Different device, different use case. I read on my iPad most of the time, but when I want a Kindle, I want a Kindle. E-ink, cellular connectivity. If you don't read at least one book a week, this probably isn't for you. That's why I still have an old Kindle with keyboard - I only use it at the beach. But if you read a lot, your situation might be different.
Your wife is more fastidious than mine. She murdered quite a few electronics before I caught on and started insisting she put them in protective cases. At least two netbooks and three phones. She got a 4S, it went into an Otterbox on day one, and lo, these many years later, it's still sitting in my travel bag, perfectly unharmed, as a backup phone in case her main one dies on a trip.
She had a bunch of Kindles die on her, but they were the gen 2 version with awful QC. We had a couple that were DOA as warranty replacements.
Forget Chromebooks; if you're going to spend that much, you can get an HP Stream Pro G3 11.6" running Windows 10 Pro 64 for under $200. It's an anemic Celeron processor, and it's 1366x768, and the MMC is only 64 GB, but if you want something that's cheap and will run everything you really really need, it's fine. Very lightweight, too - 2.57 lb/ / 1.17 kg. I've been trialing it for the role of "crappy notebook that I take when I don't expect to need a real computer but might end up needing one anyway", and it has done just fine.
Not only is it great for that, it works just as well in other countriea. I could do it without GPS and traffic info, but boy would it be a lot less effective. It has saved me many, many hours of frustration. The only hard part is figuring out when it's confused, which is rare but not unheard-of, especially if there's an unexpected road closure.
If the agency is sued by a requestor after denying a request, the requestor is generally entitled to an award of legal fees if a court finds that the request is legitimate. If the agency sues the requestor preemptively to prevent the release of information, they generally are not. That's the difference.
And the grand national footprint of Maxi Foods is... what? If I can get really cheap food by making a 2500-mile commute to the store, well, it's not so cheap anymore, is it? You can get avocados off the farm for 10 cents apiece in the right parts of California, but that isn't much help to someone who lives east of the Mississippi. Walmart is cheaper than the local stores, cheaper than the available major chains, and much cheaper than the farmers' markets. You can get much cheaper rice, and Sriracha by the foodservice pack, at the Asian markets, but the fresh stuff isn't much (if any) less expensive than at the regular stores. They just have specialty ingredients.
Most people, when buying bottled water, are not really paying for the water. They are paying for a cold, transportable bottle of reasonably pure water. Likewise, with gasoline, you're paying for the refining and cracking, not just the oil.
Walmart has pretty cheap groceries. You're not going to find fine cheeses or Prime meat, but if you just need staples... the produce is limited in variety, but generally inexpensive and of good quality. You find yourself in Podunk, USA, and want some Sriracha? Walmart has it. Want to buy everything in one trip? Walmart sells it.
As for shopping at one store, I generally do 90% of my shopping at a very generic grocery store. Every once in a while, I need a specialty ingredient, or higher quality meat, or whatever, but yes, one store cuts it for the vast majority of my shopping.
I can read Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, if not the underlying languages. Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Hangul, any Chinese or Japanese script? Nope, sorry. How many of these would you recognize without the red+white+swoop pattern?
It's not to get you to buy it because you like the shape, it's to allow you to recognize the genuine article even if you don't understand the writing on the bottle. It's like the Nike Swoosh - a trademark. Given how few glass bottles are sold these days, it's not so much of an advantage anymore.
Questions like these are, to me, one of the best use cases for blockchain stuff. Prepare a document, store the hash in the transaction (Btc has some data available, so it's possible), and record on blockchain. Pow, proof that you had a document with that hash available on that date. You don't even have to tell anyone what it says, but you can easily prove you had it then.
It's the kind of house where the real estate agent would call it a "study" or "library" rather than an office, but it's where my computer sits, and there's no room under the desk for a tower, because my desk is an antique built for the pre-typing era. My wife's office is mich more practical.
Well, there's also WAF. My last Windows machine was fantastic for the time, and I had a great 27" monitor. But my office is in the formal part of a formal house, and she didn't want a bunch of cables. So I bought an iMac when it was starting to age, and frankly, I'm perfectly happy with it. Unix CLI, decent GUI, and it can even run Windows in a pinch. I bought a Mac for the looks. And it does look a hell of a lot better than most of the other stuff out there, even Dell's all-in-ones, at basically no price premium.
