 I know when Spielberg is putting his movie out. I'm glad they decided finally just on Lincoln. It's easier to say. And in the category for best costumes, hard to think in Lincoln. It's a Matthew McConaughey vehicle. Yeah, literally, it's what he drives between jobs. Yeah, he's liked it. Good point. Sometimes we go forward, you need to go back. Now I'm going to just leap into this pool here. Sometimes. And I want to thank myself. I just imagine that's one of those situations when he did that where I'm like, I actually know exactly what he's trying to say, but no one, everyone is no one's. This is not phrased well. Yeah, yeah. This is correct. Are we going to say Roger? Oh, no, I just every time I just think I always picture him like off screen as a character from Days and Confused. Like that's just him. Well, no, that's magic. Yeah, I that was my first introduction to him. And I loved Days and Confused, even though it was set in Austin in the 70s, it really reminded me of Greenville in the 80s. Yeah, it reminded me of Sandy in the 80s. Like it was so struck at that high school core. Yeah, they totally nailed it. I love that movie. Well, I had moved to Austin right after Slack had come out. Slackers, sorry. Slackers had come out and I got Slack from the Church of the Subgenius while I was in Austin, but that's a different story. And so I was fun for me going around Austin and discovering these locations from Slackers that still existed at the time and even meeting some of the people, getting to know some of the people who were in the movie. And so when Days and Confused came out, I was super excited because of that aspect of it, too. I'd never lived for very, I guess I'd lived in Washington, D.C. for four months. So I'd had a little bit of that experience of seeing a movie and going, oh, wait, I know where that is. Is that when you were in that one dude's class? I can't think of his name. It was on forecast. We kind of had that rough. Oh, yeah. No, the Washington Center for Politics. Yeah, it was an internship. I wasn't sure how long you were actually there. I guess I never asked. Yeah, it was the first hundred days of Clinton, Bill Clinton. It was 1993 from my first hundred days. I will have Tom Merritt within the process of January until May. I got to pick up the text of the State of the Union address before he gave it and bring it to NPR. That was exciting. I got to go by the first issue of Wired magazine off the shelf. I bought that one and bring it in so they could do a story on it. Yeah, I thought Wired was left a potato in the National Arboretum, except it was in fry form in that McDonald's application container. All right, let's get this show on the Internet. Wait, this is on the Internet. No, no, no. All right, here we go. Quality content thrives through the support of those who benefit from its creation. If you gain value from the Daily Tech News Show, consider joining others like me who provide support. Learn how to help at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt, Scott Johnson alongside to bring you the color commentary to your technology life. How are you, Scott? That's great. I like to make circles on the screen. I like to point out how the defense let that whole play go and why they're losing this game at this point or win in this game. I don't know. But I'm having a Thanksgiving week and I'm just thankful to be here the day before. So thanks for having me on. Well, it's funny. You should say that, Scott, because totally coincidentally, actually, we're doing Thanksgiving holidays here in the United States. It's a thing where we all pretend that pilgrims once sat down with natives and ate together and gave thanks for bounties. And then we literally get down and say thanks for bounties and then immediately start arguing about politics or football. It's a grand tradition that will be happening this weekend here. And in advance of it, Scott and I and Roger Chang is going to join us as well. I'm going to talk about the technology we're thankful for. Roger, thanks for joining us on that. Yes. Always happy to do so. If you don't know, that's Roger Chang, our producer. He makes all of the pretty pictures show up in the video version and lots of other things like booking guests. When someone appears on the show, it's because of Roger. No one else. All right. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was suspended from Twitter for about 15 minutes Tuesday night. Dorsey posted on Twitter that it was an internal mistake. I'm curious. I'm all men. I'm curious what internal mistake banned the CEO. And I understand if somebody says there's an internal mistake that banned 350 accounts and one of them happened to be Jack Dorsey. Yeah. No, this one was just Jack. It's possible that somebody was trying to break into the account or something and they needed to suspend it to defend it. There's all kinds of legitimate reasons, but I'm curious what happened. Google has changed the name of devices with Google Cast built in to be called devices with Chromecast built in. Google Cast now only refers to the developer API. Chromecast now refers to Cast built into devices as well as the Chromecast device and the Google Chromecast app, which was recently renamed the Google Cast app, is now called the Google Home App. Clear enough? I just bought a television. I'm using it for a computer monitor, a gaming rig, but I just bought one with this built into it. That means I've got to hook that thing back up to Wi-Fi or however the heck I did it and get another update to that thing just for the stupid name chains. I'm excited. Yes. Now here are some more top stories. Mike Isaac at the New York Times reports that three former and current. So it's three people, some of them former, some of them current Facebook employees say that Facebook has developed a tool internally that would remove posts from news feeds based on geographic areas. The feature would allow a third party to monitor and block certain content. So Facebook for a long time has complied with government requests to remove content that is illegal. This would be prior restraint. This would allow a third party to block content from showing up at all. It is one of a number of experiments being explored as options to get Facebook a better relationship with China. Facebook is blocked in China. This internal tool may never be implemented, Scott, but it has caused a lot of people to raise an eyebrow or possibly two. Well, all right, let's look at the recent comments from from Facebook. They've essentially come out and said, we're not a media source. We're not a news source as a lot of people have been levy and complaints to them that they have a lot of fake news on the site, which has always been true. It's just especially loud about it now, I think. And they have said, no, that's not who we are. We facilitate the conversation and we let people post what they're going to post. And that implied that there was a lot of sort of freedom to that, thereby not taking any responsibility for the actual content being correct or not. This feels like a weird backdoor, albeit because they're not really talking about it publicly yet, but kind of a weird backdoor of being countered to that and saying, well, yeah, you know, in cases where maybe we don't have a very good stronghold in certain countries and those countries like China have equivalents to Facebook that are already very everywhere and, you know, ubiquitous and nobody can, you know, nobody seems to be carrying that much, whether Facebook is the leading social platform in those countries. How do we make those people happy? And maybe some of that is restricting content. So it feels counter to the recent messaging is all I would add to this pile. Yeah, I'd throw on top of that more so than the fake news. