And it stated that the batteries were not allowed in checked.
Loose Li-Ion batteries aren't allowed in checked luggage, but since laptop batteries are attached and below 100Wh they're okay.
A Li-Ion battery cannot be transported in the hold unless attached to a camera or the equipment it is intended to power. The attached battery must not exceed 100Wh in capacity. Spare Li-Ion batteries must be transported in your carry-on luggage. An individual may take on-board, in carry-on luggage, an unspecified number of Li-Ion batteries that have capacities of 100Wh or less (as the operator and state variations allow). Li-Ion batteries that have capacities greater than 100Wh, but less than 160Wh, are restricted to 2 items per person, in carry-on luggage. For example, a crew of 3 people can share the allowance between them and take a total 6 batteries (2 each) in this capacity range. Li-Ion batteries that have capacities greater than 160Wh are forbidden from civil aircraft, unless a state exemption has been obtained (i.e. CAA/FAA operator).
Now 100Wh is for big cinema rigs and such, a normal DSLR battery is maybe 10-15Wh. I suppose they could be a dick if you have a spare or two but really it would just be to be dicks.
It's all about getting the money. Funniest story a former colleague told me, son had borrowed dad's credit card to go drink... and he started out sober and signed in his dad's name, but as the night passed he got so drunk he started signing with his own name. Son returned the card, dad disputed the mysterious charges without knowing any of this. They called back, told him he'd better have a chat with his son. Dad confronted son, son denied it and apparently dad was still not convinced because he went like "But he said he didn't do it!" and my colleague was like *facepalm*.
They sent him copies of the slips, son finally admitted it and dad was like "But I didn't sign for this, can't I still dispute it?" and my colleague went like "Sure... no problem after all you didn't spend it. But we have more or less a written confession here plus this conversation on tape and then we'd have to report it to the police for theft of the card, fraud of the money and document fraud. Up to you." and dad went like "Uhm... I'll get back to you." The dispute was dropped, case closed at least from the credit company's side...
The irony here is that even if they put a gun to everyones heads and forced them to ruin encryptions' value by compromising it with 'backdoors' (that anyone would eventually be able to discover and leverage) criminals and terrorists would not just use non-compromised encryption (copied from before the ban on 'real' encryption)
Well most suggestions don't involve building an algorithmic backdoor, but about making the manufacturer retain a copy of embedded keys. Like for every iPhone there's a master UID - essentially a 256 bit AES key - fused into the processor during manufacturing. They (supposedly) don't keep a copy, they certainly could and stick in a vault somewhere and in theory they'd only hand individual keys over to law enforcement with a warrant. The "doomsday" scenarios are that a powerful organization robs the vault or the government demands they hand over the contents, it would never be script kiddies.
It wouldn't stop people who intentionally use other encryption software on top, that cat is out of the bag to stay. The trouble for police now is that commodity, mass market items come with impenetrable security by default rendering warrants useless. What they want is something like a 21st century version of the CALEA act to demand the cops can wiretap phone calls. It wouldn't stop people talking in code over the phone, but it's still pretty useful...
Well, people tend to take things they haven't worked for as granted and that goes both for technology and society. My dad was born before WW2, he remembers Norway as occupied by the Nazis. I can't appreciate our freedom the way he can, I've never lived it. And that means we sometimes lose perspective, like how a few deaths to terror is actually a lot better than the millions upon millions killed in the last great war. While I can read a history book I can't really grasp how it was to live before TV, but I do remember the time before cell phones and I understand the difference that makes far better. I'm not saying it's always so, but often those who have worked and sacrificed and suffered are under-appreciated by posterity, not by intent or malice but simply because we haven't truly felt the impact they made. For us it's "always" been so.
This graphic paints a different picture. Three days to beat AlphaGo "Lee Sedol"-version, 21 days to beat AlphaGo "Master"-version that beat Ki Jie + 60 top pros, after 40 days AlphaGo "Zero@40" is now crushing the "Master" version by winning 90% of the time. I think that means the journalist got two things intermingled, "Zero@3" only surpassed the "Lee Sedol" version while "Zero@40" wins 100-0 against it. It's done both, but not at once.
Although to me this is clearly a case of A.I., parent has a point that not all types of problems lend themselves to be treated as reinforcement learning tasks, which seems to have been the key to success in this case.
