Do you really get to use unlimited data? Or do you get to use 5GB of data and then they start throttling you?
I'm currently on T-Mobile's pay as you go. $30 a month for 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, 5GB unthrotled data + unlimited throtled data. The only thing that _might_ tempt me to switch for more than double the price is if the data is _really_ unlimited and entirely unthrotled.
How many potential installs are they looking for? If i were a Verizon customer i'd consider paying at _least_ $10 extra to avoid having all the extra crap installed on my phone.
(Assuming of course that after paying the Danegeld the amortized cost would still be less than switching to a different phone on a different provider.)
In short, the restriction is not specifically on GPS, it's on mapping services in general. So they can use GPS to determine your location, but they're not allowed to show the details of the location you are at in high detail. Since you can see a (not very useful) map in Pokemon Go i guess it falls under the restriction? Either that or Niantic/Alphabet/Google wasn't willing to take the time to differentiate between requests to the map DB from Pokemon Go vs requests from Google Maps.
On the other hand the jitteryness of the location reported by GPS that you observed may or may not have been due to GPS jamming by North Korea: http://www.reuters.com/article...
So yeah, based on what you just said i guess making my purchasing decision before the 560 came out was a mistake. I think i hadn't realized at the time that the "xx" portion of the number had a similar meaning and release schedule between generations.
...actually, now that i check it looks like they only started that trend with the 200 series, a year before i was making my decision. So i feel a _little_ less bad about not having figured it out at the time.
I already posted a little about this in a different sub-thread, but if my old notes are right it looks like six years ago i made the choice to go with the newish GTX 460 for a little under $200 instead of the brand new GTX 580 for about $500.
According to the benchmark site you linked it looks like the 580 had a little more than 6 times the processing power of the 460, but the 460 was less than half the price and i'm still able to play all the games i'd like, though perhaps not with the highest settings, so i don't feel like it was a terrible choice. (Although the GPU fan has started intermittently failing, so i've taken off the side of my PC and have a floor fan next to it to keep things at a reasonable temperature, but that's an entirely different issue =)
It's entirely possible though that i made a mistake by not waiting long enough for the GTX 560 to come out to make an "even" comparison. Obviously if it was a mistake that's something i'd like to correct this time around.
I may be using the terminology incorrectly. When i ordered by current PC.... almost six years ago (wow, and that would be why i'm seriously looking at components now) i believe i had the option between a number of GTX 4xx cards and one or two GTX 5xx cards that had just come out. I ended up going with the GTX 460, which had been available for awhile but not a full year. Maybe about six months?
I was thinking of doing the same thing this year. Wait for the 10xxs to come out and then wait a little longer for the price of the 9xxs to drop in response. But if i was planning to spend about $200 on the card anyway perhaps i should spend a little more and go for the 1060. I certainly don't have the old prices available now, but i don't recall the 5xxs being that cheap when they first came out, which made going for the high end of the previous generation/lower tier/whatever seem much more appealing.
In the past for moderately priced gaming PCs i've always gone for the mid-tier option ($200ish) from the previous generation, but this sounds like a pretty good deal. Is this going to be the new gold standard for the mid-price range?
Agreed. The basic premise is to make everyone with reasonable expectations content with their life. Obviously some issues are more complex and intractable than others, but there's definitely some low hanging fruit we could get started with.
Realistically we can go in one of two directions. We can try to lock everything down, which as you've detailed eventually means locking EVERYTHING down. Constant surveillance by a police state everywhere you go.
Or we can go in the direction of happiness and freedom. Happy and content people generally don't want to kill other people. Especially not if it puts themselves at risk. You do this by:
Reducing income disparities (not necessarily full communism or even socialism, but at the very least narrowing the gap between the 1% and everyone else, and making sure people either have universal basic income or a _guarantee_ of a job if they want one.)
Ensuring equality for _everyone_. No downtrodden racial or religious or gender or whatever group that will feel the need to rebel.
Funding _effective_ mental health treatment.
Legalizing drugs and eliminating the DEA (if you know someone whose life is being ruined by addiction that's very sad, but let's try to convince them to get counseling and treatment rather than trying to make them and lots of other people criminals while inadvertently funding murderous drug cartels.)
And most importantly, we need to work on seeing that all these improvements happen worldwide. Not necessarily all at once, but there needs to be obvious progress. It's no good if you fix everything in your own country but the next country over is still in a crappy situation and blames you for it, regardless of whether that blame is fair or not.
