That's kind of a scum move on the part of Santa Cruz though. If the government intended for that land to remain open to unrestricted public use, they shouldn't have sold it in the first place. Or, at the very least, any easements should have been disclosed upfront before the sale (Aren't they supposed to be written into the deed itself, for that matter?); so that the buyers would be able to take into account that they would be denied the use of it themselves when deciding how much to offer to pay. Full disclosure, you know.
It is exceedingly rare for Apple to comment on *anything* outside of their carefully planned, prepared, and rehearsed product announcement presentations. Outside those sessions, new features/products just appear on the site or software update without fanfare.
"As an Apple customer", you ought to be long aware of this fact.
GPS is line-of-sight to the sky though. Take that away, and location services based on known WiFi points pretty quickly goes from "spotty and kind of inaccurate" to "you think I'm WHERE?!?!?". So... unless I'm missing some other technological advantage... I would think that E911, operated by the phone company and able to fall back to cell tower triangulation when GPS is unavailable, would be more accurate when the caller is indoors than turning on GPS and hoping for the best.
Yup. I own most of the Disney movies I actually like. I own, for example, the DVD of Aladdin. The only reason I'd watch it on Netflix would be if I wanted instant gratification to watch it on a whim and save the whole 60 seconds it would take to eject whatever disc is in the Playstation, walk over to the shelves, carry the DVD to the TV, and swap it in. I'm not going to pay an extra subscription to save that minute. Nor will I pay an extra fee for the availability of direct-to-video rubbish like Aladdin 2: "We couldn't afford Robin Williams this time.", Aladdin 3: "You mean Jaffar's not dead YET? WTF?", or Aladdin 4: "The one with the whales." As for the bottom of the barrel trash they produce for their cable channel? LOL LOL LOL.
So I'll skip the subscription, and just buy the Blu-Ray for the next Pixar movie. Easy.
Even if voice recognition were perfect, it'd still be only good for two things:
1) Hands-free operation when you're driving, cooking, or some other solitary tash that absolutely requires the use of both hands lest safety be compromised.
2) Novelty
Imagine trying to use speech recognition for anything productive:
"sudo space ess you space dash, return. em why ess queue el, return. use tee ee ess tee dee bee semicolon enter. caps-lock-on select space asterisk space from space caps-lock-off em ess underscore users underscore five five space caps-lock-on space where space caps-lock-off space phone underscore number equal-sign eight six seven five three zero nine backslash capital gee return"
That was painful enough just to type. Now imagine the above repeated a few dozen times in one of the open-plan offices that are all the rage now. Hell, even in a room full of cubicles, the result would be somewhere within the Venn diagram of "totally non-productive" and "utterly rage-inducing".
Well, we do know for a fact that it was the CIA, not the Air Force, that commissioned the development and production, and was the primary early operator of, the U-2 and A-12 (predecessor of the SR-71). The NRO, which designs and operates reconnoissance satellites is a joint CIA/Air Force endeavor. And rumors have been abounding since its retirement about a manned SR-71 replacement. Aircraft and spacecraft development eat up a lot of money, especially if it's done in secret. It's a bit more reasonable, I would think, to extrapolate that past behavior forward and assume that technological projects like the above are ongoing and expensive; rather than to engage in conspiracy theory.
Chavez was a profoundly unqualified and incompetent president and ultimately proved to be more into ego, authoritarianism, cronyism, and blaming his every failure on anyone but himself, than in his espoused political ideology. Maduro is more of the same, but stepped up a notch. I, for one, have seen and RCA'd more than enough engineering failures in my time to be pretty well inclined not to blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence. And I see no reason to believe that your average geopolitical type is any more competent than your average engineer (Actually, I'd evaluate them as LESS competent, overall.)
Really? I know the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But you couldn't come up with a more legit source than glen beck's propaganda rag?
