 There we are. We're live on all the streams live, live, live, live, live apologies that you will not be getting the benefit of the wisdom of Patrick Beja today. He, uh, he got called away unexpectedly. And, uh, so Roger's going to fill in for him and we wish Patrick the best. He'll be back soon. I'll say that again momentarily when we actually start doing the show. Roger, are you going to, are you just going to hide behind the stories? Uh, no, I'll pop the, it's depending how, uh, dexterous my hands are for swapping in and out of this. Part of it was I just started playing Halo 4 again and my hands are a little cramped from 10 minutes on, on the Xbox control. I'm such an old man. I'm such an old man. 10 minutes, 10 minutes. No, it's like, it's so bad. It's ridiculous. It's like, oh, my hands are cramped. You know, I laugh, but I know exactly what you're talking about. Sometimes it's just like, what was I doing? Oh, it was a baby shower, a baby shower. They, uh, made me do, they, you know, they always do games. This was a co-ed baby shower. And so I got pulled into a team and I had to squeeze a bottle full of apple juice through and through, you know, a baby nipple top and there was a race. And man, it only took like 10 minutes, but afterwards my hand was just stuck at that position for an hour. I remember, I don't know if this was an apocryphal story because it was like, it wasn't carried on a wire service. It was just a website, but like some poor kid in, uh, Britain, like got an early form of arthritis because he kept playing video games for so long, like just constantly and the always a little skeptical of those things. Like planning of kids play video games for a long, probably as long as this kid and didn't get arthritis. So was he unusually susceptible to it? Yeah. What happened anyway? Like, well, I know, I, you know, I'll say this. I had a co-worker who was already predisposed to having arthritis just inflamed joint and the act of playing games actually made it worse. Yeah, of course. Like, like any, any activity that strains the joints will make your arthritis worse. All that bag head on bag head violence is getting out of hand. All right. Let's go. We ready? You ready? Yes. I'm ready. Bus is leaving early. Here we go. Daily Tech News show is powered by its audience. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 10th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt and Patrick Beja was supposed to be here today. He got called away unexpectedly. We wish him well. He will be back. In the meantime, our producer, Roger Chang, will step in and pinch hit now batting Roger Chang. Hello. I am pinch hitting. I am the fallback. Remember the fall guy on TV? Well, I'm the fallback. Yeah. That was Lee majors, right? The fall guy. Yes. And he even, he even sang the tune that started the show, which is why it's so bad. You are DTNS is $6 million, man. That's what you're trying to say. And I, you know, $6 million today is still worth a lot. I know you wish you had a biotic hand after your 10 minutes of playing Halo. Yeah. Like, ah, you know what? This is the thing with age. It just tells you that you're getting older and you shouldn't do the useful things like play video games. It's hell. It's hell. We are going to talk about the $2 billion lawsuit that Zenimax has filed against Facebook. That's kicking off oral arguments today. So we'll be talking about that in a little bit. Apple is seeking customs exemptions for parts and products related to plans to build a data center server manufacturing facility and a factory it owns in Mesa, Arizona. Snap Inc has announced it will locate its international headquarters in London. And now here are some more top stories. After Consumer Reports found battery life in the new MacBook Pros ranged between 3.7 hours all the way up to 19 and a half hours. Apple worked with Consumer Reports to find out why. And Consumer Reports, it turns out, has a policy to turn off browser cache for the browsing test on every laptop it tests. Apple says that's not expected behavior. It's a hidden setting. It causes the browser to work harder than it should. And in normal use, Safari caches things like images to the hard drive. So I guess that makes kind of a bit of sense. The other thing, the real thing they found was that that practice of not caching images triggered a bug in the way Safari loaded icons that would waste some power cycles. Now Apple says they have fixed that bug and Consumer Reports says it will rerun its tests with the fix and update its recommendation accordingly should they get different results. Apple's trying to say that that's why you got those wild results all over the place. But there are so many other people including outlets that test and review laptops saying the same thing. The Verge says the same thing. There's wildly different battery life with the new MacBook Pros and it's hard to figure out why that happens. Which to me, I think, I mean this does illuminate or shine some light on what the potential issue is that Apple is relying on a lot of software workarounds to maximize power usage on the platform rather than most, you know, the approach that most reviewers do is that the platforms independent of the software to let just run a bunch of stuff on it see how long it lasts. Apple and not saying they're right but perhaps you're seeing it as one of the same. They aren't two separate things that you can just pull apart. They need to work together. I do find it a little PR-ish. Like it's definitely, whoa, whoa, whoa, you didn't test it the way we test it. So let's explain to you how you should test this to get the results we've been getting. It's a little bit like saying to a potential reviewer of a washing machine saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you get your clothes a little dirty than the way we get it to test the washing machine. So let's let me show you how you should get your clothes dirty before you throw it in. Well, yeah, the first half where they're talking about actually, you know, turning off the caching. I don't see that Apple gets to criticize that for the points you made but also that's consistent with every other laptop and every other laptop doesn't have these wild fluctuations. And the other thing is I have one of the new MacBook Pros and I have seen wild fluctuations in battery life and I have not turned off my image caching in Safari. In fact, I don't even use Safari. So well, there's your problem, Tom. Apple's going