 Hey, this is Chet Page, and you are listening to The Daily Tech News Show. This show is entirely sponsored by listeners like you. If you would like to help contribute to the show, head on over to patreon.com.acetetect. This is The Daily Tech News for Monday, June 1st, 2015. I'm Tom Mary, joining me today as she does on Monday's Ms. Veronica Belmont, co-host of the Sword and Laser Morning Stream contributor, and that is the least of her great accomplishments in life. How are you, Veronica? I'm good. Feeling good after that. How are you, Tom? I am doing well. I'm excited to talk about our main topic from Pew Research Center. We like to pull these Pew Research Center topics from time to time. They have good stuff. And I will tease ahead. I did some master's work on a similar topic when I was in grad school. Did you? I did. Well, it must have been a very long time ago, because as we learned from this study and from many other studies, Tom is not a millennial. No, Tom is old. Tom is of the generation that apparently wasn't very important to the Pew Research Study on where people get their news. Top line is millennials get it from Facebook, but we'll talk more about that in a little bit. Shall we do some headlines? Let's. Terry Meyerson wrote on the Windows blog today that Windows 10 will become available as a free upgrade to existing Windows 7 and Windows 8 users starting July 29th. The upgrade is only for PCs and tablets. There's no announcement on phones or any of the other platforms yet. Meyerson asks users to reserve the free Windows 10 upgrade now by looking for a Windows icon in the system tray and following the prompts. I think this is so they can anticipate server load and such. Venture Beat reports, if you don't see that reservation icon, you should check and see if you have Windows Update KB3035583 installed. Basically patch up your Windows and you should see it. Get ready to roll. Absolutely. I'm actually kind of excited about this because they're definitely taking elements of Windows 7 and Windows 8 and kind of combining it all into this new platform and it's going to be, it's going to be pretty cool. I think. Yeah. Anybody who's been running the Windows 10 preview has that I've talked to has liked it a lot. I kept it off my main machine because I wanted to see this experience like how they would roll out the free upgrade. So this is really interesting to see. However, on my older Windows machines, it is kind of a pain because they don't use them very often to go in and be like, oh, I have to patch so many things. All of the things. But that's good. Actually, this is a good side effect to make me like go in there and make sure that those things are up to date and secure. And just, yeah, for security reasons, it's good to do that anyway, even if you're not looking for the new hotness. Moving on, the Verge reports Google launched a new privacy and security site at my account.Google.com. It has tools that walk you through checking your settings, including what information is shared with which Google services, what permissions apps have, and what devices you've authorized to access your account. It also links off to and consolidates other services like downloading copies of your data and designating a trustee to handle your account. I really, this is going to sound weird. I really enjoyed doing this this morning. I'm a bit of a data nerd, though. The more information, transparency and insight this gives you into your information, the better, as far as I'm concerned. And I really liked seeing the way they had it all laid out. It's a little confusing, it's a little overwhelming at first, but they have a couple of those tools that you mentioned, the tutorials to walk you through stuff. And, you know, I did something like, I have an old Nexus 7 sitting in the closet. Now it's not hurting anything, but I realized it said, hey, you haven't used this in a while, or do you still want this authorized? I'm like, no, actually, I'm using my Nexus 9 now. I don't need that authorized. What if it got lost or whatever, turn it off? That's great. Yeah, I'm glad this is getting some attention because, you know, people really should go in and check their permissions every so often. From any account that you can really do this to, I mean, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Google, third-party apps have access to a lot of information on there. And if they're compromised, that can lead to bigger problems down the road. So yeah, check in at, what was it, myaccounts.google.com? Myaccount.google.com, and it's pretty easy. It's laid out very nicely. So it's a good way to get started making sure everything is nice and secure. Speaking of your Facebook secure, the next web reports Facebook announced the ability to list an open PGP key on your Facebook profile now. This allows Facebook to sign their notification emails to you with their own key and send them to you end-to-end secure. Key management is only available through the desktop, so you have to be on your