Government staffing has issues. Who was this employee related to? Patronage lives at all levels of government.
Employee's story doesn't make sense, dates don't line up. Who was her supervisor? What's his/her version? Next supervisor up?
More to the point, why wasn't the system constructed in such a way that it is impossible for a bureaucrat to approve an application and issue a CCW permit without first completing a background check? That and the queue of angry NRA members waiting on their CCW licenses should provide a sufficient motivation to resolve any login issues post haste.
Okay, how about writing the question properly: Should Apple continue to use a proprietary protocol which excludes most of the planet from communicating with their zealot-like customers who have drunk too much kool-aid to consider open alternatives?
You would benefit hugely from an anger management course.
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Funny thing, I don't pirate much content but what I do pirate I don't pirate because I'm a penny pinching bargain hunter. My pirating is mostly because of dumbass artificial trade barriers that result in stuff being 'unfortunately not available in my region' or because whatever I want to watch is on some TV channel that I can only get access to by subscribing to an overpriced channel package of whom all but one or two out of a hundred channels are full of garbage that does not interest me. If I could obtain the shows, movies, documentaries, standup, music, etc... via on-demand streaming services at an affordable price and I'd probably never pirate anything at all. Fortunately at least some of the streaming services seem to be figuring this out.
There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS
You know the argument is going to be good when you start off with a technicality.
Well, it seems to me that if you are going to dump all over a product you should at least get the name right since if you don't, it doesn't inspire much confidence in the validity of your arguments.
Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down
0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system
2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations.
3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX.
4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway.
5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!
Heck there isnt even a ??? step
There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS and large portions of your rant apply to Windows+DirectX too. Neither of those two is dead yet so I think your predictions of the death of macOS (which is presumably what you meant) are somewhat premature. Personally I would have liked to see Apple go for Vulkan instead of pissing about with their own API but there is at least one compatibility layer, MoltenVK, so I'm not seeing any reason to go into a full-blown panic attack and twist my underpants up into a bunch. Besides, Apple has been known to do a 180 and it would not surprise me if they just decided out of the blue to switch to Vulkan at some point in time. Until then my (rather insubstantial) gaming needs are perfectly well served by macOS/iOS and if I ever feel the need to do any hardcore gaming I'll either buy a console or (Yuck, Yuck! and triple YUCK!) buy a Windows box for gaming.
Well Reddit for one is the greatest gathering of crackpots, conspiracy theorists and perverts in the know universe, Facebook is an ego singularity and Alexa (well at least in my experience) is completely useless.
Could be worse, you could be shelling out for a cat.
Yeah, but at least the cat isn't pretending to give a shit, it's very open and honest about not giving a shit about you and that kind of honesty is something to value.
This ban is something that has been happening all over the world in some shape or form. Personally, I have little problem with it. I'm actually happy to see when a restaurant or coffee shop has utensils that are biodegradable. It's a great move.
What I don't like, from the end of this article, is the other part of the EU proposal. Why should the manufacturers be responsible for preventing people from being jackasses and throwing their garbage wherever they please? There are so many analogies to make here, it's not worth it.
People ultimately need to be held responsible for proper disposal and/or recycling of materials and consumables they are consuming. The manufacturer in this case isn't building in some weird feature making it difficult to throw the stirring straw in a garbage can. People just need to start being more responsible and not thinking that someone else will clean up after them.
It's pretty basic. Currently manufacturers are not responsible for the costs of disposing of their products. They can make them as toxic and environmentally problematic as they want because they can offload the costs and problems their products cause after the end of their useful lives on the taxpayer and the environment. If you make manufacturers responsible for paying not only for development, marketing, sales and product support but also for disposal you motivate the manufacturers to come up with new and innovative methods to make their products as easily and cheaply recyclable as possible in order to maximise profits. It's just a way to leverage the inventiveness of private industry and the workings of the free market to solve a very serious problem that results form own activities of companies and I think it will work because industry tends to be good at coming up with clever ways of solving sticky problems if profits are at stake. Now, I'm sure that you, as libertarian, find this idea terribly unjust but the rest of us find it equally unjust that private profit making companies can drown us in plastic garbage, make us pay for the mess and not be in any way responsible for solving that problem. Unfortunately for the manufacturers Europe is a cluster of democracies and the people drowning in plastic garbage are in charge, not the industrialists. I'm pretty sure most Europeans will welcome this measure.
