I think nuclear is a great choice, both now and going forward. I still think it has no relevance whatsoever to a discussion about the reliability of wind and solar.
As for moving the goalposts, on rereading what was said in light of what you just said, I think I see where you were coming from. For my part, my intent was simply to poke a troll for fun while pointing out that there are obvious techniques available and in use to address the "unpredictability" problem. It wasn't intended as an endorsement for solar or wind, and you're quite correct to point out that I overstated things by declaring them "solved".
Why can't someone think that one was too early and the other was too late? I'm fine with both of them doing as they did, but I could see someone making an argument for there being a sweet spot for ditching 32-bit, and that each of them missed it in different directions.
You've just moved the goalposts. I was addressing the AC's unpredictability concern. You're talking about the physical size of infrastructure, a wholly unrelated topic, and you've dragged nuclear into it too for reasons I can't fathom.
I really don't feel like trying to convince you of anything much, though I will chime in regarding the topic of labor costs: I think they're a red herring being used by both sides. The labor levels are only high for renewables because we're in a state of transition during which there are a lot of one-time installations. Those jobs will disappear as we reach a stable state, along with the benefits and drawbacks tied to them.
This is already a solved problem. Slap some batteries or other energy storage devices (e.g. industrial flywheels) on the "unpredictable" sources and you can capture that energy for later use, thus making it predictable. And despite your claim that "[t]hese are just facts", the rest of what you said is actually fact-free philosophizing. Rather elegantly written for a troll, to be sure, but fact-free, nonetheless.
Plus, I gotta ask: why do you think so little of America? You clearly don't believe we're industrious enough to use an "unpredictable" energy source, so you're suggesting we should just call it quits instead. That's a lousy attitude, regardless of your political affiliation.
Seriously. I was told on day one at my current place of employment that the company's policy was to treat us like adults. If you need to go to the doctor, go to the doctor. Tell us about it as soon as you can, please, but seriously, go to the doctor and don't worry about work. Same thing if you have a sick kid or spouse. Or car trouble. Or any of those other sorts of things that just kinda come up unexpectedly. Let us know when you can, but take care of those priorities.
As far as leaving early goes, we work 40 hours a week. Be here mostly during work hours so we can actually do work together, but if you want to break from the routine, that's fine. Just let your boss know your plans as early as possible so they can adapt their plans, and make up the hours elsewhere in the week, or else use some paid leave time. No biggie. I regularly head out early on Fridays all year round since I prefer to work an extra 30-45 minutes each of the other days during the week. Others routinely come in and leave early every day, or else come in and leave late every day.
And overtime? People needing to take overtime is viewed as a red flag that there's a problem that needs to be addressed so things can get back to normal. I've probably worked a grand total of 10 hours of overtime in the last 6 years, all of which was voluntary.
The guys at the top started out as developers themselves, have been running the company for 20 years, have grown it slowly to about 75 employees, and have instilled common sense notions like that into the fabric of the company culture. It still shocks me a bit when I'm reminded that other companies don't practice common sense.
This whole discussion is about mobile usage. If they each have devices, each device has its own 10Mbps connection, which leads me back to my initial question: what are they doing that needs more?
Why does theirs cost more? Off the top of my head? - They include a 4K IPS monitor - They weren't able to get a nerd to build it for free on his own time - They warranty their work for a year - They provide telephone, email, and in-person customer support - They have fixed costs for scaling their operation so they can do more than one at a time - They need a profit margin to stay in business
All-in-all, that's a pretty good deal for the $400 or so that you've said they're charging over you.
All of which is to say, you can build one-offs for cheaper than the big players if you're willing to work for free, disclaim any responsibility for problems, and keep no inventory on hand. They don't get to do those things if that want to stay in business.
If the S version is supposedly better, why offer a $50 "upgrade" to the less secure non-S version? You can't have it both ways. Either you own your walled garden or you accept your open platform. You can't offer an upgrade to a version you're claiming is superior.
Moreover, they're basically arguing that their software is more secure because it's hobbled by design. A rock is similarly secure against WannaCry, but that doesn't mean it's actually useful for everyday computing tasks.
If you want unlimited backup, you can still get it for $10 less per year than Amazon's price at Backblaze, same as before, even cheaper if you're willing to pay for two years up front. And CrashPlan is still offering unlimited storage at the same price as Amazon.