desktop or laptop to be able to set this up, though Facebook hopes to add mobile support in the future. Yeah, I think they really should work towards that pretty quickly because I think a majority of their messages go through the mobile side now at this point. It's such a huge platform for them. And to be able to have that extra layer of security is really smart. Yeah, I'm assuming that the emails, once you set it up on the desktop, all the emails will be signed with these keys. It's just that you can't set it up on the tablet. Oh, so you still use it through the? Yeah, yeah, I think once you set it up, then they just encrypt everything that's sent. Kind of a surprisingly advanced amount of security. I mean, you're talking about just notifications. This is a lot of times you would see something like this put on passwords or bank account information. Facebook's saying, hey, you want everything from us secure? We'll do that for you. No, I love it. I think it's a great idea. I talked about this next story a little bit on TMS this morning, so I'm pretty stoked about it. Eurogamer reports that LEGO has launched a Minecraft style game called LEGO Worlds. It was developed by TT Games and available from Steam. Early access right now for $14.99. The game will feature familiar LEGO game elements as well as procedurally generated worlds, discovery, unlocks, rideable creatures, vehicles, and a day-night cycle. That's not unlike Minecraft. The main difference from Minecraft appears to be a focus on creativity rather than survival and the ability to change vast chunks of the terrain at will. You know, I don't know if I totally agree with that because I feel like Minecraft really does focus on creativity a lot. And I'm not sure how much of the LEGO MMO that they were planning is going to get rolled into LEGO Worlds, like how much multiplayer stuff we're going to see on there. If you'll be able to visit your friends' worlds and jump back and forth and have a world that you're building. It's a single player right now. As far as I can tell, I've only read a couple of stories, but I haven't seen anything talking about the kind of multiplayer gameplay that we can experience in Minecraft now. Do you think, I mean, I know a lot of people out there are looking at this saying, rip off. Just ripping off Minecraft. And to that I say, that's fine. Pepsi ripped off Coke and a lot of people like Pepsi. It's always good to have alternatives in case you don't like the original. And if they're going to focus, you know, like you say, there's a lot of creativity in Minecraft. Don't you think there's not? But if LEGO is going to say, we're going to focus more on that and less on the survivability. That's just a matter of degree. And that's just like having a different flavor of game. Even if it is derivative, I don't know. I'm fine with that. Something that I kind of talked about a little bit on TMS this morning was that perhaps this will be a little more accessible to new players and to younger people because maybe it's just me, but I had a hard time really digging into Minecraft and figuring out how to get good at it. Maybe other people like us have a hard time. Us old timers. And so maybe this is going to be a little bit along easier for people to jump into. Maybe it'll be more kid focused. But yeah, LEGO has a great track record with video games. What? What? Minecraft's pretty kid focused. I almost feel like it's the opposite. Like old people like us might use this because it's easier. I'm like, oh yeah, it'll be totally easier for the kids. Me. Me, yeah. No, I think you're right. It might be a gateway for people to get into Minecraft actually. And obviously, when you looked at Minecraft at the beginning, you're like, oh, this is a very LEGO-like world that they've created. So why not have LEGO do this? Oh, chat room. Chat room is saying multiplayer has been announced and it's coming. And it's coming. Okay, good. I'm not saying that this is ever going to be better than Minecraft, but it doesn't have to be. Just another way to play. Thanks, Eladir. It's compute text time, which means Asus announced more ZenPad tablets than we could possibly tell you about here. But Anantek did a good job boiling down the announcement. The big two that you'll hear about are the ZenPad 8 and the ZenPad S8. The 8 has LTE, a 1280 by 800 screen and a 1.2 gigahertz Silvermont Atom processor. The S8 has a 2.33 gigahertz Silvermont Atom processor and a 2048 by 1536 screen, as well as a USB Type-C connector, that new reversible USB connector. Also supports a 1024 pressure level stylus, which is very cool. There also have been announced for the ZenPad 8. Interchangeable back plates, one of which has a built-in battery, which you might expect to extend the battery life. Another has six speakers that kind of flip out almost like a flip case and can deliver 5.1 DTS surround sound from your tablet cover. Okay. Yeah. Apparently it works really well. Asus also announced a phone called Selfie, which has front and rear 13 