 If I understand you right, Patrick, the term troll derives from an actual small being that carries data around on the Internet. Right. Yeah. Well, it's not just the data. It's also the UI elements and, you know, initially obviously it was just the text, the characters. It was much simpler. Sure. But we've, you know, the trolls have been training and they've been specializing and you have, they now carry around a lot of what you see, obviously not everything, but a lot of what you see on your web pages and in the web, you know, the videos and all of this is carried by the trolls, yeah. So those under construction signs back in the 90s were because we didn't have enough trolls, but now we have plenty of Internet trolls. Well, yeah. No one could have expected that the demand for trolls would be that high. And by the way, when you're saying Internet trolls, people might assume that you mean trolls in the way we know the term today, which is, yeah, the, the, the, the controversy build. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Not the actual Internet trolls that build the Internet. Yeah. Exactly. Got you. Yeah. That's where it comes from. I see. God, you learn something new every day. Mm-hmm. So it's fantastic. Yeah. Well, let's, uh, let's do a tech news podcast. You know what? That's exactly why I showed up. So, uh, all right, it's like, like scheduled it on a calendar almost. All right. Here we go. When having tea with the queen, you must remember three important things. One, pinky up, two, never wear a hat more audacious than hers. And three, make sure you wear your DTNS T-shirt to become Queen Appropriate. Go to DailyTechNewsShow.com forward slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 8th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today, Mr. Patrick Bezier, host of all of the fine programming at FrenchSpin.com and our Tuesday co-host. How are you, sir? I am pretty good. I'm pretty good. How are you, sir, Tom Merritt? Although I should call you sir, this wouldn't be appropriate, since I don't think you've been knighted yet. I did apply for a Duke ship in the North American title board, and one, Mark the Terpster Terpin, bought me a Lord ship in England. So you could call me Duke or Lord, but not you're right, not sir. Not sir. Well, Lord Tom Merritt, how are you doing today? I am well. You're a liege. My liege? Somebody's liege. I don't know who's liege. I'm from the U.S. We don't got no liege. I'm doing well. We had a great time on Pixels. Patrick's show about video gaming earlier this week, so you might want to go check that out at FrenchSpin.com. We'll tell you a little bit more about that later. Today, we've got a very interesting topic that Patrick brought up, comparing tech companies to countries. I think there are, that this might be surprising to some people, but at the same time, there are a lot of similarities, and it might be something that we might want to consider a little bit more seriously than just the joking, oh, you know, the country of Facebook or, well, discuss it in the, yeah, we've got, we've got reasons. You may be skeptical, but stay tuned. Let's start off with the headlines. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Justice has asked a district judge to countermand Magistrate Judge James Orenstein's decision that the All Ritz Act could not be used to compel Apple to assist in unlocking an iPhone 5S in the New York drug case. Doesn't mean they'll get their way, but they, I don't know that it's technically an appeal in this particular maneuver, but they're asking for a countermanding of that order. So the Department of Justice is part of the government, right? Doesn't that fall under something they shouldn't do in this principle of separation of power, or I'm sure it isn't, since they're doing it. Well, no, the FBI's part of the government too, and they're suing. Right, they're suing, but they're asking the judge to rule. No, no, that's what the Department of Justice does. The Department of Justice is the part of the U.S. government that goes to court and prosecute criminals. They can't ask a district judge to do something. Well, no, this is a normal thing. If you're a party to a court, and the judge rules against you, you can appeal, or in this case, I guess there's another technical name for it. Right, right. I misunderstood, I misunderstood, I thought they were like, hey, could you please rule in our favor? Oh, no, no, no, that's interesting, it's an interesting interpretation. You're right, it wasn't the U.S. Department of Justice going to the judge behind everyone's back and going, you should just countermand this order. This is an open court proceeding. If the order had been ruled against Apple, Apple could have done the same thing. Right, the same way Apple is asking the judge to, you know, in the case in December, they're not doing the same thing. Right, okay, okay, that makes a lot more sense now I get it. That's why it's unsurprising. Right. And, however, surprisingly, Microsoft announced it's making a version of its SQL server database that will run on Linux. What is happening? A preview version is now available. The full release is expected sometime in mid-2017, and thanks to Captain Kipper, Silva42, and Greg N for posting about it on the subreddit. Cats are, how does the saying go? Cats and dogs sleeping together. There were animated gifs of cats and dogs taking naps all over the internet last night because Microsoft really following through on such a Nadella's promise that we're just going to make our software run everywhere, putting SQL database on Linux? This is the kind of thing that Balmer was going to war about ten years ago. So, it's a new world, and it does inform that Windows Universal Platform conversation about video games that Tim Sweeney was writing about. We talked about it in DTNS, and we talked about it on Pixels. Because Microsoft's attitude is, yeah, no, we're going to make stuff run everywhere. Yeah, it's definitely surprising, and I feel like we keep repeating the same thing, but for those of us who knew the old Microsoft of the 90s, had you told me that this kind of thing would happen one day, I would have said over somebody's dead body, somebody being the people at the head of Microsoft, I guess in a way they've left, so, you know, they're not in charge of it. People who are calling Linux dangerous in the 90s have left. The