America stopped decades ago, so instead, we have had it going to China and other nations. That also needs to stop. ALL OF IT. Far better for America to recycle, bury, or burn it.
Burning plastic releases massive amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere (not to mention an array of toxic chemicals) so please do the rest of us a favour and talking restrict your choices to burying, recycling or best of all stop using plastic.
And six bankrupt casinos weren't enough to disabuse them of those notions because?
Because they think he got rich doing it, and if he got rich then god must love him. If they knew he was in debt, they'd think god hated him.
By that logic, if his tax returns become public and the extent of his tax cheating is revealed, their opinion of him will only be enhanced since Republicans hate taxes to begin with..
This doesn't surprise me in the least. America is due to experience the fate of Ancient Rome. Our elected leadership is corrupt and self-serving, income inequality and average debt is rising, and our infrastructure is decaying. Methinks revolution is not too far off.
Rome went from a democracy to being a mixed system with a democratic facade that was functionally an absolute monarchy. So if you think the US is about to go the way of Rome prepare yourself for this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DO...
In Puerto Rico it's sunny about 65% of daylight hours
That's nice. But you still need to account for the other 35%, and cloudy days, etc. Batteries are expensive. Solar is expensive. Handling peak demand is expensive. Despite all the subsidies to solar, fossil fuels are still the most efficient and reliable methods for energy.
The 65% is high levels of sunlight, a large portion of the other 35% is partially cloudy skies. Solar panels do not stop generating energy just because there is no direct sunlight, plus, if you combine solar, wind, batteries and design the grid properly you can compensate for localised gaps in generation. At worst Puerto Rio could reduce it's reliance on NG by as much as 60-70%. Also, renewables are now as cheap as NG and in a place as sunny as Puerto Rico probably cheaper since solar panels are extremely efficient down there. Also there are billions being sunk into lithium mining and battery production so I expect battery prices to fall off a cliff over the next decade, plus, there are other ways to store energy than batteries.
When we reach a point where disconnecting from the grid becomes feasible things will get interesting. Neighbors interconnecting, building micro grids with a single connection to the national one, and only wanting to pay one service fee for the whole group.
That is the plan in parts of Europe and that is what some people in Puerto Rico would like to do. That is also why the Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner, Republican heavyweights and representatives of the fossil fuel industry are hard at work drawing up plans for Puerto Rico to become a 'fossil fuel energy hub' for the entire Caribbean. What are you willing to bet that aid payments to rebuild Puerto Rico's energy infrastructure will be conditional on them being spent on fossil fuel power plants backed up by anti renewables legislation and the forced privatisation of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority? I particularly love this quote by Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee: "Energy to Puerto Rico... is going to have to be imported. Natural gas would be a brilliant way to do that.”. In Puerto Rico it's sunny about 65% of daylight hours. This bozo takes one look at that and concludes the only viable way of generating energy in a country that close to the equator which get that much sun is to import natural gas.
The problem is that power generation and distribution is a natural monopoly. There's only one set of wires going to the consumer.
Politicians try to dress that up and provide competition but the underlying reality is that's just more middlemen taking a cut - usually with a % going back to said politicians. Best you can do is run it as a monopoly in which case you don't get those stupid peak charges and you can do sane long term capacity planning. Admitted that does assume a well run monopoly but it can work.
It is a monopoly unless and until the consumer makes his/her own electricity and stores it in his/her own battery wall. At that point you get a very competitive industry where many providers of solar panel packages, wind generators and battery walls compete to sell their products wherever they can market it which is pretty much anywhere that has a road network.
I find it curious that when Google or MS actively prevent any competitive service on their products the Apple fanbois scream anti-trust. However Apple has a pretty good chuck of the mobile market in terms of manufacturers and routinely and actively prevents competitive products.