megapixel cameras and the ZenWatch 2, which has a power button that looks like Apple's digital crown, but it's just a power button. It has 49 millimeter and 45 millimeter versions of the ZenWatch 2. None of this stuff has price and release date. A few of them, they said, check back at EFA in September and maybe we'll give you solid dates. I think it's hilarious that everyone's saying it looks like Apple's digital crown. It's a watch that has a crown. It doesn't look like Apple's digital crown. It looks like a watch that has a crown. Crowns existed before the digital crown. The hilarious part about that is when I originally wrote this story, I said it has a power button that looks like a watch winder. And I'm like, you know what? Everyone's gonna say, you mean it looks like Apple's digital crown because they stole it, so I changed it to that. But you're absolutely right. It's a crown. It's just a crown. It's just a crown, although nobody knew what a crown was, or at least most people didn't, except watch enthusiasts, until Apple came out and was like, it's a digital crown, except it's not a digital crown. It's a real life crown. It just does different things to your digital watch, anyway. The selfie phone looks kind of crazy too. It's huge, it's enormous. Yeah, and it's got a little pivot stand so you can take selfies with relative ease. Optional pivot stand. It doesn't come with every model though. When are we gonna have a built-in selfie stick in a phone? That's what I wanna know. Or retractable? When are we gonna have a built-in cure for narcissism? It's not just an app, but no. Touche. I have no problem with selfies. There are people who take it too far, that's all. Indeed. All right, well Reuters reports BlackBerry and Ryan Seacrest-Back Typo have settled their dispute over Typo's BlackBerry-like keyboard case for phones and tablets. The settlement is that Typo won't sell the cases for phones anymore, but they can still sell them for devices with screens larger than 7.9 inches. Which, you know, tablets are still good to go. Seacrest out, unless it's a tablet. I kind of don't understand this. I'm sure there's a reason. Obviously it's a compromise, and it's a compromise that allows Typo to continue to sell some things. I'm sort of expecting a BlackBerry version of this case to come out. And possibly maybe at that time some Typo cross-licensing where Typo had a patent or two that BlackBerry didn't cover on maybe the integration into the case or something. And Typo ends up making some money out of this and BlackBerry sells these cases. That would not surprise me. Don't you think that's something John Chen would do? He's like, sure, we'll sell an iPhone case, why not? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, though, that it's probably going to lead to something further down the road. But it is nice of BlackBerry to carve out the entire system for tablets. NVIDIA has unleashed its latest flagship GPU, the GTX 980 Ti, according to The Verge. The GTX 980 Ti sports 22 SM units, 2,816 stream processing units, six gigabytes of VRAM with a clock frequency of 1,000 megahertz and texture filtering rate of 176 gigatexels per second. The card achieved 4K performance, well over 30 frames per second on Battlefield 4 and Shadow of Mordor with the max settings, which is why NVIDIA also announced some new 4K displays because very few people have them. The GPU is future-proofed with support for DirectX 12 and NVIDIA's new virtual reality API GameWorks VR. GTX 980 Ti will retail for $649.99. And so really, the performance is pretty comparable to the Titan X, and people are saying, look, that's $250, $350 less than the $1,000 Titan X. So you might as well get this one. Get in. Yeah, this is exciting. I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade. I don't even know if I can. I'll figure that out later. That's not for this show. TechCrunch is reporting that GoPro has announced the Hero Plus LCD. The camera is targeting YouTubers with an LCD screen, a touch screen, 1080p, 60 frames per second recording, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Hero Plus LCD will release June 7th for $299. And the ninth thing. Well, your GoPro. Yeah, they're going. Announcing, well, I'm just going to let me real quickly. I want to give them props for announcing a date and a price. Thank you. Yay! So unlike everyone else all the time. This is great, too, because of course, if you're getting into the GoPro ecosystem, you'll be able to use all of their accessories, all their mounts, everything that they've been developing over the past many years. They've got all the great stuff already released, and this will work with that. So you don't have to think about getting a competitor camera. It's nice that it already works with everything they already have. And you don't have to be a YouTuber to use it. You can be a Vesseler or a Vimeoer or a Daily Motioner. Is it, do you think it's still really for action-oriented stuff, though? Because I was thinking about it. I'm