Or it might just be that the rate of IE use fell, and completely separately, murder rate also fell at the time, with no relationship between the two. They are correlated (more murders happened when people used IE), but that doesn't prove that IE causes murder.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to make a sufficiently complex web app work with IE. Trust me, this is not a false correlation. Every time I deal with IE, I want to wring someone's neck.
I see what you're saying. My point was that there are multiple thresholds in some cases, and that for things with two thresholds (good-neutral and neutral-bad), you can't know whether the amount you're exposing people to is good or bad, because it depends on how much of that a given person has been exposed to previously.
So a threshold model makes sense medically, but you can't build a law on it. So the only real option is to limit the law to things that A. are readily avoidable, and B. create a significant increase in cancer risk, rather than worrying about things that are barely above the noise threshold and are unavoidable, like acrylamide, which appears naturally in cooked foods.
The threshold model is not a great model. After all, low-dose exposure to some carcinogens actually decreases cancer risk. For example, areas with higher background radiation have lower cancer risks than average.
But of course, the bigger problem is that, as currently interpreted, Prop 65 is an absolutely stupid law, because literally everything contains some substance that can cause cancer or reproductive harm. The idea behind Prop 65 — discouraging the use of materials that are known to significantly increase your risk of cancer (e.g. asbestos) and warning people when they might potentially be exposed to it is not entirely without merit. The problem is that the list of substances needs to be much shorter, and the minimum quantity needs to be much higher. Otherwise, it loses all meaning, just as it has.
And let you say, "No, not everything causes cancer or reproductive harm," I'll point out why you're wrong.
First, most foods contain iron. Iron is a required nutrient. If you don't take in enough iron, you will die. However, it also encourages the production of cancer-causing free radicals, so in large quantities, it causes cancer. Whoops.
Many other foods (e.g. bananas) contain potassium, again a required nutrient. A certain percentage of potassium is radioactive. If isolated, you could give someone a fatal dose of radiation poisoning with the potassium extracted from a sufficiently large number of bananas Again, in small quantities, it is beneficial, and in large quantities, it causes cancer. Not good at all.
But it gets better. Every food in existence, by definition, contains carbon, a certain percentage of which is radioactive. You literally cannot eat without consuming something that is at least slightly radioactive. Radiation is known to cause both cancer AND reproductive harm. So every restaurant, whether they serve coffee or not, technically must carry a Prop 65 warning, because they contain organic matter (not to mention any building with a hardwood floor, a wooden door, wooden tables or chairs, etc.)
But the best part of this story is that air contains oxygen, which catalyzes reactions. Oxidative stress is causally linked to cancer. So the freaking air we breathe causes cancer, and if it didn't we couldn't breathe it. So any environment with a breathable atmosphere is known to cause cancer, and any environment without one will kill you before you can reproduce, and thus causes reproductive harm.
In other words, Prop 65, as currently interpreted by the court system, is a complete and utter joke, and we just need to put up a big-ass sign at every highway entrance to the State of California that says "Warning: The entire State of California contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm" and be done with this silly little worthless hack job of a law once and for all.
We need to get back to reasonable materials on phones. a good textured back in a premium plastic style would avoid the need for a case on most of these phones, would look better, and be more durable.
It's actually not more durable, if you make the plastic thin enough, which they will.:-(
We've lost the durability war at this point. All tech is fragile crap. All that remains is for it to become cheap, fragile crap.
Even ignoring the possibility of a government frame job, if we accept the possibility that it was planted, who is to say that the CIA et al were the ones who planted it? If someone is talented enough to steal from one of the world's elite cracking teams, don't you think that person would also be smart enough to make sure someone else takes the fall for it?
But why not just "enter" using a MIDI keyboard? Finale has supported that even back when I used it. That HAS to be the fastest way to enter music into Finale.
Same reason I don't carry an external typing keyboard. No room in my camera bag.:-)
But honestly, by the time you correct all the transcription/quantization mistakes, it's not actually faster, in my experience, than keying it in by hand with a computer keyboard — particularly while composing. Obviously YMMV.
And to be fair, unless it has gotten a LOT better since I last dealt with it in 1988 or so (which is ENTIRELY possible!), Finale was not the most well-thought-out UI experience. Afterall, it is a high-end Music COMPOSITION and ARRANGEMENT tool; not "Performance" software.
It has gotten a lot better since 1988. But it is still just for composition and arrangement, not performance. Those weird key combinations I described are ways of changing the duration of notes as you enter them. You choose (for example) the eighth note tool, click in or hit enter to place the note, then hit option-# to change it from an eighth note to the actual duration that you intended. Once you know the key combinations, you can key stuff in much more quickly.