Even then there will still be the occasional person who's mentally unbalanced and upset that some group they dislike is getting "preferential" (i.e. fair) treatment and will decide to go kill some people. But you can't stop all the bad stuff form happening in life. We just need to accept that some risks are unavoidable (like the much higher risk of injury or death if you choose to travel by automobile, which 99% of us seem to be just fine with) and get on with our lives.
A popular(?) theory is that now that Sony and Microsoft have fairly standardized hardware they are switching to a more iPhone type release schedule, where they will be releasing updated versions at a more regular interval but maintaining support and continuing releases for the previous (mini) generation.
By which theory in another two or three years they'll come out with XBOne.Three and PS4.3 and the original XBOne and PS4 will be retired from active development but the XBOne.Two and PS4.2 will still be supported.
I guess idea of a switch from generations to an "ecosystem" is that it will help keep users and developers locked in instead of having to re-compete for the same user base. I have no idea if it will actually work out that way, but we'll see.
Good point! It _is_ possible to change it, but as you said it's linked to other elements that i don't necessarily want to be the same color as the taskbar, and the choice of colors they give you is _very_ limited. Even if i were willing to have the title bars be the same light grey that color wasn't an option without resorting to a 3rd party program.
Have they made it so i can change the color of the taskbar to any color i want? (Without installing Classic Shell.) More importantly, have they made it so i can change the text color in the taskbar, and more importantly the systray? Really it would be nice if they just enabled all of the settings that you _used_ to be able to set via the.theme files.
I was able to change the color of my taskbar to a nice light grey with Classic Shell and by switching to the AeroLite theme i was able to get black text in the actual taskbar. But the text in the systray is still white on light grey, making it practically unusable.
6: Fear of malicious apps: As with #2 a lot of people don't give a fuck, but as more and more stories come out about malicious apps slipping past the security of the official stores more and more people will be wary of downloading an app they're not sure they can trust.
7: Lack of space: Many phones have limited space and don't allow you to use an SD card. On my Android phone when i dip below 500 MB of free space it won't let me install anything new, or even update an existing app. So i can either find some music or photos i want to delete or an old app i want to uninstall or just say screw it, i didn't want that new app that badly anyway.
And finally, N: The original premise, most people already have all the apps they really need: This by itself might not kill app downloads, but when you combine it with all the other issues listed above it provides a strong incentive to just not bother.
That's a perfectly reasonable comparison. Of course given that cars kill a little over 30,000 people a year (at least in recent years, it's been higher in the past) it is not entirely unreasonably to call cars "death traps" as well. They're just a death trap we accept as a necessary part of life.
And for a number of years they've also acted as my personal benchmark for comparison with other causes of death when trying to determine how serious a problem is. Does it kill less than 30,000 people a year? Then maybe attempting to fix that problem shouldn't be your #1 top priority, especially if the attempted fix will cause other problems.
So when you say "small airplanes are approximately as safe as driving a car" what my brain instantly converted that to internally was "small airplanes: much worse than 9/11!"
I am very excited about this announcement both because whoever came up with the original design "feature" was a horrible human being and deserves to fry in the afterlife, but also because it proves that i do not actually hate all change! Some change is good!
Now if you'll excuse me, i need to get back my losing fight to keep using the Classic/XP Windows UI, menu bars instead of ribbons, and the KitKat Google UI.
I did specify later in the post that i was talking about the ineffectiveness of outlawing popular drugs, but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume you're just didn't read the entire thing before responding.
Even so, i don't think your example really supports the case you want to build.
" Drug makers abandoned it, and soon-enough, it was outlawed for the good reasons I described."
From wikipedia: "Desomorphine was first synthesised in the U.S. in 1932 and patented on November 13, 1934. In Russia, desomorphine was declared an illegal narcotic analgesic in 1998."
So is wikipedia totally wrong about this, or do you think 66 years between being created and being declared illegal in Russia is "soon-enough"?
"Outlawing it did NOT lead to a ton of people desperately seeking it. On the contrary---It was not until the recent 'Krokodil' epidemic in Russia that any American even had knowledge of the drug."
So you're saying that outlawing it prevented an epidemic... until there was an epidemic? Sounds more like a failed anti-tiger rock.
"No one was clamouring for it just because it was illegal."
