There comes a point, and its exact location may differ from individual to individual, where more money is just not worth the aggravation. Selling your health and/or your relationships for money???
The point, in my experience, is approximately five miles up the 101. More than about five miles of that 5 MPH traffic, and I'm looking for VC funding to develop Dogbert's anti-traffic missile system.
Spray cold water on a lit incandescent bulb sometime. Yeah, halogen bulbs burn hotter, but they aren't *that* much more dangerous than any other incandescent unless you do something stupid or careless.
So.. 1.5% of the population... that's a powerful voting block?
If they're all in the same rough geographical region, then absolutely. The two least populous New Hampshire counties have only 33,000 and 44,000 people, respectively. If you assume that fewer than 57% of people vote in any given election, that means there are 19,000 and 25,000 likely voters in each of those counties in any given election. If you put 10,000 "free staters" in both counties, assuming they all vote, they could easily tip the balance of pretty much any election. Put 20,000 "free staters" in either of those counties, and if they all decided to vote for a third party, it would basically eliminate the viability of both major parties in that county. Those counties have 7 and 11 representatives in the New Hampshire's House of Representatives. By using this approach, they could potentially give 4.5% of the seats in that lower house to their 1.5% of the population. Not too shabby.
As to whether the impact on the legislative process would be significant, that's a different question. They certainly could, but there's nothing stopping the major parties from making it very hard for extreme-minority parties to get anything done using various procedural tricks. Only time will tell whether they'll continue to have the same successes in the long run.
And it isn't even Webkit devs fault, it is the shit standards committee for being too slow at making things standards and shit developers for using experimental code. But the biggest part of the issue is web browser vendors having experimental things behind a prefix in the first place!
It should only ever work if someone enabled a flag in the advanced settings, like originally planned. (about half of the experimental code is behind a flag, the rest completely open)
The parent might have been modded down as inflammatory, but IMO, this part is basically dead on (albeit a bit too harsh). In my mind, CSS3 is a constantly evolving nightmare of ever-changing proportions, and the vendor prefix thing is just plain nutty. Either it is something that will likely be part of the standard as-is, in which case it shouldn't have a vendor prefix, or it isn't, in which case it shouldn't be enabled by default. The problem is that it takes so many years between when somebody realizes that they need to solve some missing functionality in CSS yesterday and when the standards bodies actually decide that it should be standardized that the train has not only left the station, but has circled the globe a hundred times before they even shout "All aboard!"
Because it takes so long, you end up with companies who make mobile browsers telling web developers that they basically have to use these vendor-specific tags to work around browser-specific quirks and similar, and then web developers do so, and the non-vendor-prefixed versions don't get added because they aren't part of the spec yet, and by the time they become part of the spec, those web developers have already moved on to other projects, and it works now, so why change it?
The entire CSS standards process, at least from the perspective of an outsider, seems to be thoroughly bass-ackwards, if you know what I mean. Until that gets straightened out, expect more of this silliness in the future. There are so many parts of the CSS spec that should have been nailed down as final standards years ago, but are still in "Candidate Recommendation" state since 2014. I began starting to use it experimentally two days before it went into that state. Chrome enabled it by default a few months later, as did WebKit.
So now, two years later, I now have content sold through the iBooks Store (among others) that uses CSS shapes. We're way past the point where this spec is readily mutable, IMO, because people have been using it publicly for about 1.5 years. Yet it is still stuck in a "Candidate Recommendation" state because there's really only one code base that supports the feature (WebKit and Blink hadn't split when work on this spec began, so they don't qualify as two independent implementations, despite cumulatively being used in almost three-quarters of the browsers out there, between Chrome, Safari, Opera, and various other WebKit-based browsers).
It seems to me, then, that the biggest problem facing the standards process is that neither Microsoft nor Firefox is able to keep up with the rate at which the CSS spec is expanding. Fixing that lag should probably become a priority, as it seems to be a big part of why things take so long to become proper standards. But failing that, the standards process needs to treat WebKit and Blink as separate code bases, even though some of their implementation might have shared a common lineage at one time. At this point, I'm pretty sure they've diverged enough that they should be treated as independent.
Apple's does. It can do all this and more, and there are tons of interactive educational materials done this way But it doesn't fit his open source or kindle requirements. So while it's not true that no format can do it, it's not an answer to his question.
The Kindle requirement isn't easily solvable. The Kindle reader platform doesn't support JavaScript, so the only thing you can really do is a "book as app" thing where you write an Android app that builds a custom eBook reader on top of WebKit's paged media support.
Supporting iOS 6 is indeed a pain in the backside because of the UI metrics changes (and probably other reasons), though auto-layout can help. It isn't nearly as difficult as supporting iOS 5, though, or worse, iOS 4, which is what that 2011 device probably came with initially. The lack of proper ARC support in iOS 4 would be nightmarish. And you'll definitely swear every time you run Deploymate on the project only to find hundreds of symbols that didn't exist yet in iOS 6 (or 5 or 4). It is completely doable; you just have to be careful.
