Online sources of information are probably updated immediately when the runway numbers are repainted. However, many pilots fly with paper charts and airport directories. Either they fly old planes without modern avionics, or they simply want information that will survive a computer hardware failure. These paper documents expire in a few months and _should_ be replaced after expiration. For at least a few months (possibly longer), pilots rely on old information from paper charts and directories to get runway numbers for the airport they are using. If you are approaching XYZ airport and you see runway 19, but your airport directory says XYZ has runway 18 and 00 instead of 19 and 01, that's a problem..
It's not so bad at controlled airports, where pilots have to request landing clearance from air traffic control. The current runway number is given by ATC as part of that clearance. For example: "Cessna 236, cleared to land, runway 19". But at non-controlled airports, it's up to the pilot to broadcast his/her intention to land. There is room for confusion when the number painted on the ground does not match the paper chart. Some pilots would reasonably believe they have arrived at the wrong airport.
Everyone has privacy rights, but everyone has a right to due process as well. A landlord's lack of camera disclosure falls far short of any level of proof necessary to establish violation of a tenant's privacy rights. Without such proof, it's not easy to find any jurisdiction on the planet (least of all Europe) that will act on the mere possibility that privacy rights might have been violated.
The solution is ridiculously simple. All rental contracts to include boilerplate text that acknowledges the presence of cameras and the circumstances under which the landlord intends to use them. Such text won't change much, but it eliminates potential complaints. Happy now?
To a certain extent, the Air BnB business model depends on tenants accepting the presence of cameras that operate when the property is unoccupied. The only viable alternative is to stay at a hotel, where housekeepers visit daily and a property manager is on site.
Assume whatever you want, but without actual proof that the camera was used, your assumptions fall short of probable cause. No proof means no search warrant, which means no arrest, which means game over.
The only recourse AirBnB offers for finding an undisclosed surveillance device is a refund, as described at https://www.airbnb.com/help/ar...
The presence of an undisclosed camera is at most, a breach of contract. And since AirBnB anticipates this and prescribes a specific remedy, it won't be easy for a tenant to get any more compensation than a free rental. After all, the tenants agreed to the terms (and the specific remedy for undisclosed cameras) as part of the contract.
The USE of such a camera might be grounds for all sorts of civil & criminal trouble, but the proof of use is ultimately on you. If you call the cops, they would need a search warrant (in the landlord's home state) to do any meaningful followup. That's a lot of effort with a low probability of success. Without a solid reason to believe the camera was in use, I wouldn't bet much on the search warrant, much less the search. At best, you end up with a 5% chance of catching a landlord illegally using a camera vs. a 100% chance of getting blacklisted as a tenant.
What I think you'll see in the future is a boilerplate disclosure of surveillance devices, whether they are present or not, just as you can't open a food wrapper these days without some form of peanut disclosure. Otherwise, the only camera-free properties to rent will be those where the landlord manages the property in person. That would pretty much eliminate the entire category of vacation home rentals.
People can (and do) deploy hidden cameras in conjunction with home security systems, for the purpose of identifying burglars or home invaders. A homeowner could reasonably claim that the cameras are only activated when the property is vacant. Considering that the value proposition of Air BnB is to facilitate absentee landlords, such property owners have a reasonable use case for cameras: to inspect the property via remote control after tenants leave, to see if the housekeeping service is doing their job. If the cameras are not actually running while tenants are present, there is no need to disclose their presence.
Hypothetically, if I owned a home in some far away place and wanted to rent it out via Air BnB, I would (at a minimum) have some sort of home security system to protect the property during weeks when it might be vacant. If someone wants to rent it and they ask me if the property is ready for visitors, I might want a camera system to help determine the status of the house. If I pay a service provider for maintenance or cleanup, I'm going to want some verification that they showed up and did the work. Cameras can do all of that, using nothing more than hardware already present for the security system.
