Couldn't they have just ordered the custom screws air-shipped from a Chinese factory or redesigned the thing to use a more ordinary screw? I wonder what's so special about that particular screw. Is it a "tamper proof head" like Apple's 5-point "Torx" security screws to keep mere plebs from opening the hardware?
I think the whole point here was to make the things as completely in the US as possible and it turned out that US industry cannot even handle large volume screw production. Additionally Trump's useless steel tariffs aren't helping any entrepreneurially minded US'ians trying to fix this market gap to compete with the Chinese since I don't think screw manufacturing is a high margin business and tariffs are not helpful in that respect
I mean, I might be willing to pay "Greater than iDevice prices" if they used the right packaging.
Take for example, if they made the packaging out of the tanned hides of plutocratic executives. I would pay top dollar for a phone wallet sewn from Mark Zuckerburg's pasty white skin. If I cant get it in that fashion, I would settle for Larry Ellison, or Brian Roberts, but that last one is pushing it. If you can somehow swing regulators, I would be willing to pay double for an Ajit Pai packaging.
Now, to be sure they arent pulling a fast one, I need some DNA evidence to validate the packaging's origins. We can't have them using some 3rd world country as a resource to defraud the public, after all.
Oh, my. Did you forget to take your medicine again Mr. Lecter?
The fact that we interbred with them means they were the same species as us
That might be the sort of thing they taught you in high school decades ago when we were kids, but the definition of species has had to be revised considerably since then. It is a murky concept. See Ring Species for an example of how complex it can get.
Mostly, homo sapiens and neanderthals did not interbreed, just sometimes.
Last time I checked there was no consistent universally accepted definition of what constitutes a 'species'. Many Geneticists for example are even of the opinion that there is no genetic evidence for concept of 'races' in humans, which is another categorisation that has never been clearly defined. From the point of view of genetics, 'race' is little more than an artificial construct that humans have created to make each others lives more complicated and generally more miserable than they have to be.
In the past, Neanderthal humans were believed to be largely close-distance hunters. A new paper in the journal Nature, based on actual outdoor tests with multiple test subjects throwing two wooden spears closely mimicking ancient spears found in various places at a target, surmises that spear throwing Neanderthals may in fact have been able to kill animals at distances of 60 feet or even greater. The authors found that targeting a wooden spear accurately at that distance takes skill, and even worked out the impact velocity of Neanderthal spears at such a distance. Nevertheless, Neanderthals with sufficient practice in spear throwing may very well have been capable of killing at distances far greater than previously thought. This changes the assumption that Neanderthals needed to get very close to animals in order to have a chance of killing them.
I've always wondered where this myth came from that Neanderthals were unable to throw their spears any significant distance and needed to get up close and personal to get a kill. There was even this crazy hypothesis for a while that Neanderthals simply couldn't throw spears because of the structure of their shoulder bones. During tests with the Schöningens spears that German archaeologists conducted 20 years ago they found that modern athletes could throw replicas of the Schöningen spears up to 70 meters. A skilled spear man can hit something the size of the heart/lung area of a deer for example at a third and up to half that range. Modern day javelin throwers can hit a coconut at 20 meters, I'd expect palaeolithic hunters to be far more skilled. The Shöningen spears are over 300.000 years old and were already quite cleverly optimised for throwing and would have been made by proto-Neanderthals. The Schöningen find pretty much destroyed the idea that humans were basically carrion eaters until very recently in their history and only used spears along with fire to chase predators off their kills. They probably did that as well but they mostly seem to have been active hunters from very early on. Nevertheless there are still people sticking to the carrion eater theory.
The people making the decisions will be long gone by then, anything can happen.
If this was the US I'd agree with you since in the US you have a culture of electing Republicans who then tear down everything the Democrats did, them you elect the Democrats who tear down everything the Republicans did, then you elect the Republicans who tear down everything the Democrats did.... and repeat this ad infinitum in the expectation that eventually something will change for the better. However, this is German and here Liberals and conservatives can actually agree and work together on sensible policies. If the CDU (the conservatives) are willing to do this, the Social Democrats and Greens (aka. the evil liberals) will be even more willing to do it. Coal is a dead and uneconomical way of producing energy and it looks to me like the Germans have accepted that and moved on to technologies that have a future.