Now if you want to support the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, or the first or second generation iPod Touch models, you're in for that special hell normally reserved for child molesters and people who talk in movie theaters. You'll have to use Xcode 4.5 and an ancient SDK to build the version for armv6, use a newer Xcode version with a newer SDK to build for arm64, and then lipo them together afterwards. But if you can pull that off, you could ostensibly still ship an app that supports iPhone OS 2.0 and later, unless Apple is rejecting anything with an armv6 slice outright, in which case you can't.:-)
I think you could always move it to T-Mobile when AT&T drops support. You might lose visual voicemail on the original iPhone, because I don't think they fully support the older models, but I'm pretty sure my original iPhone roams on T-Mobile's network when I use my European SIM card with it. And T-Mobile isn't dropping EDGE support in 2017, unlike AT&T.
If they would let people downgrade OSes (or even if they didn't go out of their way to prevent people from downgrading the OS), then it wouldn't be a problem at all.
One problem with doing that is that Apple made a big mistake a long time ago, and instead of learning from that mistake, they kept compounding it with mistake after mistake on top of it.
Early on, Apple forced people to pay $99 a year to develop apps for their own devices. I don't know all the reasons behind this, but my gut says that the strict control was mostly out of an irrational fear that users would steal IPAs and sign them themselves.
The lack of free licenses for open source developers and private individual use created a huge jailbreak community that would barely even exist had they made it possible to develop apps for iOS for free back in 2008 instead of waiting to make that change until 2015.
In part because of that huge jailbreaking community, it was necessary to find and fix security holes much more aggressively than was needed for OS X.
This, combined with the misperception that users would never want to reject a free major OS upgrade, meant that IIRC Apple never released any security updates to existing OSes except for a single update to iPhone OS 1.x (because the 2.0 upgrade wasn't initially free for iPod Touch users).
The result is that every few releases, Apple manages to ship a release that impacts performance enough to make users of older devices scream and sue. This policy of downgrade prevention is also an absolute nightmare for app developers. On OS X, we can slap multiple versions of the OS on multiple partitions, and quickly test our software on every version of the OS on every device if we want to. On iOS, we need to keep around one device per OS version. And if you really want to do it right, you ought to have one of each model of device running every single patch release of the OS that Apple ever shipped for that device, under the assumption that there's some possibility that your app might encounter serious problems on any arbitrary one of them, and maybe even only on one particular device on one particular OS version.
For example, at a previous employer, we ran into a crasher bug that took a long time to fix because we didn't have the obscure combination of OS and hardware required to reproduce it. The crash occurred only on 64-bit devices that were still running iOS 7 (all versions) rather than having been upgraded to iOS 8 or iOS 9. I kept digging and digging, and after several web searching sessions over the course of several weeks, I stumbled across a Stack Overflow answer that mentioned a bug in the tagged pointer support in the 64-bit Objective-C runtime in iOS 7 (and fixed in iOS 8) that caused NSNumber objects to not work correctly when stored in Objective-C associated objects, with a workaround involving converting them to NSDecimalNumber objects before storing them.
The problem, of course, is that there were exactly two models of 64-bit iOS devices that could run iOS 7, and they both were devices that originally shipped with iOS 7, and Apple had shipped two major releases since then. To verify the fix, we had to find a copy of one of those two-year-old models of iOS hardware that had never been upgraded past its original iOS version. Somehow, the folks acquiring hardware for us managed to pull that off. I don't want to know how. But it made me acutely aware of just how many hundreds of combinations of hardware and OSes you have to keep around if you really want to guarantee that everything works correctly. Minimally, you ought to have each screen size in each OS that supported that screen size, which means at least a dozen devices even if you only want to support the current and previous OS release, or a whopping eighteen to support the previous two releases, and that's without factoring in any point releases.
It would take minimal effort for Apple to fix this problem. They just need t
Many of the security problems with Android are design problems rather than bugs. iOS tends to let the user control app access to shared data, whereas Android tends to put control over access rights in the hands of the developers. Android is getting better at this in recent versions, but there's still a bit of a stigma because of historical problems.
And as other folks have mentioned, Android's biggest problem is that Google lets hardware developers ship custom versions of the OS in ways that make future updates dependent on the hardware vendor. Companies that make cheap commodity hardware have little incentive to provide those updates, because they are better off selling replacement hardware. As a result, last I checked, a staggering percentage of Android users were running old, unpatched versions of the OS. So Android is insecure because Android *was* insecure when the devices shipped.
Also, if they have other revenue streams keeping them closer to their current lifestyle, they are probably still being taxed enough that they are not receiving a basic income at all. Well, they are still receiving it but their taxes are $10k more to compensate (someone is still paying for this). I would love to see more government programs helping working professionals start their own companies, but I don't think a basic income would be a big help in this department.
