A very fair point, and yes, that’s on me. My understanding was that they were prohibitively expensive when done at the whole-home level and that they require regular maintenance as well, hence my statement that I couldn’t be bothered. If you’re suggesting they may actually be cost effective, however, it’s something worth revisiting, since it’s entirely possible that I am either wrong or misinformed about their costs.
And it’s also worth saying: thanks for keeping me honest by calling me out on my apparent hypocrisy. Comments like yours here are what I appreciate most about this site.
Water store? Honestly ignorant here, since that isn’t something I’ve ever heard of. The closest thing I know of are water delivery services that deliver those large tanks of spring water to your home. I did some quick searching, but I don’t seem to know what I’m looking for, since the results I found didn’t look too fruitful. Could I get a link?
But yes, refillable, large containers would be my idea of an ideal solution if I knew where to get them filled with water from somewhere else. I wasn’t aware that that might actually even be a thing, so I’d love more info.
Why the hell not? I discourage people from following my lead when it comes to bottles. Sure, I'll explain my reasoning, but I'll just as quickly explain to people that my reasoning almost certainly doesn't apply to their situation, since I've never tasted water this bad anywhere else.
I have no interest in trying to convince you or anybody else to make yourself be the slightest bit uncomfortable on order to help others.
You don't have to. I already said I'm inconveniencing myself, gave examples of it, and indicated a willingness to do even more, if only I knew how to do so in a reasonable way. I hate the bottles, but I don't see an alternative. Perhaps, in your efforts to do better, you've become aware of filtration systems that would help my situation? Or ways to buy water from elsewhere in bulk that don't involve plastic? I'm all ears. Really.
If you need somebody to pat your head and rub your tummy
Doubling down on the role of condescending prick, I see?
Oh, Heaven forbid you have something cross your palette that is less than perfect. I'm sorry you're so delicate. I drink tap water that tastes like chlorine, but I deal with it, because my precious, precious taste buds aren't as important as my contribution to cancer all over the world due to increased externalities from a plastic bottle.
My suggestion is: suck it up.
Thanks for proving everything I said about you true:
If a desire to drink something that doesn't taste like salt water isn't a "good reason" to you, I'd suggest that you've valued dogmatism more than you've valued having a proper regard towards your fellow man.
If you actually had any interest in the cause you're espousing, you'd have jumped at the opportunity to help someone like me get over the sorts of hurdles I'm describing
Telling someone to suck it up does nothing to help the environment. If you actually cared about the environment, you'd do better than that, since I actually want to be doing better, but see no way to do so myself. Stop being a condescending prick and actually do something to help the cause you say you support.
If you're willing to ignore the upsides that people have repeatedly cited in this thread and in response to you, then sure, plastic bottles are nothing but downside. But why stop at plastic bottles, when—once you're willing to ignore upsides—there are much bigger targets for your concern?
I trust that you're walking around naked so as to avoid contributing to the wasted energy used in the production of fibers (e.g. raising sheep/llamas/spiders, synthesizing polyester, etc.), manufacturing of cloth (e.g. spinning wheels, looms, etc.), assembly of clothing (e.g. sewing machines, presses, A/C for the workers, etc.). And of course, the toxic chemicals that must be used to make them (e.g. glues, dyes, softeners, etc.) that aren't good. And the oil that went into that polyester/buttons/batting won't be usable by humans likely ever again. There's no upside to clothes, for sure, but there are certainly downsides.
Likewise, I trust that you avoid making use of transportation, public or otherwise, since there's a lot of wasted energy that goes into making cars and trains, as well as making them move uselessly from place to place. And of course the toxic chemicals that must be used to make them and make them move aren't good. And the oil that went into that gasoline/chassis/wire insulation won't be usable by humans likely ever again. There's no upside to transportation, for sure, but there are certainly downsides.
And let's not even talk about what a waste of resources electronics are. They're nothing but plastics, rare earth metals, third world mines, and bad factory conditions. Right? Bad all around, no upsides at all! You're personally killing the planet by using or owning electronics, no exceptions, no redemption.
Or, perhaps some of us are rational human beings with reasons for the actions we take (reasons which we've even explained to you). Perhaps some of us have even given significant thought and consideration to our decisions and make a point of seeking out responsible producers and manufacturers, inasmuch as we're able to do so. Perhaps some of us recognize upsides that you seem incapable of acknowledging, which drive us to make different choices than you do. Perhaps some of us would love for the math to work out differently in our situations, but we acknowledge the reality of the situations we face, rather than falling back on a hardline ideology that falls apart once you try to apply it outside of the hypothetical, frictionless vacuum in which it was conceived. Perhaps some of us think that you would immediately cave on your stance too if you faced the situations we're facing.
Perhaps.
But hey, it's a good thing that choices other than the ones we make have no upsides, right? We wouldn't want to have to weigh matters or give alternative points of view any actual thought!
And of course, each of those water bottles that you use is going to be around on the planet for thousands of years. That's a tremendous amount of environmental damage you're creating for no good reason.
If a desire to drink something that doesn't taste like salt water isn't a "good reason" to you, I'd suggest that you've valued dogmatism more than you've valued having a proper regard towards your fellow man.