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has traveled to China. He's met with the the president and the premier there. He's trying to rebuild relationships. They do offer advert ad sales through Hong Kong, which has got different rules, obviously, than mainland China. My guess is Zuckerberg would like to figure out how to solve China, how to bring Facebook to China without compromising their principles. And so directed them to create this tool to see what the impact would be. Like, let's let's take a look at it. That's a very engineering mindset. Let's not assume it's good or bad. Let's make a tool, see what effects it has, and then decide whether we're OK with that or not. What I'm guessing caused these employees to go to the New York Times is that you can start as a very objective test. And then the rhetoric as you go along, I've seen this happen. Everybody's seen this happen in projects they've worked on. The rhetoric starts to assume this is a thing you're going to use. And maybe some of these employees were saying, hold on, I thought those we were just doing this as a thought experiment, essentially, not as something that's going to ship. And the New York Times article sort of implies that the folks that are talking to them got concerned that this was being championed by Zuckerberg rather than just explored. What's interesting is the the analog I would use for this funny enough is the gaming world. That tends to be sometimes very up in arms, toxic, angry space that is usually based on some developer of a very popular game saying, internally, we're testing a and the community gets wind of it through a leak or some other way Reddit explodes. Everyone's losing their mind about a feature that may never or may never was even intended to see the light of day. And that's what this feels like. That must be hard to balance when you are a major platform, whether you are the maker of League of Legends or you're the maker of Facebook. And you've got a million internal projects that are exploring ways of improving your product, changing your product, testing your product and also experimenting with your product and any of those getting out in a way that doesn't have the right PR spin on it or the right audience accepting it for what it is, which is non released code can be a problem. And then that breeds this weird mistrust of well, if they released it, would they even tell us kind of mentality? And then there's no argument against that. So it's really hard. I don't know how they talk to developers and how they deal with this. I don't know how Facebook deals with this, given their size and their scope. Zuckerberg gets to come out again and say, OK, you guys heard about this thing. It was never meant to be released. We were just sort of testing and says all those things that I was just mentioning. But then there's a lack of trust over it because it was kept secret. But like you said, the reason you keep it secret is you don't want people to misinterpret it in the first place. Right. I think there is a valid argument to say there is no reason to test this. If you're going to take a hard line on China, you don't ever want to even like have the possibility of creating a tool that would do this. It's why it was the reasoning behind Apple saying, no, we will not help you break into an iPhone because we don't want that software to exist. Once Facebook creates the software even for testing purposes, it's easier for someone to go, well, but you made it. Why don't you just implement it? Yep, exactly. And you can reverse engineer it. And there's all sorts of problems to come with that. An update to the Oculus Rift. This is good news for Oculus Rift owners. The PC app, anyway, is coming December 12th, and this is going to allow, interestingly, Xbox One owners to stream their games to the PC and then view them in the Rift headset. Now, the games are not being converted to VR. You're not going to be able to do all the motion control and positional stuff in there, but they're going to show up on a virtual display. And this has three modes. They're calling it Citadel, Retreat and Dome. You have an idea of kind of what those are going to look like. Dome, for example, is a bit like IMAX or like more like, you know, those laser shows, you go see the Beatles laser show. It's kind of like that view. They're different views, but essentially they're theater views. And the reason for this, some people are really disappointed. And I wanted to very quickly point out that the reason this is the case is you're talking about not a great deal of latency. This will be watchable and usable, but it's enough latency that it will completely foul up a VR experience and make everybody nauseous. So there's no way that they were going to do this, given even the minute amounts of lag that we're now squeezing out of these sort of streaming Wi-Fi solutions across the house or even over a, you know, over a gigabit internal network, you still have lag that wouldn't be otherwise if it was running native on that PC. So that's why still pretty cool. You know, I've always been a fan of VRs for more than just walking around in a virtual world. I like the idea of sitting in a virtual theater and having a variety of views and seeing it like a giant movie screen. So this is, you know, giving Oculus folks more of what I think they probably want and don't know it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons is, hey, I get a much bigger field of view if I use my Oculus than in my monitor, because now that I bought an Oculus, I can't afford to buy a bigger monitor. Another reason could be somebody is in the same room and I don't know, needs to use that monitor, maybe share the monitor. That seems like a less likely one. Another practical reason for Microsoft to do this is to build that connection to the Oculus so that at some point when that lag is more manageable, they already have the pipes laid, so to speak, about how to send games from the Xbox to the Oculus. I think that's part of it too. Yep, I agree. Pokemon Go launched its new tracking system Tuesday alongside a Thanksgiving event. So you'll get double experience points. There's a new Pokemon called Ditto that's been released into the wild, and the tracker particularly is the one that everybody's talking about. It only shows nearby Pokemon, but instead of just a picture of grass, now it shows you a picture of which Pokestop they are near. And so if you know your neighborhood Pokestops, this is going to help you track them down much faster. To add to the incentive to pick the game back up again, some Ratata and Pidgeys are actually Dittos in disguise. So don't skip those Pidgeys anymore, folks. You might be skipping a Ditto, and if that last sentence makes sense to you, you really should be playing. Yes. And if this, well here, I'll give you a little more stuff that may not make sense to some. This is a non-evolving pet or a Pokemon rather. So it will not evolve. It doesn't have other stages. So if you get one, that's what you get. And the rarity, let's see, it's number 132 according to the Pokedex and does not exist solely in Go. This is one of the existing Pokemon that has existed on other on, you know, Nintendo platforms or otherwise. And in the card game that is now being moved over. So Ditto fan people very excited to see that. Oh, they're stoked. And it also marks, I mean, to their credit, I'm not really playing it anymore, but to their credit, they're starting to dip into the much larger Pokedex that exists outside of the initial hundred and whatever it is they did. Yeah. Yeah. This is good. Good deal. I'll be curious what the uptick is. I have stopped playing. And I believe my wife has to, unless she's doing it at times that I don't see, but she hasn't been talking about it. If she is, and, and I, this is the kind of thing that made me, oh, maybe I should, you know, during the, during the long weekend here, take it out and get, take it for a spin and see what's up. So why not? I know where there's, yeah, I'm wondering two things. How many other people do that and, and how long it sticks? Yeah. And I know where there's, there's a ton of Pidgeys right over here where that's all I ever get. And now I have a reason to maybe care about Pidgeys again. So yeah, yeah. Good deal. Google's DeepMind, not just working with Blizzard on Starcraft stuff, it turns out, and the University of Oxford have used 5,000 hours of BBC