Every tried to use Google maps or Waze with carplay? Nope. Terms and conditions say you are not allowed to make a navi platform for it.
Alternative app store? Nope. Not allowed.
I could not personally care any less about the restrictions on Apple products since I do not use them. It's just silly though that Android gets anti-trust lawsuits when Apple is far more anti-competition in their actions.
Quite frankly, as long as I have a Bluetooth access point in my car with a relatively new Bluetooth version, I could not care less about Car Play or any other in-car entertainment system. I just hook up my cellphone to the Bluetooth link, stick the smartphone/tablet in a holder with a built-in wireless charger and use the gadget which then becomes my in-car entertainment and navigation system. The only down side is a bit of audio lag due to buffering in the car's audio system and the fact that Bluetooth audio apparently suffers from quality loss due to compression. Having said that, the speakers in my car are pretty crap like most OEM car speakers and I'm not an audiophile and thus would not know grade-A audio quality if it jumped up and bit me in the balls. When it comes to audio all I know is the difference between awful, OK and amazing and the setup in my car rates solidly 'OK' and will suffice for my purposes.
Disney is thoroughly destroying the franchise. Capitalism for the win!
The franchise was thoroughly destroyed when Lucas decided it was a good idea to end The Return of the Jedi to with a spectacular fluffy teddy-bear battle choke full of slapstick and that was way, way before Disney had anything to do with it.
Under U.S. law any treaty not ratified by the Congress is not worth the paper it is written on. No U.S. treaty is binding unless it has passed both houses of Congress. that's the law. Sorry if you were misinformed.
Again, nobody gives a shit, the US went back on it's word, nobody cares that Trump and the Republicans are on a holy crusade to undo everything Obama ever did. The US is in the middle of making a similar agreement with North Korea. Do you honestly think that what happened with Iran is going to boost the North Korean's trust that anything the US says or does is worth wasting their time on it? Then Mike Pompeo goes on TV and gives a half hour speech on how the goal with repudiating the Iran agreement and the new sanctions is regime change and then there is Bolton talking about the fact that he had the Lybia model in mind for N-Korea. Hmmm... broken promises, regime change, brutally murdered dictator, now there is a bunch of prospects that are bound to get N-Korea's dictator to the table!
Trump is, of course, wholly unqualified to be President.
Having stated the obvious about him, let me clear up something that should be pretty obvious about Clinton. Here's who funds Hillary, her top contributors:
Paloma Partners (hedge fund) $21,613,800
Pritzker Group (investment firm) $16,626,207
Renaissance Technologies (hedge fund) $16,543,000
Saban Capital Group (investment firm) $12,283,411
Newsweb Corp (media conglomerate) $11,016,642
Soros Fund Management (investment firm) $10,556,793
> Nor the tax breaks for the ultra rich including Wall Street.
The literally works for the largest Wall Street firms, that's who pays her bills. Ultra-rich? With $29 billion, Pritzkers are one of the wealthiest families in the country. Soros is one of the richest people on Wall Street, with $8 billion. These are the people funding Clinton, the people she works for.
So what you are saying is that because Hillary is corrupt it's OK for your guy (who ran on a platform of cleaning up political corruption) to be a corrupt scumbag too? Interesting point of view.
Do you understand that you're writing parody there? Fixing the Middle East mess? Ask ISIS how it's going over there since Obama left office. He apparently has ended a 70 year war in Korea by mocking the fat, ugly imbecilic dictator on the other side over the internet. The economy is doing ell and employment is about the highest it's ever been. He's another Bill Clinton - horrible person, fine President.
Deposing Saddam Hussein because he was on the verge of developing WMDs. How is that going? Any luck finding those WMDs?... oh right, are you too busy dealing with the dumpster fires you lit after the Iraq invasion to remember the non existing WMDs. As for ending the 70 year war in Korea, after the demonstration of how the US honours the nuclear agreement it made with Iran, the subsequent assurances from Mike Pompeo that the US goal in Iran is now to affect regime change and the assurance from John Bolton that the Lybian model (where the dictator ended up getting sodomised by his angry subjects with a bayonet) would be applied to North Korea, I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of the greatest negotiator in human history ending the Korean war. In fact I'd not trust the US to keep any agreement or honour any treaty even as long as the president whom made it holds office.
