For domestic flights within the US, airlines are liable for up to $3000 for lost or damaged property. That's plenty enough to replace a laptop.
No, it isn't. It isn't even in the right order of magnitude. The maximum configuration of MacBook Pro is $4,000 before you factor in the value of the data on the computer, which offers the potential for nearly unbounded loss under the right circumstances.
For example, if that laptop contains an unreleased feature film, and if that laptop gets stolen and the contents get leaked while in the airline's care, we could be talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and I would not expect their damage waiver to hold up in court under those circumstances.
I don't think the TSA has really thought this through, and if the airlines agree to it, we need to subject them all to mandatory drug tests; there's not enough crack in the world for this to make sense, and we all want to know what they're smoking.
Yes, in terms of time, at first glance, it might seem backwards. OS X got 32-bit Intel apps in 2005 and 64-bit app support in 2007. iOS got then in 2007 and got 64-bit app support in 2013. But that's not the complete story. On OS X, some software has seen minor updates to keep it running on newer CPUs without completely rewriting it. The oldest of that software, potentially written as far back as 1984, is based on the Carbon API. As others have already mentioned, the UI portion of that API has no 64-bit replacement. So in a way, OS X potentially has 33 years of hard-to-update 32-bit apps, whereas iOS had only six years of relatively easy-to-update 32-bit apps.
And there are some other big differences:
On iOS, all software is distributed through Apple, so they can force developers to upgrade if they want to make money.
On OS X, some software costs $$$, whereas most iOS apps cost $.
On OS X, users tend to use more software on a regular basis, whereas most iOS users pretty much use the built-in Safari, Calendar, and Mail apps, plus maybe a half dozen third-party apps at most.
People rarely use iOS devices for serious productivity except in Safari because of its limited high-end app availability and limited support for external hardware (no support for external storage, optical drives, USB scanners, USB printers, etc.).
Hardware won't break when they drop 32-bit support on iOS, because Apple doesn't allow iOS apps to talk directly to arbitrary USB devices.
So basically, the toy-consumer-product nature of iOS makes mandatory 64-bit much less problematic than it would on OS X. If people relied on old software on iOS to the extent that they do on OS X, it would be a much bigger deal.
The compromise is that High Sierra + 1 will give a warning every time you launch a 32-bit app saying that your app won't run in High Sierra + n (for some unknown value of n).
On iOS, it makes a lot more sense than on OS X. Maintaining the 32-bit slice essentially doubles the size of every library and framework binary and requires keeping around the 32-bit system call support at the kernel level as well (to the extent that it differs). On iOS, that two or three gigabytes of additional storage matters to some users.
On OS X, the only real reason to drop it is the maintenance cost of keeping all of those bits of code running, which if you're not adding anything to them, should be extremely low (i.e. close to zero). An extra couple of gigabytes our of 2 terabytes is nothing, and the extra hassle of having to find replacements for apps that no longer work is annoying. On the other hand, the usage rate of 32-bit apps may be so low that it isn't worth even a small amount of effort to keep them running, in which case nobody will care.
As for me, I have a number of apps that are still 32-bit-only, but none of them are apps that I use on a regular basis, so it really won't be a big deal having to run them on one of my old laptops instead. This is basically a shrug from my perspective.
AFAIK, FLAC files are usually smaller than ALAC,
not larger, though I guess if users rejected ALAC because of the sometimes extremely bad file size, there's a chance they might not reject FLAC, which I think is more consistent (at a cost in terms of CPU overhead).
A 10 inch drive necessitates a room of at least 400sq feet too. Small rooms cant accommodate 10 inch drivers. It's just going to be far too loud.
It's the other way around. A room of 400 square feet or more necessitates at least 10" drivers. I'm using 10" drivers in a home theater room that's only about half that size, and it is not too loud. That's why amplifiers let you independently adjust the bass output to suit the room.
Eight-inch drivers are great for near-field monitors that are only three or four feet away from you. They really don't move enough air for decent music reproduction in a room that's 400 square feet, IMO. The critical element is listening distance, not room size. The farther you are away from the speakers, the more you have to crank up the bass output to get decent sound.