The problem, say with some of the rats, is that Trump may know where some of their skeletons are buried. He's trying shut Cohen up over spilling his guts to Congress using vague threats about his family, i.e., Cohen's father's business dealings.
True, but there are so many rats to choose between in the Trump Administration that Mueller must be spoiled for choice.
6 of his stooges are arrested, but the mob boss himself remains free. Look at how hard and how long it took to get charges against John Gotti to stick despite many of his followers being arrested. Trump is well positioned to have all his henchmen arrested and thrown in jail but seems to be quite the "Teflon Don" humself. I won't be convinced they're any nearer to putting him behind bars until he's walked out the white house in handcuffs.
These people are a bunch of backstabbing egomaniacs with pronounced sociopathic tendencies, they only care about themselves. It is only a question of time before one of them rats Trump out and the fact that Trump is not exactly know for returning the loyalty he demands of his minions won't do him any favours.
Along the same lines as the left eating it up when Obama mocked Mitt Romney for calling out Russia as a potential threat...fast forward a few years when Hillary was unable to pull out a win (again) and the Russians were back on the left's threat radar and the root of all evil (in spite of the clear flow of money and favors from Russia to the Clintons during Hillary's tenure at the State Department).
If it wasn't for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.
Double standards? For decades the American right was in a state of utter paranoia over Russia, Then Russia fixed an election for Trump (which by the way is a strange way for Russia to express the cozy relationship they have with the Clintons according to you) and now the entire Republican Party is running around in t-shirts labelled: “I’d rather be a. Russian intelligence asset than a Democrat””. Seems to me that Trumpkins who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The news in 2018 was all "There's a Planet X, there's a Planet X". Fast forward to January 21 2019. Two Cambridge PhD's claim "it may be a ring of smaller" objects. Now the news is all "There is no Planet X, there is not Planet X." Nobody has been able to observe either a 9th Planet or a ring of smaller objects yet. So basically, nobody knows whether there is a 9th Planet out there or not. Everybody's speculating. (Btw, Nibiru sounds like a Linux distro =)
No, the news used to be that a Planet X about 10 times the mass of Earth could explain the strange orbits of some of these Trans Neptunian Objects. Now the news is that a ring of smaller objects could also explain the strange orbits of these same TNOs. It just gives scientists something else to look for. That is how science works, people come up with educated guesses (hypotheses) to explain a phenomenon and then try to confirm or disprove them through observation and experiment. This is just science working properly, so no need to get your underwear all tied up into a knot over it.
When he was leaking things that made Bush look bad you loved Julian Assange so hard that Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie.
And when he was leaking things that made Bush look bad the right wing hated Julian Assange so hard they had smoke coming out of their collective ears, now they love him because he fixed an election for Trump. People love and hate things based on whether these thing further or hinder their cause which shouldn't surprise anybody.
Yeah, and as and Apple user I must say that I find it deliciously ironic that the 'ultimate in [port less] courage' that you guys like to bitch about so much runs Android:-D
I dunno, it's fairly normal for Apple to steal features from Android phones, so I'm not surprised that an Android phone will clearly be the basis for the inevitable all-display, buttonless, portless, SIMless iPhone X++.
So when the guy who came up with a cart that had round wheels, the next guy who wanted to set up a cart building workshop should have used octagonal ones?... the guy after that hexagonal wheels, etc?? Because nobody should ever copy a good idea...
Europe couldn't even scramble planes to bomb Libya...and they want to try to do something in space again?
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...https://www.nytimes.com/2011/0...
"Libya has been a war in which some of the Atlantic alliance’s mightiest members did not participate, or did not participate with combat aircraft, like Spain and Turkey....the French finally pulled back their sole nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for overdue repairs and Italy withdrew its aircraft carrier to save money. Only eight of the 28 allies engaged in combat, and most ran out of ammunition, having to buy, at cost, ammunition stockpiled by the United States."
