At least they are banned from Central Park - that place would become uninhabitable very quickly if the dogs were allowed in.
If dogs are banned in Central Park, they're doing a poor job of enforcement. I visited in July and at least two families had dogs with them. One of the dogs was even stalking a pigeon on a grassed area.
There fore I think that "alot" actually is a good word.
No, it's not. Unlike "breakfast" and "therefore", what you think is a good word is too close in spelling to an existing word with a completely different meaning, "allot".
To be fair, it *is* slower when paying individually at restaurants, since the server can't take all the bills and cards and run it through a magstripe terminal, then bring them all back for signing. Now, a single wireless POS machine (very rarely two) has to make its way to every person at the table.
Contactless or tap payments, while convenient, ironically seems to contradict the entire point of having chip & PIN by skipping both authentication methods. Though as long as tap payments are limited to a per-transaction amount ($25? $50?), thieves will get get less POS mileage out of stolen cards.
OK, it's more of an inconvenience than a necessity. It's ridiculous that the US has barely started to use the system though -- it's almost 10 years old.
The US hasn't switched to metric system or dollar coins yet. Partly due to cost, partly due to "things works fine the way they are," and I suspect partly because they must be "leaders" in everything and can't be seen as "following the rest of the world."
I predict that the US still won't have fully (or at least 99%) converted to chip&pin credit card terminals (even with magstripe fallback) by 2020.
That is why it is getting increasingly tough to find a phone with a replaceable battery.
Or, you could buy something other than an iPhone.
Or a Nexus 4. Or a Nexus 5. Or an HTC One / One X+. Or a Sony Xperia Z1. Or an LG G2. Or a Nokia Lumia 1020.
The AC is correct. A surprising number of high-end smartphones, including Google's own flagship units, have followed Apple by using non-replaceable batteries.
Canada's health care system is in some trouble and costs are rising due to various issues, but it is not in danger of "collapsing" into the mess that the US had, or is currently working towards. The wealthy often do go to the US and elsewhere for more timely treatment of critical illness, but if anything that relieves pressure on the domestic health care providers (and they still have to pay taxes and subsidies into the healthcare system regardless).
And don't use our wealthy going elsewhere for treatment as proof that our system is flawed and incapable of supporting itself, because many US citizens have been dependent on the cheaper prescription drug orders to the US being filled by Canadian pharmacies, legal or otherwise.
Lack of housing bubble: As much as our current Conservative government loves to trot out our more regulated banking system as the beacon of hope to the world, they actually were trying to follow the US in deregulating banks. The only thing that stopped them was that they had a minority government at the time, so the opposition parties prevented that from happening, saving us from the 2008 housing bubble burst.
I'd dispute that. Though they're no doubt capable of inflicting massive damage, the Chinese military does not have the overconfidence borne of defeating a major power in war, like the Japanese had against Russia.
I don't agree. For all that I've no use for people who don't realize that, unlike many recent ventures, the US fought WWII for very good reasons, and probably saved millions of lives by doing so
Since you seem a bit confused about the reason the United States of America joined the war effort let me educate you. The USA practised an isolationist policy and refused to join World War II to defeat Germany and its allies until Japan carried out an attack on Pearl Harbor. The entire attack would not have happened except for a delay by some US political figure whose name I forget at the moment to see the Japanese Ambassador. When the Japanese Ambassador and his aid heard of the attack from the person they were meeting they were gravely disappointed. There is a fact-based movie about the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor; not the crap movie made of recent vintage.
(Bold emphasis mine.)
Not the poster you're responding to, but if this fact-based movie you speak of is Tora! Tora! Tora!, you're forgetting key details.
In that movie it's made quite clear that the entire attack would happen whether or not the Japanese ambassador saw the US official. That delay was also secondary to another delay caused by a Japanese security directive that meant the regular typist(s) couldn't type up the last of the 14-part message, and a much slower hunt-and-peck non-typist with enough security clearance had to be used instead.
Whether that part of the movie is accurate is also largely irrelevant, since in reality the 14-part message was neither a declaration of war nor severed diplomatic relations (though combined with intercepted Japanese instruction to their embassy to destroy their decoding gear, it was taken as a strong indicator that either would've happened shortly afterward). Documents revealed in 1999 also strongly suggest the Japanese military convinced the government not to do so before their surprise attack happened.
Better question: what game actually requires this?
Seriously now. Unless you're trying to just throw money away on some 6-screen rig or something, a single-screen at 1920x1080 will run almost all games of today fine from 3-year-old cards.