I'm not convinced that any amount of cabinet design can give decent base response even at close distances with a 4.5" cone, though, unless they've drastically increased the cone excursion limits; ported speakers only get you so far.
I can understand 3D printers still needing custom drivers, or those big industrial copiers needing specialized drivers to deal with some custom publishing feature, but why on earth does a simple B&W laser printer need special hardware instructions just to print a Word document?
The irony is that to some degree, the opposite is true. If you ignore the custom PPDs (which are just text files) to enable full feature support, you can send a plain-old-ordinary PostScript file to the most expensive Fiery setup, and it will basically "just work". My wide-format color laser has a PPD, with no custom drivers. The color copiers that offer multifunction printing generally require no drivers. And so on. It's the $100 PCL-based printers (and worse) that require custom drivers, mostly because they print via USB instead of over a network, which means there's no established standard for uploading the page data (*).
(*) Technically, there is a USB printer class, but AFAIK, it lacks the descriptive capabilities needed for declaring what language the printer speaks over the bulk endpoint, making it completely hopeless as a plug-and-play standard. By contrast, network printers almost invariably support PostScript-over-LPD, and occasionally support AirPrint. Both have distinct ports, so there's no difficulty figuring out which protocol a device supports. This just leaves PPD detection and downloading, which is trivial, and which is not required at all for basic printing features to work.
Just because you can do it in a one-off demonstration with a single battery on a single car doesn't mean it would be practical to scale the concept up to a gas station that handles eight cars a minute all day. The power requirements alone would likely make such an arrangement infeasible, not to mention designing some sort of storage rack that could safely store that many batteries weighing more than half a ton each while charging them.
If you assume that in the worst case, you have one car coming in every minute and that it takes an hour to charge the battery, that means that in the worst case, you would need to store sixty batteries per "pump". A typical gas station has eight to twelve pumps, so you're talking about storing 480–720 batteries. That's 288–432 tons of batteries taking up roughly 6,400–9600 cubic feet. To put that in perspective, that's anywhere from two to six times the size of the gas tanks that gas stations have now, and that doesn't include space for lift equipment, storage racks, power infrastructure, etc. Basically, you would have to start by digging a hole and building a basement that's twenty feet deep under the entire parcel. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly nuts. Possible, yes, in theory, but....
And remember that it would require 120 kW of power per battery, times 720 batteries. This is approximately 86 megawatts of power. If you wanted to power that by solar panels, it would take approximately 200 acres, or a little less than a quarter the size of New York's Central Park. For one gas station. Or a typical coal power plant would power approximately six gas stations. The roughly 13,500 gas stations in California, then, would require approximately 1.161 terawatts, or 560 Hoover Dams, or 295 Palo Verde nuclear plants running at full tilt.
Mind you, they wouldn't require that all the time—only during the hour or so when demand is at its peak—but unless I'm off by a couple of zeroes, that would basically mean a peak power capacity that would greatly exceed the feasible power production that the United States could ever hope to build in the next several decades, just to cover California's car needs alone. That's why mass use of electric cars is only feasible if the vast majority of cars are charging slowly at night rather than rapidly during the day. The numbers just don't work otherwise (and maybe they don't anyway).
Eliminating the English track doesn't work very well, because a lot of countries with relatively low income and/or relatively high poverty rates have English as a common language across a wide range of ethnic groups. If you don't provide content in English, you'll either have to have many, many more translations ($$$$) or you'll miss out on most of your potential audience.
Other artificial barriers to trade are of limited effectiveness, in practice. They appear to work so long as only a few movies are released at a low cost in relatively poor countries. If that percentage were to change drastically so that a high enough percentage of movies were released at a low cost in some country, we would quickly reach a tipping point beyond which it would make sense to have a second Blu-Ray player or whatever with a different region. (Many anime fans already do this, precisely because of inflated U.S. prices coupled with inadequate availability.) And in the network-based movie realm, it is even more hopeless, because VPNs are relatively easy and cheap.
As I stated in my previous post we see this cost of wind and solar being cheaper than coal is only true if the fossil fuel back up remain in place (the coal plants already exists as you point out). If the goal is to go beyond nibbling at the edges of coal burning and replace coal completely then solar energy will have to be cheap enough to make up for the infrastructure needed to account that the sun does not always shine.