Like? Evolution is a form of reinforcement "learning". And for the nature vs nurture crowd, so is the passing down of knowledge and skills. Even in situations that aren't actually physically repeated we make a mental simulation of what we think might happen and play out scenarios, then it's corrected by reality as things do or don't work out as we thought. Of course a Go AI has it easy in that the rules define the outcome so it can just play itself a zillion times without external input. If you were trying to be say a chef it'd be pretty hard to lock yourself in a kitchen all alone and come out a three star Michelin chef.
"As an alternative to ads, we are testing out in-browser cryptocurrency mining as a means to fund our website. If you prefer our ad-supported version, click here" and see how many would actively choose ads. I mean if this is a functioning micro-transaction system I think it's got much less downsides than almost every other possible alternative, particularly that you don't need any kind of payment info or personal data. If it's any kind of site where you have an account you could have like points and build up a sort of credit you'd "pay" with to read articles and so on.
What you thought that it doesn't cost anything to lift those very heavy wings into orbit? Do you think there are a lot of prepared runways on Mars or the Moon?
Even if there were, wings would be utterly useless due to the near non-existent athmosphere. Venus might work, otherwise not many places to go. Also, wings are not just mass but they're also drag otherwise they wouldn't be very good wings. But to be fair with the Space Shuttle designers they made something that can land and not parachute down as a capsule, that's not trivial. But the way SpaceX nails landings lately they should just install a rollercoaster deck on stage one, make sure the return arc crosses the 100km line to call yourself an astronaut and sell tickets to the wildest 8 minute ride you can get. It probably wouldn't cost "much", they lift nearly 100 tons to stage separation so a 100 kg person + chair = 0.1% = $60k or so. Life Insurance not included.
Well project Treble is supposed to make it so that they can update Android separate from the vendor implementation, from what I understand one side effect is that all phones could run stock Android. Whether vendors will let you is another story, but hopefully at least now you'll get timely and long lasting updates.
1. By far most game AIs are not "learning" in any sense of the word and since learning is essential to intelligence calling it AI is really a misnomer. They do what they do, when you've found a flaw in the algorithms you can just exploit it over and over again and it'll never change or improve. 2. There's no such thing as "perfect play" in any game more complex than tic-tac-toe. Even chess computers only do "good enough". 3. Cheating is orthogonal to AI, there's nothing inherent to AI about "use information the player doesn't normally have".
The main reason we don't use machine learning is that it's bloody hard. If that was easy, we'd just bog it down with disadvantages until it was a good match.
Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards and you can go nuts with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.
The 15" version reportedly starts at $2499, maybe if it's my company paying but not me. It makes my gaming PC - which in itself is a giant money sink - seem like a good investment. Unless you're actually making money with it, real money.
I heard here on Slashdot that they were doomed since they were removing content and raising prices! This is unpossible!
1. Forecasts for next quarter are much lower:
Note that the results do not include the effects of Netflix's price increases in the U.S. and other territories, which took effect for new subs in early October and will roll out to existing members through the fourth quarter.
2. It's quite unlikely they'd capture market share that way unless the competitors do even worse changes, but the market can still be growing. For example if old people don't use Netflix and young people do you'd see a ~1m growth/quarter (323/78/4) just from plain aging. Replacing "traditional" products like say landlines, dead tree newspapers, buying CDs and cutting cable often have a clear age profile where people are convinced by other people in roughly the same age group, say +/- 5 years. So this year 25yos are cable cutters, then next year 30yos, then 35yos, then 40yos... like a wave rolling upwards in the age brackets.
As for the international market, it's probably fueled by a ton of people getting high speed enough Internet to do streaming, where the ISPs often don't have any original content and don't have the same incentives to curb use. Netflix is just a product that drives consumers to sign up, same way as MP3s, torrents and YouTube. I've actually seen it used as a LoC measure for Internet speeds, with this fiber connection you and your SO and your X kids can stream Netflix 4K at the same time.
You talk a lot about legal and illegal without mentioning jurisdiction which is rather important since the US got jurisdiction over MS US, Ireland over MS Ireland. The US can legally put the thumbscrews on MS US to produce the documents, Ireland can legally put the thumbscrews on MS Ireland to not produce the documents. Which puts Microsoft in a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" position, but there's no "world court" they can appeal to. The US can say we're right, appeal denied and Ireland can say the same. It still won't be possible for Microsoft to comply with both.