I'm not a "I don't get what the big deal is" person. I'm not a "I simply must have water from a spring-fed river" person. I'm a "I hate getting bottled water, but see no reasonable alternative" person, which should have been clear from my previous post. I'm already avoiding bottled water where I can (e.g. using filtered water for coffee and tea), but I see no way to avoid it when it comes drinking plain water, since Brita simply isn't doing enough. If you actually had any interest in the cause you're espousing, you'd have jumped at the opportunity to help someone like me get over the sorts of hurdles I'm describing, since the only thing keeping me from joining your side is an awareness of a means to reasonably do so! As best I can figure, however, your goal in posting was simply to stoke yourown ego with a self righteous proclamation at my expense.
Congratulations. It was a great success.
Again, I would gladly drink tap water here at home—just like I do everywhere else and just like I have for the rest of my life—if I knew how to make it tolerable. I'm aware of the environmental problems with bottled water (aside: does recycling not exist where you live?). I'm aware that even at just $0.10/bottle for the stuff we buy, it's still orders of magnitude more expensive than what we get from the tap. Despite that, it's still our best option when it comes to plain water. If our tap water tasted anything like it does 50-100 miles in any direction, we'd be drinking it. If it tasted anything like it does literally anywhere else that I've ever lived or visited in my life, we'd be drinking it. But it doesn't. Our water here tastes bad, really bad, and that situation hasn't changed in the 16 years that I've been here. The locals all talk about it. The transient students and workers all talk about it. The professors at the university talk openly about it in class and even discuss its causes. It's a well-known problem that everyone here is aware of, but the municipality hasn't chosen to take whatever steps would be necessary to address it on their end.
Give me suggestions to address the issue on my end and I'll consider them, but don't expect a gracious response if you insist on unhelpfully beating people up with the mantra that "bottles are bad" without even trying to show the slightest bit of regard towards the hurdles in their way.
The last time I was in Europe, the tap water tasted horrible. Then I hopped on a train to a different part of Europe, and suddenly the tap water tasted fine. I, like you, had assumed that all water in a large region tastes exactly the same. Imagine my shock to discover that the water in one place tastes different than the water in a different place!
</sarcasm>
Likewise, given that the US is several thousand miles across, and that depending on where you're located you may be dealing with deserts, glaciers, mountains, tropics, forests, prairies, urban centers, or more, you might find that the water tastes different from place to place. Everywhere else I've lived (Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts), it's been fine. Where I'm at now, it's terrible when it comes to flavor. It's perfectly safe to drink, of course, but it's salty as all get out, enough to ruin tea and coffee. Just depends on where you live. *shrug*
It's not always about health. Sometimes it's literally a matter of taste.
At least where we live now, we have a large quantity of naturally occurring sodium in our ground water. When combined with the chlorination of the water treatment system, the result is tap water with an excessively salty taste. As in, it ruins what would otherwise be perfectly good tea or coffee and can affect cooking recipes to a lesser degree. Put simply, it isn't at all pleasant to drink by itself unless it's been filtered several additional times or you dump additional flavoring into it (e.g. I'll always order water with lemon or lime when we eat out, just to mask the flavor of the water). It's perfectly safe to drink, of course, but the taste of it...blech.
Mind you, I grew up drinking water straight from the tap as we moved from Los Angeles to Palm Beach to Houston by the time I was 16, so I'm not picky about my water needing to taste a particular way. Whether it's collected on the second Tuesday after the vernal equinox from the shavings of an Alaskan glacier or "collected" from a rubber hose behind a seedy industrial park, it's generally fine by me...so long as that hose is attached to a tap at least 100 miles from where I live. Anywhere else I go, I'm happy to drink water straight from the tap, but we rely on drinking the cheapest stuff they sell at the store at home, which was almost certainly filledfrom the aforementioned rubber hose. We do use a Brita-filtered pitcher for the water we use in our tea and coffee, since it does a good enough job at taking the edge off, but for drinking water by itself, the taste here just isn't something we've ever been able to get used to and I honestly can't be bothered to set up a more advanced filtration system, so simply as a matter of taste, I'm sadly one of those suckers who buys bottled water.
“Looks worse” is a matter of subjective preference, which I specifically addressed, but when it comes to objective measures (e.g. fidelity), yes, it’s definitively worse. Feel free to sharpen things on your end if that’s your preference, but don’t foist your (bad) taste on everyone else.
They weren’t talking about leaving the state. They were talking about moving out of their parent’s basement. With housing prices higher there than anywhere else in the nation, however, the answer is nearly always, “no”.
Sharpening the image is an inherently lossy process. You're replacing a more detailed image containing a soft edge with something that has a crisp edge with less gradation. You can't then reverse the process to get back to the original image, since there'd be no way to tell the difference between things that actually had a sharp edge in the original image and things that had merely had their edges sharpened after the fact. They'd both look the same.
Frankly, sharpness is a really lousy measure for determining how good an image is. It doesn't make images look better, in and of itself, and it's something that the user can already introduce themselves if that's where their preferences lie, simply by bumping up the sharpness on their TV. Of course, if your goal is to have the highest fidelity image, you shouldn't set your TV's sharpness to anything over 0. Back in the day of analog CRTs it used to be the case that sharpness might improve the fidelity, but ever since the switch to digital LCDs anything more than 0 adds sharpness that wasn't there in the original image, thus decreasing the visual fidelity of the resulting image.
