Going to an actual deli isn't always a very viable option because they're not that common, at least around here.
Subway is awful, but I think a lot of people see it as a fresh alternative to greasy fast food. And it mostly is if you stick to cold cuts and vegetables. It's all low quality no matter what.
And their awfulness has insured they have a ton of competitors, Jimmy Johns, Whichwich, Potbelly, and probably others, too.
and still would like to have an easy access to Asian and Australian markets and attractions,
What makes "Asia" any easier to get to from NZ than anywhere else? Aukland-Bangkok is still a 12 hour flight. It's actually less flying time to Santiago, Chile than Bangkok. Once you're at the 12 hour flight duration, you might as well say anywhere is close to anywhere so long as you have access to an international airport.
My impression is that while New Zealand is has stunning scenery, the people I've met that have been there or live there say it's astonishingly expensive because almost everything has to be imported and the taxes are high. And you're a zillion miles from everywhere except Australia, which I will grant may be a reason to live there.
I wonder if it hasn't gotten this way simply as a synthesis of multiple agendas and their outcomes.
Management wants to hire the cheapest possible talent. For a while, they achieve this goal, and the staff mix shifts towards less talented people. Productivity expectations don't go away and the more experienced/better staff shoulder the burden.
Management notices (perhaps even having to fire some quantity of cheap staff for obvious gaffes and lack of productivity), and listens to the chorus of "hire smarter people". So the interviews get harder, with the idea that this will allow smarter *and* cheaper hires.
This works to a degree, but now the more experienced people are somewhat threatened by an influx of smart *and* cheap staff. So the interview questions get much harder and more unrealistic under the guise of ever-smarter people requirements, but the actual goal is just raising the bar so that you wind up with really smart people but too far out on the spectrum, deficient in the soft skills that would allow them to rise in the organization. The old hands gain talent that eases the workload but greatly reduce the risk to their own organization standing.
Even if none of this is true, it still seems that an obviously flawed hiring process like this has to be a byproduct of agendas other than simply "hiring the most capable people". Still I think cost and self-preservation are probably large factors in these processes.
Most restaurants that sell sandwiches are primarily trying to sell you a very large hunk of bread with as little protein as possible. It's not just sub shops, it's anywhere.
I went low carb for a couple of years and one of the shocking things was ordering sandwiches and even hamburgers and finding out that there was very little meat inside. I often had to order two sandwich items to get enough food to not feel extremely hungry.
One of the few places where I don't feel like I'm just being fed bread is Potbelly if you order one of their "flats". These are some kind of flat bread which is quite thin. I suppose other chains may have something similar. I still often order it with double meat if there's some question what and when dinner will be.
At Jimmy John's you can get a lettuce wrap, which is kind of messy but serviceable. I prefer a hot sandwich, though, and I don't know of anyplace that will do a hot lettuce wrap.
There is some ever-so-slight chance that losing Lightning for USB-C is part of some other, larger strategy involving broader peripheral use on iPhones and especially iPads.
When the iPad Pro came out there seemed to be a lot of marketing trying to sell it as some kind of Laptop Lite, which is tough sell with a hermetically sealed system that doesn't support (AFAIK) even bluetooth mice other than a couple of specialty models and even then on an app-by-app basis, let alone various USB thumb drives or other basic USB devices.
Maybe they see some synergy between peripheral compatibility, parts sourcing, and use-case expansion as somehow key to expanding market share. By switching to USB-C they can further cut overhead costs (USB-C sockets in like quantities have to be cheaper than Lightning ones), roll out some kind of additional peripheral compatibility and maybe grow their iPad sales, or at least stave off losses to Wintel tablets.
The switch to USB-C would make less sense in the context of phones vs. tablets, but would it be expected (or even demanded) by consumers that phones and tablets would share the same connector, as well as unify the entire product lineup from phone to desktop.
I thought this was an older directive which they managed to meet by selling phones in the EU with a female micro-USB to Apple adapter included in the box, thus making it USB-compatible.
For all of their hype about courage, design, etc, I've always subscribed somewhat to the idea that Apple like proprietary because it drives more marginal revenue for them via licensing and (at least initially) single-source supplier status on some aspects of their hardware.