X-Plane... though some argue that's not a "game." Even on 1080p with the latest, fastest consumer GPUs, you can't max out all the GPU-dependent settings on a scenery-heavy area without fps dropping to single digits.
I worked at a cafe in Ontario, and we had so many tax rules that the company writing our POS software couldn't even get it to work properly.
That's still at the provincial (state) level. GP post already mentioned the stupidity of hundreds if not thousands of city/county/district-level sales and use taxes per state, each of which might have slightly different tax rules like you see in your cafe.
So if your POS software company is already having a hard time working at a provincial level, multiply that by up to the number of municipal areas to see how much worse it is in the US.
Facebook datamining and consumer focus is exactly the opposite of Blackberry's claim to fame of security and enterprise focus.
This isn't to say a FB buyout of BB is or was out of the question, but BB has done very poorly in the consumer space, and being bought by FB would result in many remaining enterprise customers dropping them like a hot potato.
In Australia and New Zealand we also have a GST system just like Canada. And Simgapore.
It's what a sensible country does. Your state based tax system is pretty brain damaged and only going to cause more and more problems as time goes on..... goodluck with that.
State taxes (or provincial ones in Canada) are bad enough but manageable due to limited numbers, and you usually know if you're in one state/province or another.
But the US goes even further and has county/district sales and use taxes, adding thousands of slightly different tax rates across the country. Check out California's... and that's just for locations starting with "A"! Texas has an an equally ridiculous long list of slightly different rates.
This means that the shop down the street, but in a different county, may charge you slightly more or less for a product that has the same sticker price (which are almost always pre-tax numbers in the US... Canada does too but at least we don't do local sales taxes). I suppose locals know exactly where the county lines are, but what a mess to keep track of.
I get the historical reasons why this is--it's similar to why there's no federal or even in-state standards for election systems. Each county is theoretically independently managed and sets their own rates. This works for property taxes and infrequent purchases, but not online goods and services.
It's no wonder US online retailers and services have resisted sales tax for so long, it's a logistical nightmare to set up the database of thousands of tax rates across the country and keep them up to date.
But on that point.... if merely "driving with a monitor visible to the driver" is illegal, then wouldn't a completely integrated HUD system in an advanced vehicle also be illegal?
It's not "merely" driving with a monitor visible to driver. That was my first thought too, but after checking the full text of the Section, it includes a pretty comprehensive list of exceptions including vehicle info display and GPS, under which an integrated HUD system would definitely be covered.
My comment came from a misunderstanding of the phrase "the better part of" (or even "the best part of" which is what 0123456 wrote).
Apparently it means "over half of" instead of "a significant majority of." It doesn't make sense to me, since that means even $501 is the better part of $1000.
Hopefully Cook learned his lesson after hiring some exec from a discount chain, to manage the Apple Retail operations. That was a disaster, and though it took a year to hire a replacement, the new retail exec at least comes from a place that cares about image and quality over penny-pinching.
By resorting to the warranty's options, Apple's operational cost rises, and the user still doesn't have wi-fi on their phone.
If I'd spent the best part of $1,000 on a phone and the wi-fi stopped wroking, the last thing I'd care about is the manufacturer's operational costs.
Perhaps if enough people send their phones back, they might not release an operating system that breaks peoples' phones next time.
Though your point is valid, it is undermined by your misrepresenting the phone's price. The number of people who actually spent $850 on an iPhone (i.e. 64 GB *and* unlocked) is a small minority. Most who buy the latest generation, will be the $200 16 GB on contract ($650 contract-free).
If you insist that this is the "true cost" of the phone whether they bought it on contract or not, then I'd better see you using the same standard for the competition, e.g. the $610 Nokia Lumia 1020, the $640 Samsung's Galaxy S4, and the $725 Galaxy Note III.
Although that's what Enterprise ended up being, the original intention was to refit Enterprise to be fully spaceflight-capable, but changes to design specs during the late 70s meant a teardown and rebuild was too costly.
So we have the irony where Star Trek fans successfully campaigned to rename the first shuttle, which ended up never actually going into space.
the obamacare website the contractors had to build in a few months and code hundreds of pages of law and regulations into logical business rules and a database schema. and no time was there testing or a ramp up of opening up the site to a few people and then allowing more people access as they work out the bugs
But the ACA has been law for 3 1/2 years.