Of course, that's assuming you're talking about backups, which is what USA Today mentioned. But this Amazon service is more comparable to Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud Drive, which are general purpose personal cloud storage services, rather than backup services. In that regard, it was the best deal.
The subject line is an honest question. It's certainly nice to have faster speeds available, but in terms of everyday usage, I can't think of anything a typical mobile user would do today that would benefit significantly from speeds above about 10Mbps. 1080p streaming from YouTube or Netflix only needs about 2-4Mbps, and HD video streaming is about the heaviest operation I'd expect a typical user to engage in. Maybe download an MP3 or read some e-mails? Do a little web browsing? None of those benefit significantly, and, frankly, many servers throttle downloads anyway, preventing users from benefiting from faster speeds.
Obviously, many of us here can think of reasons we ourselves have for wanting more, such as using your phone as a WiFi hotspot so that you can torrent the latest episode of Game of Thrones on your laptop while sipping a Mai Tai on the beach, but I'm not talking about those sorts of uncommon uses. I'm also NOT saying that "10Mbps is enough for anyone, and no one will ever need more". Clearly our consumption will keep increasing for the foreseeable future, so we obviously need to keep improving our infrastructure.
Even so, I'm honestly curious if there are any common, compelling use cases around today that I'm forgetting about that benefit from faster speeds. If not, then it would suggest that deployment is basically where it should be (at least in terms of mobile) and that there isn't a problem yet.
Precisely. I've been holding off on most smart devices, just so that I could wait for HomeKit to (maybe?) finally become a thing. Between Samsung's SmartThings, Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, and all the other brands in that space, HomeKit is the only approach I've seen that places a major priority on security and privacy, rather than attempting to make a quick grab for market share by rushing insecure, unvetted devices to market. While I may not care much about privacy in some areas of my life, I absolutely care about privacy in my home, so it's been worth the wait to see if it can become the right approach for me.
it certainly isn't worth having it always listening for "Hey, Siri" akin to the creepy home listening devices.
While I agree, I think it's worth pointing out a key difference: Siri determines on-device whether you said "Hey, Siri", and only starts transmitting after that.
In contrast, after receiving an Echo Dot as a gift from my company last year, we found a section in the companion mobile app (which, suspiciously, no longer seems to be available) that gave you a list of every time Alexa thought you had talked to it. Creepily, it even provided the recordings themselves so that you could listen through them to evaluate its performance and let Amazon know if Alexa had messed up. After listening to a few dozen of the recordings, it became apparent that Alexa was always listening and always transmitting, even if you weren't talking to it, since the recordings frequently started before we ever talked to it, as well as containing comments we had made long after accidentally triggering it.
My wife, a "normal" non-nerd, was the one who was initially in favor of setting it up, and she's the only one who ever got any regular use out of it (as a voice-activated Pandora player), but even she's creeped out enough by it now that she asked if I'd be okay selling it on Craigslist.
Agreed. The only sure thing about entering a duopoly controlled market is that you'll be getting hit from more than one side. It's the same problem independent parties have in a two-party system: they'll mostly just eat market share from one of the sides, rather than carving out their own sizable niche, and their best ideas will eventually be co-opted by the bigger players, marginalizing them or putting them out of business.
I recently ran into a similar problem when visiting my parents recently.
I wanted to update my mother's Mac to the latest version of macOS, but she was apparently logged out from her Apple account, so clicking the Get button in the Mac App Store to initiate the download resulted in a login prompt before it could start. I punched in her credentials, saw it spin for a bit, and then was given a cryptic error message that yielded no fruitful results in a quick search. Trying again resulted in more of the same: a login prompt and the cryptic error. After a few more tries, it said we had tried too many times, so it prompted us to punch in a six-digit code that had been sent to her iPhone. Her response was to pull out a notepad where she had written down the previous code that they had sent her months earlier, thinking that was what they were referring to.
...
Anyway, after I showed her that she had received a new one and told her that she could dispose of the old one, I still couldn't figure out what to do. No prompt appeared on the Mac for entering the code, and entering it in for the password field as if it were a OTP wasn't working either. Finally, I noticed what you alluded to: that back on the iPhone, at the end of a long, otherwise normal sentence, they offhandedly mentioned that you should append the code to the end of the password. A HA!
Which got me a bit further...before resulting in a different, cryptic error message.
