 Well, hello. Hey everybody, have you heard the news? What's the good word, Tom? I'm in Austin, Texas. How many tacos have you had over the last three days? I have had a total of eight tacos. That's a good answer. But have you had any megas? I have had not only two plates of megas, but three of the tacos were megas tacos. Yeah, but so jelly. Oh, man. Although Tom, Heather Frank and I went to a place. I have to remember the name of it. It was in Culver, but we had tacos and they were excellent. I had never been there before. Right. It wasn't Tito's I'm taking it like you know. No, no, it wasn't. In fact, let me look it up. No, it was sort of in this like mall area. I don't know. Culver is so weird. I find it disturbing that when you search for megas now on Google, the top result is the pioneer woman. Oh, she's got a recipe of megas. I've used a couple of her recipes before. I'm not argued about her recipes. I'm just fascinating that, you know, that's the first results. Right. Right. Oh, that's interesting. I have to check that out. Low key. L. O. Q. U. I. Oh, all right. Really good tacos. Really good. I'm in the chat room here. Oh, if you go into the chat room with colloquy, it'll be me again. So no, I'm using my laptop. Okay, got it. I don't want to be you, Tom. I know, man. I don't some sometimes I don't either. I truly love the array of Bill Murray gear that's available at the chives store. What did you say, Patrick? I love you, man. Apparently that documentary about Bill Murray that was here itself by is amazing. Eileen saw it and she's been talking about it. I've heard it. I've heard it's really good. Yeah. Correct. All right. Oh, real quick, Tom. Line 22. Aragwin. Oh, yeah. Good question. That's what I would guess. But I don't really understand the Aragin. Okay. All right. I think as English speaking white people, we can say Aragin and be okay. Cool. I think the mayor of Berkeley shall understand, I hope. If not, you know, as long as it'll linger too long. Don't let it linger. Yeah. Roll that R for days. If I could roll ours, I could speak. I can only roll the R once. I roll it, but in the wrong way. Like it's not my tongue. I gargle. Yeah. Like it's not actually I'm not wrong. I don't even know if that's wrong. I think it's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Roger, are you ready? Yeah, I should probably hit record all week. If I hit recorded, it restarts. And so let me see. Boom. Let me hit him and hit that. OK. All right. Silencio. And hit record now. The Daily Tech News Show is brought to you by people like me, not outside organizations. To learn more, go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 12, 2018 from DTNS. Temporary headquarters in downtown Austin, Texas. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, where it happens to be my mother's birthday. I'm Sarah Lane. Patrick Gordon, where are you at? So I saw Roger come up, so I kept my mouth shut. I'm somewhere in downtown Oakland, California. Excellent. Contemplating MIGAs. Man, the MIGAs are good in Austin. Big thanks to Brian Brush for letting me use his studio here in Austin the last couple of days. He's got a show at the same time on Mondays. So I'm sort of camping out here in the hotel, but we've got it. We've got a lovely location keeping our fingers crossed about the bandwidth. Roger, you had a little bandwidth issue at your own house. So you're actually in my studio in Los Angeles. Yes, we have transposed our locations. I checked with my wife and my internet still out. So I made the correct decision. Well done. Well done. Anyway, if there are little bumps in the road on this episode, we apologize, but hey, that's the internet. It's fun. Let's talk about a few tech things you should know. Microsoft announced Monday that its slot competitor, Microsoft Teams, is now used by 200,000 organizations in 181 markets and 39 languages. That's a significant jump from 50,000 when it launched out of preview just a year ago. New features on deck for teams this year include cloud recording with auto transcription, that would be helpful, Cortana integration deeper anyway, and mobile sharing during meetings. Slack, by comparison, if you want to look at numbers, has six million daily active users, two million of whom are paying customers as of September 2017. Worth noting, Microsoft does not allow a full free teams option. Cortana, cancel all my meetings. Kaspersky Lab has discovered state-sponsored malware. They're calling it Slingshot that targets micro-tick routers. It stores its files in an encrypted virtual file system and shuts down components when forensic tools are active. So it's very good at evading detection. Slingshot can capture keyboard strokes, your network traffic, your passwords, your screenshots. It's pretty nefarious. Almost 100 individuals, governments and institutions are known to be infected. Micro-Tick has a patch out to fix it. We don't know what other routers might or might not be affected. A Reddit user received a pairing notification for Android Wear, but it used the term Wear OS, which may point to Google rebranding the name or at least thinking about it, at least an Android P developer preview and the latest beta 12.5, in which case both use the term Wear OS. The notification was generated by Google Play Services that use the nearby feature to see if devices are close by that can be paired, such as a watch. But W-E-A-R, right, not W-H-E-R-E. Right. In case anyone's wondering. Android Wear has been wearing it. