A car stereo with Bluetooth costs $15. Walmart also sells Bluetooth adapters in the impulse bins at the check-out counters.
Yeah, the lack of a headphone jack probably annoys audiophiles, but if you're really that picky about your audio quality, you're probably using a standalone media player.
I've personally been using a phone without a headphone jack for several months now and haven't missed it. I never used it on my previous phone - I went Bluetooth "everything" quite awhile ago.
Payment processors and other similar organisations simply get massively lobbied by this well connected and loud group of crazies that are very skilled in using platforms like twitter to organise their hate mob.
If fringe group nationalists really gave a shit, they'd drop checks in the mail if they had to. Funny thing about conservatives is they're perfectly happy to expect others to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but when it's their turn, suddenly the whole world is fucking them over. Oh, the irony.
The big reason I want them to have internet is so they can stop watching cable and over air TV and get out of the propaganda bubble their in.
Are you on a different internet than the rest of us? The internet is the greatest political echo chamber circle-jerk ever created. TV may be the idiot box, but even Faux News manages to be critical of the orange man once in awhile.
Most of the people who vote Republican simply do so because the status quo works for them. They've got a job, a roof over their head, health coverage, and a fridge full of food. All they see from the Democratic party is politicians wanting to take away more of their hard-earned money and give it to, in the perception of many Republican voters, ne'er-do-wells. Being connected to the internet is more likely to reinforce, rather than challenge, that perception.
But I'm willing to go as far as saying the closest crypto has to "intrinsic value" is the cost of making them. They can't go below that for long
This is precisely why the mining difficulty automatically adjusts. When a coin is no longer profitable to mine, people shut the mining rigs down. The network difficulty adjusts itself, and the same number of coins continue to be produced by less miners (and by extension, less electricity being used).
Republicans favor the Net Neutrality we have today.
Yeah, it's so fucking awesome to have a single choice of broadband provider, one which now has carte blanche to implement whatever means they deem necessary to squeeze more profit out of a market they've monopolized.
Government regulation is not the best solution, but voting for regulation is all that remains when voting with your wallet is not an option. The fault is not with those of us who were forced into a corner and vote "left". The fault lies with businesses who have chosen not to play fairly at the game of capitalism. We're simply demanding they be held accountable.
Why people want to take a perfectly good system and tart it up with regulations that can only do harm, I've no idea.
We already had net neutrality and the internet didn't implode on itself. The only "harm" done would be to the greedy telco companies, who want to squeeze every last penny out of their customers.
If someone is having trouble balancing their budget, buying an expensive phone every other year probably won't even make the top 20 things to fix in their spending habits.
Many people spend more money on Starbucks/cigarettes/cable bill/booze than a $1k biennial smartphone purchase. But God forbid you're a ne'er-do-well with an iPhone, because it's obviously the cause of your financial woes.
The naysayers also tend to forget there's a thriving secondary market for cell phones, to recoup some of the cost of the new phone. Good luck selling those used cigarettes.
The thing that annoys me about it is that it will continue to nag me about upgrades; like literally every time I unlock it I have to say no don't upgrade.
Install the TVOS beta profile and it will stop nagging you to update (iOS allows the profile to be installed, but since the iPhone can't run TVOS, it will always think there is no update available). Granted, this solution isn't immediately obvious (googling for "iOS block updates" turns up info on blocking app updates), but it became commonplace in the jailbreak scene to prevent an accidental iOS upgrade.
I can see how a local telco like Telstra might have to do it, but the tech giants like Apple/Google/MS etc don't.
Bwahahahah! That's a good one. Yeah, I'm sure they're all just lining up to put principles ahead of profit.
All they have to do is a pop-up which says "In compliance with Australian regulation whatever it's called, your unique decryption key will be uploaded to and retained on our servers. Have a nice day."
So you have to carry the bigger battery. Bigger drone.
Possible fix: Cloud-connected landing pads that double as charging stations. Amazon could give them away to Prime Members who'll set them up at their homes, and you'd earn Amazon credit each time a drone makes a pit stop.