Which makes it seem strange that they would abandon Lightning for an industry standard connector. Dropping 30 pin connectors made sense from a practical perspective, and IIRC, they have some kind of proprietary chip in them which enables Apple to get a licensing cut (or guarantee quality standards, depending on how you like your kool-aid).
A standard connector would end their relative monopoly on cabling.
The rest of it -- virtual home button, etc, I'm totally willing to believe. The home button would actually be in keeping with their stated goals of removing bulky fixtures and connectors.
Netflix is also producing TV-style programming, which is different from Hollywood movies. The economics are different, the production values are different, etc.
TV shows generally have lower production quality, but some Netflix originals I would say are near movie-quality, like House of Cards. It doesn't have the cheap TV feel that some of their series have, it's mostly on par with HBO's better efforts which I think are movie-quality.
I don't see why you couldn't use the series format with careful scheduling to get movie quality for less money; make sure you can get maximum use out of existing sets, locations, costumes -- basically shoot extra footage.
Yes, I took my iPhone 6 Plus (normally on AT&T in the US) to the UK in December. A friend in the UK had mailed me an activated Asda pay-as-you-go SIM so I could have cheap phone service and data while in the UK.
When I first got there, tethering still showed up as an option. I (unfortunately) agreed to a carrier update while I was there and lost tethering -- apparently not a part of my Asda service. It wasn't a problem while I was there, the hotel actually had good and free wifi and I only really needed data on my phone, which worked fine.
It's really shitty that carriers dig this deep and have found (yet another) way to chisel their customers. I tried digging online just now, and I really couldn't find an unlocked hotspot with US LTE bands, I'd be curious to know if carriers treat hotspot devices like tethering.
I've been a mostly satisfied AT&T customer for the last 7 years. In their favor, good coverage everywhere I've been, including Stumblefuck, ND, and they unlocked 2 (paid for) phones quickly and easily when I went to the UK so I could use an Asda SIM. Historically trips to the store have been brief and easy and I got what I needed done without grief.
That changed on Saturday. Like most people, we haven't been upgrading handsets and my wife was complaining about problems with her iPhone 5s, so we decided to get her a new phone. She wanted a 7 Plus.
On trip one, we went in and the sales droid pulled out all the stops to get us to buy other shit. $50 iPad mini if we added a line of service. Beats wireless headphones on the table "ready to buy", DirecTV, fucking cell phone insurance plan pre-added to our account in the tablet application. After telling him to fuck off over everything he wanted to do and to not stick us on a 6 gig shared plan when we use 5.95 GB regularly, we finally finished and walked out with the new phone and a case for it (she makes the money, so she gets to buy an overpriced case, but I digress).
Sure enough when we get home -- it's an iPhone 7 -- NOT the plus model. Couldn't tell from the box without the Plus box next to it to compare (or reading the microscoping printing on the bottom label).
Go back to the store WITH the iPhone 7 Plus case we bought and explain it to a different sales droid. Told him the first salesmen brought out the wrong phone, sold us a case that didn't match it without saying anything and who can tell from the sealed iPhone box (iPhone 7 and 7 Plus packaging is IDENTICAL in appearance other than size, and the non-plus box still larger than an actual Plus phone). Told him we had wanted the Plus but been given the smaller one in error. "Why would we pick out a wrong-sized new case? Why would sell us a phone and mismatched case?"
He wanted to charge me a $45 restock fee. Store was crowded and I raised my voice and told him I wasn't paying for his mistake and I would (well, mostly) walk away to T-Mobile with all 3 lines of service. Manager heard my voice, came over and approved the exchange without the $45 fee. Then THIS guy wouldn't let up about the insurance plan -- "Are you a gambler?" Fuck off.
So I get home.....and, the dumbshit assigned MY number to the now-right new iPhone SIM. Third trip back to the store to get a new SIM for my phone and the right number on the new phone.
3 fucking trips due to their incompetence. I told the manager when I was there that he needed to focus his employees on the details of their transactions, not on the relentless upselling.
