Extending rights to robots is ridiculous because they're machines.
If they actually get smart enough that they're self-aware (I'm dubious about this, but let's just assume for the sake of argument), then we've really screwed up because that'll ruin the whole reason we built the robots in the first place: to do our menial work for us. If we make them smart and self-aware so they demand all the same rights we have (including not being slaves), then why did we invent them in the first place? We might as well have stuck with human laborers. And what's worse, the machines have the potential to be smarter and more efficient than us, and decide that we need to be eliminated.
This is probably why we don't see any alien life: they all invented smart robots who then terminated their creators, and didn't see the point of contacting other inferior biological lifeforms.
There is: Bluetooth. But it sucks. The sound quality isn't that great, it's subject to radio interference, but worst of all it requires batteries, which adds a lot of weight (a regular pair of earbuds weighs next to nothing). Maybe when they figure out how to make Bluetooth headphones that don't require any power that'll be a viable alternative.
Well this isn't exclusive to Apple, it's how most companies of any size are. If you don't like the way you're treated as a customer, then stop buying their products. Corporations are fundamentally amoral; their only goal is profit. For some companies, that means bending over backwards to make customers happy, so they come back instead of going to the competition. For other companies, they have a huge customer base that will keep buying their crap no matter how poorly they're treated, so why shouldn't they use the opportunity to screw them over and squeeze them for more profit?
Yeah, that's too bad. If you want to plug in both headphones and a charger, you're using it wrong, just like on a previous model if you had reception problems, it was because you were holding it wrong.
If this is a problem for you, then you need to look for a different phone vendor that lets you use the phone in the way *you* want. You're not going to get that with Apple.
We DO have input on how all these companies design their devices, including Apple. It's called "money".
The Samsung Galaxy S6 was a big step backwards from the S5: it eliminated waterproofing, the microSD slot, and the removable battery. It didn't sell very well compared to previous Galaxy S* phones, so the S7 brought back the waterproofing and microSD slot (but not the battery).
Apple gets away with this shit because its customers are stupider than the other companies'. Samsung customers pissed about the S6 either kept their S5 or moved to some competing phone. But Apple customers won't do that, they'll just keep buying Apple products no matter what, and rationalize to themselves that Apple must know best.
Right, and this shows why Lightning is far superior and we need to abandon 3.5mm jacks immediately. With Lightning headphones getting their plugs broken like this frequently, people will need to buy more Lightning headphones, and also spend a bunch of money to get their iPhones repaired or replaced. 3.5mm jacks don't offer this golden opportunity.
iPhones aren't that popular in 3rd-world countries, or anywhere outside the US really. 3rd-world countries mainly use cheap Android phones, for obvious cost reasons.
No, hopefully they won't, and instead they'll tell people like you that you're trying to use it wrong, just like people were holding their phones wrong on a previous model.
Then we can watch as a bunch of suckers buy these phones anyway and then complain about this, or spend $$ for expensive adapters to fix this "problem".
Apple is just like MS, but for mobile devices: it doesn't matter how much they screw the user, the users will keep coming back for more.
Well someone will take a different tack with software and OS in the future placing user authority as #1.
Oh please. We've all been talking about "the year of Linux on the desktop" for over 15 years now, and it hasn't happened, or really come even close. Even Macs have had a lot more success in penetrating the business computing sector. Red Hat and Canonical have been at this stuff for ages with no real success (except on servers of course).
If a company like Tesla would hurry up and release an OS and business documents suite, I'd be really happy.
We already have other business documents suites: OpenOffice and LibreOffice have been around for ages, and there's also Google Docs. People aren't using them much; businesses especially are sticking with MS Office. And why would an automaker get into business software anyway?
OSes are pretty basic things if you gut the bloatware and go minimalist. Linux does a good job but they don't make it easy for the mainstream public.
Yes, they do actually. Installing something like Linux Mint is pretty easy, and a whole lot easier than installing Windows. I'd really like to see someone sit grandma down at a desktop PC built from components and have her install the latest Windows on it. You really think grandma is going to be able to figure out how to download drivers for stuff? And then get all the essential but not-included software you still need to make it functional (like a real web browser, a PDF viewer, etc.)? With Linux, you can have a fully-functional system in a half-hour all from one USB stick. Making things easy makes no difference at all; people are going to continue to use Windows.