To the naysayers who think short battery life can't be worked around, look at the cell phone industry. The technology required cell towers to be built all over the place (one tower per every 1 to 22 miles of coverage, depending on various factors), so that's what they did. I'm sure back when cellular technology was first starting out, some luddites were probably claiming "It'll never work, you'd need massively powerful transmitters, and even bigger batteries!"
The most likely cause of delay in Amazon implementing drone deliveries is not the batteries, but the aspect of safety. These things will fall from the sky when something goes wrong, and there's some truth to the idiom "crash and burn", at it applies to drones. How to minimize the risk of injury/death/property damage when a delivery drone fails (and gravity does its thing) is the real showstopper for this technology.
You may not realize it but the level of animal products per capita in the US is unsustainable
Cows are a renewable resource. They fucking eat grass. If humanity becomes doomed because we can't figure out how to grow grass for cows to eat, we deserve our fate.
Furthermore, if you're talking about cow farts, we can clean that shit out of the atmosphere with technology that exists today. If it actually became a problem, we'd have more motivation to use it.
How is the number of subscribers one has on YouTube even a thing that people care about?
Everything that's popular/trending on YouTube is utter tripe. The only things worth watching on there are from the handful of content creators who don't give a shit about regularly spewing out clickbait garbage just to keep their rankings up.
Maybe not Michael Jackson famous but still pretty famous.
He's famous for being famous. Michael Jackson was famous for his musical abilities, and later for his alleged inappropriate interests/conduct with children.
If PewDiePie wants to keep his #1 spot, maybe he should consider fondling a few kids. Anything for the fans, right?
How many times have you gone through a self-scan and it screwed up and you had to find a human to fix the mess?
This is also an implementation problem. The self checkout machines have no way of knowing if you're honest, so they treat every user as if they're trying to walk out with the store. So, when the scale malfunctions or you accidentally double-scan something, it doesn't trust you to override the error.
All of the stores which let you use an app to turn your smartphone into a self-checkout scanner avoid this idiocy (most likely because it's not anonymous, as you have to make an account to use the app). I wish more stores implemented this, because scanning stuff as you're putting it in your cart saves a lot of time.
I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed, even if they're McJobs.
Do you also happen to ride a horse, and light your home with kerosene? Are you going to get arrested for shooting at the delivery drones, when they start putting your local UPS drivers out of work?
Technology has been putting people out of work ever since the industrial revolution. Society will continue to adapt. It may not be initially pleasant for everyone, but if enough people are disgruntled, change will materialize. It always does.
That will work until one of them creates a Square account, and holds out one of their portable Bluetooth CC and/or NFC readers...
I've been waiting for THAT to happen.
I've seen quite a few bums with phones, but none that have caught on to mobile payments yet. If enough people stopped carrying cash, I'm sure they'd figure it out.
Trump has lowered the tax rate of the very people who got rich offshoring while at the same time increased the cost of goods that ordinary people buy
And anyone with a functional brain realizes now is a good time to buy whatever Chinese-made crap you had your eyes on, because soon it's gonna cost more.
Judging by the shit I've seen "deplorables" post, I very much doubt many of them understand that it's a tax they'll have to cough up. I think they imagine Trump is just going to send a bill to China.
the actual situation is merely that it would take time to ramp US production back up, and time for inventories to build to desired levels?
The next administration can press the "undo" button on all of Trump's bullshit. No one with half a brain is going to invest a cent in increasing domestic production. All tariffs accomplish is hitting average hard-working Americans right in their wallets.
Most rich people I know don't have an iphone. They don't feel the need to prove their status the same way as an insecure poor person.
People buy $4k+ wristwatches as a "status symbol." People buy iPhones because they don't want to deal with Android's bullshit (largely a fault of Google being Google). Furthermore, flagship Android phones aren't much cheaper.
In the grand scheme of things, a $1k phone every 2 years is still cheaper than the average cable bill, smoking habit, or a heavy Starbucks addiction. If it's really breaking the piggy bank, you might want to re-examine your finances.