It depends on how they tax it. If they tax it like normal income and you have $20k of income from other sources, you'd pay 15% in taxes on that $10,000, which means you would still get $8,500 of basic income. Of course, the tax status of a basic income is entirely at the discretion of the people who design the basic income. They could make it tax-free, they could make it subject to the normal tax brackets, or they could put it on a sliding scale similar to tax credits, where you get progressively less as your income increases, up to the point where you don't get any. So you're right that it wouldn't be a big help, but it probably would be of some help. Every little bit of additional income brings you a little bit closer to being able to do something that you otherwise could not do.
You say that as if the number of TVs per household growing by 1.5 isn't almost doubling the average. Just goes to show if you make something better and or cheaper people will even increase their budget to get more of it. Computers, tablets, and smartphones are also new items that find their way into people's budgets if there is enough benefit. And I'm willing to bet never having to do laundry or dishes again for $500 per month would find its way into a lot of upper middle class budgets, even if they may only spend $200-300 on a monthly or bi-weekly cleaning today.
Except it wouldn't be never having to do laundry or dishes again for $500 per month. Nobody is going to give up that much of their time for that little money. And it doubled over forty years. In 1975, $740 would buy you a 25" TV. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $3350 today. A 24" TV costs $140 today. So the price dropped by a factor of 22, and the number of TVs bought increased by only a factor of two. The reality is that people mostly buy TVs based on needing to have a TV in a particular room, with little regard for much money each TV costs. People who don't have the money tend to buy it on a credit card and pay it off over time (if they pay it off at all). There's just not a strong correlation between people's purchasing habits and price anymore except possibly among people who are barely surviving financially.
Almost anyone who cleans homes for a living does it because they have almost no other options. In my area (wealthy Chicago suburbs) it is because they don't speak English so they can only hold jobs where they don't have to. These are the immigrant parents giving their children a chance at a better life.
So I can only speak for my area, but I'm friends with a family where the mother and daughter clean houses for a living. The daughter (who speaks perfect English) does it to help her mom out because her sister (also perfect English) has a newborn, and she does this while attending college full-time. And although the mother isn't a native English speaker, I've never had trouble understanding her and vice-versa, so I wouldn't think she would have trouble finding other jobs, particularly in an area with such a large Hispanic community. I've never thought to ask what they bring home per hour, but I can only assume that it pays better than the alternatives, or that it provides some other tangible benefits (such as flexibility in working hours).
I agree that a hiring binge would not come from businesses providing the same services with less costs. The hiring binge comes from being able to offer new and better services that were impossible when labor costs were too high. Restaurants are incredibly low margin businesses and they basically sell a commodity, so if they could get another 10% reduction in costs (from labor and lower supplier costs) that would result in an almost equal 10% reduction in the cost to eat at a restaurant. As more people start eating at restaurants because it is cheaper now, the number of restaurant workers goes up. In this example, and most examples, the number of new jobs would not be that significant. But with unemployment numbers in single digits, even slight increases in employment would have drastic effects.
You're assuming that the unemployed would be willing to go back to work when they could get half their salary without lifting a finger. I don't know anyone who would put up with annoying customers for only $4 per hour, and that includes people who work in those sectors today. You'd average more than that by asking for handouts on the street.
Very few people in the top 20% of earners (the people who would be paying for basic income) worry about safety much. Crime is a problem that almost only affects the working class and poor, because the upper middle class pays insane property taxes to ensure they don't have to worry about crime. Our entire judicia
To remove the human element of it, think of adoption of big screen TVs. 20 years ago owning a 50 inch TV was very uncommon. This wasn't because no one wanted them, its because they cost over $5000 (over $10k in 2015 dollars). Today most middle class homes have at least one TV over 50", but only because they can be found for under $1000.
Ah, but most of those TVs were bought because an old one died, not because they were adding TVs. They got bigger because the major manufacturers have basically stopped selling small TVs, shifting larger models down into the same price class. The number of TVs per household has grown by only about 1.5 over the last forty years.
If the cost of housekeeping saw a similar decline, you would see far more dual earning families paying people to do laundry and dishes.
Doubtful. Cleaning houses is hard work. My cleaning service charges me about $75 for about an hour of work for three people. I realize that the employees don't get all of that, but that small business brings in about $25 per person-hour, and I'd imagine that they make a good percentage of that, because otherwise they would leave and start their own businesses for a bigger cut of the pie. So it costs close to 3x minimum wage just to get people who are legally eligible to work in the U.S., to ensure that they don't do a half-assed job, to ensure that they aren't tempted to steal things to make ends meet, and to convince them to do that level of manual labor. If you start paying maids a basic income whether they work or not, they might have more money to spend, or they might take advantage of the money as an opportunity to work fewer hours. They won't voluntarily choose to work for less, because they basically set their own pay rate, give or take.