to come knock on your door using the wrong browser. You're using the wrong browser. Obviously, that's that's the answer. LG announced a 5.7 inch QHD plus LCD screen. This is LG display, the LG that makes screens for everybody with an 18 nine aspect resolution. The ratio allows a traditional 16 nine video alongside or image alongside extra screen space for buttons or maybe a virtual second screen. We don't know. LG display also claims lower power consumption and better outdoor visibility. The screen will be used in the next LG flagship phone expected to be the G6 at Mobile World Congress in February. This they're talking about getting rid of the bezels. You know, every every phone maker is talking about that. But having a little extra screen space so far has been used in things like the bended screen on Samsung where they put notifications along the side on the on the Galaxy S7 Edge. Things like that. What what do you make of this? I see it as a basically attempt to differentiate their smartphone from their peers because currently there's so much on the market that you you're splitting hairs either between features, between price points, between, you know, aesthetics. And so it's it's really I think we're to me it's a little bit of how saturated the market is with so many vendors, so many models, so many choices. I mean for the consumer this is great for the for the for the manufacturers like oh how do we make our product a little different. One thing I will say is that anyone who hates shoving a smartphone even a five inch screen smartphone in their pocket now it's probably going to hate this because it's no way this is going to fit in any normal normal pocket and I perhaps see in the next decade the fashion of having phone pockets in the same day that we have watch pockets. Now you're talking crazy. Like people you but you you have been saying this for years and it has not happened. It's gonna it's gonna happen you know type scales are are geologic. Sometimes they move very slow sometimes they're very fast. Everything I just said makes no sense. No I don't. LG display though making an 189 aspect resolution. What's that? Oh no it's it's actually definitely cool. I it's I'll be interested to see it. I probably won't be attracted to it just because of the size issue but there might be people who have you know a phone. Yeah I'm curious what they're going to make of it actually to be honest. I I wonder what they can use that extra screen resolution for their screen space not not resolution. Fitbit has acquired Romanian luxury smartwatch maker Vector in a statement Vector said it would begin and I quote building other new and amazing products features and experiences for Fitbit. Thankfully they're building amazing products. I would hate if they weren't. Similar to Pebble Fitbit which as you all know Fitbit recently acquired Vector makes e-ink smart watches. They have the 30-day battery life and stuff like that. So there seems to be a theme in these acquisitions. They Vector watches worked across iOS Android and Windows and Fitbit's doing the same thing with Vector. Now they don't Vector doesn't have quite as vocal a community as Pebble but they will no longer be making Vector watches. No watches put out under the Vector name. The products will continue to work but they won't be developing the software for it anymore. So Fitbit is up to something like this makes this is a piece that fits with Pebble because it's an e-ink watch. It's different than Pebble because it's a luxury-looking brand. It's a startup that they could get for a smaller amount of money than buying from a large established player and I'm very curious what Fitbit thinks it can do with these watchmakers given what it wants to do with wearables which is figure out how to move out of the tracker business which is starting to become stable. It's not a bad business to be in necessarily but it's just not growing. I totally see it as as kind of a maybe a slow realization that the usage scenarios that they had when people are coming up with the idea of a smart watch aren't exactly what they thought it was and they definitely you know the thing with e-ink is that you know what you mentioned before they have a huge tremendous battery advantage over using the screens that they have now for smart watches. So people might they might skimp out on more colorful brighter displays but for something that last 30 days that you don't need to charge would be enormously positive for the user because now you're not like oh well you know I'd like to go for a render day but my I haven't charged my watch and well it's going to take a couple of hours. It's like 30 days I think mechanical. Yeah no it's that that was one of the big advantages of the Pebble obviously and the big advantages of getting a Fitbit type tracker or one from Fitbit's competitors is that the battery life is very long because they don't have to do a lot the way smart watches have done. Definitely Fitbit is looking at this and saying how do we make battery life a priority and get into the smart watch game without throwing everything at the kitchen sink and having an incredibly expensive smart watch because the other thing about Pebble is they weren't typically expensive. Now the vector watches because they were you know affordable luxury were a little more expensive but they were affordable luxury they were like hey these look like luxury watches but they don't cost like luxury watches. So putting all that together it would seem that we should expect a long battery life e-ink Fitbit watch that they promote as this is the watch that works across platforms. You don't have to worry about charging and does all of the things we know you want and it's that last bit that I don't have any insight with and I wonder if Fitbit has any insight of what do people really want out of a smart watch beyond just fitness tracking. You know it's really interesting you say that because in many ways they're approaching the smart watch from a different angle than say like Apple where it's app heavy it's you know let's let's take everything we've learned with the iPhone and kind of condense or distill those features into a watch. Fitbit's coming like listen we don't need to give make the thing perfect we just need to make it good enough that covers 80 percent of what people want to do because people potentially might forgo the other 20 percent if the cost is low enough and the convenience factor is high. All right this next story