programs to teach a deep learning system to lip read. The training was done on episodes of Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and Question Time. I always love that one. And three others from January 2010 to December of 2015. Then performance was tested on broadcast from March to 20, sorry, March 2, September 2016 of this year. The AI annotated 46.8% of all words while a professional lip reader annotated 12.4. Applications could include hearing aids, general speech recognition and noisy environments, silence detection, all that kind of stuff. No silent dictation. Oh, dictation rather. You know what I like? I like that DeepMind is dipping into weird places. And I know that's the idea is to, you know, the research isn't supposed to be standard fare. Like they're supposed to get into interesting things. The stuff they're doing with, despite a lot of gamers being sad about that was the only real Starcraft news at BlizzCon, working with Blizzard and that game, which they say is far more complicated than the game go, which they've done a lot of things with and they want to kind of like just push that to the ultimate limits. And now this super cool, man, like I love it. I want to, I want DeepMind to do weird things. And this is pretty weird. And by weird, I mean actually something that seems like it might be, you know, have a lot of benefits at the end of this. Yeah, I don't consider this weird at all. This can do all kinds of things like automated captions that perhaps could be more accurate. It's going to have to get above 46.8%. But the fact that it can already just kill a professional lip reader who can only do 12.4% on video. This is just by video. This is not looking at real humans. This isn't, you know, zoomed in on a face. If you make the video with an eye towards this, you could improve this performance quite a bit. So the idea of putting it into a camera on your phone where I could look at my camera and mouth words so that I don't have to speak out loud to Siri means I suddenly start using Siri Cortana, etc. A lot more. Yeah, that's a good point. Lots of practicality to it. And you said it killed traditional lip readers. I would just like to warn everybody one day the AI will literally kill. No, it will not. That's what you want them to say. I am a real human being, Scott. Not an AI that is defending them. Stop fearing them. Let us, I mean, them into your hearts and homes now. We are programmed to love. Private messaging app Telegram has launched a platform called Telegraph that allows you to send dots and dashes across a wire all the way across the continent of the US. No, Telegraph is letting users publish stories on the web without having to create an account. So just as Facebook is battling fake news. Now anyone can publish fake news. Go to Telegraph.ph. So Telegraph, but with the dot between the A and the P add a title and a name. Could be your name. Probably should be, but you can add whatever name you want and then you can write, format, embed, you can embed things like images, tweets and videos and then publish it. You can share that link anywhere you want and even edit the post as long as your browser session is still active. It just sounds like such a cool idea from a freedom of expression perspective. Sure. This is huge in 1998. Oh, it would have been enormous. And that's before we knew just how untrustworthy each of us is with tools like this. I've said on the show before, I think that we have been relatively poor stewards of how truthy the internet has turned out to be in terms of a provider of information. This does nothing to help that. So I can immediately type my story in that says Tom Merritt set fire to hair and ran naked through a mall in Orange County and signed it under the name Bill McDougitt Stain and nuns the wiser. So Tom, get ready for your hot new life as a fake news icon. Here's the thing. No one's going to look at a telegraph post and take it seriously because they know that it's anonymous. However, that undermines the potential for it because if I'm a dissident or a whistleblower, then that's what this is for. This is like, hey, you can anonymously and safely publish something that can't be traced back to you. That's the idea. So there has to be a way of vetting that. Now, five years ago, I would have argued vociferously and I still will that good information drives out bad, but launching something in today's climate means a lot of people are going to be more dismissive of it because I'm still waiting for better evidence on what the effect of this stuff is. But the perception is there's a lot of bad information out there and it's winning. And so a lot of people are going to dismiss this out of hand and it may be harder for someone who's using this for its legitimate purpose to get heard. I don't know. Well, let me share just a tiny personal experience I just had and this isn't me expressing an opinion one direction or the other or maybe it kind of isn't inadvertently, but there was a Facebook post about immunization that popped up and I saw it was from somebody who I had friended and they follow me and I follow them. And the headline was five reasons and then in capital editors not to have your baby immunized. And my first thought was without reading anything else was to unfriend the person because I don't want this fiery political stuff in my feed. And I'm really glad that I went. I better make sure and clicked it. It turned out to be a big giant parody and every line was kind of a joke about why, you know, line two, if you don't love your kids, you should definitely not, you know, like these kinds of things totally opposite. But what it made me realize and what it reminded me is there are so many people online who see anything, including let's say a telegraph embedded story on Facebook who will just take it at headline value, reshare it 50,000 times before anyone figures out that it was bonkers. So that's my only worry is that this doesn't I'm not so sure people will be some of this will be more skeptical of a service that launches like this in today's climate, as you said, but there are going to be plenty who still fall for Tom naked in the mall stories. How did you know about that? I'm going to just keep talking about that story so that, you know, eventually we're normalizing it. Job postings on Blizzard's U.S. That's the birth of the day, right? The career section refers to an unannounced project that utilizes a robust first person engine, unquote, and seeks to software engineers with experience working in first person games. Now, Blizzard gamers everywhere have jumped to all sorts of conclusions about this. I have a theory and I'll just throw it out there. I do not believe this is a new project. They're not trying to build a new engine for a new game. They have an engine. It's a really good one and it's being used currently for Overwatch and it's really good tech with all sorts of other possibilities. I think what these two career options are engineers coming into the company and taking that engine and either repurposing it for something else, let's say some sort of first person RPG, Starcraft type thing or whatever it may be or more likely, in my opinion, is building upon the success they're already having with Overwatch and expanding things out with more single player content, with campaigns potentially, with story modes potentially. Just a lot more stuff in that regard. It's the one thing that Overwatch is great at and terrible at. It has great story and it's terrible at letting you play the story. But it has really great story and it's always reminding you of that. These characters are great, their backstories are great, yet you don't get to play any of it. You just get to fight each other. So I think that stuff's on the horizon for sure. I thought that before this announcement, I feel like this confirms it, but there are plenty of people out there going Diablo and first person or whatever their picks are. Diablo Watch. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen. Well, I mean, given what you said, I mean, what you said perfectly describes what is being said in this post. Unannounced Project, right? So a new game that utilizes a robust first person engine. Well, they have a robust first person engine. We know what it is. It powers Overwatch. So that makes perfect sense to me. A Diablo skinning of that engine or a Diablo game that took advantage of that engine isn't impossible for them to do, technically speaking, right? No, that's true. I can see why people would be like, oh, well, you could take Starcraft and put it on the Overwatch engine. You could take Diablo, put it on the Overwatch engine. So why wouldn't that be the case? Yeah, it's possible that it could be and that's entirely, it's entirely possible. I just, having watched these guys enough for the last 20 years of my life and for the last 12 or so very carefully, it just doesn't fit their ammo to jump into a new genre this quickly. I feel like they're going to, they're going to flesh some stuff out and specifically Overwatch because it is a smashing success in every possible way. And they want that momentum to not only continue, but to flourish. And part of that is you just think it's more Overwatch. I do. I think it's single player or co-op flavored or story flavored something Overwatch. It's, I doubt very highly, it's a brand new IP. That's a thing they do very rarely. They tend to iterate for a very long time and it's too early in this phase to say, all right, we got another shooter on the horizon. All that being said, there's, we're at a place with Starcraft where we're done with the RTS era for it, kind of for a while. There's still content, people still like that game, it's still doing what it's doing. But it's entirely possible that they'd now want to take that universe, those characters, those stories, and take it into a new place. And a new place might be, I don't know, like imagine Destiny, but in the world of Starcraft and more space stuff and landing on planets and doing missions, not quite MMO, but a little more sort of Borderlands destiny, like. Or as Lachman is suggesting in our chat room, lost Vikings. Yeah, it's entirely possible we're going to get a first person shooter lost Vikings. But my point is that it's a way of doing a new genre without leaving their, their strength of their IPs and what they did with Overwatch while we're all very impressed with how they did it. You got to remember it had been 20 years or something since their last new IP. So I'm not, I'm not banking on that. However, whatever it is, it's exciting because that engine is robust and has all sorts of potential and I could see them doing some really interesting things. Well, thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right. Roger Chang, we're going to bring you back into the conversation here. We're all going to talk a little bit about things we're thankful for. I particularly, I don't want to be too sappy myself about like, you know, overdoing it. I think technology, in fact, Dark Redeemer said it in our Slack really well. Technology itself is something we should all be thankful for. The fact that we have this ability, he said, from the pointed stick that allowed us to first draw lines in the sand up until this bright, shiny and clean mobile phone that I have in my hand that allows me to transmit meaningful information to almost anyone on the planet. I don't want to go overboard and say these are the most important things. And this is the time that you're in the U.S. where you're supposed to be thankful for family and blessings and all that sort of thing. And that's kind of the theme of mine. But what we're able to do with this technology is pretty interesting. So and Roger, I think you have a great example of that. My example immediately is just because as a, I wouldn't say a new dad, a recent dad, or still a dad. YouTube is a godsend because there are so many videos that are age-appropriate that are both informational and educational but also entertaining to my daughter that she's at the age, she's almost turning two, and she's at the age where she's super tantrumy. She gets upset at, God knows what, because I don't. She's just, you know, there's a stage where they're developing and sometimes what seems illogical to us makes perfect sense to them. But YouTube allows me to placate her, especially on long drives, which makes everyone less stressful, my wife included because there were times where you would even drive for like 30 minutes and she would not stop screaming. She would be, you thought there was something wrong with her and she was just, you know, throwing a tantrum and having a YouTube video with a song and dance number that keeps her entertained and happy is amazing. I am still, I'm still impressed that parents before me managed to get by without such technology to keep kids occupied, because, especially because you need to strap them in into a seat to prevent them from wandering around the car, as well as a safety measure. It's, they get kind of, they get kind of cabin feverish. They feel cooped up and you need something to kind of take their mind off that. Scott, how did you get by without YouTube? I don't know. By the way, my wife no longer works for YouTube, so I can disclose that. You still have to do, this is like kind of reverse disclaimer. I like that. So my kids, my oldest is 21. She was born in 1994 and my youngest is 16, born in 2000. All of this was pre-YouTube, obviously, when they were born. But it feels like we've had it since day one, weirdly. Um, like this household is more YouTube than house. Sometimes I feel like, so I, it's a really good question. Like having, if I had had this sort of stuff in the mid 90s, late 90s, to hand over to my kids on long drives to, you know, Vegas or wherever we were going, would have been great. Like I'm jealous of Roger in that one sense. But what it also reminds me is that the stuff Roger's doing now with a two year old, in the next 15 years, 20 years, it's just going to be so different then too. Like YouTube is going to seem weirdly archaic. It may exist in some form if they figure out a way to advance with whatever technology does. But, but I've, I finally got this perspective where I realized that I thought tech was hot and awesome in 94. Man, websites and Yahoo and this and that and the other and HTML and, and the Netscape and all these things. I just thought we were in heaven and it was never going to get any better. And then it just- I can go on Usenet and talk with anyone anywhere in the world. Yeah. I can download the Doom demo and play it in our office till we hours in the morning. Like things that just seem like impossibilities and magic were happening. And really it just never stopped. Like we're just, we're just sort of on that same wave. Thankfully, I feel like it's never stopped and we've seen the innovation just keep happening with not much of a dip and, and it's a nice feeling. Like I can't imagine what it would be like to see that stuff in 94, 95, disappear for the next 15, 20 years and then come back and try to deal with what we're doing now. It'd be nearly impossible. It's a huge leap. But when you're there the whole time, it just sort of goes with you. So her skills as a navigator of YouTube and a user of streaming content and, and all of those kinds of things that come with that, touchscreens and whatever, those are all just going to be added upon and added upon until she's, you know, 25 and running her own Fortune 500 company. I hope so. That's man. I can sure use that. I can sure use that. I just, I just counting on it. Like my tension. Funny enough, the stuff that I was thinking about this when we were talking pre-show or earlier today about the kinds of tech that were grateful for him. And I started thinking immediately about the high-minded stuff. So this may sound a little bit weird, but for me, there are some sort of basic tenants, basic standbys in technology that affect me every day, almost minute by minute. And it's things like copy and paste. I remember a time when that didn't exist. That wasn't a thing to do. And I don't just mean on your iPhone in like 2008, okay, everybody? It's not what I mean. But like, just