Back when we still signed things in Canada, like barbarians:
I went to the police station to have a background check done for a name change. On their counter, they had some notices you could read while you were waiting, and one of them was to not put a signature on your card, but instead put 'ask for ID'. Seemed to make sense, so I did.
That worked for a while, but one day when I was buying something at Future Shop (which was later taken over by Best Buy), they said that they wouldn't accept anything without a signature on the back. So I signed the card right in front of them, then signed the slip. I complained that this is how the police said to do it, but they claimed it was corporate policy. Obviously, I immediately complained (over the phone—god, this was so long ago) and the customer service person I called said that it WASN'T against their policy and everything should've been fine.
ANYWAY, all that to say that the signature-as-authentication thing was incredibly stupid, since they'd happily watch you undermine a better authentication right in front of them.
Chip and pin is better. The only time I get my credit card number stolen is when I drive into the USA and have to swipe it somewhere. (Seriously, there's a very strong correlation with that, and when I talk to the credit card companies while asking for new cards, that's usually what they pin it on.)
According to Apple—though we'll only know this for sure once it comes out—you don't need to lift it and point it directly at your face, it works at a variety of angles. Assuming your face is even remotely in the field of view, you only need to wake the phone to do it. For Apple Pay, you need to press the side button to confirm the payment, so it's going to be exactly as cumbersome as TouchID. Tap your phone on your desk to wake it, it unlocks.
Right now, we don't know enough about how it works in real use, but from Apple's own descriptions, none of the things you described is a situation where you'd be less able to unlock your phone than now.
Fall is second worst, correct, but only after spring.
Summer is best, winter is second.
I hate those mushy-middle temperatures. Cold in the morning, warm in the afternoon? Just sort of cool outside but the sun is shining? You can't PLAN on that sort of weather. Do I wear a sweater or not? If I wear one, am I going to have to roll up my sleeves for 15s and then decide it's too cold for that? Make up your damn mind?
You know where you stand with summer and winter. Gimme 25 to 30C and -20 to -30C, and I can work with that.
What situations are you in that you need your phone unlocked and arenâ(TM)t looking at it? As long as the phone unlocks for your first interaction, isnâ(TM)t that fast enough? The scan is, supposedly, effectively instantaneous once the phone is woken up, and the system works in the dark.
I donâ(TM)t necessarily believe faceid is a better solution than TouchID, but Iâ(TM)m not convinced this specific complaint is valid either. Weâ(TM)ll all have to see it working in real life first, I reckon.
This is actually extremely easy to validate. The origin of the term was a republican staffer who thought âoeclimate changeâ sounded less threatening than âoeglobal warmingâ.
No, I saw this even on release versions with no beta profile installed. Same with my partner, who's never installed a dev or beta profile in her life. The frequency has dropped off quite a lot—I probably only see the popup once ever 3 or 4 months now—but for a while, it was a daily irritant.
My point is that in general, the justifications being brought to bear here ('my headphones sound so much better than bluetooth headphones!') are specious.
Don't like charging another thing? Well, I think that ship has sailed, but okay. Don't like that you can't charge the phone and listen at the same time without a dongle? Yeah, that's legit. But complaining about the sound quality from your phone in a public space is asinine—there are so many other factors that degrade the sound that I'd wager anyone can reasonably tell the difference while they're on the bus—and complaining about the sound quality at home is similarly unreasonable, since you can plug your phone into something that you CAN plug wired headphones into.
There are reasons to not like bluetooth headphones, but sound quality is probably not one of them.
I disagree in this case. Apple has had an annoying problem for a couple of years where it would pop up an anonymous dialog box asking you to log in for no discernible reason.
You should never be prompted to enter your password without some sort of justification and idea of where it's coming from. It used to pop up 6 or 8 times in a row and I'd dutifully enter my password, wondering what the heck was going on. Usually I'd press the cancel button before iOS stopped asking me.
Apple's crafted a system where you reflexively enter your password with no justification, and they could make that stop any time by including information about the process that's asking for it. It really is a problem in iOS that we've been complaining about for years. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to point out that it could be used for phishing.