If they choose to work fewer hours, the lower availability is likely to drive the price of these services up as people offer to pay higher than the going rate just to get service. This, in turn, will attract more people, and the price will stabilize at a higher price point than the current cost. More people will have jobs, but at a higher price point. If they choose to keep working normally and have more spending money, they might create jobs in other sectors. Either way, I can't see any plausible situation where they voluntarily choose to make less money for the same amount of work so that more people can have jobs.
And for people who aren't essentially independent contractors, the price of labor has no real bearing on the number of people employed. If a restaurant could hire people for half the money, they would pocket most of the money, and would hire very few additional people. There are two main factors in whether a business hires another employee: employee retention and cost-benefit analysis, and neither one would point towards a hiring binge.
On the employee retention side, if employees are fed up and leaving because they have too much work to do, hiring more employees to make the workday easier might help, but if that isn't already happening, then it probably won't suddenly start happening just because the employees are getting part of their income from the government instead of from their employer. And if they do start leaving en masse, hiring more workers probably won't fix the problem, because the real problem at that point would be folks deciding that it isn't worth putting up with that crap for only an extra $4 per hour versus doing nothing. Either way, employee retention isn't going to cause the business to hire more workers after a minimum wage reduction.
This leaves cost-benefit analysis. If the marginal increase in income caused by adding one employee is expected to exceed the marginal cost from hiring that employee, they will hire that extra employee. Now there's always the possibility that the marginal benefit from hiring an extra employee might exceed half the current cost of a new employee, but not exceed the full current cost of a new emp
How many jobs could be created if maids could work for $4/hour because they get 50% of their income from a basic income?
None. We don't need twice as many maids. We hire exactly as many maids as we need to serve the people who want maid service. Statistically speaking, raising the minimum wage has never significantly reduced the number of workers or impacted the growth in the number of workers, so it makes little sense to think that lowering it will significantly increase the number of jobs. Thus, a basic income that merely makes up for substandard wages solves nothing. It just puts more money back in the hands of businesses and accelerates the growth of the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots.
A better use for a basic income is to make up for the fact that there are not enough jobs to keep everyone fully employed. So instead of having ten maids working 40 hours at $8/hour, you might have 20 maids working 20 hours at $8/hour, and they would get the rest of their income from the basic income, making up for the fact that they can't get a full 40 hour schedule. That way, instead of being a money grab by businesses, this approach allows a time grab by individuals, freeing up more time to do the things that matter to them.
This approach also has the advantage of making it possible for people to spend part of their time doing work in artistic fields, where there's no notion of a wage. It would allow them to get by even if they don't successfully sell those paintings or musical compositions or photographs or whatever. You can't really achieve that by making those people work the same amount of time for half the wages, even if you replace those lost wages.
Which, incidentally, means that it is likely possible for Apple to surreptitiously add a device to your account. So upon subpoena, it seems likely that Apple could grant access to all future messages, just not messages that have already been sent.
I imagine that trains and planes have more regulation for similar reasons; as we now know, you could potentially cause a plane to crash into a building, for example. A train derailed can hurt lots of people and destroy lots of cargo.
It isn't possible to derail a train by being on the train, because it is not physically possible to get from the inside of a passenger train into the engine while it is in motion. You have to walk across the ground. So that argument makes little sense.
If you can stop, you stop. If you can avoid, you avoid. It's preferable to go into the ditch than hit another vehicle. etc.
If you can't do either one, you slow down as much as you can to minimize the damage. It is preferable to hit another vehicle than to hit a pedestrian. The ditch vs. car is debatable, but I would say that hitting another car with crumple zones will cause less risk to human life than hitting the ditch unless the ditch is shallow enough to not stop your vehicle.
Oh look, your camera now supports RAW? Thought that was only for pro cameras not P&S pocket models...
Of course, there's still the question of whether they actually have a fast enough SD card slot to write RAW files at a rate that won't cause you to swear constantly (not to mention the risk of a hardware watchdog rebooting the device if it writes for too long like my original Digital Rebel used to do sporadically when paired with a microdrive).
It is this sort of nonsense, coupled with constant head clogs, that made me give up on inkjets entirely and move to color laser printers. The color quality approaches that of inkjet printing, the cost per page is a fraction of cost of inkjet printing, I can leave it sitting there for two months and then print something without taking out the heads and soaking them in alcohol overnight, and it isn't a ticking time bomb just waiting to fail after some arbitrary number of pages.
What is your solution to almost daily security breaches of potentially life-ruining data?
More government regulation of credit bureaus and credit card companies so that no piece of data that can potentially be compromised qualifies as "potentially life-ruining". The problem is not that your SSN can be stolen. The problem is that it actually matters whether your SSN gets stolen, which is entirely an artificial problem caused by credit bureaus treating a non-secret number as though it were some sort of password, allowing people to take out credit using entirely different addresses and phone numbers than they've ever used before without doing due diligence to determine whether that person moved, and fraudulently and libelously report nonpayment of those bogus debts as though they were real.