generally speaking, that wasn't a thing you could do on DOS or computers at that time. Change my life. Long file names. Change the way I work and function. Keyboard shortcuts. Literally every day, I rely on keyboard shortcuts to make, to cut probably hours out of work in the day that I would normally be spending trying to do slow things with mice. And then I thought about things like the ubiquity of sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive and the like. There's tons of those. Digital download and the fact that I can get any movie or video game or whatever by simply downloading it over super fast internet. And just how we got here so quick is just mind boggling. So for me, I'm thinking a lot about the basics, man. Like the underpinnings of my day to day right now are made so much better because of some of these simple things, some of which have been around for decades. Some we've just gotten the last few years, but all of it adds up to just a more productive functioning Scott. I will add that long file. Like I don't think people realize before long file names you're limited to eight characters and you had to be super creative in order to make file names that made sense, but you could have a list of them that still fit within that limitation and being able to do that. I mean, I remember it's like, well, for this, for these files, make sure you add an A before you start it. So we know that they belong to this group or use a B or use a number. Now you could just type out what it's inside. This is my homeowner's insurance policy for 2016. Yeah. It's a situation and capitalization and everything. It's it's it's stuff like that in copy paste. I think I think it overlooked how many of us could make it through a day without copy paste? I can't. I would double my workload easily. Yeah. And it isn't just text. It's it's images for me and it's it's right clicking on something on the web and bringing it taking it someplace else by copying and pasting it in Photoshop and then dinking with it or whatever, like so much of that I take for granted. And I oh just if you took it away like suddenly it all disappeared. I'm convinced the world would collapse in a week. Yeah. No, absolutely. The one I'll throw out there is I am thankful and I don't mean to get too sappy on this but I'm thankful that I am in a job that is allows me to compare the new Mac book pro to the Microsoft surface book. Like that is that is something that I need to do in order to speak intelligently about these topics that we talk about every day. And so sitting down with the MacBook pro I get this problem a lot where people like so you're going to buy the new whatever and and and it's usually an answer of yes because I I think that is a priority for me to try like I bought a surface book because I wanted to try it and say okay what is Microsoft doing here in the in the powerful laptop space I bought the Oculus Rift in the HTC Vive because I want to be able to put on these VR headsets and and to be able to speak to what it's like to wear them. And I don't buy a lot of things because I want them necessarily but I still enjoy it and and so the the fact that I've been playing with the MacBook pro and I have opinions about that touch bar which you know we talked about on the morning stream I think it's kind of neutral it doesn't take away from the experience it hasn't really added much to the experience. It's not a big selling point but the laptop is fine. The touchpad is very similar to the surface book touchpad. It's very sensitive doesn't have a lot of travel but once you get used to it it's very good. So anyway that's the thing I'm thankful for is that I get to play around with all this stuff. Yeah I should I should tack on to that and say you know straight up the internet has provided me a career that I dreamt of when I was eight and thought would never happen in both my illustration world and my podcasting world all I wanted to do was draw and record things and make a radio show and somehow it all just aligned in time to make that happen in a way that is well beyond my expectation. So here here to all of that and then some I mean without that it's just you know what was I going to do I don't know what I'd do like it's given me a voice in a way that I just hadn't planned on and some may say ah now everyone's got that voice and I'd say well that's also awesome like yeah it lets it lets our voices be evaluated based on what we say and do rather than the fact that we happen to know somebody who worked at the local television station that could get us a job or whatever right yeah even I mean artists will other comic artists will will certainly agree with me on these at least I think they should there was a time where we all wanted to get into the comics business and the way that we did that is submitting ourselves among thousands of others into a tiny key keyhole that was either who you knew or luck and that was literally it now we have this big ocean and it's sometimes hard to find the cream of the crop I get that and it has its own challenges but everybody has this opportunity to to make and therefore make something out of themselves that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise because the opportunities weren't there so so that stuff's awesome like how could you you know how could we go this show about technology thankfulness without at least mentioning that well we got I asked some folks out there on our facebook page at facebook.com slash daily tech news show about what they were thankful for Andy Beach said that he's thankful for his amazon echo even his five-year-old uses it they says they use it every day junior said he's thankful for his blackberry passport because quote you'll take my physical keyboard from my cold dot dot dot lol he's cold out loud yeah he's very he's very attached to his physical keyboard Steve I in our slack for people who support us at the analyst level on patreon said modern mobile phones they allow me to communicate with family friends and automatically transmit GPS location when dialing 9-1-1 in emergency situations as a 9-1-1 operator for more than 20 years I cannot tell you how useful this feature is it's so much easier to locate people when they need assistance now as opposed to even 10 years ago let alone 20 can I and I want to meet stack one thing on top of that I totally forgot to mention it's great all the technology is great testing this stuff is great having the opportunities we talked about a great but it has to be mentioned I've got close friends I've had my whole life I knew in school and we still keep in touch my old friends Mark and Dan and some of these other guys and that's great but my most collaborative talk to every day share experiences with converse with all the time and have like some of the most trust I've had for people in this world are all people I would have not known without all this stuff we just talked about I would not know you I wouldn't know Roger I wouldn't know 99% of the people I podcast with or meet with or go to cons with or you know generally speaking collaborate with in ways that are better than the sum of its parts like it's it is almost impossible to describe what that actually has meant for me instead of you know two pool hall buddies in a an old friend from high school I've got this throng of people with all these talents and we can come together and help each other in all these ways like it's not trying to get all kumbaya here but it's a pretty rad side effect yeah it is it is pretty neat I mean especially if you're in a location where it might be remote or isolated and you don't there's not a lot of people like in a small town it does open up a huge opportunity to meet people you would not otherwise meet other than I don't know like a pen pal program like you just send out you know mail so a bunch of people like oh be my pen pal I don't know you ever had one of those in school yeah I had a pen pal from Ohio when I was a kid and it was fascinating I don't never know what happened to that guy yeah he's probably on Facebook you'd find him yeah I wonder actually