… Illinois???

Things like layoffs and at-will employment guarantee that the risk is on the individual and not the company. You need to get over that rose tinted idea of what capitalism is. It hasn’t existed in 100 years if it ever did.

I stopped selling on Craigslist after being ghosted at meetups multiple times.

As a Native American I have been asked more than once if I live in a teepee by other Americans. I often respond that I do but it has doors and windows and running water and we call it a house.

The problem with this idea is that it assumes that those areas are politically aligned. I highly doubt people in liberal areas like Austin are going to be okay with being lumped in with whatever happens in Texas and I am confident that the Native Americans in Oklahoma will never be okay with it.

The divide in the US is largely rural vs urban not north vs south or east vs west anymore.

I know a couple lesbians who, while otherwise as liberal as is stereotypical for the community, are vehemently anti-trans. I have been told by some gay friends that this is more common than one would think.

Most people don’t realize that many organizations require devices that have email on them to be enrolled in device management. So when you put your email on your phone you are also making it so the IT department at your work can track your location and remotely erase your phone. One place I worked also required a PIN on the phone so you couldn’t use fingerprint or Face ID.

Suffice it to say that I haven’t had work email on a personal device since Blackberrys were a thing.

The main issue with that is MS made a million different versions of Vista and some of them had significantly higher requirements than others. So you had OEMs selling machines that were ‘Vista Ready’ in the lead up to launch but they barely made the requirements for the basic version. Then you had people going to Best Buy and getting the premium version and having a horrible experience.

I had Vista on my MacBook Pro and it was a a solid OS, especially if you needed 64-bit support. In fact the Pro was PC Magazine’s #1 pick for Vista machines which caused quite a stir at the time when Bootcamp was still new.

95 didn’t even ship with FAT32 support originally. I agree with the original comment that it wasn’t until the OSR versions that it got good. But they never sold those in the box, you could only get an OSR version from a prebuilt computer. So a lot of people never experienced them or didn’t experience the original 1995 version of 95 that still required 8 character filenames.

Where do you think white people came from?

Native Americans didn’t come up with this shit. It’s absolutely an import, just not from the 1930s.