One of the cool things about solar is that it produces power when people most need power—during the day, and particularly during the hottest parts of the day. So the fact that the sun doesn't always shine is largely immaterial unless you're trying to use solar power for base load.
But a reduction in carbon emissions doesn't depend on shifting base load to solar. We could drastically reduce carbon emissions just by reducing our dependence on coal during peak power use, reducing the use of natural gas peaker use during the day, etc. without even considering the addition of nuclear plants, contrary to your initial argument.
And we could go even further without adding nuclear. Because solar is cheaper than natural gas already (assuming you aren't trying to store the power), we could easily replace nearly all coal use during the day with solar power, which could provide for our power needs during the day with ease, leaving coal and natural gas producing power only at night, which would mean those plants would be running only about half the time on average, representing a whopping 50% reduction in fossil fuel use without adding a single nuclear plant to replace the fossil fuel plants.
Don't get me wrong; I think nuclear power probably will be necessary to provide our base load at night if we actually intend to completely eliminate coal, natural gas, and diesel as means of power production. But clearly we can go a long way towards reducing fossil fuel use right now using the technology that we already have, and taxing carbon emissions is an entirely effective way at making solar seem even cheaper by comparison, thus promoting its use on new projects instead of the much less environmentally friendly natural gas peaker plants that seem to be so popular these days.
Personally, I like the idea of just leaving a desktop computer connected to the Internet and using screen sharing from a rental laptop while onboard the plane. It will bring the in-flight wireless to its knees, of course—particularly if more than one person is forced to do that—but perhaps that's one of the thoughts that should be running through the heads of the airline CEOs when deciding whether to sue the TSA and demand an injunction against any such laptop restrictions on domestic flights. Just saying.
Your use case is way outside the norm. Watch most people on a flight. They work through their email inbox and 'do spreadsheets.'
Almost all of which, as I said, could be done almost as easily on your cell phone without paying for a laptop rental.
People who do simple stuff that you can do on a cell phone won't pay for a laptop rental because it isn't worth the money just for a slightly bigger screen to read your email. People who do real work won't pay for laptop rental because isn't useful without all your software preinstalled. So who do they think would actually pay for such a service?
On the whole, he's arguably slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton, just less authoritarian (which is really saying something, because he's ridiculously authoritarian). The problem is that by world standards, she's so far to the right that you can't even see her from the center, along with almost all other American politicians....
That's why, as someone else already mentioned, the right workaround (ignoring the huge inconvenience of not being able to work during the flight itself) would be to buy a gun (even a starter pistol) and store it (properly declared and unloaded) in a checked lockbox along with your laptop.
Of course, if everyone who owned a laptop did this, the TSA would probably implode from the extra workload of handling that many hand inspections, but that's not my problem; that's something for the total newbie TSA people who naïvely proposed a no-laptops-onboard policy to solve.
Some airline is already experimenting with providing laptop loaners for free to business and first class passengers.
What!?! How could a loaner laptop be even slightly useful? Nearly everything I do with my laptop requires installing hundreds of dollars in software, much of which allows a limited number of installations, thus making it infeasible to install it on a loaner even if I wanted to. And even if I could get past the installation limit, it would still take the better part of an hour with a fast Internet connection just to get the software installed. And you almost certainly wouldn't have a fast Internet connection on a plane, which means you'd have to somehow do that on the ground....
And then, there's Xcode. No installation limit, but you would start installing it on one coast and it would just about be done installing when you got to the other coast.
Anyone who could realistically use a loaner laptop could also just as easily use an iPad, because their needs can't possibly be much more than web browsing. And if that's all you're going to use the laptop for on the flight, what's the point of having one at all? The airline might as well just glue a $100 Android tablet to the back of every seat and be done with it.
No, a loaner laptop, even ignoring the completely nightmarish IT security implications, would be utterly useless, and the only thing such a ban will do is create an instant market for private flight sharing programs. Perhaps call one Lyft With Lift....
I managed to get damage to a trombone inside a hard case, when the airline dropped it so hard that one of the corners broke off the case. So to the question of whether I would ever trust by laptop to an airline's care, the answer isn't just no, but, "Oh, f**king h**l, no. Not even if they agreed in advance to treble damages with a million-dollar cap."