Open Office does these things but they don't compete against MSFT in the best way. They go toe-to-toe with features. That's stupid. They should have gone pure minimalist.
Yeah, I'm sure that's really what mainstream users want: to replace their word processor with a text editor with CSS templates. *rollseyes*
There's two sides to this: any competent user these days will not browse without an ad-blocker, but you're right, adding that in muddles the waters because the ad-blocker is a significant piece of software by itself and has a huge effect.
I think the solution is that we need a better test: the browsers should all be run in standard, default configuration ("out of the box"), and then in one or maybe two more configurations with an ad-blocker (two for trying two competing ad-blockers). The obvious test here is to add uBlock Origin to each browser (if available), and also ABP, since those are easily the two most-popular blockers.
Showing the results of all 4 browsers, in 3 different configurations (or less, some browsers may not have certain blockers available), would be a much more comprehensive test showing its strengths and weaknesses.
The thing you're missing is that in Linux, the browser is built from sources by the distro, not supplied by Firefox, so distros can and do make customizations. Linux Mint makes money by making certain search engines default on the version Firefox they package. This is different on Windows where users download a pre-built Firefox directly from Mozilla's site, and presumably Mozilla makes money the same way.
Yeah, and it's funny how Microsoft themselves can't seem to figure this one out, even though they make that argument themselves about Windows (the PC OS).
No one cares about having a phone that's submersible at 100M for 5 years; people just want their phone to not crap out if they drop it in the toilet or get caught out in the rain. AFAIK, IP68 meets those requirements.
No system (though it's coming; they're very conservative and are waiting for it to be better-tested by other distros). No GNOME3 (at all, the choices are KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce). The only "crapware" I can find is that their version of Firefox makes Yahoo the default search engine, which isn't hard to change. And LM has been around for years now, with no signs of fading away.
I do agree that there's been too much convergence, especially with the DEs which is what the user interacts with the most, yet is also the component where it's not all that useful to have a single standard, unlike other lower-level parts. I honestly have no idea why Gnome3 has been adopted so widely, when it's really the antithesis of the hacker ethos that Linux came from. Gnome is all about removing user choice and dumbing things down for casual users, not providing a powerful and configurable environment for power users or anyone who wants the ability to customize their system. Even MacOSX is probably more customizable than Gnome3.
People keep paying for cable TV. People keep buying magazines and newspapers. People keep going to pro sporting events. Ads everywhere.
Those aren't the same people as Netflix subscribers. Some businesses are simply more successful at getting suckers as customers than others. Netflix is not the type of business that will do well only catering to suckers, unlike people who go to ball games and subscribe to cable TV.
Huh? "Still"? When did they *ever* test those things? Assuming you're in the USA, that is.
I had my driving test way back in 1990. The instructor had me: back out of the parking space at the DMV center (standard perpendicular space), pull out of the parking lot, take a right turn onto a 2-lane street, drive 100 feet or so to the intersection (DMV center was at an intersection), take a right turn, then take an immediate right turn back into the DMV parking lot, then park.
That was over a quarter-century ago. If they ever had rigorous driving tests, it must have been many decades ago.
Fuel shouldn't be a problem: the car should detect the temperature's too high and the occupants are in danger, and automatically open all the windows. As long as the battery is barely working, this will work.
Automatics don't have an easily-available "park" position either, if they're Jeeps. On those stupid things, you have to push the shift lever upwards three separate times to shift into P: once to go to neutral, once to go to R, and once to go into P. They don't have a tradition multi-position lever like any decent car, because it's cheaper to make a crappy lever with two microswitches.
I believe it was a Jeep, and it was most probably one of those stupid Jeeps that had a shitty shifter design that's just basically a 3-position forward/back lever, where you have to look at a tiny indicator on the dashboard to see which position (P, R, N, D) is selected, rather than looking at the actual shifter position as you do in almost every other automatic-transmission car ever made. There've been a LOT of problems with people accidentally leaving this in the wrong position (like neutral) and having the vehicle roll. It's been so bad that Jeep was forced to do a recall to replace these shitty shifters with a more traditional model.