United States FCC is circulating a proposal among members for a $9.25 a month broadband internet subsidy for low-income households. According to The New York Times, the proposal is part of a larger $2 billion overhaul of the FCC's lifeline program that subsidizes phone service for the poor. So, right now they subsidize phone service to make it cheap, and the internet is not part of that, so this would change that and say, hey, internet should be part of that too. A third party would be used to vet applications to prevent abuse. There have been some accusations of abuse of the telephone subsidy in the past, so they want to prevent that from happening if they can. The lifeline program changes will be voted on March 31st. As a raging socialist, I approve of all of this. Are you a raging socialist? No, I'm not. I just, you know, it's funny because whenever we talk about stuff on the Phileus Club, I'm accused of being very liberal, of being very left-wing, kind of, and this time in the latest episode, we talked a lot about the situation in France and how work reform is not going through, and everyone who listened to it from France is now accusing me of being a horrible conservative, you know, right-wing US capitalism sell-out. For not supporting the rights of the workers, yeah. Well, yeah, anyway, this is another conversation, but it's very interesting how people react to stuff. Toyota announced Project Blade, Blade-B-L-A-I-D, I guess that's how it's pronounced, it would be a different kind of product, I guess, if it was Blade-B-L-A-D-E, but that program, B-L-A-I-D, is a program to develop a device worn around the neck to give blind and visually impaired people greater mobility. The device features voice control and cameras that can recognize things like stairs, doors, and signs. Haptic feedback guides the user to their destination. Future plans include the addition of mapping, object identification, and facial recognition. This is so interesting. There's lots of people doing assistance for the visually impaired and the blind. Microsoft, I think, has a headset where the auditory cues are given about where to turn and, you know, directions and things like that. The haptic feedback is very interesting because I've seen those experiments before where people get what they call another sense, I guess it's a sixth sense, because they have the magnetic poles press against them based on what's north and they start to develop sort of an instinctual knowledge of where north is because of that. This is taking that same idea of like a haptic feedback just pressing against you to indicate what direction you should go and what objects are around you and what signs say. I think that's fascinating. Yeah, it's really interesting and you can absolutely imagine how machine learning and pattern recognition in pictures is going to, I guess that's what they're planning on adding in the future. So, yeah, it's- No price to release dates on this. This is a project under development, so. And Toyota, not car related. If you're like, well, how does this fit in with cars? It doesn't. Well, Toyota, aren't they, oh no, it's Honda. I thought the robot, Asimov, was Toyota, but that's another example of a car company doing something that is only in the most distant sense related to cars. Last week, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service issued PINs to 2.7 million people as one measure in response to an attack that accessed 700,000 U.S. taxpayer records last year. Now the IRS has ended the PIN system after a week, after attackers accessed PINs 800 times and used them to file fraudulent tax returns. Turns out that the vulnerability that allowed the 2.7 million records to be accessed last fall was a knowledge-based authentication system. So the IRS decided to protect these PINs with a knowledge-based authentication system. So it would ask you things like former street addresses, the kind of information that can be found online in many cases just by searching around. The IRS says it's now reviewing its security system thanks to SB Sheridan for posting about this on the subreddit. So you know, going back to that raging socialist thing, I often wonder about the reason why Americans are so, and they're always convinced that the government is doing a poor job at everything, well, not everything. And I'm generalizing, I understand. But sometimes you read something like this and you think, well, maybe the reason they think that is that it often happens, but you know. I mean, I don't know that France don't make no mistakes either. Well, they make mistakes, but it doesn't seem like these kinds of mistakes would, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I want to stop the conversation there. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to get into a like, why is France government considered better than that? Yeah, because that's not what it's about. There's population differences and all that sort of thing. But I will definitely take your point of, you know, an incident like this does not inspire confidence because we're using the same system. And the other thing is the president issued directives requiring two factor authentication of the departments. This doesn't meet the requirements. The IRS isn't even playing by its own boss's rules when they did this, so I don't understand it at all. And it's not like, you know, that issue, that previous issue with the IRS. First of all, the IRS is kind of an important administration that you want to be trustworthy, right? And the 2.7 million thing, I'm sorry, the 700,000 taxpayer record records that were accessed was a big deal. So it's kind of like, why are you now reviewing the system that allowed, shouldn't have you done that immediately after the issue happened? I thought that what they had been doing since last autumn was reviewing the system. And then, yeah, I get that the IRS's challenge is to benefit ease of use with security. And that is a difficult challenge because you're talking about every single taxpayer in the United States of varying levels of understanding and tax-savviness having to be able to access this system. And you don't want to go too far the other way and have people not able to get at their tax records because that's going to make them as upset as well. So it's not an easy trick. But the solution is not, let's just do the same thing again. Yeah. And you know