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamplord... Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb.... I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
I'm not an American either and I don't have a stake Reps vs. Dems trench-warfare the US'ians have got going. I can also only sit in amazement and watch this farce unfold. Trump fancies himself as the greatest negotiator in history, the most clever political strategist of our time and in that capacity he has managed to destroy the USA's credibility by reneging on the Iran nuclear agreement with the predictable result that that now nobody believes that anything the US commits to will survive the next presidential transition or even the next morning POTUS wakes up in a bad mood and fires off a Twitter storm. I've been watching John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Netanyahu and the rest of that ilk cheering this latest Iran move along and making the case that you can only fight war with war. Nobody except Israeli nationalists and the Fox and Friends audience is buying it. There are already four raging dumpster fires in the Middle East: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen and nobody except Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US war hawk and a few small nations of no real consequence has the slightest appetite to light up a fifth one.
Do you honestly believe that Hillary wouldn't pull same shit on him if they swapped places? Pot calling kettle black.
Captcha:swingers
I think that if the roles were reversed, Hillary, or any other presidential candidate you care to name, Democrat or Republican, would be concentrating on doing his job, solving the middle east mess, getting infrastructure reform done, finding some kind of compromise in the Obamacare feud that everybody can live with, doing something about mass shootings. Basically that candidate would be doing their job rather than spending all his time obsessing about what the person who lost the election was allegedly doing years ago and extorting foreign leaders into bailing out his son in law's real estate company and investing in his own resort projects in as a prerequisite to getting things done.
Slashdot Mirror
Government staffing has issues. Who was this employee related to? Patronage lives at all levels of government.
Employee's story doesn't make sense, dates don't line up. Who was her supervisor? What's his/her version? Next supervisor up?
More to the point, why wasn't the system constructed in such a way that it is impossible for a bureaucrat to approve an application and issue a CCW permit without first completing a background check? That and the queue of angry NRA members waiting on their CCW licenses should provide a sufficient motivation to resolve any login issues post haste.
And you would benefit from getting the joke...
Me and everybody else it would seem. If that was funny it would have been modded +5 funny by now.
Okay, how about writing the question properly: Should Apple continue to use a proprietary protocol which excludes most of the planet from communicating with their zealot-like customers who have drunk too much kool-aid to consider open alternatives?
You would benefit hugely from an anger management course.
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Funny thing, I don't pirate much content but what I do pirate I don't pirate because I'm a penny pinching bargain hunter. My pirating is mostly because of dumbass artificial trade barriers that result in stuff being 'unfortunately not available in my region' or because whatever I want to watch is on some TV channel that I can only get access to by subscribing to an overpriced channel package of whom all but one or two out of a hundred channels are full of garbage that does not interest me. If I could obtain the shows, movies, documentaries, standup, music, etc... via on-demand streaming services at an affordable price and I'd probably never pirate anything at all. Fortunately at least some of the streaming services seem to be figuring this out.
There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS
You know the argument is going to be good when you start off with a technicality.
Well, it seems to me that if you are going to dump all over a product you should at least get the name right since if you don't, it doesn't inspire much confidence in the validity of your arguments.
Yet another reason not to visit the USA.
Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down
0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system 2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations. 3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX. 4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway. 5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!
Heck there isnt even a ??? step
There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS and large portions of your rant apply to Windows+DirectX too. Neither of those two is dead yet so I think your predictions of the death of macOS (which is presumably what you meant) are somewhat premature. Personally I would have liked to see Apple go for Vulkan instead of pissing about with their own API but there is at least one compatibility layer, MoltenVK, so I'm not seeing any reason to go into a full-blown panic attack and twist my underpants up into a bunch. Besides, Apple has been known to do a 180 and it would not surprise me if they just decided out of the blue to switch to Vulkan at some point in time. Until then my (rather insubstantial) gaming needs are perfectly well served by macOS/iOS and if I ever feel the need to do any hardcore gaming I'll either buy a console or (Yuck, Yuck! and triple YUCK!) buy a Windows box for gaming.
