TWA, Continental, Pan Am, and United Airlines were each responsible for some of the largest purchase orders for the Concorde, so I'd hardly say it's reasonable to suggest they were "threatened" by the Concorde.
And it wasn't just the US that banned those flights. Much of Europe and Asia did as well, even countries that you may not expect to put such a high value on noise concerns (e.g. India and Malaysia both banned supersonic Concorde flights over their airspace).
The bigger problem, however, was simply that the Concorde was designed prior to the oil crisis of the '70s, and as a result only got 15.8 miles per gallon per passenger. At the time it debuted, that was half the efficiency of a 707 (33.3), a third that of a 747 (46.4), and closing in on a quarter of a DC-10 (53.6). And these days, modern planes of comparable capacity and range (e.g. the just-launched 737 MAX-8) are hitting efficiencies as high as 110 miles per gallon per passenger, nearly 7x that of the Concorde.
When the support contract for the Concorde ended in the middle of the post-9/11 aviation slump, the costs for maintaining the fleet went up yet again. Between that, the ridiculous fuel costs, and them having trouble putting butts in its seats following 9/11 and the Air France crash in 2000, it was prohibitively expensive to continue operations.
The Concorde was too expensive to operate for all sorts of reasons.
It was designed before the world at large had enacted regulations against excessive noises over residential regions, as well as before the oil crisis of the '70s. By the time the first orders were being fulfilled in the late '70s, the general perception by the airlines was that it was a gas guzzler that was half as efficient as competing models while offering no competitive advantage along the vast majority of routes, due to its inability to operate overland at supersonic speeds. While dozens of orders were placed in the 1960s, all but 20 were cancelled prior to their fulfillment, immediately relegating the Concorde to niche status.
Because the Concorde had no way to justify its higher ticket price if it couldn't operate at supersonic speeds, the vast majority of routes were entirely non-viable right from the start, ensuring that it was never able to break out of the niche of high-speed transoceanic flights. Making matters worse, its parts were more specialized than those of a subsonic plane and weren't produced in nearly the sorts of quantities we saw with 747s and the like, meaning that it never benefitted from any economies of scale. As if all of that wasn't enough, at the time of its retirement it was the only plane still flown by British Airways that hadn't yet eliminated the need to have a flight engineer as a member of the crew on every flight.
Oh, and then there was Air France Flight 4590, which dampened interest in flying on the Concorde. As if that weren't enough, guess what date Concorde resumed service after the crash? September 11th, 2001. You can't even make this stuff up.
Between the general downturn in the aviation industry following 9/11, as well as the support contract provided by Airbus ending around that time, it became too expensive to operate the fleet, even with the crazy ticket prices you're talking about.
That said, had the Concorde been able to fly at supersonic speeds across the continental US and Europe without running afoul of noise regulations, that would immediately open up hundreds of routes as viable possibilities. If on top of that it was designed with greater fuel efficiency in mind, there's nothing suggesting that it wouldn't have been much more widely adopted, providing it with a much better chance at being economically viable.
Is that still the case? Amazon started collecting sales tax a few years ago in all states where it has a physical presence. I believe they even collect it on behalf of third-party sellers if those sellers ship their products to Amazon's warehouses so that the products can be "Fulfilled by Amazon".
Even so, I quite agree with the sentiment you're espousing that Amazon is far more threatening than most people give it credit. One of the smartest things they've done is play the part of benevolent monopolist while slowly becoming a more and more abusive monopsonist (i.e. the sole buyer) in a variety of markets. They made their margins razor thin so that they could drive both online retailers as well as brick and mortar stores out of business. Having succeeded in capturing a large swath of the retail market, we've now seen them start to squeeze both sides of the market for profit: they're turning the screws on sellers who have no one left to sell to, driving those sellers to unsustainable pricing while capturing the savings as profit for themselves, and they're simultaneously raising the prices paid by consumers who have been trained to shop only at Amazon, again capturing the increase as profit for itself.
By playing the long game like this, they've managed to avoid any sort of major public outcry, given that consumers tend not to complain about cheaper prices, and it's only as prices have started going up that consumers have started to take notice. That said, anyone paying attention has seen the writing on the wall for years, given that monopsonies are just as dangerous as monopolies, and Amazon began abusing its monopsony positions much earlier. Antitrust regulations are designed to protect against both, but American regulators tend to be slow to pursue monopsonies, given that they have a far less direct impact on consumers. Now that Amazon is starting to take advantage of its near-monopolies and engage in other deceptive practices, however, maybe we'll finally start to see some regulatory intervention.