is one that a lot of companies just could not resist turning into a clickbait headline yesterday. Yahoo filed a US SEC document Monday. The document was fairly uninteresting. If you've been following the Verizon acquiring Yahoo story you know and in fact even before Verizon agreed to acquire Yahoo you know that Yahoo decided to sell off its production business its content business but separate itself into two companies when it did so. The remaining company would only exist to hold on to Alibaba shares and its ownership of Yahoo Japan and there may be a few other details there but that's the major reason that you would have a holding company left over after Verizon buys Yahoo. So for all intents and purposes that remaining company is no longer Yahoo because the Yahoo website the brand and Marissa Meyer were all going to Verizon if that acquisition were to close. So this document that was filed on Monday simply said okay we need to let the SEC know that after the Verizon acquisition of Yahoo closes the remaining company will be called Altaba and it will have a smaller board of directors. There'll be five people from Yahoo's board of directors will stay on with this smaller holding company called Altaba. It's a fairly boring story. It says you know what this is this is how we're going to organize the company that really only exists to hold the stock that isn't sold to Verizon. However because of some of the wording of the document you have to say that the existing Yahoo board members will resign because technically that company is still Yahoo even though they've sold the rights to the name and everything to Verizon and you have to say that the name of Yahoo will change and so a lot of people wrote up the headline Marissa Meyer resigning from Yahoo which will change its name to Altaba. Technically true but entirely misleading because no one ever expected Marissa Meyer to stay on the board of the holding company she was going to Verizon it makes perfect sense that she would not be a member of the smaller board of directors and everyone expected the holding company to change its name and not call itself Yahoo since part of the big deal that Verizon was paying for was to get the name Yahoo. So when you saw all of these stories about Marissa Meyer resigning from Yahoo's board I have to say Roger I find all this horribly misleading. Did you get confused by any of it? You got you got muted somehow so I can't hear what you might be trying to say to me. Apologize. There you go. I was going to sneeze a minute ago and I forget. Yeah it's a bit of a non-story but it also I think oh my... You're having a little bit of a of internet difficulty so your your your audio is coming in intermittently. You were going to say it was possibly a it was possibly there probably is some significance to this. Possibly no significance it just to the most. Yeah I mean if there is significance to this it would do that come through okay. If there is significance to this it would be that Yahoo feels confident enough that the acquisition is still going to happen that they're continuing to file paperwork. However in the paperwork they have to list the risks that would cause the acquisition to fall apart and one of the risks they listed in this filing because it's up to date is that there were two vulnerabilities announced. Two hacks announced last year and Verizon might seek to terminate the acquisition or renegotiate it and we all knew that that's true. I honestly I think just at this point Yahoo is tech media's whipping boy for just vlogging stuff. I understand the importance of a lot of it but at the same time it just doesn't feel it doesn't feel like I mean just nothing too revealing about the content. Let's just say I'm not impressed with the quality of coverage on this particular story. And someone who's anonymous in our chat room is saying where did it say Meyer will join Verizon. I didn't read anything about her in that. None of these stories today are talking about that. Previously sources close to the acquisition said that Meyer would stay on with Verizon in some role and they didn't know what role that would be. And the fact that Meyer wouldn't stick around to operate a holding company since that's not her forte shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Maybe she won't. Maybe she won't go to Verizon. Maybe she'll just resign altogether. But the key is no one should expect Marissa Meyer to stay on with this company that's holding the stock and she's not resigning today. This is all contingent on the closing of Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo. I've never seen so much. What's the word for when you not micromanage something but you look at something with the magnifying glass for a little too long? It just seems like there's a play by play coverage that doesn't actually need to be there about this. For me the whole story is that this is a story. Yeah there's a fascination with Marissa Meyer and Yahoo that's been going on since she took over that that elevates stories to things like this. I maybe missing something. If you're if you're someone who follows this and say well you know what there is an interesting part of this that maybe it's you know because she's not on the board she loses a certain amount of stock and that's going to impact her bottom line and so maybe she would have wanted to stay on this smaller board. I don't know. I don't know about anything like that but nothing when I read the filing I read the filing before all these stories came out because Hacker News had it because Hacker News is awesome and always on top of these sorts of things and I nothing in it shocked me. I'm like oh okay so they're they're filing the creation of the holding company. It didn't didn't seem very very crazy to me at all. Microsoft released a preview build of its Windows 10 created update to Windows insiders on Monday. The edge browser gets a visual tab preview bar. The ability to set aside open tabs in a sidebar. It will now block flash by default. Cortana gets an update to let app specific voice commands surface as suggestions in the search bar. Cortana can now also be used to set up a windows install to increase accessibility access. The build also supports a lower blue light mode for nighttime. There's the ability to group some things in folders in the start menu and finally the big one. The blue screen of death on insider builds is now officially changed to the green screen of death. It's a huge day. It's a huge