It's clear to see why the US - or indeed any country - don't like the idea that you can "jurisdiction shopping", like oh all our company data is outsourced to our wholly owned subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and we wouldn't want to break any local laws, you'll have to go through the courts there. But if that's a problem you should restrict the export of information, like if you're a US company the data on US citizens must be accessible to US courts. Trying to demand that all data held by foreign subsidiaries, even on foreign citizens be available to US courts is begging for trouble.
The reciprocity here is that a Chinese court can demand data on US citizens stored on US servers by a US subsidiary because it's owned by a Chinese company. The US would never grant the permissions it's trying to create for itself, it's one rule for us and one rule for everybody else. Hopefully the supreme court is smart enough to see that, otherwise there is only one choice: Stop making any product made by a US company in any privacy-sensitive context.
(3) Input cheating. Most likely to get you banned -- this is basically an aim-bot that synthesizes the right input based on either reading the screen or, more likely, hovering data as in (2). Fairly easy to spot from looking at the server replay, as it will basically be a few milliseconds from when an enemy comes into view and when a perfectly-placed shot is fired. Also, in my experience looking at replays, humans almost always overshoot when aiming and then correct back. Aimbots somehow manage to decelerate right on target...
I remember aimbots that worked like that in Unreal Tournament last century. They were quickly banned, they were quickly modified to "merely" be superhuman-ish. I have a friend who could get himself banned on any public server with the sniper rifle, he wasn't cheating as I saw him play in real life just very quick, very skilled. Hit a few too many headshots and he'd be banned as a cheater. I'm sure the anti-hack system was also pretty crude just like the aimbots themselves, but it's not trivial to accurately recognize what's human and not. Like whether you're playing a chess computer or if it's Magnus Carlsen pranking you, it's probably the former but unless they 100% match the best line and just pick a "humanly" good move it's hard to tell.
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer. Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Pretty much, this is all about Linux on the client. Red Hat, creators of all things terrible according to/. trolls is on solid, stable revenue growth going from 1.5bn in FY 2015 to 2.1bn in FY 2017 and if the last quarters go as well as the first two then ~2.4bn in FY 2018. Even Microsoft says nearly one in three Azure VMs are Linux. As for the latter part, Linux proponents have tried for 20 years but essentially it boils down to two problems:
1) It's not MS Office/Photoshop etc. 2) Catch 22, no Linux users = no market = no Linux version
I know at least a few users who would never take anything other than Excel. And to be honest that's by itself is okay, the problem is that it's owned by Microsoft so there's no incentive to offer it on Linux.
First of all you, you seem to have missed the primary function of unions which is to make a fair share of the wealth generation go back to the workers, not merely the capitalists. Working conditions, health and safety, working hours and so on have always been secondary struggles where the workers demand some other form of compensation than wages. In that respect unions are failing horribly and apart from the minimum wage - that in real dollars is no higher than in the 1950s - the government is not going to fix.
It's no doubt that if you're a struggling business the unions can be a burden but if they were generally driving companies out of business the richest 15% wouldn't be making more and more money while everyone else loses. What you're seeing is a system where the money is extracted whenever the business is profitable, then makes everyone else take the burden when it's unprofitable. The US has managed to create something worse than social welfare, it's corporate welfare where you take from the tax payers and give to the corporations.
For example, why was your future retirement income to the company's future? Put that money into a pension fund when you do work, if the company goes tits up or you change jobs or lose your job it stops accumulating but it's yours. Or at least a potential share if you make it to retirement age. I mean they're back in business now aren't they? Making money again, which is extracted until the next crisis when the coffers again will be mysteriously empty. And they've done a great frame job when people like you blame the unions for that, nothing like 1%ers making the other 99% blame each other.
On an operating system with working symlinks, you can install part of a game on ssd, and part on HDD. It's only amateur hour windows where this is still a problem.
Acutally Windows 7+ has symbolic links. But while that's technically true, you'd still have to identify which files go where and redo it every time you install the game and if an updates changes any file paths or folder structures it might not stick. Steam could push a standard split where publishers could put up to say 10% of the installation files in a folder marked for acceleration. Make a 20GB game? Max 2GB goes in that special folder. Of course you could pick that both folders are the same, all 20GB on the SSD or all 20GB on the HDD - or 2GB on the SSD 18GB on the HDD. That way even a 128GB SSD would get you far, paired with a HDD. Today you can barely install a few big games before it's full.
OK, then I do not agree with the point of your example. Whether Apple screwed up its QA on the update or honestly misses something that was difficult to catch, there is no justification for it to cast FUD upon third party repair businesses. Which just makes Apple look evil, but then... haven't we known that since forever?