Interesting logic, Europe's space program sucks because an unspecified set of countries ran out of ammo over Lybian in 2011. For one thing the major players here were the UK and the French, the Germans bowed out anticipating what a FUBAR Lybia would become. The French who make their own bombs and ammo, they have not relied on the US for their aircraft munitions in a major way for a long time (and for a very good reason) and I know for a fact that the French did not deplete their stockpiles in 2011. That leaves the UK and a bunch of countries that buy their jets from the US on US military assistance programs. The US deliberately keeps such countries on a starvation diet of munitions and parts. On top of that all repairs to certain system parts on F-16s for example have to be done by US citizens flown in especially for the purpose which, as you can imagine, is a very slow and inefficient process. The Finns for example, bought their own F-18 fleet outright, and were thus able to rip out several of these untouchable black boxes and replace them with something they could fix themselves which had a correspondingly positive effect on operational readiness. On top of that the EF Typhoon was, at the time, still being introduced into service and not upgraded to perform A2G missions, forcing the RAF for one to rely on the Tornado which was beginning to be phased out at the time. But all this aside, remind me again why this has anything to do with ESA and the European space program??
Big mistake. They should have gone with SpaceX. They have a new stainless steel rocket in development already. Plus they have the lowest launch costs in the world. Yes, I live in the same fantasy land as the ESA does.
Ariane 6 will have a reusable 1st stage at smaller performance penalty than Falcon 9. I salute anybody who chooses to compete instead of capitulating. Middle finger to Elon Musk, if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry he's going to have to fight for it.
Pulling out doesn't mean blocking access to all EU IP addresses. It means shutting down EU subsidiaries, at most. ISPs would then have to decide whether to block google.com or not, but, good luck with that, given how many third party websites load things from Google servers.
The idea that the EU market is so large the EU can pull whatever nonsense it likes is probably going to be tested severely in the coming years. It looks increasingly like a lawless place - GDPR is a classic example of a law that says nothing and everything simultaneously, in which enforcement is entirely political. But there are many other such laws. The idea that the EU is a fair and predictable place to do business is increasingly stressed, and there are plenty of ways to make money from people in it without needing to follow EU law, no more than everyone in Europe has to follow every aspecft of US law to sell products to it successfully.
If Google is willing to bend over and spread'em to stay in the Chinese market then they are not about to pull out of the EU. Also, Google abandoning a market the size of the EU will basically create a protected reservation, a huge market where competitors can grow that one day might threaten Google. Then there is the fact that the EU much like the US is a very wealthy area and consistently delivers high level of profits for Google. The idea that Google will abandon the EU and go back to California to sulk is about as stupid as the idea that Europe will grind to a halt and devolve into a bronze age society because of an absence of Google. The only thing that will happen if Google goes away will be the same thing that happened when the Dinosaurs went away, the little furry critters living in the holes under the tree roots evolved into big critters with long sharp claws and fangs or pointy horns so please read the following and commit it to memory: GOOGLE will never abandon the EU market and go back to California to sulk!!!
I'm wondering if the next President will reverse course and ban offshore drilling again. Could that happen before they get their oil rigs set up? With the incoming flood of electric cars, changes in vehicle ownership due to self-driving tech, and the current low price of oil due to fracking, I'm skeptical that we really need off-shore drilling. If there's another world war and Canada and Mexico embargo us, then sure, otherwise we should be fine. (Hint: we'd be the Axis.)
It could very well be that a great many investors, having to choose between investing in offshore drilling and renewables, simply choose not to fall into the 'buggy whip trap' and invest in the choice that has a future. Also, careful investors will want to wait and see what happens in 2020, for the exact reason you mentioned, president man-baby could be voted out and offshore drilling could be banned again (and I hope it will be). Extraction costs for offshore oil will only increase as they move into picking higher and higher hanging fruit. The extraction costs of wind and solar are basically zero.