If your vendor hasn't updated their app in literally years, it's not just 64-bit that's missing. It's bug fixes, security updates, new hardware features which it doesn't take advantage of, new features of any kind for that matter, and so on. That's not a vendor you should be purchasing from. And if you rely on old, unpatched, unsupported software for anything mission-critical then, quite frankly, you're as much of an ass as the vendor that's not keeping their product up-to-date. Moreover, this change has been known to be in the pipeline for years not just to developers, but to end users as well. So there's no excusing your not migrating any important data before you upgrade to iOS 11.
tl;dr version: Only dumbasses have anything to worry about.
For various political reasons, neither Russia not the US have brought their full military strength against any foe since 1945. For that matter, neither has anyone else. And no one really has any compelling interests in Afghanistan. As the other poster mentioned, it's just a nice, out of the way, place for the major powers to fight by proxy.
But if the real powers were willing to go full-up WW2, with all of the savagery that entails... mass carpet bombing from formations including hundreds of aircraft, events like the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the eastern front in the European theater, invading with literally hundreds of thousands of troops, and of course nuclear weapons... Well, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan didn't just have "militias with guns". They had actual militaries on-par with the other major powers at the beginning of the war. They had navies, air forces, tanks, modern industry and, in the case of Germeny, better technology including the first jet aircraft, superior submarines, and rocketry. And they were both soundly defeated.
That's the bottom line. No one has fully committed to fighting a real war since WW2. But if it ever does come to that, some hick masturbating about his AR-15 lower receiver whilest holed up in a barn or cave is going to wind up a whole lot of dead when a B-52 drops a few tons of high explosive on his head.
With few exceptions, the movie theater is just too sub-par to be worth going. Dunkirk may very well be one of those exceptions. But the fact is, that unless the movie involves Jedi Knights, the USS Enterprise, or Kaiju, home TVs and sound systems are fine for the vast majority of films. Nolan claim otherwise reeks of stuck-up pretentiousness.
And it's mostly the theater chains' faults. The ticket price is ever-increasing with no corresponding improvement in value. $20 for a soda and bag of semi-stale popcorn is just absurd. They don't keep the theaters clean. And they do nothing about asses who talk during the movie, use their cellphones, get up and wander around in front of you, or bring their shrieking babies.
The exception, of course, is the Alamo Drafthouse. Ever since they opened up a theater here, I've seen more movies in the theater than I had in, I'd guess, nearly a decade before. They actually make it worth it by providing a much nicer theater, good food & drinks (ZOMG, their boozy milkshakes are the bomb.), expelling the talkers and cell-phone crowd, and disallowing the shrieking babies in the first place. It's definitely now: Alamo, or I don't go.
Very little, I have no doubt. You are humoring the lie that a "pirated" work is a lost sale. It's not. I know this from personal experience. So...
Confessions of a former warez kiddie:
"Piracy" (It's not piracy, of course, no theft on the high seas is involved. But I'll indulge the cartels' weasel words.) is in no way about acquiring and actually using the content, be it software, music, or whatever. Do you think that some "pirate" who gets and cracks the latest pro version of AutoCad, for example, is actually going to use it? Of course not. I was never going to be a draftsman or mechanical engineer or the like. I was a just kid with a 28.8K modem, too much free time on my hands, too little money for a proper hobby, and the silly desire to have "elite" status on the local BBSs. That $1499 retail value copy of AutoCad was never used for more than a few doodles. It was split up into 1.44MB chunks, uploaded to a few BBSs to improve my ratio, copied off to floppies to rot in a box, and deleted when I needed room for the next thing. "Piracy" is a game, nothing more. And the way you keep score is a combination of the retail value your horde, your ratio, and your access levels on the boards. Then you graduate, get a real job, and leave it all behind.
So no. If the copyright cartels lost any money pre-DMCA; it's a trivial sum compared to the damage they've done to the tech industry. Of this, I have zero doubt.