I never said that. I said that making a drug that people already want illegal doesn't work. But apparently there were eventually a million people clamoring for it despite it being illegal. So either making it illegal didn't prevent that, in which case your argument is wrong, or making it illegal actually encouraged that, in which case your argument _very_ wrong.
"Russia got the problem under control by making codeine a prescription-only drug. Oh, hey, that's another example of a prohibition of a drug actually curtailing a problem"
I think you need to check the definition of "prohibition". And that's great, they managed to curtail the problem of some people doing stupid things with a bad drug by making it more difficult for everyone else to get a good and useful drug.
And finally, it's impossible to gather hard evidence on this one way or the other, but i strongly suspect there wouldn't be very many people interested in what clearly sounds like a crappy drug if they had easy and legal access to safer, and possibly more rewarding, alternative drugs.
"Golly, I thought that the US ruled the world, but apparently that is not the case. .."
Because it has been repeatedly shown that trying to outlaw any kind of drug only leads to even worse health problems, violence, crime, loss of citizen's rights, loss of revenue, increased government spending, and just all around misery.
Tax it, sure. Regulate it, sure. Especially when it comes down to forcing manufacturers to accurately inform their customers of the contents of the product and any potential risks. Or putting restrictions on where and when people can imbibe the drug in question. (One can argue about what exactly those limits should be, but at least some things like "don't smoke in indoor public spaces" and "don't drink while driving" are perfectly reasonable.)
But outlawing tobacco (or any other popular drug) would just be a disaster for everyone.
Minutephysics posted an interesting video putting forth a theory i don't think i've ever heard before along those lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The short version is, given a set of randomly chosen groups there will be a distribution of various factors, in particular for this case we're concerned about size, in which _usually_ it follows some kind of bell curve.
Take countries, if you measure population a very small number of countries have high populations and contain the majority of the human race. If you measure size, a very small number take up a large area and contain the majority of the available surface area of the planet. If you pick a random person or a random square mile it is very likely it will be from one of those populous or large countries. But there are (comparatively) a huge number of other, smaller, less densely populated countries on the planet.
So by the same rule, statistically speaking, we should expect that we are one of the most populous species occupying one of the largest inhabited planets. And we should expect to find _many_ other species, each of which inhabits a small world and has a comparatively small population. And if you continue along those lines you should also expect those planets to be in closer orbits around smaller, dimmer stars, etc.
Of course there are some obvious problems with this theory. It is only a statistical likelihood for starters. _Someone_ has to be living in the smaller places, and maybe, against the odds, we are the "minority" and there multiple other races with trillions of members living on giant planets. Or of course we might be the only one.
Another "problem" with this logic is that i've seen the same argument used to "prove" that the world is about to end. The total human population keeps going up over time. You are statistically most likely to be born during the time of the greatest population. Therefore the population will _not_ continue to go up in the future, in fact statistically speaking it "ought" to be smaller than it is now, and the smaller it is in the future the more likely you are to be born during the time in which you actually were born. Ergo the world is about to end.
Cruz and Kasich (and the others while they were still in) were playing iterative rounds of something resembling the Prisoner's Dilemma. Choosing to stay in the race increased their odds of being the nominee by a large factor _if_ there was a contested convention. However staying in the race, and thus dividing the non-Trump votes, also increased the odds that Trump would win outright and there _wouldn't_ be a contested convention.
If one of them had decided to drop out much earlier the other one might have been able to stop Trump from getting enough votes to lock in the nomination and steal it away from him at the convention. (This makes it slightly different from regular Prisoner's Dilemma in that cooperating involves the two players choosing different actions.) Given that going by the number of delegates the one who probably should have dropped out early was Kasich, it's kind of pathetic that he drug his heels long enough to quit _right_ after Cruz. Good job you two! Your arrogant electoral mutual suicide pact has all but guaranteed a Trump nomination!
(I wonder if there were any backroom negotiations going on to try and convince Kasich to drop out in exchange for a vice presidential slot? That's not something that's usually done but this was a pretty unusual case.)
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Do you really get to use unlimited data? Or do you get to use 5GB of data and then they start throttling you?
I'm currently on T-Mobile's pay as you go. $30 a month for 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, 5GB unthrotled data + unlimited throtled data. The only thing that _might_ tempt me to switch for more than double the price is if the data is _really_ unlimited and entirely unthrotled.
They probably receive $10 per app install, if they install a dozen different apps from other companies, you'd be paying more like $120 extra.
According to TFS, "Verizon was seeking between $1 and $2 for each device affected".