I went through a set of Shures (cable casing cracked), then had the replacements die because some rain blew into them when I was caught out in a rainstorm. There's $400 down the drain.
I went through 3 sets of Sennheiser sports headphones. 2 failed at the jack, one failed because the wires cracked. That was over 2 years. (Sennheiser replaced one set under warranty.)
I've had etymotics and Skull Candys (TERRIBLE, DO NOT BUY) and generic Apple earbuds and they all have cable or jack failures at some point.
The $25 bluetooth earbuds I have sound just as good as those Sennheisers, but I can buy FIVE pairs for the price of one of the Sennheiser sets. The Skull Candys are terrible at any price. I'd almost rather not listen to music.
I also don't snag the cables on anything anymore. I'll never use wired headphones with my phone again.
You're driving those cans with your puny little phone? All you guys whining about audio quality of bluetooth headphones are like people putting shitty lenses on nice cameras.
If you're at home, hopefully you're plugging the headphones into a decent amp. If you are, just buy a goddamn dock for your phone that has an audio out jack, or one of the DACs that plugs into the lightning port.
If you're not at home, you've already lost this fight. Those beyerdynamics are nice—I've got some 990s myself—but take them out into the world and you're going to have to deal with street noise, bus noise, whatever noise...you're losing any advantage you had by having those nice headphones in the first place.
A nice pair of headphones is meaningless if you're plugging them into something that can barely drive them and you're being assaulted by noise from every direction.
You seem to be in this weird divide where you care just enough to buy moderately expensive stuff, but don't care enough to do it properly.
I use bluetooth headphones when I walk around town and commute and exercise. They're ultra convenient, and that's what I want at that point. (And in fact, for $25, these little headphones last 8 hours and sound just as good as any earbud-type headphones that I've used up to around $150. My Shure SE425s were better, but eventually they gave up the ghost because some rain blew into them during a particularly bad outing.)
At my desk, my phone is on a dock. The Apple lightning dock has an audio out, and that goes to a small powered mixer, which then goes to some nicer headphones. If I were really going to do this properly, I'd buy myself a little amplifier.
I don't understand how you can complain about audio quality, when even at your desk when you're driving your headphones from a DAC that costs 30c. (To be fair, Apple's DAC has been of surprisingly high quality in their phones with headphone jacks. It might be cheap, but you can actually do a lot worse.)
You're trying to play both sides against the middle. Do you care about audio quality or not? If you do, there's still plenty of ways to accommodate that, and some of them don't require the audio-out jack on a phone. If you don't, why are you whining?
I've been thinking about this, and if there were a standard API for harnessing my CPU for a few cycles while I browsed, and a setting where I could decide how much time to give on a site-by-site basis, I think I'd be much more willing to do this than have ads. The thing that bugs me is the underhanded nature of it right now, but it's honestly kind of a good idea.
Of course, for this to work, several things need to be in place and the red tape in getting this off the ground properly would probably be a huge hassle. But as a way to pay for content, this is kind of brilliant.
The map data is significantly better in my city, and Apple does stuff like tell me what exit I'm looking for when I'm leaving the metro station so I can get out onto the street I want. The last time I checked Google Maps, it wasn't doing that, though that may have changed.
There are still definitely times where Google's lead time makes a difference—they've had more time to refine some of their data, so when I look for roads in small municipalities in Quebec, Google is still more likely to get me to the right town than Apple. But I keep Google Maps unloaded unless I'm desperate. Apple's Maps is far better on an iPhone just for the iPhone integration alone. Apple did some good work getting it up to snuff.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Apple Maps remains the highest used map application on iOS. The power of defaults is enormous, which is why both Google and Apple want to have the default app on your phone. Google pays Apple $3 billion/yr to be the favoured search app for Siri. Sideloading isn't really a thing on iOS devices. WebKit is the MANDATORY rendering engine for all iOS web rendering; Chrome is literally just chrome around WebKit.
Your inputs are so bad that there's no way to come to any reliable conclusions about what either company is doing.
