Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Boland
Reason challenged: Advocates rape and violence
Why is it not a rule that you have to actually read the book before you ban it? Or did the censor completely miss the message of the book?
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Reason challenged: Anti-ethnic and unsuited for age group
This one is from a public library so I have no idea what the problem with the age group is. It also shows another complete lack of understanding of the material.
To run down the articles: the iPhone 8 isn't selling like a flagship Apple phone, because it's not the flagship. The iPhone X is.
The new Apple Watch is too sticky with the Wifi. Will be fixed in a patch shortly.
A phone with a mono speaker doesn't support Dolby Atmos, a technology nobody gives a rats ass about in the first place. Atmos enabled receivers have been flooding the secondary market after completely failing to justify their price premium.
Is this really the best the haters can come up with this time? No "hold your phone a certain way to reduce the signal level", no snapping the phones in half to prove that they can be snapped in half? Are you too good to bitch about the lack of a headphone jack this time, or is it because too many Android phones came out without headphone jacks in the intervening time?
Biggest expense is definitely shipping the water. The bottles are nearly free at the scale Nestle operates. It's trucking around all of those tons of water that get expensive. Plus advertising, warehouse expenses, salaries, etc...
It should be remembered that there was a lot of extremely shitty hardware in PCs back in those days. If you had some then you could definitely have a "ctrl-alt-delete never works on this stupid crashy piece of crap" experience. I remember friends with Packard Bell machines that had this notorious sound card/winmodem seemingly designed to lock up your machine as often as possible. One of my friends replaced it with a couple of ISA cards and couldn't believe how much it transformed his machine. He was able to do an entire homework assignment without the thing locking up on him once. Of course the machine would then corrupt the assignment on disk because they used the infamous CMD640 chip, but that was a different issue.
That is not my memory at all. Ctrl-Alt-Delete worked unless your machine was hard locked (trapped in an interrupt handler thanks to a buggy driver or misbehaving hardware).
Water is everywhere, our bodies are mostly water by weight, and yet you somehow want me to believe that if I'm submerged in water for just a few minutes I'll die? That makes no sense to anyone with a shred of scientific understanding of our bodies, or indeed basic biology.
Apple used to ship the best starting programming environment ever developed, Hypercard, for free on all of their machines. The same company doesn't allow programming on iOS except in very limited (in-game typically) ways. There is absolutely a sense that you should be a consumer, not a producer, on modern devices and it drives me crazy.
This damn article has been making the rounds all over the internet and every single time people immediately point out that the headline is garbage yet no "editor" ever has the balls to fix it. This is what is wrong with modern journalism.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that Android phones usually come out with features first, there are many companies making the phones and on aggregate have a much more frequent release cycle than Apple. Apple however usually puts in the time to make sure a feature is useful and well considered before adding it to the phone. So it's late getting an OLED phone, but Apple's probably won't turn yellow after a year or two.
As a side effect a cargo ship emits as much sulphur dioxide and particular pollution as 50 million cars. Just 15 ships emit more pollution than all of the world's cars put together.
If a Hyperloop ever gets built it will definitely be one of the most expensive forms of transportation available, at least if they're doing anything even remotely similar to Musk's original cocktail napkin. It seems like they might struggle on the uptake in a country with such a low median income. On the other hand, they don't have the Dubai problem where everybody already drives cars and everything is paved. There is a potential market in India, just as long as it connects some presidental suburb with the government buildings where they work so they can ignore the systemic transportation problems in the city.
Option 2 sounds like a classic tax avoidance loophole. In the US you see these closed from time to time with much associated whining and gnashing of teeth.
This has been tried, AppleTV for example lets you buy shows/movies one at a time. It's largely a failure because the price points are ridiculous. They want to charge $3 per episode of a TV series, which is downright silly compared to a Netflix subscription at $10/month.
The only time it might make sense is if you're considering subscribing to HBO only to watch Game of Thrones for a season and absolutely nothing else, but honestly the difference is so marginal that it's almost certainly better to do the HBO subscription and watch a couple of movies and/or other TV shows too.