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Apple getting into the newsstand game. Apple is acquiring texture, formerly known as Next Issue and often referred to in headlines as the Netflix of magazines. I guess your access to around 200 magazines for $10 a month. Eddie Q., Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, said in a statement, we are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users, which I assume is why is his explanation for why they bought texture. It's like, great, that's awesome. Why'd you buy texture? Texture will continue development on apps for iOS, Android, Amazon, Kindle, Fire, Windows 8 and 10 for the time being. That's good to know. And Apple will buy the full company, including the employees. It's not an aqua hire. It's not just getting the patents or something like that. They're folding texture into Apple. I mean, on its surface, it's sort of like if Apple is still going to make iPads, this is a company to buy, right? I mean, it's perfect for that. Next Issue and, you know, it has been re-banned to texture since then. But I mean, that was that's been an iPad app for quite some time. A nice one. And I don't know. I mean, that the iPad experience is the place to to read magazines. I don't know. I'm going to be on the iOS, you know, ecosystem. I have never taken to reading magazines on a tablet. And maybe it's just me. Well, I think the irony there for me is that almost all the magazines that texture has deals with are all super active on the newsstand still, right, or what's left of the newsstand. When I say that, like, they're the ones that are in that little, you know, point of purchase area right before you check out of the supermarket, right, because supermarkets have been radically shrinking their magazine sections and newsstands are really hard to find. But almost all those super popular magazines, they have all have really great websites, which I find really peculiar where you would be like, I could pay 10 bucks a month and get 200 magazines or he get most of their websites for free, which is a little bizarre to me. Like Esquire has a good website, National Geographic has a good website. But yeah, the whole like I've seen so many bad implementations of magazines I just sort of stopped looking at the sort of, you know, I I don't know, I, you know, I still buy paper magazines because I love magazines and they'll be gone before my children, I think, are old enough to vote. But the I don't know, I'm curious to see what they do with it because so many things Apple is kind of like, we'll take that and put it over there. And then it sort of I want them to figure it out. I want them to make me give up my print scientific American subscription because it's just good, so good to read it on tablet. Not holding my breath, but we can dream. Well, Tom, you're in Austin. So, you know, maybe this will resonate with you. Austin based startup Icon. That's Icon All Caps announced plans to print a 650 square foot house made of cement using large 3D robots. Icon says the homes would cost $10,000 each and aims to bring that price down to $4000 eventually. Icon plans to build 100 of its houses in El Salvador sometime next year, 2019. Yeah, I got real excited when I looked out the window and I saw down there that there was a tiny little house, but it's just like a smart home demo house. It's not it's more of like a trailer. Yeah, it's not the 3D printed house. Apparently they've got one here somewhere. I'm going to try to run out and see if I can find it at some point. But I I know, Patrick, you were pointing out before the show. This is not the first time someone's talked about 3D printing a house, but it's a little bit bigger and a little bit cheaper. Right. Well, this there was a big flurry of 3D printing building technology back in 2016, mostly around the company called Avis Core. And they have a very similar where there's sort of a big column and like a putsmeister type concrete pump is on an arm and moves everything around. It's trippy to watch one of these things work. Actually, you know, I thought the aesthetics on this house were pretty good. And I think much more usable. One of the first 3D houses built was in Russia and it was like 400 square feet and it was round and everybody thinks round houses are cool till they try to put furniture in them or they find out what it's going to cost to custom make counters. But I'm really curious to see what this what this does because it could be really, really inexpensive. Concrete holds up really well. I'm very curious. I'm very curious to see where it goes. The McFly project announced it is setting up infrastructure for VTOL taxis, Vertical Takeoff and Landing taxis in Nairobi, Kenya. McFly has plans to offer the service in 23 cities nationwide. Company will use its own McFly token on the Ethereum blockchain for handling payments so skepticism gets a little higher. The ICO is live, although Phase 1.2 has been delayed until April. My skepticism gets a little higher and there's no prototype or working model of the McFly urban flying taxi currently available. They kind of need the money from the ICO in order to build the thing, which makes my skepticism real high. Right. One of these guys, one of these folks is going to do it. Vertical Takeoff and Landing has so many people hammering away at it. One of them's got to succeed, right? Yeah, but there's the whole idea of actually being able to. A friend of mine worked on a project with the FAA where they were trying to figure out simply how to route planes to create sort of a mesh network of small airports in the United States for commercial aviation, which was a nightmare. So the idea