Show me the company that says any bozo can repair our tech with junkyard scraps and duct tape and we'll support it. Unless it's serial number matching or some other kind of pairing explicitly designed to avoid replacement parts, the fact that it fails is proof that the third party parts/work is not identical to Apple's own. That it took an OS update before the difference was exposed doesn't change that, consider for example an over-spec'd part that can be replaced by an inferior one - until a new tuning program requires the previously over-spec'd part. That's not Apple's fault, even if they bring the problem to the surface. And I think it's fair to warn people about that, if you use third party knock-offs that risk is on you.
Some of you are missing the ramifications of this. Even though this is magnetic media it will drive down the cost of cloud storage. Right now it is cheap, but not that cheap. This could make is feasible for everyone to store all of their data in cloud for pennies a year....encrypted of course.
Archive storage is simple enough, but is there any such service that has an open source client and lets you set an AES key so it can be sorta like a remote mounted encrypted container? Or are the sync tools so smart you can create a big container in a sync'd folder and it'll sync just the bits that change? Because I don't trust anything that's in the hands of Apple/Google/Dropbox to be truly private, in fact we know many people want the cloud provider to provide integration with apps or sharing or whatever which it obviously can't do without access to the actual files. I'd want it more like a safety deposit box where only I have the key.
Above 1 TB only geeks and IT companies care. Just like it was case for CCD above 10 Megapixel. At 1 TB disk is "solved" problem for general audience and things that matter now are performance and durability.
Not for HDDs, the "high performance" market has all but disappeared except for a few hybrid SHDDs for laptops. Even failure rate is for consumers "it can fail", they don't have enough in a RAID setup or whatever to care about the statistics, at most they have a SSD for performance and a HDD for bulk storage. And the enterprise typically has this in some kind of SAN or storage server to handle failures, unless it's so bad that the failure rate works out to a $/TB difference they don't care. So the HDD market has almost been reduced to a singular metric, $/TB.
Even the SSD market is seeing some form of saturation, for consumer workloads with low queue depth the differences from one SSD to the other is very modest, if you flip the graphs from MB/s to seconds/task it's like a really fast SSD boots Windows loaded up with software in 30 seconds and a "slow" SSD takes 35. Some games have ridiculously long load times regardless if you put them on HDD or SSD, whatever it's waiting for it's not the disk. It's a bit annoying that games that take 50GB+ can't split their assets up over two disks for fast/slow access but it's not going to change so whatever, if you play it a lot make room on your SSD and put the more rarely played games on HDD if you run out of space.
You can dream that China is all eco-hippies. Truth is, they're doing their best to avoid dependence on foreign resources and foreign technology or at the very least control it through direct ownership.If they had Saudi-Arabia's oil reserves they wouldn't give a shit to find alternatives.
Full disclosure is meaningless if there is no option to completely opt-out of telemetry and data collection. There is no usable alternative to Windows, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have 90+% market share on the desktop. Simply telling people what you are doing means nothing if they have no choice but to accept it, whether they like it or not.
While I agree it's half a solution, it wouldn't do much good if an alternative is available but nobody knows why they'd want it or need it. There's a reason the first amendment is the first, and why the four boxes of liberty are soap, ballot, jury and ammo in that order. The most important part of any change is to raise awareness as to why the change is needed. Clearly that too has some limitations (see: Snowden) but at least it brought the discussion out of the tin foil hat crowd and into the general public. And while the alternatives might be poor you can't really make a decision until you know the stakes.
Still, I wonder what happened that killed brand loyalty so completely.
Greater transparency and lower transaction costs. Brand is always a substitute for some real product/service quality you want to know but is too much effort. Like if you're in a foreign country, you could go to $random place or you could go to McDonald's. And McD was a "known quantity", you get a burger that - for better or for worse - tastes exactly like at home. Been there, done that - too much weird stuff let's just get a burger and fries. Now you have like a zillion suggestions and reviews, if you care to make a slight effort you can find something local, authentic and to your taste. Still, looking at the number of sequels, prequels, spin-offs and remakes in say the movie industry I'd say brands are alive and well in some areas. "Nobody got fired for buying X" is always about branding, even though it's a bad product it's not your fault that you picked a bad apple from generally reliable provider.
Slashdot Mirror
And it stated that the batteries were not allowed in checked.
Loose Li-Ion batteries aren't allowed in checked luggage, but since laptop batteries are attached and below 100Wh they're okay.