Later in the day, it occurred to me to try logging in as part of a different type of operation, such as downloading an app that she had previously purchased. Sure enough, after punching her credentials in everything worked as expected. She was logged in! So, going back to the free macOS update, I tried to download it again, and was this time greeted with an error message saying her credit card had expired and needed to be updated. After doing that, she was able to download the update without a problem.
All of which only took several hours. Did I mention that she had a notepad with the previous code written down? She had apparently been dealing with this problem for months, ever since my younger sibling logged her out for inexplicable reasons.
Near as I can figure, despite the fact that it was a free update, the Mac App Store was treating it as a purchase and was trying to process that purchase along with the login as part of an atomic operation. When the purchase failed on account of her credit card having expired, it resulted in the login failing as well, hence the initial, cryptic message. When we forced things a step further with the code, I'm guessing the second error message was the result of them being unable to give her a meaningful message about private information like the credit card being expired, given that she wasn't actually logged in.
All of which is to say, kudos to Apple for pushing 2FA, but I am NOT looking forward to the support calls I'll be dealing with.
I'd suggest that they do that too, just as anyone else with decent marketing does, but don't let your distaste for that aspect of the company obscure the fact that they actually have achieved a great deal of success, whether we're talking critically, technically, or commercially. A company can be both deeply flawed and wildly successful; the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Going back to the topic of their innovations, to me, a lot of their actual innovation seems to come from their bringing things in-house or figuring out how to do things en masse. For instance, their last-gen phones are--by a wide margin--still outpacing current-gen phones from all of their competitors in every side-by-side test I've seen, thanks in large part to them bringing their chip design in-house a few generations back. And while "unibody" designs are commonplace these days, it's easy to forget that precision milling was considered cost prohibitive for consumer electronics at the time Apple started doing it, making those designs groundbreaking at the time. Similarly, they push bounds in other areas, such as using 7000-series aluminum alloys in their watches, rather than the softer but more common 6000-series alloys, and using in-house metallurgists to create a custom 18K gold alloy for their solid gold watch, that way it didn't come with the drawbacks typically associated with 18K gold.
Of course, they do things we nerds don't like, such as removing headphone jacks and using proprietary connectors, as well as a great many other things not to like, but that doesn't change the fact that they've succeeded quite a bit too. Again, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
In fact, I find the insistence by some in this community that it be only one or the other to be rather odd. I know we all join tribes, and that reason goes out the door as soon as we start to get into tribal warfare, but I continue to find it odd how people who are typically quite open to nuanced and subtle arguments on virtually any other topic will suddenly throw that reason out the door as soon as you say something that doesn't align with their tribal affiliation.
Apple is rarely the first to introduce something, but they have a better than average track record of being the first ones to do a thing successfully.
Look back through their major products over the decades: the Mac wasn't the first PC, the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, the iPad wasn't the first tablet, the Apple TV wasn't the first set-top box, and the Apple Watch wasn't the first smartwatch. Some of those succeeded, others not so much, but none were the first. It seems odd to ask when the last time was that they were first, given that they've made their name by not being first.
As for Safari, from what I recall hearing recently (i.e. I have no citation), Safari still commands the majority share of browser usage on the Mac, likely on account of it coming preinstalled. I actually went back to Safari on the Macs we have at home after being on Chrome for years. The experience of using Safari on a Mac has for the last few years, in my opinion, provided the best out-of-box experience out of any browser (which stands in sharp contrast to the experience of using Safari on Windows, which was even worse than using iTunes on Windows). That said, for people who want more out of their browser, Chrome is still the right choice for many of them, especially given the dearth of Safari extensions compared to Chrome extensions. For me, however, I was getting creeped out by Chrome's increased invasiveness, and I didn't care for the way it sucks up power and RAM on the laptop I use at home, so I was willing to trade a little convenience for better efficiency and privacy.
...which I suppose I'm not helping any, given that I just wrote a Chrome extension this last week to scratch an itch I had at work (controlling the browser-based podcast player I use at work via globally-accessible hotkeys).
Let me suck some of the humor out of this moment with a fact check: chickens weren't part of the Jewish sacrificial system during Biblical times.
As far as animals were concerned, sheep, goats, oxen, and bulls were regularly sacrificed, with different ones being used for different types of sacrifices. Doves were an acceptable sacrifice in some cases, though I believe they were only used when the person offering the sacrifice couldn't afford the appropriate animal.
Also, if memory serves, touching a woman during menstruation merely made you ritually unclean until evening, at which point you'd take a bath and then be back to ritually clean again. I don't recall it requiring a sacrifice, though I've only read the Bible cover-to-cover maybe a dozen times so far, so I could be mistaken.