of figuring out how to have, you know, fly. I mean, think about it. People drive like idiots in California, even though the basic rules of the road haven't really changed much in the last 70, 80 years, 60 years, 50 years, whatever. I'm imagining what happens with the guy with the air Tesla decides he's going to hammer into the, you know what I mean? Like, I just, I don't know, I'm we keep seeing the whole like Vertical Takeoff and Landing car stuff. And it never you see it like rise up 12 feet on chains and then drop back down and then you never really see it again. And and McFly's answer to your like people drive really crazy in insert state here is they're going to do autonomous, right? So if you can make that happen under controlled circumstance, that could at least take that factor out of the equation. McFly's arguing that this is actually safer to do it that way. And then having people do it like you're talking about. Yeah, but it's also it's like they're talking about for Nairobi, eight dollars a minute when they eventually have vehicles. And, you know, it's going to be a dynamic payment system on the McFly tokens on their blockchain. So, you know, as people want more. So they're going to have sort of built in what does Uber call it when they when the prices go berserk? Oh, yeah, the dynamic price. The dynamic pricing price. Third price. Thank you. You know, I think it's fascinating that they're launching in Nairobi. I want to see them actually build an air taxi and see someone actually fly in it. Yeah, that's when I'll start believing it's it's going to. Well, we saw the we saw the one in Saudi Arabia kind of lift off the ground like on chains. That's the one I think that that I've seen video of. Right. I mean, there's there's somebody been doing that demo, you know, about 60 miles east of here for like the last 15 years. The Saudi one might have gone from one place to another, though. So, folks, if you're if you're, you know, following the VTEL stuff real close and you know, better, let us know feedback at Daily Tech Newshow.com. Well, back in California, Berkeley, California City Council member Ben Bartlett is proposing using cryptocurrency to handle municipal bonds. Bartlett calls it an initial community offering ICO, but get it community, but believes that the blockchain based smart contracts could cut out cost and red tape when issuing new bonds, especially for smaller projects. Bartlett is working with startup neighbor Lee and Mayor Jesse Erwin on proposals coming in May. So, OK, immediately these days, you roll your eyes when you hear the word blockchain, right? Like I get that this feels like they've got a startup. I don't know anything about neighbor Lee, but but potentially I'm going to be willing to believe that this is a startup that actually knows what they're doing and you can use the ICO. You can use the blockchain for very successful things. And from what I have read, the bureaucracy and the inflexibility of the municipal bond system really is a problem. And it really does keep cities from doing small projects. They have to have multi millions, not even just one or two million, but multi million projects to make it worthwhile to pay all the bank fees in middlemen. Well, neighbor Lee is essentially allowing individuals to invest directly in bonds or it's kind of like a new bond market, right? You know, so you can go in and like, you know, right now you can go to or these are past offerings. Sorry. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, go bonds, twenty eighteen series A. So it's just as boring as your traditional bonds. State of California General Obligation Bonds, March, twenty eighteen, the sale date, you know, you can it's it's you know, they've got neighbor Lee's participating like fourteen point seven billion issuances, but I don't know those are all hosted on neighbor Lee. I don't know. I think this is like you were saying, like we all roll our eyes at blockchain at this point. It's like, OK, it's a distributed ledger, but it's blockchain and it's cool and it got a lot of attention because of Bitcoin and I don't understand how it's going to cut costs because you're going to have to build an interface and a system and access and make it secure and then get it through all the financial like, you know what I mean? Like it's it's it's the idea definitely cut costs, but it's it is an upfront investment. It always is. That's true. And and where it makes sense for JP Morgan, right on the level that they operate to team up with a bunch of other big banks, that upfront cost is saved in an instant, right through the city of Berkeley. Is it is it saved in an instant when you have to go through all that vetting or not and can they work out all the, you know, the legal issues around it. It sounds like they got the mayor on board, which is the right way to approach this. I'm curious what they actually announced in May. I think this is all about. I think neighbor Lee would probably be the company who is going to shepherd this idea of of bringing new technology into bond issuing. Whether or not it's actually necessary, like I don't that's the part I don't really understand. Like why would blockchain make this so much easier to manage? Well, because you wouldn't have to have all the companies that are middlemen involved in simply the act of verifying. I mean, I I snap to that, like I understand like what the blockchain saves a lot of this double checking stuff because it is a secure ledger that is incredibly difficult to to forge. So I could get where there could be a bunch of savings, but