It's not even an Amazon or online problem. This happens at physical retail too.
Years and years ago there was a game I had been looking forward to playing, so my mother kindly purchased it as a birthday gift for me from a retail store. They must've seen a sucker coming in when they saw her, since not only did they sell a used copy to her as new and at full price for new copies, they didn't even bother selling her a decent used copy. Besides the shrink wrap obviously being missing, the cartridge had a save file on it already, the cover of the game manual had been used to test someone's ballpoint pen, and several other items that were supposed to be in the case had been removed.
Of course, this is Gamestop, which has (had?) a commonplace practice of allowing employees to take games homes and play them, only to re-shrink wrap those copies afterwards and sell them as new. I was boycotting them prior to what they did to my mother. To say the least, what they did to her didn't exactly win back my business.
Similarly, when I was in grad school, a number of my housemates worked at a particular used video games store (a local place, not a chain). They came back with story after story about all the things the store's owner (who eventually ran the business into the ground after starting it with an inheritance he received) would do to cut corners. For instance, Sony was trying to push blu-ray adoption really hard when the Playstation 3 launched, so you could send in your PS3 box's UPC to get three random blu-rays for free. The store's owner would cut the UPCs off each box before he sold it to a customer, mail them to Sony to redeem the blu-rays, then would take those blu-rays to Best Buy to "get a refund". At the time, Best Buy didn't require a receipt and their blu-ray prices started at $15 (even for terrible movies that no one wanted), so this store owner was able to defraud Best Buy to the tune of $45+ for each PS3 his store received, not to mention defrauding his customers by selling a damaged item as new, since they wouldn't be able to redeem those blu-rays themselves or otherwise use the UPC as a proof of purchase, should they ever need it.
I assume the tax would apply to those services as well. Generally legislation isn't specific as to which service you use.
How's that supposed to work? The two aren't anything alike.
They operate over different networks (cellular vs. cellular, WiFi, and wired). They operate on cellular via different channels (dedicated vs. general purpose). They differ in security (not encrypted vs. end-to-end encrypted). They require different hardware (SIM vs. any Internet connection). They operate on different classes of devices (phones and SIM-equipped laptops/tablets vs. PCs, phones, tablets, and MP3 players). The natively support differing numbers of devices per user (one per user vs. many per user). They natively support different content (texts alone vs. texts + effects, audio/video, typing notifications, tap backs, read receipts, stickers, money, hand drawings, etc.).
And that's all before we even get to the most obvious problem: one costs the end user a monthly fee just to use it, the other doesn't cost anything. Collecting a tax on $0 is a fool's errand.
I'd shudder to think how legislators would define the law in such a way that it could apply to those services in any sort of reasonable way. Aside from how they are visually presented to end users, there's really no similarity at all between iMessages/WhatsApp and standard SMS texting. If anything, the former bears more resemblance to instant messaging than it does to SMS texting. How are legislators supposed to draw a line that puts iMessage/WhatsApp on the same side as SMS without also including IRC, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google app of the month, e-mail, or really just about any other form of asynchronous communication, free or otherwise?
A user may think that the only difference is that one is a green bubble and the other is blue, but the actual differences are vast.
While I'm not usually part of the conspiracy crowd, I'll make an exception for this one. Did anyone expect an internal investigation of Supermicro to yield anything but an "innocent" verdict? Can you imagine the damage to Supermicro's brand had any other result been released?
Wait a sec. That logic makes no sense.
Regardless of which side of this debate you're on, this is the result we expected. The people who think Bloomberg got it wrong were expecting this result because Bloomberg got it wrong. The conspiracy believers were execting this result because there's a coordinated coverup. That the result matched everyone's expectations no more proves a coverup than it disproves one. It's simply the expected result.
That said, while the result matching expectations may not prove or disprove anything, there's only one direction that the result itself can incline any rational person: towards thinking that Bloomberg got it wrong. While you're welcome to dismiss it, the findings themselves are yet another piece of evidence against Bloomberg's claims, and they join a growing body of evidence, all of which so far has lined up against Bloomberg's claims. On the other hand, this result provides no evidence whatsoever in support of a coverup (again, it's the expected outcome for both sides). Of course, if you choose to dismiss it as part of the coverup, then you've just expanded the scope of the coverup to include these auditors as well, in which case it now takes even more faith to believe in the coverup than before. For any rational person, a demand to increase one's faith in a thing without being given any basis for doing so would be cause to reevaluate that faith.
If this result pushed you to "make an exception" by joining the conspiracy crowd, I'd suggest that you're either confused or lying, because you're clearly already a card-carrying member of the conspiracy crowd. At best you can dismiss the results as meaningless, but there's no rational way to take this result and go in the direction you say you went.
What's missing from the summary is the fact that, in addition to not covering this year's models, this injunction doesn't bar sales of any iPhone running iOS 12, which is the latest version of iOS. Given that every model Apple currently sells can be updated to iOS 12 (and were likely being sold with iOS 12 installed, straight out of the box, even prior to this ruling), Apple has issued a statement making it clear that all iPhones remain available for purchase in China. I.e. This injunction did absolutely nothing at all.