Facebook? Reddit? Alexa?
What are these things? Get offa my lawn!
Well Reddit for one is the greatest gathering of crackpots, conspiracy theorists and perverts in the know universe, Facebook is an ego singularity and Alexa (well at least in my experience) is completely useless.
Could be worse, you could be shelling out for a cat.
Yeah, but at least the cat isn't pretending to give a shit, it's very open and honest about not giving a shit about you and that kind of honesty is something to value.
Nothing is stopping them, other than it's a PITA to switch between app-store accounts
Welcome to my world.
This ban is something that has been happening all over the world in some shape or form. Personally, I have little problem with it. I'm actually happy to see when a restaurant or coffee shop has utensils that are biodegradable. It's a great move.
What I don't like, from the end of this article, is the other part of the EU proposal. Why should the manufacturers be responsible for preventing people from being jackasses and throwing their garbage wherever they please? There are so many analogies to make here, it's not worth it.
People ultimately need to be held responsible for proper disposal and/or recycling of materials and consumables they are consuming. The manufacturer in this case isn't building in some weird feature making it difficult to throw the stirring straw in a garbage can. People just need to start being more responsible and not thinking that someone else will clean up after them.
It's pretty basic. Currently manufacturers are not responsible for the costs of disposing of their products. They can make them as toxic and environmentally problematic as they want because they can offload the costs and problems their products cause after the end of their useful lives on the taxpayer and the environment. If you make manufacturers responsible for paying not only for development, marketing, sales and product support but also for disposal you motivate the manufacturers to come up with new and innovative methods to make their products as easily and cheaply recyclable as possible in order to maximise profits. It's just a way to leverage the inventiveness of private industry and the workings of the free market to solve a very serious problem that results form own activities of companies and I think it will work because industry tends to be good at coming up with clever ways of solving sticky problems if profits are at stake. Now, I'm sure that you, as libertarian, find this idea terribly unjust but the rest of us find it equally unjust that private profit making companies can drown us in plastic garbage, make us pay for the mess and not be in any way responsible for solving that problem. Unfortunately for the manufacturers Europe is a cluster of democracies and the people drowning in plastic garbage are in charge, not the industrialists. I'm pretty sure most Europeans will welcome this measure.
America stopped decades ago, so instead, we have had it going to China and other nations. That also needs to stop. ALL OF IT. Far better for America to recycle, bury, or burn it.
Burning plastic releases massive amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere (not to mention an array of toxic chemicals) so please do the rest of us a favour and talking restrict your choices to burying, recycling or best of all stop using plastic.
And six bankrupt casinos weren't enough to disabuse them of those notions because?
Because they think he got rich doing it, and if he got rich then god must love him. If they knew he was in debt, they'd think god hated him.
By that logic, if his tax returns become public and the extent of his tax cheating is revealed, their opinion of him will only be enhanced since Republicans hate taxes to begin with..
took one look at Trump and saw the greatest negotiator in history, a business genius without peer
Since they haven't seen his tax returns, which would disabuse them of those notions
And six bankrupt casinos weren't enough to disabuse them of those notions because?
This doesn't surprise me in the least. America is due to experience the fate of Ancient Rome. Our elected leadership is corrupt and self-serving, income inequality and average debt is rising, and our infrastructure is decaying. Methinks revolution is not too far off.
Rome went from a democracy to being a mixed system with a democratic facade that was functionally an absolute monarchy. So if you think the US is about to go the way of Rome prepare yourself for this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DO...
In Puerto Rico it's sunny about 65% of daylight hours
That's nice. But you still need to account for the other 35%, and cloudy days, etc. Batteries are expensive. Solar is expensive. Handling peak demand is expensive. Despite all the subsidies to solar, fossil fuels are still the most efficient and reliable methods for energy.