you're not wrong about all the setup. The US FCC says swarm technologies launched for small internet satellites in January without authorization. This is the world we live in. People launch things like it used to be you couldn't launch things without authorization because you had to be a nation state. The satellites were part of the Indian Space Agency's launch on January 12th, but no operator was identified on the cargo list. Swarm was founded by former Google aerospace engineer Sarah Spangelo and developer Benjamin Longmeyer, who has sold a previous company of his to Apple. The four satellites from swarm are part of the space bees system. It's a plan to provide low cost internet from space to help with Internet of Things and sensors and stuff like that. Great plan, except their launch plans had been rejected previously because the satellites are so small, it would be difficult to track, and Swarm's plan is to put many of these in space. So if you have a bunch that are hard to track, that becomes even more of a problem because of the risk of catastrophic collision. These things go fast once they're in orbit, and if, you know, maybe they won't hit the International Space Station, but they could hit another satellite and disable it. So the FCC was saying, no, you don't get approval to put these up yet. We need to do some more work and they put them up anyway. I mean, and will they be fine? Like, I mean, it seems like something that you really shouldn't be able to do unless you have the proper permits. Yeah, well, the FCC regulates commercial satellites, and they dismissed Swarm's application. And if, you know, Well, they just, they just, they did not approve the application, but they still had the approval to launch things. They just had to fire a better plan. Now, Sarah, I think the answer to your question is y'all going to lose your launch privileges. You're not going to be allowed to launch anything ever. Exactly. I just, I don't know how you really do that and just say like, we'll just ask for forgiveness later. I mean, what did they think? I don't know. Oh, sorry. No, no, go ahead, please. Tell me what they were thinking. The actual letter from the FCC says these spacecrafts are therefore below the size threshold of which detection by the space surveillance network can be considered routine. And, you know, basically that they they're smaller than 10 by 10 by 10. So they were told to not launch the tiny satellites. They launched the, I mean, this is, this is like, you know, Travis Kalanick got away with a lot of stuff. Uber, you know, I can just see the VC guy looking at the swarm guy, the swarm engineer and being like, you have to be aggressive, be aggressive, fast and launch things. Ask, you know, yeah, ask, you know, launch now, ask permission later. I just, you know what I mean? Like I can hear that conversation where somebody doesn't understand the stakes and once results is demand. Like, you know, all they had to do was put it in a bigger box. Yeah, well, or maybe that maybe that defeats their plan. If it's in a bigger box, then they can't put as many up, etc. Whatever. I get that. But and I also get that they're probably like saying, look, the chance of these four causing a problem is almost a zero. It's only if everybody does that. But that's the FCC's point is, look, if we start letting you do it, then everybody's going to want to do it. So we have to, you know, we have to hold the line and come up with more responsible measures. And it is well documented that space is full of debris and junk right now. Like it is, is becoming a problem. These are smart people, right? Swarm technology, CEO, Canadian working NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. If anyone knows, feedback at TechnoShow.com. Sarah Benjamin, explain yourselves. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to Daily Tech headlines.com. It is the brief way to stay on top. We know you might not have time for 30 minutes of DTNS every day. You can catch up on those later, but still stay up on the news with Daily Tech headlines available on the Amazon Echo, on the Google Home, on the Anchor app and as a podcast in all of your favorite podcatchers at DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, Broadcom, Qualcom and now Intel. It's a love triangle. Broadcom said Monday it will move its headquarters from Singapore to the US by April 3rd. So if you didn't realize, Broadcom is actually located in Irvine, but the US headquarters is San Jose and they have another headquarters in Singapore. There were some tax reasons, financial reasons for doing that, but that was causing issues with the potential acquisition of Qualcom, which is a US company. So they said, look, we will read domicile to the United States by April 3rd. That's two days before Qualcom shareholder meeting. So if we do win the shareholder vote will be in the US by then. However, the US Treasury Department said a letter this morning saying Broadcom violated an order from a national security panel and didn't see any other details about that. But that could complicate matters. And Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel was considering an acquisition of Broadcom as a defensive measure because they're worried about Broadcom and Qualcom combining and being a threat to Intel's business, which, you know, is great in desktop chips. But desktop chips or even laptop chips are not going to help them forever. And they're trying to find what that next big new thing for them to win in is. So Intel buying potentially buying Broadcom would mean that Intel