Sounds like a great place to use the wonderful emoji characters which have infected so many other things where actual letters should be used.

Because who doesn't know how to pronounce a string of ambiguous images.

And how much of each person's proprietary data will be getting sent to MS and used for whatever purposes they desire?

Canaries used to be used in mines to alert miners when there was a lack of oxygen or poisonous gas. If the canary passed out or died, everyone needed to get out.

So is this new channel being made to alert you early so that when something breaks, you know to that it's time to move away from Windows?

Every time I go to a theater, there's always a single ticket taker located directly after the box office. It's usually a teenager who really doesn't care anyway. So now, rather than that, they'll need to have ticket takers assigned to each theater making sure that each ticket holder is sitting in their assigned seats? Doubt it. Outside of the premier showing of a given movie, I don't see this changing anything. Just pay for the cheapest ticket and sit wherever you want.

The Global Positioning System satellites are owned and operated by the US government. It makes me wonder if the US has some sort of ability to do some sort of regional blocking.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

Does that work like a double negative equating to a positive? If so, it was just "Intelligence".

Yeah, if the tech companies get broken up, they have more competition and things actually have to change. But if Congress writes privacy laws (written by the lobbyists employed by the tech companies), the tech companies can continue business as usual.

Also another downside to the idea of "encrypt everything".

>For the last long while Firefox has been perfecting "Surprise and Annoy."

And when I opened up Firefox this morning, I was greeted with another "Surprise and Annoy". The overflow menu for the bookmarks bar is now spaced out twice as much as it used to be, so you can now only see half as many bookmarks as you previously could.

STOP F'ING WITH THE UI

It's always been way too easy to impersonate someone else via email. Even with all of the "security" in place, I can route a message through our internal relay server and have it appear to come from anyone. And everyone's mail program is "smart" enough to look at the from address of "jsmith@mycompany.com" and replace it with the person's full name "John Smith, CEO" making it very difficult for even an educated user to determine that this message came through our internal relay rather than from the actual person.

I'm all for them doing this, but what good does it do on a Saturday? Nobody that should see any of this is even going to be in the office on a weekend.

They are the BEST (Barely Educated Slow Thinkers)!

>It would enable vehicles to transmit their location, speed, direction and other information 10 times per second.

So my car is supposed to take another car's word about what it is doing? How long until someone else figures out how to make their car "lie" to watch the fun? It's guaranteed to happen. And will companies be continually updating these things, or are you just up a creek once your car is "obsolete" (aka when the warranty has expired and they want you to buy a new one).

I honestly wonder if we should start removing some data and keeping it in offline or non-instantaneous storage. Or maybe some sort of distributed storage. Honestly, there is no reason for some company to have everyone's SSNs and other data readily available 24/7. Certain relevant pieces could be kept online for easy access, but what if any access of the data required accessing it from some sort of offline/nearline storage. Or even just a time delay to retrieve the data from the system (and not just a bulk dump of database contents). Even if it took just 1 minute for a credit bureau to access your data, the ability to harvest millions of records would be severely reduced. And there should be a physical limitation to how many request these systems handle. So if there are 10,000 requests happening during a time when only 1000 typically happen, there should be alarms going off.

Have you looked at Project Fi, Google's MVNO service provider? It's got all of the same features as Google Voice, and depending on data usage, can be pretty cheap too.