That's more than likely part of the high cost of OEM repairs -- they already outsource that stuff to third parties, so there are additional transaction costs of job routing and the material and overhead costs of parts depots spread all over. Plus most of the labor providers are big companies with big overheads which jacks up costs.
It would probably be good for everybody if OEMs would build out a network that used existing screwdriver shops as official repair locations. They do a lot of the work now, but are kind of cut out of the parts supply. There's one near my house I've used to help source parts for my own repairs and they say that OEM parts are tough to get because the OEMs don't supply repair parts like they used to. They often rely on EBay and stripping broken systems for parts these days.
I think an advantage for Netflix is their ability to produce niche content.
Studios have to aim for a broader appeal for any given film since they can produce and distribute fewer titles which usually have a higher budget and thus greater risk, and to hedge against risk they have gotten in the habit of re-doing what was popular before with the idea that it will be popular again. So they make a picture that's only of average quality to an average audience.
By aiming at niche audiences, Netflix makes content that may have a smaller audience but provides better than average satisfaction to the audience. I think I've heard more people talk about Stranger Things than any of the Oscar nominated films or most of movies released this year period.
I'd also wager that a 10 episode Netflix serial, even at near-movie quality production values, has some economies of scale and has a cost per running hour that is less than a Hollywood film, providing more content at aggregate cost. The difference between a 10 hour series and a 2 hour movie is often more expository scenes that make more efficient use of the cast and crew since you're getting more mileage out of costumes, settings and locations.
Ford has $60 billion in fixed assets on their balance sheet, Apple less than half that. I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants nor doing the work to line up thousands of supplier relationships necessary to actually build an entire car.
I don't follow the auto industry, but my sense has always been that while they have a deep parts supply chain there really aren't contract manufacturers who build whole cars based on third party designs the way smartphones or computers are made.
If you were running a shop fixing these things, you would have some process surrounding the job which took into account paperwork, getting the parts and laptop to the bench, opening the parts (which would no doubt be packaged up the wazoo), installing them, finishing paperwork, putting the laptop back and dealing with the old parts (electronics waste process) and putting the laptop back on the pickup shelf.
You'd be crazy if you didn't bill this as a one hour job and covering your labor costs would make it a $200 repair pretty easily. And if you were a smart business person, you'd probably also survey the market and price according to market options -- ie, buying a new laptop for $900 -- and extract another $100 in pricing.
Bam. $300 repair job. Sure, Lenovo's pricing is way out of line but they are in the business of selling new laptops, so they are going to structure pricing to motivate you to buy a new laptop.
But in the bigger picture, people fixing things as a business have other costs to consider that have to met by their labor charges. There's no such thing as pricing a labor job based solely on the time to do the primary repair. The *process* takes longer and that process is necessary to run the business and that cost has to be covered. Your personal repair speed isn't the basis of a business process.
The one thing I know is you can not have a rational discussion with them about gun control.
And this is where the discussion quickly disintegrates, because any discussion with someone who believes in the right to bear arms is quickly labeled "irrational" when the person who believes in less gun control doesn't immediately agree with the person who believes in more gun control.
It is still a rational discussion even if your counter-party does not abandon their position and cede to your argument.
Nearly all the people I've known who have been gun rights advocates, even those who have been senior members of lobby organizations, have been in favor of gun control measures, usually enforcement of existing gun control laws like prohibitions on convicted felons from possessing them (as one example). In fact, a major theme is that the government itself does not prosecute many gun control measures already on the books.
I doubt more than a small percentage of the people charged with gun crimes in Chicago who are eligible for Federal charges were referred to Federal prosecutors and further, that Federal prosecutors declined to prosecute a number of cases that were referred to them. If you can charge a violent felon with a gun crime, why wouldn't you?
Because gun control advocates label any discussion which doesn't start out with "How much more gun control should we have?" as *irrational*, it's led to the belief that gun control advocates really are gun ownership ban advocates -- there isn't a threshold for them where there is "enough" gun control, they favor outright gun ownership bans and often won't say it directly.
Many larger recreational vessels (say, 30' and over) have been available with combination systems (radar, depth sounders, chartplotters, autopilots) which integrate to make the boat self-piloting.