It seems like a long time, but bureaucracy really gets in the way. A company I worked at was involved in many federal government (not USA though) projects, including one or two that came directly from signed legislation. It was not uncommon to see actual work starting a full year or more after the RFPs were put out (which themselves were a month or two after the funding was confirmed).
And this was for small projects with total funding of a few hundred thousand to a couple of million dollars, max.
You'd think the high-profile nature of ACA might make this go faster, but no: according to the contract for website development contract to CGI was awarded in late 2011... over 1.5 years after the ACA was signed.
So in fact they had less than 2 years between being awarded the contract, to getting the system up and running.
You can argue that CGI wasn't competent for the task, but you can't say they had 3.5 years to do it in.
Congrats! You managed to get stuck in an infinite loop in a self-contained system just two simple lines, instead of the dozens it took for Apple to do it in Mail against a remote server's junkmail system.
In aviation, more maneuverable aircraft yield right-of-way to less maneuverable aircraft. Though not actually codified, this is generally true in automotive. No one argues with the 18-wheeler. Then it breaks down when cyclists expect everyone to move for them (and this is the exact argument another gentlemen here was making the other day when claiming it's the driver's responsibility to adjust *their* behavior to accommodate cyclists).
Maybe motorcycles and bicycles should also be automated. I mean, fair is fair.
It's not just bicycles, the practice breaks down for anything smaller than a car, like mopeds and of course pedestrians.
I suspect it has to do with relative speeds, and available room to manoeuvre. A car and an 18 wheeler are wildly different masses but can move at the same speed on the roadway. A smaller plane might be slower than a bigger one, but can manoeuvre better and it isn't restricted to 2 dimensions for avoiding a collision.
For the slower, smaller things on the road: they may technically be more manoeuvrable but the speed differences make it harder to get out of the way in time. Bikes/mopeds are restricted to veering left and right, with curb or barrier limiting choices further. Pedestrians have more freedom of movement but even less speed.
As for the gentleman saying drivers have to adjust their behaviour to accommodate cyclists: as you noted cyclists aren't angels, but generally speaking, he's not wrong. Bikes legally belong on roads, so car drivers do in fact have to accommodate them, whether it's to pass them, turning at intersections... heck, even opening driver-side doors after parking on on a street can be deadly (New York City taxis have stickers asking clients to exit passenger-side for this very reason). In many places without dedicated bike lanes, bikes are even legally allowed (and sometimes encouraged) to take the entire lane, the same way a horse-drawn carriage or tractor does, so cars would have to move an entire lane to pass. Most cyclists are reluctant to take advantage of this last privilege because they do recognize the inconveniences they've already put on drivers and don't want to cause even more grief, but they reduce own their safety by not doing so.
Lying on an affidavit is perjury and gathering evidence is limited to what the warrant states. Other evidence outside the scope of the warrant requires another warrant before it can be taken. Otherwise that evidence is inadmissible.
Evidence against an accused, sure. The journalist was not charged with anything illegal, none of her notes would be used to prosecute her for anything.
This was an intel-gathering operation. Doesn't matter if the warrant doesn't cover it, the information is now exposed to whatever agencies wanted it in the first place, and they will take action against the [disloyal | patriotic] informants in ways the legal system can't handle. They've acted on intel obtained by far worse means, this won't even make them blink.
We're just lucky the journalist didn't get served with one of those can't-admit-you-got-one national security certificates, and is able to tell her story.
I think it comes down to the fact that Microsoft just released Windows 8.1. Like all previous service pack updates, substantial or otherwise, this one is free. The difference here is that the release of that has hit so close to the release of Mavericks. In that light, charging for an OSX update that doesn't feature too many obvious changes likely wouldn't go over well amongst many. So Apple traded some minor profit for good publicity.
The impression I got is that it's a semi-permanent change, though, i.e. future OSX upgrades would also be free.
It's actually a rather staggering amount of potential sales they're passing up on for this OSX version alone: close to $1 billion at the previous price of $20 (assuming 40-50 million Mavericks-capable Macs sold since 2007, given that Macs now have an installed base of 72 million, 28 million copies of Mountain Lion sold as of June excluding pre-installs).
Not to mention the possibility that once self-driving cars become more widespread, they could be granted lanes and eventually entire roadways to drive at higher speeds than regular traffic, subject to road conditions of course.
The downside to that is that higher speed = more fuel, until they figure out a way to safely draft.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they are banned from Central Park - that place would become uninhabitable very quickly if the dogs were allowed in.
If dogs are banned in Central Park, they're doing a poor job of enforcement. I visited in July and at least two families had dogs with them. One of the dogs was even stalking a pigeon on a grassed area.