what? I'm sure if we had someone who actually knew the exact issue that was happening there, who came here and told us, well, actually the reason we did it like this was because of this and that, we would go, oh, all right. Maybe we'd understand it some more. Yeah, instead of, yeah. Skype added modern standard Arabic as its eighth language supported by its real-time voice translating service. To try it, you can just click the globe icon in Skype for Windows on the desktop version. Yeah, so just for the Windows desktop version of Skype. But now coming closer and closer to being a universal translator here. Pretty cool. Have you tried the universal translator look-alike thing? I have tried translating it. I haven't tried to have a conversation with someone. How is it that I haven't either? And I'm sort of wondering, how's it that we haven't even tried it? It's kind of like the magic move, right? It's not like I don't know someone around me that speaks French. And French was one of the first languages here. So, yeah, let's give this a shot. Yeah, that's right. It's just, I'm wondering like, is that one of those things that we think is gonna change the world once it happens? And when it actually happens, you're like, well, we kind of speak English with everyone anyway, so. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Tonight, folks, tonight is a special night. All systems are go. That's the board game, go. A battle for the soul of the machine in Seoul, Korea. Deep Minds AlphaGo with a mix of deep neural network machine learning and tree search techniques versus Go Champion Lee C. Dole with the asymmetric cognitive power of the human mind. At stake, 700,000 pounds. Watch live, 4 a.m. GMT, March 9th. On YouTube. Exciting. Sorry, I turned into a promotion, didn't I? I apologize for that. I'm excited about this. It's the modern day Casper A versus IBM's Deep Blue playing chess. Exactly. And I remember those days of Deep Blue and there were a few games where Deep Blue won, then it lost and then I almost said he won, he lost, he won again and then at some point he was just winning and that was it. And it was super exciting at the time. So is there a next frontier after Go or is that it? I guess it's the Turing test. Yeah, there's always other frontiers. Board game wise, I don't think there would be. C. Dole predicts a 4-1 or 5-0 win for himself but he says that he doesn't think he'll be able to beat, then necessarily have that good of a record the next time. He thinks that the machine learning is getting better and better all the time. And this, what's it called again? Deep Minds AlphaGo. AlphaGo had a big win against another Go expert back in October that we talked about before. So coming off a win, both of them, I'm assuming C. Dole won the last time he played because he's a champion. I don't really know that. Yeah, I'll be expecting AlphaGo to turn into Overwatch Go or Alpha Overwatch and try to beat me at Overwatch for its next time. Are you team Lee or team AlphaGo? I would say I will be on the correct side of history because ultimately I think AlphaGo is gonna win so I'm gonna start rooting for it from now so that when it becomes our overlord, I can say I was with you from the start. The robot overlords will note that Patrick began his support of your kind very early. Exactly. Upload VR noticed that Amazon has posted a job opening on Glassdoor for a senior software development manager of Virtual Reality for Amazon Video in Santa Monica. The description says the Virtual Reality team will explore and create the platform and interface for immersive storytelling. This will include an ingestion and playback platform for virtual reality experiences. So yeah, who isn't doing virtual reality nowadays? I think this is the next big theater for weird and failed experiments and I don't mean that in a negative way. It's gonna be fun to watch. Nobody understands how to make films and movies and storytelling in VR yet. Nobody. If anyone does tell you they know they've cracked it, they're probably lying or they're a super genius and you should ride their coattails to success because the thing about it is unlike a film, the point is not to control the gaze of the viewer. Unlike a film, you're not watching it with other people unless they're virtual other people, there's just so many differences between it. I'm fascinated with what people are going to come up with because you can definitely tell a story here but the rules are all changed. Yeah, and you know, that's what we've been saying from last year or the year before. VR is gonna be a lot of trial and error and there hasn't been a change in the way we approach visual anything since, I guess, 3D in gaming and that was that took, for those who remember, we were talking about the 90s earlier, that took a lot of trial and error and there was a lot of puke inducing experiments, I would say, and games that works, game that didn't work. This is kind of the same thing. There are gonna be a lot of things you have to try to know if they're gonna work or not. I'm guessing we're gonna see a lot of them that are not gonna work. And the next web is writing today about Tovala and their convenient meal prep Kickstarter. Here's what it is. A smart oven, that's what they're kick starting is the smart oven, then they'll sell you the meals for like 15 bucks a piece. Smart oven reads the barcodes on the food and then can either steam, broil, bake, or use convection to heat the food at the right temperature for the right amount of time. So you don't have to program anything. It just reads the barcode and does it. The device is capable of all four different things. It's that kind of oven. And then there's an app that'll alert you when the meal is ready. You can even adjust cooking time. You can adjust cooking presets for non Tovala meals if you just wanna heat up a good old fashioned microwave and frozen dinner. Meals from Tovala are designed to cook in 15 to 30 minutes. Right now you can get the oven at the early bird price of $199 plus shipping. So it ends up being $229 in the U.S. It is expected to retail for around $329. So can it do each of those things in succession? Like can it use first microwave, then, I don't know, steam, then broil, or yes. I think my hang up on this is it doesn't change the food out, right? So whatever food's in there is gonna get the same treatment as any other food in