So if they install a dozen different apps that would be $12 - $24.
How many potential installs are they looking for? If i were a Verizon customer i'd consider paying at _least_ $10 extra to avoid having all the extra crap installed on my phone.
(Assuming of course that after paying the Danegeld the amortized cost would still be less than switching to a different phone on a different provider.)
Or another early sign that the AI revolution may be different from earlier industrial revolutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Since the rest of the thread seems to have devolved into a lot of name calling, here is some results from 5 minutes of google searching:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/go...
http://ogleearth.com/2012/07/c...
In short, the restriction is not specifically on GPS, it's on mapping services in general. So they can use GPS to determine your location, but they're not allowed to show the details of the location you are at in high detail. Since you can see a (not very useful) map in Pokemon Go i guess it falls under the restriction? Either that or Niantic/Alphabet/Google wasn't willing to take the time to differentiate between requests to the map DB from Pokemon Go vs requests from Google Maps.
On the other hand the jitteryness of the location reported by GPS that you observed may or may not have been due to GPS jamming by North Korea:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Just a small math error on Orwell's part. He thought we'd hit peak dystopia 16 years before the year 2000, but it was actually 16 years after.
Looks like we're crossing the streams :)
...actually, now that i check it looks like they only started that trend with the 200 series, a year before i was making my decision. So i feel a _little_ less bad about not having figured it out at the time.
So yeah, based on what you just said i guess making my purchasing decision before the 560 came out was a mistake. I think i hadn't realized at the time that the "xx" portion of the number had a similar meaning and release schedule between generations.
I already posted a little about this in a different sub-thread, but if my old notes are right it looks like six years ago i made the choice to go with the newish GTX 460 for a little under $200 instead of the brand new GTX 580 for about $500.
According to the benchmark site you linked it looks like the 580 had a little more than 6 times the processing power of the 460, but the 460 was less than half the price and i'm still able to play all the games i'd like, though perhaps not with the highest settings, so i don't feel like it was a terrible choice. (Although the GPU fan has started intermittently failing, so i've taken off the side of my PC and have a floor fan next to it to keep things at a reasonable temperature, but that's an entirely different issue =)
It's entirely possible though that i made a mistake by not waiting long enough for the GTX 560 to come out to make an "even" comparison. Obviously if it was a mistake that's something i'd like to correct this time around.
I may be using the terminology incorrectly. When i ordered by current PC.... almost six years ago (wow, and that would be why i'm seriously looking at components now) i believe i had the option between a number of GTX 4xx cards and one or two GTX 5xx cards that had just come out. I ended up going with the GTX 460, which had been available for awhile but not a full year. Maybe about six months?
I was thinking of doing the same thing this year. Wait for the 10xxs to come out and then wait a little longer for the price of the 9xxs to drop in response. But if i was planning to spend about $200 on the card anyway perhaps i should spend a little more and go for the 1060. I certainly don't have the old prices available now, but i don't recall the 5xxs being that cheap when they first came out, which made going for the high end of the previous generation/lower tier/whatever seem much more appealing.
In the past for moderately priced gaming PCs i've always gone for the mid-tier option ($200ish) from the previous generation, but this sounds like a pretty good deal. Is this going to be the new gold standard for the mid-price range?
Agreed. The basic premise is to make everyone with reasonable expectations content with their life. Obviously some issues are more complex and intractable than others, but there's definitely some low hanging fruit we could get started with.
Realistically we can go in one of two directions. We can try to lock everything down, which as you've detailed eventually means locking EVERYTHING down. Constant surveillance by a police state everywhere you go.
Or we can go in the direction of happiness and freedom. Happy and content people generally don't want to kill other people. Especially not if it puts themselves at risk. You do this by:
Reducing income disparities (not necessarily full communism or even socialism, but at the very least narrowing the gap between the 1% and everyone else, and making sure people either have universal basic income or a _guarantee_ of a job if they want one.)
Ensuring equality for _everyone_. No downtrodden racial or religious or gender or whatever group that will feel the need to rebel.
Funding _effective_ mental health treatment.
Legalizing drugs and eliminating the DEA (if you know someone whose life is being ruined by addiction that's very sad, but let's try to convince them to get counseling and treatment rather than trying to make them and lots of other people criminals while inadvertently funding murderous drug cartels.)