Surely at some point there have been problems where these systems didn't work as intended and there were accidents that resulted.
For most boats, though, at best the control system (electronics and autopilot) might come from one vendor, the hull from another, and the primary propulsion from a third.
But I wonder if they have held the electronics/autopilot liable for the malfunction or if they have shifted it onto the mariner in all cases.
That's kind of bullshit, really, because the enable-exchangecertificate -services flag specifies specific services in an umbrella manner (eg, IIS, SMTP, etc) and neither it nor its official documentation explains that assigning a certificate to these services *won't* actually use this certificate.
Ie, the -services iis flag will get your assigned cert for OWA/ActiveSync/OA with IIS, but the Backend site will hang onto the self-signed cert at installation, as will hub transport SMTP. And it's poorly documented at best and NOT mentioned in the enable-exchangecertificate documentation in addition to running counter to past version behavior.
But the larger problem is that Exchange on premise is rapidly become a spaghetti mess of code written mostly for O365 hosting and cut-down and neutered for sites not quite ready to pay 3 to 5 times as much for hosted Exchange. The documentation blows, which is magnified as more and more configuration melts into a maze of Powershell commands.
I predict that by Exchange 2019 or whatever the next version is that MS will have reduced the documentation and ease of management so much that only sites large enough to support dedicated exchange teams (and access to high-level support) will even be able to run it on premise.
I like the idea, but I find it clashes with reality too often.
Management wants everything for free, SCOM they won't pay for and scripting is seen variously as a kind of technological masturbation and time wasting or the creation of unmanageable spaghetti.
IIRC, the AT&T Next program or whatever they called it made my last iPhone (6 Plus, so it's been a while) basically an 18 month interest free loan.
If you're upgrading on two year cycles, then that's at least 6 months with no payments. 3 years would make it 18 on and 18 off with payments.
In some cases, even "perpetual" payments may not be as bad as they seem. Until the 6 Plus, I upgraded every year but my wife got my year old handset and her handset got pushed down to be our "home" phone. So each phone technically had a 3 year (probably slightly longer) use cycle, at which point it was close to software obsolete or nearly unusable with the most recent software update.
My 6 Plus is the first iPhone I've had where there wasn't a noticeable degradation in performance when switching to the "new" OS released with a new phone model. Between that and the lack of compelling new technology, I've been content at this point to hold on to my 6 Plus. It really is all I need.
You're right that the tyranny of the majority could be a big problem, but these days initiative and referendum seems like it has some real benefits. As a safety override for legislatures which are increasingly incapable of only passing legislation beneficial to the moneyed class or so divided by partisanship they are unable to fix issues which the partisans have stakes in but which the electorate sees as non-partisan.
I'd put legalizing recreation marijuana in the category of cases where referendums served the public good. It stays illegal because the existing stakeholders in the security state and big pharma see it as antithetical to their individual interests, and most politicians are too pusillanimous to take a reasonable position on the issue.
You can't really compete with the concept of WWZ zombies -- they're just too fast and aggressive, but I think nearly every other invocation of them would fall away from an elliptical wall.
The other low-tech zombie fighting tool I've always wanted to see employed is a good old demining flail. These look like tanks with a combine attached on front, only the combine part is steel weights the size of melons attached to chains. They rotate and pound the ground to set off any mines.
If you raised the flail assembly so it just spun in the air, you could literally drive into zombie hoards at low speed and just pulp them.
My guess is that a similar apparatus on a smaller scale could probably be adapted to nearly any vehicle, probably even improvised from hydraulic sweeper attachments for Bobcats.
I always wondered why a slope with an incline that gradually increased to vertical wasn't ever employed in zombie fiction forts. They would shamble forward until their center of mass shifted and then fall back.
With the right slope contour, you could make it so they fell back pretty far.
Another option would be a kind of blind curve, where they shamble in and then just shamble away on the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh, just convert it to imperial pecks and you'll instantly visualize it as a dustbin.
Going to an actual deli isn't always a very viable option because they're not that common, at least around here.