Exactly. When the author starts off with "Download more than a few apps and the notifications become a non-stop, cacophonous waterfall of nonsense", I couldn't help but laugh, since that hasn't been my experience at all. Mine goes more like:
1) Download app 2) Launch app 3) Receive prompt to enable notifications 4) Deny it
Unless an app has provided me with a compelling reason for allowing notifications prior to prompting me to enable notifications, I never enable them in the first place. Simple as that.
Well designed apps that respect you will wait until you do something that warrants a notification (e.g. you go into settings and opt-in to being notified about something) before prompting you to allow notifications. Ones that treat you poorly will prompt you at first launch. And if an app that was allowed to show me notifications ever abuses that permission, I'll immediately kill that permission in the phone's global settings.
Since when were Pro Tools and Photoshop Apple products?
He never suggested they were. He merely said that there were "no real options" for alternatives to those apps on Linux, a claim to which you provided no counterexamples. Then again, suggesting there are "no real options" sounds like a setup for a No True Scotsman fallacy, so I'm not sure that you would have been able to suggest anything to his satisfaction anyway.
While the notion of a Terminator-sequel, self-aware system like Skynet is still firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction, the idea that we can make an autonomous system designed to kill humans isn't neatly so far-fetched, nor is the idea that some of them may go beyond their expected parameters. They'd be dumb killing machines, little more than a modern, mobile version of mines, but they'd be more than capable of killing people who happened to wander into their path until they ran out of ammo.
They're unlikely to be existential threats to humanity as a whole unless we give them incredibly lethal payloads and the means to re-equip themselves autonomously, but so long as these dumb machines still depend on us for ammo, we don't need to worry about them learning how to equip themselves otherwise, so the threat will always be limited.
You say there's corruption. If so, is the corruption in: A) Corporations with deep pockets engaging in crony capitalism strictly for their own benefit.
B) A government engaging in such outlandish politics that the only way sanity gets a seat at the table is if corporations spend big on lobbying.
C) Both
D) Neither
Arguably, the answer in this case may be B. Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying, particularly given their size, but the last two quarters, i.e. since Trump was elected, have been their largest quarter-over-quarter increases in lobbying dollars spent, suggesting that the things Trump is doing in the White House have demanded a response from the company. As such, is it corruption on their part for finally playing the game, or is it corruption on Trump's part for forcing them to pay up?
The proper price in the free market is whatever you can get someone to buy it for without engaging in fraud.
FTFY
If I tell someone I'm selling a brand new computer with the latest hardware, and instead sell a box loaded with dated components from years ago, I'm engaging in fraud. While someone may have been willing to pay the price I set, my activity would neither be legal nor conducive to a healthy market. Likewise, I can't lie to someone by telling them that the item they're buying is discounted from a higher price when it was never offered at that higher price to begin with. There are laws in most jurisdictions against doing so.
I knew it started on Channel 4, since it was a big coup when Netflix won the rights for the third series. What I forgot, however, was that the third series had so many episodes. My memory only pinned it at about 3-4 episodes, like the previous series, not 6, like it actually was.
If I get android O, I get all of android O. Every android O device will support all the android O features.
Theoretically? Sure. In practice? Not so much. For both platforms, the chief reason a feature is missing is lack of hardware support. Simple as that.
For instance, full hardware-based disk encryption has been available in Android for years, but it still is only available on devices with the necessary hardware. Similarly, my iPhone 5s lacks Apple Pay because it has an earlier generation Secure Enclave that lacks the capability to authenticate Apple Pay's requests. Reasons of that sort account for the vast majority of missing features, though to a layman on either platform they may seem to be arbitrary cutoffs.
That said, I won't deny that Apple has indeed engaged in arbitrary cutoffs to drive sales of newer devices. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but I won't dispute it. Likewise, Apple has locked out features for performance reasons, such as accelerometer-based animations in the UI being considered too taxing on older devices when they were first introduced. Jailbreakers who forced them to be enabled on those older devices quickly found out that their batteries were draining far faster than before.
Even so, those cutoffs are the exception, not the rule, so regardless of which platform you're talking about, the overwhelmingly common reason why features are missing is simply a lack of hardware support. As such, while Apple may be willing to lock out features on older devices, in practice their doing so rarely affects things in a way that differs from how things work with Android.
I was shocked someone didn't mention Be Right Back earlier. It's eerie how prescient some of those episodes have turned out in the few years since they aired.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I'd definitely recommend checking the whole series out on Netflix. It's well worth a watch, and less than a dozen episodes in total so far.