like, oh, that would be cool to record stuff on the go. But I'm not like a sports dude. Actually, that would be a hilarious series of you doing extreme walking around. Extreme dog walking. Yeah. Extreme going to the dog park. Your dog gets kind of extreme going up that hill sometimes. That's true. That's true. Reuters reports Intel has agreed to buy FPGA chip maker Altera for $16.7 billion. Intel will be able to bundle its chips with Altera's programmable chips, which are often used to do things like speed-up web searches. So yeah, Intel obviously trying to break into mobile more, but also here saying, like, we know that the data center needs a bunch of chips too, and we want to sell a lot of those as well. All right. Tech crunches. Tech crunches. Tech crunch passes along the Wall Street Journal's sources that say Apple will reveal its new streaming music service next week at WWDC. And it will cost $10 a month for unlimited listening. It will not have an ad-supported tier, though there may be some free tracks available. New channels will come to iTunes Radio 2, hosted by Dr. Dre, and other talent recruited from places like BBC One. Hmm. Yeah. Dr. Dre, that's not surprising. No, not surprising at all. And we know that they hired some folks from BBC. I don't know. We'll wait. We'll wait to see what happens at WWDC to really get excited about this. But to me, one of the keys will be can I combine my iTunes Cloud music with this to make playlists? It all going to be in one interface, which is why I switched to Google Music All Access. It's not like they have the best streaming catalog out there necessarily, but they allow me to combine stuff. And that's more and more important for me. Somebody who's collected a lot of weird MP3s that the artists have never licensed with all these various music streaming. And iTunes, obviously, would be the perfect place for that. No, I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to offer as well, because I've been jumping back and forth between Ardeo and Spotify and various other music services over the past year or two. And it seems like this one could solve some of my problems. And it would just be nice to keep everything in one ecosystem again and not have to worry about exporting playlists and tracks and what have you, or finding all of my collection all over again once I make a switch to a different service. But yeah, as you said, we'll have to see what they have to offer when WWDC rolls around. Big thanks to everybody who contributes at our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, obviously the Google privacy story, the Facebook privacy story, got big votes up there today, and Abby Choyla Condolce submitted the guardian write-up of the fact that the US Patriot Act, section 215, that's the part that deals with bulk surveillance, was allowed to expire Sunday night, meaning such data collection must be stopped in the US for the time being. Now the USA Freedom Act is expected to be revived and passed later this week. That would allow a more limited form of data collection to be allowed. The Freedom Act does not allow the NSA to collect records in bulk and includes some new rules on transparency. A lot of people still feel like it goes too far, but it's more restricted than section 215 anyway. All right, and TM204 flagged the CBC write-up about the woman who dropped off an original Apple computer for recycling at Milpitas' California's Clean Bay area. She said she cleaned out her garage after her husband passed away, and didn't want a receipt and did not leave a name. Only 200 of the first apples were made. Clean Bay area sold the computer to a private collector for $200,000 and is seeking the woman to split the money with her. Wow, she had no idea. Okay, this story has gotten a lot of attention obviously, because wow, one of 200 Apple ones, many of which have probably been destroyed, right? So there aren't very many of them out there. It's very rare to find one at all. This woman just drops one off at the recycling center. So A, good on her for knowing where to go with the stuff and dropping it off. I'm very generous to say, oh no, we'll just give it to you. Clean Bay area then hustled to sell this thing. Did you notice that? Oh, we already sold it for $200,000, but we'll split the amount if she shows back up. I mean, I don't know, I'm gonna blame them. She did give it to them, but still. They gave it to them. I mean, there's, what can you do at that point? I mean, she basically let go of it. If they really wanted to be the good Samaritan, they wouldn't have sold it and they would have tried to find her to like, look, do you know what you had here? But at the same time, I don't think they were evil by doing what they did. Well, at least they're going hapsies. That's right. That's better than nothing. That's better than nothing. $100,000 is better than not $100,000. Well, but the thing is, they knew this would get out. And if they just sold it and kept all the money, then they would have a PR nightmare on