The credit bureaus are the problem, period. There is no such thing as "identity theft". There is only widespread conspiracy to commit libel resulting from gross criminal negligence on the part of credit bureaus. The only way to fix the problem is to fix the lax regulation that has allowed these companies to libel creditors with near impunity for decades.
On the credit card side:
Require that all credit card readers support NFC, provide short-range magnetic resonance power, and have a spot to place the card during the transaction so that the card is fully visible by the purchaser for the duration of the purchase process.
Require that all credit cards have a screen that displays the name of the vendor and requires you to press a button on the card to authorize the transaction using proper PK crypto signatures.
Require that all credit cards be able to generate a unique, single-use card number for Internet transactions.
Ban all credit cards with fixed card numbers.
That's quite literally the only way that has even a prayer of eliminating the risk of compromised payment terminals being used maliciously. The device that authorizes the transaction must be an inexpensive and normally disconnected device, such as a thick credit card, as opposed to a cellular phone, because otherwise you're just moving the attack target around. And the button to authorize the transaction must be part of that device so that it cannot be easily compromised. Otherwise, a compromised reader could potentially show the transaction on the screen, authorize it, and then very quickly show and authorize a second transaction before the customer notices.
And if it isn't mandated by law, the card companies won't implement this, because it is relatively expensive, and they would rather just force merchants to eat the cost of fraud rather than take steps to actually prevent fraud.
On the credit card bureau side:
Require that credit bureaus be able to support all allegations of nonpayment with reasonable evidence, and if they fail to produce that evidence, require them to remove the allegation.
Require that credit bureaus provide all consumers with the option to require two-factor authentication (e.g. callback at a known phone number) for all new credit applications, at no cost to the consumer.
Require that credit bureaus immediately transition to their own unique identifier for credit purposes that is A. separate and distinct from the SSN, and B. changeable upon request, again at no cost to the consumer.
And more generally:
Make it illegal for non-government entities to use a social security number for any purposes whatsoever other than those explicitly required by law (e.g. reporting of wages).
Assign everyone in America a new, randomly chosen, twelve-digit SSN. Require a five-year transition to the new identifiers, after which the old SSNs become irrelevant.
If government did these things, so-called "identity theft" would just about cease to exist. But they won't, because politicians can win votes by paying lip service to "identity theft" while not actually f
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The point, in my experience, is approximately five miles up the 101. More than about five miles of that 5 MPH traffic, and I'm looking for VC funding to develop Dogbert's anti-traffic missile system.
Spray cold water on a lit incandescent bulb sometime. Yeah, halogen bulbs burn hotter, but they aren't *that* much more dangerous than any other incandescent unless you do something stupid or careless.
Normally, I'd say "Only in Chicago," but apparently you weren't kidding about New Jersey.
SMH.
If they're all in the same rough geographical region, then absolutely. The two least populous New Hampshire counties have only 33,000 and 44,000 people, respectively. If you assume that fewer than 57% of people vote in any given election, that means there are 19,000 and 25,000 likely voters in each of those counties in any given election. If you put 10,000 "free staters" in both counties, assuming they all vote, they could easily tip the balance of pretty much any election. Put 20,000 "free staters" in either of those counties, and if they all decided to vote for a third party, it would basically eliminate the viability of both major parties in that county. Those counties have 7 and 11 representatives in the New Hampshire's House of Representatives. By using this approach, they could potentially give 4.5% of the seats in that lower house to their 1.5% of the population. Not too shabby.
As to whether the impact on the legislative process would be significant, that's a different question. They certainly could, but there's nothing stopping the major parties from making it very hard for extreme-minority parties to get anything done using various procedural tricks. Only time will tell whether they'll continue to have the same successes in the long run.
The parent might have been modded down as inflammatory, but IMO, this part is basically dead on (albeit a bit too harsh). In my mind, CSS3 is a constantly evolving nightmare of ever-changing proportions, and the vendor prefix thing is just plain nutty. Either it is something that will likely be part of the standard as-is, in which case it shouldn't have a vendor prefix, or it isn't, in which case it shouldn't be enabled by default. The problem is that it takes so many years between when somebody realizes that they need to solve some missing functionality in CSS yesterday and when the standards bodies actually decide that it should be standardized that the train has not only left the station, but has circled the globe a hundred times before they even shout "All aboard!"
Because it takes so long, you end up with companies who make mobile browsers telling web developers that they basically have to use these vendor-specific tags to work around browser-specific quirks and similar, and then web developers do so, and the non-vendor-prefixed versions don't get added because they aren't part of the spec yet, and by the time they become part of the spec, those web developers have already moved on to other projects, and it works now, so why change it?