And again, the DMCA is just one law that other interests have bought that has harmed tech. Still in RIAA-land, consider the continually precarious financial situation of the likes of Pandora, Spotify, and SoundCloud because tech does not have that the same protections against the cartel's price fixing and gouging that terrestrial radio does. Or consider the extortion that Netflix has suffered at the hands of Comcast, Verizon, et. al. because of the lack of net neutrality protections.
More like fighting back and not, as they say, "bringing a knife to a gun fight." There was a time, up through the '90s or so, when Silicon Valley wasn't much into playing the lobbying game. And it wound up hurting them fairly badly.
Consider just one law... How much money, time, and actual engineering work do you think tech has had to waste to comply with the DMCA? I couldn't even begin to guess, myself. How much Danegeld is Google forced to pay, for its YouTube unit alone, to the copyright cartels because of the DMCA? How many tech companies were full-out put out of business? It wasn't just Napster by a damn sight. If SV had been fighting equally dirty back when the RIAA and MPAA bought the DMCA for themselves, to what more productive use could tech's wasted money and effort be put versus dealing with DMCA BS? What companies would still be in business? How many developers, SysAdmins, and the like, would not have lost jobs over the years?
Of course, we'd all like it if lobbying went away. And if you can come up with an effective way for tech to fight back against its enemies buying laws in their favor, without going to DC and buying some laws of their own, I'm all ears. I can't really think of a way. And having the moral high ground doesn't do you a lot of good, after all, when the enemy had the legal high ground.
Or, since you just vandalized their property in front of witnesses and probably on-camera, they could have you arrested and probably score themselves a civil judgment against you as well.
For people who live in a "taxi city" like New York or Chicago or London, there really is very little difference between Uber, Lyft, a classic taxi, or a minicab. These are cities where a significant fraction of the populace uses taxis much of the time already. Here Uber and Lyft are additional players in the taxi economy, but they don't change the game one iota. I won't get into the politics of whether they are good or bad in these locales. That's not my soapbox.
Thing is, ride-sharing is a game changer, even in the city. I've lived in San Francisco (A "taxi city".) since well before the advent of Uber and Lyft, and used to have to rely on the occasional taxi. And you know what the change in the game is? Quality of service.
For starters, taxi dispatch is a sick, sad, joke. Oh sure, if you call that number on the side of the cab, they'll SAY a cab will be there in 20 minutes. 20 minutes later, when you call back, they'll SAY it'll be there in another 15. Call again? 15 more minutes. And so on and so on and so on. With Uber (Originally as "Ubercab"... yes, I've been using them since the very beginning.), well, I don't have to describe the car-summoning process with ride-sharing apps, do I? Since all of the billing is done through the app, the "My credit card reader is broken. Cash only. Would you like me to drive you to, on the meter, to an ATM?" scam is a thing of the past. No Uber driver has ever refused to take me to the avenues. And you can get a timely pickup in the Outer Sunset or Richmond. Not true of taxis. I've never gotten into an Uber or Lyft car that stank of smoke, pee, or vomit; also not true of taxis. And oh, did I mention how easy it is to get an Uber or Lyft, compared to the Sisyphean struggle it is to get a cab? I alluded to it. But the ability to actually get a ride when you need it where you need it and where you need to go is a massive improvement over taxis.
So yeah, while the ride-share companies did not exactly invent an entirely new industry or service in "taxi cities". Their service is so titanically superior over the legacy taxi companies that I would argue that they are very much game-changers here, even if not particularly a novelty.
Seriously? I'd love to see a pit open up and swallow Kayne, Jayz, Bey, Caitlyn, Kim, Kris, and the rest of the Kardashian pantheon, into the 9th level of the inferno too. I feel somewhat dirty even knowing the names of that many of their lot off the top of my head. But news of their "exploits" is all but impossible to miss, even in passing. Pretending total ignorance is not clever. And genuine total ignorance is contemptible.
I'd be fine with allowing airlines to add standing-room-only airplanes on two conditions:
1) Once per flight leg, every passenger is allowed to punch or kick... full force, mind you, not a symbolic little love tap, but no weapons... a single airline employee, without repercussion.
