However tricky the headphones may be, they're really only marginal improvements over Bluetooth. My phone magically pairs with the car's infotainment system and when I turn on my headset by the computer it pairs to my phone, and that's just generic Bluetooth.
I think the bigger problem is that both of their major products, phones and computers, are (like everyone else's), so mature they're kind of at conceptual dead ends. The only improvements are minor and incremental to the underlying technologies -- faster cpus and the like.
I think in a lot of ways Microsoft has kind of been the cautionary tale for Apple.
Microsoft has spent billions on new products (I'm hesitant to call it innovation, since many products were market-chasers) but how many actually became market factors? Really, only Xbox.
And then there's the (relative) open nature of Windows, which has handcuffed Microsoft into years of legacy application support and lots of hardware to support. I think Apple feel they've beat this by keeping iPhone/iPad closed devices and moving their computers to nearly as closed a hardware model and being fairly ruthless about obsoleting old OS releases and API levels.
The (good?) news for Apple now is, like Microsoft, they can continue to make money off recurring purchases of the same product at high levels of profit with really no significant competitor to take away their markets and enough lock-in that their user base doesn't stray to the alternatives where they exist.
At least for Microsoft they appear to have Azure as a kind of evolutionary step towards a new product/business model. Apple doesn't have that and doesn't seem to have any means of getting there.
Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
That's not bad! Thanks for the tip. The SuperMicro server I posted a link is definitely overkill for just pfSense (it's really a great virtualization box), for pfSense you really only need a low power system with multiple NICs.
Maybe I'm giving the captains of industry too much credit, but is there some chance that they have done their own reading of the tea leaves and come to the conclusion that some kind of change is afoot politically, socially and maybe even economically that might cause them to re-prioritize investments, even if it doesn't mean abandoning globalization as usual?
For better or worse, Trump bested the political establishment at their own game and did it without even playing by their rules or spending much money while simultaneously being exposed as crude and simple. That might mean that broader change is afoot that should be paid attention to in terms of business priorities.
Aye, dual Ethernet is the feature that seems to be missing from them. There are of course workarounds involving USB3 dongles but I'm not sure if any of the common ones using ASIX chips have support in something like pfSense, although apparently there is a driver for ESXi that will support them as NUCs have been popular lab machines for VMware setups.
Even if the dongle solution works in a given use case, it's still a cursed dongle and not the clean built-in port solution.
In addition to the second Ethernet port, I'd like to see rack mount ears made for it with space to accommodate the PSU brick and any dongles you'd consider adding.
I'm guessing these things are designed to do a couple of things:
1) Cooperative channel and power management -- make sure they don't step on each other any more than is necessary.
I wonder why they haven't built this into wifi devices forever, too. Input a "coordination key" on each device and then let them learn about each other and manage power and channel assignments.
2) Wireless backhaul -- place one where it can get signal from another unit and use that as uplink to distribute signal to areas that drop off badly. Seems marginally useful unless you have an extra radio and the backhaul is handled as a separate stream from client traffic and the backhaul signal is AC.
For some reason it seems like what would end up happening is the place you can't get 5 Ghz N or AC from where you already have a router you probably can get 2.4 Ghz. So in your remote nook you're connecting clients at AC speeds with a backhaul speed a fraction of that.
I'm not saying they can't be fixed but right now it appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem.
It's not really available right now to purchase, so it's not even a search for anything at the moment. I'd guess these problems will mostly solve themselves over time. I'm willing to be optimistic on the hardware side making it actually possible -- ie, you can actually plug in your phone to a monitor and use it as a passable PC, the sort of slightly-above-annoying performance of a standard business desktop.
My bigger question is will "they" allow it to actually happen? I mean, what would it mean to MS if suddenly the tier of people who own a phone and a computer because they need to actually use computer-scale programs, displays, keyboards, etc, suddenly no longer "need" that extra computer and no longer buy that compulsory desktop hardware and license?