There are also keyboard combinations for things like articulations, where if you want something to be staccato (for example), you can choose the articulation tool and hold down the 'S' key while clicking, rather than clicking and then searching for the dot in the resulting menu afterwards.
That's a really a**hole thing to say to someone who has a close family member who is suffering from tremors. Shame on you.
You are entirely correct. Please accept my sincere apology for my unknowing gaffe and insensitivity.
No worries. To be fair, I chuckled a bit.:-)
1. There seems to be plenty of space between the center of the top row of keys to the bottom of the Touchbar to avoid "Accidental Touches" by all but the most ham-fisted "Typists".
Seems is the operative word. The most common situation in which I see this happening is when I have to hit option and a far-off number key (e.g. 7) with the left hand between mouse clicks with the right. In that situation, it isn't the finger on the key that brushes the touch bar, but rather my middle finger, which has no safe place to rest. Yes, these sorts of chording behaviors are un-ergonomic as heck, but they make note entry fast as long as you don't have a touchbar popping open System Preferences all the time and taking you completely out of the app.
Perhaps you should adjust your "chording" a bit. I am really not trying to be snarky.
Absolutely, though it turns out to be easier said than done. The easier solution, albeit a partial one, was just to make sure the parts of the touchbar that my middle finger gets near when holding option-6 through option-8 with my left hand are blank. That at least makes it tolerable.
2. If it bothers you that much, simply park an external keyboard (with a "real" ESC key!) in front of your MBP. Yes, it's a bit of a kludge...
A bit? I bought a laptop, not a desktop. I shouldn't have to use an external keyboard just because some engineer thought that putting a touch-sensitive strip less than an eighth of an inch from active keys was a good idea.
well, you can continue to bitch about the keyboard you can't change, or find a way to deal with it. But I think you are much more interested in the former "solution"
That's not a solution. At best it's a workaround, and isn't very practical when I'm not at home. The thing is, a lot of folks at Apple read Slashdot. Complaining about it might not solve the problem for me, but at least it might get somebody's attention who can solve it (whether through software or future design changes).
The biggest problem with the touchbar, honestly, is that the software that drives it is so underdeveloped. They provide support for app developers to customize it for a particular app, but they don't support letting users customize it for a specific app. (You can only choose between a few predefined sets or a single custom set.) If I could make the touchbar show nothing in Finale, show only the escape key in Terminal, etc. without fragile third-party hacks, it would be a lot less horrid. And the lack of touch sensitivity/glancing blow detection is just one of many examples of them shipping this hardware before the software was really ready.
That's a really a**hole thing to say to someone who has a close family member who is suffering from tremors. Shame on you.
1. There seems to be plenty of space between the center of the top row of keys to the bottom of the Touchbar to avoid "Accidental Touches" by all but the most ham-fisted "Typists".
Seems is the operative word. The most common situation in which I see this happening is when I have to hit option and a far-off number key (e.g. 7) with the left hand between mouse clicks with the right. In that situation, it isn't the finger on the key that brushes the touch bar, but rather my middle finger, which has no safe place to rest. Yes, these sorts of chording behaviors are un-ergonomic as heck, but they make note entry fast as long as you don't have a touchbar popping open System Preferences all the time and taking you completely out of the app.
2. If it bothers you that much, simply park an external keyboard (with a "real" ESC key!) in front of your MBP. Yes, it's a bit of a kludge...
A bit? I bought a laptop, not a desktop. I shouldn't have to use an external keyboard just because some engineer thought that putting a touch-sensitive strip less than an eighth of an inch from active keys was a good idea.
Having said that, I DO believe Apple should update their TouchBar driver or firmware to include some sort of "sensitivity" or "glancing-blow" detection/adjustment, kind of like with the Trackpad. Another fix would be to mount the entire TouchBar on a "spring-loaded" mount; so that a bit of down-force (albeit anywhere on the TB) would be required to "register" a Tap. If Apple can make a "clicky" Trackpad, then they could easily do that.
The right fix would have been to put the touchbar above the function key row, rather than replacing it. If almost nobody uses those keys (which is probably the case, with the exception of escape), then they would serve as an adequate buffer zone. But that doesn't fit the narrative of those being useless legacy baggage, so....
And don't get me started on the control strip above the keyboard, which would be great if it didn't register the slightest accidental brush of a partial finger as "send mail" or "clear calculator input" etc. That thing really ought to be force sensitive. (Fortunately the "Send Mail" button in Mail can be disabled in the settings).
This. A thousand times, this. The mechanical parts of the keyboard are fine by comparison. No real problems, or at least none worse than my previous machines, which all occasionally had crumb problems (easily solved by massaging the key). But the touchbar? The touch bar needs to die in a fire. It is a perfect example of what SJ meant when he said that his most important job was saying no. Someone else should have said it, but apparently, nobody did, and as a result, we have the single most flaky laptop in the history of computing, constantly doing things that the user did not expect, all because somebody thought, "Let's add touch to the Mac, but let's not do it with an actual touchscreen." F**king wankers.