there. So one of the demonstrations they show is like chicken in broccoli, and then there's another thing with some sauce. And it's like, okay, that's great that you can use convection or microwave, whatever is most appropriate to get the right cooking texture. But you're not going to fry it, at least probably not. And you're gonna have whatever you put in there at exactly the same temperature with the exact same cooking part. So not every meal is gonna turn out here, but it does seem to be like an improvement on frozen dinners. Yeah, because there are some microwave ovens that also grill, right? And sometimes you have a combination of the two that make convection. We've got one of those. Right. So yeah, I'm wondering, you know, the only thing missing would be little robot arms that would go and move stuff around and make it. When it starts to get close to replicator status, right? When it could actually put the stuff in there for you. All you do is go like, cook me the chicken croquette. And it's like, great. I think I'm gonna try this thing out, though. I'm fascinated. Really? Yeah. When is it gonna be available? Do they say on the Kickstarter? That is a very fair question that I don't have at the answer. But by golly, if my fiber internet can catch up. It's saying we're shipping Q4 of this year. Yeah. All right, well. I'm very curious as well now. Hey, thanks, folks, for submitting stories. That helps us put the line up together every day. You guys have been submitting great stuff. Love everybody who votes. Even if you just go in and vote on a few things, it's very helpful. Go to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com to participate. And that is a look at the headlines. So, Patrick, we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. What got you started along the lines of thinking are countries and tech companies becoming closer and closer? I know it started when we were talking to Carl Heath on his podcast. Yeah. He mentioned something about the way governments approach those big companies. And he mentioned something about, well, exactly that. The fact that those big companies, it's almost like having a relationship with a country more than a simple company. And I've been thinking about things along the same lines for a long time, not quite in this way, but there are definitely things that happen in the digital space and with the sort of critical mass that some of those companies have been garnering for a long time. I think if I go back to the first inkling that there was something really special about all of this, it's as very often with me, it goes back to gaming. I remember thinking about World of Warcraft, which is a game I played a lot before I even started working at the company that makes that game. And I remember thinking, there are several million people playing the game and this is one of the only environments where the developers can decide to change something in the game. And they change the reality of that game for millions and millions of people instantly. So I don't know if this is quite the right way to approach this comparison from the get-go. It might be something we talk about a little bit later, but that's where it came from for me. And then when you start thinking about the sheer size of those companies and the amount of people that are involved in that same space, what's a country really? Yeah, well I think that's the most interesting thing about the way you've brought this up is back in January of last year when Apple's market cap became so huge. There were a lot of stories about Apple is bigger than most GDPs. And Financial Times was one of the few outlets that said, well, GDP is not really a good comparison to market cap or even revenue. Apple has the biggest market cap right now, 564.8 billion. The EU's GDP is only 18.5 billion, but those are a little bit apples and oranges. Even revenue is different. Walmart's got the biggest revenue as of 2014 and probably still close to the top, if not at the top, 485 billion. So the Financial Times was saying, well, if you wanna compare GDP, which is the production of a society, you'd have to compare it to employee compensation plus something called EBITDA, which is your earnings before tax and depreciation and other things like that. Financial Times suggested in 2014 that that would put Apple below Ecuador and Slovakia and above Oman and Azerbaijan, which is an interesting comparison all on its own. But Patrick, you went an entirely different direction and said, no, it's not about the money they're making. It's not about their economy. That's interesting. There are other reasons that these companies are starting to feel somewhat like countries. Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the money, what you were saying, especially if you look at the revenue, Walmart is gonna be the biggest company there is, right? So, or a couple of years ago. And we never really thought about those physical, material, tangible companies as countries that didn't strike us in any way. However, for those internet companies, they have, I think there are a couple of things. First of all, it's the size of the population which is striking. When I say the population, I'm already kind of assuming, talking about them as countries. When you talk about users, you have numbers in the hundreds of millions, if not over a billion in the case of Facebook and a couple of others. So, you already have Facebook which has over 1.5 billion users. That's more than any country in the world, including China and India, which are way above anyone else. So, the thing is- Yeah, China had 1.375, India 1.3, Facebook 1.591, billion. So, already, a country is a grouping, I guess, a grouping of people in a geographical space and they have a similar culture. Now, I'm not preface to all of this. We're not saying those companies are countries. It's just interesting to draw parallels there. But there's a lot of people that have a common activity or a common virtual meetings place in Facebook, in Twitter, in Snapchat. And they are sort of governed by a set of rules that apply to all of them. They have similar behaviors. And if we talk about the relationships that actual countries have with them, there are a lot of sort of diplomatic relationships that they have to cater around or talk around in regards especially to data and taxes. If we get back to the real world for a