And most importantly, we need to work on seeing that all these improvements happen worldwide. Not necessarily all at once, but there needs to be obvious progress. It's no good if you fix everything in your own country but the next country over is still in a crappy situation and blames you for it, regardless of whether that blame is fair or not.
Even then there will still be the occasional person who's mentally unbalanced and upset that some group they dislike is getting "preferential" (i.e. fair) treatment and will decide to go kill some people. But you can't stop all the bad stuff form happening in life. We just need to accept that some risks are unavoidable (like the much higher risk of injury or death if you choose to travel by automobile, which 99% of us seem to be just fine with) and get on with our lives.
A popular(?) theory is that now that Sony and Microsoft have fairly standardized hardware they are switching to a more iPhone type release schedule, where they will be releasing updated versions at a more regular interval but maintaining support and continuing releases for the previous (mini) generation.
By which theory in another two or three years they'll come out with XBOne.Three and PS4.3 and the original XBOne and PS4 will be retired from active development but the XBOne.Two and PS4.2 will still be supported.
I guess idea of a switch from generations to an "ecosystem" is that it will help keep users and developers locked in instead of having to re-compete for the same user base. I have no idea if it will actually work out that way, but we'll see.
Good point! It _is_ possible to change it, but as you said it's linked to other elements that i don't necessarily want to be the same color as the taskbar, and the choice of colors they give you is _very_ limited. Even if i were willing to have the title bars be the same light grey that color wasn't an option without resorting to a 3rd party program.
Have they made it so i can change the color of the taskbar to any color i want? (Without installing Classic Shell.) More importantly, have they made it so i can change the text color in the taskbar, and more importantly the systray? Really it would be nice if they just enabled all of the settings that you _used_ to be able to set via the .theme files.
I was able to change the color of my taskbar to a nice light grey with Classic Shell and by switching to the AeroLite theme i was able to get black text in the actual taskbar. But the text in the systray is still white on light grey, making it practically unusable.
Since you've made a list, i'll add to it:
6: Fear of malicious apps: As with #2 a lot of people don't give a fuck, but as more and more stories come out about malicious apps slipping past the security of the official stores more and more people will be wary of downloading an app they're not sure they can trust.
7: Lack of space: Many phones have limited space and don't allow you to use an SD card. On my Android phone when i dip below 500 MB of free space it won't let me install anything new, or even update an existing app. So i can either find some music or photos i want to delete or an old app i want to uninstall or just say screw it, i didn't want that new app that badly anyway.
And finally, N: The original premise, most people already have all the apps they really need: This by itself might not kill app downloads, but when you combine it with all the other issues listed above it provides a strong incentive to just not bother.
That's a perfectly reasonable comparison. Of course given that cars kill a little over 30,000 people a year (at least in recent years, it's been higher in the past) it is not entirely unreasonably to call cars "death traps" as well. They're just a death trap we accept as a necessary part of life.
And for a number of years they've also acted as my personal benchmark for comparison with other causes of death when trying to determine how serious a problem is. Does it kill less than 30,000 people a year? Then maybe attempting to fix that problem shouldn't be your #1 top priority, especially if the attempted fix will cause other problems.
So when you say "small airplanes are approximately as safe as driving a car" what my brain instantly converted that to internally was "small airplanes: much worse than 9/11!"
And fits comfortably in my hand!
...no wait, they stopped making them reasonably sized after the first gen Moto X.
Oh wait, that hasn't been true of the Nexus line since Nexus One.
So Motorola!
So.... the answer is Sony now i guess?
"...or have a job", apparently.
I am very excited about this announcement both because whoever came up with the original design "feature" was a horrible human being and deserves to fry in the afterlife, but also because it proves that i do not actually hate all change! Some change is good!
Now if you'll excuse me, i need to get back my losing fight to keep using the Classic/XP Windows UI, menu bars instead of ribbons, and the KitKat Google UI.
"Where's the greek guy with the electric hair to explain all this?"
You mean this guy?
I did specify later in the post that i was talking about the ineffectiveness of outlawing popular drugs, but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume you're just didn't read the entire thing before responding.
."
Even so, i don't think your example really supports the case you want to build.
" Drug makers abandoned it, and soon-enough, it was outlawed for the good reasons I described."
From wikipedia: "Desomorphine was first synthesised in the U.S. in 1932 and patented on November 13, 1934. In Russia, desomorphine was declared an illegal narcotic analgesic in 1998."
So is wikipedia totally wrong about this, or do you think 66 years between being created and being declared illegal in Russia is "soon-enough"?