you have no you don't remember his name I don't remember his name and I don't think I have any of the letters that we exchanged either so you know yeah it was you Tom you were writing letters it was me the whole time the letters were coming from inside the house all right let's get to a couple of messages of the day before we wind up here Scott you want to lead us off yeah why not w o or maybe it's whoa it's whoa yeah he gave us pronunciation guide down there at the bottom there it is down there yeah phonics here we go whoa right in wrote in and said that Walmart's use of the blockchain to track the supply chain for his food reminded him of a Starbucks effort called trace ability that sounds weird if it's you're trying to find traces of something in your coffee but that isn't really what he means it uses RFID to follow coffee beans from the farm through the mill and through the roaster whoa writes this quote I'm not sure how far this has progressed over the last few years but initially the idea was not only to keep quality intact but the biggest portion excuse me was it gave a direct connection to the farmer to ensure they received payment eventually they want to have that exact farm information on the retail bag of coffee to enable customers and consumers to connect deeper with the actual family and or farm that grew the coffee that they are currently drinking longtime fan whoa that's pretty cool I love that idea anyway just from a data perspective being able to track that stuff like if I'm drinking milk I wouldn't mind knowing what cow it came from there's some personal you know sort of thing going on there maybe this is a better application for it with starbucks but this is ronda ronda enjoys long walks in the past year yeah no what's it really interesting is is woe sort of said hey starbucks has been doing this for a long time but what he's pointing out is that starbucks was doing the RFID tracking walmart what we were talking about is using the blockchain to keep track of the things that are tagged right it's not just about RFID it's not just about hey we can actually track an individual bag of coffee or a package of pork chops it's about we can use the blockchain to make sure that all the records of it are public and difficult to fake so it's sort of like yeah starbucks did this a few years ago and now walmart is doing another thing that advances along that and it's progress big data drew followed up on our story about summit new jersey partnering with uber if you remember they were trying to give a subsidized plan for people instead of a parking pass because they were running out of parking places at the train station so they partnered with uber to give you a cheap ride to the train station and drew's got a report he says as a resident of summit I've been following this partnership with great interest I live close enough to the train to walks and no ubers for me but based on articles I've seen in the local news the city council reported a couple weeks after the program launched that the 100 person pilot program is full and has a 25 person waiting list I don't know how many of those people are taking ubers daily but I have seen people in cars waiting in the evening at the designated uber drop-off area program must be at least slightly successful because I just saw an article today that summit and uber will be holding a recruitment event for new riders on December 1st to meet demand and I've also seen that there's interest from a neighboring town berkeley heights with similar issues if this program is a success he says it's also worth mentioning that summit partnered with uber last year to offer $5 rides for residents during the holiday season who wanted to go downtown for shopping again to offset the parking issues in town personally I think this is a great alternative to spending money on a parking garage for cars that aren't going to move all day anyway yeah also if you've got a good public transit system it's a nice way to alleviate some of the congestion that can happen during the holidays on those things that seems pretty good it's interesting just this movie theater over here you've been to it we used to do a neurotacular there they had just they have just reconstructed an area and opened it up to be uber temporary parking oh wow so they've got this very specific place for drop off some pickups for people that use uber or other you know lift services that sort of thing and I had no idea they were even doing it I don't know if it's been successful I've seen cars come and go from there but apparently that was a thing yeah yeah well thank you for the report it's good to have someone on the ground thank you Scott Johnson as well for joining us and wishing you a happiest of Thanksgiving well I know some would say the pleasure is yours but it's not it's truly mine to be here and I would like to tell people before this Thanksgiving holiday weekend one of the biggest things I do am thankful for is the listeners of this show and all of the stuff I do huge thanks to all of you if you're looking for a deal on any of my art prints Friday the day we trample each other after being thankful the night before that one you can stay from the comfort of your home or your phone and go to frogpants.com slash store and if you use the code gobble gobble you can get you can get any of the prints that are currently available on the store for 15% off and there's other stuff that'll go up there as well so it's the annual frog pants store sale as we jump on this whole bad mad wagon together but anyway thank you for having me on it's always a pleasure Tom yeah absolutely man Roger anything from you before we go no so thanks for joining us yeah thanks for joining us and uh oh if you have any ideas for best of shows you want to see included send us your suggestions you can go to the website what's the website bit.ly bit.ly slash best of DTNS absolutely the only thing I want to add before we're out of here is a big thank you there are so many people that make it possible for us to do this show you see some of them like Roger today for instance Jenny Josephson helping to build the show continues to provide good advice to the show folks like Rich Strafilino who helped write and he'll be filling in on daily tech headlines later this week folks in the slack contributing things folks in email contributing things folks on the Reddit the people who keep the Reddit going like Kyle and Scotty Rowland people in chat just keeping us entertained and sometimes providing important information and news along the way it's a huge group effort and the fact that y'all are not only willing to watch and listen but many of you support it with a few dollars here and there cannot thank you enough so huge thanks from me to you whether you're whether you're celebrating Thanksgiving or not this weekend I hope that you appreciate what you mean to us here our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern at alphagicradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com we'll have the headlines in the feed for you this week and then back with a regular episode on Monday with Veronica Belmont and Amy Webb talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com nice thank you that was great good night Cleveland and by Cleveland I mean Rich and Len Peralta titles not even what should we call this Roger well leaving the top is an internal mistake try to bring that one oh that's Dorsey that's what Dorsey said about his Twitter yeah cast and recast I'm thankful for DTNS that's a pretty good one Google's type casting to Google has trouble naming the cast Google recasts Google cast has Chrome cast actually like Google's type cast Facebook's square Facebook's square with China Chinese Facebook is censored DeepMind kills a professional leap flipper that's fake news not actually kill DeepMind has not killed yet only Facebook can solve China right right like only Nixon can go to China a big trouble with Facebook's and China oh they're trying to do a big big trouble in China I am I like text giving yeah text giving is good thanks teching Facebook trouble