day. This one goes in the chronology of tech history don't you think? I think it's fascinating because in many ways this reminds me of the way OS 10 used to crib all the apps and all the widgets that people would install to make the OS a little more usable and just kind of rolling in to the next version of the OS. No, I think it's great. I mean it's it's it's if it's a more usable windows creators update that's awesome. I think I mean I mean to be honest a lot of these things should have just already been in there and it might seem a little late to the party but you know better late than ever. You could say that about Windows 10 since launch right? Like Windows 10 has been catching up for for things that a lot of people thought should have been in Windows 8. Yes and I'm one of those people that think that way. But I don't see anything in here that's bad. I mean like I say I wish they would have made flash not default like off by default a long time ago but I'm glad they're doing it. Yeah I mean just you know that I guess the other bit of is this you know flash is slowly getting stomped out like a brush fire right? It's slowly different places are getting put out which is good. You just come seeing an ember here and there. It's like I better make sure you know there's so many legacy sites that use it which are the noisemen of no end. But yeah you know eventually eventually it will be purged from the nets the internet. Green screen of death now you can chroma key in all kinds of visual effects on you on when your computer dies. You know back in the day before there was a blue screen of death there was just a black screen because your computer wouldn't boot or it just crashed and you wouldn't have nothing on the screen. I wonder if I wonder why they chose green though. It's green because well that that's that's the common phrase green is soothing. I don't think so. I've never seen something come up I mean just because people see it. Jealousy and when your computer crashes you're jealous that other people's hasn't. Well that that could be very well the case. Yeah you know might not yellow or definitely don't want red. Red would be interesting because that's that's very Star Trek red alert. Yeah. Finally the U.S. Department of Defense's strategic capabilities office along with the naval air systems command announced on Monday that it had successfully demonstrated one of the world's largest micro drone swarms over China Lake California back in October. Three F.A. 18 fighters dropped 103 Perdix micro drones. The drones are told to conduct broad tasks like observe an airfield and then communicate with one another to execute the mission so you don't give instructions to each drone in the swarm. You just tell the swarm observe this tower and there's a little bit of machine learning going on in there where the drones figure out how to accomplish that task together. And the key here is with little human input. So you can look at this and say a triump in swarm technology and machine learning and UAV control unmanned aerial vehicle control. Other people are looking this and saying yeah they use surveillance as their example but this could also be a bunch of explosive drones and then they will be deciding where they would explode if you did that. Now the key here is of course that that isn't what they did but it could be used for that. This is something that the military specifically especially the Air Force and Navy have been wanting to do for the longest time. They want an automated system that they don't need to babysit like you do with with current UAVs to accomplish the mission. Most importantly though is it's cheap. A per unit cost is so much cheaper. I mean it's expensive if compared you know for these predicts drones they're 3D printed like you just mass produce them for almost nothing. For not exactly and there's a conscious effort there was I'm not sure if it still will be that way in a few years to you know with the F-35 and other big ticket items that have sucked in enormous sums of money you know the pendulum has shifted it's like how do we mass produce a lot of low cost things that might get blown up taken down or whatever but we'll have enough of them that we can get the job done whether or not they're smart bombs whether or not they're little reconnaissance drones or even one of the one of the things I think not Raytheon was it Raytheon that they put out was basically decoys right you put enough of these out in the for example a SAM site that has like maybe 20 or 30 missiles you put enough fake targets in there they'll be shooting them instead of the actual you know planes that are carrying whatever weapons and stuff to eliminate the target so I mean it's it's it's kind of cool kind of scary though at the same time because eventually a lot of this military technology gets distilled into a civilian variant and I can't wait to be swarmed by ad bots telling me that the new whopper whatever is available at my local Burger King obviously any technology can be used for good or ill and so that that's the way I approach this story is if it's being used for ill whether it's bombs going off in places that they shouldn't or ads swarming poor Roger as he's merely trying to walk down the street then then I will become concerned and and we should we should push against that but I think this is fantastic and a fantastic advance and and like quite often happens advances in defense can be turned into uses in non-military situations and there are a lot of good non-military uses for these definitely and I think one area you might see potentially is search and rescue where you need to cover a large swath of ground but even if you had one you know spotter plane or whatever you could cover more ground if you had a group of these low-cost inexpensive devices flooding an area yeah and just tell them what to kind of look for almost like given the dog ascent right we're looking for something like this and and look for signs of that and track it yeah that's that's a a fantastic example of the sort of thing you could use this for so I'm curious to see where that goes next awesome to get all the tech headlines each day in less than 10 minutes subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com all right so I'm going to go through the history of the ZeniMax media versus Facebook situation and then Roger and I are going to talk a little bit about our opinions on this and sort of the Roger you brought up when we were prepping for