My previous MacBook Pro, as much as the bad top speaker annoyed me, was a great machine until some dirtbag stole it out of my car in a church parking lot. Now, I have this touchbar travesty, and I'm not amused.
The touchbar is orders of magnitude too sensitive, to the point that it is almost completely and utterly useless. I would estimate that fewer than one percent of detected touchbar touches were intentional. The rest were accidental triggers. It's so bad that I've literally disabled all of the touchbar buttons except for screen brightness, escape, keyboard brightness, and volume, and even with a mostly-empty touchbar, I STILL trigger them accidentally enough to be annoying. On my work machine, I even disabled the volume controls, because I kept accidentally unmuting it in the office while typing, and then wondered why I kept hearing Mail playing sounds every time an email arrived.
My favorite touchbar hassle is its behavior in Finale, where I routinely have to hold down modifier keys while hitting numbers. The probability of accidentally touching the touchbar while doing that approaches 100%, and to make matters worse, there's an undocumented "feature" where if you hold down option and touch the touchbar, it opens System Preferences to the related pane (e.g. the Sound preferences pane if you option-touch the volume buttons). In theory, that sounds like a good idea. In practice, there have been days when I've launched System Preferences accidentally more than twenty times in a single editing session.
The touchbar is, to be frank, so bad that I would gladly PAY Apple to replace it with a normal keyboard. That option was never available in the 15" model, or else I would never have gotten a touchbar to begin with, because frankly, it seemed like a gimmick, and I use the escape key a lot... but before I bought it, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that it would be anywhere near as bad as it is. I expected the escape key to be a headache. I didn't expect to have to basically disable the whole d**n touchbar just to get any work done.
So what can be done to fix it? The most guaranteed-reliable fix would be to put touch sensors in the upper row of keys. If you're hovering over the upper row of keys, any touchbar touch is pretty much guaranteed to be an accident. You *might* be able to solve it by using pressure sensing, but the better solution from a touch perspective would be actually ensuring that the touch happens somewhere in the vicinity of the middle of the touch bar vertically, rather than near the bottom edge. If they made it ignore all touches in the bottom half of the strip, that would probably take care of most of the problems most of the time. That might even be possible to do in software.
What I don't understand is how the folks in Apple's upper management could have believed that this worked well enough to ship it. We use MacBook Pros at work, and out of my
> > People who end up in jail are typically not people who have a couple thousand dollars to spare they've saved up.
> Then bail is obviously too high.
So you're thinking that because my brother was too irresponsible to save up $20 while he was committing his daily crimes such as shoplifting and domestic abuse, he should be set free and not have to face trial? Or are you thinking that his bond should be $5, because certainly he'll show up to court to get his $5 back?
If he's that irresponsible, he shouldn't get out on bail in the first place.
> it shouldn't take anything close to a year to get your money back because it shouldn't take a year to resolve a criminal dispute.
Are you under the impression that bail bondsmen set the courts' schedules?
In a manner of speaking, they do. More precisely, the existence of bail bondsmen facilitates the slowness of our system of justice.
You see, if the bondsmen didn't exist, then most of those people would be in jails, which means the jails would quickly fill up with people waiting to go to trial, and the flow of people into the system would be limited to no more than the flow of people out of the system. The net effect would be that either the prosecutors would have to exercise some prosecutorial restraint or the city/state/federal government would have to hire enough judges to clear the backlog.
With bail bondsmen, the number of people waiting for trial is essentially unbounded. They could have every man, woman, and child in the country out on bail. So as long as they don't flee or commit some other crime while waiting that causes the judge who set bail to lose an election, the justice system can move as glacially as it wants to.
Where exactly do you find a justice system that is both fast and fair? North Korea's is pretty fast. They don't spend the time needed to be fair. The United States spends a lot of time trying to fair, but doesn't do an amazing job of it.
The inadequate speed of the U.S. justice system is not because it takes too much time to get the decisions right; on average, most trials last less than a week. The problem is that it is massively underfunded, and thus takes months or years before cases even go to trial. This, in turn, is mostly because of a lack of prosecutorial restraint, which in large part is facilitated by the bond system.
There are really only two valid solutions to the problem: either prosecute fewer cases or hire enough judges so that trials aren't delayed ridiculously.
On the flip side, if someone is doing a truly bad job, but is being kept in office by friends or family who happen to be in a position to appoint them to those jobs, then giving voters the ability to vote them out is a good idea.