Nuclear power is only dead because of NIMYism. The moment the anti-nuke crowd's ideas started to gain traction, it was all over. We stopped building reactors, which meant R&D slowed to a crawl because there was no reason to design something that would never get built. Thus, improvements that would otherwise have driven down the cost of nuclear power, improved the safety, improved the efficiency, and reduced the size never happened.
And so we're stuck with technology from the dark ages and forty-year-old reactors that keep getting permission to keep running for decades past their design lifetime. And over time, these are going to get less and less safe, again because of NIMYism. Eventually, they will all be discontinued, and everyone will conclude that nuclear power just isn't feasible, when in reality, we just never really tried.
A power generation techology with a proven track record of catastrophic failures and irradiating huge areas of the plantet's surface has NIMBYism problems... I wonder why? Could it be that nobody wants the things in their back yard for a reason and that the anti-nuke crowd has a pint? Just a thought... Now start telling us about 'breeder reactors', I have some choice comments from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the US Navy on those things.
Because having to hand over your laptop to a "Genius Bar" for a week while they "wait for parts" is such a great option. And of course, you can't remove the SSD or HDD before doing so, because the fucking thing is part of the system board, so they may have access to your persona data.
I think this will be seen as a particularly dark time in Apple's laptop history. Between the butterfly keyboard and this, we're seeing problems that even long-time Apple fans won't stand for. I'm actually of the opinion that Apple can make a laptop as unrepairable as they like, as long as it doesn't break or they're willing to replace it without any fuss, but that's just not what we're seeing here.
Their nickle-and-diming is truly baffling. They used to pick the more expensive options (and charge for them) knowing that cheaping out would just cause trouble down the road. Buy it nice, or buy it twice, as they say.
I'm glad I don't need to have a laptop in my life. If I did, I would really be looking at buying something old and used. None of these new laptops looks like a good investment right now.
What's wrong with the butterfly keyboard? As long as you hoover out the breadcrumbs once in a while (or blow them out with compressed air) the thing works fine. Now, you can tell me you don't like the short key-press, ergonomics, feedback, that you want a Macbooks with a IBM Model M built into it but don't tell me the butterfly keyboard is unreliable, the first ones were but the later generations are fine.
If they're doing that then they're playing with fire, because all it takes is a manufacturing defect that causes widespread breakage within the warranty period, and all of a sudden the malicious design works against them.
Macs can be hard to pull apart and generally they are getting worse but "malicious design to prevent repair"?? I've pulled plenty of Macs of all kinds apart, repaired and upgraded them and while I can imagine many more pleasant things to do, "malicious design to prevent repair" is a quite deliberate exaggeration. There is a large set of laptops other than just MacBooks that are a bitch to repair. Is there some kind of international cabal of laptop makers engaged in a conspiracy against the public? Personally, I'll go with brother Occam's razor and choose the simple explanation. I think people here, and the Apple & Microsoft critics in particular, have a tendency to attribute to malice, conspiracy and even satanic influence to that which can be adequately explained as incompetence.
Google provides a very clear and useful hint when it has removed results due to this "right to be forgotten" law. This is when you fire up the VPN to, say, the US and repeat the search, then do a diff between the results to find the interesting ones.
Which is an extra step most people won't know to take and so a incompetent doctor is allowed to continue incompetently treating people because the right to privacy trumps a patient's well being.
Well that's easy then pull out of all EU countries and find out who begs who back first.
Yeah, go back to California to sulk and leave a market of 500 million potential customers to your competitors that you have poured considerable efforts and money into making sure remain 3rd rate players with marginal market share so they won't threaten your monopoly. On what level does that seem like an intelligent plan to you? Google is about as likely to abandon the EU market as a pig is likely to voluntarily move out of a field of clover.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't they have just ordered the custom screws air-shipped from a Chinese factory or redesigned the thing to use a more ordinary screw? I wonder what's so special about that particular screw. Is it a "tamper proof head" like Apple's 5-point "Torx" security screws to keep mere plebs from opening the hardware?