"Removing" suggests they had it in the first place. They didn't. The iPhone was never aimed at people who wanted to replace batteries. I understand the frustration with the headphone jack removal, but what sort of sense does it make to complain that a device isn't something it never claimed to be?
Every device is the sum of a set of design decisions. Apple chose to make specific compromises in order to make gains in areas that appeal to their target demographic, of which you are clearly not a member. There's nothing wrong with that. If their compromises don't appeal to you, don't buy their devices. And if their design decisions become the dominant ones in the industry, you'd be better served by educating others on the value of your priorities, rather than complaining that you can't find devices that match your (apparently niche) set of priorities.
For my part, while I recognize that some people enjoy them, I still don't see the appeal of inductive charging (whether I set it on a dock or a pad makes no difference to me), the benefit of waterproofing is negligible to me (in 15 years, I've never spilled liquid near a device, and I've had exactly one case where I would have appreciated being able to take pictures in water), and a replaceable battery adds bulk that I'd prefer to do without (I rarely travel so the primary use case doesn't apply to me, and even in old devices I've never had the battery capacity drop enough to warrant a replacement).
However, new iPhone buyers probably go 2.5-3.5 years between new and unsupported.
So far as the flagship iPhones go, the iPhone 5 is the only one losing support in iOS 11. It was, as you said, launched in 2012, and it was discontinued a year later in 2013, meaning that by the time iOS 11 launches later this year, every iPhone 5 buyer will have received a minimum of 5 years of support, with people who bought it on launch day receiving 6 years of support. With iOS 11 dropping support for 32-bit processors and the iPhone 5 is on the wrong side of that divide, it's unsurprising that it's being left behind, but it'll be interesting to see whether iOS 12 retains support for the iPhone 5s next year, given that there isn't any obvious hardware divide that would warrant dropping support for that model.
As for the 5c, it certainly is on the low side of support. In fact, it's even worse than you suggested, given that Apple was still dumping...err...making them available for sale in some markets (e.g. India) as late as early 2016. Even so, the iPhone 5c has always been an outlier. It was billed as a lower-cost alternative to the flagship iPhone lines, and it sold poorly enough that Apple never made another in that line, so it's doubtful the 5c would affect the numbers that much. But yes, the iPhone 5c received remarkably poor support, ranging from 1.5-4 years, depending on when purchased.
In general, however, iPhones receive support far in excess of "cheap Chinese android phones".
Apple is very much a mixed bag when it comes to product longevity in real live.
You can't just drop a statement like that without backing it up with some evidence. While we can point to a handful of instances where Apple dropped support for things earlier than some people, particularly nerds, would have liked, calling their product longevity a mixed bag is a gross overstatement of the actual problem facing most users, in much the same way that saying "Malware is thousands of times more common on Android than iOS" is a way that the media (and Apple fanboys) like to lie with statistics. Sure, it may be true, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the situation (i.e. that malware isn't really a common problem on either platform).
Certainly when it comes to iPhones, Apple has a rather good track record for product longevity, and it's widely understood that they support old devices with the latest updates for longer than any of their Android counterparts.
For my part, the iPhone 5s I bought in 2013 and still use today as my primary device will be fully supported in iOS 11 that is coming out later this year. Generally speaking, it still runs just as well today as it did on the day I bought it. It's only been in the last few months that I've even started noticing a performance difference between apps on my iPhone and the same apps running on newer devices, but the differences are nowhere near sufficient to warrant an upgrade. The phone still holds enough of a charge that it can (admittedly barely) last from work on Friday to work on Monday without needing a charge over the weekend, so the battery hasn't forced an upgrade, and I don't expect that it will anytime soon.
In fact, I've had the money set aside in my budget since 2015 to buy a new iPhone outright, given that I had anticipated upgrading on the stereotypical two-year cycle, but my iPhone 5s continues to run like a champ, much to my surprise and delight. As such, I've held off upgrading for the last two years, and given the rumors circulating so far and the continued performance from my current device, I expect that I'll do so again this year, meaning that by the time I finally do decide to upgrade, I will have had a fully supported, still-useful iPhone running the latest OS with the latest security updates and the latest features for a period lasting no less than 5-6 years.
Sure, I've even filed one before. The ballot, which is handled separately from the return envelope, has no personally identifiable information on it. If your state, or any state you're aware of, does differently, go ahead name it. As it is, I think you're just making concerns up.
Do you really think the combined areas of all the rooftops in the USA would add up to the area of Alaska?