"Outlawing it did NOT lead to a ton of people desperately seeking it. On the contrary---It was not until the recent 'Krokodil' epidemic in Russia that any American even had knowledge of the drug."
So you're saying that outlawing it prevented an epidemic... until there was an epidemic? Sounds more like a failed anti-tiger rock.
"No one was clamouring for it just because it was illegal."
I never said that. I said that making a drug that people already want illegal doesn't work. But apparently there were eventually a million people clamoring for it despite it being illegal. So either making it illegal didn't prevent that, in which case your argument is wrong, or making it illegal actually encouraged that, in which case your argument _very_ wrong.
"Russia got the problem under control by making codeine a prescription-only drug. Oh, hey, that's another example of a prohibition of a drug actually curtailing a problem"
I think you need to check the definition of "prohibition". And that's great, they managed to curtail the problem of some people doing stupid things with a bad drug by making it more difficult for everyone else to get a good and useful drug.
And finally, it's impossible to gather hard evidence on this one way or the other, but i strongly suspect there wouldn't be very many people interested in what clearly sounds like a crappy drug if they had easy and legal access to safer, and possibly more rewarding, alternative drugs.
"Golly, I thought that the US ruled the world, but apparently that is not the case. .
Holy non-sequitur Batman?
Because it has been repeatedly shown that trying to outlaw any kind of drug only leads to even worse health problems, violence, crime, loss of citizen's rights, loss of revenue, increased government spending, and just all around misery.
Tax it, sure. Regulate it, sure. Especially when it comes down to forcing manufacturers to accurately inform their customers of the contents of the product and any potential risks. Or putting restrictions on where and when people can imbibe the drug in question. (One can argue about what exactly those limits should be, but at least some things like "don't smoke in indoor public spaces" and "don't drink while driving" are perfectly reasonable.)
But outlawing tobacco (or any other popular drug) would just be a disaster for everyone.
Minutephysics posted an interesting video putting forth a theory i don't think i've ever heard before along those lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The short version is, given a set of randomly chosen groups there will be a distribution of various factors, in particular for this case we're concerned about size, in which _usually_ it follows some kind of bell curve.
Take countries, if you measure population a very small number of countries have high populations and contain the majority of the human race. If you measure size, a very small number take up a large area and contain the majority of the available surface area of the planet. If you pick a random person or a random square mile it is very likely it will be from one of those populous or large countries. But there are (comparatively) a huge number of other, smaller, less densely populated countries on the planet.
So by the same rule, statistically speaking, we should expect that we are one of the most populous species occupying one of the largest inhabited planets. And we should expect to find _many_ other species, each of which inhabits a small world and has a comparatively small population. And if you continue along those lines you should also expect those planets to be in closer orbits around smaller, dimmer stars, etc.
Of course there are some obvious problems with this theory. It is only a statistical likelihood for starters. _Someone_ has to be living in the smaller places, and maybe, against the odds, we are the "minority" and there multiple other races with trillions of members living on giant planets. Or of course we might be the only one.
Another "problem" with this logic is that i've seen the same argument used to "prove" that the world is about to end. The total human population keeps going up over time. You are statistically most likely to be born during the time of the greatest population. Therefore the population will _not_ continue to go up in the future, in fact statistically speaking it "ought" to be smaller than it is now, and the smaller it is in the future the more likely you are to be born during the time in which you actually were born. Ergo the world is about to end.
Cruz and Kasich (and the others while they were still in) were playing iterative rounds of something resembling the Prisoner's Dilemma. Choosing to stay in the race increased their odds of being the nominee by a large factor _if_ there was a contested convention. However staying in the race, and thus dividing the non-Trump votes, also increased the odds that Trump would win outright and there _wouldn't_ be a contested convention.
If one of them had decided to drop out much earlier the other one might have been able to stop Trump from getting enough votes to lock in the nomination and steal it away from him at the convention. (This makes it slightly different from regular Prisoner's Dilemma in that cooperating involves the two players choosing different actions.) Given that going by the number of delegates the one who probably should have dropped out early was Kasich, it's kind of pathetic that he drug his heels long enough to quit _right_ after Cruz. Good job you two! Your arrogant electoral mutual suicide pact has all but guaranteed a Trump nomination!
(I wonder if there were any backroom negotiations going on to try and convince Kasich to drop out in exchange for a vice presidential slot? That's not something that's usually done but this was a pretty unusual case.)