their hands. So they kind of have to at least make the offer. Captain Kepter submitted the engadget report that passes long info from Nikkei that Nintendo's forthcoming NX console could be using the Android operating system. Nintendo has said it won't discuss NX until 2016. So of course they have no comment on this rumor. I find this rumor possible, but I would almost guarantee this will not be Google's version of Android. This would be Nintendo using the Android operating system the way Amazon uses it as an underlying operating system to make it easier for them to put their own system in place. Right, I agree with you wholeheartedly. But I am very curious to see the new operating system anyway because Nintendo, man, so many thoughts about Nintendo. Do you think there's also the rumor that they will keep the Wii U and the 3DS around and the NX will be a new console as part of a trio? What do you think the chances are of that? I honestly, I don't have a lot of thoughts about that in particular. I just worry about them with hardware. I know they are holding on to dear life in the hardware sector. And I really wish they would go software only and people just keep telling me that they're never gonna do that, but we'll see how this next one performs. Well, with the partnership to put out new titles under mobile with DNA, and that makes it possible that they would benefit from putting out a console that ran Android because then they could run those titles very easily. And if also using Android as the underlying operating system makes it easier for them to make the hardware amazing, then I'm all for that. But I don't know what they can do to make the hardware amazing. I didn't before the Wii either and the Wii hardware was incredible at the time. No one had ever done that kind of motion control, so we'll see. And that's a look at the headlines. All right, let's look at this Pew Research Center study. Millennials and political news conducted between March 19th and April 29th of 2014, so a year old on the data, but they've been going through and mining it. They've released some of the data from the same study under a political preferences study previously, but this time they're looking at it by generation. So what are the generations? They define millennial as someone born between 1981 and 1996. No. That makes you a millennial, Veronica? Barely, barely. You skate in as one of the older millennials, the responsible millennials, and they define a baby boomer as someone born between 1946 and 1964, which leaves me as undefined. I've just- You're just a guy. I'm just this guy, you know. Actually, no, they bundle in Gen Y and Gen X as Gen X, so all you Gen Yers, you don't even get your own. You had to share it with those old Gen Xers. Well, this is crazy because I was originally in the Gen Y category and then they created millennials and we got bundled under the millennial banner. And which, you know, I feel bad saying this, but I mean, millennials get such a terrible rap these days. And like, so it's kind of like, whoa. So we try to do a little distancing, but. We had our day. Back in the Gen Xers were the folks that everyone called slackers and all that stuff, so. It's true. But the data is very interesting because it's, you know, we use the term interesting a lot because it's an easy go-to word, but this is actually really interesting, I swear to God. Millennials are really getting a lot of their political information and news from Facebook around 61%. And in fact, they don't really pay attention to a lot of different news sources like television, for example. But the thing that I worry about overall is that millennials are getting, let's just say, people who are paying attention to Facebook more than other news sources for their political information. Isn't that information already coming to them kind of biased because they're getting curated content based on their location, based on who they're friends with, based on what stories they've liked in the past. So I feel like it's just perpetuating existing viewpoints instead of giving you a wider reaching view of politics at large. Well, right, that's the worry, right? If 60, what is it? 61% of millennials said that they get news about politics and government in the last week during the survey from Facebook. Baby boomers, only 39% said they had done that. 60% of the baby boomers said they got local TV. Yeah, it's almost an exact flip-flop. Yeah, exactly. Millennials, 61% Facebook, 37% local TV. Baby boomers, 39% Facebook, 60% local TV. And then Jen Hags, 50-50. We're just 50-50. We give everybody a chance. Here's an interesting point. News sources, I'm sorry, millennials don't realize they're using Facebook in this manner because the way they did the survey is they asked them first, what's your main source of political news? 21% of millennials said CNN. Now you say, oh, that's a low percentage, but that was the highest number for any particular source. They said CNN, NBC News, Fox News, a couple of newspaper sites, Buzzfeed, places