We've had the hardware ability for years now to boot and run Windows off a USB stick. USB 2 was possible if mostly impractical, but USB 3 has made it not just possible but probably better performing than many spinning rust PCs yet you still cannot install Windows to a USB stick other than the moderately crippled Windows to Go version.
IMHO if it was available there would be a huge demand for blank PCs with no operating system as people just moved their basic installs to new hardware or just used whatever hardware was in front of them. Really, we should have been doing this 5+ years ago and at this point it would make so much sense if every PC had an internal USB port it could boot from.
The older I get, the more I mourn for the computing environment we *could* have if it wasn't 99% crippled by rent-seeking bean-counters maxing licensing revenue.
The problem with DC branch circuits is the heavy gauge wire needed to keep voltage losses down, and even then you have to ask how much current you want to run via straight DC.
My guess is that unless there was a major standards push, we'd have a mishmash of DC voltages. The "safe" bet would be DC runs in the wall of 48V (smaller wires) but I would bet much of the time you would be locally down converting that to 12V a lot of the time which would be pretty wasteful.
This is a major headache on boats now, where it's better to have a 24V DC system but you still end up with a bunch of minor stuff that wants 12V because there is no 24V version.
First you either have to carry the dock everywhere if you want portability which negates the advantage of carrying just a phone.
Unlike the laptop many people carry with them along with a phone?
If you assume something like this gains traction, then I foresee a lot of situations where docking setups just become ubiquitous or people that need truly portable docking simply carry a laptop-like device which the phone slots into.
I'm less bothered by the storage side of it, my years-old iPhone has 128 GB flash now, two years out what will a typical phablet potentially have? 512 GB? Which means local data storage will be a lot less of an issue, and combined with cloud based storage and docking points having access to at least wifi if not wired bandwidth means you're less hobbled by access to bulk data storage not local to the device.
I'm most curious how carriers will manage to string along the glacial growth in data caps. A neighbor is a city manager for a local suburb and he was explaining the discussions they were having with cell carriers now for what I assume is 5G tower siting, which from his description involves many more micro-cells vs. larger towers we see now.
It may be that carriers are more or less planning for 5G networks which overcome issues of spectrum and bandwidth via smaller cell sites and will ultimately push up caps to where they're less of an issue than they are now. I'm willing to believe caps are mostly a profit system for carriers now, but I'm also guessing they're also used somewhat to manage congestion issues with the existing large-cell model.
Another idea I haven't seen mentioned much in the phone-as-computer world is the notion of applications running as VMs or containers; perhaps docking your phone with a physical computer will make it another node in small VM cluster and you'd merely live migrate your app container to the bigger machine node for access to more compute/storage/RAM when docked for extended periods of time.
You would think they would be trying to get to the phone-as-desktop-computer stage.
Running Photoshop on a phone as a standalone device makes no sense, patched into a full-size monitor it makes complete sense.
It almost looks like phones as portable computers capable of being both mobile devices and (at least lightweight) desktop devices with peripherals seems within reach, and sharing the ability to run the legacy code base.
I hear so much talk about the future of Microsoft being Azure, it also kind of seems like the future of electricity generation being fusion. The march continues to the goal line but he goal line keeps moving, leaving you closer but no nearer.
VM workloads are still fantastically expensive on Azure and nobody seems really interested in database as a service functionality due to the immense lock-in. Network bandwidth from most buildings is just too expensive to get the throughput necessary to offsite significant data unless all but the display part of its lifecycle is in the same cloud.
And while raw CPU has kind of stagnated, vendors keep pushing increasingly dense computing solutions with flash storage on the precipice of eliminating spinning disk completely for capacities around 100 TB. 2U of rack space with tens of TB of flash storage, a couple of TB of RAM and still more CPU than anyone can actually use.
I just see too many companies figuring the bill for Azure VMs plus lock-in at the services level plus the comms charges and just not seeing why they shouldn't stick with ridiculous performance advantages locally and bypass the uncertainty of cloud.
It almost looks like what should be happening here is a kind of natural selection process where Hollywood shifts their money spent making theatrical films where the theater plays a major role.