It doesn't need to, which you would have realized if you had taken your own advice and rewatched the video you linked. The TED Talk specifically said that rooftop installations in England were getting 20W/m^2, 4x the number you quoted (which was for solar parks in England). At those numbers, home-based installations would only need to cover 5% of England in order to achieve 100% coverage of the country's energy needs. And that's ALL of the country's energy, including transportation, businesses, and home use.
And then it gets better. England has a population density of 406 people/km^2, but the world as a whole (Antarctica excluded), has 56 people/km^2. As such, the rest of the world can enjoy the same benefits as England's 1W/m^2 level of consumption with just 0.14W/m^2, because they're able to spread that same energy consumption across nearly 8x as much land. Even if the rest of the world was covered in England's stereotypically gloomy weather, they'd only need to have rooftop installations covering 0.7% of their land area.
Oh, but most of the world isn't so gloomy as England. In deserts, the TED Talk indicates that solar parks can hit 20W/m^2. If rooftop installations in deserts receive similar gains to what they saw beyond solar parks in England, then rooftop installations would produce 80W/m^2 in deserts, meaning they would only need to cover about 0.2% of the land area in order to provide for 100% of that region's energy needs.
And that's before we even get into the efficiency gains that have occurred in the five years since he gave that talk, not to mention the fact that the sun's rays are far weaker in England than they are in much of the rest of the world.
Maybe I botched the math somewhere, but this doesn't seem nearly so far fetched as you're trying to suggest, especially since your one and only source directly contradicts your claims.
All of which is to say, yes, please, rewatch the video.
They mention that possibility in the article, but rule it mostly out on account of the fact that 95% of the traffic to the page is from mobile devices, which are fairly atypical for botnet attacks.
Facebook, Google, etc. create profiles for everyone they see on the Internet, even people who don't sign up for accounts. Creating an account links his actual identity to that profile, allowing Facebook to tie that anonymous profile to things his friends may have said or posted that included him. As he's forced to log in from various devices, they can figure out if he prefers iOS or Android. By looking at who he associates with, they can make some pretty good guesses about his income and his leanings on various topics. And, as I already mentioned, they can link in the earlier data they collected about him on various sites, allowing them to start delivering personalized ads or sell his information to interested parties.
Deleting the account after that doesn't do much of anything since, at least in the States, it just deactivates it until you log in again. All of the data is still there. And in the meantime, they still have cookies on your machines, signatures for each of them, and they've been able to put a name and face to that anonymous profile. They'll still track you as you go around the Internet, account or not.
While I'm not opposed to the idea, it does come with challenges. For instance, the most likely first use for beds on flights would be on long-haul routes, but those are wide enough that keeping the side-by-side orientation we have now with chairs would mean that not everyone would have access to the aisle. So far as I know, trains and other transportation systems don't have to deal with that problem since they're narrow enough that everyone has aisle access. It may be as simple as re-orienting the beds so that people have their heads to the windows and feet to the aisle, but then where does the luggage go so that you can grab it quickly from the aisle? There's also the issue that a lot of people suffer from motion sickness when lying down in a moving vehicle, whereas they're just fine if they can keep their head elevated. While this could be alleviated by giving them room to sit up on their bed, you'd then be giving up many of the benefits of being able to stack people.
Again, I'm not opposed to the idea of beds (not at all!), and I do think we can design our way out of most or all of the problems I just listed, but I suspect that something in between (i.e. an inclined chair) will be the route we eventually take.
Is that true? I've never used iStuff, but at least it used to be the case that you needed to register as a developer in order to install programs that you have compiled on your own iPhone.
One point of clarification: you do need a developer account, just not a paid one. Getting a free developer is as simple as visiting Apple's developer site, logging in with your Apple ID, and agreeing to their developer terms. That's it. Once you do, it'll unlock access to the developer tools for your Apple ID, including the ability to sideload.
it would then be possible to distribute free software to iPhone users without jailbreaking.
Indeed, which is why you can find plenty of emulators and other apps that aren't allowed in the App Store being distributed via other channels.
Given that the one I have is a 2010 or 2011 model and can't even operate without being plugged in, I'd say that many of those are comparable to what I have.
Slashdot Mirror
TWA, Continental, Pan Am, and United Airlines were each responsible for some of the largest purchase orders for the Concorde, so I'd hardly say it's reasonable to suggest they were "threatened" by the Concorde.
And it wasn't just the US that banned those flights. Much of Europe and Asia did as well, even countries that you may not expect to put such a high value on noise concerns (e.g. India and Malaysia both banned supersonic Concorde flights over their airspace).