hopes that Broadcom will not buy Qualcom. Well, that's a good question. Would they would they try to buy Broadcom to stop Broadcom from buying Qualcom or would they try to snap up the whole thing after Broadcom bought Qualcom? The general consensus is that they would be buying Broadcom to prevent Broadcom from buying Qualcom and becoming a company with a market capitalization roughly the size of Intel's and controlling 40 something percent of mobile sales. This is the weirdest story. It's one of those things where you like you keep it in my case. Like, you know, I kept ignoring it because I'm like, oh, God, this is no, I don't want to deal with this. But Broadcom, a lot of the way Broadcom Broadcom is this weird collection of stuff, right? They do all these different kind of chips. And one of the ways they have grown traditionally is by acquiring other companies. And this would be, you know, this would be a big acquisition like Qualcom and Broadcom are roughly the same size. If you look at stock valuations, Qualcom is obviously this huge player in the mobile industry. Although ironically, at the top of the mobile industry, they've been losing share as, you know, Huawei and my goodness, Samsung, you know, as they start kind of developing their own high end chipsets for stuff. But they are they are the player in terms of mobile. And the idea is, is when you go way back, Steve Jobs came to Intel and asked Intel to make a mobile processor for the iPhone. And Intel was like, your projections are nuts, dude. And we don't want warehouses full of this crap, which 1.8 billion iPhones later turns out to have been a probably a really bad call on Intel's part. And then so they they don't do the deal with Apple. And of course, the Android phones come, then all of a sudden Qualcom's making money handover fist. And at that point, Intel has this panic attack and Intel tries to create, you know, mobile atom processor. Intel essentially tries to play catch up with Qualcom and just fails miserably and never really receives anything because because it went back in 2012 until it was like, yeah, you know, it's Windows, you know, an x86 processors will always be. And then the way and now they're trying to leap ahead. Now they're like, oh crap, we missed the mobile revolution. Let's try to get into Internet of Things. Let's try to get into whatever the next thing is going. Well, it's been like they're worried. They look at Qualcom being stale, right? And Intel's like, ah, Qualcom's doing what we did. We can jump ahead. But if Broadcom buys Qualcom, suddenly maybe Broadcom's diverse portfolio of modem chips and everything else helps Qualcom diversify and causes a big problem for Intel. Well, like 80 percent, I want to say 80 percent, most of Intel's profits come from 80 x86 processor sales. And the rest of what's what really this has come down to is Intel sells a lot of modems to Apple for iPhones. And if Broadcom buys Qualcom, then basically Broadcom's going to tell Qualcom to quit arguing with Apple over the cost of modems and just pay the fees, right? No, that's one big example, right? Which then cuts out Intel's like sole presence in the mobile market. And then what gets really crazy so you've got like Intel's panicking about Broadcom buying Qualcom one because it'll make this huge organization and then maybe, you know, maybe, you know, because at this point, Intel's Samsung is now a larger as of like Q4 2017. Samsung is, you know, basically ended Intel's 25 year reign as the largest chip maker in the world, right? So I think people are a little uptight inside of Intel, you know, and then on top of this, you've got so, you know, Broadcom's looking to buy Qualcom. Qualcom doesn't want to be bought. The shareholder offer is huge. Like it's like it was, I think the offer is like 50 percent over the sales price when, you know, what the stock was undervalued. That's what Qualcom told me. Yeah. Of course, they'd say that. I also love the fact that just, you know, Broadcom was like, oh, would it make sense to you as regulators for us just to be in the US? OK, we'll just go ahead and move all of our operations, which were already 50 percent of the US to the US. Like, what is that? You know, you're not changing anything. They're just a citizen who put the company. Yeah. But but but then they're basically there's been there's been objections to the US Committee for Foreign Investment in the US. CFIR. Yeah. And the reason they got spanked recently is because they were I guess they were supposed to provide five business days notice before it, like, did anything to relocate the capital. But the, you know, the the CFI US has been really uptight about this because they don't want they don't want sort of foreign consolidation over control over 5G spectrum. It's it's like the deep you get into this, the weirder it gets like there's a great tech crunch kind of walk through where they talk about how it's like this multi dimensional chest from hell and it's just getting more and more ridiculous. So to sum up, Broadcom wants Qualcomm. Yes, Qualcomm has qualms Intel joins in to the romcom. Yes. Meanwhile, the United States government doesn't want Qualcomm to be foreign owned. So the foreign company is going to relocate to the US. Well, it's not relocating. It's it's citing a piece of paper. Like they just yeah, all their stuff's here anyway. Yeah, that's what's so odd about it might as well move back to their old department. Yeah. It's pretty much what's going on. So and the deep you get into it, it's just, you know, you know, Jean-Louis Gasset wrote a really interesting article this morning, basically saying like, yes, Intel could buy Broadcom. It would be horrible for Broadcom and for Intel. Yeah. And for the consumer, because it would be so much consolidation. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and in our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. Time to check the mail bag. What is there, Sarah? Someone who asked to be anonymous had a very good point regarding right to repair. We talked about this last week says, when it comes to this bill, I'm all for it. I run a small computer repair shop, but I've always thought that people should be able to fix their own broken stuff. The majority of my clients, they're older. They don't want to deal with their repair themselves. They don't know how to or not worth their time or whatever. I also deal with a good amount of people who can't afford to get new computers, can't afford to get new cell phones every year. So not replacing a broken screen or hinge is a really cost effective solution. Goes on to say it's funny because we started talking about cars in the discussion. I like to compare computers to cars for a lot of the reasons that we just talked about. For example, both are easy to use, but just about anyone. If you think of it this way, cars haven't stopped innovating really, even though you can take a car to any corner garage for repairs and maintenance. Why would a computer or a cell phone be any different? Anybody who claims giving owners the right to repair a product themselves or have their devices repaired by third parties is, in my opinion, wrong. Well, I mean, Tukau's on Twitter here, brought up a good point. He or she said, you know, what about safety and security? What about the idea that if third parties work on something, they might make it worse. They might cause harm. And my answer to him is like, well, we've figured that out with appliances and with cars. I'm sure we could figure that out for electronics. We even have certified repair for many electronics already. It's just that the companies have been moving away from doing that and wanting to hold more control over that stuff. Well, thank you, Anand, for the feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love your feedback. Keep it coming. Also, thanks to Patrick Martin for being with us this fine Monday. Patrick, what's been going on in your world and how can people keep up with it? I head on over to techthing. T-E-K-T-H-I-N-G.com. It's the show I host with Shannon Morris and we just had a huge, a couple of weeks ago, special on backup and backing up and how we do our three, two, one backups. And yes, we talked about lubricating fans last week. Fan loop, people. It's a thing. The right to repair in action. A-hydrated. Awesome, check it out. T-E-K-T-H-I-N-G.com. Thanks to everybody who supports us on Patreon. We need to keep you coming. We need to keep you in the tent. We need your support. Our goal every month is always to get at least one more patron the last month and we've got some great cool things if you're a member of DTNS's patron that you can get like exclusive weekly hot takes from me, special monthly post letting folks know what's happening ahead of time, business cards so you can say you're a producer of the show, all that stuff available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030. UTC, yeah, that's right. We roll back to daylight savings again, at least in some parts of the U.S. So find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We shall be back tomorrow. I will be traveling, but Sarah and Roger will be here with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. I hope you've enjoyed this program. What happened to the music there, Roger? I don't know, someone's alarm's going off. That's a bad idea. Roger is muted, so I don't know what happened. Oh, nice. A calendar app in the Mac App Store. The music played so audio hijack got it, but they didn't get it. I muted the thing. So it all played, it all played, but I had my muted because I'm sorry. It's OK. But they made it into this version, the show. No problem. No problem. Sorry. Is that good? Yes, thank you. I hope you have enjoyed this program. There. Apologies, apologies. Patrick, I surprised you didn't have anything to say about the right to repair stuff. Are you just? I have a lot to say, but I felt like maybe I'd been talking too long. Too much to say. I was like, you know, the average house in China is barely 600 square feet. It's crazy. Average house in the UK, 800 square feet. Average house in Japan, 1,000 square feet. This is crazy. I would be, I'm surprised that Japan would have a greater median. And the square footage than the UK. The UK started so much? I don't know. There was a really interesting article that pointed out how in Great Britain homes, kids usually have their crib. Then they have a bed and a trunk. And then later on, they get how the sense of personal space is much, much smaller there. And also when they were building, so much of the UK was built, I think, when building materials were, if this small of your home was, the less likely you were to freeze in the winter. And so much it was built so long ago. But it's crazy. Australia's average house size is bigger than the US. Yeah, but that's due to rampant investment in the property. I got 99 qualms, but Intel ain't one. Average house in Russia is 614 feet. Oh, you know what it is? Probably the influence of communism. No, you have to be careful with the qualms. QAL qualms about qualms. The thing is, you need to be careful with some of the square footage numbers. 