like that. Then when they said, did you get any political news from this site? And then they would prompt them and ask them about it. That's when Facebook got the 61%. So once they were reminded about Facebook, they went, oh yeah, I did get some political news from Facebook. So they don't even realize that they're getting it, which could make your point about bias even worse. But here's the thing, at least half of the posts they see are related to government and politics, but they say they see other people's views. In fact, millennials more than anybody else said they saw opposing views or different views than their own over boomers and Gen X. The boomers are all seeing people that agree with them. So it's more of a problem for the boomers who aren't using Facebook as much than it is for the millennials. Well, that's true because if you're going to other sources to look for news, you're probably already going to bias content. You're probably going to, whether it's MSNBC, if you're more on the liberal side, or if it's Fox News, if you're more on the conservative side, I'm making generalizations here, but I think boomers and people of the older Gen Y generations, we know which news sources we already like and so we're going there getting the news we expect to see. But if you're on Facebook and maybe if you have a more diverse group of friends or family, then you're getting news stories that you may not necessarily agree with, kind of shoved into your feed and then you can be like, oh, my family, oh, they're the worst, oh, unfollow, get them out of here. Oh, I can't stand it. Why, how did I come from that nest? So you can ask that. I think you're right. I think the more often you use Facebook, the more likely you are to start to see or friend people with opposing viewpoints or differing viewpoints. Even boomers, they said, do posts on Facebook mostly reflect your own views? Only 31% of boomers said they did. So even baby boomers are seeing more diverse viewpoints. For Gen X, it was 21% and for millennials, 18%. So both of them are saying, no, most of the views don't reflect exactly what I'm saying. Again, this is self-reported though. I'd be curious if you could do some kind of content analysis of people's news feeds and say, okay, this does or does not match the viewpoints of the viewer or whether they would like to think they're seeing more diverse views than they are. Yeah, it's interesting to see also the, oh, God, I'm hearing myself use that crutch word over and over, it's driving me crazy. And now I'm just making the viewers more aware of it too by bringing it up. But the shows that they- Millennials are more often likely to do that, I've known. Is that a thing? Is that a thing we do? The trusted versus mistrusted news sources are pretty funny. Distrusted more than trusted by all three generations include the Glenn Beck program, the Rush Limbaugh show, the Sean Hannity show and Buzzfeed. Right, I think that's significant, right? And let's just say right now, if you're a fan of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, this is just what you would expect younger generations generally prefer more liberal viewpoints and older generations prefer more conservative viewpoints. So it's no surprise that conservative shows would be less popular with the younger set. However, Buzzfeed is the big outlier there, right? And your fear could be like, yeah, those young kids, they just want listicles and that's all they read and they believe everything they read on Buzzfeed. Apparently not. But however, Daily Show, Colbert Report, Algeriza were trusted by Millennials but not by Generation X or Baby Boomers. Algezera, yeah. So that is really interesting that more Generation Xers and Baby Boomers distrust Colbert and Daily Show. Baby Boomers because they probably, again, tend to be more conservative because they're older, whereas the Generation Xers, they just don't trust anybody. That's kind of what I've come to agree. So yeah, however, 14 of the 36 sources that were listed on Pew were trusted by all three generations. So across the gamut for the most part, they are trusting traditional news sources in all three cases. If you're wondering about Twitter, 14% of the Millennials said they got news from Twitter, 9% of Gen Xers and 5% of Baby Boomers and news sources that Millennials were more aware of than Baby Boomers or Gen Xers were Buzzfeed, even though they don't trust them, and Google News. Google News was barely mentioned by the Baby Boomers at all. I was really curious to see what the 14 trusted across the board news sources were. And I'm having a hard time finding that in the article. It's Appendix B, I believe. I can't remember what page it's on, but yeah, that would be interesting. While you're finding that, while you're digging that back out, let me say that this reminded me of when I proposed my master's thesis back in 1993 before the last of the Millennials was born, I wanted to do a paper on people getting their news from non-news sources. And