The bigger problem, however, was simply that the Concorde was designed prior to the oil crisis of the '70s, and as a result only got 15.8 miles per gallon per passenger. At the time it debuted, that was half the efficiency of a 707 (33.3), a third that of a 747 (46.4), and closing in on a quarter of a DC-10 (53.6). And these days, modern planes of comparable capacity and range (e.g. the just-launched 737 MAX-8) are hitting efficiencies as high as 110 miles per gallon per passenger, nearly 7x that of the Concorde.
When the support contract for the Concorde ended in the middle of the post-9/11 aviation slump, the costs for maintaining the fleet went up yet again. Between that, the ridiculous fuel costs, and them having trouble putting butts in its seats following 9/11 and the Air France crash in 2000, it was prohibitively expensive to continue operations.
The Concorde was too expensive to operate for all sorts of reasons.
It was designed before the world at large had enacted regulations against excessive noises over residential regions, as well as before the oil crisis of the '70s. By the time the first orders were being fulfilled in the late '70s, the general perception by the airlines was that it was a gas guzzler that was half as efficient as competing models while offering no competitive advantage along the vast majority of routes, due to its inability to operate overland at supersonic speeds. While dozens of orders were placed in the 1960s, all but 20 were cancelled prior to their fulfillment, immediately relegating the Concorde to niche status.
Because the Concorde had no way to justify its higher ticket price if it couldn't operate at supersonic speeds, the vast majority of routes were entirely non-viable right from the start, ensuring that it was never able to break out of the niche of high-speed transoceanic flights. Making matters worse, its parts were more specialized than those of a subsonic plane and weren't produced in nearly the sorts of quantities we saw with 747s and the like, meaning that it never benefitted from any economies of scale. As if all of that wasn't enough, at the time of its retirement it was the only plane still flown by British Airways that hadn't yet eliminated the need to have a flight engineer as a member of the crew on every flight.
Oh, and then there was Air France Flight 4590, which dampened interest in flying on the Concorde. As if that weren't enough, guess what date Concorde resumed service after the crash? September 11th, 2001. You can't even make this stuff up.
Between the general downturn in the aviation industry following 9/11, as well as the support contract provided by Airbus ending around that time, it became too expensive to operate the fleet, even with the crazy ticket prices you're talking about.
That said, had the Concorde been able to fly at supersonic speeds across the continental US and Europe without running afoul of noise regulations, that would immediately open up hundreds of routes as viable possibilities. If on top of that it was designed with greater fuel efficiency in mind, there's nothing suggesting that it wouldn't have been much more widely adopted, providing it with a much better chance at being economically viable.
All of that is what this new design is promising.
Is that still the case? Amazon started collecting sales tax a few years ago in all states where it has a physical presence. I believe they even collect it on behalf of third-party sellers if those sellers ship their products to Amazon's warehouses so that the products can be "Fulfilled by Amazon".
Even so, I quite agree with the sentiment you're espousing that Amazon is far more threatening than most people give it credit. One of the smartest things they've done is play the part of benevolent monopolist while slowly becoming a more and more abusive monopsonist (i.e. the sole buyer) in a variety of markets. They made their margins razor thin so that they could drive both online retailers as well as brick and mortar stores out of business. Having succeeded in capturing a large swath of the retail market, we've now seen them start to squeeze both sides of the market for profit: they're turning the screws on sellers who have no one left to sell to, driving those sellers to unsustainable pricing while capturing the savings as profit for themselves, and they're simultaneously raising the prices paid by consumers who have been trained to shop only at Amazon, again capturing the increase as profit for itself.
By playing the long game like this, they've managed to avoid any sort of major public outcry, given that consumers tend not to complain about cheaper prices, and it's only as prices have started going up that consumers have started to take notice. That said, anyone paying attention has seen the writing on the wall for years, given that monopsonies are just as dangerous as monopolies, and Amazon began abusing its monopsony positions much earlier. Antitrust regulations are designed to protect against both, but American regulators tend to be slow to pursue monopsonies, given that they have a far less direct impact on consumers. Now that Amazon is starting to take advantage of its near-monopolies and engage in other deceptive practices, however, maybe we'll finally start to see some regulatory intervention.
You should try this new "reading comprehension" thing sometime. It's pretty awesome. The rest of us enjoy it quite a bit.