IMO, the way it should work is that judges and prosecutors should be appointed, but the people should have the right to periodically have a confidence/no-confidence vote. And should voters decide to throw someone out, the people in charge of appointing them would then have to appoint someone else; the people shouldn't get to vote on who the replacement will be, so long as it isn't the original appointee. This provides a balance between the need for oversight by the public and the need for a stable judiciary.
On the flip side, there's only so much you can do to increase highway speeds. At some point, you hit the limits of what is safe and feasible, even with self-driving tech. I'm not sure where that limit is, but I'm pretty sure it is nowhere near 600 MPH. I don't think you could physically move a tractor trailer on the surface of the earth at 600 MPH. The wind resistance would rip the sides of the trailer right off. And even if you could, the cost per mile would be enormous.
So it's really a question of having another tier that strikes a balance between time in transit versus cost while being cheaper than air travel (which, if rising fuel prices have anything to say about it, is likely to be a low bar in the future).
I suspect that the most likely shipping scheme in the distant future will involve using self-driving trucks to take the packages to a transit hub, followed by moving them by hyperloop to another hub, followed by distributing the packages via self-driving trucks to their final destinations—unless, of course, we manage to perfect antigravity technology, in which case ballistic delivery will be a viable option.:-)
It's not even that. The answer to the question of whether security makes things better or not in general is straightforward: It depends on whether the cost of the security is enough of a nuisance to exceed the projected lifetime benefit. And that largely depends on context. I'll explain by analogy.
I grew up in a small town in West Tennessee. Lots of folks around town routinely left their houses unlocked. It was that kind of town. There were a few thousand people, and everybody knew everybody, or if they didn't know somebody, they knew someone who did. In that context, it didn't take much security to keep things safe, because most people are good people, and if somebody from outside the community was wandering around, everybody knew that the person was an outsider if nobody out of a group of three or more people recognized the person. Thus, a bad person from elsewhere would arouse enough suspicion to be noticed, and would probably be thwarted in whatever nefarious deeds he or she was planning, unless it was just minor mischief like TPing the house of somebody that nobody really liked much anyway.
Now, I live in the Silicon Valley. I know two of my neighbors. Thanks to work and church, I know people from various parts of the area, but they don't live nearby I'm reasonably confident in leaving things lying around at work for precisely the same reason that I was reasonably confident back home—because everybody knows each other. But if you were to ask me if I could leave valuables lying around anywhere else, the answer would be "heck no," because nobody knows anybody, statistically speaking, and so everybody is indistinguishable from a potential insider or outsider. Even though most people are still good people, the odds of a bad person getting noticed are much lower. And with so many more people, the number of bad people is much higher even if the percentage is the same, which only compounds the problem.
The same problem exists with technology. Prior to the Internet, when computers were basically devices that you interacted with locally, security didn't matter that much, because most people are good people. When computers became more connected, that became a problem, because even if most people are good people, the bad people can get to your systems from anywhere in the world, so it only takes a few bad people to ruin everything. And because the pool of people potentially accessing your system is so much larger, the ability to distinguish good people from bad people is diminished.
So to make a long story short, computer security is a necessary response to the realities of a more interconnected world. Would things be worse without all that added security? Yes. Does the security actually make the world better? No. It just keeps things from unraveling in the presence of interconnectedness that does make the world better. The real question is whether that distinction matters.
They have been doing a lot and it has been costly, but I wouldn't be so confident that investment will become durable first mover advantage for Tesla, or if it is more the tide that raises all ships.
I think folks underestimate how valuable their supercharger network is. Having DC fast charging with prices that are always close to the commercial electricity rate for the area, rather than at whatever arbitrary price per kWh or per hour that the host business decides to charge, is a major advantage.
And IMO, one thing he has working against him is that he needs to build out a massively expensive network of superchargers (and maintain them all, including the promise of free charging for many customers)
That will become a smaller and smaller percentage of customers as time goes by, so if he can hang on for a while, this is a problem which should solve itself.
I assume you mean the free part, rather than the need for having superchargers. And you're right, but only to a point. After all, Tesla still gives out free supercharging to Model S and Model X buyers if they have a referral code from someone else who recently bought one. So mostly, it will diminish because because of Model 3 sales cutting into Model S sales (and, to a lesser extent, because not everybody will know to ask around on Tesla forums to try to get a referral code). But as long as they continue to issue those referral codes, there's a lower bound to how small the percentage of customers with unlimited charging can realistically get.
That whooshing sound is you missing the point. It doesn't matter if they "pay for themselves" when you can't afford the upfront costs. Installation is now the greatest part of many setups, not the panels themselves. The fact that California housing is already priced outside the reach of a large segment of the middle class should give you a hint that they need LESS EXPENSIVE homes.