We are talking about $80-$100 a month for cable service here once you include all of the taxes and fees and mandatory rentals. It takes a TON of streaming subscriptions to hit a number like that. Honestly, an OTA antenna, Netflix, and Amazon Prime (which you probably already have) will cover 90% of your requirements easily. Maybe add Hulu if there's something on there you want to watch. You're still somewhere around 1/3 the price of cable, and unlike cable your shows don't have ads (except on the antenna and maybe on Hulu).
Maybe Facebook sucked in a big genealogical database at some point and started using it for the recommendations? If the information is out there there is a good bet Facebook and Google are adding it to their databases.
Iridium has a pure data mode. You could even attach a serial port to the early headsets via this hilariously large connector. You did have to initiate a full "call" to send the data which makes it expensive. I've seen mention of SMS with Iridium around the web, but I'm willing to believe that it is a generation 2 feature not found on the existing constellation.
Universal remotes end up sucking because there standards on what buttons to support are skimpy. Too often you discover that some functionality is hiding on a button not implemented on the remote (like a Menu button). The Harmony remotes theoretically get around this by allowing you to reprogram buttons yourself, but the tradeoff is laughable battery life, a clunky UI, and a stupidly high price point.
I think the situation is slowly improving overall, but it still sucks.
To watch Netflix? The idea of a network connected TV doesn't seem that crazy in a world where we have literally hundreds of streaming services to choose from. Updating it is unfortunately necessary if you do this, services change over time. Building the functionality into the display cuts down on clutter, cables, power plugs, and remotes too.
Of course the downside is that even with updates, the hardware eventually goes out of date, probably faster than the display does. The best solution would be some sort of standard card you could plug into the TV that does all of the "smart" functionality and allows you to swap out the display while keeping the same Internet services. This will not happen in the foreseeable future however because the manufacturers prefer to stovepipe the whole system and it would require a working group and standardization track and everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it not a rule that you have to actually read the book before you ban it? Or did the censor completely miss the message of the book?
This one is from a public library so I have no idea what the problem with the age group is. It also shows another complete lack of understanding of the material.
To run down the articles: the iPhone 8 isn't selling like a flagship Apple phone, because it's not the flagship. The iPhone X is.
The new Apple Watch is too sticky with the Wifi. Will be fixed in a patch shortly.
A phone with a mono speaker doesn't support Dolby Atmos, a technology nobody gives a rats ass about in the first place. Atmos enabled receivers have been flooding the secondary market after completely failing to justify their price premium.
Is this really the best the haters can come up with this time? No "hold your phone a certain way to reduce the signal level", no snapping the phones in half to prove that they can be snapped in half? Are you too good to bitch about the lack of a headphone jack this time, or is it because too many Android phones came out without headphone jacks in the intervening time?
Biggest expense is definitely shipping the water. The bottles are nearly free at the scale Nestle operates. It's trucking around all of those tons of water that get expensive. Plus advertising, warehouse expenses, salaries, etc...
Have you ever looked at how many different brands of bottled water there are for sale now? It is in the thousands.
The real trick is distribution, shelf space, etc....
It should be remembered that there was a lot of extremely shitty hardware in PCs back in those days. If you had some then you could definitely have a "ctrl-alt-delete never works on this stupid crashy piece of crap" experience. I remember friends with Packard Bell machines that had this notorious sound card/winmodem seemingly designed to lock up your machine as often as possible. One of my friends replaced it with a couple of ISA cards and couldn't believe how much it transformed his machine. He was able to do an entire homework assignment without the thing locking up on him once. Of course the machine would then corrupt the assignment on disk because they used the infamous CMD640 chip, but that was a different issue.
That is not my memory at all. Ctrl-Alt-Delete worked unless your machine was hard locked (trapped in an interrupt handler thanks to a buggy driver or misbehaving hardware).
Of course it also gave MS-DOS users pause the first time they were asked to log into a WinNT machine. "Is this a prank?"
We're in the middle of a mass extinction event already, how is this one 83 years in the future going to be different?
Water is everywhere, our bodies are mostly water by weight, and yet you somehow want me to believe that if I'm submerged in water for just a few minutes I'll die? That makes no sense to anyone with a shred of scientific understanding of our bodies, or indeed basic biology.