Exactly. When the author starts off with "Download more than a few apps and the notifications become a non-stop, cacophonous waterfall of nonsense", I couldn't help but laugh, since that hasn't been my experience at all. Mine goes more like:
1) Download app
2) Launch app
3) Receive prompt to enable notifications
4) Deny it
Unless an app has provided me with a compelling reason for allowing notifications prior to prompting me to enable notifications, I never enable them in the first place. Simple as that.
Well designed apps that respect you will wait until you do something that warrants a notification (e.g. you go into settings and opt-in to being notified about something) before prompting you to allow notifications. Ones that treat you poorly will prompt you at first launch. And if an app that was allowed to show me notifications ever abuses that permission, I'll immediately kill that permission in the phone's global settings.
Yay for auto-correct.
"Terminator-esque"
"isn't nearly so far-fetched"
Since when were Pro Tools and Photoshop Apple products?
He never suggested they were. He merely said that there were "no real options" for alternatives to those apps on Linux, a claim to which you provided no counterexamples. Then again, suggesting there are "no real options" sounds like a setup for a No True Scotsman fallacy, so I'm not sure that you would have been able to suggest anything to his satisfaction anyway.
While the notion of a Terminator-sequel, self-aware system like Skynet is still firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction, the idea that we can make an autonomous system designed to kill humans isn't neatly so far-fetched, nor is the idea that some of them may go beyond their expected parameters. They'd be dumb killing machines, little more than a modern, mobile version of mines, but they'd be more than capable of killing people who happened to wander into their path until they ran out of ammo.
They're unlikely to be existential threats to humanity as a whole unless we give them incredibly lethal payloads and the means to re-equip themselves autonomously, but so long as these dumb machines still depend on us for ammo, we don't need to worry about them learning how to equip themselves otherwise, so the threat will always be limited.
You say there's corruption. If so, is the corruption in:
A) Corporations with deep pockets engaging in crony capitalism strictly for their own benefit.
B) A government engaging in such outlandish politics that the only way sanity gets a seat at the table is if corporations spend big on lobbying.
C) Both
D) Neither
Arguably, the answer in this case may be B. Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying, particularly given their size, but the last two quarters, i.e. since Trump was elected, have been their largest quarter-over-quarter increases in lobbying dollars spent, suggesting that the things Trump is doing in the White House have demanded a response from the company. As such, is it corruption on their part for finally playing the game, or is it corruption on Trump's part for forcing them to pay up?
The proper price in the free market is whatever you can get someone to buy it for without engaging in fraud.
FTFY
If I tell someone I'm selling a brand new computer with the latest hardware, and instead sell a box loaded with dated components from years ago, I'm engaging in fraud. While someone may have been willing to pay the price I set, my activity would neither be legal nor conducive to a healthy market. Likewise, I can't lie to someone by telling them that the item they're buying is discounted from a higher price when it was never offered at that higher price to begin with. There are laws in most jurisdictions against doing so.
I knew it started on Channel 4, since it was a big coup when Netflix won the rights for the third series. What I forgot, however, was that the third series had so many episodes. My memory only pinned it at about 3-4 episodes, like the previous series, not 6, like it actually was.
If I get android O, I get all of android O. Every android O device will support all the android O features.
Theoretically? Sure. In practice? Not so much. For both platforms, the chief reason a feature is missing is lack of hardware support. Simple as that.
For instance, full hardware-based disk encryption has been available in Android for years, but it still is only available on devices with the necessary hardware. Similarly, my iPhone 5s lacks Apple Pay because it has an earlier generation Secure Enclave that lacks the capability to authenticate Apple Pay's requests. Reasons of that sort account for the vast majority of missing features, though to a layman on either platform they may seem to be arbitrary cutoffs.
That said, I won't deny that Apple has indeed engaged in arbitrary cutoffs to drive sales of newer devices. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but I won't dispute it. Likewise, Apple has locked out features for performance reasons, such as accelerometer-based animations in the UI being considered too taxing on older devices when they were first introduced. Jailbreakers who forced them to be enabled on those older devices quickly found out that their batteries were draining far faster than before.
Even so, those cutoffs are the exception, not the rule, so regardless of which platform you're talking about, the overwhelmingly common reason why features are missing is simply a lack of hardware support. As such, while Apple may be willing to lock out features on older devices, in practice their doing so rarely affects things in a way that differs from how things work with Android.
I was shocked someone didn't mention Be Right Back earlier. It's eerie how prescient some of those episodes have turned out in the few years since they aired.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I'd definitely recommend checking the whole series out on Netflix. It's well worth a watch, and less than a dozen episodes in total so far.
I did. I wrote two paragraphs doing so. Don't be obtuse.