A Li-Ion battery cannot be transported in the hold unless attached to a camera or the equipment it is intended to power. The attached battery must not exceed 100Wh in capacity. Spare Li-Ion batteries must be transported in your carry-on luggage. An individual may take on-board, in carry-on luggage, an unspecified number of Li-Ion batteries that have capacities of 100Wh or less (as the operator and state variations allow). Li-Ion batteries that have capacities greater than 100Wh, but less than 160Wh, are restricted to 2 items per person, in carry-on luggage. For example, a crew of 3 people can share the allowance between them and take a total 6 batteries (2 each) in this capacity range. Li-Ion batteries that have capacities greater than 160Wh are forbidden from civil aircraft, unless a state exemption has been obtained (i.e. CAA/FAA operator).
Now 100Wh is for big cinema rigs and such, a normal DSLR battery is maybe 10-15Wh. I suppose they could be a dick if you have a spare or two but really it would just be to be dicks.
It's all about getting the money. Funniest story a former colleague told me, son had borrowed dad's credit card to go drink... and he started out sober and signed in his dad's name, but as the night passed he got so drunk he started signing with his own name. Son returned the card, dad disputed the mysterious charges without knowing any of this. They called back, told him he'd better have a chat with his son. Dad confronted son, son denied it and apparently dad was still not convinced because he went like "But he said he didn't do it!" and my colleague was like *facepalm*.
They sent him copies of the slips, son finally admitted it and dad was like "But I didn't sign for this, can't I still dispute it?" and my colleague went like "Sure... no problem after all you didn't spend it. But we have more or less a written confession here plus this conversation on tape and then we'd have to report it to the police for theft of the card, fraud of the money and document fraud. Up to you." and dad went like "Uhm... I'll get back to you." The dispute was dropped, case closed at least from the credit company's side...
The irony here is that even if they put a gun to everyones heads and forced them to ruin encryptions' value by compromising it with 'backdoors' (that anyone would eventually be able to discover and leverage) criminals and terrorists would not just use non-compromised encryption (copied from before the ban on 'real' encryption)
Well most suggestions don't involve building an algorithmic backdoor, but about making the manufacturer retain a copy of embedded keys. Like for every iPhone there's a master UID - essentially a 256 bit AES key - fused into the processor during manufacturing. They (supposedly) don't keep a copy, they certainly could and stick in a vault somewhere and in theory they'd only hand individual keys over to law enforcement with a warrant. The "doomsday" scenarios are that a powerful organization robs the vault or the government demands they hand over the contents, it would never be script kiddies.
It wouldn't stop people who intentionally use other encryption software on top, that cat is out of the bag to stay. The trouble for police now is that commodity, mass market items come with impenetrable security by default rendering warrants useless. What they want is something like a 21st century version of the CALEA act to demand the cops can wiretap phone calls. It wouldn't stop people talking in code over the phone, but it's still pretty useful...
Well, people tend to take things they haven't worked for as granted and that goes both for technology and society. My dad was born before WW2, he remembers Norway as occupied by the Nazis. I can't appreciate our freedom the way he can, I've never lived it. And that means we sometimes lose perspective, like how a few deaths to terror is actually a lot better than the millions upon millions killed in the last great war. While I can read a history book I can't really grasp how it was to live before TV, but I do remember the time before cell phones and I understand the difference that makes far better. I'm not saying it's always so, but often those who have worked and sacrificed and suffered are under-appreciated by posterity, not by intent or malice but simply because we haven't truly felt the impact they made. For us it's "always" been so.
This graphic paints a different picture. Three days to beat AlphaGo "Lee Sedol"-version, 21 days to beat AlphaGo "Master"-version that beat Ki Jie + 60 top pros, after 40 days AlphaGo "Zero@40" is now crushing the "Master" version by winning 90% of the time. I think that means the journalist got two things intermingled, "Zero@3" only surpassed the "Lee Sedol" version while "Zero@40" wins 100-0 against it. It's done both, but not at once.
Although to me this is clearly a case of A.I., parent has a point that not all types of problems lend themselves to be treated as reinforcement learning tasks, which seems to have been the key to success in this case.
Like? Evolution is a form of reinforcement "learning". And for the nature vs nurture crowd, so is the passing down of knowledge and skills. Even in situations that aren't actually physically repeated we make a mental simulation of what we think might happen and play out scenarios, then it's corrected by reality as things do or don't work out as we thought. Of course a Go AI has it easy in that the rules define the outcome so it can just play itself a zillion times without external input. If you were trying to be say a chef it'd be pretty hard to lock yourself in a kitchen all alone and come out a three star Michelin chef.