The 65% is high levels of sunlight, a large portion of the other 35% is partially cloudy skies. Solar panels do not stop generating energy just because there is no direct sunlight, plus, if you combine solar, wind, batteries and design the grid properly you can compensate for localised gaps in generation. At worst Puerto Rio could reduce it's reliance on NG by as much as 60-70%. Also, renewables are now as cheap as NG and in a place as sunny as Puerto Rico probably cheaper since solar panels are extremely efficient down there. Also there are billions being sunk into lithium mining and battery production so I expect battery prices to fall off a cliff over the next decade, plus, there are other ways to store energy than batteries.
When we reach a point where disconnecting from the grid becomes feasible things will get interesting. Neighbors interconnecting, building micro grids with a single connection to the national one, and only wanting to pay one service fee for the whole group.
That is the plan in parts of Europe and that is what some people in Puerto Rico would like to do. That is also why the Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner, Republican heavyweights and representatives of the fossil fuel industry are hard at work drawing up plans for Puerto Rico to become a 'fossil fuel energy hub' for the entire Caribbean. What are you willing to bet that aid payments to rebuild Puerto Rico's energy infrastructure will be conditional on them being spent on fossil fuel power plants backed up by anti renewables legislation and the forced privatisation of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority? I particularly love this quote by Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee: "Energy to Puerto Rico ... is going to have to be imported. Natural gas would be a brilliant way to do that.”. In Puerto Rico it's sunny about 65% of daylight hours. This bozo takes one look at that and concludes the only viable way of generating energy in a country that close to the equator which get that much sun is to import natural gas.
The problem is that power generation and distribution is a natural monopoly. There's only one set of wires going to the consumer.
Politicians try to dress that up and provide competition but the underlying reality is that's just more middlemen taking a cut - usually with a % going back to said politicians. Best you can do is run it as a monopoly in which case you don't get those stupid peak charges and you can do sane long term capacity planning. Admitted that does assume a well run monopoly but it can work.
It is a monopoly unless and until the consumer makes his/her own electricity and stores it in his/her own battery wall. At that point you get a very competitive industry where many providers of solar panel packages, wind generators and battery walls compete to sell their products wherever they can market it which is pretty much anywhere that has a road network.
I find it curious that when Google or MS actively prevent any competitive service on their products the Apple fanbois scream anti-trust. However Apple has a pretty good chuck of the mobile market in terms of manufacturers and routinely and actively prevents competitive products. Every tried to use Google maps or Waze with carplay? Nope. Terms and conditions say you are not allowed to make a navi platform for it. Alternative app store? Nope. Not allowed.
I could not personally care any less about the restrictions on Apple products since I do not use them. It's just silly though that Android gets anti-trust lawsuits when Apple is far more anti-competition in their actions.
Quite frankly, as long as I have a Bluetooth access point in my car with a relatively new Bluetooth version, I could not care less about Car Play or any other in-car entertainment system. I just hook up my cellphone to the Bluetooth link, stick the smartphone/tablet in a holder with a built-in wireless charger and use the gadget which then becomes my in-car entertainment and navigation system. The only down side is a bit of audio lag due to buffering in the car's audio system and the fact that Bluetooth audio apparently suffers from quality loss due to compression. Having said that, the speakers in my car are pretty crap like most OEM car speakers and I'm not an audiophile and thus would not know grade-A audio quality if it jumped up and bit me in the balls. When it comes to audio all I know is the difference between awful, OK and amazing and the setup in my car rates solidly 'OK' and will suffice for my purposes.
Disney is thoroughly destroying the franchise. Capitalism for the win!
The franchise was thoroughly destroyed when Lucas decided it was a good idea to end The Return of the Jedi to with a spectacular fluffy teddy-bear battle choke full of slapstick and that was way, way before Disney had anything to do with it.
Under U.S. law any treaty not ratified by the Congress is not worth the paper it is written on. No U.S. treaty is binding unless it has passed both houses of Congress. that's the law. Sorry if you were misinformed.