I'm sure he didn't think it was in neutral, he thought it was in park. Automatic drivers have, for decades now, been taught that there is no "parking brake", only an "emergency brake", and that to park the vehicle, all you have to do is shift the transmission into "park". This has been done by society at large, and by the automakers themselves by making these brakes obscure in many automatic models. Very, very few people actually set their parking brakes in an automatic. I do, but that's because I drove a stick for 20 years, and I know how cars work and that it's not good practice to rely on the transmission to keep the car from rolling. Most people, unlike myself, are not engineers who have done significant auto repair work and studied how they (and their transmissions) work mechanically.
The problem here was Jeep: they designed a shitty, unsafe shifter that's just a lever with a couple of microswitches which select the transmission position (P-R-N-D), rather than having an actual lever position corresponding to the selection. It's very easy for someone (esp. if they're not really used to the vehicle, as is the case with rental-car drivers) to not realize which position the thing is in, and leave it in neutral, and have it roll. It's happened many, many times, so much that the government forced stupid Jeep to issue a recall on these deathtraps and change them to a more traditional shift lever like everyone else uses. Unfortunately, poor Anton didn't get his fixed in time.
Personally, I hope Jeep gets the snot sued out of them, and maybe even a criminal judgment for negligence. They are completely at fault here. When there's countless incidents of people having unsafe situations (vehicle rolling) with some cheap-ass shift lever, it's not driver error, it's a shitty design by the automaker, and should be punished. This is almost as bad as the ignition switch fiasco that GM went through, for which they got off way too easy too.
This just reinforces my resolve against buying any American-branded car ever. They're always cutting corners like this and creating unsafe products in the process.
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Extending rights to robots is ridiculous because they're machines.
If they actually get smart enough that they're self-aware (I'm dubious about this, but let's just assume for the sake of argument), then we've really screwed up because that'll ruin the whole reason we built the robots in the first place: to do our menial work for us. If we make them smart and self-aware so they demand all the same rights we have (including not being slaves), then why did we invent them in the first place? We might as well have stuck with human laborers. And what's worse, the machines have the potential to be smarter and more efficient than us, and decide that we need to be eliminated.
This is probably why we don't see any alien life: they all invented smart robots who then terminated their creators, and didn't see the point of contacting other inferior biological lifeforms.
There is: Bluetooth. But it sucks. The sound quality isn't that great, it's subject to radio interference, but worst of all it requires batteries, which adds a lot of weight (a regular pair of earbuds weighs next to nothing). Maybe when they figure out how to make Bluetooth headphones that don't require any power that'll be a viable alternative.
That's still a lot better than 4-color CGA graphics which were dominant on PCs for a long time.
Well this isn't exclusive to Apple, it's how most companies of any size are. If you don't like the way you're treated as a customer, then stop buying their products. Corporations are fundamentally amoral; their only goal is profit. For some companies, that means bending over backwards to make customers happy, so they come back instead of going to the competition. For other companies, they have a huge customer base that will keep buying their crap no matter how poorly they're treated, so why shouldn't they use the opportunity to screw them over and squeeze them for more profit?
Yeah, that's too bad. If you want to plug in both headphones and a charger, you're using it wrong, just like on a previous model if you had reception problems, it was because you were holding it wrong.
If this is a problem for you, then you need to look for a different phone vendor that lets you use the phone in the way *you* want. You're not going to get that with Apple.
We DO have input on how all these companies design their devices, including Apple. It's called "money".
The Samsung Galaxy S6 was a big step backwards from the S5: it eliminated waterproofing, the microSD slot, and the removable battery. It didn't sell very well compared to previous Galaxy S* phones, so the S7 brought back the waterproofing and microSD slot (but not the battery).
Apple gets away with this shit because its customers are stupider than the other companies'. Samsung customers pissed about the S6 either kept their S5 or moved to some competing phone. But Apple customers won't do that, they'll just keep buying Apple products no matter what, and rationalize to themselves that Apple must know best.