That whooshing sound is you missing the point. There are companies that will put solar panels on your house for zero dollars, in exchange for being able to sell you the power, and sell any excess power back to the grid. That means this does not inherently drive up the price of the home. It does, however, inherently mean that homeowners will pay less for electricity.
One site being affected by bug this is a fluke. Two being affected by the same bug is a pattern.
This seems like an awfully convenient way for someone to maliciously gain access to somebody else's account on sites that do stupid things like locking you out after a certain number of failed login attempts:
First, find a way to gain surreptitious access to the site's logs (or gain access via a gag-order-protected subpoena later).
Second, introduce a bug in bcrypt that logs the unencrypted password.
Third, enter a wrong password until the user gets locked out.
Fourth, wait for the user's new password to show up in the logs.
The best part is that this could even allow someone to compromise specific accounts on sites that encrypt all user data while in stable storage and in backups, unless those sites also encrypt all of their log data.
For now, I'm willing to give the parties involved the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was just an accident, or possibly two accidents, and assume that somebody at Twitter read the story about GitHub and thought, "I'd better make sure we don't do that." That said, the possibility that a bug like could this exist in some sort of production software that would be shared by such disparate companies as Twitter and GitHub is downright alarming, and the possibility that this was malicious should at least be in the back of everyone's minds right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like someone who has never tried to make a sufficiently complex web app work with IE. Trust me, this is not a false correlation. Every time I deal with IE, I want to wring someone's neck.
I see what you're saying. My point was that there are multiple thresholds in some cases, and that for things with two thresholds (good-neutral and neutral-bad), you can't know whether the amount you're exposing people to is good or bad, because it depends on how much of that a given person has been exposed to previously.
So a threshold model makes sense medically, but you can't build a law on it. So the only real option is to limit the law to things that A. are readily avoidable, and B. create a significant increase in cancer risk, rather than worrying about things that are barely above the noise threshold and are unavoidable, like acrylamide, which appears naturally in cooked foods.
The threshold model is not a great model. After all, low-dose exposure to some carcinogens actually decreases cancer risk. For example, areas with higher background radiation have lower cancer risks than average.
But of course, the bigger problem is that, as currently interpreted, Prop 65 is an absolutely stupid law, because literally everything contains some substance that can cause cancer or reproductive harm. The idea behind Prop 65 — discouraging the use of materials that are known to significantly increase your risk of cancer (e.g. asbestos) and warning people when they might potentially be exposed to it is not entirely without merit. The problem is that the list of substances needs to be much shorter, and the minimum quantity needs to be much higher. Otherwise, it loses all meaning, just as it has.
And let you say, "No, not everything causes cancer or reproductive harm," I'll point out why you're wrong.
First, most foods contain iron. Iron is a required nutrient. If you don't take in enough iron, you will die. However, it also encourages the production of cancer-causing free radicals, so in large quantities, it causes cancer. Whoops.
Many other foods (e.g. bananas) contain potassium, again a required nutrient. A certain percentage of potassium is radioactive. If isolated, you could give someone a fatal dose of radiation poisoning with the potassium extracted from a sufficiently large number of bananas Again, in small quantities, it is beneficial, and in large quantities, it causes cancer. Not good at all.
But it gets better. Every food in existence, by definition, contains carbon, a certain percentage of which is radioactive. You literally cannot eat without consuming something that is at least slightly radioactive. Radiation is known to cause both cancer AND reproductive harm. So every restaurant, whether they serve coffee or not, technically must carry a Prop 65 warning, because they contain organic matter (not to mention any building with a hardwood floor, a wooden door, wooden tables or chairs, etc.)
But the best part of this story is that air contains oxygen, which catalyzes reactions. Oxidative stress is causally linked to cancer. So the freaking air we breathe causes cancer, and if it didn't we couldn't breathe it. So any environment with a breathable atmosphere is known to cause cancer, and any environment without one will kill you before you can reproduce, and thus causes reproductive harm.
In other words, Prop 65, as currently interpreted by the court system, is a complete and utter joke, and we just need to put up a big-ass sign at every highway entrance to the State of California that says "Warning: The entire State of California contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm" and be done with this silly little worthless hack job of a law once and for all.
It's actually not more durable, if you make the plastic thin enough, which they will. :-(
We've lost the durability war at this point. All tech is fragile crap. All that remains is for it to become cheap, fragile crap.
The actual leaker, if it was someone else.
Even ignoring the possibility of a government frame job, if we accept the possibility that it was planted, who is to say that the CIA et al were the ones who planted it? If someone is talented enough to steal from one of the world's elite cracking teams, don't you think that person would also be smart enough to make sure someone else takes the fall for it?
Same reason I don't carry an external typing keyboard. No room in my camera bag. :-)
But honestly, by the time you correct all the transcription/quantization mistakes, it's not actually faster, in my experience, than keying it in by hand with a computer keyboard — particularly while composing. Obviously YMMV.