1) Animated films oriented towards kids. When our son was younger, we went to a lot of animated film because it was a reasonable family activity that got everyone out of the house.
2) Visual-heavy blockbusters which do well in the various IMAX/3D formats or for which all but the most elaborate home theater isn't competitive with a large-scale cinema screen.
They should make fewer traditional films oriented towards "theatrical" distribution because there's little reason to see these in a theater unless the theater experience (going out, meeting friends, a date, etc) itself is nearly more important than whatever it is you see.
This money should be spent instead on making "mini-series" or other multi-episode films or streaming series, since it seems like the economics of a six episode serial is about the same as a 2 hour theatrical film.
I'm not sure how fraud can possibly apply to sex unless there is a quid pro quo involved in the sex, in which case it's not consensual sex but prostitution, sex in exchange for something.
If I tell a woman I'm wealthy, I really love her, or anything similar and then she agrees to have sex with me but find out that none of it was true, how is it rape?
Most of the plausible situations which might involve "fraud" seem to center around therapists or other medical practitioners who claim that sex is somehow necessary for treatment, and that's already covered by laws regulating professional conduct or the inherent coercive relationship involved.
I think a good number of women would LIKE it to be rape if a sex partner who says he cares for them and then turns out not to, but of course how would you handle the cases where a man decided he didn't like you AFTER having sex?
Women too often seem to want to turn buyer's remorse or their own gullibility into rape.
The guy who I saw first doing this ("Rick" on Backroom Casting Couch) sure made it look real.
Many of the girls he films seem completely believable as total amateurs, so much so that if these girls are putting on an act, someone in mainstream Hollywood needs to talk to them about acting in real films. I just don't think strippers, hookers or low-end porn pros can pull off some of the facial expressions and awkward pauses that happen in BRCC's videos.
I always assumed there was a gimmick to them, though. My assumption is that the action actually plays out as it appears, but afterward he has them sign a release and probably has to pay some of them something to get it signed even though during the video he tells them that they're not getting paid today.
Some of the episodes seem rigged, as if he had to actually hire a few entry level pros to get episodes made on schedule, but most of the time it has a really remarkable reality to it that seems as if many of these girls really are amateurs falling for his ploy. It's basically too real appearing to be entirely contrived.
One thing I do like about Obama is that I think he really is personally committed to measured and considered policy.
But one thing I hate about Obama is that there's a whole sphere of *leadership* where appearing measured and considered doesn't do you any good. At absolute best it makes you look "strategic" but mostly it just makes you appear weak and unwilling or unable to make a decision, caught in a web of analysis paralysis and afraid of risk.
With Obama, he treats every issue as if decision making is the primary element. If that was the case, when we wouldn't really need a leader, we'd just need someone to be the committee chairman. But in many cases we need a leader willing to take risks and rally people behind decisions. With Obama it's hard to do that when everything feels like the outcome of a committee discussion as to what color to paint the bike shed.
There may be some subset of buyers who buy that car based merely on performance, but there will likely be a larger subset of buyers looking for a high performance daily driver with use criteria beyond mere performance.
The latter category of people also overlap with the likely readership of Consumer Reports, while the former will be reading Car and Driver or some other performance related magazine where power and speed are the evaluation criteria.
Probably to mollify the feds under the Justice Department guidelines for state-level marijuana legalization. Pull out all the stops to demonstrate how much control you're imposing.
Long March 2D Rocket, genuine manufacture, capable of placing satellites in orbit. Minimum order quantity 2, maximum order 25 requires 2 week lead time. International shipping from Guangzhou.
This occurred to me. Rather than an obvious "cyberattack" where you shut off ATMs or electricity or some other completely obvious visible service, instead you demonstrate how you can hit the remote off button for avionics on specific aircraft at will.
It works well because unlike things expected to be network connected and possibly have some kind of reachable vulnerability in a knowable failure domain, something not considered practically hackable gets disabled and there's not even good theories about how its done or what the limits of such a technique may be.