Is there room for abuse? Absolutely. Bad landlords could hide under the skirt of reasonable use cases, and run the cameras 24x7. Even worse, the government really wants you to begrudgingly accept THEIR 24x7 cameras, so they are unlikely to provide meaningful protection from private cameras. Although Air BnB says disparaging things about hidden cameras, they don't want to lose their base of absentee landlords either. You can't have it both ways. The cameras are winning this battle, using expedience as a shield against privacy rights.
To the extent that tuition waivers are granted in exchange for work by the recipient, they should be considered taxable income. In current practice, the waivers are little more than a tax dodge.
If nothing changes except the tax status of waivers, then yes, grad students will get screwed. But the change (if it happens) will not occur in a vacuum.
"Full price" tuition is like sticker price on a car or the asking price on a house. Hardly anyone pays full price. Every year, tuition rises by some ridiculous amount, with a corresponding increase in the average amount of "financial aid" for each student. When someone like George W. Bush applies to Yale or Harvard with more money than brains, they find room for him somehow -- at full price of course.
If universities had to charge the same price to every student in an identical program, and students had to think twice before signing up for vast amounts of debt, the free market would balance at some point lower than current prices.
Thanks largely to government "help", far too much money has been pumped into higher education. University spending (public and private) continues to grow in the absence of any restraint. Students can always borrow more money next year because the government will borrow more money to lend. As a result, tuition rises faster than inflation every year, but the quality of the finished product is pretty much the same.
We have a similar problem with health care. For many years, employees sought better and better health care insurance, because employers paid most of the cost and employees received the benefit tax-free. As taxes and health care costs both grew without restraint, the value of employer-provided health care increased as well, fueling a vicious cycle. Every year, the cost of health care increases far beyond the rate of inflation because insured people are effectively discouraged (if not blocked altogether) from price shopping for their insurance or health care services.
Before Congressional Democrats butchered it, early drafts of the Affordable Care Act tried to encourage more competition for both insurance and health care services. By the time the law was finalized, lobbyists "fixed" it, preserving the sacred status of health insurers, health care providers, and big pharma. To this day, vast amounts of government "help" accomplish little more than inflating the health care bubble and taking care of lobbyists.
In some ways, taxing tuition waivers and student loan interest can be considered the Obamacare of higher education. If the tax dodges go away and loan interest is taxed as well, maybe it's time for students to set a limit on the amount they are willing to pay for tuition. Rest assured, universities will not allow their seats to remain empty. If supply and demand forces them to lower their operating cost to survive in a price sensitive environment, so be it.
Students should be outraged at the prospect of paying high tuition, borrowing money at high interest rates, and paying high taxes on top of it all. I understand their anger. But asking government to keep inflating the bubble is a big mistake and not sustainable. Such "help" will only make things worse.
In some states, coal is one of the leading energy sources for electrical power. Depending on where you live, your "clean" electric car may be powered by COAL.
Lithium ion batteries store a LOT of energy, and it's not that hard to get them to ignite, at which point they burn VERY hot. Plenty of YouTube videos with lithium ion battery fires. Go watch some before attempting to explain how safe they are on an airliner.
A bunch of bad people could carry laptops on the same flight, and short out the battery packs with a paper clip. Not very difficult with most batteries. Even Apple products could be modded to make the batteries vulnerable.
Checked baggage or carry-on, lithium ion batteries are a problem either way. A laptop could serve as it's own timer, with a hardware mod to close a relay and short out the batteries while the damn thing sits in the cargo hold. As an added bonus, nobody can get in while the plane is in flight. Sure, there is a fire suppression system, but I wouldn't bet on it because such fires are difficult to extinguish.
A few problems here: 1. You mentioned spark plugs twice. If you have coil-on-plug design, you replace them with the coils, else you replace them with the spark plug wires. It's one or the other. 2. You mentioned coils twice. See above. 3. If you get your car repaired at the stealership, you pay the prices you mentioned. That stuff is a lot cheaper at an indy mechanic, cheaper than that as a DIY. 4. I drive a BMW 528, 9 years old with 120,000 miles. Of all the repairs you mentioned, the ONLY one I have EVER had done is coils + plugs, for about $350 on a 6-cylinder car. 5. Had a battery replaced in my car for about $150 (massive battery, complicated by German engineering). My guess is the Tesla battery is far more expensive
I figured it had to be a free factory. Nobody in their right mind would build or lease an unsubsidized factory in California today, given the high cost of taxes and labor. Elon would not have taken the bait without some plan to prevent unions from making the venture unprofitable. Looks like part of that plan is on display.