Subway is awful, but I think a lot of people see it as a fresh alternative to greasy fast food. And it mostly is if you stick to cold cuts and vegetables. It's all low quality no matter what.
And their awfulness has insured they have a ton of competitors, Jimmy Johns, Whichwich, Potbelly, and probably others, too.
and still would like to have an easy access to Asian and Australian markets and attractions,
What makes "Asia" any easier to get to from NZ than anywhere else? Aukland-Bangkok is still a 12 hour flight. It's actually less flying time to Santiago, Chile than Bangkok. Once you're at the 12 hour flight duration, you might as well say anywhere is close to anywhere so long as you have access to an international airport.
My impression is that while New Zealand is has stunning scenery, the people I've met that have been there or live there say it's astonishingly expensive because almost everything has to be imported and the taxes are high. And you're a zillion miles from everywhere except Australia, which I will grant may be a reason to live there.
I wonder if it hasn't gotten this way simply as a synthesis of multiple agendas and their outcomes.
Management wants to hire the cheapest possible talent. For a while, they achieve this goal, and the staff mix shifts towards less talented people. Productivity expectations don't go away and the more experienced/better staff shoulder the burden.
Management notices (perhaps even having to fire some quantity of cheap staff for obvious gaffes and lack of productivity), and listens to the chorus of "hire smarter people". So the interviews get harder, with the idea that this will allow smarter *and* cheaper hires.
This works to a degree, but now the more experienced people are somewhat threatened by an influx of smart *and* cheap staff. So the interview questions get much harder and more unrealistic under the guise of ever-smarter people requirements, but the actual goal is just raising the bar so that you wind up with really smart people but too far out on the spectrum, deficient in the soft skills that would allow them to rise in the organization. The old hands gain talent that eases the workload but greatly reduce the risk to their own organization standing.
Even if none of this is true, it still seems that an obviously flawed hiring process like this has to be a byproduct of agendas other than simply "hiring the most capable people". Still I think cost and self-preservation are probably large factors in these processes.
Why should I feel represented by someone just because they happen to have something in common with me?
I'll bet this is true of most self-appointed representatives of interest groups.
I'd even wager to say that there are a lot of racists who turn on TV and see some neo-Nazi and think "that guy is so dumb".
Most restaurants that sell sandwiches are primarily trying to sell you a very large hunk of bread with as little protein as possible. It's not just sub shops, it's anywhere.
I went low carb for a couple of years and one of the shocking things was ordering sandwiches and even hamburgers and finding out that there was very little meat inside. I often had to order two sandwich items to get enough food to not feel extremely hungry.
One of the few places where I don't feel like I'm just being fed bread is Potbelly if you order one of their "flats". These are some kind of flat bread which is quite thin. I suppose other chains may have something similar. I still often order it with double meat if there's some question what and when dinner will be.
At Jimmy John's you can get a lettuce wrap, which is kind of messy but serviceable. I prefer a hot sandwich, though, and I don't know of anyplace that will do a hot lettuce wrap.
There is some ever-so-slight chance that losing Lightning for USB-C is part of some other, larger strategy involving broader peripheral use on iPhones and especially iPads.
When the iPad Pro came out there seemed to be a lot of marketing trying to sell it as some kind of Laptop Lite, which is tough sell with a hermetically sealed system that doesn't support (AFAIK) even bluetooth mice other than a couple of specialty models and even then on an app-by-app basis, let alone various USB thumb drives or other basic USB devices.
Maybe they see some synergy between peripheral compatibility, parts sourcing, and use-case expansion as somehow key to expanding market share. By switching to USB-C they can further cut overhead costs (USB-C sockets in like quantities have to be cheaper than Lightning ones), roll out some kind of additional peripheral compatibility and maybe grow their iPad sales, or at least stave off losses to Wintel tablets.
The switch to USB-C would make less sense in the context of phones vs. tablets, but would it be expected (or even demanded) by consumers that phones and tablets would share the same connector, as well as unify the entire product lineup from phone to desktop.
I thought this was an older directive which they managed to meet by selling phones in the EU with a female micro-USB to Apple adapter included in the box, thus making it USB-compatible.