Or the thought is "I live in an uncompetitive district/state, my vote doesn't matter anyway."
Apple used to ship the best starting programming environment ever developed, Hypercard, for free on all of their machines. The same company doesn't allow programming on iOS except in very limited (in-game typically) ways. There is absolutely a sense that you should be a consumer, not a producer, on modern devices and it drives me crazy.
This damn article has been making the rounds all over the internet and every single time people immediately point out that the headline is garbage yet no "editor" ever has the balls to fix it. This is what is wrong with modern journalism.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that Android phones usually come out with features first, there are many companies making the phones and on aggregate have a much more frequent release cycle than Apple. Apple however usually puts in the time to make sure a feature is useful and well considered before adding it to the phone. So it's late getting an OLED phone, but Apple's probably won't turn yellow after a year or two.
As a side effect a cargo ship emits as much sulphur dioxide and particular pollution as 50 million cars. Just 15 ships emit more pollution than all of the world's cars put together.
It's insane
If a Hyperloop ever gets built it will definitely be one of the most expensive forms of transportation available, at least if they're doing anything even remotely similar to Musk's original cocktail napkin. It seems like they might struggle on the uptake in a country with such a low median income. On the other hand, they don't have the Dubai problem where everybody already drives cars and everything is paved. There is a potential market in India, just as long as it connects some presidental suburb with the government buildings where they work so they can ignore the systemic transportation problems in the city.
Option 2 sounds like a classic tax avoidance loophole. In the US you see these closed from time to time with much associated whining and gnashing of teeth.
This has been tried, AppleTV for example lets you buy shows/movies one at a time. It's largely a failure because the price points are ridiculous. They want to charge $3 per episode of a TV series, which is downright silly compared to a Netflix subscription at $10/month.
The only time it might make sense is if you're considering subscribing to HBO only to watch Game of Thrones for a season and absolutely nothing else, but honestly the difference is so marginal that it's almost certainly better to do the HBO subscription and watch a couple of movies and/or other TV shows too.
We are talking about $80-$100 a month for cable service here once you include all of the taxes and fees and mandatory rentals. It takes a TON of streaming subscriptions to hit a number like that. Honestly, an OTA antenna, Netflix, and Amazon Prime (which you probably already have) will cover 90% of your requirements easily. Maybe add Hulu if there's something on there you want to watch. You're still somewhere around 1/3 the price of cable, and unlike cable your shows don't have ads (except on the antenna and maybe on Hulu).
Maybe Facebook sucked in a big genealogical database at some point and started using it for the recommendations? If the information is out there there is a good bet Facebook and Google are adding it to their databases.
Iridium has a pure data mode. You could even attach a serial port to the early headsets via this hilariously large connector. You did have to initiate a full "call" to send the data which makes it expensive. I've seen mention of SMS with Iridium around the web, but I'm willing to believe that it is a generation 2 feature not found on the existing constellation.
Universal remotes end up sucking because there standards on what buttons to support are skimpy. Too often you discover that some functionality is hiding on a button not implemented on the remote (like a Menu button). The Harmony remotes theoretically get around this by allowing you to reprogram buttons yourself, but the tradeoff is laughable battery life, a clunky UI, and a stupidly high price point.
I think the situation is slowly improving overall, but it still sucks.
The point was to reduce clutter/cables/power, not increase it!
Out to an external box with its own network connection, power connection, etc...
And I have never seen a set that passes remote events out HDMI to a connected device that actually listens to them.
To watch Netflix? The idea of a network connected TV doesn't seem that crazy in a world where we have literally hundreds of streaming services to choose from. Updating it is unfortunately necessary if you do this, services change over time. Building the functionality into the display cuts down on clutter, cables, power plugs, and remotes too.
Of course the downside is that even with updates, the hardware eventually goes out of date, probably faster than the display does. The best solution would be some sort of standard card you could plug into the TV that does all of the "smart" functionality and allows you to swap out the display while keeping the same Internet services. This will not happen in the foreseeable future however because the manufacturers prefer to stovepipe the whole system and it would require a working group and standardization track and everything.
The reason to do the search is to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening in the future.