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
The purpose of a lawsuit is not to get your job back or to force someone to hire you. Anybody attempting that is an idiot. The purpose of a lawsuit is to A. get monetary compensation for lost wages due to unfair termination or lack of hiring or whatever, and B. make your former employer (or former prospective employer) serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry.
If one company gets away with illegal hiring practices, whether it's ageism, gender discrimination, or something else entirely, then other companies will see their behavior and assume that it must be acceptable, because otherwise the first company would have gotten sued or prosecuted. Eventually an entire industry ends up doing something illegal. The only way to prevent illegal hiring practices from running rampant is to ensure that the anyone engaged in illegal hiring practices gets punished in a timely fashion by the court system.
Maybe you missed the memo, but unsubsidized solar is already cheaper than coal for new construction. Coal is only cheap because the plants already exist.
I don't want to go to a filling station. I want to do my everyday charging at home.
This. In fact, IMO, home charging is the main reason to get an electric car. Stopping to fill up once or twice a week is a pain in the backside, because unless you're the kind of person who always fills up on particular days whether your tank is empty or not, you'll always run low on fuel at the most inopportune times, like when you're running late for something. By charging overnight at home, you're assured that your vehicle will always be charged and ready when you leave in the morning, and will get you through the day, ignoring very rare long-distance trips.
The battery in a Tesla Model S weighs 1,200 pounds. Good luck coming up with a practical way to remove and replace a battery that weighs half as much as a Nissan Versa, not to mention a practical way to store hundreds or even thousands of them while they charge. Sorry, but offline charging of EV batteries is completely and utterly impractical.
This case was not about an innocent bystander, but rather a distributor trying to use a constitutional challenge to avoid conviction. The 9th circuit ruled that the law was unconstitutional by interpreting the statute in such a way that distributing child porn was illegal regardless of whether the person distributing the child porn knew that it was child porn (or even knowing that it was porn, for that matter). In the majority opinion, they said that such a reading was completely absurd and cannot possibly have been the intent of Congress in writing the law, and thus the only plausible interpretation was that the act was only a crime if the distributor knew that it was child porn. Based on that, the SCOTUS reversed the finding of unconstitutionality.
Because the lower courts had already ruled that the distributor knew that the material was child porn, the conviction was therefore upheld for lack of a constitutional reason to overturn it. The opinion of the majority strongly implied that any law lacking such a requirement would be held prima facie unconstitutional.
Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented, arguing that such a law would only be unconstitutional if the distributor did not know that the content was pornography, arguing that porn has lower protection than other forms of speech and that someone knowingly distributing porn should be strictly liable for verifying the age of the performers.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it isn't. It isn't even in the right order of magnitude. The maximum configuration of MacBook Pro is $4,000 before you factor in the value of the data on the computer, which offers the potential for nearly unbounded loss under the right circumstances.
For example, if that laptop contains an unreleased feature film, and if that laptop gets stolen and the contents get leaked while in the airline's care, we could be talking about tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and I would not expect their damage waiver to hold up in court under those circumstances.
I don't think the TSA has really thought this through, and if the airlines agree to it, we need to subject them all to mandatory drug tests; there's not enough crack in the world for this to make sense, and we all want to know what they're smoking.
Yes, in terms of time, at first glance, it might seem backwards. OS X got 32-bit Intel apps in 2005 and 64-bit app support in 2007. iOS got then in 2007 and got 64-bit app support in 2013. But that's not the complete story. On OS X, some software has seen minor updates to keep it running on newer CPUs without completely rewriting it. The oldest of that software, potentially written as far back as 1984, is based on the Carbon API. As others have already mentioned, the UI portion of that API has no 64-bit replacement. So in a way, OS X potentially has 33 years of hard-to-update 32-bit apps, whereas iOS had only six years of relatively easy-to-update 32-bit apps.
And there are some other big differences:
So basically, the toy-consumer-product nature of iOS makes mandatory 64-bit much less problematic than it would on OS X. If people relied on old software on iOS to the extent that they do on OS X, it would be a much bigger deal.