Not even close to missing that - because I can watch all of this from a single box (AppleTV
AppleTV can't directly buy/rent content from Vudu or Amazon. It might be the ideal solution for your use, but there still is no one-size-fits-all streaming box. And yeah, you're probably saving money but someone who wants sports channels, and Netflix & Amazon's exclusive content, and HBO, and CBS All Access, and Hulu without the commercials, etc... is probably spending more now than in the glory days of cable/DirecTV/Dish - and has more than one "box".
You were so close to getting the point and then totally missed it. If the government provided healthcare to all, then yes - they'd be justified in pushing agendas to reduce costs by encouraging people to quit unhealthy habits. But even in that situation, taxes would be preferable to an outright ban.
Here in the USA, it's primarily private insurance companies which would see a benefit to decreased smoking rates. There's your agenda, and also why we don't have any sort of healthcare-for-all system here. Gotta please the almighty corporate overlords.
That's what this is really about. Netflix, Amazon, CBS All Access, and now Apple - they're the new premium "cable" networks. Except now, you've got competing incompatible hardware platforms and separate bills for streaming all this shit. It might almost make you miss the days when you had a single cable bill and could watch everything you paid for from a single cable box.
The argument against smoking is that it pollutes the air of non-smokers
Yup, and as a non-smoker, as long as you're doing that shit outside, away from public entrances, or on/in your own property - I have no problem with it. I'm not a fan of nanny state regulations, because they generally don't know when to stop. You end up with things like banning big soda cups, which could've been filled with calorically indistinguishable from water diet soda, but the nanny state doesn't like the idea you're drinking too much of something with fizz and flavor.
If the government wants to get involved in peoples' health, they could start by expanding healthcare to everyone who can't currently afford it. But nope, let's just take away the minty cancer sticks...
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A car stereo with Bluetooth costs $15. Walmart also sells Bluetooth adapters in the impulse bins at the check-out counters.
Yeah, the lack of a headphone jack probably annoys audiophiles, but if you're really that picky about your audio quality, you're probably using a standalone media player.
I've personally been using a phone without a headphone jack for several months now and haven't missed it. I never used it on my previous phone - I went Bluetooth "everything" quite awhile ago.
Payment processors and other similar organisations simply get massively lobbied by this well connected and loud group of crazies that are very skilled in using platforms like twitter to organise their hate mob.
If fringe group nationalists really gave a shit, they'd drop checks in the mail if they had to. Funny thing about conservatives is they're perfectly happy to expect others to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but when it's their turn, suddenly the whole world is fucking them over. Oh, the irony.
The big reason I want them to have internet is so they can stop watching cable and over air TV and get out of the propaganda bubble their in.
Are you on a different internet than the rest of us? The internet is the greatest political echo chamber circle-jerk ever created. TV may be the idiot box, but even Faux News manages to be critical of the orange man once in awhile.
Most of the people who vote Republican simply do so because the status quo works for them. They've got a job, a roof over their head, health coverage, and a fridge full of food. All they see from the Democratic party is politicians wanting to take away more of their hard-earned money and give it to, in the perception of many Republican voters, ne'er-do-wells. Being connected to the internet is more likely to reinforce, rather than challenge, that perception.
But I'm willing to go as far as saying the closest crypto has to "intrinsic value" is the cost of making them.
They can't go below that for long
This is precisely why the mining difficulty automatically adjusts. When a coin is no longer profitable to mine, people shut the mining rigs down. The network difficulty adjusts itself, and the same number of coins continue to be produced by less miners (and by extension, less electricity being used).
Republicans favor the Net Neutrality we have today.
Yeah, it's so fucking awesome to have a single choice of broadband provider, one which now has carte blanche to implement whatever means they deem necessary to squeeze more profit out of a market they've monopolized.