Like removing user replaceable batteries
"Removing" suggests they had it in the first place. They didn't. The iPhone was never aimed at people who wanted to replace batteries. I understand the frustration with the headphone jack removal, but what sort of sense does it make to complain that a device isn't something it never claimed to be?
Every device is the sum of a set of design decisions. Apple chose to make specific compromises in order to make gains in areas that appeal to their target demographic, of which you are clearly not a member. There's nothing wrong with that. If their compromises don't appeal to you, don't buy their devices. And if their design decisions become the dominant ones in the industry, you'd be better served by educating others on the value of your priorities, rather than complaining that you can't find devices that match your (apparently niche) set of priorities.
For my part, while I recognize that some people enjoy them, I still don't see the appeal of inductive charging (whether I set it on a dock or a pad makes no difference to me), the benefit of waterproofing is negligible to me (in 15 years, I've never spilled liquid near a device, and I've had exactly one case where I would have appreciated being able to take pictures in water), and a replaceable battery adds bulk that I'd prefer to do without (I rarely travel so the primary use case doesn't apply to me, and even in old devices I've never had the battery capacity drop enough to warrant a replacement).
However, new iPhone buyers probably go 2.5-3.5 years between new and unsupported.
So far as the flagship iPhones go, the iPhone 5 is the only one losing support in iOS 11. It was, as you said, launched in 2012, and it was discontinued a year later in 2013, meaning that by the time iOS 11 launches later this year, every iPhone 5 buyer will have received a minimum of 5 years of support, with people who bought it on launch day receiving 6 years of support. With iOS 11 dropping support for 32-bit processors and the iPhone 5 is on the wrong side of that divide, it's unsurprising that it's being left behind, but it'll be interesting to see whether iOS 12 retains support for the iPhone 5s next year, given that there isn't any obvious hardware divide that would warrant dropping support for that model.
As for the 5c, it certainly is on the low side of support. In fact, it's even worse than you suggested, given that Apple was still dumping...err...making them available for sale in some markets (e.g. India) as late as early 2016. Even so, the iPhone 5c has always been an outlier. It was billed as a lower-cost alternative to the flagship iPhone lines, and it sold poorly enough that Apple never made another in that line, so it's doubtful the 5c would affect the numbers that much. But yes, the iPhone 5c received remarkably poor support, ranging from 1.5-4 years, depending on when purchased.
In general, however, iPhones receive support far in excess of "cheap Chinese android phones".
Apple is very much a mixed bag when it comes to product longevity in real live.
You can't just drop a statement like that without backing it up with some evidence. While we can point to a handful of instances where Apple dropped support for things earlier than some people, particularly nerds, would have liked, calling their product longevity a mixed bag is a gross overstatement of the actual problem facing most users, in much the same way that saying "Malware is thousands of times more common on Android than iOS" is a way that the media (and Apple fanboys) like to lie with statistics. Sure, it may be true, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the situation (i.e. that malware isn't really a common problem on either platform).
Certainly when it comes to iPhones, Apple has a rather good track record for product longevity, and it's widely understood that they support old devices with the latest updates for longer than any of their Android counterparts.
For my part, the iPhone 5s I bought in 2013 and still use today as my primary device will be fully supported in iOS 11 that is coming out later this year. Generally speaking, it still runs just as well today as it did on the day I bought it. It's only been in the last few months that I've even started noticing a performance difference between apps on my iPhone and the same apps running on newer devices, but the differences are nowhere near sufficient to warrant an upgrade. The phone still holds enough of a charge that it can (admittedly barely) last from work on Friday to work on Monday without needing a charge over the weekend, so the battery hasn't forced an upgrade, and I don't expect that it will anytime soon.
In fact, I've had the money set aside in my budget since 2015 to buy a new iPhone outright, given that I had anticipated upgrading on the stereotypical two-year cycle, but my iPhone 5s continues to run like a champ, much to my surprise and delight. As such, I've held off upgrading for the last two years, and given the rumors circulating so far and the continued performance from my current device, I expect that I'll do so again this year, meaning that by the time I finally do decide to upgrade, I will have had a fully supported, still-useful iPhone running the latest OS with the latest security updates and the latest features for a period lasting no less than 5-6 years.
My Android phones last just fine.
Define "just fine".
Sure, I've even filed one before. The ballot, which is handled separately from the return envelope, has no personally identifiable information on it. If your state, or any state you're aware of, does differently, go ahead name it. As it is, I think you're just making concerns up.
Do you really think the combined areas of all the rooftops in the USA would add up to the area of Alaska?