Lacking basic shelter one can claim as recurring occupancy; sleeping outdoors or in temporary accommodation provided as a charity on a daily or weekly basis; living in a vehicle or structure lacking running water or bathroom facilities. I think fewer people meet this definition.
Non-normative homelessness: Having recurring but possibly unstable occupancy in a dwelling but in a manner not meeting normative standards for living arrangements associated with your demographic in your society. I would throw a family of 3+ people sharing a single room with bathroom facilities shared by unrelated people as meeting this kind of criteria of homelessness in the United States and would suspect it is a larger number than strict homelessness listed above.
There's all kinds of ways to define homelessness, but I would call single families sharing a room in a house designed for single family occupancy to be at least substandard if not a kind of homelessness since its clearly not desirable to them. I can't think of any family who lives in a house or typical apartment who would choose to share a typical 2000 sq ft house with other families.
I do think some of the subtext of this discussion is kind of disturbing -- "they're not suffering enough to be called homeless" or "they're making stupid decisions and deserve this outcome".
I'm kind of mystified by the abuse of CR testing here. There's kind of a meme that CR can't test anything besides blenders, AFAICT it originated back in the day when they started testing stereos and audiophiles got bent that their testing wasn't judging whether exotic equipment produced the exotic sounds or wasn't using the requisite 00 gauge welding cable to connect the speakers.
They're not disassembling the batteries and running the cell material through a mass spectrometer or conducting elaborate electrical tests of the batteries themselves; they don't need to.
What they do need to do is design reasonable structured tests of laptop usage and keep track of the battery's lifespan during these tests and compare it to the manufacturer's claims. That's well within CR's ability and it's perfectly valid. Either the computer battery does what the manufacturer claims it will do or it doesn't.
What CR is likely complaining about is that Apple modeled their battery life on some average use pattern that's not very realistic or very easy to deviate from in ways that seriously affect battery life.
What Apple should have done was modeled their battery life based on more intensive use cases. But of course then you can't make the laptop even thinner and the battery even smaller and then make long life battery claims. IMHO Apple is a victim of their own thinness obsession and is fudging the numbers to make it look positive.
The problem with employee turnover as an expense is only really a problem to the extent that you consider lost internal productivity to be a burden.
I think in a lot of companies they see internal IT users the way any monopoly sees its customers -- people who are going to buy whatever fucking shit product you put out at whatever high price you want to charge because they have no other choice. It's the same crappy service they deliver to their actual customers when they have the market cornered.
I'm not arguing that you're wrong, that the quality of service suffers or that turnover has costs or that it may have broader business impacts, but that they don't care because it's the same ripoff monopolist mindset applied to a different single-sourced seller/customer relationship that you see everywhere (eg cable TV).
Why provide a better product -- internal IT -- when the same customer base will pay the same price for a shittier product in light of any alternative? Even if the users hate it, their managers won't gripe about it either if the chargebacks are less for them, and even if they do gripe they'll be told that the organization benefits because IT costs are lower.
For me, psychologically at least, there's not really any realistic amount of money that would offset the delay.
It would literally require them telling me they were transferring me to the private aviation terminal to be flown on a private jet to go along with it, or whatever the cash equivalent of that is.
Many people love to volunteer to take a later flight in exchange for compensation.
I get why airlines overbook from an operational standpoint, but this volunteering to take a later flight part is what mystifies me. Vacations are only so long, hotel rooms are paid for, activities with inflexible schedules are planned, someone's changed their plans to provide destination end transport, and so on.
While I'm pretty sure this is mostly my biases, I can't even begin to imagine sitting at the airport thinking "No problem, I'd love to get to my destination 8-24 hours later, because I'm not looking down a stack of nested contingencies that require me to get someplace as scheduled for them to work. And of course I want that voucher which is totally flexible, provided I want to fly from TUL to FAR on a Tuesday in January."