As for what Qualcomm's patents are/were covering, MacRumors' article indicates they were used to "adjust and reformat the size and appearance of photos", for "managing applications using a touch screen when viewing and navigating apps", and a third patent of which has apparently already been invalidated in court.
Forget the content creators banding together, if YouTube simply keeps trying to monetize itself as heavily as it has been recently, they'll lose a number of their regular users.
Right now, it's not uncommon for my wife and I to launch the YouTube app on a TV-connected device right before we hit the hay, watch a video or two as we wind down mentally, then go to sleep. But with them shoving unskippable ads down our throats on what feels like every single video, as well as interrupting the content to shove ads into the videos if they run longer than about 10 minutes, we're quickly reaching a breaking point. We're close to either not bothering with YouTube at all for any amount of idle watching, or else I'll finally get around to setting up whole-home ad-blocking for our entire home network (e.g. Pi-hole), either of which is a loss for them.
Be that as it may, how is it relevant or contrary to anything I said?
We're talking about the period from 2014-2018, during which time there wasn't a housing crash. And even if there had been a crash sufficient to push a loan upside down, that owner's equity wouldn't have disappeared: it would have simply gone negative, much to their chagrin.
If you own something, you have equity in it. That doesn't magically become false if the thing loses value in a crash, even if the value of the equity you possess may change dramatically.
Glassdoor just updated their best companies to work for list and Facebook is in the top 10 based on employee feedback. Methinks someone is lying to Glassdoor about their experience at Facebook.
I think it was the one that debuted as an Android exclusive, with the ability to type directly to the Google Assistant? Honestly, I'm not sure. I only stopped using Google Talk last year, just in time to have to leave Google Hangouts because it was shutting down too, just in time to have to migrate away from Google Chat because my company was switching to Slack to get away from all of that nonsense.
You're also assuming folks are moving FROM a home where they have equity
Given that the OP was talking about a person who bought a house in 2014, it's safe to assume that they are moving from a home in which they have equity.
and not a condo or an apartment.
It sounds like you don't understand how condos work. People buy condos, just like they buy houses. A condo's owner has equity in their condo, the same way that a house's owner has equity in their house. A condo's owner may rent their condo out to someone else, which I'd wager is what's confusing you, but that's just as true of houses as it is condos, so it's incorrect to draw a distinction between the two.
If I were to sell my home today and move to another State into a similar sized and age home, it would cost me at least 2x - 4x as much depending on the State.
If that's actually true, yours is an abnormal situation on which we should NOT model expected outcomes. But given what appears to be a lack of awareness on your part with regards to how housing and equity works, I'm inclined to think you're simply unaware of housing prices available elsewhere. I'd love to hear the numbers for your situation and which state you're in.
That's great to hear, but again, there's a big difference between "receiving 5G coverage" and "receiving 5G speeds". Moreover, being in "most major metro areas" doesn't mean most people in most major metro areas will receive coverage.
For instance, when it comes to wired ISPs, so long as anyone in the county has the option to purchase a broadband package—as self-reported by the ISPs themselves—the FCC considers the county as a whole to have broadband access. Similarly, a wireless carrier could claim that they provide coverage in 100% of the counties in a state by simply putting up one antenna in each county. It doesn't do 99% of the people in the state any good, but it makes for a great statistic to use when marketing their network to potential customers.
Because they have a history of tactics like those, I don't put much stock in vague claims about being in places like "most major metro areas". That bar is actually pretty low.
That's kinda where I'm at with my thinking. 5G support may storm the holiday season, but without the corresponding infrastructure upgrades in your area, it won't do you any good. Given that our local 4G connections didn't actually come with 4G speeds until somewhat recently, I'm not exactly holding my breath for 5G speeds anytime in the next few years in my area.
And, frankly, even if they were to come soon, I'd be hard-pressed to think of many situations where I'd meaningfully benefit from the speed jump. There certainly are use cases for speeds like those (e.g. able to do work from a cellular-connected laptop), so I'm glad to see that the rollout is happening, but the heaviest thing most smartphone users might do is watch an HD video on YouTube, which only needs 3-5 Mbps for 1080p, which is a fraction of the speed that 4G already offers. They'll see no benefit from 5G, so marketing it as "storming" the holiday season is nothing more than an attempt at driving demand for a feature that laypeople don't really understand.
And how much do they expect advertisers to pay for ads that people are guaranteed not be watching - because they're doing something else?
How are they getting advertisers to pay for ads today? After Hulu switched from free-with-ads to paid-with-ads, I got the impression they managed to scare off most of their user base (they certainly lost me, and I had been with them since the closed beta). With Fox selling most of its assets to Disney and ABC being Disney's as well, it's likely that Hulu will lose most of the content from two of its three largest content providers (leaving just NBC) as soon as those licensing agreements are up.
This is probably Hulu's attempt to drum up monetization—even modestly—in order to bring in more content providers, but there are more and more companies out there willing and able to help the big players get their own streaming services off the ground (e.g. after Major League Baseball did really well with MLB.tv, they spun the group off as MLB Advanced Media, which has provided backend services for everyone from ESPN to HBO), so it strikes me as being too little, too late.