Performance is more important than aesthetics when you're talking servers, but for a desktop? I'm not crunching numbers. I'm mostly surfing, and the Mac looks better and doesn't really cost much more (if any) than a comparably-capable Windows machine. I do miss my two-monitor setup, but that's a separate issue (the Mac can do it, I just don't; gave my old big monitor to a guy with macular degeneration so he could actually read things).
Price controls on generic drugs are already the cause of near-constant shortages in the US. Which drug is in shortage changes from week to week, but there's always at least one. I could do my job (anesthesiologist) with thirty drugs or so, but I do need to have them.
Pharmaceutical research is watched very closely to make sure it toes certain lines. Said lines do not necessarily include "actually helping people". OTOH, when they really do come up with a blockbuster drug that should make them an absolute fortune, people gripe about the cost. I've got one in mind that, yes, is around $90 a dose, but also prevented two people who were scheduled for outpatient surgery from going to the ICU overnight on a ventilator. Pharmacy complained about the cost, we just started documenting what we were avoiding by using it and all of a sudden the resistance from hospital administration melted.
Probably no worse than human clerks. I recall once reading a story of an English tourist who went to a liquor store and showed his passport to prove his age. They wouldn't take it (IIRC, somewhere in Westchester Co., NY). He pointed out that he had a UK passport, a T-shirt on with UK dates, and an English accent, and they said "tough, we only take NY state licenses, find somewhere else to go."
I hate browsing on my phone, and I don't use any of the major social media apps, but having constantly-updated maps + traffic-aware GPS, the ability to stream music, podcasts, etc. in the car on long trips, the abiliy to set up WiFi hotspot anywhere I have a cell connection, and being available whenever I'm overseas... those are great. Compared to early 2000s, yeah, it makes life much better. Compared to early 1990s, it's not even the same thing. I never get ripped off by taxis, because I show them my destination in Google Maps. They know I'm watching. I can use city buses, because the routes and schedules are programmed in (you were going to pay to travel anyway, this way you get free sightseeing with it). I get rerouted around traffic jams automatically.
Jesus, they have booze delivery now? Look at what I get for living in the sticks, where we make extra sure to stock up beforehand instead. There's no such thing as having too much alcohol, especially if a hurricane is coming - something I learned a long time ago. You'll drink it eventually.
That said, I can't imagine that it's terribly different. They all have some mechanism to make sure you're not under 21, right? Hard to do that via drone; you can always just scan a borrowed license if they want a barcode, and it's not like there's someone who can really verify the picture matches. As for the other stuff, I think the only difference is the requirement for a fully-enclosed vehicle with GPS tracking and the ability to take cash - if you know that a drone is likely to contain either a good load of great weed, or a bunch of cash, or both, the risk of said drones meeting an unpleasant fate really does skyrocket.
Why are you writing them checks? I've helped out my in-laws quite a bit, but that was after they spent years taking care of me and my wife when we were young and poor. Her brother? He's on his own.
You're Gen X, just the tail end. My wife and I are just a few years older than you, both of our younger siblings are just a few years younger - and there is a very real difference. I have a lot more in common with someone ten years older than me than I do with someone ten years younger. To me, that's enough to call it a meaningful thing.
Walking around a field is a right. Walking through one is not. The government's own guide to the law says you can't cross land where crops are growing. So, depending on the specifics, it very well can be illegal to stand in the middle of a field.
You can probably use my account to figure out who I am, if you really want to. I'm pretty sure I've dropped enough biographical data over the years. But there's a difference between "I'm safe from the NSA/FBI/CIA when they're actively pursuing a high-level spy" and "I'm safe from the IRS when they're fishing for auditees".
Well, suing the police for false arrest is very unlikely to go your way, as they have rather broad authority to make mistakes. I'm pretty anti-cop, as a general rule, but there's pretty much no way around this problem if you don't want your cities to devolve into mass chaos. Police have to make snap decisions based on very limited information, and you don't want to live in a world in which they are punished for making a wrong one, because the result is anarchy (and not the good kind).
Social media posts aren't adequate for DUI unless you're drinking/toking/whatever on the camera, but they're perfectly adequate to prove reckless driving or speeding.