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However tricky the headphones may be, they're really only marginal improvements over Bluetooth. My phone magically pairs with the car's infotainment system and when I turn on my headset by the computer it pairs to my phone, and that's just generic Bluetooth.
I think the bigger problem is that both of their major products, phones and computers, are (like everyone else's), so mature they're kind of at conceptual dead ends. The only improvements are minor and incremental to the underlying technologies -- faster cpus and the like.
I think in a lot of ways Microsoft has kind of been the cautionary tale for Apple.
Microsoft has spent billions on new products (I'm hesitant to call it innovation, since many products were market-chasers) but how many actually became market factors? Really, only Xbox.
And then there's the (relative) open nature of Windows, which has handcuffed Microsoft into years of legacy application support and lots of hardware to support. I think Apple feel they've beat this by keeping iPhone/iPad closed devices and moving their computers to nearly as closed a hardware model and being fairly ruthless about obsoleting old OS releases and API levels.
The (good?) news for Apple now is, like Microsoft, they can continue to make money off recurring purchases of the same product at high levels of profit with really no significant competitor to take away their markets and enough lock-in that their user base doesn't stray to the alternatives where they exist.
At least for Microsoft they appear to have Azure as a kind of evolutionary step towards a new product/business model. Apple doesn't have that and doesn't seem to have any means of getting there.
Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
That's not bad! Thanks for the tip. The SuperMicro server I posted a link is definitely overkill for just pfSense (it's really a great virtualization box), for pfSense you really only need a low power system with multiple NICs.
Maybe I'm giving the captains of industry too much credit, but is there some chance that they have done their own reading of the tea leaves and come to the conclusion that some kind of change is afoot politically, socially and maybe even economically that might cause them to re-prioritize investments, even if it doesn't mean abandoning globalization as usual?
For better or worse, Trump bested the political establishment at their own game and did it without even playing by their rules or spending much money while simultaneously being exposed as crude and simple. That might mean that broader change is afoot that should be paid attention to in terms of business priorities.
Aye, dual Ethernet is the feature that seems to be missing from them. There are of course workarounds involving USB3 dongles but I'm not sure if any of the common ones using ASIX chips have support in something like pfSense, although apparently there is a driver for ESXi that will support them as NUCs have been popular lab machines for VMware setups.
Even if the dongle solution works in a given use case, it's still a cursed dongle and not the clean built-in port solution.
In addition to the second Ethernet port, I'd like to see rack mount ears made for it with space to accommodate the PSU brick and any dongles you'd consider adding.
Really though, what you end up wanting kind of already exists -- https://www.supermicro.com/pro...
I'd call that the rack mount NUC on steroids, although the price point is higher than a NUC.
I'm guessing these things are designed to do a couple of things:
1) Cooperative channel and power management -- make sure they don't step on each other any more than is necessary.
I wonder why they haven't built this into wifi devices forever, too. Input a "coordination key" on each device and then let them learn about each other and manage power and channel assignments.
2) Wireless backhaul -- place one where it can get signal from another unit and use that as uplink to distribute signal to areas that drop off badly. Seems marginally useful unless you have an extra radio and the backhaul is handled as a separate stream from client traffic and the backhaul signal is AC.
For some reason it seems like what would end up happening is the place you can't get 5 Ghz N or AC from where you already have a router you probably can get 2.4 Ghz. So in your remote nook you're connecting clients at AC speeds with a backhaul speed a fraction of that.
I'm not saying they can't be fixed but right now it appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem.
It's not really available right now to purchase, so it's not even a search for anything at the moment. I'd guess these problems will mostly solve themselves over time. I'm willing to be optimistic on the hardware side making it actually possible -- ie, you can actually plug in your phone to a monitor and use it as a passable PC, the sort of slightly-above-annoying performance of a standard business desktop.
My bigger question is will "they" allow it to actually happen? I mean, what would it mean to MS if suddenly the tier of people who own a phone and a computer because they need to actually use computer-scale programs, displays, keyboards, etc, suddenly no longer "need" that extra computer and no longer buy that compulsory desktop hardware and license?