The compromise is that High Sierra + 1 will give a warning every time you launch a 32-bit app saying that your app won't run in High Sierra + n (for some unknown value of n).
On iOS, it makes a lot more sense than on OS X. Maintaining the 32-bit slice essentially doubles the size of every library and framework binary and requires keeping around the 32-bit system call support at the kernel level as well (to the extent that it differs). On iOS, that two or three gigabytes of additional storage matters to some users.
On OS X, the only real reason to drop it is the maintenance cost of keeping all of those bits of code running, which if you're not adding anything to them, should be extremely low (i.e. close to zero). An extra couple of gigabytes our of 2 terabytes is nothing, and the extra hassle of having to find replacements for apps that no longer work is annoying. On the other hand, the usage rate of 32-bit apps may be so low that it isn't worth even a small amount of effort to keep them running, in which case nobody will care.
As for me, I have a number of apps that are still 32-bit-only, but none of them are apps that I use on a regular basis, so it really won't be a big deal having to run them on one of my old laptops instead. This is basically a shrug from my perspective.
The bottom note on a standard (non-extended) piano is 27.5 Hz. Bottoming out at 50 Hz means you lose an entire octave.
AFAIK, FLAC files are usually smaller than ALAC, not larger, though I guess if users rejected ALAC because of the sometimes extremely bad file size, there's a chance they might not reject FLAC, which I think is more consistent (at a cost in terms of CPU overhead).
Or just make them get law degrees. Harvard has nearly a 0% recidivism rate; people who go to Harvard almost never go back. :-)
It's the other way around. A room of 400 square feet or more necessitates at least 10" drivers. I'm using 10" drivers in a home theater room that's only about half that size, and it is not too loud. That's why amplifiers let you independently adjust the bass output to suit the room.
Eight-inch drivers are great for near-field monitors that are only three or four feet away from you. They really don't move enough air for decent music reproduction in a room that's 400 square feet, IMO. The critical element is listening distance, not room size. The farther you are away from the speakers, the more you have to crank up the bass output to get decent sound.
I'm not convinced that any amount of cabinet design can give decent base response even at close distances with a 4.5" cone, though, unless they've drastically increased the cone excursion limits; ported speakers only get you so far.
The irony is that to some degree, the opposite is true. If you ignore the custom PPDs (which are just text files) to enable full feature support, you can send a plain-old-ordinary PostScript file to the most expensive Fiery setup, and it will basically "just work". My wide-format color laser has a PPD, with no custom drivers. The color copiers that offer multifunction printing generally require no drivers. And so on. It's the $100 PCL-based printers (and worse) that require custom drivers, mostly because they print via USB instead of over a network, which means there's no established standard for uploading the page data (*).
(*) Technically, there is a USB printer class, but AFAIK, it lacks the descriptive capabilities needed for declaring what language the printer speaks over the bulk endpoint, making it completely hopeless as a plug-and-play standard. By contrast, network printers almost invariably support PostScript-over-LPD, and occasionally support AirPrint. Both have distinct ports, so there's no difficulty figuring out which protocol a device supports. This just leaves PPD detection and downloading, which is trivial, and which is not required at all for basic printing features to work.
Well, good news. Now, there's a Mac Pro that's an iMac.
*sigh*
Just because you can do it in a one-off demonstration with a single battery on a single car doesn't mean it would be practical to scale the concept up to a gas station that handles eight cars a minute all day. The power requirements alone would likely make such an arrangement infeasible, not to mention designing some sort of storage rack that could safely store that many batteries weighing more than half a ton each while charging them.
If you assume that in the worst case, you have one car coming in every minute and that it takes an hour to charge the battery, that means that in the worst case, you would need to store sixty batteries per "pump". A typical gas station has eight to twelve pumps, so you're talking about storing 480–720 batteries. That's 288–432 tons of batteries taking up roughly 6,400–9600 cubic feet. To put that in perspective, that's anywhere from two to six times the size of the gas tanks that gas stations have now, and that doesn't include space for lift equipment, storage racks, power infrastructure, etc. Basically, you would have to start by digging a hole and building a basement that's twenty feet deep under the entire parcel. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly nuts. Possible, yes, in theory, but....