It doesn't need to, which you would have realized if you had taken your own advice and rewatched the video you linked. The TED Talk specifically said that rooftop installations in England were getting 20W/m^2, 4x the number you quoted (which was for solar parks in England). At those numbers, home-based installations would only need to cover 5% of England in order to achieve 100% coverage of the country's energy needs. And that's ALL of the country's energy, including transportation, businesses, and home use.
And then it gets better. England has a population density of 406 people/km^2, but the world as a whole (Antarctica excluded), has 56 people/km^2. As such, the rest of the world can enjoy the same benefits as England's 1W/m^2 level of consumption with just 0.14W/m^2, because they're able to spread that same energy consumption across nearly 8x as much land. Even if the rest of the world was covered in England's stereotypically gloomy weather, they'd only need to have rooftop installations covering 0.7% of their land area.
Oh, but most of the world isn't so gloomy as England. In deserts, the TED Talk indicates that solar parks can hit 20W/m^2. If rooftop installations in deserts receive similar gains to what they saw beyond solar parks in England, then rooftop installations would produce 80W/m^2 in deserts, meaning they would only need to cover about 0.2% of the land area in order to provide for 100% of that region's energy needs.
And that's before we even get into the efficiency gains that have occurred in the five years since he gave that talk, not to mention the fact that the sun's rays are far weaker in England than they are in much of the rest of the world.
Maybe I botched the math somewhere, but this doesn't seem nearly so far fetched as you're trying to suggest, especially since your one and only source directly contradicts your claims.
All of which is to say, yes, please, rewatch the video.
Chicago doesn't have one. That's why he didn't list it.
They mention that possibility in the article, but rule it mostly out on account of the fact that 95% of the traffic to the page is from mobile devices, which are fairly atypical for botnet attacks.
Facebook, Google, etc. create profiles for everyone they see on the Internet, even people who don't sign up for accounts. Creating an account links his actual identity to that profile, allowing Facebook to tie that anonymous profile to things his friends may have said or posted that included him. As he's forced to log in from various devices, they can figure out if he prefers iOS or Android. By looking at who he associates with, they can make some pretty good guesses about his income and his leanings on various topics. And, as I already mentioned, they can link in the earlier data they collected about him on various sites, allowing them to start delivering personalized ads or sell his information to interested parties.
Deleting the account after that doesn't do much of anything since, at least in the States, it just deactivates it until you log in again. All of the data is still there. And in the meantime, they still have cookies on your machines, signatures for each of them, and they've been able to put a name and face to that anonymous profile. They'll still track you as you go around the Internet, account or not.
While I'm not opposed to the idea, it does come with challenges. For instance, the most likely first use for beds on flights would be on long-haul routes, but those are wide enough that keeping the side-by-side orientation we have now with chairs would mean that not everyone would have access to the aisle. So far as I know, trains and other transportation systems don't have to deal with that problem since they're narrow enough that everyone has aisle access. It may be as simple as re-orienting the beds so that people have their heads to the windows and feet to the aisle, but then where does the luggage go so that you can grab it quickly from the aisle? There's also the issue that a lot of people suffer from motion sickness when lying down in a moving vehicle, whereas they're just fine if they can keep their head elevated. While this could be alleviated by giving them room to sit up on their bed, you'd then be giving up many of the benefits of being able to stack people.
Again, I'm not opposed to the idea of beds (not at all!), and I do think we can design our way out of most or all of the problems I just listed, but I suspect that something in between (i.e. an inclined chair) will be the route we eventually take.
Is that true? I've never used iStuff, but at least it used to be the case that you needed to register as a developer in order to install programs that you have compiled on your own iPhone.
Yup, it's true. You're correct that it used to require a paid account, but we haven't needed paid accounts to compile and sideload apps since Xcode 7 launched in mid-2015.
One point of clarification: you do need a developer account, just not a paid one. Getting a free developer is as simple as visiting Apple's developer site, logging in with your Apple ID, and agreeing to their developer terms. That's it. Once you do, it'll unlock access to the developer tools for your Apple ID, including the ability to sideload.
it would then be possible to distribute free software to iPhone users without jailbreaking.
Indeed, which is why you can find plenty of emulators and other apps that aren't allowed in the App Store being distributed via other channels.
You show us anywhere that you can buy even a broken macbook Air for $100. Go ahead, we'll wait
Here are 220 sold listings on eBay in the last three months alone, all of which sold for under $100.
Given that the one I have is a 2010 or 2011 model and can't even operate without being plugged in, I'd say that many of those are comparable to what I have.