99 qualms, then. That's what we're doing. I got 99 qualms. You want that one? Yeah. It's done. So let it be written. No, like in Australia, they actually, I heard they include the garage when they include square footage for the house, whereas some most places in the US just only include the living space. Yeah, but you're still looking at, like, I mean, Hong Kong, it's like the average house. Average space is like 484 square feet. Have you been to Hong Kong? Yeah. No, I've seen, I get that, but I mean, like, you know, even in China, it's still like, I think, 630 square feet or something. Russia, it's like 620. The average home in Russia is smaller than the average home in China, which is crazy. It's because the majority of those people have, their middle class isn't the same as like a Western country's middle class in terms of the amount of money they bring in. It's middle class relative to the entire country's economy. Yeah, but also in the US, you've got, like, a third of the housing having been built, I think, in the last 40 years when the square footage is just shot through the roof. Shot through the roof. I'm going to play. You give small homes bad names. Bad names. I always thought about that. Then I said, no, no to small homes. Although I do like, if they could incorporate some of the modularity that some people incorporate into small homes into just a medium or regular sized home. Has anyone heard, has anyone's had their ALEX-A device to start randomly laughing? Oh, no. No, we talked about the fact that this happened. It didn't happen to me. But it was disconcerting, to say the least. I don't want her laughing at me, ever, particularly not, went on profit. Creepy laughter in the middle of the night. Yeah, the whole thing still. It's just coming alive. The network is coming alive. Well, they're saying like, AIs, essentially, that was an article that was floating around, like AIs hallucinating is a big problem, as AIs get smarter. Yeah, that's what that's saying. Well, you know, they call it hallucinating. I call it dreaming, Patrick. Just Roger dream of electric sheep. I mean, isn't that like, you know, the sign of certain intelligence is like animals dream, like even dogs dream and stuff. Oh, no dogs dream. But dogs are, like, that's, no one's. They're practically. Does anyone think dogs don't dream? It's more like, what is Alexa doing? Of electric sheep? What if Alexa was just, oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. What if the Amazon Echo was just dreaming about shipping packages and answering other people's questions? I don't know. Lyft says it passed a billion dollars in revenue last year and is growing faster than Uber. Are they still having get over Lyft? Get over Lyft? What are you talking about? No, I just say, the whole, I don't know, the whole Lyft Uber thing has always been very odd to me. What, competition amongst service providers is odd to you? What are you talking about? Well, yes, actually. Commentary on the current climate, isn't it? Well, you know, somebody who's like, I don't understand why you left Comcast so quickly for this unproven startup. But I'm like, do you have Comcast? They're like, yes. I'm like, is there a viable alternative? They're like, no, I'm like, trust me, as soon as there is, you'll leave. Where is your, oh, here it is, slack, slack. Yeah, so Lyft was not saying it. Recode's headline was saying it. This is the modern malaise, right? The headline says Lyft says it passed a billion dollars in revenue last year, M dash, and is growing faster than Uber. There we go. Momentum, oh, here's the USA Today article. Momentum at least appears to be on Lyft's side. Uber, which declined to comment for this story, may have mounting brand image issues, but at a $70 billion valuation, roughly 10 times the size of Lyft, Uber is in nearly 600 cities in 81 countries. Yeah, Lyft said that it passed a billion dollars in revenue in 2017, grew 168% year over year, which is three times faster than the 61% that Uber reported, which makes sense, because Lyft is coming from behind. So. And drivers seem to like Lyft a lot better than the Uber. More black cat than they used to. I can just screen capture because your cat's. He's been howly in this entire show. Hopefully you didn't hear him much, but now I'm like, OK, you want to be on display? Here you are. Do you like this? You sure you shouldn't have named him Douglas Ginsburg? This cat, man. More trouble than your word. How? Trying to find that perfect balance on the auto brightness on this camera where you can still see the lake, but I'm not too dark. You are rather backlit. Yeah, but then when I lean in. But I can see it. I can see it. When I lean in and I'm not backlit anymore, then you can't really see it. You need some solar shield on the windows. Yeah. Or really greatly. I'm sure the hotel would mind. No, you should just carry a roll of neutral density and defilter in your luggage when you travel. You can call yourself a professional, Thomas. Please let Roger put together your mobile lighting kit. I'm an embarrassment of riches. I remember like I've pulled like lampshades off of lamps and put them onto the coffee tables and show you. Well, I guess I could show you. It's not going to be very pretty. This, you know, is the old ice. Turned upside down for the. I use paracord to like lash my microphone to something once. Where it's like. It looks like a pretty nice hotel, though. Yeah, it's not bad. They weren't really ready to be open. It's brand new, like it opened last week. Yeah, so there are some bumps in the road. South by is a