The entire CSS standards process, at least from the perspective of an outsider, seems to be thoroughly bass-ackwards, if you know what I mean. Until that gets straightened out, expect more of this silliness in the future. There are so many parts of the CSS spec that should have been nailed down as final standards years ago, but are still in "Candidate Recommendation" state since 2014. I began starting to use it experimentally two days before it went into that state. Chrome enabled it by default a few months later, as did WebKit.
So now, two years later, I now have content sold through the iBooks Store (among others) that uses CSS shapes. We're way past the point where this spec is readily mutable, IMO, because people have been using it publicly for about 1.5 years. Yet it is still stuck in a "Candidate Recommendation" state because there's really only one code base that supports the feature (WebKit and Blink hadn't split when work on this spec began, so they don't qualify as two independent implementations, despite cumulatively being used in almost three-quarters of the browsers out there, between Chrome, Safari, Opera, and various other WebKit-based browsers).
It seems to me, then, that the biggest problem facing the standards process is that neither Microsoft nor Firefox is able to keep up with the rate at which the CSS spec is expanding. Fixing that lag should probably become a priority, as it seems to be a big part of why things take so long to become proper standards. But failing that, the standards process needs to treat WebKit and Blink as separate code bases, even though some of their implementation might have shared a common lineage at one time. At this point, I'm pretty sure they've diverged enough that they should be treated as independent.
The Kindle requirement isn't easily solvable. The Kindle reader platform doesn't support JavaScript, so the only thing you can really do is a "book as app" thing where you write an Android app that builds a custom eBook reader on top of WebKit's paged media support.
AFAIK, since roughly WWDC 2015. This is a brand new policy change.
Supporting iOS 6 is indeed a pain in the backside because of the UI metrics changes (and probably other reasons), though auto-layout can help. It isn't nearly as difficult as supporting iOS 5, though, or worse, iOS 4, which is what that 2011 device probably came with initially. The lack of proper ARC support in iOS 4 would be nightmarish. And you'll definitely swear every time you run Deploymate on the project only to find hundreds of symbols that didn't exist yet in iOS 6 (or 5 or 4). It is completely doable; you just have to be careful.
Now if you want to support the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, or the first or second generation iPod Touch models, you're in for that special hell normally reserved for child molesters and people who talk in movie theaters. You'll have to use Xcode 4.5 and an ancient SDK to build the version for armv6, use a newer Xcode version with a newer SDK to build for arm64, and then lipo them together afterwards. But if you can pull that off, you could ostensibly still ship an app that supports iPhone OS 2.0 and later, unless Apple is rejecting anything with an armv6 slice outright, in which case you can't. :-)
I think you could always move it to T-Mobile when AT&T drops support. You might lose visual voicemail on the original iPhone, because I don't think they fully support the older models, but I'm pretty sure my original iPhone roams on T-Mobile's network when I use my European SIM card with it. And T-Mobile isn't dropping EDGE support in 2017, unlike AT&T.
One problem with doing that is that Apple made a big mistake a long time ago, and instead of learning from that mistake, they kept compounding it with mistake after mistake on top of it.
The result is that every few releases, Apple manages to ship a release that impacts performance enough to make users of older devices scream and sue. This policy of downgrade prevention is also an absolute nightmare for app developers. On OS X, we can slap multiple versions of the OS on multiple partitions, and quickly test our software on every version of the OS on every device if we want to. On iOS, we need to keep around one device per OS version. And if you really want to do it right, you ought to have one of each model of device running every single patch release of the OS that Apple ever shipped for that device, under the assumption that there's some possibility that your app might encounter serious problems on any arbitrary one of them, and maybe even only on one particular device on one particular OS version.
For example, at a previous employer, we ran into a crasher bug that took a long time to fix because we didn't have the obscure combination of OS and hardware required to reproduce it. The crash occurred only on 64-bit devices that were still running iOS 7 (all versions) rather than having been upgraded to iOS 8 or iOS 9. I kept digging and digging, and after several web searching sessions over the course of several weeks, I stumbled across a Stack Overflow answer that mentioned a bug in the tagged pointer support in the 64-bit Objective-C runtime in iOS 7 (and fixed in iOS 8) that caused NSNumber objects to not work correctly when stored in Objective-C associated objects, with a workaround involving converting them to NSDecimalNumber objects before storing them.
The problem, of course, is that there were exactly two models of 64-bit iOS devices that could run iOS 7, and they both were devices that originally shipped with iOS 7, and Apple had shipped two major releases since then. To verify the fix, we had to find a copy of one of those two-year-old models of iOS hardware that had never been upgraded past its original iOS version. Somehow, the folks acquiring hardware for us managed to pull that off. I don't want to know how. But it made me acutely aware of just how many hundreds of combinations of hardware and OSes you have to keep around if you really want to guarantee that everything works correctly. Minimally, you ought to have each screen size in each OS that supported that screen size, which means at least a dozen devices even if you only want to support the current and previous OS release, or a whopping eighteen to support the previous two releases, and that's without factoring in any point releases.