The average teen is ineligible for credit and does not earn enough money to buy an unsubsidized phone + monthly prepaid voice/data plan. Jobs for teens are scarce. In my town, half of them don't work at all. Maybe the problem is not what teens do with a smartphone, it's how they get to make the choice of owning one without the requirement to earn one. Mom and Dad hand over a $700 piece of hardware and spend another $500 annually on service plans, while the teenager's part of the bargain is little more than exclaiming "Hurray! Free stuff!". Then they turn 18, graduate from high school, and borrow other people's money to go to college. Student loans are not free, but to a person who has learned to expect handouts, it sure looks that way. Smartphones are the entry level of perpetual entitlement and dependence. If we have destroyed a generation, it's mostly because parents waited too long to introduce the concept of financial self sufficiency.
Before computers, there were typewriters (almost all of which used a Courier font). There was forensic analysis of typed documents, based mostly on matching tiny artifacts and inconsistencies to individual typewriters or possibly a brand/model of typewriter. Modern font forensics is a whole lot easier if all you care about is establishing the approximate year when a font became available. In the Killian documents case, nobody cared about matching the documents to the original typewriter or printer, they cared about whether or not the font existed when the documents were purportedly written. The ability to do this quickly and cheaply is relatively new, enabled by a proliferation of font types. If everyone still used Courier exclusively, it wouldn't be easy to prove anything by merely identifying a font.
Was the reprint of your short story presented as an original document by CBS news? I doubt it. Would you try to use your LaserWriter print to prove that you wrote the story as a kid with your TRS-80? Lotsa luck.
The purveyor of the documents, Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, claims to have burned the originals after faxing copies to CBS.
How incredibly convenient. If I didn't know better, I'd say someone didn't want the paper or toner to be analyzed, not realizing that the font was already a problem.
In the 60 Minutes segment, anchor Dan Rather stated: "We are told [the documents] were taken from Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s personal files" and incorrectly asserted that "the material" had been authenticated by experts retained by CBS.
Either CBS producers knew it was a computer-generated print and thought nobody would notice, OR they saw what they wanted to see missed the obvious clues. Considering what a massive embarrassment this was for CBS (not to mention a career-ender for Dan Rather and 4 other people), I find it hard to believe this was simply a case of retyping a few memos. CBS has long since given up trying to convince anyone. After all, no matter what shape the originals were in, if they were legible enough to be retyped, they were legible enough to be photocopied. Unless, of course, the Word memos are partially or completely fabricated, in which case the known facts fit together without rationalization.
The first time I saw fonts at the center of an investigation was the CBS story about George W. Bush's military service. The CBS news story presented a document from the 1970s that was supposedly from an IBM Selectric typewriter when in fact it was from an Apple Macintosh using Microsoft Word default settings and a Palatino font. At the time, I was surprised to see how obvious the forgery was, and how easily it was exposed. Without this case, I wonder if anyone would have investigated the Calibri font in Pakistan.
Back in the late 1970's, I learned to type on a manual typewriter. As a result, I developed a heavy typing touch, which served me well with 1980's keyboards like the VT-100 terminal. A few years later, we had VT220 terminals with LK-201 keyboards. Every key was in the right place, but the key action was lighter and I wore out them out periodically. Today, my typing touch is considerably lighter. The LK-250 is the PC (ancient DIN connector) version of the LK-201, with the alt key replacing the compose key. IMHO, we reached the epitome of keyboard design back in the 1990's, with honorable mention to Apple for their keyboard designs of 2008-2015.
If and when the US has high-speed rail, TSA will be waiting for you at the train station. The only reason they don't do it now is that because AmTrak cannot afford to lose any passengers for a mode of transportation that costs more than flying and takes longer than driving.