2) No less than once per quarter (Hell, let's do it at earnings call time.) every C-level, president, VP, director, and manager of the airlines must present themselves to the public. There will be no security screenings at the venue. There will be no repercussions for the actions of the public. Vendors will be on-site selling alcoholic beverages, rotten eggs and vegetables, balloons filled with pigs' blood or any other substance that the latex will hold, bricks, and shuriken.
I was trying to type "will have to write better code.". I'm not sure how exactly "will have wrote" came out, beyond that whole post being a pre-coffee incident.
For starters, I've been reading "the sky is about to fall" articles for at least 20 years about how: "In 2-3 more years Moore's Law is going to slam into a barrier imposed by the laws of physics.". The entire world of computing will come crashing down and burn, the beast will rise from the pit, the keymaster and gatekeeper will find each other, the dead will dig themselves up from their graves, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. The doom and gloom crowd have been wrong every time so far. Every time, some clever person at IBM or Intel has figured a way to cross the streams and save the world. So why should I trust the chicken littles that we're living in the end times now?
And even if Moore's Law slows down or pauses, there's plenty of room in the hardware we have today for continued improvement on the software side. Developers will just have to rely less on "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" languages and frameworks and go back to optimizing their code for performance... like they used to before crap like Java,.Net, and Rails encouraged everyone to be lazy and rely on ever-improving CPUs to make their apps not suck. Why should the hardware guys do all the work, after all? Hell, they can start by writing their code to be properly multi-threaded. My desktop, for example, has a core i7 with 4 physical cores and 8 virtual ones via hyper-threading. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've watched some program or another run a single core up to 100%, stop there, and ignore the 7 other threads it could be running simultaneously to improve its performance nearly 8-fold, no new or faster hardware needed.
The problem is that, in altogether too many cases, "charity" is not altruism at all. Instead, it is a thinly veiled canard disguising the promulgation of ideology. The Salvation Army, for example, would prefer that transgendered people freeze to death in the streets over offering them so much as a warm place to not die for eight hours. And that's just the most notorious of a number of ideological attacks on their part that have nothing to do with charitable works or helping anybody.
So, while government is certainly imperfect; it should certainly not be allowed to abrogate its responsibilities in a vain and false notion that "charity" will pick up the slack.
And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question. Because just about every time I've seen an argument for Vulkan vs. Metal it's been all ideological purity, not technological superiority.
Does Vulkan have features that are missing in Metal (And Metal 2)? Is the performance better? Do they control patents that are being denied to Apple? If I don't care so much about free software, the GPL, and all that, but want to be able to use the better product, what's the BFD?
This isn't about the rights of consumers at all. As a consumer, once money has changed hands, the hardware is yours to do with as you please. Repair it yourself. Pay Apple to repair it for you. Pay one of those sketchy mall kiosks to do so. Use in a "will it blend" video. It's all good. It's your hardware and Apple has no say in what you do with it, or what you pay any random business to do with it.
Hell, if you want to start your own repair business, you have the right to do so and Apple couldn't stop you. Hence the existence of the aforementioned sketchy mall kiosks. But you'd have to source the parts and work out how to do the work yourself.
What's going on with "right to repair" laws is that certain 3rd-party businesses want to take shortcuts, and force Apple to aid them in setting up and running their operations. They don't want to bother building relationships with parts vendors in Asia; they want to glom onto (gratis) the supply chain Apple has built over the years. They don't want to do a Chilton's-style teardown to work out their procedures on their own; they want Apple to disclose its own internal documentation, free and without proper non-disclosure arrangements.
So very much this. Given the notion that out of fast, cheap, and $x, you can have any two; it's practically a truism that PHB/MBA types will always choose fast and cheap, no matter the value of $x. The only exceptions are when you're contractually or legally obligated to have $x, such as in PCI or HIPAA environments. And even then, fast or cheap is only given up for $x very begrudgingly, and sometimes only on paper but not in reality.