Government regulation is not the best solution, but voting for regulation is all that remains when voting with your wallet is not an option. The fault is not with those of us who were forced into a corner and vote "left". The fault lies with businesses who have chosen not to play fairly at the game of capitalism. We're simply demanding they be held accountable.
So, they got rid of the headphone jack, but now it includes tomatoes and sour cream? I'm so torn.
Why people want to take a perfectly good system and tart it up with regulations that can only do harm, I've no idea.
We already had net neutrality and the internet didn't implode on itself. The only "harm" done would be to the greedy telco companies, who want to squeeze every last penny out of their customers.
If someone is having trouble balancing their budget, buying an expensive phone every other year probably won't even make the top 20 things to fix in their spending habits.
Many people spend more money on Starbucks/cigarettes/cable bill/booze than a $1k biennial smartphone purchase. But God forbid you're a ne'er-do-well with an iPhone, because it's obviously the cause of your financial woes.
The naysayers also tend to forget there's a thriving secondary market for cell phones, to recoup some of the cost of the new phone. Good luck selling those used cigarettes.
The thing that annoys me about it is that it will continue to nag me about upgrades; like literally every time I unlock it I have to say no don't upgrade.
Install the TVOS beta profile and it will stop nagging you to update (iOS allows the profile to be installed, but since the iPhone can't run TVOS, it will always think there is no update available). Granted, this solution isn't immediately obvious (googling for "iOS block updates" turns up info on blocking app updates), but it became commonplace in the jailbreak scene to prevent an accidental iOS upgrade.
I can see how a local telco like Telstra might have to do it, but the tech giants like Apple/Google/MS etc don't.
Bwahahahah! That's a good one. Yeah, I'm sure they're all just lining up to put principles ahead of profit.
All they have to do is a pop-up which says "In compliance with Australian regulation whatever it's called, your unique decryption key will be uploaded to and retained on our servers. Have a nice day."
So you have to carry the bigger battery. Bigger drone.
Possible fix: Cloud-connected landing pads that double as charging stations. Amazon could give them away to Prime Members who'll set them up at their homes, and you'd earn Amazon credit each time a drone makes a pit stop.
To the naysayers who think short battery life can't be worked around, look at the cell phone industry. The technology required cell towers to be built all over the place (one tower per every 1 to 22 miles of coverage, depending on various factors), so that's what they did. I'm sure back when cellular technology was first starting out, some luddites were probably claiming "It'll never work, you'd need massively powerful transmitters, and even bigger batteries!"
The most likely cause of delay in Amazon implementing drone deliveries is not the batteries, but the aspect of safety. These things will fall from the sky when something goes wrong, and there's some truth to the idiom "crash and burn", at it applies to drones. How to minimize the risk of injury/death/property damage when a delivery drone fails (and gravity does its thing) is the real showstopper for this technology.
You may not realize it but the level of animal products per capita in the US is unsustainable
Cows are a renewable resource. They fucking eat grass. If humanity becomes doomed because we can't figure out how to grow grass for cows to eat, we deserve our fate.
Furthermore, if you're talking about cow farts, we can clean that shit out of the atmosphere with technology that exists today. If it actually became a problem, we'd have more motivation to use it.
How is the number of subscribers one has on YouTube even a thing that people care about?
Everything that's popular/trending on YouTube is utter tripe. The only things worth watching on there are from the handful of content creators who don't give a shit about regularly spewing out clickbait garbage just to keep their rankings up.
Maybe not Michael Jackson famous but still pretty famous.
He's famous for being famous. Michael Jackson was famous for his musical abilities, and later for his alleged inappropriate interests/conduct with children.
If PewDiePie wants to keep his #1 spot, maybe he should consider fondling a few kids. Anything for the fans, right?
How many times have you gone through a self-scan and it screwed up and you had to find a human to fix the mess?
This is also an implementation problem. The self checkout machines have no way of knowing if you're honest, so they treat every user as if they're trying to walk out with the store. So, when the scale malfunctions or you accidentally double-scan something, it doesn't trust you to override the error.