And remember that it would require 120 kW of power per battery, times 720 batteries. This is approximately 86 megawatts of power. If you wanted to power that by solar panels, it would take approximately 200 acres, or a little less than a quarter the size of New York's Central Park. For one gas station. Or a typical coal power plant would power approximately six gas stations. The roughly 13,500 gas stations in California, then, would require approximately 1.161 terawatts, or 560 Hoover Dams, or 295 Palo Verde nuclear plants running at full tilt.
Mind you, they wouldn't require that all the time—only during the hour or so when demand is at its peak—but unless I'm off by a couple of zeroes, that would basically mean a peak power capacity that would greatly exceed the feasible power production that the United States could ever hope to build in the next several decades, just to cover California's car needs alone. That's why mass use of electric cars is only feasible if the vast majority of cars are charging slowly at night rather than rapidly during the day. The numbers just don't work otherwise (and maybe they don't anyway).
Eliminating the English track doesn't work very well, because a lot of countries with relatively low income and/or relatively high poverty rates have English as a common language across a wide range of ethnic groups. If you don't provide content in English, you'll either have to have many, many more translations ($$$$) or you'll miss out on most of your potential audience.
Other artificial barriers to trade are of limited effectiveness, in practice. They appear to work so long as only a few movies are released at a low cost in relatively poor countries. If that percentage were to change drastically so that a high enough percentage of movies were released at a low cost in some country, we would quickly reach a tipping point beyond which it would make sense to have a second Blu-Ray player or whatever with a different region. (Many anime fans already do this, precisely because of inflated U.S. prices coupled with inadequate availability.) And in the network-based movie realm, it is even more hopeless, because VPNs are relatively easy and cheap.
If you only jump headfirst into free trade for a single industry, then the catastrophe would obviously be industry-specific. :-)
One of the cool things about solar is that it produces power when people most need power—during the day, and particularly during the hottest parts of the day. So the fact that the sun doesn't always shine is largely immaterial unless you're trying to use solar power for base load.
But a reduction in carbon emissions doesn't depend on shifting base load to solar. We could drastically reduce carbon emissions just by reducing our dependence on coal during peak power use, reducing the use of natural gas peaker use during the day, etc. without even considering the addition of nuclear plants, contrary to your initial argument.
And we could go even further without adding nuclear. Because solar is cheaper than natural gas already (assuming you aren't trying to store the power), we could easily replace nearly all coal use during the day with solar power, which could provide for our power needs during the day with ease, leaving coal and natural gas producing power only at night, which would mean those plants would be running only about half the time on average, representing a whopping 50% reduction in fossil fuel use without adding a single nuclear plant to replace the fossil fuel plants.
Don't get me wrong; I think nuclear power probably will be necessary to provide our base load at night if we actually intend to completely eliminate coal, natural gas, and diesel as means of power production. But clearly we can go a long way towards reducing fossil fuel use right now using the technology that we already have, and taxing carbon emissions is an entirely effective way at making solar seem even cheaper by comparison, thus promoting its use on new projects instead of the much less environmentally friendly natural gas peaker plants that seem to be so popular these days.
Personally, I like the idea of just leaving a desktop computer connected to the Internet and using screen sharing from a rental laptop while onboard the plane. It will bring the in-flight wireless to its knees, of course—particularly if more than one person is forced to do that—but perhaps that's one of the thoughts that should be running through the heads of the airline CEOs when deciding whether to sue the TSA and demand an injunction against any such laptop restrictions on domestic flights. Just saying.
Almost all of which, as I said, could be done almost as easily on your cell phone without paying for a laptop rental.
People who do simple stuff that you can do on a cell phone won't pay for a laptop rental because it isn't worth the money just for a slightly bigger screen to read your email. People who do real work won't pay for laptop rental because isn't useful without all your software preinstalled. So who do they think would actually pay for such a service?
On the whole, he's arguably slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton, just less authoritarian (which is really saying something, because he's ridiculously authoritarian). The problem is that by world standards, she's so far to the right that you can't even see her from the center, along with almost all other American politicians....
That's why, as someone else already mentioned, the right workaround (ignoring the huge inconvenience of not being able to work during the flight itself) would be to buy a gun (even a starter pistol) and store it (properly declared and unloaded) in a checked lockbox along with your laptop.