Slashdot Mirror
Different device, different use case. I read on my iPad most of the time, but when I want a Kindle, I want a Kindle. E-ink, cellular connectivity. If you don't read at least one book a week, this probably isn't for you. That's why I still have an old Kindle with keyboard - I only use it at the beach. But if you read a lot, your situation might be different.
Your wife is more fastidious than mine. She murdered quite a few electronics before I caught on and started insisting she put them in protective cases. At least two netbooks and three phones. She got a 4S, it went into an Otterbox on day one, and lo, these many years later, it's still sitting in my travel bag, perfectly unharmed, as a backup phone in case her main one dies on a trip.
She had a bunch of Kindles die on her, but they were the gen 2 version with awful QC. We had a couple that were DOA as warranty replacements.
Forget Chromebooks; if you're going to spend that much, you can get an HP Stream Pro G3 11.6" running Windows 10 Pro 64 for under $200. It's an anemic Celeron processor, and it's 1366x768, and the MMC is only 64 GB, but if you want something that's cheap and will run everything you really really need, it's fine. Very lightweight, too - 2.57 lb/ / 1.17 kg. I've been trialing it for the role of "crappy notebook that I take when I don't expect to need a real computer but might end up needing one anyway", and it has done just fine.
Not only is it great for that, it works just as well in other countriea. I could do it without GPS and traffic info, but boy would it be a lot less effective. It has saved me many, many hours of frustration. The only hard part is figuring out when it's confused, which is rare but not unheard-of, especially if there's an unexpected road closure.
If the agency is sued by a requestor after denying a request, the requestor is generally entitled to an award of legal fees if a court finds that the request is legitimate. If the agency sues the requestor preemptively to prevent the release of information, they generally are not. That's the difference.
And the grand national footprint of Maxi Foods is... what? If I can get really cheap food by making a 2500-mile commute to the store, well, it's not so cheap anymore, is it? You can get avocados off the farm for 10 cents apiece in the right parts of California, but that isn't much help to someone who lives east of the Mississippi. Walmart is cheaper than the local stores, cheaper than the available major chains, and much cheaper than the farmers' markets. You can get much cheaper rice, and Sriracha by the foodservice pack, at the Asian markets, but the fresh stuff isn't much (if any) less expensive than at the regular stores. They just have specialty ingredients.
Most people, when buying bottled water, are not really paying for the water. They are paying for a cold, transportable bottle of reasonably pure water. Likewise, with gasoline, you're paying for the refining and cracking, not just the oil.
Walmart has pretty cheap groceries. You're not going to find fine cheeses or Prime meat, but if you just need staples... the produce is limited in variety, but generally inexpensive and of good quality. You find yourself in Podunk, USA, and want some Sriracha? Walmart has it. Want to buy everything in one trip? Walmart sells it.
As for shopping at one store, I generally do 90% of my shopping at a very generic grocery store. Every once in a while, I need a specialty ingredient, or higher quality meat, or whatever, but yes, one store cuts it for the vast majority of my shopping.
I can read Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, if not the underlying languages. Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Hangul, any Chinese or Japanese script? Nope, sorry. How many of these would you recognize without the red+white+swoop pattern?
It's not to get you to buy it because you like the shape, it's to allow you to recognize the genuine article even if you don't understand the writing on the bottle. It's like the Nike Swoosh - a trademark. Given how few glass bottles are sold these days, it's not so much of an advantage anymore.
Questions like these are, to me, one of the best use cases for blockchain stuff. Prepare a document, store the hash in the transaction (Btc has some data available, so it's possible), and record on blockchain. Pow, proof that you had a document with that hash available on that date. You don't even have to tell anyone what it says, but you can easily prove you had it then.
It's the kind of house where the real estate agent would call it a "study" or "library" rather than an office, but it's where my computer sits, and there's no room under the desk for a tower, because my desk is an antique built for the pre-typing era. My wife's office is mich more practical.
Well, there's also WAF. My last Windows machine was fantastic for the time, and I had a great 27" monitor. But my office is in the formal part of a formal house, and she didn't want a bunch of cables. So I bought an iMac when it was starting to age, and frankly, I'm perfectly happy with it. Unix CLI, decent GUI, and it can even run Windows in a pinch. I bought a Mac for the looks. And it does look a hell of a lot better than most of the other stuff out there, even Dell's all-in-ones, at basically no price premium.