I think the whole point here was to make the things as completely in the US as possible and it turned out that US industry cannot even handle large volume screw production. Additionally Trump's useless steel tariffs aren't helping any entrepreneurially minded US'ians trying to fix this market gap to compete with the Chinese since I don't think screw manufacturing is a high margin business and tariffs are not helpful in that respect
I mean, I might be willing to pay "Greater than iDevice prices" if they used the right packaging.
Take for example, if they made the packaging out of the tanned hides of plutocratic executives. I would pay top dollar for a phone wallet sewn from Mark Zuckerburg's pasty white skin. If I cant get it in that fashion, I would settle for Larry Ellison, or Brian Roberts, but that last one is pushing it. If you can somehow swing regulators, I would be willing to pay double for an Ajit Pai packaging.
Now, to be sure they arent pulling a fast one, I need some DNA evidence to validate the packaging's origins. We can't have them using some 3rd world country as a resource to defraud the public, after all.
Oh, my. Did you forget to take your medicine again Mr. Lecter?
The fact that we interbred with them means they were the same species as us
That might be the sort of thing they taught you in high school decades ago when we were kids, but the definition of species has had to be revised considerably since then. It is a murky concept. See Ring Species for an example of how complex it can get.
Mostly, homo sapiens and neanderthals did not interbreed, just sometimes.
Last time I checked there was no consistent universally accepted definition of what constitutes a 'species'. Many Geneticists for example are even of the opinion that there is no genetic evidence for concept of 'races' in humans, which is another categorisation that has never been clearly defined. From the point of view of genetics, 'race' is little more than an artificial construct that humans have created to make each others lives more complicated and generally more miserable than they have to be.
In the past, Neanderthal humans were believed to be largely close-distance hunters. A new paper in the journal Nature, based on actual outdoor tests with multiple test subjects throwing two wooden spears closely mimicking ancient spears found in various places at a target, surmises that spear throwing Neanderthals may in fact have been able to kill animals at distances of 60 feet or even greater. The authors found that targeting a wooden spear accurately at that distance takes skill, and even worked out the impact velocity of Neanderthal spears at such a distance. Nevertheless, Neanderthals with sufficient practice in spear throwing may very well have been capable of killing at distances far greater than previously thought. This changes the assumption that Neanderthals needed to get very close to animals in order to have a chance of killing them.
I've always wondered where this myth came from that Neanderthals were unable to throw their spears any significant distance and needed to get up close and personal to get a kill. There was even this crazy hypothesis for a while that Neanderthals simply couldn't throw spears because of the structure of their shoulder bones. During tests with the Schöningens spears that German archaeologists conducted 20 years ago they found that modern athletes could throw replicas of the Schöningen spears up to 70 meters. A skilled spear man can hit something the size of the heart/lung area of a deer for example at a third and up to half that range. Modern day javelin throwers can hit a coconut at 20 meters, I'd expect palaeolithic hunters to be far more skilled. The Shöningen spears are over 300.000 years old and were already quite cleverly optimised for throwing and would have been made by proto-Neanderthals. The Schöningen find pretty much destroyed the idea that humans were basically carrion eaters until very recently in their history and only used spears along with fire to chase predators off their kills. They probably did that as well but they mostly seem to have been active hunters from very early on. Nevertheless there are still people sticking to the carrion eater theory.
The people making the decisions will be long gone by then, anything can happen.
If this was the US I'd agree with you since in the US you have a culture of electing Republicans who then tear down everything the Democrats did, them you elect the Democrats who tear down everything the Republicans did, then you elect the Republicans who tear down everything the Democrats did .... and repeat this ad infinitum in the expectation that eventually something will change for the better. However, this is German and here Liberals and conservatives can actually agree and work together on sensible policies. If the CDU (the conservatives) are willing to do this, the Social Democrats and Greens (aka. the evil liberals) will be even more willing to do it. Coal is a dead and uneconomical way of producing energy and it looks to me like the Germans have accepted that and moved on to technologies that have a future.
The problem, say with some of the rats, is that Trump may know where some of their skeletons are buried. He's trying shut Cohen up over spilling his guts to Congress using vague threats about his family, i.e., Cohen's father's business dealings.