A law degree used to be mandatory, now it's a large majority.
No and no. A law degree was never mandatory for every agent, the requirement is still in place for the positions that required it before, and it was never even a plurality across all agents, let alone a "large majority".
The FBI does require a law degree for certain positions, but only for a small fraction of the jobs for which they're hiring. The FBI's official jobs site lists a number of career paths for agents, including a number of specializations. Of those, only the legal specialization requires a law degree. Given that the FBI employs everything from snipers to hackers to accountants to chemists, it should be patently obvious that a law degree is not currently a general requirement. Moreover, you can go all the way back to prohibition to see that they were hiring many of those same positions from the very start, none of which required a law degree back then either.
Sweet jesus you're using the X-Files as your source?
When you're making ludicrous claims, the best way to highlight their absurdity is to point out that even over-the-top fiction doesn't take it that far. Why? Can you think of a better way to highlight how absurd your claims are?
What you just said is neither true in the real world, nor is it even true in fiction. From the X-Files to Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, I can't think of a single example that would have given you the false notion that every FBI agent has a law degree. Some certainly do, but that's true at pretty much any law enforcement organization.
Moreover, this is being used for sentencing, not for determining one's innocence. The defendant's guilt has already been decided at this point. And on top of that, bounds are already established for what penalties can be levied for each variety of crime, so it can't exceed those bounds either. As you said, the judge is already a black box. All this does is apply some consistency between the black boxes we're using.
Being bought out by Take Two actually isn't a problem, in my mind. Take Two is a publisher with a decent track record of doing justice by its IPs (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, Red Dead, Bioshock). They let games percolate in development until they're ready, support them with updates for years, and are, in turn, rewarded by their fans with ongoing sales (e.g. GTA5 came out in 2014, but it's still in the Top 10 global sales charts as of right now).
To me, the far larger problem for Kerbal was that a good chunk of their team was stolen away and hired on by Valve awhile back to work on undisclosed projects. Losing the core of your team is a far larger problem to overcome than coming under the umbrella of a publisher who is known for being one of the most hands-off publishers in the biz.
I never thought I'd find myself thinking about that overused The Dark Knight quote about "the hero we deserve" in relation to Trump, but here you've gone and made me think it.
You don't suppose he's actually making himself the villain in order to unite us? That's a scary thought.
The summary doesn't make it clear that these are two separate cases, both in Florida.
Christopher Wheeler is in Broward County and was sentenced to 180 days in jail for refusing to give police his password. He claims he already gave it to them, but the one he gave them doesn't work, hence the contempt of court ruling. Meanwhile, in an entirely separate case, Wesley Victor in neighboring Miami-Dade County claimed he didn't remember the password when he was ordered to provide it 10 months after his arrest, and the judge did not hold him in contempt.
From what I understand (as an Internet armchair lawyer, i.e. IANAL), both of these actually make sense. Wheeler, from the sounds of things, had indicated through his previous actions and testimony that it was his phone and that he knew the password, so supplying the password would not be considered testimonial in nature at that point, which is why passwords typically can't be compelled from people. As such, it makes sense to hold him in contempt of court if he refuses to hand over a password that they've already established he has. As for Victor, it had been 10 months since they had confiscated his phone, and he never claimed to remember the password at that point, so it makes sense (at least to me) that they wouldn't hold him in contempt of court.
What might be more interesting is Victor's girlfriend, who's in the same situation he is, but who provided the wrong password for her phone. If she's NOT held in contempt of court after doing so, it would be interesting to hear what the court's rationale is.
It doesn't switch back and forth between modes. It starts in their low-emissions mode and then switches to high-emissions mode once they detect that the wheel has turned more than 15 degrees. A car in normal driving conditions would thus trigger the high-emissions mode almost immediately, given that almost every drive begins with having to either get out of a parking space, turn onto a road, or change lanes to rejoin the flow of traffic. But a car that's just spinning its wheels in place so that it can be checked for emissions under controlled conditions? It'll never trigger high-emissions mode.
As for why they weren't smart enough to make it work like you thought? They couldn't. The low-emissions mode achieves its lower emissions by sacrificing performance. If they sacrificed performance every time they started going in a straight line, people would notice pretty quickly that something was up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think nuclear is a great choice, both now and going forward. I still think it has no relevance whatsoever to a discussion about the reliability of wind and solar.