Right, and this shows why Lightning is far superior and we need to abandon 3.5mm jacks immediately. With Lightning headphones getting their plugs broken like this frequently, people will need to buy more Lightning headphones, and also spend a bunch of money to get their iPhones repaired or replaced. 3.5mm jacks don't offer this golden opportunity.
iPhones aren't that popular in 3rd-world countries, or anywhere outside the US really. 3rd-world countries mainly use cheap Android phones, for obvious cost reasons.
No, hopefully they won't, and instead they'll tell people like you that you're trying to use it wrong, just like people were holding their phones wrong on a previous model.
Then we can watch as a bunch of suckers buy these phones anyway and then complain about this, or spend $$ for expensive adapters to fix this "problem".
Apple is just like MS, but for mobile devices: it doesn't matter how much they screw the user, the users will keep coming back for more.
Yes, you do need to replace all your devices every 2 years. It's good for Apple profits.
If you don't like it, then stop buying stuff from Apple.
Well someone will take a different tack with software and OS in the future placing user authority as #1.
Oh please. We've all been talking about "the year of Linux on the desktop" for over 15 years now, and it hasn't happened, or really come even close. Even Macs have had a lot more success in penetrating the business computing sector. Red Hat and Canonical have been at this stuff for ages with no real success (except on servers of course).
If a company like Tesla would hurry up and release an OS and business documents suite, I'd be really happy.
We already have other business documents suites: OpenOffice and LibreOffice have been around for ages, and there's also Google Docs. People aren't using them much; businesses especially are sticking with MS Office. And why would an automaker get into business software anyway?
OSes are pretty basic things if you gut the bloatware and go minimalist. Linux does a good job but they don't make it easy for the mainstream public.
Yes, they do actually. Installing something like Linux Mint is pretty easy, and a whole lot easier than installing Windows. I'd really like to see someone sit grandma down at a desktop PC built from components and have her install the latest Windows on it. You really think grandma is going to be able to figure out how to download drivers for stuff? And then get all the essential but not-included software you still need to make it functional (like a real web browser, a PDF viewer, etc.)? With Linux, you can have a fully-functional system in a half-hour all from one USB stick. Making things easy makes no difference at all; people are going to continue to use Windows.
Open Office does these things but they don't compete against MSFT in the best way. They go toe-to-toe with features. That's stupid. They should have gone pure minimalist.
Yeah, I'm sure that's really what mainstream users want: to replace their word processor with a text editor with CSS templates. *rollseyes*
Great, so now you get to pay double for your phone service with Verizon, America's most expensive carrier.
There's two sides to this: any competent user these days will not browse without an ad-blocker, but you're right, adding that in muddles the waters because the ad-blocker is a significant piece of software by itself and has a huge effect.
I think the solution is that we need a better test: the browsers should all be run in standard, default configuration ("out of the box"), and then in one or maybe two more configurations with an ad-blocker (two for trying two competing ad-blockers). The obvious test here is to add uBlock Origin to each browser (if available), and also ABP, since those are easily the two most-popular blockers.
Showing the results of all 4 browsers, in 3 different configurations (or less, some browsers may not have certain blockers available), would be a much more comprehensive test showing its strengths and weaknesses.
What kind of horribly company do you work for that all your co-workers have Windows Phones?
You can look for a new job, you know.
No, it's different with Linux Mint:
https://www.linuxmint.com/sear...
The thing you're missing is that in Linux, the browser is built from sources by the distro, not supplied by Firefox, so distros can and do make customizations. Linux Mint makes money by making certain search engines default on the version Firefox they package. This is different on Windows where users download a pre-built Firefox directly from Mozilla's site, and presumably Mozilla makes money the same way.
This is all true, but users still refuse to abandon the Windows platform, no matter how rapey it gets. So what incentive does MS have to change?
Yeah, and it's funny how Microsoft themselves can't seem to figure this one out, even though they make that argument themselves about Windows (the PC OS).
No one cares about having a phone that's submersible at 100M for 5 years; people just want their phone to not crap out if they drop it in the toilet or get caught out in the rain. AFAIK, IP68 meets those requirements.
Here's a tip: download Linux Mint KDE Edition.