For all of their hype about courage, design, etc, I've always subscribed somewhat to the idea that Apple like proprietary because it drives more marginal revenue for them via licensing and (at least initially) single-source supplier status on some aspects of their hardware.
Which makes it seem strange that they would abandon Lightning for an industry standard connector. Dropping 30 pin connectors made sense from a practical perspective, and IIRC, they have some kind of proprietary chip in them which enables Apple to get a licensing cut (or guarantee quality standards, depending on how you like your kool-aid).
A standard connector would end their relative monopoly on cabling.
The rest of it -- virtual home button, etc, I'm totally willing to believe. The home button would actually be in keeping with their stated goals of removing bulky fixtures and connectors.
Netflix is also producing TV-style programming, which is different from Hollywood movies. The economics are different, the production values are different, etc.
TV shows generally have lower production quality, but some Netflix originals I would say are near movie-quality, like House of Cards. It doesn't have the cheap TV feel that some of their series have, it's mostly on par with HBO's better efforts which I think are movie-quality.
I don't see why you couldn't use the series format with careful scheduling to get movie quality for less money; make sure you can get maximum use out of existing sets, locations, costumes -- basically shoot extra footage.
Yes, I took my iPhone 6 Plus (normally on AT&T in the US) to the UK in December. A friend in the UK had mailed me an activated Asda pay-as-you-go SIM so I could have cheap phone service and data while in the UK.
When I first got there, tethering still showed up as an option. I (unfortunately) agreed to a carrier update while I was there and lost tethering -- apparently not a part of my Asda service. It wasn't a problem while I was there, the hotel actually had good and free wifi and I only really needed data on my phone, which worked fine.
It's really shitty that carriers dig this deep and have found (yet another) way to chisel their customers. I tried digging online just now, and I really couldn't find an unlocked hotspot with US LTE bands, I'd be curious to know if carriers treat hotspot devices like tethering.
I've been a mostly satisfied AT&T customer for the last 7 years. In their favor, good coverage everywhere I've been, including Stumblefuck, ND, and they unlocked 2 (paid for) phones quickly and easily when I went to the UK so I could use an Asda SIM. Historically trips to the store have been brief and easy and I got what I needed done without grief.
That changed on Saturday. Like most people, we haven't been upgrading handsets and my wife was complaining about problems with her iPhone 5s, so we decided to get her a new phone. She wanted a 7 Plus.
On trip one, we went in and the sales droid pulled out all the stops to get us to buy other shit. $50 iPad mini if we added a line of service. Beats wireless headphones on the table "ready to buy", DirecTV, fucking cell phone insurance plan pre-added to our account in the tablet application. After telling him to fuck off over everything he wanted to do and to not stick us on a 6 gig shared plan when we use 5.95 GB regularly, we finally finished and walked out with the new phone and a case for it (she makes the money, so she gets to buy an overpriced case, but I digress).
Sure enough when we get home -- it's an iPhone 7 -- NOT the plus model. Couldn't tell from the box without the Plus box next to it to compare (or reading the microscoping printing on the bottom label).
Go back to the store WITH the iPhone 7 Plus case we bought and explain it to a different sales droid. Told him the first salesmen brought out the wrong phone, sold us a case that didn't match it without saying anything and who can tell from the sealed iPhone box (iPhone 7 and 7 Plus packaging is IDENTICAL in appearance other than size, and the non-plus box still larger than an actual Plus phone). Told him we had wanted the Plus but been given the smaller one in error. "Why would we pick out a wrong-sized new case? Why would sell us a phone and mismatched case?"
He wanted to charge me a $45 restock fee. Store was crowded and I raised my voice and told him I wasn't paying for his mistake and I would (well, mostly) walk away to T-Mobile with all 3 lines of service. Manager heard my voice, came over and approved the exchange without the $45 fee. Then THIS guy wouldn't let up about the insurance plan -- "Are you a gambler?" Fuck off.
So I get home.....and, the dumbshit assigned MY number to the now-right new iPhone SIM. Third trip back to the store to get a new SIM for my phone and the right number on the new phone.
3 fucking trips due to their incompetence. I told the manager when I was there that he needed to focus his employees on the details of their transactions, not on the relentless upselling.