the show the great man theory of technology news and how that changes things because we've got a couple of big personalities going on here you've got Mark Zuckerberg involved you've got John Carmack who invented doom and id software involved and of course Palmer Lucky is no small personality either so here's what's happening ZeniMax media claims that John Carmack and ZeniMax bought id so that's why Carmack was working for ZeniMax and his colleagues at ZeniMax transformed the Rift prototype by adding hardware to it and creating special software for its operation and that Oculus then took the work of Carmack and ZeniMax and did not pay them for it and not only that hired Carmack away and he stole intellectual property from ZeniMax and gave it to Oculus so that's the case trial is opening in district court in Dallas they did jury selection yesterday opening statements are Tuesday today as we're recording this show here's the history Carmack did begin corresponding with Palmer Lucky in April 2012 at the time the Rift didn't have a head mount didn't have specific software didn't have integrated motion sensors all of those things are important to note in the following arguments Lucky agreed to let Carmack and therefore ZeniMax use the Rift to showcase Doom 3 at E3 in 2012 now he said you can use the Rift but remember I don't have a head mount specific software or an integrated motion sensor so Carmack used his own software for the test bed used Doom 3 that he had modified to run and glued a Hillcrest motion sensor to the prototype Rift that Lucky had sent him and figured out how to head mount it using a using a head mounted display that he already had to mount it Lucky did sign an NDA this was prior to the formation of Oculus and now in court Lucky is claiming that that NDA is invalid and unenforceable because of a lack of a definition it's a little bit of a technicality here however ZeniMax claims that Lucky and CEO Brendan Eribe became increasingly evasive and uncooperative after Oculus was formed after E3 when ZeniMax was asking for payment for some sort of royalties for the use of the things that John Carmack had contributed now Carmack who now works for Oculus says he offered to manufacture and sell a consumer headset similar to Lucky's but his idea fell flat with ZeniMax's CEO Robert Altman at the time he didn't seem interested ZeniMax also declined to invest in Oculus in an early financing round and was unwilling to accept anything short of a large non-dilutable stake in return for Carmack's participation so Carmack says they could have been making these they didn't want to that's what Carmack says and it's on record that they declined to invest and Carmack says that's because they wanted too large of an investment Oculus then hired Carmack in 2013 and ZeniMax claims he copied thousands of documents from his computer at ZeniMax Oculus told the press that Carmack developed VR tech in his parents' garage but ZeniMax says that story is false that he developed at at ZeniMax Facebook announced its intent to purchase Oculus in March 2014 and up till that point ZeniMax had presented no interest in suing Oculus for intellectual property after Facebook announced its intent to purchase ZeniMax filed a lawsuit on May 21st, 2014 shortly after Facebook acquired Oculus and ZeniMax sought two billion dollars in damages which is the same amount that Facebook paid for Oculus all right so Facebook said in a court filing in August 2015 that ZeniMax made no claim to own the technology and asserted no intellectual property rights before March, 2014 and in the December filing Carmack said his employment agreement with ZeniMax allowed him to be involved in Oculus because it wasn't a gaming company and it wasn't in competition with ZeniMax and that's why he's saying even when I said hey do you want to get in competition with Oculus they said no so it's going to pivot on that NDA for one thing and it's going to pivot on the fact that Carmack glued a motion sensor and therefore created hardware while an employee of ZeniMax and allowed Palmer Lucky to see the software that he had created and whether a jury thinks that that then gave Palmer Lucky the boost to finish the software for the Oculus Rift what do you make all this Roger I just think it's one giant wheel of he said she said but also what's really interesting is the motive right because like as you were mentioning earlier like there was no inclination of interest in Oculus up until the time after Facebook acquired them and so you know like well why don't you say something sooner and it's I mean this is as closest to gossipy news as you get like in the valley like you know like people this is the reason why so many companies and startups especially when they when they get funded have all these lawyers suddenly descend on them with all these really weird legalese because they want to avoid situations where well you know you know we don't we didn't have an exclusivity on Carmack's work outside of the company that he did for this for this other company but now you're coming back and say well he did something that we think is appropriating the tough that we sort of made have done at the same time so with it what it boils down to is how persuasive uh their attorneys are in court really I think it's it's going to be going down to like which which one of these jurors is going to best respond to this guy who's telling me that you know a hard luck story like we really missed out because we were cheated and we were misled as opposed to the other guys like listen we gave these guys an opportunity to be part of the company invested in it said no it's like well fine we move on to the next guy it's what everyone does and so I mean I I I don't I'm having a hard time saying we're ZeniMax has a very strong case I mean they have a case but I don't I don't see anything more than maybe a couple of tepid anecdotes that flesh out their case yeah from the ZeniMax side if you if you had a hard time following all of that when I was explaining it from the ZeniMax side what happened was Palmer Lucky wasn't doing very well he hadn't finished his rift and so he started talking to John Carmack who then started giving him tips and then at E3 Carmack built hardware which Carmack says was essentially hot gluing a hillcrest sensor to the side of the rift prototype and created software which again Carmack says is taking some testbed software that already existed because Oculus didn't have any software and ZeniMax