"As an alternative to ads, we are testing out in-browser cryptocurrency mining as a means to fund our website. If you prefer our ad-supported version, click here" and see how many would actively choose ads. I mean if this is a functioning micro-transaction system I think it's got much less downsides than almost every other possible alternative, particularly that you don't need any kind of payment info or personal data. If it's any kind of site where you have an account you could have like points and build up a sort of credit you'd "pay" with to read articles and so on.
What you thought that it doesn't cost anything to lift those very heavy wings into orbit? Do you think there are a lot of prepared runways on Mars or the Moon?
Even if there were, wings would be utterly useless due to the near non-existent athmosphere. Venus might work, otherwise not many places to go. Also, wings are not just mass but they're also drag otherwise they wouldn't be very good wings. But to be fair with the Space Shuttle designers they made something that can land and not parachute down as a capsule, that's not trivial. But the way SpaceX nails landings lately they should just install a rollercoaster deck on stage one, make sure the return arc crosses the 100km line to call yourself an astronaut and sell tickets to the wildest 8 minute ride you can get. It probably wouldn't cost "much", they lift nearly 100 tons to stage separation so a 100 kg person + chair = 0.1% = $60k or so. Life Insurance not included.
Well project Treble is supposed to make it so that they can update Android separate from the vendor implementation, from what I understand one side effect is that all phones could run stock Android. Whether vendors will let you is another story, but hopefully at least now you'll get timely and long lasting updates.
1. By far most game AIs are not "learning" in any sense of the word and since learning is essential to intelligence calling it AI is really a misnomer. They do what they do, when you've found a flaw in the algorithms you can just exploit it over and over again and it'll never change or improve.
2. There's no such thing as "perfect play" in any game more complex than tic-tac-toe. Even chess computers only do "good enough".
3. Cheating is orthogonal to AI, there's nothing inherent to AI about "use information the player doesn't normally have".
The main reason we don't use machine learning is that it's bloody hard. If that was easy, we'd just bog it down with disadvantages until it was a good match.
Nah, you can just get a $15 adapter and put it in any PCIe 4x slot. By the way, if you really want crazy performance get a X399 motherboard with PCIe bifurcation and load it up with quad NVMe cards and you can go nuts with 28GB/s in an 8-way RAID 0 configuration. Not that you'd really notice at consumer queue depths.
The 15" version reportedly starts at $2499, maybe if it's my company paying but not me. It makes my gaming PC - which in itself is a giant money sink - seem like a good investment. Unless you're actually making money with it, real money.
Okay, that's kind of annoying - they appear to only have topo maps for Earth, the Moon, Mercury and Mars.
Hereby nominated for the "21st century problems" award...
I heard here on Slashdot that they were doomed since they were removing content and raising prices! This is unpossible!
1. Forecasts for next quarter are much lower:
Note that the results do not include the effects of Netflix's price increases in the U.S. and other territories, which took effect for new subs in early October and will roll out to existing members through the fourth quarter.
2. It's quite unlikely they'd capture market share that way unless the competitors do even worse changes, but the market can still be growing. For example if old people don't use Netflix and young people do you'd see a ~1m growth/quarter (323/78/4) just from plain aging. Replacing "traditional" products like say landlines, dead tree newspapers, buying CDs and cutting cable often have a clear age profile where people are convinced by other people in roughly the same age group, say +/- 5 years. So this year 25yos are cable cutters, then next year 30yos, then 35yos, then 40yos... like a wave rolling upwards in the age brackets.
As for the international market, it's probably fueled by a ton of people getting high speed enough Internet to do streaming, where the ISPs often don't have any original content and don't have the same incentives to curb use. Netflix is just a product that drives consumers to sign up, same way as MP3s, torrents and YouTube. I've actually seen it used as a LoC measure for Internet speeds, with this fiber connection you and your SO and your X kids can stream Netflix 4K at the same time.
You talk a lot about legal and illegal without mentioning jurisdiction which is rather important since the US got jurisdiction over MS US, Ireland over MS Ireland. The US can legally put the thumbscrews on MS US to produce the documents, Ireland can legally put the thumbscrews on MS Ireland to not produce the documents. Which puts Microsoft in a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" position, but there's no "world court" they can appeal to. The US can say we're right, appeal denied and Ireland can say the same. It still won't be possible for Microsoft to comply with both.