That's more than likely part of the high cost of OEM repairs -- they already outsource that stuff to third parties, so there are additional transaction costs of job routing and the material and overhead costs of parts depots spread all over. Plus most of the labor providers are big companies with big overheads which jacks up costs.
It would probably be good for everybody if OEMs would build out a network that used existing screwdriver shops as official repair locations. They do a lot of the work now, but are kind of cut out of the parts supply. There's one near my house I've used to help source parts for my own repairs and they say that OEM parts are tough to get because the OEMs don't supply repair parts like they used to. They often rely on EBay and stripping broken systems for parts these days.
I think an advantage for Netflix is their ability to produce niche content.
Studios have to aim for a broader appeal for any given film since they can produce and distribute fewer titles which usually have a higher budget and thus greater risk, and to hedge against risk they have gotten in the habit of re-doing what was popular before with the idea that it will be popular again. So they make a picture that's only of average quality to an average audience.
By aiming at niche audiences, Netflix makes content that may have a smaller audience but provides better than average satisfaction to the audience. I think I've heard more people talk about Stranger Things than any of the Oscar nominated films or most of movies released this year period.
I'd also wager that a 10 episode Netflix serial, even at near-movie quality production values, has some economies of scale and has a cost per running hour that is less than a Hollywood film, providing more content at aggregate cost. The difference between a 10 hour series and a 2 hour movie is often more expository scenes that make more efficient use of the cast and crew since you're getting more mileage out of costumes, settings and locations.
That was my thought.
Ford has $60 billion in fixed assets on their balance sheet, Apple less than half that. I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants nor doing the work to line up thousands of supplier relationships necessary to actually build an entire car.
I don't follow the auto industry, but my sense has always been that while they have a deep parts supply chain there really aren't contract manufacturers who build whole cars based on third party designs the way smartphones or computers are made.
If you were running a shop fixing these things, you would have some process surrounding the job which took into account paperwork, getting the parts and laptop to the bench, opening the parts (which would no doubt be packaged up the wazoo), installing them, finishing paperwork, putting the laptop back and dealing with the old parts (electronics waste process) and putting the laptop back on the pickup shelf.
You'd be crazy if you didn't bill this as a one hour job and covering your labor costs would make it a $200 repair pretty easily. And if you were a smart business person, you'd probably also survey the market and price according to market options -- ie, buying a new laptop for $900 -- and extract another $100 in pricing.
Bam. $300 repair job. Sure, Lenovo's pricing is way out of line but they are in the business of selling new laptops, so they are going to structure pricing to motivate you to buy a new laptop.
But in the bigger picture, people fixing things as a business have other costs to consider that have to met by their labor charges. There's no such thing as pricing a labor job based solely on the time to do the primary repair. The *process* takes longer and that process is necessary to run the business and that cost has to be covered. Your personal repair speed isn't the basis of a business process.
The one thing I know is you can not have a rational discussion with them about gun control.
And this is where the discussion quickly disintegrates, because any discussion with someone who believes in the right to bear arms is quickly labeled "irrational" when the person who believes in less gun control doesn't immediately agree with the person who believes in more gun control.
It is still a rational discussion even if your counter-party does not abandon their position and cede to your argument.
Nearly all the people I've known who have been gun rights advocates, even those who have been senior members of lobby organizations, have been in favor of gun control measures, usually enforcement of existing gun control laws like prohibitions on convicted felons from possessing them (as one example). In fact, a major theme is that the government itself does not prosecute many gun control measures already on the books.
I doubt more than a small percentage of the people charged with gun crimes in Chicago who are eligible for Federal charges were referred to Federal prosecutors and further, that Federal prosecutors declined to prosecute a number of cases that were referred to them. If you can charge a violent felon with a gun crime, why wouldn't you?
Because gun control advocates label any discussion which doesn't start out with "How much more gun control should we have?" as *irrational*, it's led to the belief that gun control advocates really are gun ownership ban advocates -- there isn't a threshold for them where there is "enough" gun control, they favor outright gun ownership bans and often won't say it directly.