Google LOVES Apple, make no mistake. They pay $3 billion/year to be the default search engine because they make more money back from Apple users than they pay. Google isn't dumb. More money is spent on Apple mobile devices than on Android mobile devices. Apple devices inherently imply a certain amount of disposable income, on average.
And frankly, Google doesn't care one way or the other and hasn't for YEARS. They're not competing with Apple, they're competing with Samsung. Google's goal is to be in everyone's pocket, regardless of OS, and Android is just *leverage*. The original strategy was to make sure Microsoft didn't end up with a mobile monopoly, but they ended up using the strategy against Apple instead. Now Google wants to make devices so they have leverage over Samsung, since Samsung is trying to build its own services, like Bixby.
Google has ALWAYS wanted the best experience for people because network effects feed back on themselves and are multiplicative. Google needs data to be good, and once they get data, they get better, and because they're better, more people use them, so they use the data to be better some more. Literally zero of this is new; this is just the natural extension of the system we've lived in for the last decade.
Look, we pass laws for all sorts of reasons, and some of those reasons are because people can't be expected to know everything all of the time. There are warnings on bottles of bleach, indicating that it's caustic and poisonous. Of COURSE I know that it's caustic and poisonous on my own, but maybe someone else doesn't, and we have a responsibility to do our best to protect people from these sorts of every day hazards.
Where does one go to learn what sources are trustworthy and which aren't? Which class do you take to learn how to discern a scam from a real piece of news? There are people in the WHITE HOUSE being phished and sending emails to pranksters. These are, ostensibly, sufficiently intelligent people that they made it into government. They might not be geniuses, but they've at least been able to scam and fool enough people to get themselves where they are, and they're being taken in by absurd scams perpetrated by bad actors.
You're asking a lot, and in the mean time, real damage is being done. Institutions are being undermined and people are being hurt. And if Google and Facebook don't act on their own to curb this, some government somewhere is going to tell them to do it, and THEN we'll be seeing some REAL censorship.
When everyone read newspapers and had the same 3 main channels for the evening news, the level of understanding of the world was somewhat better. You can make the point—and it's a fair point—that our curated news stream also robbed us of knowing things that the powers-that-be didn't want us to know. But in general, the news that was reported was the news that actually happened.
We have precious few trusted sources now, and part of the problem is that Google represents itself—or at the very least doesn't try to disabuse people of the notion—that they're a way to search for knowledge and truth, and so people take Google at face value when it returns results, and the people that would like to undermine the news for whatever reason (their own gain, their own amusement) know it and they game the system.
It's not censorship to mark sources like 4Chan as of dubious value. Yes, yes, people should be less gullible, but who's teaching them to be less gullible, and what damage can be done before they learn?
Perhaps the real problem is that Google has too much trust and authority, and too much ability to control the news. Or that Facebook is many people's main source of news on any given day, and that too is subject to exploitation. It's impossible for the government to regulate companies like Facebook and Google effectively; not only do I not think the government would do a bad job of it, the value of those companies comes exactly from the massive network effects that lead to this fake news problem in the first place.
Better to let Google and Facebook try and find some way to indicate that a news source is probably untrustworthy than let governments in the world do it. And they WILL do it if the corporations don't.
In addition to this, we have to remember that Netflix *has already paid for its own internet service*.
Netflix has an ISP, same as you. They pay their bandwidth costs, and so they've stood up to their end of the bargain.
YOU paid for your internet service, and so you deserve every bit of that internet service that you paid for. You should not be held hostage by your own ISP for service that you've given them money for.
Net Neutrality is fundamentally about forcing ISPs to give everyone what they've already paid for.
So they say that 'an iPhone or iPad' normally drains in 240 minutes or in 96 minutes in iOS 11.
This is already a weird place to start. I go for almost 12 hours on a charge for my iPad, and that's mixed usage, including games that use the GPU. (5th Gen iPad)
Oh, that's also on iOS 11. I haven't had battery drain problems since beta 3 or 4.