True, but there are so many rats to choose between in the Trump Administration that Mueller must be spoiled for choice.
They really have Trump where they want him now...
Who has Trump where they want him?
6 of his stooges are arrested, but the mob boss himself remains free. Look at how hard and how long it took to get charges against John Gotti to stick despite many of his followers being arrested. Trump is well positioned to have all his henchmen arrested and thrown in jail but seems to be quite the "Teflon Don" humself. I won't be convinced they're any nearer to putting him behind bars until he's walked out the white house in handcuffs.
These people are a bunch of backstabbing egomaniacs with pronounced sociopathic tendencies, they only care about themselves. It is only a question of time before one of them rats Trump out and the fact that Trump is not exactly know for returning the loyalty he demands of his minions won't do him any favours.
Along the same lines as the left eating it up when Obama mocked Mitt Romney for calling out Russia as a potential threat...fast forward a few years when Hillary was unable to pull out a win (again) and the Russians were back on the left's threat radar and the root of all evil (in spite of the clear flow of money and favors from Russia to the Clintons during Hillary's tenure at the State Department).
If it wasn't for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.
Double standards? For decades the American right was in a state of utter paranoia over Russia, Then Russia fixed an election for Trump (which by the way is a strange way for Russia to express the cozy relationship they have with the Clintons according to you) and now the entire Republican Party is running around in t-shirts labelled: “I’d rather be a. Russian intelligence asset than a Democrat””. Seems to me that Trumpkins who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The news in 2018 was all "There's a Planet X, there's a Planet X". Fast forward to January 21 2019. Two Cambridge PhD's claim "it may be a ring of smaller" objects. Now the news is all "There is no Planet X, there is not Planet X." Nobody has been able to observe either a 9th Planet or a ring of smaller objects yet. So basically, nobody knows whether there is a 9th Planet out there or not. Everybody's speculating. (Btw, Nibiru sounds like a Linux distro =)
No, the news used to be that a Planet X about 10 times the mass of Earth could explain the strange orbits of some of these Trans Neptunian Objects. Now the news is that a ring of smaller objects could also explain the strange orbits of these same TNOs. It just gives scientists something else to look for. That is how science works, people come up with educated guesses (hypotheses) to explain a phenomenon and then try to confirm or disprove them through observation and experiment. This is just science working properly, so no need to get your underwear all tied up into a knot over it.
When he was leaking things that made Bush look bad you loved Julian Assange so hard that Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie.
And when he was leaking things that made Bush look bad the right wing hated Julian Assange so hard they had smoke coming out of their collective ears, now they love him because he fixed an election for Trump. People love and hate things based on whether these thing further or hinder their cause which shouldn't surprise anybody.
....of my life being effected that can be 100% linked undoubtedly to Global Warming.
How, exactly is this touching me in my daily life?
Hmm...I just can't think of an example of my life being effected that can be 100% linked undoubtedly to cancer.
I suppose cancer isn't a problem if it isn't affecting me directly.
The ultimate in courage!
Yeah, and as and Apple user I must say that I find it deliciously ironic that the 'ultimate in [port less] courage' that you guys like to bitch about so much runs Android :-D
I dunno, it's fairly normal for Apple to steal features from Android phones, so I'm not surprised that an Android phone will clearly be the basis for the inevitable all-display, buttonless, portless, SIMless iPhone X++.
So when the guy who came up with a cart that had round wheels, the next guy who wanted to set up a cart building workshop should have used octagonal ones? ... the guy after that hexagonal wheels, etc?? Because nobody should ever copy a good idea...
Europe couldn't even scramble planes to bomb Libya...and they want to try to do something in space again? https://www.theguardian.com/wo... https://www.nytimes.com/2011/0... "Libya has been a war in which some of the Atlantic alliance’s mightiest members did not participate, or did not participate with combat aircraft, like Spain and Turkey. ...the French finally pulled back their sole nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for overdue repairs and Italy withdrew its aircraft carrier to save money. Only eight of the 28 allies engaged in combat, and most ran out of ammunition, having to buy, at cost, ammunition stockpiled by the United States."