We've had the hardware ability for years now to boot and run Windows off a USB stick. USB 2 was possible if mostly impractical, but USB 3 has made it not just possible but probably better performing than many spinning rust PCs yet you still cannot install Windows to a USB stick other than the moderately crippled Windows to Go version.
IMHO if it was available there would be a huge demand for blank PCs with no operating system as people just moved their basic installs to new hardware or just used whatever hardware was in front of them. Really, we should have been doing this 5+ years ago and at this point it would make so much sense if every PC had an internal USB port it could boot from.
The older I get, the more I mourn for the computing environment we *could* have if it wasn't 99% crippled by rent-seeking bean-counters maxing licensing revenue.
The problem with DC branch circuits is the heavy gauge wire needed to keep voltage losses down, and even then you have to ask how much current you want to run via straight DC.
My guess is that unless there was a major standards push, we'd have a mishmash of DC voltages. The "safe" bet would be DC runs in the wall of 48V (smaller wires) but I would bet much of the time you would be locally down converting that to 12V a lot of the time which would be pretty wasteful.
This is a major headache on boats now, where it's better to have a 24V DC system but you still end up with a bunch of minor stuff that wants 12V because there is no 24V version.
First you either have to carry the dock everywhere if you want portability which negates the advantage of carrying just a phone.
Unlike the laptop many people carry with them along with a phone?
If you assume something like this gains traction, then I foresee a lot of situations where docking setups just become ubiquitous or people that need truly portable docking simply carry a laptop-like device which the phone slots into.
I'm less bothered by the storage side of it, my years-old iPhone has 128 GB flash now, two years out what will a typical phablet potentially have? 512 GB? Which means local data storage will be a lot less of an issue, and combined with cloud based storage and docking points having access to at least wifi if not wired bandwidth means you're less hobbled by access to bulk data storage not local to the device.
I'm most curious how carriers will manage to string along the glacial growth in data caps. A neighbor is a city manager for a local suburb and he was explaining the discussions they were having with cell carriers now for what I assume is 5G tower siting, which from his description involves many more micro-cells vs. larger towers we see now.
It may be that carriers are more or less planning for 5G networks which overcome issues of spectrum and bandwidth via smaller cell sites and will ultimately push up caps to where they're less of an issue than they are now. I'm willing to believe caps are mostly a profit system for carriers now, but I'm also guessing they're also used somewhat to manage congestion issues with the existing large-cell model.
Another idea I haven't seen mentioned much in the phone-as-computer world is the notion of applications running as VMs or containers; perhaps docking your phone with a physical computer will make it another node in small VM cluster and you'd merely live migrate your app container to the bigger machine node for access to more compute/storage/RAM when docked for extended periods of time.
You would think they would be trying to get to the phone-as-desktop-computer stage.
Running Photoshop on a phone as a standalone device makes no sense, patched into a full-size monitor it makes complete sense.
It almost looks like phones as portable computers capable of being both mobile devices and (at least lightweight) desktop devices with peripherals seems within reach, and sharing the ability to run the legacy code base.
I hear so much talk about the future of Microsoft being Azure, it also kind of seems like the future of electricity generation being fusion. The march continues to the goal line but he goal line keeps moving, leaving you closer but no nearer.
VM workloads are still fantastically expensive on Azure and nobody seems really interested in database as a service functionality due to the immense lock-in. Network bandwidth from most buildings is just too expensive to get the throughput necessary to offsite significant data unless all but the display part of its lifecycle is in the same cloud.
And while raw CPU has kind of stagnated, vendors keep pushing increasingly dense computing solutions with flash storage on the precipice of eliminating spinning disk completely for capacities around 100 TB. 2U of rack space with tens of TB of flash storage, a couple of TB of RAM and still more CPU than anyone can actually use.
I just see too many companies figuring the bill for Azure VMs plus lock-in at the services level plus the comms charges and just not seeing why they shouldn't stick with ridiculous performance advantages locally and bypass the uncertainty of cloud.