As for moving the goalposts, on rereading what was said in light of what you just said, I think I see where you were coming from. For my part, my intent was simply to poke a troll for fun while pointing out that there are obvious techniques available and in use to address the "unpredictability" problem. It wasn't intended as an endorsement for solar or wind, and you're quite correct to point out that I overstated things by declaring them "solved".
Why can't someone think that one was too early and the other was too late? I'm fine with both of them doing as they did, but I could see someone making an argument for there being a sweet spot for ditching 32-bit, and that each of them missed it in different directions.
You've just moved the goalposts. I was addressing the AC's unpredictability concern. You're talking about the physical size of infrastructure, a wholly unrelated topic, and you've dragged nuclear into it too for reasons I can't fathom.
I really don't feel like trying to convince you of anything much, though I will chime in regarding the topic of labor costs: I think they're a red herring being used by both sides. The labor levels are only high for renewables because we're in a state of transition during which there are a lot of one-time installations. Those jobs will disappear as we reach a stable state, along with the benefits and drawbacks tied to them.
This is already a solved problem. Slap some batteries or other energy storage devices (e.g. industrial flywheels) on the "unpredictable" sources and you can capture that energy for later use, thus making it predictable. And despite your claim that "[t]hese are just facts", the rest of what you said is actually fact-free philosophizing. Rather elegantly written for a troll, to be sure, but fact-free, nonetheless.
Plus, I gotta ask: why do you think so little of America? You clearly don't believe we're industrious enough to use an "unpredictable" energy source, so you're suggesting we should just call it quits instead. That's a lousy attitude, regardless of your political affiliation.
Seriously. I was told on day one at my current place of employment that the company's policy was to treat us like adults. If you need to go to the doctor, go to the doctor. Tell us about it as soon as you can, please, but seriously, go to the doctor and don't worry about work. Same thing if you have a sick kid or spouse. Or car trouble. Or any of those other sorts of things that just kinda come up unexpectedly. Let us know when you can, but take care of those priorities.
As far as leaving early goes, we work 40 hours a week. Be here mostly during work hours so we can actually do work together, but if you want to break from the routine, that's fine. Just let your boss know your plans as early as possible so they can adapt their plans, and make up the hours elsewhere in the week, or else use some paid leave time. No biggie. I regularly head out early on Fridays all year round since I prefer to work an extra 30-45 minutes each of the other days during the week. Others routinely come in and leave early every day, or else come in and leave late every day.
And overtime? People needing to take overtime is viewed as a red flag that there's a problem that needs to be addressed so things can get back to normal. I've probably worked a grand total of 10 hours of overtime in the last 6 years, all of which was voluntary.
The guys at the top started out as developers themselves, have been running the company for 20 years, have grown it slowly to about 75 employees, and have instilled common sense notions like that into the fabric of the company culture. It still shocks me a bit when I'm reminded that other companies don't practice common sense.
This whole discussion is about mobile usage. If they each have devices, each device has its own 10Mbps connection, which leads me back to my initial question: what are they doing that needs more?
Why does theirs cost more? Off the top of my head?
- They include a 4K IPS monitor
- They weren't able to get a nerd to build it for free on his own time
- They warranty their work for a year
- They provide telephone, email, and in-person customer support
- They have fixed costs for scaling their operation so they can do more than one at a time
- They need a profit margin to stay in business
All-in-all, that's a pretty good deal for the $400 or so that you've said they're charging over you.
All of which is to say, you can build one-offs for cheaper than the big players if you're willing to work for free, disclaim any responsibility for problems, and keep no inventory on hand. They don't get to do those things if that want to stay in business.
If the S version is supposedly better, why offer a $50 "upgrade" to the less secure non-S version? You can't have it both ways. Either you own your walled garden or you accept your open platform. You can't offer an upgrade to a version you're claiming is superior.
Moreover, they're basically arguing that their software is more secure because it's hobbled by design. A rock is similarly secure against WannaCry, but that doesn't mean it's actually useful for everyday computing tasks.
If you want unlimited backup, you can still get it for $10 less per year than Amazon's price at Backblaze, same as before, even cheaper if you're willing to pay for two years up front. And CrashPlan is still offering unlimited storage at the same price as Amazon.
Of course, that's assuming you're talking about backups, which is what USA Today mentioned. But this Amazon service is more comparable to Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud Drive, which are general purpose personal cloud storage services, rather than backup services. In that regard, it was the best deal.