I posited that younger people got their news from non-news sources more often than others. When I said non-news sources, I meant things like The Simpsons, late night with David Letterman. I think it was still late night then, before Late Show. And Saturday Night Live. And I think, it makes me happy that we're still seeing that kind of study being done. Of course, in the modern day, it's not about non-news shows. You've got a lot more diverse sources for things. Did you find it? I found the sources, but I'm having a hard time finding the 14 trusted across the board sources. Well, it's at the top of the trust and distrust of news source among Millennials. And the top were The Economist, NPR, Politico, BBC, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN, New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, Google News, PBS Washington Post, MSNBC, The New Yorker, Al Jazeera Colbert Report, Daily Show, and Huffington Post. Yeah. So that's the Millennials. They trust more than distrust the Huffington Post. I think I agree with that. And then they about equally trust and distrust things like The Blaze, Fox News, Rudd Report, Guardian, Slate, et cetera. I was more confused by how few trusted Twitter, because I would imagine that you would follow sources that you trusted. So why would you not believe those sources about the news they were delivering to you? Yeah. It's not like you're just given new sources to follow unless you're looking at things that other people are retweeting or sharing. All right, so let's back up to your original point, which I think is actually the pertinent one here. If Facebook is the trend, right? Let's, you know, the baby boomers, the Gen Xers, we're all old, get us out of the way. The Millennials are the future. If Facebook is the trend, does that give Facebook too much power over shaping the news? I think Facebook knows it. Yeah, they certainly do. They want to appear to be responsible with it. But that algorithm that makes your newsfeed, nobody can explain it. Nobody can really tell you how it works. There's some secrets that work there. I don't want to put on my tinfoil hat necessarily, but a tweak of that algorithm could change the fortunes of a political candidate, you would think. Oh, yes. And I mean, there's a lot of very cool articles about that topic specifically that we should dive into once the elections really start rolling around. Yeah, yeah, good idea. Because yeah, we could do a whole episode on that kind of thing, like how social media affects political interest and change and can you really change someone's mind through posts on Facebook? Can you kind of curate content in a way that makes them change their mind about certain political issues? I would love to know that. But I think that research is being worked on very heavily, especially within Facebook. There was a very interesting Radio Lab episode, I believe, about relationships and how news articles in your feed affect your relationships. And yeah, so there's a lot to be learned from the data that they're gathering. I like that idea. Yeah. Our Pick of the Day comes from Randy, since telling you that the weather seems to be a thing to do, he says it's humid here in Michigan. Randy, I think you're supposed to, the way people have been doing it, and I don't care whether you do it this way, is Randy from humid Michigan, but I like the way he did it. He has another YouTube channel to suggest and I can recommend this one as well, the Ben Heck Show, great for makers and the maker curious. Randy says I've always described it as the new Yankee workshop for geeks. I started watching around the time he made automatic light sensing glasses that will flip his sunglasses down. More recently, he made a portable Dreamcast, made a DIY PIC32 dev board, and did a tabletop CNC tutorial. He's been doing this for four years. So there's a ton of back catalog to watch. Yeah, Ben Heck is great. He's amazing. He's the man. Yeah, he used to do stuff for revision three. His show was part of the revision three family. He's always done cool stuff. We used to talk about his stuff back on the buzz out loud days. Dude, where are you? Oh my gosh. Yeah, he's a very cool guy, very nice fellow as well. Send your PICs to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and you can find my PICs at dailytechnewshow.com slash PICs. Few emails to get through and then we're done. Drew says on Friday's show, the subject of using VPNs to fool geofencing restrictions came up and Darren mentioned the dream of living in a world where so many people use VPNs that there's no telling where anyone is physically located. This made me think of an analogy with area codes. Now that we all have cell phones. Not all that long ago, it was very practical to reverse look up a caller's code and be very confident in their physical location with the prevalence of cell phones and the ability to keep your phone number when you move or change carriers and synchronize address books to keep us from knowing more