Of course, if everyone who owned a laptop did this, the TSA would probably implode from the extra workload of handling that many hand inspections, but that's not my problem; that's something for the total newbie TSA people who naïvely proposed a no-laptops-onboard policy to solve.
What!?! How could a loaner laptop be even slightly useful? Nearly everything I do with my laptop requires installing hundreds of dollars in software, much of which allows a limited number of installations, thus making it infeasible to install it on a loaner even if I wanted to. And even if I could get past the installation limit, it would still take the better part of an hour with a fast Internet connection just to get the software installed. And you almost certainly wouldn't have a fast Internet connection on a plane, which means you'd have to somehow do that on the ground....
And then, there's Xcode. No installation limit, but you would start installing it on one coast and it would just about be done installing when you got to the other coast.
Anyone who could realistically use a loaner laptop could also just as easily use an iPad, because their needs can't possibly be much more than web browsing. And if that's all you're going to use the laptop for on the flight, what's the point of having one at all? The airline might as well just glue a $100 Android tablet to the back of every seat and be done with it.
No, a loaner laptop, even ignoring the completely nightmarish IT security implications, would be utterly useless, and the only thing such a ban will do is create an instant market for private flight sharing programs. Perhaps call one Lyft With Lift....
I managed to get damage to a trombone inside a hard case, when the airline dropped it so hard that one of the corners broke off the case. So to the question of whether I would ever trust by laptop to an airline's care, the answer isn't just no, but, "Oh, f**king h**l, no. Not even if they agreed in advance to treble damages with a million-dollar cap."
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
The purpose of a lawsuit is not to get your job back or to force someone to hire you. Anybody attempting that is an idiot. The purpose of a lawsuit is to A. get monetary compensation for lost wages due to unfair termination or lack of hiring or whatever, and B. make your former employer (or former prospective employer) serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry.
If one company gets away with illegal hiring practices, whether it's ageism, gender discrimination, or something else entirely, then other companies will see their behavior and assume that it must be acceptable, because otherwise the first company would have gotten sued or prosecuted. Eventually an entire industry ends up doing something illegal. The only way to prevent illegal hiring practices from running rampant is to ensure that the anyone engaged in illegal hiring practices gets punished in a timely fashion by the court system.
Maybe you missed the memo, but unsubsidized solar is already cheaper than coal for new construction. Coal is only cheap because the plants already exist.
This. In fact, IMO, home charging is the main reason to get an electric car. Stopping to fill up once or twice a week is a pain in the backside, because unless you're the kind of person who always fills up on particular days whether your tank is empty or not, you'll always run low on fuel at the most inopportune times, like when you're running late for something. By charging overnight at home, you're assured that your vehicle will always be charged and ready when you leave in the morning, and will get you through the day, ignoring very rare long-distance trips.
The battery in a Tesla Model S weighs 1,200 pounds. Good luck coming up with a practical way to remove and replace a battery that weighs half as much as a Nissan Versa, not to mention a practical way to store hundreds or even thousands of them while they charge. Sorry, but offline charging of EV batteries is completely and utterly impractical.
Go read the actual decision and then tell me I'm wrong.
This case was not about an innocent bystander, but rather a distributor trying to use a constitutional challenge to avoid conviction. The 9th circuit ruled that the law was unconstitutional by interpreting the statute in such a way that distributing child porn was illegal regardless of whether the person distributing the child porn knew that it was child porn (or even knowing that it was porn, for that matter). In the majority opinion, they said that such a reading was completely absurd and cannot possibly have been the intent of Congress in writing the law, and thus the only plausible interpretation was that the act was only a crime if the distributor knew that it was child porn. Based on that, the SCOTUS reversed the finding of unconstitutionality.
Because the lower courts had already ruled that the distributor knew that the material was child porn, the conviction was therefore upheld for lack of a constitutional reason to overturn it. The opinion of the majority strongly implied that any law lacking such a requirement would be held prima facie unconstitutional.
Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented, arguing that such a law would only be unconstitutional if the distributor did not know that the content was pornography, arguing that porn has lower protection than other forms of speech and that someone knowingly distributing porn should be strictly liable for verifying the age of the performers.