Probably when the last Android phone on their network stops working. They can push as hard as they want to incentivize new customers to purchase iPhones, but they aren't going to give up the monthly revenue they get from their existing base, which is mostly Android.
In the past, VM has introduced new phone technology (like 4G) with corresponding new plans. Each time, they grandfathered the existing base. I had a $25/month plan with a 3G phone, which they honored until I wanted to buy a 4G phone, at which point I had to get the $35 plan. I expect to keep my $35 plan until I need a new phone, at which point I get an iPhone on their new $50 plan, or an Android phone on some other network.
Amazon has been selling VM phones for years, usually offering a better selection and better pricing than buying the exact same phone in the exact same box from VM. I predict that Amazon will continue to sell VM Android phones, and VM will continue to activate them, until the inventory is exhausted. If they follow past practices, even new customers should be able to get VM Android phones on Amazon and activate them on VM.
As you say, nobody is running online price checks at Whole Foods; they KNOW it will be cheaper elsewhere. I view the Whole Foods acquisition as Amazon's attempt to engage the least price-sensitive consumers they can find. Maybe Whole Foods customers will pay a premium (vs. local grocers) for Amazon's legendary online shopping experience. If Amazon ever found a way to deliver groceries to the customer without human cashiers or drivers, it would change the grocery industry forever.
Otherwise, YouTube becomes a cesspool of fake news and political correctness. I don't expect YouTube material to be vetted, confirmed, or "proven", and that's part of the appeal. There are a lot of hypersensitive snowflakes who would flag every opinion that doesn't agree with theirs. Hell, I expect a few downvotes for simply mentioning this possibility -- which will prove my point.
Owning a car means wasting a lot of money on insurance, depreciation, property tax, etc. When you can summon a robo-car with your phone, the incentive to own a car goes away. The auto makers will still sell cars, but the customers will be quantity buyers, and sales volume will be a lot less.
Slashdot Mirror
Online sources of information are probably updated immediately when the runway numbers are repainted. However, many pilots fly with paper charts and airport directories. Either they fly old planes without modern avionics, or they simply want information that will survive a computer hardware failure. These paper documents expire in a few months and _should_ be replaced after expiration. For at least a few months (possibly longer), pilots rely on old information from paper charts and directories to get runway numbers for the airport they are using. If you are approaching XYZ airport and you see runway 19, but your airport directory says XYZ has runway 18 and 00 instead of 19 and 01, that's a problem..
It's not so bad at controlled airports, where pilots have to request landing clearance from air traffic control. The current runway number is given by ATC as part of that clearance. For example: "Cessna 236, cleared to land, runway 19". But at non-controlled airports, it's up to the pilot to broadcast his/her intention to land. There is room for confusion when the number painted on the ground does not match the paper chart. Some pilots would reasonably believe they have arrived at the wrong airport.
A clever person could build an mp3 tool to discover, categorize, and play such content.
Everyone has privacy rights, but everyone has a right to due process as well. A landlord's lack of camera disclosure falls far short of any level of proof necessary to establish violation of a tenant's privacy rights. Without such proof, it's not easy to find any jurisdiction on the planet (least of all Europe) that will act on the mere possibility that privacy rights might have been violated.
The solution is ridiculously simple. All rental contracts to include boilerplate text that acknowledges the presence of cameras and the circumstances under which the landlord intends to use them. Such text won't change much, but it eliminates potential complaints. Happy now?
To a certain extent, the Air BnB business model depends on tenants accepting the presence of cameras that operate when the property is unoccupied. The only viable alternative is to stay at a hotel, where housekeepers visit daily and a property manager is on site.
Assume whatever you want, but without actual proof that the camera was used, your assumptions fall short of probable cause. No proof means no search warrant, which means no arrest, which means game over.
The only recourse AirBnB offers for finding an undisclosed surveillance device is a refund, as described at https://www.airbnb.com/help/ar...
The presence of an undisclosed camera is at most, a breach of contract. And since AirBnB anticipates this and prescribes a specific remedy, it won't be easy for a tenant to get any more compensation than a free rental. After all, the tenants agreed to the terms (and the specific remedy for undisclosed cameras) as part of the contract.