There fore I think that "alot" actually is a good word.
No, it's not. Unlike "breakfast" and "therefore", what you think is a good word is too close in spelling to an existing word with a completely different meaning, "allot".
To be fair, it *is* slower when paying individually at restaurants, since the server can't take all the bills and cards and run it through a magstripe terminal, then bring them all back for signing. Now, a single wireless POS machine (very rarely two) has to make its way to every person at the table.
Contactless or tap payments, while convenient, ironically seems to contradict the entire point of having chip & PIN by skipping both authentication methods. Though as long as tap payments are limited to a per-transaction amount ($25? $50?), thieves will get get less POS mileage out of stolen cards.
OK, it's more of an inconvenience than a necessity. It's ridiculous that the US has barely started to use the system though -- it's almost 10 years old.
The US hasn't switched to metric system or dollar coins yet. Partly due to cost, partly due to "things works fine the way they are," and I suspect partly because they must be "leaders" in everything and can't be seen as "following the rest of the world."
I predict that the US still won't have fully (or at least 99%) converted to chip&pin credit card terminals (even with magstripe fallback) by 2020.
That is why it is getting increasingly tough to find a phone with a replaceable battery.
Or, you could buy something other than an iPhone.
Or a Nexus 4. Or a Nexus 5. Or an HTC One / One X+. Or a Sony Xperia Z1. Or an LG G2. Or a Nokia Lumia 1020.
The AC is correct. A surprising number of high-end smartphones, including Google's own flagship units, have followed Apple by using non-replaceable batteries.
Canada's health care system is in some trouble and costs are rising due to various issues, but it is not in danger of "collapsing" into the mess that the US had, or is currently working towards. The wealthy often do go to the US and elsewhere for more timely treatment of critical illness, but if anything that relieves pressure on the domestic health care providers (and they still have to pay taxes and subsidies into the healthcare system regardless).
And don't use our wealthy going elsewhere for treatment as proof that our system is flawed and incapable of supporting itself, because many US citizens have been dependent on the cheaper prescription drug orders to the US being filled by Canadian pharmacies, legal or otherwise.
Lack of housing bubble: As much as our current Conservative government loves to trot out our more regulated banking system as the beacon of hope to the world, they actually were trying to follow the US in deregulating banks. The only thing that stopped them was that they had a minority government at the time, so the opposition parties prevented that from happening, saving us from the 2008 housing bubble burst.
The Canadians remind me of Wilson, the next door neighbor you never saw and only heard him talk behind the fence.
If memory serves, Wilson was far more intelligent and savvy to the ways of the world, and solved most of his neighbour's problems.
I'm not sure that was the metaphor you were going for :)
I'd dispute that. Though they're no doubt capable of inflicting massive damage, the Chinese military does not have the overconfidence borne of defeating a major power in war, like the Japanese had against Russia.
I don't agree. For all that I've no use for people who don't realize that, unlike many recent ventures, the US fought WWII for very good reasons, and probably saved millions of lives by doing so
Since you seem a bit confused about the reason the United States of America joined the war effort let me educate you. The USA practised an isolationist policy and refused to join World War II to defeat Germany and its allies until Japan carried out an attack on Pearl Harbor. The entire attack would not have happened except for a delay by some US political figure whose name I forget at the moment to see the Japanese Ambassador. When the Japanese Ambassador and his aid heard of the attack from the person they were meeting they were gravely disappointed. There is a fact-based movie about the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor; not the crap movie made of recent vintage.
(Bold emphasis mine.)
Not the poster you're responding to, but if this fact-based movie you speak of is Tora! Tora! Tora!, you're forgetting key details.
In that movie it's made quite clear that the entire attack would happen whether or not the Japanese ambassador saw the US official. That delay was also secondary to another delay caused by a Japanese security directive that meant the regular typist(s) couldn't type up the last of the 14-part message, and a much slower hunt-and-peck non-typist with enough security clearance had to be used instead.
Whether that part of the movie is accurate is also largely irrelevant, since in reality the 14-part message was neither a declaration of war nor severed diplomatic relations (though combined with intercepted Japanese instruction to their embassy to destroy their decoding gear, it was taken as a strong indicator that either would've happened shortly afterward). Documents revealed in 1999 also strongly suggest the Japanese military convinced the government not to do so before their surprise attack happened.
Better question: what game actually requires this?