It would take minimal effort for Apple to fix this problem. They just need t
Many of the security problems with Android are design problems rather than bugs. iOS tends to let the user control app access to shared data, whereas Android tends to put control over access rights in the hands of the developers. Android is getting better at this in recent versions, but there's still a bit of a stigma because of historical problems.
And as other folks have mentioned, Android's biggest problem is that Google lets hardware developers ship custom versions of the OS in ways that make future updates dependent on the hardware vendor. Companies that make cheap commodity hardware have little incentive to provide those updates, because they are better off selling replacement hardware. As a result, last I checked, a staggering percentage of Android users were running old, unpatched versions of the OS. So Android is insecure because Android *was* insecure when the devices shipped.
It depends on how they tax it. If they tax it like normal income and you have $20k of income from other sources, you'd pay 15% in taxes on that $10,000, which means you would still get $8,500 of basic income. Of course, the tax status of a basic income is entirely at the discretion of the people who design the basic income. They could make it tax-free, they could make it subject to the normal tax brackets, or they could put it on a sliding scale similar to tax credits, where you get progressively less as your income increases, up to the point where you don't get any. So you're right that it wouldn't be a big help, but it probably would be of some help. Every little bit of additional income brings you a little bit closer to being able to do something that you otherwise could not do.
Except it wouldn't be never having to do laundry or dishes again for $500 per month. Nobody is going to give up that much of their time for that little money. And it doubled over forty years. In 1975, $740 would buy you a 25" TV. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $3350 today. A 24" TV costs $140 today. So the price dropped by a factor of 22, and the number of TVs bought increased by only a factor of two. The reality is that people mostly buy TVs based on needing to have a TV in a particular room, with little regard for much money each TV costs. People who don't have the money tend to buy it on a credit card and pay it off over time (if they pay it off at all). There's just not a strong correlation between people's purchasing habits and price anymore except possibly among people who are barely surviving financially.
So I can only speak for my area, but I'm friends with a family where the mother and daughter clean houses for a living. The daughter (who speaks perfect English) does it to help her mom out because her sister (also perfect English) has a newborn, and she does this while attending college full-time. And although the mother isn't a native English speaker, I've never had trouble understanding her and vice-versa, so I wouldn't think she would have trouble finding other jobs, particularly in an area with such a large Hispanic community. I've never thought to ask what they bring home per hour, but I can only assume that it pays better than the alternatives, or that it provides some other tangible benefits (such as flexibility in working hours).
You're assuming that the unemployed would be willing to go back to work when they could get half their salary without lifting a finger. I don't know anyone who would put up with annoying customers for only $4 per hour, and that includes people who work in those sectors today. You'd average more than that by asking for handouts on the street.
Ah, but most of those TVs were bought because an old one died, not because they were adding TVs. They got bigger because the major manufacturers have basically stopped selling small TVs, shifting larger models down into the same price class. The number of TVs per household has grown by only about 1.5 over the last forty years.
Doubtful. Cleaning houses is hard work. My cleaning service charges me about $75 for about an hour of work for three people. I realize that the employees don't get all of that, but that small business brings in about $25 per person-hour, and I'd imagine that they make a good percentage of that, because otherwise they would leave and start their own businesses for a bigger cut of the pie. So it costs close to 3x minimum wage just to get people who are legally eligible to work in the U.S., to ensure that they don't do a half-assed job, to ensure that they aren't tempted to steal things to make ends meet, and to convince them to do that level of manual labor. If you start paying maids a basic income whether they work or not, they might have more money to spend, or they might take advantage of the money as an opportunity to work fewer hours. They won't voluntarily choose to work for less, because they basically set their own pay rate, give or take.
If they choose to work fewer hours, the lower availability is likely to drive the price of these services up as people offer to pay higher than the going rate just to get service. This, in turn, will attract more people, and the price will stabilize at a higher price point than the current cost. More people will have jobs, but at a higher price point. If they choose to keep working normally and have more spending money, they might create jobs in other sectors. Either way, I can't see any plausible situation where they voluntarily choose to make less money for the same amount of work so that more people can have jobs.
And for people who aren't essentially independent contractors, the price of labor has no real bearing on the number of people employed. If a restaurant could hire people for half the money, they would pocket most of the money, and would hire very few additional people. There are two main factors in whether a business hires another employee: employee retention and cost-benefit analysis, and neither one would point towards a hiring binge.