is saying that design of hardware that software was then stolen by Carmack when he went to Oculus and yeah and that's the only reason that the Oculus Rift is successful because he took that Carmack and Oculus are saying that's ridiculous I hot glued a sensor an off-the-shelf sensor to something and I used some testbed software which was you know not particularly revelatory and was built specifically for Doom 3 none of that would have changed the fact that Rift succeeded what did what what I think ZeniMax is really upset about Roger is John Carmack left ZeniMax ZeniMax had dismissed it as well you're going to go waste your time on this VR that's not going to work and it turned out it did work and it turned out that not only did it work but they got Facebook to pay two billion dollars for it so ZeniMax is upset you mean are you saying that they're sourgraping the entire issue it's like oh we totally feel a little bit like it might be sourgrapes yeah it totally feels like that team that has that that unbeknownst MVP player like that's a second string or third string quarterback that they're totally dismissing and then he gets traded off because they don't think he's worthwhile to another team and they they win their Super Bowl and they're like wait wait a minute we had that guy first we totally developed discuss like no you did nothing with it well but if I were to to argue ZeniMax's side of this it would be that hey if you didn't get around to suing until later it could be for a lot of reasons and you don't lose your right to sue just because you did it after somebody got acquired right so that is neither here nor there that's the kind of thing you use to try to sway a jury but it actually doesn't change the law if you're within the statute of limitations you get to sue whenever you get a chance to sue and there could be all kinds of reasons for that so that part doesn't matter what matters is did Carmack do work for ZeniMax that he then took and gave to Oculus well and then but that and and the big question mark is how do you prove that how do you prove that he took anything right John Carmack is that you know what I'm just contracting out with this guy he's not he he's not enough he's not a game company right and he's just developing hardware I didn't see a conflict of interest I worked for him you were okay with it yeah and and Oculus is saying what they did did not contribute like we knew that we could glue sensors to things like we did know that that was not that was not something we only got from John Carmack and ZeniMax has a point that sure but once John Carmack came over to your team you really solved a lot of your problems and he was our guy and that's where it kind of starts to look more like what you were talking about where hey we trained this guy even though they didn't train their guy they they just bought id software you know it's I'm still having I mean it is a stretch I can see the point I would probably side with Oculus at this point because there isn't unless they have definitive proof that's like Carmack lifted software or hardware technology that ZeniMax had ownership of and brought it over to Oculus I mean I mean everything else just sounds like hearsay right oh yeah well he he worked for us and he he's a smart guy and then you suddenly have this smart guy and you've solved a lot of your problems that's our smart guy so you so you owe us money smart guy yeah well and that's why you have trials that's why you have lawyers that's why you have judges and juries so that someone in partial can look at this and say well hold on let's look at the evidence is the code similar did he take things was he not allowed to take things they're going to look at all all of those arguments thanks to everybody who participates in our sub reddit helps us figure out which stories you're interested in us talking about submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com got a couple of messages before we're out of here today first one comes from Chris who says during episode 2941 you decried the lack of a security standard and said like you L for electricity well may have the pleasure of introducing you to wait for it you L 2900-1 that's right the underwriters laboratory has collaborated with other industry security experts to develop the cyber security assurance program like all standards there are some critics but no one can argue with the intent which is to define a standard for connected devices and few argue with the components which are industry best practices like fuzzing third party vulnerability analysis static analysis of code for security exploits and more so there you go the fact that we don't know about it and it was announced in April of 2016 means that it's not getting a whole lot of take-up from people these days but that doesn't mean it's not a good standard and thank you Chris for pointing out to us that's exactly the kind of thing we were talking about that's good news I mean I think really having a a broad broadly recognized standard especially for things like security is crucial it's crucial for moving ahead especially in a world where so many of our consumer electronics products are now connected devices and people are like well what am I buying I know if it's a UL someone tested it and it's not going to fry my house and that goes to Darren's point is just having a logo on a box doesn't make you secure and you shouldn't rely on that but I go back to my argument from that episode which was sure but having people working on standards is at least getting us a little farther down the road from and I agree with Darren to an extent but at the same time why shouldn't people have a certain level of confidence when they see a label on a box it's all about whether you can have that confidence in the label you know and it's a fair point so cool David in Brisbane Australia said as a data analyst who used to work in traffic and transport forecasting I am really excited about Uber opening up their traffic data it gives us great insights into where people are coming from and going to as well as travel times at congested speeds on roads I know we in Australia have been trying to request this type of data from taxi companies who have held it close to their chest perhaps due to concern over scrutiny of taxi driver work hours speeding etc this data alone is a very small part of traffic forecasting lots already goes into these models but more data is always better than less I hope that it shakes the