Again, nobody gives a shit, the US went back on it's word, nobody cares that Trump and the Republicans are on a holy crusade to undo everything Obama ever did. The US is in the middle of making a similar agreement with North Korea. Do you honestly think that what happened with Iran is going to boost the North Korean's trust that anything the US says or does is worth wasting their time on it? Then Mike Pompeo goes on TV and gives a half hour speech on how the goal with repudiating the Iran agreement and the new sanctions is regime change and then there is Bolton talking about the fact that he had the Lybia model in mind for N-Korea. Hmmm... broken promises, regime change, brutally murdered dictator, now there is a bunch of prospects that are bound to get N-Korea's dictator to the table!
Trump is, of course, wholly unqualified to be President. Having stated the obvious about him, let me clear up something that should be pretty obvious about Clinton. Here's who funds Hillary, her top contributors:
Paloma Partners (hedge fund) $21,613,800 Pritzker Group (investment firm) $16,626,207 Renaissance Technologies (hedge fund) $16,543,000 Saban Capital Group (investment firm) $12,283,411 Newsweb Corp (media conglomerate) $11,016,642 Soros Fund Management (investment firm) $10,556,793
https://www.opensecrets.org/pr...
> Nor the tax breaks for the ultra rich including Wall Street.
The literally works for the largest Wall Street firms, that's who pays her bills. Ultra-rich? With $29 billion, Pritzkers are one of the wealthiest families in the country. Soros is one of the richest people on Wall Street, with $8 billion. These are the people funding Clinton, the people she works for.
So what you are saying is that because Hillary is corrupt it's OK for your guy (who ran on a platform of cleaning up political corruption) to be a corrupt scumbag too? Interesting point of view.
Do you understand that you're writing parody there? Fixing the Middle East mess? Ask ISIS how it's going over there since Obama left office. He apparently has ended a 70 year war in Korea by mocking the fat, ugly imbecilic dictator on the other side over the internet. The economy is doing ell and employment is about the highest it's ever been. He's another Bill Clinton - horrible person, fine President.
Deposing Saddam Hussein because he was on the verge of developing WMDs. How is that going? Any luck finding those WMDs? ... oh right, are you too busy dealing with the dumpster fires you lit after the Iraq invasion to remember the non existing WMDs. As for ending the 70 year war in Korea, after the demonstration of how the US honours the nuclear agreement it made with Iran, the subsequent assurances from Mike Pompeo that the US goal in Iran is now to affect regime change and the assurance from John Bolton that the Lybian model (where the dictator ended up getting sodomised by his angry subjects with a bayonet) would be applied to North Korea, I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of the greatest negotiator in human history ending the Korean war. In fact I'd not trust the US to keep any agreement or honour any treaty even as long as the president whom made it holds office.
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamplord ... Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb. ... I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
I'm not an American either and I don't have a stake Reps vs. Dems trench-warfare the US'ians have got going. I can also only sit in amazement and watch this farce unfold. Trump fancies himself as the greatest negotiator in history, the most clever political strategist of our time and in that capacity he has managed to destroy the USA's credibility by reneging on the Iran nuclear agreement with the predictable result that that now nobody believes that anything the US commits to will survive the next presidential transition or even the next morning POTUS wakes up in a bad mood and fires off a Twitter storm. I've been watching John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Netanyahu and the rest of that ilk cheering this latest Iran move along and making the case that you can only fight war with war. Nobody except Israeli nationalists and the Fox and Friends audience is buying it. There are already four raging dumpster fires in the Middle East: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen and nobody except Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US war hawk and a few small nations of no real consequence has the slightest appetite to light up a fifth one.
Do you honestly believe that Hillary wouldn't pull same shit on him if they swapped places? Pot calling kettle black. Captcha:swingers
I think that if the roles were reversed, Hillary, or any other presidential candidate you care to name, Democrat or Republican, would be concentrating on doing his job, solving the middle east mess, getting infrastructure reform done, finding some kind of compromise in the Obamacare feud that everybody can live with, doing something about mass shootings. Basically that candidate would be doing their job rather than spending all his time obsessing about what the person who lost the election was allegedly doing years ago and extorting foreign leaders into bailing out his son in law's real estate company and investing in his own resort projects in as a prerequisite to getting things done.