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That's kind of a scum move on the part of Santa Cruz though. If the government intended for that land to remain open to unrestricted public use, they shouldn't have sold it in the first place. Or, at the very least, any easements should have been disclosed upfront before the sale (Aren't they supposed to be written into the deed itself, for that matter?); so that the buyers would be able to take into account that they would be denied the use of it themselves when deciding how much to offer to pay. Full disclosure, you know.
It is exceedingly rare for Apple to comment on *anything* outside of their carefully planned, prepared, and rehearsed product announcement presentations. Outside those sessions, new features/products just appear on the site or software update without fanfare.
"As an Apple customer", you ought to be long aware of this fact.
GPS is line-of-sight to the sky though. Take that away, and location services based on known WiFi points pretty quickly goes from "spotty and kind of inaccurate" to "you think I'm WHERE?!?!?". So... unless I'm missing some other technological advantage... I would think that E911, operated by the phone company and able to fall back to cell tower triangulation when GPS is unavailable, would be more accurate when the caller is indoors than turning on GPS and hoping for the best.
Yup. I own most of the Disney movies I actually like. I own, for example, the DVD of Aladdin. The only reason I'd watch it on Netflix would be if I wanted instant gratification to watch it on a whim and save the whole 60 seconds it would take to eject whatever disc is in the Playstation, walk over to the shelves, carry the DVD to the TV, and swap it in. I'm not going to pay an extra subscription to save that minute. Nor will I pay an extra fee for the availability of direct-to-video rubbish like Aladdin 2: "We couldn't afford Robin Williams this time.", Aladdin 3: "You mean Jaffar's not dead YET? WTF?", or Aladdin 4: "The one with the whales." As for the bottom of the barrel trash they produce for their cable channel? LOL LOL LOL.
So I'll skip the subscription, and just buy the Blu-Ray for the next Pixar movie. Easy.
Even if voice recognition were perfect, it'd still be only good for two things:
1) Hands-free operation when you're driving, cooking, or some other solitary tash that absolutely requires the use of both hands lest safety be compromised.
2) Novelty
Imagine trying to use speech recognition for anything productive:
"sudo space ess you space dash, return. em why ess queue el, return. use tee ee ess tee dee bee semicolon enter. caps-lock-on select space asterisk space from space caps-lock-off em ess underscore users underscore five five space caps-lock-on space where space caps-lock-off space phone underscore number equal-sign eight six seven five three zero nine backslash capital gee return"
That was painful enough just to type. Now imagine the above repeated a few dozen times in one of the open-plan offices that are all the rage now. Hell, even in a room full of cubicles, the result would be somewhere within the Venn diagram of "totally non-productive" and "utterly rage-inducing".
Well, we do know for a fact that it was the CIA, not the Air Force, that commissioned the development and production, and was the primary early operator of, the U-2 and A-12 (predecessor of the SR-71). The NRO, which designs and operates reconnoissance satellites is a joint CIA/Air Force endeavor. And rumors have been abounding since its retirement about a manned SR-71 replacement. Aircraft and spacecraft development eat up a lot of money, especially if it's done in secret. It's a bit more reasonable, I would think, to extrapolate that past behavior forward and assume that technological projects like the above are ongoing and expensive; rather than to engage in conspiracy theory.
Chavez was a profoundly unqualified and incompetent president and ultimately proved to be more into ego, authoritarianism, cronyism, and blaming his every failure on anyone but himself, than in his espoused political ideology. Maduro is more of the same, but stepped up a notch. I, for one, have seen and RCA'd more than enough engineering failures in my time to be pretty well inclined not to blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence. And I see no reason to believe that your average geopolitical type is any more competent than your average engineer (Actually, I'd evaluate them as LESS competent, overall.)
Really? I know the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But you couldn't come up with a more legit source than glen beck's propaganda rag?
Try:
http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/...