Who said they aren't using cookies (or any other identification techniques)? The headline merely mentions not being logged in. You can be logged out and still receive cookies and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
A very fair point, and yes, that’s on me. My understanding was that they were prohibitively expensive when done at the whole-home level and that they require regular maintenance as well, hence my statement that I couldn’t be bothered. If you’re suggesting they may actually be cost effective, however, it’s something worth revisiting, since it’s entirely possible that I am either wrong or misinformed about their costs.
And it’s also worth saying: thanks for keeping me honest by calling me out on my apparent hypocrisy. Comments like yours here are what I appreciate most about this site.
Water store? Honestly ignorant here, since that isn’t something I’ve ever heard of. The closest thing I know of are water delivery services that deliver those large tanks of spring water to your home. I did some quick searching, but I don’t seem to know what I’m looking for, since the results I found didn’t look too fruitful. Could I get a link?
But yes, refillable, large containers would be my idea of an ideal solution if I knew where to get them filled with water from somewhere else. I wasn’t aware that that might actually even be a thing, so I’d love more info.
I'm not encouraging others to follow my lead.
Why the hell not? I discourage people from following my lead when it comes to bottles. Sure, I'll explain my reasoning, but I'll just as quickly explain to people that my reasoning almost certainly doesn't apply to their situation, since I've never tasted water this bad anywhere else.
I have no interest in trying to convince you or anybody else to make yourself be the slightest bit uncomfortable on order to help others.
You don't have to. I already said I'm inconveniencing myself, gave examples of it, and indicated a willingness to do even more, if only I knew how to do so in a reasonable way. I hate the bottles, but I don't see an alternative. Perhaps, in your efforts to do better, you've become aware of filtration systems that would help my situation? Or ways to buy water from elsewhere in bulk that don't involve plastic? I'm all ears. Really.
If you need somebody to pat your head and rub your tummy
Doubling down on the role of condescending prick, I see?
Oh, Heaven forbid you have something cross your palette that is less than perfect. I'm sorry you're so delicate. I drink tap water that tastes like chlorine, but I deal with it, because my precious, precious taste buds aren't as important as my contribution to cancer all over the world due to increased externalities from a plastic bottle.
My suggestion is: suck it up.
Thanks for proving everything I said about you true:
If a desire to drink something that doesn't taste like salt water isn't a "good reason" to you, I'd suggest that you've valued dogmatism more than you've valued having a proper regard towards your fellow man.
If you actually had any interest in the cause you're espousing, you'd have jumped at the opportunity to help someone like me get over the sorts of hurdles I'm describing
Telling someone to suck it up does nothing to help the environment. If you actually cared about the environment, you'd do better than that, since I actually want to be doing better, but see no way to do so myself. Stop being a condescending prick and actually do something to help the cause you say you support.
If you're willing to ignore the upsides that people have repeatedly cited in this thread and in response to you, then sure, plastic bottles are nothing but downside. But why stop at plastic bottles, when—once you're willing to ignore upsides—there are much bigger targets for your concern?
I trust that you're walking around naked so as to avoid contributing to the wasted energy used in the production of fibers (e.g. raising sheep/llamas/spiders, synthesizing polyester, etc.), manufacturing of cloth (e.g. spinning wheels, looms, etc.), assembly of clothing (e.g. sewing machines, presses, A/C for the workers, etc.). And of course, the toxic chemicals that must be used to make them (e.g. glues, dyes, softeners, etc.) that aren't good. And the oil that went into that polyester/buttons/batting won't be usable by humans likely ever again. There's no upside to clothes, for sure, but there are certainly downsides.
Likewise, I trust that you avoid making use of transportation, public or otherwise, since there's a lot of wasted energy that goes into making cars and trains, as well as making them move uselessly from place to place. And of course the toxic chemicals that must be used to make them and make them move aren't good. And the oil that went into that gasoline/chassis/wire insulation won't be usable by humans likely ever again. There's no upside to transportation, for sure, but there are certainly downsides.
And let's not even talk about what a waste of resources electronics are. They're nothing but plastics, rare earth metals, third world mines, and bad factory conditions. Right? Bad all around, no upsides at all! You're personally killing the planet by using or owning electronics, no exceptions, no redemption.
Or, perhaps some of us are rational human beings with reasons for the actions we take (reasons which we've even explained to you). Perhaps some of us have even given significant thought and consideration to our decisions and make a point of seeking out responsible producers and manufacturers, inasmuch as we're able to do so. Perhaps some of us recognize upsides that you seem incapable of acknowledging, which drive us to make different choices than you do. Perhaps some of us would love for the math to work out differently in our situations, but we acknowledge the reality of the situations we face, rather than falling back on a hardline ideology that falls apart once you try to apply it outside of the hypothetical, frictionless vacuum in which it was conceived. Perhaps some of us think that you would immediately cave on your stance too if you faced the situations we're facing.
Perhaps.
But hey, it's a good thing that choices other than the ones we make have no upsides, right? We wouldn't want to have to weigh matters or give alternative points of view any actual thought!
And of course, each of those water bottles that you use is going to be around on the planet for thousands of years. That's a tremendous amount of environmental damage you're creating for no good reason.
If a desire to drink something that doesn't taste like salt water isn't a "good reason" to you, I'd suggest that you've valued dogmatism more than you've valued having a proper regard towards your fellow man.