It has gotten a lot better since 1988. But it is still just for composition and arrangement, not performance. Those weird key combinations I described are ways of changing the duration of notes as you enter them. You choose (for example) the eighth note tool, click in or hit enter to place the note, then hit option-# to change it from an eighth note to the actual duration that you intended. Once you know the key combinations, you can key stuff in much more quickly.
There are also keyboard combinations for things like articulations, where if you want something to be staccato (for example), you can choose the articulation tool and hold down the 'S' key while clicking, rather than clicking and then searching for the dot in the resulting menu afterwards.
That's a really a**hole thing to say to someone who has a close family member who is suffering from tremors. Shame on you.
You are entirely correct. Please accept my sincere apology for my unknowing gaffe and insensitivity.
No worries. To be fair, I chuckled a bit. :-)
Seems is the operative word. The most common situation in which I see this happening is when I have to hit option and a far-off number key (e.g. 7) with the left hand between mouse clicks with the right. In that situation, it isn't the finger on the key that brushes the touch bar, but rather my middle finger, which has no safe place to rest. Yes, these sorts of chording behaviors are un-ergonomic as heck, but they make note entry fast as long as you don't have a touchbar popping open System Preferences all the time and taking you completely out of the app.
Perhaps you should adjust your "chording" a bit. I am really not trying to be snarky.
Absolutely, though it turns out to be easier said than done. The easier solution, albeit a partial one, was just to make sure the parts of the touchbar that my middle finger gets near when holding option-6 through option-8 with my left hand are blank. That at least makes it tolerable.
A bit? I bought a laptop, not a desktop. I shouldn't have to use an external keyboard just because some engineer thought that putting a touch-sensitive strip less than an eighth of an inch from active keys was a good idea.
well, you can continue to bitch about the keyboard you can't change, or find a way to deal with it. But I think you are much more interested in the former "solution"
That's not a solution. At best it's a workaround, and isn't very practical when I'm not at home. The thing is, a lot of folks at Apple read Slashdot. Complaining about it might not solve the problem for me, but at least it might get somebody's attention who can solve it (whether through software or future design changes).
The biggest problem with the touchbar, honestly, is that the software that drives it is so underdeveloped. They provide support for app developers to customize it for a particular app, but they don't support letting users customize it for a specific app. (You can only choose between a few predefined sets or a single custom set.) If I could make the touchbar show nothing in Finale, show only the escape key in Terminal, etc. without fragile third-party hacks, it would be a lot less horrid. And the lack of touch sensitivity/glancing blow detection is just one of many examples of them shipping this hardware before the software was really ready.
That's a really a**hole thing to say to someone who has a close family member who is suffering from tremors. Shame on you.
Seems is the operative word. The most common situation in which I see this happening is when I have to hit option and a far-off number key (e.g. 7) with the left hand between mouse clicks with the right. In that situation, it isn't the finger on the key that brushes the touch bar, but rather my middle finger, which has no safe place to rest. Yes, these sorts of chording behaviors are un-ergonomic as heck, but they make note entry fast as long as you don't have a touchbar popping open System Preferences all the time and taking you completely out of the app.
A bit? I bought a laptop, not a desktop. I shouldn't have to use an external keyboard just because some engineer thought that putting a touch-sensitive strip less than an eighth of an inch from active keys was a good idea.
The right fix would have been to put the touchbar above the function key row, rather than replacing it. If almost nobody uses those keys (which is probably the case, with the exception of escape), then they would serve as an adequate buffer zone. But that doesn't fit the narrative of those being useless legacy baggage, so....
This. A thousand times, this. The mechanical parts of the keyboard are fine by comparison. No real problems, or at least none worse than my previous machines, which all occasionally had crumb problems (easily solved by massaging the key). But the touchbar? The touch bar needs to die in a fire. It is a perfect example of what SJ meant when he said that his most important job was saying no. Someone else should have said it, but apparently, nobody did, and as a result, we have the single most flaky laptop in the history of computing, constantly doing things that the user did not expect, all because somebody thought, "Let's add touch to the Mac, but let's not do it with an actual touchscreen." F**king wankers.
My previous MacBook Pro, as much as the bad top speaker annoyed me, was a great machine until some dirtbag stole it out of my car in a church parking lot. Now, I have this touchbar travesty, and I'm not amused.
The touchbar is orders of magnitude too sensitive, to the point that it is almost completely and utterly useless. I would estimate that fewer than one percent of detected touchbar touches were intentional. The rest were accidental triggers. It's so bad that I've literally disabled all of the touchbar buttons except for screen brightness, escape, keyboard brightness, and volume, and even with a mostly-empty touchbar, I STILL trigger them accidentally enough to be annoying. On my work machine, I even disabled the volume controls, because I kept accidentally unmuting it in the office while typing, and then wondered why I kept hearing Mail playing sounds every time an email arrived.