My iPhone 6 (1 year old; my original was replaced by Apple) doesn't really have any noticeable battery drain issues either. It lasts about 8 hours on a charge, with mixed usage and GPS apps running in the background, etc. (Worth noting: I removed the facebook app a few years ago because at the time it was absolutely destroying my battery life. From what I've heard, that's no better.)
This isn't to say that battery drain isn't an issue, but I've got a couple devices, some generations apart, and I've been running iOS 11 since beta on one of them. Wandera's numbers don't really pass the sniff test for me—how are they measuring this battery usage? Maybe it's THEIR app that's the problem?
Well, that was super regionally based. Certainly, if you lived in certain areas of the world, this was true. Other places, you could probably find clear running water or natural wells in a lot of places. The world to population ratio was much better then.
This is only possible because of capitalism, but I have a quibble with you saying that water isn't a right.
People have a right to life, and a right to try and subsist if nothing else. A country is little more than a social agreement that the land within the borders belongs to everyone in it and we have a certain set of shared values, and the government will work to protect the rights of the people within those borders, particularly those of the citizens. And while we've now set it up so that you can own land, it's obnoxious that one might be able to claim that a citizen cannot find water in their country and drink freely of it, as they were able to 1000 years ago and the land wasn't paved over. You might settle near a source of water, and everyone there would share this resource of the land. Nobody put any work into that water, it's just available. The price you pay for water is searching for it and getting to it.
Indeed, in France, water is provided for free. You can take water from the fountains. It's a right that you have for the resource that's collectively owned. You should either get to drink that water or be paid handsomely for someone like Nestle taking it out of the ground and selling it to you. But there should still be freely available clean water provided to the populace at large for drinking. Nobody should be forced to pay for that essential quality of life. It's like saying you don't have a right to (breathable) air. Absolutely you do.
There was a time where we were all on our own, hunting and scavenging, and so you could 'work' for your sustenance by hunting. People aren't really allowed to do that anymore except within certain restrictions (hunting licenses, owning farm land, etc.) so as a society we now have a responsibility to take care of those people and make sure they have the bare minimum. (And we do an *okay* job of that.)
I suspect we agree more than we don't, here. Nestle cons lots of governments out of this sort of deal. We'll fight for oil revenues, but we're keen to give away our water and let Nestle mark it up 10000%. It's criminal.
I don't know why there's this narrative that the Apple market is 'saturated'. They're still growing, just more slowly.
But even if that were the case, Apple is well known for allowing its own products to cannibalize sales of its other products. There's going to be a lot of demand for the X, and so that's suppressing iPhone 8 sales. Hardly a revelation.
There are plenty of people on long update cycles now; the most common one is 'when my phone breaks'. Assuming you're actually fairly careful with your phone, you'll get iOS updates for phones as old as the iPhone 5S, which was released in 2013. iOS 11 runs well on my iPhone 6, and I plan my upgrades to be on a 4 year cycle, because that's where I think the value is. A huge number of people bought the iPhone 6, and so how many of them really feel like they need an upgrade is a bit of an open question.
There's this story that Apple fans aren't just loyal, we're fanatical to the point of nonsense, and we buy things for no reason, all the time, and that's not true. We spend our money where we think it's warranted, and we like Apple products because they're well engineered and built to last if you put in a little effort. We don't buy things that are new for the sake of buying new things. I understand this narrative is important for some people because it makes them feel like the only reason that Apple is successful is because they're good at marketing and its customers don't understand what they're doing, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that there are plenty of good reasons to buy Apple's stuff on its own merits.
The iPhone 8 looks like a great phone. If this were my upgrade year, I might consider one—though I would probably also go for the X, since that feels like it has longer legs for the future. I'm sure a lot of other people are making this decision and that's probably the one Apple was expecting. Relax.
It works about as well as iOS 10 did, but with the new options for reviewing what junk is taking up space on your phone, it gives you a lot more room to work if you made a dumb decision (like me) and bought the 16GB version.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when we still signed things in Canada, like barbarians:
I went to the police station to have a background check done for a name change. On their counter, they had some notices you could read while you were waiting, and one of them was to not put a signature on your card, but instead put 'ask for ID'. Seemed to make sense, so I did.