Performance is more important than aesthetics when you're talking servers, but for a desktop? I'm not crunching numbers. I'm mostly surfing, and the Mac looks better and doesn't really cost much more (if any) than a comparably-capable Windows machine. I do miss my two-monitor setup, but that's a separate issue (the Mac can do it, I just don't; gave my old big monitor to a guy with macular degeneration so he could actually read things).
Price controls on generic drugs are already the cause of near-constant shortages in the US. Which drug is in shortage changes from week to week, but there's always at least one. I could do my job (anesthesiologist) with thirty drugs or so, but I do need to have them.
Pharmaceutical research is watched very closely to make sure it toes certain lines. Said lines do not necessarily include "actually helping people". OTOH, when they really do come up with a blockbuster drug that should make them an absolute fortune, people gripe about the cost. I've got one in mind that, yes, is around $90 a dose, but also prevented two people who were scheduled for outpatient surgery from going to the ICU overnight on a ventilator. Pharmacy complained about the cost, we just started documenting what we were avoiding by using it and all of a sudden the resistance from hospital administration melted.
Probably no worse than human clerks. I recall once reading a story of an English tourist who went to a liquor store and showed his passport to prove his age. They wouldn't take it (IIRC, somewhere in Westchester Co., NY). He pointed out that he had a UK passport, a T-shirt on with UK dates, and an English accent, and they said "tough, we only take NY state licenses, find somewhere else to go."
I hate browsing on my phone, and I don't use any of the major social media apps, but having constantly-updated maps + traffic-aware GPS, the ability to stream music, podcasts, etc. in the car on long trips, the abiliy to set up WiFi hotspot anywhere I have a cell connection, and being available whenever I'm overseas... those are great. Compared to early 2000s, yeah, it makes life much better. Compared to early 1990s, it's not even the same thing. I never get ripped off by taxis, because I show them my destination in Google Maps. They know I'm watching. I can use city buses, because the routes and schedules are programmed in (you were going to pay to travel anyway, this way you get free sightseeing with it). I get rerouted around traffic jams automatically.
Jesus, they have booze delivery now? Look at what I get for living in the sticks, where we make extra sure to stock up beforehand instead. There's no such thing as having too much alcohol, especially if a hurricane is coming - something I learned a long time ago. You'll drink it eventually.
That said, I can't imagine that it's terribly different. They all have some mechanism to make sure you're not under 21, right? Hard to do that via drone; you can always just scan a borrowed license if they want a barcode, and it's not like there's someone who can really verify the picture matches. As for the other stuff, I think the only difference is the requirement for a fully-enclosed vehicle with GPS tracking and the ability to take cash - if you know that a drone is likely to contain either a good load of great weed, or a bunch of cash, or both, the risk of said drones meeting an unpleasant fate really does skyrocket.
Why are you writing them checks? I've helped out my in-laws quite a bit, but that was after they spent years taking care of me and my wife when we were young and poor. Her brother? He's on his own.
You're Gen X, just the tail end. My wife and I are just a few years older than you, both of our younger siblings are just a few years younger - and there is a very real difference. I have a lot more in common with someone ten years older than me than I do with someone ten years younger. To me, that's enough to call it a meaningful thing.
Walking around a field is a right. Walking through one is not. The government's own guide to the law says you can't cross land where crops are growing. So, depending on the specifics, it very well can be illegal to stand in the middle of a field.
Not the same as itemized deductions. Retirement plans are on a different line. Point taken, though.
You can probably use my account to figure out who I am, if you really want to. I'm pretty sure I've dropped enough biographical data over the years. But there's a difference between "I'm safe from the NSA/FBI/CIA when they're actively pursuing a high-level spy" and "I'm safe from the IRS when they're fishing for auditees".
Well, suing the police for false arrest is very unlikely to go your way, as they have rather broad authority to make mistakes. I'm pretty anti-cop, as a general rule, but there's pretty much no way around this problem if you don't want your cities to devolve into mass chaos. Police have to make snap decisions based on very limited information, and you don't want to live in a world in which they are punished for making a wrong one, because the result is anarchy (and not the good kind).
Social media posts aren't adequate for DUI unless you're drinking/toking/whatever on the camera, but they're perfectly adequate to prove reckless driving or speeding.
Most poor people don't itemize, because the standard deduction is better for them. Just don't try to hide your income from the IRS.