It almost looks like what should be happening here is a kind of natural selection process where Hollywood shifts their money spent making theatrical films where the theater plays a major role.
1) Animated films oriented towards kids. When our son was younger, we went to a lot of animated film because it was a reasonable family activity that got everyone out of the house.
2) Visual-heavy blockbusters which do well in the various IMAX/3D formats or for which all but the most elaborate home theater isn't competitive with a large-scale cinema screen.
They should make fewer traditional films oriented towards "theatrical" distribution because there's little reason to see these in a theater unless the theater experience (going out, meeting friends, a date, etc) itself is nearly more important than whatever it is you see.
This money should be spent instead on making "mini-series" or other multi-episode films or streaming series, since it seems like the economics of a six episode serial is about the same as a 2 hour theatrical film.
I'm not sure how fraud can possibly apply to sex unless there is a quid pro quo involved in the sex, in which case it's not consensual sex but prostitution, sex in exchange for something.
If I tell a woman I'm wealthy, I really love her, or anything similar and then she agrees to have sex with me but find out that none of it was true, how is it rape?
Most of the plausible situations which might involve "fraud" seem to center around therapists or other medical practitioners who claim that sex is somehow necessary for treatment, and that's already covered by laws regulating professional conduct or the inherent coercive relationship involved.
I think a good number of women would LIKE it to be rape if a sex partner who says he cares for them and then turns out not to, but of course how would you handle the cases where a man decided he didn't like you AFTER having sex?
Women too often seem to want to turn buyer's remorse or their own gullibility into rape.
The guy who I saw first doing this ("Rick" on Backroom Casting Couch) sure made it look real.
Many of the girls he films seem completely believable as total amateurs, so much so that if these girls are putting on an act, someone in mainstream Hollywood needs to talk to them about acting in real films. I just don't think strippers, hookers or low-end porn pros can pull off some of the facial expressions and awkward pauses that happen in BRCC's videos.
I always assumed there was a gimmick to them, though. My assumption is that the action actually plays out as it appears, but afterward he has them sign a release and probably has to pay some of them something to get it signed even though during the video he tells them that they're not getting paid today.
Some of the episodes seem rigged, as if he had to actually hire a few entry level pros to get episodes made on schedule, but most of the time it has a really remarkable reality to it that seems as if many of these girls really are amateurs falling for his ploy. It's basically too real appearing to be entirely contrived.
One thing I do like about Obama is that I think he really is personally committed to measured and considered policy.
But one thing I hate about Obama is that there's a whole sphere of *leadership* where appearing measured and considered doesn't do you any good. At absolute best it makes you look "strategic" but mostly it just makes you appear weak and unwilling or unable to make a decision, caught in a web of analysis paralysis and afraid of risk.
With Obama, he treats every issue as if decision making is the primary element. If that was the case, when we wouldn't really need a leader, we'd just need someone to be the committee chairman. But in many cases we need a leader willing to take risks and rally people behind decisions. With Obama it's hard to do that when everything feels like the outcome of a committee discussion as to what color to paint the bike shed.
There may be some subset of buyers who buy that car based merely on performance, but there will likely be a larger subset of buyers looking for a high performance daily driver with use criteria beyond mere performance.
The latter category of people also overlap with the likely readership of Consumer Reports, while the former will be reading Car and Driver or some other performance related magazine where power and speed are the evaluation criteria.
Probably to mollify the feds under the Justice Department guidelines for state-level marijuana legalization. Pull out all the stops to demonstrate how much control you're imposing.
Long March 2D Rocket, genuine manufacture, capable of placing satellites in orbit. Minimum order quantity 2, maximum order 25 requires 2 week lead time. International shipping from Guangzhou.
This occurred to me. Rather than an obvious "cyberattack" where you shut off ATMs or electricity or some other completely obvious visible service, instead you demonstrate how you can hit the remote off button for avionics on specific aircraft at will.
It works well because unlike things expected to be network connected and possibly have some kind of reachable vulnerability in a knowable failure domain, something not considered practically hackable gets disabled and there's not even good theories about how its done or what the limits of such a technique may be.