I'm not a "I don't get what the big deal is" person. I'm not a "I simply must have water from a spring-fed river" person. I'm a "I hate getting bottled water, but see no reasonable alternative" person, which should have been clear from my previous post. I'm already avoiding bottled water where I can (e.g. using filtered water for coffee and tea), but I see no way to avoid it when it comes drinking plain water, since Brita simply isn't doing enough. If you actually had any interest in the cause you're espousing, you'd have jumped at the opportunity to help someone like me get over the sorts of hurdles I'm describing, since the only thing keeping me from joining your side is an awareness of a means to reasonably do so! As best I can figure, however, your goal in posting was simply to stoke yourown ego with a self righteous proclamation at my expense.
Congratulations. It was a great success.
Again, I would gladly drink tap water here at home—just like I do everywhere else and just like I have for the rest of my life—if I knew how to make it tolerable. I'm aware of the environmental problems with bottled water (aside: does recycling not exist where you live?). I'm aware that even at just $0.10/bottle for the stuff we buy, it's still orders of magnitude more expensive than what we get from the tap. Despite that, it's still our best option when it comes to plain water. If our tap water tasted anything like it does 50-100 miles in any direction, we'd be drinking it. If it tasted anything like it does literally anywhere else that I've ever lived or visited in my life, we'd be drinking it. But it doesn't. Our water here tastes bad, really bad, and that situation hasn't changed in the 16 years that I've been here. The locals all talk about it. The transient students and workers all talk about it. The professors at the university talk openly about it in class and even discuss its causes. It's a well-known problem that everyone here is aware of, but the municipality hasn't chosen to take whatever steps would be necessary to address it on their end.
Give me suggestions to address the issue on my end and I'll consider them, but don't expect a gracious response if you insist on unhelpfully beating people up with the mantra that "bottles are bad" without even trying to show the slightest bit of regard towards the hurdles in their way.
The last time I was in Europe, the tap water tasted horrible. Then I hopped on a train to a different part of Europe, and suddenly the tap water tasted fine. I, like you, had assumed that all water in a large region tastes exactly the same. Imagine my shock to discover that the water in one place tastes different than the water in a different place!
</sarcasm>
Likewise, given that the US is several thousand miles across, and that depending on where you're located you may be dealing with deserts, glaciers, mountains, tropics, forests, prairies, urban centers, or more, you might find that the water tastes different from place to place. Everywhere else I've lived (Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts), it's been fine. Where I'm at now, it's terrible when it comes to flavor. It's perfectly safe to drink, of course, but it's salty as all get out, enough to ruin tea and coffee. Just depends on where you live. *shrug*
It's not always about health. Sometimes it's literally a matter of taste.
At least where we live now, we have a large quantity of naturally occurring sodium in our ground water. When combined with the chlorination of the water treatment system, the result is tap water with an excessively salty taste. As in, it ruins what would otherwise be perfectly good tea or coffee and can affect cooking recipes to a lesser degree. Put simply, it isn't at all pleasant to drink by itself unless it's been filtered several additional times or you dump additional flavoring into it (e.g. I'll always order water with lemon or lime when we eat out, just to mask the flavor of the water). It's perfectly safe to drink, of course, but the taste of it...blech.
Mind you, I grew up drinking water straight from the tap as we moved from Los Angeles to Palm Beach to Houston by the time I was 16, so I'm not picky about my water needing to taste a particular way. Whether it's collected on the second Tuesday after the vernal equinox from the shavings of an Alaskan glacier or "collected" from a rubber hose behind a seedy industrial park, it's generally fine by me...so long as that hose is attached to a tap at least 100 miles from where I live. Anywhere else I go, I'm happy to drink water straight from the tap, but we rely on drinking the cheapest stuff they sell at the store at home, which was almost certainly filledfrom the aforementioned rubber hose. We do use a Brita-filtered pitcher for the water we use in our tea and coffee, since it does a good enough job at taking the edge off, but for drinking water by itself, the taste here just isn't something we've ever been able to get used to and I honestly can't be bothered to set up a more advanced filtration system, so simply as a matter of taste, I'm sadly one of those suckers who buys bottled water.
“Looks worse” is a matter of subjective preference, which I specifically addressed, but when it comes to objective measures (e.g. fidelity), yes, it’s definitively worse. Feel free to sharpen things on your end if that’s your preference, but don’t foist your (bad) taste on everyone else.
They weren’t talking about leaving the state. They were talking about moving out of their parent’s basement. With housing prices higher there than anywhere else in the nation, however, the answer is nearly always, “no”.
Sharpening the image is an inherently lossy process. You're replacing a more detailed image containing a soft edge with something that has a crisp edge with less gradation. You can't then reverse the process to get back to the original image, since there'd be no way to tell the difference between things that actually had a sharp edge in the original image and things that had merely had their edges sharpened after the fact. They'd both look the same.
Frankly, sharpness is a really lousy measure for determining how good an image is. It doesn't make images look better, in and of itself, and it's something that the user can already introduce themselves if that's where their preferences lie, simply by bumping up the sharpness on their TV. Of course, if your goal is to have the highest fidelity image, you shouldn't set your TV's sharpness to anything over 0. Back in the day of analog CRTs it used to be the case that sharpness might improve the fidelity, but ever since the switch to digital LCDs anything more than 0 adds sharpness that wasn't there in the original image, thus decreasing the visual fidelity of the resulting image.