than a handful of numbers. Area codes mean very little these days. And he links to the XKCD article that shows like how to interpret a phone number and the area code is listed as where you lived in 2005. That is exactly right. Yeah. Exactly right. That is hilarious. Yeah, because I'm a 617. I got my phone the second summer that I was living in Massachusetts, specifically when I was living on Cape Cod. So I have a 617 number forever more. I have a 415 number because I got my cell phone when I was living out in the inner sunset in San Francisco. Oh no, wait. Actually, I'm incorrect there because I was in, I graduated college in 2004. So I was, that must have been 2002 that I got my first cell phone. I'm a little earlier. I got my first cell phone 2000. I was a late adopter on cell phones, but I was definitely living in the same area code in 2005. So it still works. Alan P wrote about Google's project Jaquard that in the early 1800s, Joseph Jaquard invented punch cards as a way of programming a machine. He designed a loom, which could automatically and repeatedly produce very complex patterns in fabric. The pattern was stored on a loop of cards at each clock cycle of the weaving process. The machine would lift or not lift colored threads based on the pattern of holes in the next card in the chain. Jaquard inspired both Babbage and much later, Hermann Hollerith, which by the way, today is the anniversary of Hollerith getting his punch card machine used by the US Census Bureau. Alan writes, I think Jaquard is the perfect name for a Google project which combines technology and woven cloth. So thanks for the tip, Alan. That's great. And if you don't know Hermann Hollerith's machine that tabulated records eventually became one of the companies that merged to form IBM. And then in a slightly belated reaction to the Tesla power, while Alex says, sorry I'm late on this one, I've been catching up. I used to design an oversee production of diesel tanks, systems, support and enclosures for large commercial generators. Think about the size of a truck trailer when enclosed in an 18 cylinder engine with several thousand gallons of diesel underneath it. One of the big consumers of those systems was data centers, Facebook, Google, NSA, et cetera would buy these by the dozens and have grids of them around their data centers. If there was a brownout or blackout these generators would kick in and keep the data centers at least partially operational until the grid came back up. If Elon Musk can prove the concept of these batteries, develop the technology further and scale it, this could be a huge market for them. Currently a tank empty and enclosure with support systems could run around a half a million dollars and the generator could run twice that. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's great to hear from somebody who actually has been in this business. I think that's where Elon Musk is intending to make the bulk of his money on the powerwall type batteries. I hope so. That's really cool. That was great input. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Alex. And that's it for the show. Thank you Veronica. As always a pleasure to have you as a contributor. Of course, thank you. I hope you guys didn't hear. I apparently my furniture delivery, the pre-show furniture delivery discussion occurred somewhere in the middle of the show and my doorbell started ringing. So hopefully it's here still and didn't get stolen from in front of my house. All right, we'll let you go. But follow her on Twitter at Veronica and anything else to let folks know about right now. Yeah, so I just launched a new show on Engadget called Dear Veronica. It's a weekly help advice show about everything from technology, science, internet culture, etiquette. Pretty much any question that you have, I will try to answer it or find experts who can help me from either the editors at Engadget or from people all around the web. I'm really excited about it. If you have a question that you wanna have on the show, just send me a tweet with the hashtag Dear Veronica and or you can also post a video question on Instagram or Vine or Facebook or wherever else you can, I can follow you on hashtags basically. I will look for it and I will find you. Love the idea for that show. That's awesome. Thank you. Thanks bosses by the way. It's June 1st, it's payday. So all of the folks who have been supporting us, we truly, truly appreciate it. 5,052 patrons keeping us going. You make the show possible. We cannot thank you enough. You've changed our world's dailytechnewshow.com slash support to find out more. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can call us 51259daily. Listen to the show live at tunein.alphageekradio.com and visit our website at dailytechnewshow.com. We'll be back tomorrow with Patrick Beja I believe from Finland he sent. I thought he was in Russia. Yeah, I thought he was too I thought he was in Finland. We'll find out tomorrow. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.