The subject line is an honest question. It's certainly nice to have faster speeds available, but in terms of everyday usage, I can't think of anything a typical mobile user would do today that would benefit significantly from speeds above about 10Mbps. 1080p streaming from YouTube or Netflix only needs about 2-4Mbps, and HD video streaming is about the heaviest operation I'd expect a typical user to engage in. Maybe download an MP3 or read some e-mails? Do a little web browsing? None of those benefit significantly, and, frankly, many servers throttle downloads anyway, preventing users from benefiting from faster speeds.
Obviously, many of us here can think of reasons we ourselves have for wanting more, such as using your phone as a WiFi hotspot so that you can torrent the latest episode of Game of Thrones on your laptop while sipping a Mai Tai on the beach, but I'm not talking about those sorts of uncommon uses. I'm also NOT saying that "10Mbps is enough for anyone, and no one will ever need more". Clearly our consumption will keep increasing for the foreseeable future, so we obviously need to keep improving our infrastructure.
Even so, I'm honestly curious if there are any common, compelling use cases around today that I'm forgetting about that benefit from faster speeds. If not, then it would suggest that deployment is basically where it should be (at least in terms of mobile) and that there isn't a problem yet.
Precisely. I've been holding off on most smart devices, just so that I could wait for HomeKit to (maybe?) finally become a thing. Between Samsung's SmartThings, Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, and all the other brands in that space, HomeKit is the only approach I've seen that places a major priority on security and privacy, rather than attempting to make a quick grab for market share by rushing insecure, unvetted devices to market. While I may not care much about privacy in some areas of my life, I absolutely care about privacy in my home, so it's been worth the wait to see if it can become the right approach for me.
it certainly isn't worth having it always listening for "Hey, Siri" akin to the creepy home listening devices.
While I agree, I think it's worth pointing out a key difference: Siri determines on-device whether you said "Hey, Siri", and only starts transmitting after that.
In contrast, after receiving an Echo Dot as a gift from my company last year, we found a section in the companion mobile app (which, suspiciously, no longer seems to be available) that gave you a list of every time Alexa thought you had talked to it. Creepily, it even provided the recordings themselves so that you could listen through them to evaluate its performance and let Amazon know if Alexa had messed up. After listening to a few dozen of the recordings, it became apparent that Alexa was always listening and always transmitting, even if you weren't talking to it, since the recordings frequently started before we ever talked to it, as well as containing comments we had made long after accidentally triggering it.
My wife, a "normal" non-nerd, was the one who was initially in favor of setting it up, and she's the only one who ever got any regular use out of it (as a voice-activated Pandora player), but even she's creeped out enough by it now that she asked if I'd be okay selling it on Craigslist.
Agreed. The only sure thing about entering a duopoly controlled market is that you'll be getting hit from more than one side. It's the same problem independent parties have in a two-party system: they'll mostly just eat market share from one of the sides, rather than carving out their own sizable niche, and their best ideas will eventually be co-opted by the bigger players, marginalizing them or putting them out of business.
I recently ran into a similar problem when visiting my parents recently.
I wanted to update my mother's Mac to the latest version of macOS, but she was apparently logged out from her Apple account, so clicking the Get button in the Mac App Store to initiate the download resulted in a login prompt before it could start. I punched in her credentials, saw it spin for a bit, and then was given a cryptic error message that yielded no fruitful results in a quick search. Trying again resulted in more of the same: a login prompt and the cryptic error. After a few more tries, it said we had tried too many times, so it prompted us to punch in a six-digit code that had been sent to her iPhone. Her response was to pull out a notepad where she had written down the previous code that they had sent her months earlier, thinking that was what they were referring to.
...
Anyway, after I showed her that she had received a new one and told her that she could dispose of the old one, I still couldn't figure out what to do. No prompt appeared on the Mac for entering the code, and entering it in for the password field as if it were a OTP wasn't working either. Finally, I noticed what you alluded to: that back on the iPhone, at the end of a long, otherwise normal sentence, they offhandedly mentioned that you should append the code to the end of the password. A HA!
Which got me a bit further...before resulting in a different, cryptic error message.
Later in the day, it occurred to me to try logging in as part of a different type of operation, such as downloading an app that she had previously purchased. Sure enough, after punching her credentials in everything worked as expected. She was logged in! So, going back to the free macOS update, I tried to download it again, and was this time greeted with an error message saying her credit card had expired and needed to be updated. After doing that, she was able to download the update without a problem.