That worked for a while, but one day when I was buying something at Future Shop (which was later taken over by Best Buy), they said that they wouldn't accept anything without a signature on the back. So I signed the card right in front of them, then signed the slip. I complained that this is how the police said to do it, but they claimed it was corporate policy. Obviously, I immediately complained (over the phone—god, this was so long ago) and the customer service person I called said that it WASN'T against their policy and everything should've been fine.
ANYWAY, all that to say that the signature-as-authentication thing was incredibly stupid, since they'd happily watch you undermine a better authentication right in front of them.
Chip and pin is better. The only time I get my credit card number stolen is when I drive into the USA and have to swipe it somewhere. (Seriously, there's a very strong correlation with that, and when I talk to the credit card companies while asking for new cards, that's usually what they pin it on.)
According to Apple—though we'll only know this for sure once it comes out—you don't need to lift it and point it directly at your face, it works at a variety of angles. Assuming your face is even remotely in the field of view, you only need to wake the phone to do it. For Apple Pay, you need to press the side button to confirm the payment, so it's going to be exactly as cumbersome as TouchID. Tap your phone on your desk to wake it, it unlocks.
Right now, we don't know enough about how it works in real use, but from Apple's own descriptions, none of the things you described is a situation where you'd be less able to unlock your phone than now.
Fall is second worst, correct, but only after spring.
Summer is best, winter is second.
I hate those mushy-middle temperatures. Cold in the morning, warm in the afternoon? Just sort of cool outside but the sun is shining? You can't PLAN on that sort of weather. Do I wear a sweater or not? If I wear one, am I going to have to roll up my sleeves for 15s and then decide it's too cold for that? Make up your damn mind?
You know where you stand with summer and winter. Gimme 25 to 30C and -20 to -30C, and I can work with that.
What situations are you in that you need your phone unlocked and arenâ(TM)t looking at it? As long as the phone unlocks for your first interaction, isnâ(TM)t that fast enough? The scan is, supposedly, effectively instantaneous once the phone is woken up, and the system works in the dark.
I donâ(TM)t necessarily believe faceid is a better solution than TouchID, but Iâ(TM)m not convinced this specific complaint is valid either. Weâ(TM)ll all have to see it working in real life first, I reckon.
This is actually extremely easy to validate. The origin of the term was a republican staffer who thought âoeclimate changeâ sounded less threatening than âoeglobal warmingâ.
Boy, I was dead.
No, I saw this even on release versions with no beta profile installed. Same with my partner, who's never installed a dev or beta profile in her life. The frequency has dropped off quite a lot—I probably only see the popup once ever 3 or 4 months now—but for a while, it was a daily irritant.
My point is that in general, the justifications being brought to bear here ('my headphones sound so much better than bluetooth headphones!') are specious.
Don't like charging another thing? Well, I think that ship has sailed, but okay. Don't like that you can't charge the phone and listen at the same time without a dongle? Yeah, that's legit. But complaining about the sound quality from your phone in a public space is asinine—there are so many other factors that degrade the sound that I'd wager anyone can reasonably tell the difference while they're on the bus—and complaining about the sound quality at home is similarly unreasonable, since you can plug your phone into something that you CAN plug wired headphones into.
There are reasons to not like bluetooth headphones, but sound quality is probably not one of them.
I disagree in this case. Apple has had an annoying problem for a couple of years where it would pop up an anonymous dialog box asking you to log in for no discernible reason.
You should never be prompted to enter your password without some sort of justification and idea of where it's coming from. It used to pop up 6 or 8 times in a row and I'd dutifully enter my password, wondering what the heck was going on. Usually I'd press the cancel button before iOS stopped asking me.
Apple's crafted a system where you reflexively enter your password with no justification, and they could make that stop any time by including information about the process that's asking for it. It really is a problem in iOS that we've been complaining about for years. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to point out that it could be used for phishing.