If your vendor hasn't updated their app in literally years, it's not just 64-bit that's missing. It's bug fixes, security updates, new hardware features which it doesn't take advantage of, new features of any kind for that matter, and so on. That's not a vendor you should be purchasing from. And if you rely on old, unpatched, unsupported software for anything mission-critical then, quite frankly, you're as much of an ass as the vendor that's not keeping their product up-to-date. Moreover, this change has been known to be in the pipeline for years not just to developers, but to end users as well. So there's no excusing your not migrating any important data before you upgrade to iOS 11.
tl;dr version: Only dumbasses have anything to worry about.
Politics.
For various political reasons, neither Russia not the US have brought their full military strength against any foe since 1945. For that matter, neither has anyone else. And no one really has any compelling interests in Afghanistan. As the other poster mentioned, it's just a nice, out of the way, place for the major powers to fight by proxy.
But if the real powers were willing to go full-up WW2, with all of the savagery that entails... mass carpet bombing from formations including hundreds of aircraft, events like the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the eastern front in the European theater, invading with literally hundreds of thousands of troops, and of course nuclear weapons... Well, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan didn't just have "militias with guns". They had actual militaries on-par with the other major powers at the beginning of the war. They had navies, air forces, tanks, modern industry and, in the case of Germeny, better technology including the first jet aircraft, superior submarines, and rocketry. And they were both soundly defeated.
That's the bottom line. No one has fully committed to fighting a real war since WW2. But if it ever does come to that, some hick masturbating about his AR-15 lower receiver whilest holed up in a barn or cave is going to wind up a whole lot of dead when a B-52 drops a few tons of high explosive on his head.
With few exceptions, the movie theater is just too sub-par to be worth going. Dunkirk may very well be one of those exceptions. But the fact is, that unless the movie involves Jedi Knights, the USS Enterprise, or Kaiju, home TVs and sound systems are fine for the vast majority of films. Nolan claim otherwise reeks of stuck-up pretentiousness.
And it's mostly the theater chains' faults. The ticket price is ever-increasing with no corresponding improvement in value. $20 for a soda and bag of semi-stale popcorn is just absurd. They don't keep the theaters clean. And they do nothing about asses who talk during the movie, use their cellphones, get up and wander around in front of you, or bring their shrieking babies.
The exception, of course, is the Alamo Drafthouse. Ever since they opened up a theater here, I've seen more movies in the theater than I had in, I'd guess, nearly a decade before. They actually make it worth it by providing a much nicer theater, good food & drinks (ZOMG, their boozy milkshakes are the bomb.), expelling the talkers and cell-phone crowd, and disallowing the shrieking babies in the first place. It's definitely now: Alamo, or I don't go.
Very little, I have no doubt. You are humoring the lie that a "pirated" work is a lost sale. It's not. I know this from personal experience. So...
Confessions of a former warez kiddie:
"Piracy" (It's not piracy, of course, no theft on the high seas is involved. But I'll indulge the cartels' weasel words.) is in no way about acquiring and actually using the content, be it software, music, or whatever. Do you think that some "pirate" who gets and cracks the latest pro version of AutoCad, for example, is actually going to use it? Of course not. I was never going to be a draftsman or mechanical engineer or the like. I was a just kid with a 28.8K modem, too much free time on my hands, too little money for a proper hobby, and the silly desire to have "elite" status on the local BBSs. That $1499 retail value copy of AutoCad was never used for more than a few doodles. It was split up into 1.44MB chunks, uploaded to a few BBSs to improve my ratio, copied off to floppies to rot in a box, and deleted when I needed room for the next thing. "Piracy" is a game, nothing more. And the way you keep score is a combination of the retail value your horde, your ratio, and your access levels on the boards. Then you graduate, get a real job, and leave it all behind.
So no. If the copyright cartels lost any money pre-DMCA; it's a trivial sum compared to the damage they've done to the tech industry. Of this, I have zero doubt.