taxi industry into providing this type of data too maybe possibly but I don't think it would I mean I think a lot of that taxi data is also about how they can get their cars around major traffic congested spots without tipping off their competitors like hey Mike you know we'll get you over there whatever well and that's why people were a little surprised that Uber was sharing this because Uber would like to have an advantage in that as well but I think what they're saying is our advantage is in the algorithm that routes our drivers not in the data that we use to make our decisions all right that's it for this episode of Daily Tech New Show thank you Roger for filling in Patrick Beja we'll be back next week Roger you have anything to tell folks about before we're out of here you know it if you want to follow me on Twitter at Jolly Roger J-O-L-L-Y Roger yeah you got the Jolly Roger you're early on you hopped on yes there's a lot of people use it they think it's something else but hey who am I to dissuade anyone thanks to everybody who supports the show DailyTechNewShow.com slash support is the place to go if you've got a dollar to share with us a month like a lot of people or more you can do that that's the biggest way that we make the show happen but there's all kinds of other ways if you're like man I can got a dollar we understand it's the way the economy goes sometimes so you can just tell folks about it or maybe buy something in a shop that you can justify the purchase for or just give once if you're like I got a dollar one month but maybe not every month check it out DailyTechNewShow.com slash support big thanks to all our patrons at Patreon.com slash DTNS including Jeffrey Moxley Will Curtis and Chris Ike 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 back tomorrow with Scott Johnson talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program good show okay good show thank you Roger good shoe good shoe really good shoe even if hangouts decided that it just didn't want to automatically switch and put it in again I did stop again yeah I was just doing it manually so it's going to be stuck on me for the post show because I'm distracted by editing oh hey by the way folks is there if you're in the LA area and you're free at seven o'clock tomorrow why not head down to Santa Monica where I and Ryan Williams will be hosting an event at all the details here general assembly in downtown Santa Monica it's right right down by third street promenade and that is where is it oh I'm trying to find it well the details are in patreon I sent them out in the monthly update to patreon let me see if I can find them here but anyway yeah we're going to be talking about podcasting and the business of podcasting and crowdfunding let's see I think I found it here oh no I didn't Ryan's going to be doing his podcast live there yeah here we go Wednesday, January 11th and a horrible job of finding this information aren't I we're in the workshop Ryan will select entrepreneurs from the crowd to present their idea in business and then then give them sort of a feedback on the pitches so anyway it's good place general assembly is a cool place and Ryan's a great guy and it's going to be fun so if you're around Santa Monica tomorrow at 7 p.m RSVP link is in the chat room or in the Patreon or just look up general assembly find it there what do we got for titles there Roger all right top of the heap you're browsing it wrong followed by the green screened monster followed by it's not easy being a green screen of death drones receive a swarm welcome that's how we did there a matter of battery life and death Roger makes no sense rip bs bsod it was a long live gsod maybe might be a little to obscure bsd is looking a little green the long man or click bait no more vectors ultimate ratio by the way breaking news and thank you for putting this in in the chat room taxi cab Chris Latner who is the open source advocate for Swift at Apple is leaving Apple and joining Tesla as vice president of autopilot software oh nice treating and consumer reports was holding the new MacBook Pro wrong consumer oh consumer sorry yeah it's just a typo sorry the b threw me off and I was like well I thought that was a person's name upgrade internet upgrade internet so yahoo so you're browsing it wrong seems a top tripping the Oculus Rift that's a that's a good one for the like that one oh crap I was going to vote for it then it shifted voted oh levelators done tripping the Oculus Rift I like that might go with that you know the the guy leaving Swift to go to Tesla is very gossipy too but if you if you take the personalities out of it kind of makes sense I worked at Apple for a long time set up a project that's going strong doing well what's the new challenge what's more challenging than Tesla autopilot well you know what's fascinating is how much of the tech industry actually is driven by personality I mean the most obvious ones are like Musk and Jobs and yeah sure uh Zuckerberg but like just having that not just having a vision but being able to kind of I don't want to say force it on others to kind of turn people to that viewpoint I mean it takes a lot of salesmanship right you can't you can't sweet talk someone by berating them or yelling at them there there has to be a there hasn't be a weird combination of I work for Steve Jobs but most people can't get away with it I uh I think that I guess the interesting thing you might want to say is Apple really is taking a lot of guff for not having a good AI slash machine learning product serious sort of lagging there and they don't seem to have to be contributing to any serious research etc and then one of their big software developers goes to work on autopilots maybe uh maybe things in Apple are a little too safe that's that's under stating it a little too safe a lot of people have been making exactly that criticism for well I mean you know that's one of the things what was the uh it was a dandy grove who wrote the book um only the paranoid survive like you there's a constant sure and you see it even more so in technology because of the fast pace in which developments happen but there's you know remember when Netscape was around and people were talking about people who sold their Netscape stocks that could retire early and then suddenly like you know things change overnight it's ridiculous I shouldn't say it's ridiculous it's just it's it's fascinating to see it happen because within our lifetimes we've seen two or