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This is what I was warning about since the BBS days (social networking)...

Food Lion has introduced in-store helper Marty the Robot at a store in La Follette, TN. These helpful robots are currently in four Giant/Martin’s stores in Pennsylvania and the brand plans to deploy them to all 171 Giant/Martin’s stores by the end of 2018. These friendly robotic associates have been roaming the aisles of several Giant/Martin’s stores since last year, and now Food Lion is also putting the concept to the test. Marty maneuvers around using advanced artificial intelligence and the same laser imaging technology found in self-driving vehicles. He can perform checks that help the store run more smoothly...

Ten Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime 1. The Post Office Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills. 2. The Check Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with check by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks....

Somehow my and my 11-year old son's gmail was spoofed, meaning someone is able to send messages out using our gmail accounts. The spoofed emails show up in my sent folder. We changed our Google account passwords. But I am still studying what else to do; not confident I understand how it happened, not confident I've done what needs to be done. My son plays on Xbox Live and I don't know what goes on there but he's smart enough to not give out personal info. I have a 2-step verification process enabled. Here's one of the spoofed messages (I...

Ok I did something unknown and unreproducible on my XP machine. The taskbar which is at the bottom and held my start button on the left, my quick launches right next to it, and various icons on the right hand side has suddenly zoomed to be twice as big as it was, vertically. Does anyone know how to reduce it back to a single line and still have the quick launch items on it?

Relive that sphincter-loosening Blue Screen of Death Video Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that 20 years have passed since Windows 98 memorably fell over during Bill Gates' presentation at Comdex.A nervous-looking Chris Capossela, now chief marketing officer at Microsoft, attempted to plug a scanner into a Windows 98 PC while Gates looked on. The intent was to demonstrate the plug-and-play abilities of the upcoming OS. The result was an all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and a "whoah..." from Capossela.Youtube Video"That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet," quipped Gates.As Windows 10...

Good laptops complete tasks faster; great laptops make you faster. On the strength of world-class business systems like the X1 Carbon, which helps you get more done, and elegant consumer laptops like the Yoga 920, which lasts all-day long, Lenovo has won Laptop Mag's Best and Worst Brand ratings for the second year in a row. Apple, the former champion, dropped all the way to seventh place in the rankings, which are scored based on innovation, design, support / warranty, value and selection and, most of all, product quality. HP and Dell placed second and third while Acer, Asus, Microsoft,...

On three or four occasions my cell phone number has been hijacked in someway that I have received phone calls and text messages as though it would seem from myself. Yesterday, the text message I received from myself and the image associated with the non-person who used my cellphone number to send me a text message used an image which I have saved on the cell phone. WHAT THE HECK? ANY SUGGESTIONS?

Facebook's apology-and-explanation machine grinds on, with The Social Network™ posting detail on one of its most controversial activities – how it tracks people who don't use Facebook. The company explained that the post is a partial response to questions CEO Mark Zuckerberg was unable to answer during his senate and Congressional hearings. It's no real surprise that someone using their Facebook Login to sign in to other sites is tracked, but the post by product management director David Baser goes into (a little) detail on other tracking activities – some of which have been known to the outside world for...

LOL! Zack the Barista has become a funny internet meme. You know the guy. The Starbucks barista just standing there and taking it as he is being screamed at via megaphone. Here is one of the memes but there are many others. pic.twitter.com/fuvRatHCYg— Donny Rector (@donnyr71) April 16, 2018

Development could change future smartphone, laptop and car battery technologies Scientists have found a way of using alternative metals in lithium-based batteries that might not only help relieve the issues associated with conflict materials, but also offer more storage capacity in future devices. The research team, led by professors at the University of California, Berkeley, managed to build lithium cathodes with 50 per cent more storage capacity than conventional materials - potentially enabling batteries to be made that can last considerably longer between recharges than current battery technology. This could change how we use technology in the future as these...

image Tom's Guide Apple remained the most profitable smartphone brand through the fourth quarter of 2017, according to a new market research report. The Cupertino tech giant managed to capture 86 percent of the total smartphone market profits Q4 2017, even though the premium handset segment didn’t grow as expected, according to a new report by Counterpoint Research (via CNBC). Additionally, the iPhone X accounted for 21 percent of total revenue and 35 percent total of the profits made by the entire industry in the fourth quarter — allowing Apple to grow about 1 percent, year-over-year. That’s despite the fact...

Wei Kocsis' early-stage research would be especially useful in deep-space environments, where spacecraft communicating back to Earth must currently wait for hours for a response. Instead, her work would enable the spacecraft to perform tasks using blockchain technology. In the digital-currency world, blockchain is used to record transactions securely, without the need of a central management database such as a bank. There are many variants of digital currencies, but the most popular is known as Bitcoin. The new work uses technology incorporated into a different digital currency, called Ethereum, that not only records transactions but also can execute decentralized code,...

Microsoft Windows Insider chief 'fesses up to potential blue-screen inducing glitch Windows 10 Springwatch – as it shall henceforth be known – has entered its second week and Microsoft has dropped the first clue as to what caused the delay: bugs.Though Microsoft has never actually confirmed a release date or name for the elusive Windows 10 Spring Creators Update (aka version 1803), many expected it to arrive on April 10's Patch Tuesday, with build 17133 hitting the Release Preview ring of the Windows Insider programme.But nothing happened, until now.Supremo of the Windows Insider programme, Dona Sarkar, dropped a hint last...

A Canadian woman who tried to smuggle millions of dollars worth of cocaine into Australia has been convicted and sentenced to eight years behind bars. Melina Roberge, 24, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to smuggling 95 kilos (209 pounds) of the drug into the Sydney Harbour in 2016, following an exotic weeks-long cruise that she and an accomplice documented on social media. Roberge and her accomplice, Isabelle Lagace, had turned their Instagram accounts into travel diaries in the summer of 2016, posting glamorous photos and boasting about their intercontinental adventures on the MS Sea Princess, a cruise ship that...

Systems Affected Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) Enabled DevicesCisco Smart Install (SMI) Enabled DevicesSimple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Enabled Network Devices Overview This joint Technical Alert (TA) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). This TA provides information on the worldwide cyber exploitation of network infrastructure devices (e.g., router, switch, firewall, Network-based Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) devices) by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors. Targets are primarily government and private-sector organizations, critical infrastructure providers, and the Internet service providers (ISPs) supporting these...

Updated IOS for my IPad, Safari is running slow, rebooting the page. Anyone have a suggestion how to fix this, new browser, etc? Very irritating. Thanks in advance.

Americans are getting an extra day to file their taxes after key elements of the IRS website crashed on deadline day. The IRS said that individuals or businesses with a filing or payment due Tuesday now have until midnight Wednesday to complete the task. Earlier Tuesday, Americans who had waited until the final day to file online got an unwelcome surprise: The agency’s website for making payments and gaining access to other key services was down due to what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin later described as a “high-volume technical issue.” The website was back online late Tuesday. “This is the...

It seems that a smart lawyer could create a class action lawsuit to sue Facebook, Twitter, and maybe others for shadow banning and otherwise interfering with conservative users of the sites. For example, while I don't care for Milo's lifestyle, I liked following him on Twitter. His posts generated traffic to the site. I own some Twitter stock and I want more traffic on the site. By banning him there is less traffic on the site. The likelihood of "conservative" social media sites (other than the best one, FREEREPUBLIC.COM) being created is slim. How can the existing social media sites...

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