All of which only took several hours. Did I mention that she had a notepad with the previous code written down? She had apparently been dealing with this problem for months, ever since my younger sibling logged her out for inexplicable reasons.
Near as I can figure, despite the fact that it was a free update, the Mac App Store was treating it as a purchase and was trying to process that purchase along with the login as part of an atomic operation. When the purchase failed on account of her credit card having expired, it resulted in the login failing as well, hence the initial, cryptic message. When we forced things a step further with the code, I'm guessing the second error message was the result of them being unable to give her a meaningful message about private information like the credit card being expired, given that she wasn't actually logged in.
All of which is to say, kudos to Apple for pushing 2FA, but I am NOT looking forward to the support calls I'll be dealing with.
I'd suggest that they do that too, just as anyone else with decent marketing does, but don't let your distaste for that aspect of the company obscure the fact that they actually have achieved a great deal of success, whether we're talking critically, technically, or commercially. A company can be both deeply flawed and wildly successful; the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Going back to the topic of their innovations, to me, a lot of their actual innovation seems to come from their bringing things in-house or figuring out how to do things en masse. For instance, their last-gen phones are--by a wide margin--still outpacing current-gen phones from all of their competitors in every side-by-side test I've seen, thanks in large part to them bringing their chip design in-house a few generations back. And while "unibody" designs are commonplace these days, it's easy to forget that precision milling was considered cost prohibitive for consumer electronics at the time Apple started doing it, making those designs groundbreaking at the time. Similarly, they push bounds in other areas, such as using 7000-series aluminum alloys in their watches, rather than the softer but more common 6000-series alloys, and using in-house metallurgists to create a custom 18K gold alloy for their solid gold watch, that way it didn't come with the drawbacks typically associated with 18K gold.
Of course, they do things we nerds don't like, such as removing headphone jacks and using proprietary connectors, as well as a great many other things not to like, but that doesn't change the fact that they've succeeded quite a bit too. Again, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
In fact, I find the insistence by some in this community that it be only one or the other to be rather odd. I know we all join tribes, and that reason goes out the door as soon as we start to get into tribal warfare, but I continue to find it odd how people who are typically quite open to nuanced and subtle arguments on virtually any other topic will suddenly throw that reason out the door as soon as you say something that doesn't align with their tribal affiliation.
Apple is rarely the first to introduce something, but they have a better than average track record of being the first ones to do a thing successfully.
Look back through their major products over the decades: the Mac wasn't the first PC, the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, the iPad wasn't the first tablet, the Apple TV wasn't the first set-top box, and the Apple Watch wasn't the first smartwatch. Some of those succeeded, others not so much, but none were the first. It seems odd to ask when the last time was that they were first, given that they've made their name by not being first.
As for Safari, from what I recall hearing recently (i.e. I have no citation), Safari still commands the majority share of browser usage on the Mac, likely on account of it coming preinstalled. I actually went back to Safari on the Macs we have at home after being on Chrome for years. The experience of using Safari on a Mac has for the last few years, in my opinion, provided the best out-of-box experience out of any browser (which stands in sharp contrast to the experience of using Safari on Windows, which was even worse than using iTunes on Windows). That said, for people who want more out of their browser, Chrome is still the right choice for many of them, especially given the dearth of Safari extensions compared to Chrome extensions. For me, however, I was getting creeped out by Chrome's increased invasiveness, and I didn't care for the way it sucks up power and RAM on the laptop I use at home, so I was willing to trade a little convenience for better efficiency and privacy.
...which I suppose I'm not helping any, given that I just wrote a Chrome extension this last week to scratch an itch I had at work (controlling the browser-based podcast player I use at work via globally-accessible hotkeys).
Let me suck some of the humor out of this moment with a fact check: chickens weren't part of the Jewish sacrificial system during Biblical times.
As far as animals were concerned, sheep, goats, oxen, and bulls were regularly sacrificed, with different ones being used for different types of sacrifices. Doves were an acceptable sacrifice in some cases, though I believe they were only used when the person offering the sacrifice couldn't afford the appropriate animal.
Also, if memory serves, touching a woman during menstruation merely made you ritually unclean until evening, at which point you'd take a bath and then be back to ritually clean again. I don't recall it requiring a sacrifice, though I've only read the Bible cover-to-cover maybe a dozen times so far, so I could be mistaken.