No system (though it's coming; they're very conservative and are waiting for it to be better-tested by other distros). No GNOME3 (at all, the choices are KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce). The only "crapware" I can find is that their version of Firefox makes Yahoo the default search engine, which isn't hard to change. And LM has been around for years now, with no signs of fading away.
I do agree that there's been too much convergence, especially with the DEs which is what the user interacts with the most, yet is also the component where it's not all that useful to have a single standard, unlike other lower-level parts. I honestly have no idea why Gnome3 has been adopted so widely, when it's really the antithesis of the hacker ethos that Linux came from. Gnome is all about removing user choice and dumbing things down for casual users, not providing a powerful and configurable environment for power users or anyone who wants the ability to customize their system. Even MacOSX is probably more customizable than Gnome3.
People keep paying for cable TV. People keep buying magazines and newspapers. People keep going to pro sporting events. Ads everywhere.
Those aren't the same people as Netflix subscribers. Some businesses are simply more successful at getting suckers as customers than others. Netflix is not the type of business that will do well only catering to suckers, unlike people who go to ball games and subscribe to cable TV.
Huh? "Still"? When did they *ever* test those things? Assuming you're in the USA, that is.
I had my driving test way back in 1990. The instructor had me: back out of the parking space at the DMV center (standard perpendicular space), pull out of the parking lot, take a right turn onto a 2-lane street, drive 100 feet or so to the intersection (DMV center was at an intersection), take a right turn, then take an immediate right turn back into the DMV parking lot, then park.
That was over a quarter-century ago. If they ever had rigorous driving tests, it must have been many decades ago.
Fuel shouldn't be a problem: the car should detect the temperature's too high and the occupants are in danger, and automatically open all the windows. As long as the battery is barely working, this will work.
Automatics don't have an easily-available "park" position either, if they're Jeeps. On those stupid things, you have to push the shift lever upwards three separate times to shift into P: once to go to neutral, once to go to R, and once to go into P. They don't have a tradition multi-position lever like any decent car, because it's cheaper to make a crappy lever with two microswitches.
I believe it was a Jeep, and it was most probably one of those stupid Jeeps that had a shitty shifter design that's just basically a 3-position forward/back lever, where you have to look at a tiny indicator on the dashboard to see which position (P, R, N, D) is selected, rather than looking at the actual shifter position as you do in almost every other automatic-transmission car ever made. There've been a LOT of problems with people accidentally leaving this in the wrong position (like neutral) and having the vehicle roll. It's been so bad that Jeep was forced to do a recall to replace these shitty shifters with a more traditional model.
I'm sure he didn't think it was in neutral, he thought it was in park. Automatic drivers have, for decades now, been taught that there is no "parking brake", only an "emergency brake", and that to park the vehicle, all you have to do is shift the transmission into "park". This has been done by society at large, and by the automakers themselves by making these brakes obscure in many automatic models. Very, very few people actually set their parking brakes in an automatic. I do, but that's because I drove a stick for 20 years, and I know how cars work and that it's not good practice to rely on the transmission to keep the car from rolling. Most people, unlike myself, are not engineers who have done significant auto repair work and studied how they (and their transmissions) work mechanically.
The problem here was Jeep: they designed a shitty, unsafe shifter that's just a lever with a couple of microswitches which select the transmission position (P-R-N-D), rather than having an actual lever position corresponding to the selection. It's very easy for someone (esp. if they're not really used to the vehicle, as is the case with rental-car drivers) to not realize which position the thing is in, and leave it in neutral, and have it roll. It's happened many, many times, so much that the government forced stupid Jeep to issue a recall on these deathtraps and change them to a more traditional shift lever like everyone else uses. Unfortunately, poor Anton didn't get his fixed in time.
Personally, I hope Jeep gets the snot sued out of them, and maybe even a criminal judgment for negligence. They are completely at fault here. When there's countless incidents of people having unsafe situations (vehicle rolling) with some cheap-ass shift lever, it's not driver error, it's a shitty design by the automaker, and should be punished. This is almost as bad as the ignition switch fiasco that GM went through, for which they got off way too easy too.
This just reinforces my resolve against buying any American-branded car ever. They're always cutting corners like this and creating unsafe products in the process.