And again, the DMCA is just one law that other interests have bought that has harmed tech. Still in RIAA-land, consider the continually precarious financial situation of the likes of Pandora, Spotify, and SoundCloud because tech does not have that the same protections against the cartel's price fixing and gouging that terrestrial radio does. Or consider the extortion that Netflix has suffered at the hands of Comcast, Verizon, et. al. because of the lack of net neutrality protections.
More like fighting back and not, as they say, "bringing a knife to a gun fight." There was a time, up through the '90s or so, when Silicon Valley wasn't much into playing the lobbying game. And it wound up hurting them fairly badly.
Consider just one law... How much money, time, and actual engineering work do you think tech has had to waste to comply with the DMCA? I couldn't even begin to guess, myself. How much Danegeld is Google forced to pay, for its YouTube unit alone, to the copyright cartels because of the DMCA? How many tech companies were full-out put out of business? It wasn't just Napster by a damn sight. If SV had been fighting equally dirty back when the RIAA and MPAA bought the DMCA for themselves, to what more productive use could tech's wasted money and effort be put versus dealing with DMCA BS? What companies would still be in business? How many developers, SysAdmins, and the like, would not have lost jobs over the years?
Of course, we'd all like it if lobbying went away. And if you can come up with an effective way for tech to fight back against its enemies buying laws in their favor, without going to DC and buying some laws of their own, I'm all ears. I can't really think of a way. And having the moral high ground doesn't do you a lot of good, after all, when the enemy had the legal high ground.
Or, since you just vandalized their property in front of witnesses and probably on-camera, they could have you arrested and probably score themselves a civil judgment against you as well.
Thing is, ride-sharing is a game changer, even in the city. I've lived in San Francisco (A "taxi city".) since well before the advent of Uber and Lyft, and used to have to rely on the occasional taxi. And you know what the change in the game is? Quality of service.
For starters, taxi dispatch is a sick, sad, joke. Oh sure, if you call that number on the side of the cab, they'll SAY a cab will be there in 20 minutes. 20 minutes later, when you call back, they'll SAY it'll be there in another 15. Call again? 15 more minutes. And so on and so on and so on. With Uber (Originally as "Ubercab"... yes, I've been using them since the very beginning.), well, I don't have to describe the car-summoning process with ride-sharing apps, do I? Since all of the billing is done through the app, the "My credit card reader is broken. Cash only. Would you like me to drive you to, on the meter, to an ATM?" scam is a thing of the past. No Uber driver has ever refused to take me to the avenues. And you can get a timely pickup in the Outer Sunset or Richmond. Not true of taxis. I've never gotten into an Uber or Lyft car that stank of smoke, pee, or vomit; also not true of taxis. And oh, did I mention how easy it is to get an Uber or Lyft, compared to the Sisyphean struggle it is to get a cab? I alluded to it. But the ability to actually get a ride when you need it where you need it and where you need to go is a massive improvement over taxis.
So yeah, while the ride-share companies did not exactly invent an entirely new industry or service in "taxi cities". Their service is so titanically superior over the legacy taxi companies that I would argue that they are very much game-changers here, even if not particularly a novelty.
Seriously? I'd love to see a pit open up and swallow Kayne, Jayz, Bey, Caitlyn, Kim, Kris, and the rest of the Kardashian pantheon, into the 9th level of the inferno too. I feel somewhat dirty even knowing the names of that many of their lot off the top of my head. But news of their "exploits" is all but impossible to miss, even in passing. Pretending total ignorance is not clever. And genuine total ignorance is contemptible.
I'd be fine with allowing airlines to add standing-room-only airplanes on two conditions:
1) Once per flight leg, every passenger is allowed to punch or kick... full force, mind you, not a symbolic little love tap, but no weapons... a single airline employee, without repercussion.