Many larger recreational vessels (say, 30' and over) have been available with combination systems (radar, depth sounders, chartplotters, autopilots) which integrate to make the boat self-piloting.
Surely at some point there have been problems where these systems didn't work as intended and there were accidents that resulted.
For most boats, though, at best the control system (electronics and autopilot) might come from one vendor, the hull from another, and the primary propulsion from a third.
But I wonder if they have held the electronics/autopilot liable for the malfunction or if they have shifted it onto the mariner in all cases.
That's kind of bullshit, really, because the enable-exchangecertificate -services flag specifies specific services in an umbrella manner (eg, IIS, SMTP, etc) and neither it nor its official documentation explains that assigning a certificate to these services *won't* actually use this certificate.
Ie, the -services iis flag will get your assigned cert for OWA/ActiveSync/OA with IIS, but the Backend site will hang onto the self-signed cert at installation, as will hub transport SMTP. And it's poorly documented at best and NOT mentioned in the enable-exchangecertificate documentation in addition to running counter to past version behavior.
But the larger problem is that Exchange on premise is rapidly become a spaghetti mess of code written mostly for O365 hosting and cut-down and neutered for sites not quite ready to pay 3 to 5 times as much for hosted Exchange. The documentation blows, which is magnified as more and more configuration melts into a maze of Powershell commands.
I predict that by Exchange 2019 or whatever the next version is that MS will have reduced the documentation and ease of management so much that only sites large enough to support dedicated exchange teams (and access to high-level support) will even be able to run it on premise.
I like the idea, but I find it clashes with reality too often.
Management wants everything for free, SCOM they won't pay for and scripting is seen variously as a kind of technological masturbation and time wasting or the creation of unmanageable spaghetti.
IIRC, the AT&T Next program or whatever they called it made my last iPhone (6 Plus, so it's been a while) basically an 18 month interest free loan.
If you're upgrading on two year cycles, then that's at least 6 months with no payments. 3 years would make it 18 on and 18 off with payments.
In some cases, even "perpetual" payments may not be as bad as they seem. Until the 6 Plus, I upgraded every year but my wife got my year old handset and her handset got pushed down to be our "home" phone. So each phone technically had a 3 year (probably slightly longer) use cycle, at which point it was close to software obsolete or nearly unusable with the most recent software update.
My 6 Plus is the first iPhone I've had where there wasn't a noticeable degradation in performance when switching to the "new" OS released with a new phone model. Between that and the lack of compelling new technology, I've been content at this point to hold on to my 6 Plus. It really is all I need.
You're right that the tyranny of the majority could be a big problem, but these days initiative and referendum seems like it has some real benefits. As a safety override for legislatures which are increasingly incapable of only passing legislation beneficial to the moneyed class or so divided by partisanship they are unable to fix issues which the partisans have stakes in but which the electorate sees as non-partisan.
I'd put legalizing recreation marijuana in the category of cases where referendums served the public good. It stays illegal because the existing stakeholders in the security state and big pharma see it as antithetical to their individual interests, and most politicians are too pusillanimous to take a reasonable position on the issue.
You can't really compete with the concept of WWZ zombies -- they're just too fast and aggressive, but I think nearly every other invocation of them would fall away from an elliptical wall.
The other low-tech zombie fighting tool I've always wanted to see employed is a good old demining flail. These look like tanks with a combine attached on front, only the combine part is steel weights the size of melons attached to chains. They rotate and pound the ground to set off any mines.
https://youtu.be/wf6CsvAffHo?t...
If you raised the flail assembly so it just spun in the air, you could literally drive into zombie hoards at low speed and just pulp them.
My guess is that a similar apparatus on a smaller scale could probably be adapted to nearly any vehicle, probably even improvised from hydraulic sweeper attachments for Bobcats.
I always wondered why a slope with an incline that gradually increased to vertical wasn't ever employed in zombie fiction forts. They would shamble forward until their center of mass shifted and then fall back.
With the right slope contour, you could make it so they fell back pretty far.
Another option would be a kind of blind curve, where they shamble in and then just shamble away on the other side.
It doesn't take a lot of facilities and equipment to delete parts from the assembly.