All of the stores which let you use an app to turn your smartphone into a self-checkout scanner avoid this idiocy (most likely because it's not anonymous, as you have to make an account to use the app). I wish more stores implemented this, because scanning stuff as you're putting it in your cart saves a lot of time.
I boycott fast food kiosks; I want humans to be employed, even if they're McJobs.
Do you also happen to ride a horse, and light your home with kerosene? Are you going to get arrested for shooting at the delivery drones, when they start putting your local UPS drivers out of work?
Technology has been putting people out of work ever since the industrial revolution. Society will continue to adapt. It may not be initially pleasant for everyone, but if enough people are disgruntled, change will materialize. It always does.
That will work until one of them creates a Square account, and holds out one of their portable Bluetooth CC and/or NFC readers...
I've been waiting for THAT to happen.
I've seen quite a few bums with phones, but none that have caught on to mobile payments yet. If enough people stopped carrying cash, I'm sure they'd figure it out.
Trump has lowered the tax rate of the very people who got rich offshoring while at the same time increased the cost of goods that ordinary people buy
And anyone with a functional brain realizes now is a good time to buy whatever Chinese-made crap you had your eyes on, because soon it's gonna cost more.
I remember when Republicans were against tax
Judging by the shit I've seen "deplorables" post, I very much doubt many of them understand that it's a tax they'll have to cough up. I think they imagine Trump is just going to send a bill to China.
the actual situation is merely that it would take time to ramp US production back up, and time for inventories to build to desired levels?
The next administration can press the "undo" button on all of Trump's bullshit. No one with half a brain is going to invest a cent in increasing domestic production. All tariffs accomplish is hitting average hard-working Americans right in their wallets.
Most rich people I know don't have an iphone. They don't feel the need to prove their status the same way as an insecure poor person.
People buy $4k+ wristwatches as a "status symbol." People buy iPhones because they don't want to deal with Android's bullshit (largely a fault of Google being Google). Furthermore, flagship Android phones aren't much cheaper.
In the grand scheme of things, a $1k phone every 2 years is still cheaper than the average cable bill, smoking habit, or a heavy Starbucks addiction. If it's really breaking the piggy bank, you might want to re-examine your finances.
Not even close to missing that - because I can watch all of this from a single box (AppleTV
AppleTV can't directly buy/rent content from Vudu or Amazon. It might be the ideal solution for your use, but there still is no one-size-fits-all streaming box. And yeah, you're probably saving money but someone who wants sports channels, and Netflix & Amazon's exclusive content, and HBO, and CBS All Access, and Hulu without the commercials, etc... is probably spending more now than in the glory days of cable/DirecTV/Dish - and has more than one "box".
You were so close to getting the point and then totally missed it. If the government provided healthcare to all, then yes - they'd be justified in pushing agendas to reduce costs by encouraging people to quit unhealthy habits. But even in that situation, taxes would be preferable to an outright ban.
Here in the USA, it's primarily private insurance companies which would see a benefit to decreased smoking rates. There's your agenda, and also why we don't have any sort of healthcare-for-all system here. Gotta please the almighty corporate overlords.
they need CONTENT PEOPLE WANT TO WATCH.
exclusive content.
That's what this is really about. Netflix, Amazon, CBS All Access, and now Apple - they're the new premium "cable" networks. Except now, you've got competing incompatible hardware platforms and separate bills for streaming all this shit. It might almost make you miss the days when you had a single cable bill and could watch everything you paid for from a single cable box.
The argument against smoking is that it pollutes the air of non-smokers
Yup, and as a non-smoker, as long as you're doing that shit outside, away from public entrances, or on/in your own property - I have no problem with it. I'm not a fan of nanny state regulations, because they generally don't know when to stop. You end up with things like banning big soda cups, which could've been filled with calorically indistinguishable from water diet soda, but the nanny state doesn't like the idea you're drinking too much of something with fizz and flavor.
If the government wants to get involved in peoples' health, they could start by expanding healthcare to everyone who can't currently afford it. But nope, let's just take away the minty cancer sticks...