It's not even an Amazon or online problem. This happens at physical retail too.
Years and years ago there was a game I had been looking forward to playing, so my mother kindly purchased it as a birthday gift for me from a retail store. They must've seen a sucker coming in when they saw her, since not only did they sell a used copy to her as new and at full price for new copies, they didn't even bother selling her a decent used copy. Besides the shrink wrap obviously being missing, the cartridge had a save file on it already, the cover of the game manual had been used to test someone's ballpoint pen, and several other items that were supposed to be in the case had been removed.
Of course, this is Gamestop, which has (had?) a commonplace practice of allowing employees to take games homes and play them, only to re-shrink wrap those copies afterwards and sell them as new. I was boycotting them prior to what they did to my mother. To say the least, what they did to her didn't exactly win back my business.
Similarly, when I was in grad school, a number of my housemates worked at a particular used video games store (a local place, not a chain). They came back with story after story about all the things the store's owner (who eventually ran the business into the ground after starting it with an inheritance he received) would do to cut corners. For instance, Sony was trying to push blu-ray adoption really hard when the Playstation 3 launched, so you could send in your PS3 box's UPC to get three random blu-rays for free. The store's owner would cut the UPCs off each box before he sold it to a customer, mail them to Sony to redeem the blu-rays, then would take those blu-rays to Best Buy to "get a refund". At the time, Best Buy didn't require a receipt and their blu-ray prices started at $15 (even for terrible movies that no one wanted), so this store owner was able to defraud Best Buy to the tune of $45+ for each PS3 his store received, not to mention defrauding his customers by selling a damaged item as new, since they wouldn't be able to redeem those blu-rays themselves or otherwise use the UPC as a proof of purchase, should they ever need it.
I assume the tax would apply to those services as well. Generally legislation isn't specific as to which service you use.
How's that supposed to work? The two aren't anything alike.
They operate over different networks (cellular vs. cellular, WiFi, and wired). They operate on cellular via different channels (dedicated vs. general purpose). They differ in security (not encrypted vs. end-to-end encrypted). They require different hardware (SIM vs. any Internet connection). They operate on different classes of devices (phones and SIM-equipped laptops/tablets vs. PCs, phones, tablets, and MP3 players). The natively support differing numbers of devices per user (one per user vs. many per user). They natively support different content (texts alone vs. texts + effects, audio/video, typing notifications, tap backs, read receipts, stickers, money, hand drawings, etc.).
And that's all before we even get to the most obvious problem: one costs the end user a monthly fee just to use it, the other doesn't cost anything. Collecting a tax on $0 is a fool's errand.
I'd shudder to think how legislators would define the law in such a way that it could apply to those services in any sort of reasonable way. Aside from how they are visually presented to end users, there's really no similarity at all between iMessages/WhatsApp and standard SMS texting. If anything, the former bears more resemblance to instant messaging than it does to SMS texting. How are legislators supposed to draw a line that puts iMessage/WhatsApp on the same side as SMS without also including IRC, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google app of the month, e-mail, or really just about any other form of asynchronous communication, free or otherwise?
A user may think that the only difference is that one is a green bubble and the other is blue, but the actual differences are vast.
While I'm not usually part of the conspiracy crowd, I'll make an exception for this one. Did anyone expect an internal investigation of Supermicro to yield anything but an "innocent" verdict? Can you imagine the damage to Supermicro's brand had any other result been released?
Wait a sec. That logic makes no sense.
Regardless of which side of this debate you're on, this is the result we expected. The people who think Bloomberg got it wrong were expecting this result because Bloomberg got it wrong. The conspiracy believers were execting this result because there's a coordinated coverup. That the result matched everyone's expectations no more proves a coverup than it disproves one. It's simply the expected result.
That said, while the result matching expectations may not prove or disprove anything, there's only one direction that the result itself can incline any rational person: towards thinking that Bloomberg got it wrong. While you're welcome to dismiss it, the findings themselves are yet another piece of evidence against Bloomberg's claims, and they join a growing body of evidence, all of which so far has lined up against Bloomberg's claims. On the other hand, this result provides no evidence whatsoever in support of a coverup (again, it's the expected outcome for both sides). Of course, if you choose to dismiss it as part of the coverup, then you've just expanded the scope of the coverup to include these auditors as well, in which case it now takes even more faith to believe in the coverup than before. For any rational person, a demand to increase one's faith in a thing without being given any basis for doing so would be cause to reevaluate that faith.
If this result pushed you to "make an exception" by joining the conspiracy crowd, I'd suggest that you're either confused or lying, because you're clearly already a card-carrying member of the conspiracy crowd. At best you can dismiss the results as meaningless, but there's no rational way to take this result and go in the direction you say you went.
What's missing from the summary is the fact that, in addition to not covering this year's models, this injunction doesn't bar sales of any iPhone running iOS 12, which is the latest version of iOS. Given that every model Apple currently sells can be updated to iOS 12 (and were likely being sold with iOS 12 installed, straight out of the box, even prior to this ruling), Apple has issued a statement making it clear that all iPhones remain available for purchase in China. I.e. This injunction did absolutely nothing at all.