2) No less than once per quarter (Hell, let's do it at earnings call time.) every C-level, president, VP, director, and manager of the airlines must present themselves to the public. There will be no security screenings at the venue. There will be no repercussions for the actions of the public. Vendors will be on-site selling alcoholic beverages, rotten eggs and vegetables, balloons filled with pigs' blood or any other substance that the latex will hold, bricks, and shuriken.
I was trying to type "will have to write better code.". I'm not sure how exactly "will have wrote" came out, beyond that whole post being a pre-coffee incident.
Yeah... I was abut to ask... coveted by whom?
For starters, I've been reading "the sky is about to fall" articles for at least 20 years about how: "In 2-3 more years Moore's Law is going to slam into a barrier imposed by the laws of physics.". The entire world of computing will come crashing down and burn, the beast will rise from the pit, the keymaster and gatekeeper will find each other, the dead will dig themselves up from their graves, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. The doom and gloom crowd have been wrong every time so far. Every time, some clever person at IBM or Intel has figured a way to cross the streams and save the world. So why should I trust the chicken littles that we're living in the end times now?
And even if Moore's Law slows down or pauses, there's plenty of room in the hardware we have today for continued improvement on the software side. Developers will just have to rely less on "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" languages and frameworks and go back to optimizing their code for performance... like they used to before crap like Java, .Net, and Rails encouraged everyone to be lazy and rely on ever-improving CPUs to make their apps not suck. Why should the hardware guys do all the work, after all? Hell, they can start by writing their code to be properly multi-threaded. My desktop, for example, has a core i7 with 4 physical cores and 8 virtual ones via hyper-threading. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've watched some program or another run a single core up to 100%, stop there, and ignore the 7 other threads it could be running simultaneously to improve its performance nearly 8-fold, no new or faster hardware needed.
Nah. You just have Clippy do it all for you; digital assistants finally being en vogue and all.
The problem is that, in altogether too many cases, "charity" is not altruism at all. Instead, it is a thinly veiled canard disguising the promulgation of ideology. The Salvation Army, for example, would prefer that transgendered people freeze to death in the streets over offering them so much as a warm place to not die for eight hours. And that's just the most notorious of a number of ideological attacks on their part that have nothing to do with charitable works or helping anybody.
So, while government is certainly imperfect; it should certainly not be allowed to abrogate its responsibilities in a vain and false notion that "charity" will pick up the slack.
Yes. Exactly like they did with Apple:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question. Because just about every time I've seen an argument for Vulkan vs. Metal it's been all ideological purity, not technological superiority.
Does Vulkan have features that are missing in Metal (And Metal 2)? Is the performance better? Do they control patents that are being denied to Apple? If I don't care so much about free software, the GPL, and all that, but want to be able to use the better product, what's the BFD?
This isn't about the rights of consumers at all. As a consumer, once money has changed hands, the hardware is yours to do with as you please. Repair it yourself. Pay Apple to repair it for you. Pay one of those sketchy mall kiosks to do so. Use in a "will it blend" video. It's all good. It's your hardware and Apple has no say in what you do with it, or what you pay any random business to do with it.
Hell, if you want to start your own repair business, you have the right to do so and Apple couldn't stop you. Hence the existence of the aforementioned sketchy mall kiosks. But you'd have to source the parts and work out how to do the work yourself.
What's going on with "right to repair" laws is that certain 3rd-party businesses want to take shortcuts, and force Apple to aid them in setting up and running their operations. They don't want to bother building relationships with parts vendors in Asia; they want to glom onto (gratis) the supply chain Apple has built over the years. They don't want to do a Chilton's-style teardown to work out their procedures on their own; they want Apple to disclose its own internal documentation, free and without proper non-disclosure arrangements.
So very much this. Given the notion that out of fast, cheap, and $x, you can have any two; it's practically a truism that PHB/MBA types will always choose fast and cheap, no matter the value of $x. The only exceptions are when you're contractually or legally obligated to have $x, such as in PCI or HIPAA environments. And even then, fast or cheap is only given up for $x very begrudgingly, and sometimes only on paper but not in reality.