Seriously now. Unless you're trying to just throw money away on some 6-screen rig or something, a single-screen at 1920x1080 will run almost all games of today fine from 3-year-old cards.
X-Plane... though some argue that's not a "game." Even on 1080p with the latest, fastest consumer GPUs, you can't max out all the GPU-dependent settings on a scenery-heavy area without fps dropping to single digits.
You think that's bad?
I worked at a cafe in Ontario, and we had so many tax rules that the company writing our POS software couldn't even get it to work properly.
That's still at the provincial (state) level. GP post already mentioned the stupidity of hundreds if not thousands of city/county/district-level sales and use taxes per state, each of which might have slightly different tax rules like you see in your cafe.
So if your POS software company is already having a hard time working at a provincial level, multiply that by up to the number of municipal areas to see how much worse it is in the US.
Facebook datamining and consumer focus is exactly the opposite of Blackberry's claim to fame of security and enterprise focus.
This isn't to say a FB buyout of BB is or was out of the question, but BB has done very poorly in the consumer space, and being bought by FB would result in many remaining enterprise customers dropping them like a hot potato.
In Australia and New Zealand we also have a GST system just like Canada. And Simgapore.
It's what a sensible country does. Your state based tax system is pretty brain damaged and only going to cause more and more problems as time goes on..... goodluck with that.
State taxes (or provincial ones in Canada) are bad enough but manageable due to limited numbers, and you usually know if you're in one state/province or another.
But the US goes even further and has county/district sales and use taxes, adding thousands of slightly different tax rates across the country. Check out California's... and that's just for locations starting with "A"! Texas has an an equally ridiculous long list of slightly different rates.
This means that the shop down the street, but in a different county, may charge you slightly more or less for a product that has the same sticker price (which are almost always pre-tax numbers in the US... Canada does too but at least we don't do local sales taxes). I suppose locals know exactly where the county lines are, but what a mess to keep track of.
I get the historical reasons why this is--it's similar to why there's no federal or even in-state standards for election systems. Each county is theoretically independently managed and sets their own rates. This works for property taxes and infrequent purchases, but not online goods and services.
It's no wonder US online retailers and services have resisted sales tax for so long, it's a logistical nightmare to set up the database of thousands of tax rates across the country and keep them up to date.
But on that point.... if merely "driving with a monitor visible to the driver" is illegal, then wouldn't a completely integrated HUD system in an advanced vehicle also be illegal?
It's not "merely" driving with a monitor visible to driver. That was my first thought too, but after checking the full text of the Section, it includes a pretty comprehensive list of exceptions including vehicle info display and GPS, under which an integrated HUD system would definitely be covered.
My comment came from a misunderstanding of the phrase "the better part of" (or even "the best part of" which is what 0123456 wrote).
Apparently it means "over half of" instead of "a significant majority of." It doesn't make sense to me, since that means even $501 is the better part of $1000.
Hopefully Cook learned his lesson after hiring some exec from a discount chain, to manage the Apple Retail operations. That was a disaster, and though it took a year to hire a replacement, the new retail exec at least comes from a place that cares about image and quality over penny-pinching.
By resorting to the warranty's options, Apple's operational cost rises, and the user still doesn't have wi-fi on their phone.
If I'd spent the best part of $1,000 on a phone and the wi-fi stopped wroking, the last thing I'd care about is the manufacturer's operational costs.
Perhaps if enough people send their phones back, they might not release an operating system that breaks peoples' phones next time.
Though your point is valid, it is undermined by your misrepresenting the phone's price. The number of people who actually spent $850 on an iPhone (i.e. 64 GB *and* unlocked) is a small minority. Most who buy the latest generation, will be the $200 16 GB on contract ($650 contract-free).
If you insist that this is the "true cost" of the phone whether they bought it on contract or not, then I'd better see you using the same standard for the competition, e.g. the $610 Nokia Lumia 1020, the $640 Samsung's Galaxy S4, and the $725 Galaxy Note III.
Although that's what Enterprise ended up being, the original intention was to refit Enterprise to be fully spaceflight-capable, but changes to design specs during the late 70s meant a teardown and rebuild was too costly.
So we have the irony where Star Trek fans successfully campaigned to rename the first shuttle, which ended up never actually going into space.
the obamacare website the contractors had to build in a few months and code hundreds of pages of law and regulations into logical business rules and a database schema. and no time was there testing or a ramp up of opening up the site to a few people and then allowing more people access as they work out the bugs
But the ACA has been law for 3 1/2 years.