I went through a set of Shures (cable casing cracked), then had the replacements die because some rain blew into them when I was caught out in a rainstorm. There's $400 down the drain.
I went through 3 sets of Sennheiser sports headphones. 2 failed at the jack, one failed because the wires cracked. That was over 2 years. (Sennheiser replaced one set under warranty.)
I've had etymotics and Skull Candys (TERRIBLE, DO NOT BUY) and generic Apple earbuds and they all have cable or jack failures at some point.
The $25 bluetooth earbuds I have sound just as good as those Sennheisers, but I can buy FIVE pairs for the price of one of the Sennheiser sets. The Skull Candys are terrible at any price. I'd almost rather not listen to music.
I also don't snag the cables on anything anymore. I'll never use wired headphones with my phone again.
You're driving those cans with your puny little phone? All you guys whining about audio quality of bluetooth headphones are like people putting shitty lenses on nice cameras.
If you're at home, hopefully you're plugging the headphones into a decent amp. If you are, just buy a goddamn dock for your phone that has an audio out jack, or one of the DACs that plugs into the lightning port.
If you're not at home, you've already lost this fight. Those beyerdynamics are nice—I've got some 990s myself—but take them out into the world and you're going to have to deal with street noise, bus noise, whatever noise...you're losing any advantage you had by having those nice headphones in the first place.
A nice pair of headphones is meaningless if you're plugging them into something that can barely drive them and you're being assaulted by noise from every direction.
You seem to be in this weird divide where you care just enough to buy moderately expensive stuff, but don't care enough to do it properly.
I use bluetooth headphones when I walk around town and commute and exercise. They're ultra convenient, and that's what I want at that point. (And in fact, for $25, these little headphones last 8 hours and sound just as good as any earbud-type headphones that I've used up to around $150. My Shure SE425s were better, but eventually they gave up the ghost because some rain blew into them during a particularly bad outing.)
At my desk, my phone is on a dock. The Apple lightning dock has an audio out, and that goes to a small powered mixer, which then goes to some nicer headphones. If I were really going to do this properly, I'd buy myself a little amplifier.
I don't understand how you can complain about audio quality, when even at your desk when you're driving your headphones from a DAC that costs 30c. (To be fair, Apple's DAC has been of surprisingly high quality in their phones with headphone jacks. It might be cheap, but you can actually do a lot worse.)
You're trying to play both sides against the middle. Do you care about audio quality or not? If you do, there's still plenty of ways to accommodate that, and some of them don't require the audio-out jack on a phone. If you don't, why are you whining?
Isn't that against the iOS rules? I thought you weren't allowed to have an interpreter of any kind built in.
I've been thinking about this, and if there were a standard API for harnessing my CPU for a few cycles while I browsed, and a setting where I could decide how much time to give on a site-by-site basis, I think I'd be much more willing to do this than have ads. The thing that bugs me is the underhanded nature of it right now, but it's honestly kind of a good idea.
Of course, for this to work, several things need to be in place and the red tape in getting this off the ground properly would probably be a huge hassle. But as a way to pay for content, this is kind of brilliant.
The map data is significantly better in my city, and Apple does stuff like tell me what exit I'm looking for when I'm leaving the metro station so I can get out onto the street I want. The last time I checked Google Maps, it wasn't doing that, though that may have changed.
There are still definitely times where Google's lead time makes a difference—they've had more time to refine some of their data, so when I look for roads in small municipalities in Quebec, Google is still more likely to get me to the right town than Apple. But I keep Google Maps unloaded unless I'm desperate. Apple's Maps is far better on an iPhone just for the iPhone integration alone. Apple did some good work getting it up to snuff.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Apple Maps remains the highest used map application on iOS. The power of defaults is enormous, which is why both Google and Apple want to have the default app on your phone. Google pays Apple $3 billion/yr to be the favoured search app for Siri. Sideloading isn't really a thing on iOS devices. WebKit is the MANDATORY rendering engine for all iOS web rendering; Chrome is literally just chrome around WebKit.
Your inputs are so bad that there's no way to come to any reliable conclusions about what either company is doing.