It's clear to see why the US - or indeed any country - don't like the idea that you can "jurisdiction shopping", like oh all our company data is outsourced to our wholly owned subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and we wouldn't want to break any local laws, you'll have to go through the courts there. But if that's a problem you should restrict the export of information, like if you're a US company the data on US citizens must be accessible to US courts. Trying to demand that all data held by foreign subsidiaries, even on foreign citizens be available to US courts is begging for trouble.
The reciprocity here is that a Chinese court can demand data on US citizens stored on US servers by a US subsidiary because it's owned by a Chinese company. The US would never grant the permissions it's trying to create for itself, it's one rule for us and one rule for everybody else. Hopefully the supreme court is smart enough to see that, otherwise there is only one choice: Stop making any product made by a US company in any privacy-sensitive context.
(3) Input cheating. Most likely to get you banned -- this is basically an aim-bot that synthesizes the right input based on either reading the screen or, more likely, hovering data as in (2). Fairly easy to spot from looking at the server replay, as it will basically be a few milliseconds from when an enemy comes into view and when a perfectly-placed shot is fired. Also, in my experience looking at replays, humans almost always overshoot when aiming and then correct back. Aimbots somehow manage to decelerate right on target...
I remember aimbots that worked like that in Unreal Tournament last century. They were quickly banned, they were quickly modified to "merely" be superhuman-ish. I have a friend who could get himself banned on any public server with the sniper rifle, he wasn't cheating as I saw him play in real life just very quick, very skilled. Hit a few too many headshots and he'd be banned as a cheater. I'm sure the anti-hack system was also pretty crude just like the aimbots themselves, but it's not trivial to accurately recognize what's human and not. Like whether you're playing a chess computer or if it's Magnus Carlsen pranking you, it's probably the former but unless they 100% match the best line and just pick a "humanly" good move it's hard to tell.
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer. Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Pretty much, this is all about Linux on the client. Red Hat, creators of all things terrible according to /. trolls is on solid, stable revenue growth going from 1.5bn in FY 2015 to 2.1bn in FY 2017 and if the last quarters go as well as the first two then ~2.4bn in FY 2018. Even Microsoft says nearly one in three Azure VMs are Linux. As for the latter part, Linux proponents have tried for 20 years but essentially it boils down to two problems:
1) It's not MS Office/Photoshop etc.
2) Catch 22, no Linux users = no market = no Linux version
I know at least a few users who would never take anything other than Excel. And to be honest that's by itself is okay, the problem is that it's owned by Microsoft so there's no incentive to offer it on Linux.
First of all you, you seem to have missed the primary function of unions which is to make a fair share of the wealth generation go back to the workers, not merely the capitalists. Working conditions, health and safety, working hours and so on have always been secondary struggles where the workers demand some other form of compensation than wages. In that respect unions are failing horribly and apart from the minimum wage - that in real dollars is no higher than in the 1950s - the government is not going to fix.
It's no doubt that if you're a struggling business the unions can be a burden but if they were generally driving companies out of business the richest 15% wouldn't be making more and more money while everyone else loses. What you're seeing is a system where the money is extracted whenever the business is profitable, then makes everyone else take the burden when it's unprofitable. The US has managed to create something worse than social welfare, it's corporate welfare where you take from the tax payers and give to the corporations.
For example, why was your future retirement income to the company's future? Put that money into a pension fund when you do work, if the company goes tits up or you change jobs or lose your job it stops accumulating but it's yours. Or at least a potential share if you make it to retirement age. I mean they're back in business now aren't they? Making money again, which is extracted until the next crisis when the coffers again will be mysteriously empty. And they've done a great frame job when people like you blame the unions for that, nothing like 1%ers making the other 99% blame each other.
On an operating system with working symlinks, you can install part of a game on ssd, and part on HDD. It's only amateur hour windows where this is still a problem.
Acutally Windows 7+ has symbolic links. But while that's technically true, you'd still have to identify which files go where and redo it every time you install the game and if an updates changes any file paths or folder structures it might not stick. Steam could push a standard split where publishers could put up to say 10% of the installation files in a folder marked for acceleration. Make a 20GB game? Max 2GB goes in that special folder. Of course you could pick that both folders are the same, all 20GB on the SSD or all 20GB on the HDD - or 2GB on the SSD 18GB on the HDD. That way even a 128GB SSD would get you far, paired with a HDD. Today you can barely install a few big games before it's full.