Interesting logic, Europe's space program sucks because an unspecified set of countries ran out of ammo over Lybian in 2011. For one thing the major players here were the UK and the French, the Germans bowed out anticipating what a FUBAR Lybia would become. The French who make their own bombs and ammo, they have not relied on the US for their aircraft munitions in a major way for a long time (and for a very good reason) and I know for a fact that the French did not deplete their stockpiles in 2011. That leaves the UK and a bunch of countries that buy their jets from the US on US military assistance programs. The US deliberately keeps such countries on a starvation diet of munitions and parts. On top of that all repairs to certain system parts on F-16s for example have to be done by US citizens flown in especially for the purpose which, as you can imagine, is a very slow and inefficient process. The Finns for example, bought their own F-18 fleet outright, and were thus able to rip out several of these untouchable black boxes and replace them with something they could fix themselves which had a correspondingly positive effect on operational readiness. On top of that the EF Typhoon was, at the time, still being introduced into service and not upgraded to perform A2G missions, forcing the RAF for one to rely on the Tornado which was beginning to be phased out at the time. But all this aside, remind me again why this has anything to do with ESA and the European space program??
Big mistake. They should have gone with SpaceX. They have a new stainless steel rocket in development already. Plus they have the lowest launch costs in the world. Yes, I live in the same fantasy land as the ESA does.
Ariane 6 will have a reusable 1st stage at smaller performance penalty than Falcon 9. I salute anybody who chooses to compete instead of capitulating. Middle finger to Elon Musk, if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry he's going to have to fight for it.
Meizu Unveils a Smartphone That Does Not Have Any Port
No 3,5 mm audio jack?!?!? ... blasphemy ...SACRILEGE!!!!!
Pulling out doesn't mean blocking access to all EU IP addresses. It means shutting down EU subsidiaries, at most. ISPs would then have to decide whether to block google.com or not, but, good luck with that, given how many third party websites load things from Google servers.
The idea that the EU market is so large the EU can pull whatever nonsense it likes is probably going to be tested severely in the coming years. It looks increasingly like a lawless place - GDPR is a classic example of a law that says nothing and everything simultaneously, in which enforcement is entirely political. But there are many other such laws. The idea that the EU is a fair and predictable place to do business is increasingly stressed, and there are plenty of ways to make money from people in it without needing to follow EU law, no more than everyone in Europe has to follow every aspecft of US law to sell products to it successfully.
If Google is willing to bend over and spread'em to stay in the Chinese market then they are not about to pull out of the EU. Also, Google abandoning a market the size of the EU will basically create a protected reservation, a huge market where competitors can grow that one day might threaten Google. Then there is the fact that the EU much like the US is a very wealthy area and consistently delivers high level of profits for Google. The idea that Google will abandon the EU and go back to California to sulk is about as stupid as the idea that Europe will grind to a halt and devolve into a bronze age society because of an absence of Google. The only thing that will happen if Google goes away will be the same thing that happened when the Dinosaurs went away, the little furry critters living in the holes under the tree roots evolved into big critters with long sharp claws and fangs or pointy horns so please read the following and commit it to memory: GOOGLE will never abandon the EU market and go back to California to sulk!!!
Won't someone PLEASE think of the zooplankton?!
I'm wondering if the next President will reverse course and ban offshore drilling again. Could that happen before they get their oil rigs set up? With the incoming flood of electric cars, changes in vehicle ownership due to self-driving tech, and the current low price of oil due to fracking, I'm skeptical that we really need off-shore drilling. If there's another world war and Canada and Mexico embargo us, then sure, otherwise we should be fine. (Hint: we'd be the Axis.)
It could very well be that a great many investors, having to choose between investing in offshore drilling and renewables, simply choose not to fall into the 'buggy whip trap' and invest in the choice that has a future. Also, careful investors will want to wait and see what happens in 2020, for the exact reason you mentioned, president man-baby could be voted out and offshore drilling could be banned again (and I hope it will be). Extraction costs for offshore oil will only increase as they move into picking higher and higher hanging fruit. The extraction costs of wind and solar are basically zero.
are destroying the planet with both hands. Prepare to evacuate planet!