Google LOVES Apple, make no mistake. They pay $3 billion/year to be the default search engine because they make more money back from Apple users than they pay. Google isn't dumb. More money is spent on Apple mobile devices than on Android mobile devices. Apple devices inherently imply a certain amount of disposable income, on average.
And frankly, Google doesn't care one way or the other and hasn't for YEARS. They're not competing with Apple, they're competing with Samsung. Google's goal is to be in everyone's pocket, regardless of OS, and Android is just *leverage*. The original strategy was to make sure Microsoft didn't end up with a mobile monopoly, but they ended up using the strategy against Apple instead. Now Google wants to make devices so they have leverage over Samsung, since Samsung is trying to build its own services, like Bixby.
Google has ALWAYS wanted the best experience for people because network effects feed back on themselves and are multiplicative. Google needs data to be good, and once they get data, they get better, and because they're better, more people use them, so they use the data to be better some more. Literally zero of this is new; this is just the natural extension of the system we've lived in for the last decade.
Your ad hominem attacks are very convincing. 9_9
Look, we pass laws for all sorts of reasons, and some of those reasons are because people can't be expected to know everything all of the time. There are warnings on bottles of bleach, indicating that it's caustic and poisonous. Of COURSE I know that it's caustic and poisonous on my own, but maybe someone else doesn't, and we have a responsibility to do our best to protect people from these sorts of every day hazards.
Where does one go to learn what sources are trustworthy and which aren't? Which class do you take to learn how to discern a scam from a real piece of news? There are people in the WHITE HOUSE being phished and sending emails to pranksters. These are, ostensibly, sufficiently intelligent people that they made it into government. They might not be geniuses, but they've at least been able to scam and fool enough people to get themselves where they are, and they're being taken in by absurd scams perpetrated by bad actors.
You're asking a lot, and in the mean time, real damage is being done. Institutions are being undermined and people are being hurt. And if Google and Facebook don't act on their own to curb this, some government somewhere is going to tell them to do it, and THEN we'll be seeing some REAL censorship.
When everyone read newspapers and had the same 3 main channels for the evening news, the level of understanding of the world was somewhat better. You can make the point—and it's a fair point—that our curated news stream also robbed us of knowing things that the powers-that-be didn't want us to know. But in general, the news that was reported was the news that actually happened.
We have precious few trusted sources now, and part of the problem is that Google represents itself—or at the very least doesn't try to disabuse people of the notion—that they're a way to search for knowledge and truth, and so people take Google at face value when it returns results, and the people that would like to undermine the news for whatever reason (their own gain, their own amusement) know it and they game the system.
It's not censorship to mark sources like 4Chan as of dubious value. Yes, yes, people should be less gullible, but who's teaching them to be less gullible, and what damage can be done before they learn?
Perhaps the real problem is that Google has too much trust and authority, and too much ability to control the news. Or that Facebook is many people's main source of news on any given day, and that too is subject to exploitation. It's impossible for the government to regulate companies like Facebook and Google effectively; not only do I not think the government would do a bad job of it, the value of those companies comes exactly from the massive network effects that lead to this fake news problem in the first place.
Better to let Google and Facebook try and find some way to indicate that a news source is probably untrustworthy than let governments in the world do it. And they WILL do it if the corporations don't.
In addition to this, we have to remember that Netflix *has already paid for its own internet service*.
Netflix has an ISP, same as you. They pay their bandwidth costs, and so they've stood up to their end of the bargain.
YOU paid for your internet service, and so you deserve every bit of that internet service that you paid for. You should not be held hostage by your own ISP for service that you've given them money for.
Net Neutrality is fundamentally about forcing ISPs to give everyone what they've already paid for.
So they say that 'an iPhone or iPad' normally drains in 240 minutes or in 96 minutes in iOS 11.
This is already a weird place to start. I go for almost 12 hours on a charge for my iPad, and that's mixed usage, including games that use the GPU. (5th Gen iPad)
Oh, that's also on iOS 11. I haven't had battery drain problems since beta 3 or 4.