tough place to be like, let's test our. Let's just test that out. It will be a fantastic hotel after it's been open for a month. I can I can tell, but it'll be wonderful once it's finished. Yeah, I mean, well, that's what I felt the Thursday when we came here. They were like put installing the televisions behind the bar downstairs. Cable wasn't hooked up in my room until Sunday. So yeah, there was some of that. Like it's things still being built. There's also a lot of like we didn't get made service most days. So I thought that there already was a Fairmont in Austin. I guess I was thinking of maybe there was a maybe there was one in a different location before this one. I don't know. But nice hotel once they get the kinks. Yeah, yeah. Well, everybody's really nice, like super helpful and professional and all of that. So it's always a big plus. Would you say too nice? No, actually, that's a good question. They aren't like absolutely, Mr. Merritt, they're they're they're genuine. Why is our chili so good? It's the meat. Would you like to see the kitchen? It's horrible. Well, suddenly I'm looking for hotels for CES. Patrick Norton, stop this insanity. My God, man. It's March 12th. But they're like $12, you know, you can tell this time you're in Las Vegas for like eight bucks. That's true. That's true. But can you book it for that week next year for 12 bucks? That's that's fine. No, no, you can't unless there's some horrible. Here, let's check ability. I even know when is CES 2019? Well, yeah, that's do we even have those dates yet? I'm sure we do. We've decided to have a week of CES four days off and then another five days of CES. There'll be three sets of press days. Sorry, it's already just about that bad. Start date, January 8th, 2019 and date, January 11th, wait, eight, nine. That's got to be without press days. Yeah, no, the third day. That's the day it opens is always like we've been there half a week already. Yeah, that's when I started getting really upset with CES. Yeah, that's Tuesday. So so the sixth is the probably CES unveiled, right? Here we go. Checking availability. That can't be right. Sorry. Five thousand dollars a night. No, it's it's I did it through the Google search because every so often I like to laugh really hard at how bad the rates are. And that was really impressively bad. How bad is bad? A hotel that usually goes for like $30 a night being like $206 a night. What $30? That sounds like free. Robert, Roger, Roger, Robert got me. We started staying downtown a couple of three years ago. I I we talked about it when we were at C not you and I, but I know where you're staying. Actually, that hotel could be really nice. Really? That's cool. Yeah, I mean, for, you know, a cheap Vegas hotel. Yeah, yeah. Listen, if it's if the pill is OK and it's not too loud, I'm down. That's all I know about. And there was no resort fee and there was no parking fee. Well, I think it was or feels like four dollars. Like I stopped staying at the D when like the rates went up and then they put like a twenty five dollar a day resort fee. And I'm like, oh, see, that's where I thought you were staying. Yeah, no, that was a couple of years ago. OK, then we send the D the frontier, which is the oldest operating hotel and casino in Las Vegas. The frontier. I think it's the frontier, not the frontier. Hold on, El Cortez. Oh. That was. Best on the near side of being a little too funky for me. I remember the frontier having really good chicken fried steak. OK, so all right. So because we often talk about food on the post show, what is chicken fried steak? Is it chicken? Was it steak? Oh, it's steak, but it's cooked like you would cook fried chicken. It's a it's a flat. Oh, chicken style steak, chicken fried steak. It's fried like it's chicken, but it's steak. But it's not chicken. It's just deep fried steak. Yeah, it's like a minute steak. That sounds horrible to me. It's, you know, it's it's comfort food. Chicken fried steak. Good. Yeah, it is. I mean, I believe you. I just I don't like fried chicken, so I don't think I would like fried steak. But I like cheeseburgers. How do you not like fried chicken? Don't like it. Ew, I peel all that stuff off. I have I'm having complicated feels about that, Sarah. I don't know. More for you. Why would you need more? Because it's like for all the fat, like all the calories are. But yeah, just not just not. It's just not the right thing for me. So I like chicken. Yeah, I realize. Oh, you know what the problem is? You can't book 2019 yet, it looks like. Yeah, they don't have it open. I noticed that, too. Damn it. Ah, well, you just have to revisit it this summer. Sometimes the early bird is too early for the worms. I'm also laughing because like I'm on this weird calendar interface in the website. And I'm like, wait a minute, wasn't I just at made? I'm like, it's going all through the end of the year and back again. Yeah, go sit. Oh, no, go sit July and then March. This is terribly confusing. Wrinkle in time. Oh, man. Oh, thanks, me. So what? Beginning and end. I know that I know that I know what he's doing. Wait, what? I said, I heard you find the beginning and find the end. I recognize that pattern. No, no, I don't need to find it. I just want to make sure it's all there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I'm going to take us off the video. So thanks, everybody, for watching. Thank you for supporting us. Yes. Thank you for supporting us. That's why Roger was willing to make that long drive to make sure that we got this show out. Because we have a blood bond now. All of you.