The USE of such a camera might be grounds for all sorts of civil & criminal trouble, but the proof of use is ultimately on you. If you call the cops, they would need a search warrant (in the landlord's home state) to do any meaningful followup. That's a lot of effort with a low probability of success. Without a solid reason to believe the camera was in use, I wouldn't bet much on the search warrant, much less the search. At best, you end up with a 5% chance of catching a landlord illegally using a camera vs. a 100% chance of getting blacklisted as a tenant.
What I think you'll see in the future is a boilerplate disclosure of surveillance devices, whether they are present or not, just as you can't open a food wrapper these days without some form of peanut disclosure. Otherwise, the only camera-free properties to rent will be those where the landlord manages the property in person. That would pretty much eliminate the entire category of vacation home rentals.
People can (and do) deploy hidden cameras in conjunction with home security systems, for the purpose of identifying burglars or home invaders. A homeowner could reasonably claim that the cameras are only activated when the property is vacant. Considering that the value proposition of Air BnB is to facilitate absentee landlords, such property owners have a reasonable use case for cameras: to inspect the property via remote control after tenants leave, to see if the housekeeping service is doing their job. If the cameras are not actually running while tenants are present, there is no need to disclose their presence.
Hypothetically, if I owned a home in some far away place and wanted to rent it out via Air BnB, I would (at a minimum) have some sort of home security system to protect the property during weeks when it might be vacant. If someone wants to rent it and they ask me if the property is ready for visitors, I might want a camera system to help determine the status of the house. If I pay a service provider for maintenance or cleanup, I'm going to want some verification that they showed up and did the work. Cameras can do all of that, using nothing more than hardware already present for the security system.
Is there room for abuse? Absolutely. Bad landlords could hide under the skirt of reasonable use cases, and run the cameras 24x7. Even worse, the government really wants you to begrudgingly accept THEIR 24x7 cameras, so they are unlikely to provide meaningful protection from private cameras. Although Air BnB says disparaging things about hidden cameras, they don't want to lose their base of absentee landlords either. You can't have it both ways. The cameras are winning this battle, using expedience as a shield against privacy rights.
To the extent that tuition waivers are granted in exchange for work by the recipient, they should be considered taxable income. In current practice, the waivers are little more than a tax dodge.
If nothing changes except the tax status of waivers, then yes, grad students will get screwed. But the change (if it happens) will not occur in a vacuum.
"Full price" tuition is like sticker price on a car or the asking price on a house. Hardly anyone pays full price. Every year, tuition rises by some ridiculous amount, with a corresponding increase in the average amount of "financial aid" for each student. When someone like George W. Bush applies to Yale or Harvard with more money than brains, they find room for him somehow -- at full price of course.
If universities had to charge the same price to every student in an identical program, and students had to think twice before signing up for vast amounts of debt, the free market would balance at some point lower than current prices.
Thanks largely to government "help", far too much money has been pumped into higher education. University spending (public and private) continues to grow in the absence of any restraint. Students can always borrow more money next year because the government will borrow more money to lend. As a result, tuition rises faster than inflation every year, but the quality of the finished product is pretty much the same.
We have a similar problem with health care. For many years, employees sought better and better health care insurance, because employers paid most of the cost and employees received the benefit tax-free. As taxes and health care costs both grew without restraint, the value of employer-provided health care increased as well, fueling a vicious cycle. Every year, the cost of health care increases far beyond the rate of inflation because insured people are effectively discouraged (if not blocked altogether) from price shopping for their insurance or health care services.
Before Congressional Democrats butchered it, early drafts of the Affordable Care Act tried to encourage more competition for both insurance and health care services. By the time the law was finalized, lobbyists "fixed" it, preserving the sacred status of health insurers, health care providers, and big pharma. To this day, vast amounts of government "help" accomplish little more than inflating the health care bubble and taking care of lobbyists.