It seems like a long time, but bureaucracy really gets in the way. A company I worked at was involved in many federal government (not USA though) projects, including one or two that came directly from signed legislation. It was not uncommon to see actual work starting a full year or more after the RFPs were put out (which themselves were a month or two after the funding was confirmed).
And this was for small projects with total funding of a few hundred thousand to a couple of million dollars, max.
You'd think the high-profile nature of ACA might make this go faster, but no: according to the contract for website development contract to CGI was awarded in late 2011... over 1.5 years after the ACA was signed.
So in fact they had less than 2 years between being awarded the contract, to getting the system up and running.
You can argue that CGI wasn't competent for the task, but you can't say they had 3.5 years to do it in.
Canada. Look up Steven Harper and muzzling scientists.
And under the banner of a Conservative government.
Congrats! You managed to get stuck in an infinite loop in a self-contained system just two simple lines, instead of the dozens it took for Apple to do it in Mail against a remote server's junkmail system.
In aviation, more maneuverable aircraft yield right-of-way to less maneuverable aircraft. Though not actually codified, this is generally true in automotive. No one argues with the 18-wheeler. Then it breaks down when cyclists expect everyone to move for them (and this is the exact argument another gentlemen here was making the other day when claiming it's the driver's responsibility to adjust *their* behavior to accommodate cyclists).
Maybe motorcycles and bicycles should also be automated. I mean, fair is fair.
It's not just bicycles, the practice breaks down for anything smaller than a car, like mopeds and of course pedestrians.
I suspect it has to do with relative speeds, and available room to manoeuvre. A car and an 18 wheeler are wildly different masses but can move at the same speed on the roadway. A smaller plane might be slower than a bigger one, but can manoeuvre better and it isn't restricted to 2 dimensions for avoiding a collision.
For the slower, smaller things on the road: they may technically be more manoeuvrable but the speed differences make it harder to get out of the way in time. Bikes/mopeds are restricted to veering left and right, with curb or barrier limiting choices further. Pedestrians have more freedom of movement but even less speed.
As for the gentleman saying drivers have to adjust their behaviour to accommodate cyclists: as you noted cyclists aren't angels, but generally speaking, he's not wrong. Bikes legally belong on roads, so car drivers do in fact have to accommodate them, whether it's to pass them, turning at intersections... heck, even opening driver-side doors after parking on on a street can be deadly (New York City taxis have stickers asking clients to exit passenger-side for this very reason). In many places without dedicated bike lanes, bikes are even legally allowed (and sometimes encouraged) to take the entire lane, the same way a horse-drawn carriage or tractor does, so cars would have to move an entire lane to pass. Most cyclists are reluctant to take advantage of this last privilege because they do recognize the inconveniences they've already put on drivers and don't want to cause even more grief, but they reduce own their safety by not doing so.
Lying on an affidavit is perjury and gathering evidence is limited to what the warrant states. Other evidence outside the scope of the warrant requires another warrant before it can be taken. Otherwise that evidence is inadmissible.
Evidence against an accused, sure. The journalist was not charged with anything illegal, none of her notes would be used to prosecute her for anything.
This was an intel-gathering operation. Doesn't matter if the warrant doesn't cover it, the information is now exposed to whatever agencies wanted it in the first place, and they will take action against the [disloyal | patriotic] informants in ways the legal system can't handle. They've acted on intel obtained by far worse means, this won't even make them blink.
We're just lucky the journalist didn't get served with one of those can't-admit-you-got-one national security certificates, and is able to tell her story.
I think it comes down to the fact that Microsoft just released Windows 8.1. Like all previous service pack updates, substantial or otherwise, this one is free. The difference here is that the release of that has hit so close to the release of Mavericks. In that light, charging for an OSX update that doesn't feature too many obvious changes likely wouldn't go over well amongst many. So Apple traded some minor profit for good publicity.
The impression I got is that it's a semi-permanent change, though, i.e. future OSX upgrades would also be free.
It's actually a rather staggering amount of potential sales they're passing up on for this OSX version alone: close to $1 billion at the previous price of $20 (assuming 40-50 million Mavericks-capable Macs sold since 2007, given that Macs now have an installed base of 72 million, 28 million copies of Mountain Lion sold as of June excluding pre-installs).
Not to mention the possibility that once self-driving cars become more widespread, they could be granted lanes and eventually entire roadways to drive at higher speeds than regular traffic, subject to road conditions of course.
The downside to that is that higher speed = more fuel, until they figure out a way to safely draft.