My iPhone 6 (1 year old; my original was replaced by Apple) doesn't really have any noticeable battery drain issues either. It lasts about 8 hours on a charge, with mixed usage and GPS apps running in the background, etc. (Worth noting: I removed the facebook app a few years ago because at the time it was absolutely destroying my battery life. From what I've heard, that's no better.)
This isn't to say that battery drain isn't an issue, but I've got a couple devices, some generations apart, and I've been running iOS 11 since beta on one of them. Wandera's numbers don't really pass the sniff test for me—how are they measuring this battery usage? Maybe it's THEIR app that's the problem?
Well, that was super regionally based. Certainly, if you lived in certain areas of the world, this was true. Other places, you could probably find clear running water or natural wells in a lot of places. The world to population ratio was much better then.
This is only possible because of capitalism, but I have a quibble with you saying that water isn't a right.
People have a right to life, and a right to try and subsist if nothing else. A country is little more than a social agreement that the land within the borders belongs to everyone in it and we have a certain set of shared values, and the government will work to protect the rights of the people within those borders, particularly those of the citizens. And while we've now set it up so that you can own land, it's obnoxious that one might be able to claim that a citizen cannot find water in their country and drink freely of it, as they were able to 1000 years ago and the land wasn't paved over. You might settle near a source of water, and everyone there would share this resource of the land. Nobody put any work into that water, it's just available. The price you pay for water is searching for it and getting to it.
Indeed, in France, water is provided for free. You can take water from the fountains. It's a right that you have for the resource that's collectively owned. You should either get to drink that water or be paid handsomely for someone like Nestle taking it out of the ground and selling it to you. But there should still be freely available clean water provided to the populace at large for drinking. Nobody should be forced to pay for that essential quality of life. It's like saying you don't have a right to (breathable) air. Absolutely you do.
There was a time where we were all on our own, hunting and scavenging, and so you could 'work' for your sustenance by hunting. People aren't really allowed to do that anymore except within certain restrictions (hunting licenses, owning farm land, etc.) so as a society we now have a responsibility to take care of those people and make sure they have the bare minimum. (And we do an *okay* job of that.)
I suspect we agree more than we don't, here. Nestle cons lots of governments out of this sort of deal. We'll fight for oil revenues, but we're keen to give away our water and let Nestle mark it up 10000%. It's criminal.
I don't know why there's this narrative that the Apple market is 'saturated'. They're still growing, just more slowly.
But even if that were the case, Apple is well known for allowing its own products to cannibalize sales of its other products. There's going to be a lot of demand for the X, and so that's suppressing iPhone 8 sales. Hardly a revelation.
There are plenty of people on long update cycles now; the most common one is 'when my phone breaks'. Assuming you're actually fairly careful with your phone, you'll get iOS updates for phones as old as the iPhone 5S, which was released in 2013. iOS 11 runs well on my iPhone 6, and I plan my upgrades to be on a 4 year cycle, because that's where I think the value is. A huge number of people bought the iPhone 6, and so how many of them really feel like they need an upgrade is a bit of an open question.
There's this story that Apple fans aren't just loyal, we're fanatical to the point of nonsense, and we buy things for no reason, all the time, and that's not true. We spend our money where we think it's warranted, and we like Apple products because they're well engineered and built to last if you put in a little effort. We don't buy things that are new for the sake of buying new things. I understand this narrative is important for some people because it makes them feel like the only reason that Apple is successful is because they're good at marketing and its customers don't understand what they're doing, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that there are plenty of good reasons to buy Apple's stuff on its own merits.
The iPhone 8 looks like a great phone. If this were my upgrade year, I might consider one—though I would probably also go for the X, since that feels like it has longer legs for the future. I'm sure a lot of other people are making this decision and that's probably the one Apple was expecting. Relax.
It works about as well as iOS 10 did, but with the new options for reviewing what junk is taking up space on your phone, it gives you a lot more room to work if you made a dumb decision (like me) and bought the 16GB version.
I'd agree if it weren't for the absurd state of the web. Some of these pages are just murder, even with an adblocker enabled. :/