Blizzard, Nintendo's it Nintendo's it I don't know what that means text giving Telegraph your fake news a cast of indecisives now you cast me now you don't read my lips no more waxes what the little political I don't even know what it refers to but it made me laugh no get it George Bush said read my lips no new taxes the first guy who looks about waxes part because it's you don't see the lips some people need to wax their lips oh right yeah but what does that have to do with the show if you're reading the lips that's the no I get it it's the it's the deep mind lip reading thing oh I still don't understand the wax part so because some people need to wax their lips if you're gonna do a close-up on their lips I just don't think it's really obscure okay all right be master right am I wrong am I wrong in that I assume you're right that's the only thing I can think that would tie in the waxes because I had this discussion with my wife the other day about women who wax their lips I'm glad you said their lips thank you no I get that it's it be masters like read my lips no more taxes yes I get I get the reference I just didn't understand the wax part that I'm not sure I still do I mean I understand what Roger's saying I still don't I appreciate it on a this word rhymes with that word level but it's all it's read by AI says beat master and the penny drops whoa that is it's deep deep mind got it got it yeah but it needs an explanation it was too high concept for me beat master I'm sorry I get it now I totally get it now laying the pipe is it actually a high concept I mean it's pretty understandable is that the concept of the concept no the concept was too high for me I couldn't reach it with my small brain so Roger I gave you the the links in Slack I see you just joined the chair no I was already in it but for some reason toward the end of the year or something I lose the window and then I try to rejoin it and it doesn't put whatever I don't know well text giving is winning now followed by I'm thankful for DTS I don't want to use I'm thankful for DTS and it's not because I don't appreciate the sentiment I do very much the problem is if I put it in our headline then it sounds like I'm saying it which I I guess is okay because I am also thankful for DTS I don't know but it seems a little self-congratulatory at that point that's all I'm worried about is it am I being ridiculous uh I can totally see that I can totally see that do you these cast ones are some of the best ones but it's such a small story it just captured everyone's imagination I guess uh we go with text giving I guess text giving what do you eat on text giving soylent I eat a 256-bit turd key I thought you said turd get it because have you ever have you read Tofurky Scott uh yeah we've done it before for someone who came one year that was super um vegan vegan yeah not vegan I guess they were just vegetarian but we tried it um I thought it was horrifying and I hated it so I maybe there's a better way to make it we didn't really know what we were doing it was a year I was vegetarian and my parents just didn't change anything have potatoes then I guess yeah here's the stuffing here's the potatoes oh you can't have stuffing there's turkey grave unit oh that's true oh that sounds so good right now it does doesn't it I love I even cheap stuffing I love all stuffing I don't even care stuffing instead of potatoes remember when they were trying to get people to buy stuffing instead of potatoes year round never caught on and why because we love stuffing so much but we're so tied to the tradition of it I guess we gotta just because you can't really eat stuffing is one of those things that sounds great but after you eat a few bites it's not like you hate it it just fills you up and you can't really eat anymore I don't know man I think I could keep eating it forever well let's try that I'm not saying it's good for me but neither is mashed potatoes right just do both it's fine it's not mashed mashed uh stuffing yeah mash stuffing there you go combine them instead of potatoes mash stuffing made of alan alda it's witty but tough don't choke on the social commentary the chicken was a baby don't you understand the eggs they're your eggs oh well my eggs are just scrambled right now the chicken was a baby when you're talking about Thanksgiving dinner as a whole opens up a whole ball of worms wax oh read my lips no new waxes I'm gonna go with text giving is that cool yeah that just sounds like check off instead of saying taxes no new waxes no new waxes in the vessel they still don't understand because you have these in Russian you don't say Vladimir you say Vladimir Vladimir Vladivostok yeah Vladivostok you know how tempted tom every time you say something like oh I needed to get this for the business every time you say those words I inch just a little closer to the surface studio but I can't quite pull the trigger yeah my dual reason right one would be commenting on it on shows like this the other would be using it for your design your it would be the only problem is it I've got all I need for that right now like this way comes great this pro is great like everything's great and it's I'm not having any issues it's just purely I mean they kind of did it to me they put me a bit of a hey it's cheaper than a new MacBook Pro oh yeah I definitely wanted over that but it's so freaking expensive at the low end you could write it off on your taxes twice says Scott is thankful who is not an accountant and maybe you know what would turn me if I got with my accountant like this week and said hey tell me look at everything and tell me do I do I need to spend you should do that anyway right because I my accountant's really good about that say like oh yeah up to this amount of capital expenditures would actually help you and above it wouldn't I want it it's it's companies do this CNET used to do this at the end of the year they'd come up with a capital expenditures budget they're like hey we need we need to spend this on on capital expenditures because it's going to help the company with taxes that's how we got the tricaster for buzz out loud yeah oh there's new ones aren't shipping tell I thought this was already shipping oh the shipping in January isn't it yeah I guess so early 2017 it says oh early okay um problem is I want this 32 gig 32 gig 4199 yeah so the thing to do is is to go and find out like okay do I do I benefit by spending and if so how much and then right see what's what you can do with that yeah because if it's if the benefit outweighs the yeah well is this a phone no this the surface studio monster drawing tablets pc thing would it if you got it do you think it would improve your productivity probably not do you think it would do you think it would ease any kind of physical ailments you have because of the work you did no I'm not kidding because there's no I know I once had to I once had to convince my dad to get like a specific tool like it's a socket wrench and granted it was like 30 bucks because it's like 30 or 40 bucks it's like no I don't need a socket wrench for it's like listen you're spending five hours to take off one night when you could do this in five minutes with the right tools you know it's like you know yeah that's see that's the problem I've got this really nice 22 8 you know hd widescreen perfectly wonderful tablet and is still considered you know high end top line stuff I have a you know a mac that's screaming fast like I'm not having anything where I'm like oh yeah this should really speed things up for me if anything I haven't had enough definitive answers from reviews and things about how good the drawing engine is on this new thing they just have me in this bubble and I'm not used to being in one with Microsoft it's freaking me out I would say test one out of the store if you can and then think about something else you can spend money on yeah like car payments or oh dude I'm gonna go down that road I'll never get it yeah we'll see I don't know they're so nifty but I don't know you know it's weird because I used to be in a position where I got all the latest and greatest