second, a lot of those things have been huge issues for countries that don't really know how to approach the companies, to have them handle the data of their citizens properly and pay taxes on the business that they're doing because it's almost like they don't have a resident country. If you go to the US, people are saying, oh, Apple is keeping its money overseas. And if you're going overseas, they're saying, well, it's an American company that's doing this and that, so they're almost outside of our sovereign established entities. We were talking about this in the analysts' Slack earlier today and some people were pointing out that, well, yeah, but the government can take away things. The government, you can't leave your government. You can't leave your country unless you wanna immigrate. You have to move yourself physically, which is a bigger deal than just leaving Facebook and deleting your account. And that's true and that's why we're not saying it's Neil Stephenson land and the corporations have become countries, but as easy it is to delete a Facebook account, you give up a lot. People are using it as their identity to log into places. People are using it as the way they keep up with family and friends, so in a sense, you're cutting yourself off from family and friends in many cases if you don't use Facebook. It's not as cut and dried and it's certainly not as steeped in history, but Facebook has become something of, government's too strong of a word, but it's something that is certainly involved in people's life in a way where going back to your World of Warcraft point, it can affect you more directly in many ways than the government can. Yeah, exactly, I mean, the amount of time that most people spend on Facebook make it, even if you don't consider it a different country, it's definitely a place that they go to that a lot of people go to, and you don't necessarily have to go immediately to the idea that, well, the government can do this and that and the company can't, so you can't live, leave Facebook, you can't leave your country. I would argue, actually, as someone who has traveled quite a bit, you kind of can. I can decide that I'm gonna go to another country, especially since we're living in countries where it's relative, we're in rich countries, we can do pretty much whatever we want, we can go to whatever country we want. Those things set aside, there is a lot of, I think the thing that changes between the old school brick and mortar companies and these ones is this intangible amount of power that they exert over their user base, because sure, Walmart has a lot of customers, right? But they're customers, they go to Walmart every week, maybe a couple of times a week, but it's not like Walmart delivers as much to them as Facebook or Twitter does, they're not, you're constantly connected on Facebook, constantly connected on Twitter. I don't want us to undersell the relationship Walmart has, that's why they have greeters, that's why they have loyalty cards, they're trying to collect data about you, they're trying to create that relationship, but when it all comes down to it, Walmart would love to have the relationship with you that Facebook and Google have. Right, and it's not quite a customer's relationship that you have, because it seems like when you're a customer with a company, you sort of have, especially I think in the customer service culture of the US, you sort of have at least the illusion of the upper hand, right? You can demand things of the company and if you're unhappy, you're gonna call them out or, I don't know, let your voice be heard. With Facebook, it feels, I'm not talking about the reality of the situation, but it definitely feels like you are at the mercy of Facebook's whims, if they wanna change something, it's gonna impact your life and you have very little say in it. Yeah, I'm looking at the chat room because Tynvex says Walmart has no loyalty cards but they have a receipt scanning, so they have a similar loyalty program. But I think you're getting to the difference which is Facebook is your life. Walmart would like to be your life, the Olive Garden would like to consider you family when you come to the restaurant but we all know it's not really true. Facebook is, it is, you're talking to your grandma and your friend from high school and Facebook isn't as in your way as a brick and mortar retail store would be. And so it's about data that they keep on you, it's about influence on your quality of life with your friends and family, it's about access when you're talking about Google, using Google as your Gmail and now as your document storage and running your life through Google. It is kind of scary just how much control these companies can have over it. And it goes even, when you're talking about control, what they basically, I understand this is a caricature and I'm overstating it on purpose but they decide what you see, their algorithm is going to decide what they put in front of your eyes. It's the case for Google, it's the case for Facebook, it's the case for Twitter, it's the case for a number of, so hopefully we're trusting them to do a good job at it and to remain neutral but they still have a scaring amount of power and all of that data, I mean in France if we go back to the question of countries talking to these companies as if they were countries, there's a big question about taxes for those companies because they're making a lot of money on almost a material, well actually a material things. There was for a moment, I think the idea has gone away but for a moment the country, France was toying around with the idea of taxing the use of personal data, considering personal data, their citizen's personal data as a resource that the company was using, transforming, monetizing. It's an asset, right? Yeah, right, and it's an asset. They're getting it for free, so it's like a payment. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Now, the idea has all sorts of problems attached to it. I don't think it makes sense but it sort of illustrates that inability of those countries to define the relationship they have with the companies. It's complete, it's kind of, I'm from the internet so I'm not frightened by it but I understand that some of the countries are a little bit befuddled and kind of afraid because they're losing a lot of control over what someone can do with their populations, everything almost. Philip Shane earlier today compared it to church and state. The church was not considered in Europe, in the Middle Ages, a government but it definitely had more influence over governments for a period of time and then the government sort of shook off the shackles of the church and so corporations are becoming a different entity. Another estate, if you will, that may be rising to the level of power of the government the way that governments, national governments, rose to the level of power of the church. It's a very Euro specific example but there are definitely some parallels there. I think the right to be forgotten fight in Europe has to do with the fact that if a government were to post all of these things you definitely would have the right to be forgotten immediately. Like, yes, the government can't be saying this and so the Google acting as dominantly as it is is almost seen as a government agency in that debate. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's interesting that you're bringing up, actually it could be a fifth estate or how much is it now, a sixth estate. And it's interesting that you're bringing up religion because the only, to my understanding, my very quick analysis of it, the only group of people or groups of people that have more users or more population than these companies, members, are the big monotheistic religions. There is, you know, Christianity has two billion members and Islam has 1.6. So they're both a little bit over Facebook but not for long. Facebook might overtake Islam fairly soon. And Steve Eye is saying in the chat room, it's just like all media companies, they all have, they control the stories that you see. Absolutely true and isn't media the fourth estate, right? I would argue that they have more power than the media, the traditional media because yes, they control, well, in the same way that the media does, they control what you see for news coverage and for, you know, well, media coverage, but they also have access to all of your data. They control the advertisement in a very targeted manner. They see what you tell your friends and your family. So it's even more intimate than the media that are already an estate in society. So, and I think they're separate from the media. They're really something else. So yes, the fifth estate or the seventh estate. The eighth, the zero one one estate. Well, let's hear from you guys. FeedbackandDailyTechNewShow.com. What do you think of this topic? And if you have any further thoughts, there are a lot more thoughts to have. So it's a minor bugaboo of mine. Don't say we missed something because we're not claiming to have covered everything. But just tell us what you think. Our Pick of the Day comes from Mike in Melbourne. Nothing new, he says for sure, but I just discovered it and I'm really liking Pick Pick, a screen cap utility from NG Win. Captures an extensive, simple, the editor is excellent, plenty of options and a good variety of output options including an FTP server. I've used a lot of these over the years. This is my favorite so far and it's free for personal use. Also, related to Patrick's Screed from a previous show, he thought you were really base heavy. I took that as a compliment, frankly. What does that mean? I don't even understand. You had a lot of bass in your voice. Oh, like, you mean I sound like that? Yeah, like, like, Curtis Mayfield. NGWin.com slash Pick Pick, if you want to get Mike's Pick, which is Pick Pick, a lot of Pick. It's a good screen capture utility. Lifehacker gave it five stars a few years ago. It's an oldie but a goodie. Send your picks to us folks, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. You can find more picks at DailyTechNewShow.com slash picks. I got a bunch of emails here. Michael wanted to comment on the week old story about whether Amazon would open a physical bookstore to say, guess what? They're opening another physical bookstore right next door to me here in La Jolla, near the Apple and Tesla stores in a place called UTC near the university, which, by the way, part of a Westfield Mall franchise, which Michael also pointed out, Westfield Mall's CEO is the one who leaked the thing about a bunch of Amazon bookstores opening up. So there you go. I got a couple of emails from Bill in Huntsville and Mike, AKA Gadget Chaser, about how satisfied they are with Project FI. Bill signed up for Project FI in December, bought a Nexus 6P, says it's working out great, used very little cell phone data. I had a $9.20 data usage credit on my last invoice. I have all my music on my phone and download podcasts from Wi-Fi, et cetera. And Mike says, keep in mind, if you sign up, you're gonna lose your Google voice number because it becomes your FI number, but you also gain some extra features and hangouts for Android and the web. Your voicemail will show up as a transcript in hangouts now, like they did in voice, but you don't have a separate app or a web page to open. You can also send SMS and make phone calls from hangouts on your desktop using your Project FI number. Pretty cool. And Lamar mentioned on yesterday's DTNS about emails having one address or number saying, hey, couldn't we get to a point where we just have one identity that you can contact us with? Well, TTT2, who administers our chat room among many other things, says you can guess from the theme of my emails that Estonia already does that. In the Estonian State Portal, E-E-S-T-I dot E-E, you can enter the email address you primarily use and then all emails sent to that person's code at easti.ee are forwarded to the email the person actually uses. This is used by the government if there's any official documents related to that person, they're uploaded to the portal and the person gets a notification to their entered email. When the person opens the document in the portal, it is considered as received and most importantly, it will not be additionally delivered on paper. So for example, during elections, you would receive your voting card, which is info on what voting station and when, by email and not on paper. In addition, all companies get a company registry code address at E-E-S-T-I dot E-E and a company name at E-E-S-T-I dot E-E and the same sort of notifying is applied. It says you can also enter your phone number for SMS notifications. This is really awesome. You know what I love about the leapfrogging