A law degree used to be mandatory, now it's a large majority.
No and no. A law degree was never mandatory for every agent, the requirement is still in place for the positions that required it before, and it was never even a plurality across all agents, let alone a "large majority".
The FBI does require a law degree for certain positions, but only for a small fraction of the jobs for which they're hiring. The FBI's official jobs site lists a number of career paths for agents, including a number of specializations. Of those, only the legal specialization requires a law degree. Given that the FBI employs everything from snipers to hackers to accountants to chemists, it should be patently obvious that a law degree is not currently a general requirement. Moreover, you can go all the way back to prohibition to see that they were hiring many of those same positions from the very start, none of which required a law degree back then either.
Sweet jesus you're using the X-Files as your source?
When you're making ludicrous claims, the best way to highlight their absurdity is to point out that even over-the-top fiction doesn't take it that far. Why? Can you think of a better way to highlight how absurd your claims are?
FBI agents must have a law degree.
What you just said is neither true in the real world, nor is it even true in fiction. From the X-Files to Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, I can't think of a single example that would have given you the false notion that every FBI agent has a law degree. Some certainly do, but that's true at pretty much any law enforcement organization.
Moreover, this is being used for sentencing, not for determining one's innocence. The defendant's guilt has already been decided at this point. And on top of that, bounds are already established for what penalties can be levied for each variety of crime, so it can't exceed those bounds either. As you said, the judge is already a black box. All this does is apply some consistency between the black boxes we're using.
Being bought out by Take Two actually isn't a problem, in my mind. Take Two is a publisher with a decent track record of doing justice by its IPs (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, Red Dead, Bioshock). They let games percolate in development until they're ready, support them with updates for years, and are, in turn, rewarded by their fans with ongoing sales (e.g. GTA5 came out in 2014, but it's still in the Top 10 global sales charts as of right now).
To me, the far larger problem for Kerbal was that a good chunk of their team was stolen away and hired on by Valve awhile back to work on undisclosed projects. Losing the core of your team is a far larger problem to overcome than coming under the umbrella of a publisher who is known for being one of the most hands-off publishers in the biz.
I never thought I'd find myself thinking about that overused The Dark Knight quote about "the hero we deserve" in relation to Trump, but here you've gone and made me think it.
You don't suppose he's actually making himself the villain in order to unite us? That's a scary thought.
The summary doesn't make it clear that these are two separate cases, both in Florida.
Christopher Wheeler is in Broward County and was sentenced to 180 days in jail for refusing to give police his password. He claims he already gave it to them, but the one he gave them doesn't work, hence the contempt of court ruling. Meanwhile, in an entirely separate case, Wesley Victor in neighboring Miami-Dade County claimed he didn't remember the password when he was ordered to provide it 10 months after his arrest, and the judge did not hold him in contempt.
From what I understand (as an Internet armchair lawyer, i.e. IANAL), both of these actually make sense. Wheeler, from the sounds of things, had indicated through his previous actions and testimony that it was his phone and that he knew the password, so supplying the password would not be considered testimonial in nature at that point, which is why passwords typically can't be compelled from people. As such, it makes sense to hold him in contempt of court if he refuses to hand over a password that they've already established he has. As for Victor, it had been 10 months since they had confiscated his phone, and he never claimed to remember the password at that point, so it makes sense (at least to me) that they wouldn't hold him in contempt of court.
What might be more interesting is Victor's girlfriend, who's in the same situation he is, but who provided the wrong password for her phone. If she's NOT held in contempt of court after doing so, it would be interesting to hear what the court's rationale is.
It doesn't switch back and forth between modes. It starts in their low-emissions mode and then switches to high-emissions mode once they detect that the wheel has turned more than 15 degrees. A car in normal driving conditions would thus trigger the high-emissions mode almost immediately, given that almost every drive begins with having to either get out of a parking space, turn onto a road, or change lanes to rejoin the flow of traffic. But a car that's just spinning its wheels in place so that it can be checked for emissions under controlled conditions? It'll never trigger high-emissions mode.
As for why they weren't smart enough to make it work like you thought? They couldn't. The low-emissions mode achieves its lower emissions by sacrificing performance. If they sacrificed performance every time they started going in a straight line, people would notice pretty quickly that something was up.
I certainly agree that those are factors as well, but I don't think they diminish Rotten Tomatoes' role in influencing the public's viewing habits.