maybe three generations you know of of how people interfaced with the internet yeah before it was just like well I can send you email which is this awesome thing where I get the type stuff on a green terminal and they can send it to you and I just it's it's it was uh gopher and and pine and tin and I was remarking that Jen the other day my wife because we have a little 32 inch HGTV on the end of a the table that keep my kid busy while he's eating because my wife has misophonia and I was like can you imagine when you were like you know grade school in the 80s and someone told you you'll have a really big TV that's small and light enough to sit at the end of your table and you could watch it and not only could you watch it you could you know on-demand content you don't have to wait for like eight o'clock for like the 18 to show up just go to this service and they'll just send it to you like no videotape even you just straight to it be awesome it's crazy we kind of have all of those things we just don't use it in the way that was being described it's uh when I was in high school in the 90s I don't give away my age early 90s one of the there was a new high school being built to my town and it was uh it was all the rates because this would be at the forefront of technology you was going to have an Olympic size pool it's going to have all these sporting you know venues and it's going to have this really cool system where every classroom would have its own TV now just just just for people or maybe younger than me back in my day they would have to wheel a TV on a cart down the hall within the TADGE VCR a big old top-loading VCR on it and um every classroom would have a TV and they would have a phone and they could call down to this uh to the office and tell the guy I want this videotape to be played for this room and they could send that signal right to that room oh my gosh that's so clunky but like my my my English teacher Mr. Vache was like gosh he was like oh it's gonna be awesome it's gonna be so amazing I was like I'm thinking about this and I was like really that was your solution back then how is that easier than just having the tape and the video and the VCR on the cart like because it's all centralized Tom it's all the one I'm talking about total centralized meaning single point of failure here wait Roger does not equal 60 I wish because then I'd be five years away from you know I graduated from high school in 1988 yeah so if you went to high school in the 90s you're already sounded young to me I am younger than you that's what I'm laughing at you for worrying about feeling old well no because beef wrote Roger equal 60 in the in the chat room oh before he wrote that though you're like oh I'm not gonna tell you when I went to high school it's because I'm younger than you you feel offended because I would I'm afraid to mention my age because if you're old that makes me even older yes because someone did that when they're someone in the 30s did that one around me it's like you have no freaking idea I spent most of my younger life waiting to become old though I'm gonna enjoy it no I spent most of my life figuring out how I could avoid all the troubles and being smarter than everyone else I saw and I didn't really pan out because it's always a faster fish what I was always fascinated with were the people who continued to work well into their like late 80s we had a there was a guy that used to fix all my dad's furniture at the restaurant his name was Leo and remember he built my dad a dance floor but he was like 81 82 but he just he did everything himself it's amazing it's like man I want to be I want to be like that I want to be and this kind of job that I do right now gives me hope for this but I want to be somebody who continues to work through all my life but enjoys it you know like the idea of retirement was always like you have to do this thing you don't like but finally at a certain age when you get too old you can you get the reward of being able to take it easy because you're old and tired and to me a better system might be you know we try to make sure that people are doing things they enjoy in order to have a job and you can laugh at me because it's you know it's hard for that to happen but it's not impossible and and that that might be the goal might be I mean not that this is venturing into east meets west territory maybe I should save it for a recording but you know you say like well nobody's going to want to take out the trash maybe they will right maybe there's somebody who really digs I mean you've met the internet there's there's a fetish for everything maybe there's somebody who's like love love trash I love taking out trash right and even so and even with that there's always the possibility that we can automate and mechanize a lot of the the things that nobody wants to do so I don't know I've always found that people who do physical jobs whether it's being like a cook or working in a machine shop will really gave them the most enjoyment in their job was being able to kind of guide that future they weren't just a cog yeah right they weren't just like you know Smith you you mix 20 more of these widgets you know before launch time totally and we're good and then you can move on to these other widgets it's like well now let's you know if you get something not just challenging but really interesting to do yeah it's having some agency over what you're doing like feeling like you you really are in charge of what you're doing even if you're not in charge of everything yeah it's a big difference maybe I'll retire as a babysitter you like you like no sitting with babies no not really well I love being around kids but there's times where I just need to call a timeout grab a frozen burrito and nuke it I believe that's true of everyone well maybe not the burrito part but the needing a timeout well you know everyone has a frozen burrito moment where you just want the timeout it could be a Twix could be a Kit Kat pint of ice cream grandparenting is great you deal with the kids when they're happy and you leave them what they're sad with the parents that's called being a grandparent isn't that what yeah that's that's jamming three three elevens things like grandparents yeah even if you can offer all the advice without having to deal with the repercussions all right well thanks everybody for watching it was a good show good job Roger again good good wishes to Patrick he'll be back and we will talk to you all soon