My favorite touchbar hassle is its behavior in Finale, where I routinely have to hold down modifier keys while hitting numbers. The probability of accidentally touching the touchbar while doing that approaches 100%, and to make matters worse, there's an undocumented "feature" where if you hold down option and touch the touchbar, it opens System Preferences to the related pane (e.g. the Sound preferences pane if you option-touch the volume buttons). In theory, that sounds like a good idea. In practice, there have been days when I've launched System Preferences accidentally more than twenty times in a single editing session.
The touchbar is, to be frank, so bad that I would gladly PAY Apple to replace it with a normal keyboard. That option was never available in the 15" model, or else I would never have gotten a touchbar to begin with, because frankly, it seemed like a gimmick, and I use the escape key a lot... but before I bought it, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that it would be anywhere near as bad as it is. I expected the escape key to be a headache. I didn't expect to have to basically disable the whole d**n touchbar just to get any work done.
So what can be done to fix it? The most guaranteed-reliable fix would be to put touch sensors in the upper row of keys. If you're hovering over the upper row of keys, any touchbar touch is pretty much guaranteed to be an accident. You *might* be able to solve it by using pressure sensing, but the better solution from a touch perspective would be actually ensuring that the touch happens somewhere in the vicinity of the middle of the touch bar vertically, rather than near the bottom edge. If they made it ignore all touches in the bottom half of the strip, that would probably take care of most of the problems most of the time. That might even be possible to do in software.
What I don't understand is how the folks in Apple's upper management could have believed that this worked well enough to ship it. We use MacBook Pros at work, and out of my
Plus it will ruin movies. Kids will watch "Old Yeller" and won't understand what "old" means.
> > People who end up in jail are typically not people who have a couple thousand dollars to spare they've saved up.
> Then bail is obviously too high.
So you're thinking that because my brother was too irresponsible to save up $20 while he was committing his daily crimes such as shoplifting and domestic abuse, he should be set free and not have to face trial? Or are you thinking that his bond should be $5, because certainly he'll show up to court to get his $5 back?
If he's that irresponsible, he shouldn't get out on bail in the first place.
> it shouldn't take anything close to a year to get your money back because it shouldn't take a year to resolve a criminal dispute.
Are you under the impression that bail bondsmen set the courts' schedules?
In a manner of speaking, they do. More precisely, the existence of bail bondsmen facilitates the slowness of our system of justice.
You see, if the bondsmen didn't exist, then most of those people would be in jails, which means the jails would quickly fill up with people waiting to go to trial, and the flow of people into the system would be limited to no more than the flow of people out of the system. The net effect would be that either the prosecutors would have to exercise some prosecutorial restraint or the city/state/federal government would have to hire enough judges to clear the backlog.
With bail bondsmen, the number of people waiting for trial is essentially unbounded. They could have every man, woman, and child in the country out on bail. So as long as they don't flee or commit some other crime while waiting that causes the judge who set bail to lose an election, the justice system can move as glacially as it wants to.
Where exactly do you find a justice system that is both fast and fair? North Korea's is pretty fast. They don't spend the time needed to be fair. The United States spends a lot of time trying to fair, but doesn't do an amazing job of it.
The inadequate speed of the U.S. justice system is not because it takes too much time to get the decisions right; on average, most trials last less than a week. The problem is that it is massively underfunded, and thus takes months or years before cases even go to trial. This, in turn, is mostly because of a lack of prosecutorial restraint, which in large part is facilitated by the bond system.
There are really only two valid solutions to the problem: either prosecute fewer cases or hire enough judges so that trials aren't delayed ridiculously.
On the flip side, if someone is doing a truly bad job, but is being kept in office by friends or family who happen to be in a position to appoint them to those jobs, then giving voters the ability to vote them out is a good idea.
IMO, the way it should work is that judges and prosecutors should be appointed, but the people should have the right to periodically have a confidence/no-confidence vote. And should voters decide to throw someone out, the people in charge of appointing them would then have to appoint someone else; the people shouldn't get to vote on who the replacement will be, so long as it isn't the original appointee. This provides a balance between the need for oversight by the public and the need for a stable judiciary.
Everything is expensive if you have no need to build it in quantities. Economies of scale are your friend.
On the flip side, there's only so much you can do to increase highway speeds. At some point, you hit the limits of what is safe and feasible, even with self-driving tech. I'm not sure where that limit is, but I'm pretty sure it is nowhere near 600 MPH. I don't think you could physically move a tractor trailer on the surface of the earth at 600 MPH. The wind resistance would rip the sides of the trailer right off. And even if you could, the cost per mile would be enormous.