countries actually is that they're not thinking what will the old people think or how will we figure this out or they do it and they figure it out. It works out and ultimately, it makes a lot more good than bad. Yes, there are some growing pains, I'm sure, but it makes a lot of things better. Now, I don't know that the Americans would be too happy about having that, but in Korea, for example, they have sort of an ID number that they use for every web service. It goes even farther. They have a national ID number one, specific per person, it's basically a social security number, as you were discussing with Lamar yesterday. And they use them for every web service in order to be identifiable. This is a little bit different though. Well, thanks to everybody for writing in and thank you to Patrick Beja for being on the show. People should listen to Pixels because I'm on it, but you've got lots of other stuff too. Well, you know what? The two shows that I have on Frenchspin.com are pretty good now around now. The last episode of the Phidias Club is the one that got people to call me a, what was it, Raging American Thought? No, it's the other one. Oh, wait, no, the other way. Yeah, Raging American Capitalist. Right, Raging American Capitalist sell out is what people have been reacting to when I was talking about French labor law reforms in the Phidias Club. It was a fun show. It was a good show. A lot of amusement was had. And yeah, Pixels about video games with one Tom Merritt from yesterday actually recorded. So Frenchspin.com for all of that. Thank you folks for supporting the show. We could not do it without you. We love every single one of our supporters, whether it's through Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS or PayPal or somebody just buying a mug or a T-shirt at our store. We got merch for you too if you want it. DailyTechNewShow.com slash support. March is our meetup time. Later this week I'm gonna be in Austin for South by Southwest. So I'll be doing the show from Austin on Thursday. Justin and Robert Young will be filling in for me on Friday and then on Saturday I will be at the Brew Exchange on West 6th Street from 2 to 5 p.m. March 12th for the Diamond Club Meetup. So join us. Justin and Robert Young will be there. Brian Brushwood will be there. The reason I'm not doing DTNS on Friday is I'm doing a panel at South by Southwest with Ryan of the Influencer Economy. That's at 3.30 central time at South by Southwest. I think it's in the Hilton Salon D, you know what I'm saying? Off the top of my head. But look it up. I'll be in there. It's about podcasting. And then we're gonna do it at LA Meetup on Saturday, March 19th. Keep your ears open for that. Our email address is sitting back at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily. Catch the show live Monday through Friday 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphageepradio.com and diamondclub.tv. Visit our website, DailyTechNewsShow.com. Back tomorrow with Andrew Main as our guest. I'll do that. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Good show. It was fun. That was great. Good conversation. It was good. Thanks, Roger. Yay. I like the whole government, corporate, corporation entity. Yeah, and I like Patrick. I like your take as being like, it's not about the money. I mean, it is about the money to some extent. But that's not the only way. I thought that was really good. I'm calling it now in the next 100 years, neofutilism. Yeah, so it is going to become Neil Stevenson Land. I see. I really like the conclusion we came to about the estate. I really think that kind of makes sense. What's the fifth estate? I always thought the fifth estate was the, no wait, what's the population? The people or the fifth estate? Oh, the people, that's the second. The third. The third. Nobility is the first. Second is the church, and... Fourth estate is the third. And media. Third estate. Fourth estate is media. I don't think there's a fifth estate. OK, so well, there's the movie, the fifth estate. Right, but yeah, maybe that one movie can be the fifth estate. And then social networks and big internet companies can be the sixth. I think that... What's the fifth estate about truly massage? So the internet is the cup of the fifth estate, I guess. So basically... Cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society is mostly associated with bloggers, journalists, and non-mainstream media outlets. But that's kind of saying it's new, old media, right? It's old media, I mean traditional media, but that has adapted to the internet. It's bloggers. I think we're talking about something else, right? So sixth. Can you go number up? Sixth estate. All right, sixth estate, that works. Should we use that as our title, or should we go United States of Google? Your call. I like sixth estate. I think it's... What goes to sixth estate? Yeah, I kind of like that. What's even better is a sequel, which is called the state sale. It's good, it's good, I like it. I need you. Yeah, you know how to get me. All right, I'm going to go. Ah, all right. Go to sleep. Thank you very much. It was a lot of fun. Yes. Yeah, that was good. Hug student chat room, and see you soon. All right. Bye. Bye. So if you're wondering, where's Jenny? She was on vacation last week and yesterday, and she's flying back today. So she should be back tomorrow. We miss her. Yes. Man, that flight going from east to west coast really... It'll get you. It does. I don't know. I don't know why, because going the other way isn't as bad. But going from east to west, is it because I gained... I thought I would gain the hours, but no. Well, you're flying against the headwind, right? The jet stream goes the other direction. So that slows you down. I think that's part of it. Well, it slows you down, so it takes what not only was four and a half hours to six and a half hours. Right. Well, and you get the boost on the way out from the jet stream. So you're not only just losing the head for what you lose from the headwinds, but you're also not getting the boost. But why body-wise, I feel so beaten, because it's a longer trip? Maybe. That's a good question. I don't know. Maybe it's because you're pushing into that headwind the whole way. You just get tired. Maybe. I did remember getting out around over somewhere over Wisconsin and having to push. That'll do it. Put some boards under the wings, get some traction. Kitty litter. We used to keep kitty litter in the trunk. Kitty litter? You didn't take, like, sand or grit, but we had cats. Well, kitty litter's cheaper too, or it was, I guess. And then you just throw kitty litter under the tires. Get yourself some traction. Or you could get yourself a Subaru with winter tires. You could just get... Yeah, my dad used to put chains on, and then they outlawed him in Illinois because they're tearing up the roads. Who drives with the... Oh, wait. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. I bought it. My dad bought a used car. It came with chains in the back. Man, they're a pain to stick on. Yeah, they were. You can't go faster than 30 miles an hour or something. Yeah. It really... Like, my dad moaned a little bit when they outlawed the chains, but honestly, I don't think he ever missed them. Like, they really helped that much. You know what they do in Canada? They make you get winter tires, and then you have to store your all seasons somewhere as you wish to. Oh, yeah. It's like Tahoe. They make you put on chains, don't they? If you're going up. Yeah. If you have a 4x4, and they look at the tires, and they'll think it's a CHP, they'll let you go up. It depends. But in Illinois, at least in the part of Illinois I grew up in, weren't that many hills? It's pretty flat. Yeah. It's not Kansas flat, but it's pretty flat. That's the one thing I noticed when I was in Chicago is like, it's not. I mean, even New York kind of has its undulations, but Chicago is kind of like, you know, more flat, which is good because it makes bicycling so much easier if I decided to go bicycling in Chicago, that wasn't in the winter. Taking a while to export today. Yeah. YouTube's kind of weird sometimes. Oh, you're talking about the chatroom? Oh, no, no. Isn't our chair exporting? Oh, you're exporting. No, I'm exporting from sound or audacity. The audacity. The audacity of exporting. I got to work out this thing from Veronica. Yeah. I got to do mine too. I was just thinking about that. Oh. You like your question? I picked my question. I just got to figure out how to shoot it. Probably just. Oh, I'm just going to do mine here. Yeah. That's easy. I'm going to do, I use iMovie to record it or something. Yeah. I can use QuickTime actually. QuickTime is kind of, it only does 720 though. It's kind of wonky on my machine and I don't know if it's like it drops frames. Oh, really? Yeah. Which bugs me. I do most of my YouTube videos with QuickTime and that doesn't seem to be that, the problem is it's only 720, but it doesn't seem to drop frames. Well, I'm wondering if it's just because my, I've literally just upgraded OS on the same drive or not the same drive, but the same build of OS 10 I've been using since 2008. Like, you know, I mean, it's never been a fresh clean install. Oh, yeah. There could be. There might be some cruft somewhere in there, something. You should apply to your local government Google Facebook. What if Google and Facebook merged? Fugl? It would never happen. I got Fugl. You know, it's, well, if they went to war, they conquered one of them, conquered the other. You know, that's actually not out of the realm of possibility. That's not like, say, like a cyber war. Well, you know, it's interesting because they could do a multiple fronts. They could do like, they could do kind of like a PR war where they talk smack and public. Sure. That happens. They could do a market bit where like they attack each other from the stock market. Yeah. By buying up shares and stuff. Or they could actually just go straight at it with like private contractor armies. Just invade each other's corporate campuses. They would probably get the government to create a new visa system instead of each one be or something. It'll just be each, each two kill. Eight one B bomb. Yeah. And they'll be like, they'll be like the British East India company where they just basically had their own army. Yeah. That was a company that was essentially a government. Go to the company store, but you call it something else. So people don't like, associate it with coal mining by from the company stores like coal mining. Was it also gold, gold, gold, no silver mines that they also have those. Sure. Combine all kinds of things. Voxite, tin, tin. Never hear about the workers in the tin mines anymore. No. Aren't all the, isn't most of the tin mined out of Africa? Yeah. Used to be coming out of Cornwall, but that was in ancient times. Like the 1800s? No, more like the 2000 BCs. Yeah, that's the BCs. You can't say BCE. You can't say BC. Well, you can. Right. There was, I'm reading an ancient history of the world and she says that she is not doing BCE because she finds that it doesn't really add anything and it confuses people and because she's writing for a mass audience. I see. She's like, I just, she's like to avoid the controversy. I just say BC and I don't say what it means. It could mean before common, if that's what you want it to mean. Before Cowboys. Well, long before Cowboys, that's for sure. I mean, that's, that's one of those acronyms that we just, I think history has now divorced from its underlying meaning. If we ever stop numbering the years the way we do, then I guess we'd change it. Yeah. I guess at some point they'll have, I wonder if they'll, in some point in the future, they'll just redo the year date system. Yeah. I'm amazed in Star Trek they didn't do that. Well, Star date, Star date wasn't, was that? Was it? I thought it was a Star date one, two, five point three or whatever. Big Jim makes good point. Alphabet has Boston Dynamics on its side for the war with a lot of big dogs, army full of big dogs. We'll see that. I wouldn't send the upright robot because he seems to fall over pretty easy. I'm sure Facebook could put in a fifth column at Boston Dynamics and have them splinter off. Give me a strategic, strategic, strategic, strategic. We just have Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai sit down and play a game of strategic. If that'll look like an end. You know how like they make custom variations of Monopoly for your town or company. You can do the same thing with like a bunch of war, war board games. This is allies for just America, for just Google, for just Google. All right. Well, thanks everybody for watching or listening and we'll see you tomorrow with Jenny back. Yay. Bye everybody.