OK, then I do not agree with the point of your example. Whether Apple screwed up its QA on the update or honestly misses something that was difficult to catch, there is no justification for it to cast FUD upon third party repair businesses. Which just makes Apple look evil, but then... haven't we known that since forever?
Show me the company that says any bozo can repair our tech with junkyard scraps and duct tape and we'll support it. Unless it's serial number matching or some other kind of pairing explicitly designed to avoid replacement parts, the fact that it fails is proof that the third party parts/work is not identical to Apple's own. That it took an OS update before the difference was exposed doesn't change that, consider for example an over-spec'd part that can be replaced by an inferior one - until a new tuning program requires the previously over-spec'd part. That's not Apple's fault, even if they bring the problem to the surface. And I think it's fair to warn people about that, if you use third party knock-offs that risk is on you.
Some of you are missing the ramifications of this. Even though this is magnetic media it will drive down the cost of cloud storage. Right now it is cheap, but not that cheap. This could make is feasible for everyone to store all of their data in cloud for pennies a year....encrypted of course.
Archive storage is simple enough, but is there any such service that has an open source client and lets you set an AES key so it can be sorta like a remote mounted encrypted container? Or are the sync tools so smart you can create a big container in a sync'd folder and it'll sync just the bits that change? Because I don't trust anything that's in the hands of Apple/Google/Dropbox to be truly private, in fact we know many people want the cloud provider to provide integration with apps or sharing or whatever which it obviously can't do without access to the actual files. I'd want it more like a safety deposit box where only I have the key.
Above 1 TB only geeks and IT companies care. Just like it was case for CCD above 10 Megapixel. At 1 TB disk is "solved" problem for general audience and things that matter now are performance and durability.
Not for HDDs, the "high performance" market has all but disappeared except for a few hybrid SHDDs for laptops. Even failure rate is for consumers "it can fail", they don't have enough in a RAID setup or whatever to care about the statistics, at most they have a SSD for performance and a HDD for bulk storage. And the enterprise typically has this in some kind of SAN or storage server to handle failures, unless it's so bad that the failure rate works out to a $/TB difference they don't care. So the HDD market has almost been reduced to a singular metric, $/TB.
Even the SSD market is seeing some form of saturation, for consumer workloads with low queue depth the differences from one SSD to the other is very modest, if you flip the graphs from MB/s to seconds/task it's like a really fast SSD boots Windows loaded up with software in 30 seconds and a "slow" SSD takes 35. Some games have ridiculously long load times regardless if you put them on HDD or SSD, whatever it's waiting for it's not the disk. It's a bit annoying that games that take 50GB+ can't split their assets up over two disks for fast/slow access but it's not going to change so whatever, if you play it a lot make room on your SSD and put the more rarely played games on HDD if you run out of space.
You can dream that China is all eco-hippies. Truth is, they're doing their best to avoid dependence on foreign resources and foreign technology or at the very least control it through direct ownership.If they had Saudi-Arabia's oil reserves they wouldn't give a shit to find alternatives.
Full disclosure is meaningless if there is no option to completely opt-out of telemetry and data collection. There is no usable alternative to Windows, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have 90+% market share on the desktop. Simply telling people what you are doing means nothing if they have no choice but to accept it, whether they like it or not.
While I agree it's half a solution, it wouldn't do much good if an alternative is available but nobody knows why they'd want it or need it. There's a reason the first amendment is the first, and why the four boxes of liberty are soap, ballot, jury and ammo in that order. The most important part of any change is to raise awareness as to why the change is needed. Clearly that too has some limitations (see: Snowden) but at least it brought the discussion out of the tin foil hat crowd and into the general public. And while the alternatives might be poor you can't really make a decision until you know the stakes.
Still, I wonder what happened that killed brand loyalty so completely.
Greater transparency and lower transaction costs. Brand is always a substitute for some real product/service quality you want to know but is too much effort. Like if you're in a foreign country, you could go to $random place or you could go to McDonald's. And McD was a "known quantity", you get a burger that - for better or for worse - tastes exactly like at home. Been there, done that - too much weird stuff let's just get a burger and fries. Now you have like a zillion suggestions and reviews, if you care to make a slight effort you can find something local, authentic and to your taste. Still, looking at the number of sequels, prequels, spin-offs and remakes in say the movie industry I'd say brands are alive and well in some areas. "Nobody got fired for buying X" is always about branding, even though it's a bad product it's not your fault that you picked a bad apple from generally reliable provider.