On the employee retention side, if employees are fed up and leaving because they have too much work to do, hiring more employees to make the workday easier might help, but if that isn't already happening, then it probably won't suddenly start happening just because the employees are getting part of their income from the government instead of from their employer. And if they do start leaving en masse, hiring more workers probably won't fix the problem, because the real problem at that point would be folks deciding that it isn't worth putting up with that crap for only an extra $4 per hour versus doing nothing. Either way, employee retention isn't going to cause the business to hire more workers after a minimum wage reduction.
This leaves cost-benefit analysis. If the marginal increase in income caused by adding one employee is expected to exceed the marginal cost from hiring that employee, they will hire that extra employee. Now there's always the possibility that the marginal benefit from hiring an extra employee might exceed half the current cost of a new employee, but not exceed the full current cost of a new emp
None. We don't need twice as many maids. We hire exactly as many maids as we need to serve the people who want maid service. Statistically speaking, raising the minimum wage has never significantly reduced the number of workers or impacted the growth in the number of workers, so it makes little sense to think that lowering it will significantly increase the number of jobs. Thus, a basic income that merely makes up for substandard wages solves nothing. It just puts more money back in the hands of businesses and accelerates the growth of the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots.
A better use for a basic income is to make up for the fact that there are not enough jobs to keep everyone fully employed. So instead of having ten maids working 40 hours at $8/hour, you might have 20 maids working 20 hours at $8/hour, and they would get the rest of their income from the basic income, making up for the fact that they can't get a full 40 hour schedule. That way, instead of being a money grab by businesses, this approach allows a time grab by individuals, freeing up more time to do the things that matter to them.
This approach also has the advantage of making it possible for people to spend part of their time doing work in artistic fields, where there's no notion of a wage. It would allow them to get by even if they don't successfully sell those paintings or musical compositions or photographs or whatever. You can't really achieve that by making those people work the same amount of time for half the wages, even if you replace those lost wages.
Actually, the CEO has to take 19 of the cookies, not 18, but yes.
Which, incidentally, means that it is likely possible for Apple to surreptitiously add a device to your account. So upon subpoena, it seems likely that Apple could grant access to all future messages, just not messages that have already been sent.
Not to mention bookstore websites like Amazon.
It isn't possible to derail a train by being on the train, because it is not physically possible to get from the inside of a passenger train into the engine while it is in motion. You have to walk across the ground. So that argument makes little sense.
If you can't do either one, you slow down as much as you can to minimize the damage. It is preferable to hit another vehicle than to hit a pedestrian. The ditch vs. car is debatable, but I would say that hitting another car with crumple zones will cause less risk to human life than hitting the ditch unless the ditch is shallow enough to not stop your vehicle.
Yeah. It means their driver was terrible!
Of course, there's still the question of whether they actually have a fast enough SD card slot to write RAW files at a rate that won't cause you to swear constantly (not to mention the risk of a hardware watchdog rebooting the device if it writes for too long like my original Digital Rebel used to do sporadically when paired with a microdrive).
It is this sort of nonsense, coupled with constant head clogs, that made me give up on inkjets entirely and move to color laser printers. The color quality approaches that of inkjet printing, the cost per page is a fraction of cost of inkjet printing, I can leave it sitting there for two months and then print something without taking out the heads and soaking them in alcohol overnight, and it isn't a ticking time bomb just waiting to fail after some arbitrary number of pages.
More government regulation of credit bureaus and credit card companies so that no piece of data that can potentially be compromised qualifies as "potentially life-ruining". The problem is not that your SSN can be stolen. The problem is that it actually matters whether your SSN gets stolen, which is entirely an artificial problem caused by credit bureaus treating a non-secret number as though it were some sort of password, allowing people to take out credit using entirely different addresses and phone numbers than they've ever used before without doing due diligence to determine whether that person moved, and fraudulently and libelously report nonpayment of those bogus debts as though they were real.
The credit bureaus are the problem, period. There is no such thing as "identity theft". There is only widespread conspiracy to commit libel resulting from gross criminal negligence on the part of credit bureaus. The only way to fix the problem is to fix the lax regulation that has allowed these companies to libel creditors with near impunity for decades.
On the credit card side:
That's quite literally the only way that has even a prayer of eliminating the risk of compromised payment terminals being used maliciously. The device that authorizes the transaction must be an inexpensive and normally disconnected device, such as a thick credit card, as opposed to a cellular phone, because otherwise you're just moving the attack target around. And the button to authorize the transaction must be part of that device so that it cannot be easily compromised. Otherwise, a compromised reader could potentially show the transaction on the screen, authorize it, and then very quickly show and authorize a second transaction before the customer notices.
And if it isn't mandated by law, the card companies won't implement this, because it is relatively expensive, and they would rather just force merchants to eat the cost of fraud rather than take steps to actually prevent fraud.
On the credit card bureau side:
And more generally:
If government did these things, so-called "identity theft" would just about cease to exist. But they won't, because politicians can win votes by paying lip service to "identity theft" while not actually f
That's because KwanzaaBot has RADAR jammers.