So it's really a question of having another tier that strikes a balance between time in transit versus cost while being cheaper than air travel (which, if rising fuel prices have anything to say about it, is likely to be a low bar in the future).
I suspect that the most likely shipping scheme in the distant future will involve using self-driving trucks to take the packages to a transit hub, followed by moving them by hyperloop to another hub, followed by distributing the packages via self-driving trucks to their final destinations—unless, of course, we manage to perfect antigravity technology, in which case ballistic delivery will be a viable option. :-)
It's not even that. The answer to the question of whether security makes things better or not in general is straightforward: It depends on whether the cost of the security is enough of a nuisance to exceed the projected lifetime benefit. And that largely depends on context. I'll explain by analogy.
I grew up in a small town in West Tennessee. Lots of folks around town routinely left their houses unlocked. It was that kind of town. There were a few thousand people, and everybody knew everybody, or if they didn't know somebody, they knew someone who did. In that context, it didn't take much security to keep things safe, because most people are good people, and if somebody from outside the community was wandering around, everybody knew that the person was an outsider if nobody out of a group of three or more people recognized the person. Thus, a bad person from elsewhere would arouse enough suspicion to be noticed, and would probably be thwarted in whatever nefarious deeds he or she was planning, unless it was just minor mischief like TPing the house of somebody that nobody really liked much anyway.
Now, I live in the Silicon Valley. I know two of my neighbors. Thanks to work and church, I know people from various parts of the area, but they don't live nearby I'm reasonably confident in leaving things lying around at work for precisely the same reason that I was reasonably confident back home—because everybody knows each other. But if you were to ask me if I could leave valuables lying around anywhere else, the answer would be "heck no," because nobody knows anybody, statistically speaking, and so everybody is indistinguishable from a potential insider or outsider. Even though most people are still good people, the odds of a bad person getting noticed are much lower. And with so many more people, the number of bad people is much higher even if the percentage is the same, which only compounds the problem.
The same problem exists with technology. Prior to the Internet, when computers were basically devices that you interacted with locally, security didn't matter that much, because most people are good people. When computers became more connected, that became a problem, because even if most people are good people, the bad people can get to your systems from anywhere in the world, so it only takes a few bad people to ruin everything. And because the pool of people potentially accessing your system is so much larger, the ability to distinguish good people from bad people is diminished.
So to make a long story short, computer security is a necessary response to the realities of a more interconnected world. Would things be worse without all that added security? Yes. Does the security actually make the world better? No. It just keeps things from unraveling in the presence of interconnectedness that does make the world better. The real question is whether that distinction matters.
I think folks underestimate how valuable their supercharger network is. Having DC fast charging with prices that are always close to the commercial electricity rate for the area, rather than at whatever arbitrary price per kWh or per hour that the host business decides to charge, is a major advantage.
I assume you mean the free part, rather than the need for having superchargers. And you're right, but only to a point. After all, Tesla still gives out free supercharging to Model S and Model X buyers if they have a referral code from someone else who recently bought one. So mostly, it will diminish because because of Model 3 sales cutting into Model S sales (and, to a lesser extent, because not everybody will know to ask around on Tesla forums to try to get a referral code). But as long as they continue to issue those referral codes, there's a lower bound to how small the percentage of customers with unlimited charging can realistically get.
One car driven by a human swerves to avoid another car being driven by a human and happens to hit a self-driving car. Your point?
That whooshing sound is you missing the point. There are companies that will put solar panels on your house for zero dollars, in exchange for being able to sell you the power, and sell any excess power back to the grid. That means this does not inherently drive up the price of the home. It does, however, inherently mean that homeowners will pay less for electricity.
On the plus side, the hockey puck was so bad that Apple almost single-handedly created the market for USB mice....
Man, and I would have sworn it was 42.
One site being affected by bug this is a fluke. Two being affected by the same bug is a pattern.
This seems like an awfully convenient way for someone to maliciously gain access to somebody else's account on sites that do stupid things like locking you out after a certain number of failed login attempts:
The best part is that this could even allow someone to compromise specific accounts on sites that encrypt all user data while in stable storage and in backups, unless those sites also encrypt all of their log data.
For now, I'm willing to give the parties involved the benefit of the doubt and assume that this was just an accident, or possibly two accidents, and assume that somebody at Twitter read the story about GitHub and thought, "I'd better make sure we don't do that." That said, the possibility that a bug like could this exist in some sort of production software that would be shared by such disparate companies as Twitter and GitHub is downright alarming, and the possibility that this was malicious should at least be in the back of everyone's minds right now.
Correction: Synaptics, not Qualcomm. My bad.