Strict definition homelessness:
Lacking basic shelter one can claim as recurring occupancy; sleeping outdoors or in temporary accommodation provided as a charity on a daily or weekly basis; living in a vehicle or structure lacking running water or bathroom facilities. I think fewer people meet this definition.
Non-normative homelessness: Having recurring but possibly unstable occupancy in a dwelling but in a manner not meeting normative standards for living arrangements associated with your demographic in your society. I would throw a family of 3+ people sharing a single room with bathroom facilities shared by unrelated people as meeting this kind of criteria of homelessness in the United States and would suspect it is a larger number than strict homelessness listed above.
There's all kinds of ways to define homelessness, but I would call single families sharing a room in a house designed for single family occupancy to be at least substandard if not a kind of homelessness since its clearly not desirable to them. I can't think of any family who lives in a house or typical apartment who would choose to share a typical 2000 sq ft house with other families.
I do think some of the subtext of this discussion is kind of disturbing -- "they're not suffering enough to be called homeless" or "they're making stupid decisions and deserve this outcome".
I'm kind of mystified by the abuse of CR testing here. There's kind of a meme that CR can't test anything besides blenders, AFAICT it originated back in the day when they started testing stereos and audiophiles got bent that their testing wasn't judging whether exotic equipment produced the exotic sounds or wasn't using the requisite 00 gauge welding cable to connect the speakers.
They're not disassembling the batteries and running the cell material through a mass spectrometer or conducting elaborate electrical tests of the batteries themselves; they don't need to.
What they do need to do is design reasonable structured tests of laptop usage and keep track of the battery's lifespan during these tests and compare it to the manufacturer's claims. That's well within CR's ability and it's perfectly valid. Either the computer battery does what the manufacturer claims it will do or it doesn't.
What CR is likely complaining about is that Apple modeled their battery life on some average use pattern that's not very realistic or very easy to deviate from in ways that seriously affect battery life.
What Apple should have done was modeled their battery life based on more intensive use cases. But of course then you can't make the laptop even thinner and the battery even smaller and then make long life battery claims. IMHO Apple is a victim of their own thinness obsession and is fudging the numbers to make it look positive.
The problem with employee turnover as an expense is only really a problem to the extent that you consider lost internal productivity to be a burden.
I think in a lot of companies they see internal IT users the way any monopoly sees its customers -- people who are going to buy whatever fucking shit product you put out at whatever high price you want to charge because they have no other choice. It's the same crappy service they deliver to their actual customers when they have the market cornered.
I'm not arguing that you're wrong, that the quality of service suffers or that turnover has costs or that it may have broader business impacts, but that they don't care because it's the same ripoff monopolist mindset applied to a different single-sourced seller/customer relationship that you see everywhere (eg cable TV).
Why provide a better product -- internal IT -- when the same customer base will pay the same price for a shittier product in light of any alternative? Even if the users hate it, their managers won't gripe about it either if the chargebacks are less for them, and even if they do gripe they'll be told that the organization benefits because IT costs are lower.
For me, psychologically at least, there's not really any realistic amount of money that would offset the delay.
It would literally require them telling me they were transferring me to the private aviation terminal to be flown on a private jet to go along with it, or whatever the cash equivalent of that is.
Many people love to volunteer to take a later flight in exchange for compensation.
I get why airlines overbook from an operational standpoint, but this volunteering to take a later flight part is what mystifies me. Vacations are only so long, hotel rooms are paid for, activities with inflexible schedules are planned, someone's changed their plans to provide destination end transport, and so on.
While I'm pretty sure this is mostly my biases, I can't even begin to imagine sitting at the airport thinking "No problem, I'd love to get to my destination 8-24 hours later, because I'm not looking down a stack of nested contingencies that require me to get someplace as scheduled for them to work. And of course I want that voucher which is totally flexible, provided I want to fly from TUL to FAR on a Tuesday in January."