As for what Qualcomm's patents are/were covering, MacRumors' article indicates they were used to "adjust and reformat the size and appearance of photos", for "managing applications using a touch screen when viewing and navigating apps", and a third patent of which has apparently already been invalidated in court.
Forget the content creators banding together, if YouTube simply keeps trying to monetize itself as heavily as it has been recently, they'll lose a number of their regular users.
Right now, it's not uncommon for my wife and I to launch the YouTube app on a TV-connected device right before we hit the hay, watch a video or two as we wind down mentally, then go to sleep. But with them shoving unskippable ads down our throats on what feels like every single video, as well as interrupting the content to shove ads into the videos if they run longer than about 10 minutes, we're quickly reaching a breaking point. We're close to either not bothering with YouTube at all for any amount of idle watching, or else I'll finally get around to setting up whole-home ad-blocking for our entire home network (e.g. Pi-hole), either of which is a loss for them.
Be that as it may, how is it relevant or contrary to anything I said?
We're talking about the period from 2014-2018, during which time there wasn't a housing crash. And even if there had been a crash sufficient to push a loan upside down, that owner's equity wouldn't have disappeared: it would have simply gone negative, much to their chagrin.
If you own something, you have equity in it. That doesn't magically become false if the thing loses value in a crash, even if the value of the equity you possess may change dramatically.
Glassdoor just updated their best companies to work for list and Facebook is in the top 10 based on employee feedback. Methinks someone is lying to Glassdoor about their experience at Facebook.
I think it was the one that debuted as an Android exclusive, with the ability to type directly to the Google Assistant? Honestly, I'm not sure. I only stopped using Google Talk last year, just in time to have to leave Google Hangouts because it was shutting down too, just in time to have to migrate away from Google Chat because my company was switching to Slack to get away from all of that nonsense.
You mean like every hostile or competing nation state?
You're also assuming folks are moving FROM a home where they have equity
Given that the OP was talking about a person who bought a house in 2014, it's safe to assume that they are moving from a home in which they have equity.
and not a condo or an apartment.
It sounds like you don't understand how condos work. People buy condos, just like they buy houses. A condo's owner has equity in their condo, the same way that a house's owner has equity in their house. A condo's owner may rent their condo out to someone else, which I'd wager is what's confusing you, but that's just as true of houses as it is condos, so it's incorrect to draw a distinction between the two.
If I were to sell my home today and move to another State into a similar sized and age home, it would cost me at least 2x - 4x as much depending on the State.
If that's actually true, yours is an abnormal situation on which we should NOT model expected outcomes. But given what appears to be a lack of awareness on your part with regards to how housing and equity works, I'm inclined to think you're simply unaware of housing prices available elsewhere. I'd love to hear the numbers for your situation and which state you're in.
That's great to hear, but again, there's a big difference between "receiving 5G coverage" and "receiving 5G speeds". Moreover, being in "most major metro areas" doesn't mean most people in most major metro areas will receive coverage.
For instance, when it comes to wired ISPs, so long as anyone in the county has the option to purchase a broadband package—as self-reported by the ISPs themselves—the FCC considers the county as a whole to have broadband access. Similarly, a wireless carrier could claim that they provide coverage in 100% of the counties in a state by simply putting up one antenna in each county. It doesn't do 99% of the people in the state any good, but it makes for a great statistic to use when marketing their network to potential customers.
Because they have a history of tactics like those, I don't put much stock in vague claims about being in places like "most major metro areas". That bar is actually pretty low.
That's kinda where I'm at with my thinking. 5G support may storm the holiday season, but without the corresponding infrastructure upgrades in your area, it won't do you any good. Given that our local 4G connections didn't actually come with 4G speeds until somewhat recently, I'm not exactly holding my breath for 5G speeds anytime in the next few years in my area.
And, frankly, even if they were to come soon, I'd be hard-pressed to think of many situations where I'd meaningfully benefit from the speed jump. There certainly are use cases for speeds like those (e.g. able to do work from a cellular-connected laptop), so I'm glad to see that the rollout is happening, but the heaviest thing most smartphone users might do is watch an HD video on YouTube, which only needs 3-5 Mbps for 1080p, which is a fraction of the speed that 4G already offers. They'll see no benefit from 5G, so marketing it as "storming" the holiday season is nothing more than an attempt at driving demand for a feature that laypeople don't really understand.
And how much do they expect advertisers to pay for ads that people are guaranteed not be watching - because they're doing something else?
How are they getting advertisers to pay for ads today? After Hulu switched from free-with-ads to paid-with-ads, I got the impression they managed to scare off most of their user base (they certainly lost me, and I had been with them since the closed beta). With Fox selling most of its assets to Disney and ABC being Disney's as well, it's likely that Hulu will lose most of the content from two of its three largest content providers (leaving just NBC) as soon as those licensing agreements are up.
This is probably Hulu's attempt to drum up monetization—even modestly—in order to bring in more content providers, but there are more and more companies out there willing and able to help the big players get their own streaming services off the ground (e.g. after Major League Baseball did really well with MLB.tv, they spun the group off as MLB Advanced Media, which has provided backend services for everyone from ESPN to HBO), so it strikes me as being too little, too late.
Who said they aren't using cookies (or any other identification techniques)? The headline merely mentions not being logged in. You can be logged out and still receive cookies and whatnot.