In some ways, taxing tuition waivers and student loan interest can be considered the Obamacare of higher education. If the tax dodges go away and loan interest is taxed as well, maybe it's time for students to set a limit on the amount they are willing to pay for tuition. Rest assured, universities will not allow their seats to remain empty. If supply and demand forces them to lower their operating cost to survive in a price sensitive environment, so be it.
Students should be outraged at the prospect of paying high tuition, borrowing money at high interest rates, and paying high taxes on top of it all. I understand their anger. But asking government to keep inflating the bubble is a big mistake and not sustainable. Such "help" will only make things worse.
In some states, coal is one of the leading energy sources for electrical power. Depending on where you live, your "clean" electric car may be powered by COAL.
Lithium ion batteries store a LOT of energy, and it's not that hard to get them to ignite, at which point they burn VERY hot. Plenty of YouTube videos with lithium ion battery fires. Go watch some before attempting to explain how safe they are on an airliner.
A bunch of bad people could carry laptops on the same flight, and short out the battery packs with a paper clip. Not very difficult with most batteries. Even Apple products could be modded to make the batteries vulnerable.
Checked baggage or carry-on, lithium ion batteries are a problem either way. A laptop could serve as it's own timer, with a hardware mod to close a relay and short out the batteries while the damn thing sits in the cargo hold. As an added bonus, nobody can get in while the plane is in flight. Sure, there is a fire suppression system, but I wouldn't bet on it because such fires are difficult to extinguish.
A few problems here:
1. You mentioned spark plugs twice. If you have coil-on-plug design, you replace them with the coils, else you replace them with the spark plug wires. It's one or the other.
2. You mentioned coils twice. See above.
3. If you get your car repaired at the stealership, you pay the prices you mentioned. That stuff is a lot cheaper at an indy mechanic, cheaper than that as a DIY.
4. I drive a BMW 528, 9 years old with 120,000 miles. Of all the repairs you mentioned, the ONLY one I have EVER had done is coils + plugs, for about $350 on a 6-cylinder car.
5. Had a battery replaced in my car for about $150 (massive battery, complicated by German engineering). My guess is the Tesla battery is far more expensive
I figured it had to be a free factory. Nobody in their right mind would build or lease an unsubsidized factory in California today, given the high cost of taxes and labor. Elon would not have taken the bait without some plan to prevent unions from making the venture unprofitable. Looks like part of that plan is on display.
Precisely the reason for avoiding union nonsense by moving the work elsewhere.
Build all US facilities in right-to-work states. Seems to work for BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, and Hyundai.
Paypal only, please.
I'm glad to see Amazon (or any other competitor) bring disruption to a market that sorely needs it.
The average teen is ineligible for credit and does not earn enough money to buy an unsubsidized phone + monthly prepaid voice/data plan. Jobs for teens are scarce. In my town, half of them don't work at all. Maybe the problem is not what teens do with a smartphone, it's how they get to make the choice of owning one without the requirement to earn one. Mom and Dad hand over a $700 piece of hardware and spend another $500 annually on service plans, while the teenager's part of the bargain is little more than exclaiming "Hurray! Free stuff!". Then they turn 18, graduate from high school, and borrow other people's money to go to college. Student loans are not free, but to a person who has learned to expect handouts, it sure looks that way. Smartphones are the entry level of perpetual entitlement and dependence. If we have destroyed a generation, it's mostly because parents waited too long to introduce the concept of financial self sufficiency.
Before computers, there were typewriters (almost all of which used a Courier font). There was forensic analysis of typed documents, based mostly on matching tiny artifacts and inconsistencies to individual typewriters or possibly a brand/model of typewriter. Modern font forensics is a whole lot easier if all you care about is establishing the approximate year when a font became available. In the Killian documents case, nobody cared about matching the documents to the original typewriter or printer, they cared about whether or not the font existed when the documents were purportedly written. The ability to do this quickly and cheaply is relatively new, enabled by a proliferation of font types. If everyone still used Courier exclusively, it wouldn't be easy to prove anything by merely identifying a font.
Was the reprint of your short story presented as an original document by CBS news? I doubt it. Would you try to use your LaserWriter print to prove that you wrote the story as a kid with your TRS-80? Lotsa luck.