The Dolphins wanted me to relay this message... Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!
... but we don't like the plastic aftertaste and the noise levels around here are getting way out of bounds so we are bugging out ahead of schedule.
Nuclear power is only dead because of NIMYism. The moment the anti-nuke crowd's ideas started to gain traction, it was all over. We stopped building reactors, which meant R&D slowed to a crawl because there was no reason to design something that would never get built. Thus, improvements that would otherwise have driven down the cost of nuclear power, improved the safety, improved the efficiency, and reduced the size never happened.
And so we're stuck with technology from the dark ages and forty-year-old reactors that keep getting permission to keep running for decades past their design lifetime. And over time, these are going to get less and less safe, again because of NIMYism. Eventually, they will all be discontinued, and everyone will conclude that nuclear power just isn't feasible, when in reality, we just never really tried.
A power generation techology with a proven track record of catastrophic failures and irradiating huge areas of the plantet's surface has NIMBYism problems ... I wonder why? Could it be that nobody wants the things in their back yard for a reason and that the anti-nuke crowd has a pint? Just a thought ... Now start telling us about 'breeder reactors', I have some choice comments from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the US Navy on those things.
Because having to hand over your laptop to a "Genius Bar" for a week while they "wait for parts" is such a great option. And of course, you can't remove the SSD or HDD before doing so, because the fucking thing is part of the system board, so they may have access to your persona data.
That's what encryption is for.
I think this will be seen as a particularly dark time in Apple's laptop history. Between the butterfly keyboard and this, we're seeing problems that even long-time Apple fans won't stand for. I'm actually of the opinion that Apple can make a laptop as unrepairable as they like, as long as it doesn't break or they're willing to replace it without any fuss, but that's just not what we're seeing here.
Their nickle-and-diming is truly baffling. They used to pick the more expensive options (and charge for them) knowing that cheaping out would just cause trouble down the road. Buy it nice, or buy it twice, as they say.
I'm glad I don't need to have a laptop in my life. If I did, I would really be looking at buying something old and used. None of these new laptops looks like a good investment right now.
What's wrong with the butterfly keyboard? As long as you hoover out the breadcrumbs once in a while (or blow them out with compressed air) the thing works fine. Now, you can tell me you don't like the short key-press, ergonomics, feedback, that you want a Macbooks with a IBM Model M built into it but don't tell me the butterfly keyboard is unreliable, the first ones were but the later generations are fine.
If they're doing that then they're playing with fire, because all it takes is a manufacturing defect that causes widespread breakage within the warranty period, and all of a sudden the malicious design works against them.
Macs can be hard to pull apart and generally they are getting worse but "malicious design to prevent repair"?? I've pulled plenty of Macs of all kinds apart, repaired and upgraded them and while I can imagine many more pleasant things to do, "malicious design to prevent repair" is a quite deliberate exaggeration. There is a large set of laptops other than just MacBooks that are a bitch to repair. Is there some kind of international cabal of laptop makers engaged in a conspiracy against the public? Personally, I'll go with brother Occam's razor and choose the simple explanation. I think people here, and the Apple & Microsoft critics in particular, have a tendency to attribute to malice, conspiracy and even satanic influence to that which can be adequately explained as incompetence.
Google provides a very clear and useful hint when it has removed results due to this "right to be forgotten" law. This is when you fire up the VPN to, say, the US and repeat the search, then do a diff between the results to find the interesting ones.
Which is an extra step most people won't know to take and so a incompetent doctor is allowed to continue incompetently treating people because the right to privacy trumps a patient's well being.
Well that's easy then pull out of all EU countries and find out who begs who back first.
Yeah, go back to California to sulk and leave a market of 500 million potential customers to your competitors that you have poured considerable efforts and money into making sure remain 3rd rate players with marginal market share so they won't threaten your monopoly. On what level does that seem like an intelligent plan to you? Google is about as likely to abandon the EU market as a pig is likely to voluntarily move out of a field of clover.