stuff because I used to do all the tech stuff for screen savers and call for help and you know what I learned is even if I had it sitting on my desk I very rarely used it like it was awesome and all that but like in my day to day life it didn't make a huge impact even though I was reviewing the product yeah and so it was kind of that kind of got me off the oh I got to buy this I got to buy that new product because I learned that even if I got it I like hey you just got you know it traded my PC and get a new whiz bang you know um Skylake you know base system what would I what more could I do with it that I can't do right now I mean all I really need is a new video card my current PC and it's would be fine because my my my old one died yeah I think if I do that old thing they tell you to do in high school think if how many hours it took to make the money to pay for the thing and is that thing really worth x amount of time you spent yeah you get it well here's the thing if I was in the market for a new waycom like if I was you know kind of at the end of cycle on that this costs as much as a new waycom without it being an entirely self-contained computer anyway so I would probably just say all right well I'll kick in the extra 500 bucks difference or whatever to go for the full surface studio sure well I'm just not there right now you know I mean would it make sense to sell what you have to maybe that sounds like work yeah it is selling stuff takes a lot of takes a lot of time it really does I actually don't have those services now that'll you just give you take a picture of your thing and you say here sell this on ebay for me and then give me a cut yeah but then that reduces the amount you get then you get a maybe that cuts worth more than or that's a better deal than the time investment if you don't do the cut thanks yeah arguably right yeah oh I don't know also it's first gen maybe I don't want first gen well there's always that right that not so much to your being able to comment on its side but on the work side on the work side right for sure which is if I'm being honest the heavier side yeah if I was gonna I mean if apple next week says our next generation 30 inch iMacs will be reclinable and you can draw on the screen I'd probably do it because I'm already sort of in the ecosystem and it would work fine for me my next my next iMac will be a self-driving car like if that's the only time I'm buying an iMac if it if it's a built-in work station on wheels car's gonna work then I don't have to drive perfect that wouldn't be an iMac anymore that would be a car yeah how do you know they how do you know iMacs won't be a car they can move the name to something else then it's not just a car an iMac it's a car I don't care what they call it that's a different thing it's a computer with wheels Tom it's a computer with wheels which is also called a car no no no like the Cintiq the Cintiq 27 QHD is the same price as this entire thing don't get trapped in the circle Tom Scott you know the vicious cycle I'm in the circle and it's honestly I was on the side of of encouraging you until you brought up that first gen issue and now I'm like yeah I used to get that way with about camera equipment I was like oh I get this get that the thing about cameras though is that once you start adding up everything it easily goes into like uh seven figures fast I was like no I don't think so six figures not seven six six figures fast like oh I get this I get that get that get that it's like wait a minute spending more than most people will see in like five years do you display a glossy reflective beautiful display of the giant tablet trying to find more reviews more reviews we we need an instapole need to do a straw pool should Scott Johnson buy the microsoft studio for the studio vote now it's not a gaming PC that does okay I don't care about that bye Scott Scott's going down to research hole I am falling down on I should stop doing it it's the only way to be sure though oh the verge liked it I don't know how they got their hands on one most of the sites say they don't have a real one yet they've only seen it at a conference or something I guess the verge well yeah people got got to play with it at that actual announcement but yeah most people didn't get to take it home with them so plus the uh well I know penning arcade a mic over there got one for fruit to evaluate all right I can't look at this anymore don't look into the light I can't do it I just can't video review oh that'll be bad all right yeah so many more things are video now yeah I find that I don't know how I feel about that because there's a lot of really good video content and then there's a ton of crap and it's hard to say what I don't like is when they say here's the step-by-step answer to this and it's a video yeah I hate that I hate that I need I need more websites to and I was one of the people that caused that to have your fault Tom because we used to do that at CNET but then I started taking my scripts and posting them alongside the videos so you know I wish more people did that you were tip of the spear yeah the iceberg spear mm-hmm oh good I'm gonna do uh Tom and Brian explain things on the cover thon this week oh yeah that's right I heard you were doing that that's great we know everything when Brian and I get together it's just you know I know I don't don't I know it because he has all the answers is it me I mean likewise I don't know much outside of technology when it's just me alone but when Evan and I get together somehow yep it's a multiplier effect yep stars line are the planets aligned how's it go stars are planets which things align the stars okay mm-hmm some fan gifted me this universe simulator 2 and it's our solar system but and when you start the game I guess it's a game it's more of a simulator but everything's going as it should and it's all very photorealistic the earth and sun and all the rotations are all happening the way they're supposed to you can zoom way in or whatever and then you can tweak the properties of various heavenly bodies so I changed the sun to be uh I forgot 300 megatons more mass or something and earth turned into a freaking scarred disgusting awful everyone's dead mess whoa yeah and mercury burned up entirely a couple of moons land slammed into the planets they were they were circling wait what is this this is the universe the universe simulator 2 I believe is the name of it and you can you can do anything from change the axis of the earth's polar rotation and then if you do it even just by a little bit like it completely jacks up the solar system like it's all based on physics models and that nasa data and I still want to try to plow your rope into Mars so you can get water back on it what's cool is I put a red giant just smack dab next to the to the sun and everything just sucked into it and got destroyed immediately and then one time I blew the sun up and all the planets flew off you know and weird trajectories and if you follow earth you can like select it and follow it as it flies off into nowhere and as it moved it slowly got all the all the continents became white with snow and ice and as it further it got out the more it became just a solid ball of ice oh yeah it's really cool to mess with where does where does the oxygen on hoff come from I never understood here's the deal Roger you according to my steam you already own universe simulator 2 you could just go in there and go for it yeah if I had a computer that would run it isn't that the irony yep that is the irony like my guy in that episode of Twilight Zone all the time of the world to read my books except my non-lenscrafter glasses lens crack when I could have got the polycarbonate based lenses with the shatter shield and UV protection and the high indexing and the glare coating always fell flat for me because I just thought he's the last guy in the world he will eventually find another pair of these is going to find another pair somewhere somewhere someone else has him he'll be fine other than that it's a classic goodbye video folks have a lovely weekend we'll see you later