Quoted text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The purveyor of the documents, Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, claims to have burned the originals after faxing copies to CBS.
How incredibly convenient. If I didn't know better, I'd say someone didn't want the paper or toner to be analyzed, not realizing that the font was already a problem.
In the 60 Minutes segment, anchor Dan Rather stated: "We are told [the documents] were taken from Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s personal files" and incorrectly asserted that "the material" had been authenticated by experts retained by CBS.
Either CBS producers knew it was a computer-generated print and thought nobody would notice, OR they saw what they wanted to see missed the obvious clues. Considering what a massive embarrassment this was for CBS (not to mention a career-ender for Dan Rather and 4 other people), I find it hard to believe this was simply a case of retyping a few memos. CBS has long since given up trying to convince anyone. After all, no matter what shape the originals were in, if they were legible enough to be retyped, they were legible enough to be photocopied. Unless, of course, the Word memos are partially or completely fabricated, in which case the known facts fit together without rationalization.
The first time I saw fonts at the center of an investigation was the CBS story about George W. Bush's military service. The CBS news story presented a document from the 1970s that was supposedly from an IBM Selectric typewriter when in fact it was from an Apple Macintosh using Microsoft Word default settings and a Palatino font. At the time, I was surprised to see how obvious the forgery was, and how easily it was exposed. Without this case, I wonder if anyone would have investigated the Calibri font in Pakistan.
Back in the late 1970's, I learned to type on a manual typewriter. As a result, I developed a heavy typing touch, which served me well with 1980's keyboards like the VT-100 terminal. A few years later, we had VT220 terminals with LK-201 keyboards. Every key was in the right place, but the key action was lighter and I wore out them out periodically. Today, my typing touch is considerably lighter. The LK-250 is the PC (ancient DIN connector) version of the LK-201, with the alt key replacing the compose key. IMHO, we reached the epitome of keyboard design back in the 1990's, with honorable mention to Apple for their keyboard designs of 2008-2015.
If and when the US has high-speed rail, TSA will be waiting for you at the train station. The only reason they don't do it now is that because AmTrak cannot afford to lose any passengers for a mode of transportation that costs more than flying and takes longer than driving.
Probably when the last Android phone on their network stops working. They can push as hard as they want to incentivize new customers to purchase iPhones, but they aren't going to give up the monthly revenue they get from their existing base, which is mostly Android.
In the past, VM has introduced new phone technology (like 4G) with corresponding new plans. Each time, they grandfathered the existing base. I had a $25/month plan with a 3G phone, which they honored until I wanted to buy a 4G phone, at which point I had to get the $35 plan. I expect to keep my $35 plan until I need a new phone, at which point I get an iPhone on their new $50 plan, or an Android phone on some other network.
Amazon has been selling VM phones for years, usually offering a better selection and better pricing than buying the exact same phone in the exact same box from VM. I predict that Amazon will continue to sell VM Android phones, and VM will continue to activate them, until the inventory is exhausted. If they follow past practices, even new customers should be able to get VM Android phones on Amazon and activate them on VM.
As you say, nobody is running online price checks at Whole Foods; they KNOW it will be cheaper elsewhere. I view the Whole Foods acquisition as Amazon's attempt to engage the least price-sensitive consumers they can find. Maybe Whole Foods customers will pay a premium (vs. local grocers) for Amazon's legendary online shopping experience. If Amazon ever found a way to deliver groceries to the customer without human cashiers or drivers, it would change the grocery industry forever.
Otherwise, YouTube becomes a cesspool of fake news and political correctness. I don't expect YouTube material to be vetted, confirmed, or "proven", and that's part of the appeal. There are a lot of hypersensitive snowflakes who would flag every opinion that doesn't agree with theirs. Hell, I expect a few downvotes for simply mentioning this possibility -- which will prove my point.
Owning a car means wasting a lot of money on insurance, depreciation, property tax, etc. When you can summon a robo-car with your phone, the incentive to own a car goes away. The auto makers will still sell cars, but the customers will be quantity buyers, and sales volume will be a lot less.