Problem is that the valley is every bit as expensive as the city, moreso in some cases. According to city-data.com, the median home price in San Francisco in 2013 was $778,000. The median in Palo Alto and Cupertino were over $1 million. San Mateo was $765,300. And even San Jose's median is a hefty $599,700.
So it'll be no easier to find and subsidize space for the homeless down there than up here. What really just needs to happen is for people to get it through their skulls that you can't build *out* on the tip of a peninsula any more than you can on an island in New York harbor; so in both cases you have to build UP as the city grows.
Those studios are shooting themselves in the foot though. Who wants to have to deal with multiple accounts and hunt down the show they want to watch across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Go/Now, CBS whatever, Vudu, Crackle, FXnow, and so and so on and so on? For many, Netflix is the first and only stop, and if what they want to watch isn't there, they wont scour the ends of the internet for it. They'll goto the one place they know it will be available: The Pirate Bay.
I don't judge Trump on the spin his minions try to place on his statements when they're engaged in after-the-fact damage control; no matter whether they are copy-written prose on his web site or scripted palaver from Katrina Pierson or another. I judge Trump on the actual actions and statements of Trump himself.
Samsung is not about "pushing quality". They never have been. Samsung has always been about ripping off other companies' designs, using cheaper lower quality components and crappy software, and undercutting their betters.
And it's not just Apple by a long shot. Before the ripping off Apple, Samsung was all about ripping off Blackberry. They even had the chutzpah to name one of their Blackberry knock-offs the "Blackjack". Before that, they were copying Motorola with imitation RAZRs and SLVRs. Nor is it just mobile. At least as far back as the 1990s, if Sony had a product that was a bit on the pricy side for your tastes, you could count on a Samsung knockoff to be available within a year and 25% or so cheaper. And no one could ever do anything about it because they were protected by their government.
They're a sleazy company with a sleazy business model; and not one I'd prefer to see prosper.
It's the same reason science fiction rarely wins oscars and is lumped in with fantasy when it's acknowledged as a genre at all. Same reason, for that matter that comedy doesn't win book or movie awards, and for television the Emmys shuffles comedy to its own category away from the "serious" programming and doesn't acknowledge SciFi at all. It's the same reason that the "technical" Oscars and Emmys are shuffled off to their own non-broadcast semi-ceremonies. Hell, it's the very same reason the Spielberg was ignored by the academy until Schindler's List, in spite of the undeniable awesomeness of Jaws, ET, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The people making the decisions are pretentious stuck-up snobs with overly inflated opinions of their own fabulousness. And genres such as SciFi, comedy, adventure, and the like are not "serious" enough to be rewarded more than very rarely, and then only begrudgingly by those people.
> I am far more useful when I overhear and am in the > middle of what's going on.
So very much this. I've experienced the extended telecommuting thing post-acquisition when the parent company shut down our local office and put those of us not laid-off on F/T work from home. And I know first-hand how much harder it is to effectively collaborate with your team when you only see them once a quarter, and just how valuable those everyday interactions are for generating and new ideas, and just how stir-crazy I went with no one around to talk to all day but the dogs. I'd have serious reservations about allowing telecommuting more than one or two days a week, should I find myself in the place to make that decision.
In general, that's true. But oddly enough, there are some sites that Firefox can handle just fine but drop out in both Safari and Chrome. My company's web portals to Peoplesoft and SAP are the first two that come to mind. I can login with any browser. But they work correctly only on Firefox. When I mentioned this to the SAP help desk, they told me the site is "optimized for IE 6" (Seriously, WTFH? This was in 2014, not 2002!.) and that if I'd already upgraded, there was a tool on the IT public shared drive that would let me run my browser in "IE6 Mode". Yeah, I'd upgraded already... to a MacBook with VMware Fusion for Ubuntu, CentOS, and Kali, as needed.
That was the last time I talked to that help desk, or IT team in general. And though it may be sub-par in general, Firefox is to this day the way I access SAP.
The only movie theater I'd be sorry to see go... the only movie theater that, so far as I can tell, gives a damn about making movie-going a pleasant experience... is the Alamo Drafthouse. And somehow, I very much doubt that the Alamo will go out with the rest of the chains.
The rest? They made their bed with surly, but neverltheless gutless in the face of screaming brats or prattling yackers, employees, extortionate prices for decidedly sub-par food and drinks, filthy theaters, uncomfortable chairs, and ticket prices damn near the cost to just own the BluRay or iTunes download outright. So now they can lie in that bed. Short of the Millennium Falcon, the USS Enterprise, or the Helicarrier; I'm much happier waiting and watching at home than I am going anywhere besides the Drafthouse.
The difference is that there are actually benefits to the metric system, which is superior to imperial measurements in every way except perhaps for using Celsius in weather reports instead of Fahrenheit. Yeah, I know the freezing and boiling points of water make a lot of sense from a scientific point of view. But for the weather: 0 degrees being a horribly bone-chillingly frigid day, 100 degrees being an insanely and sweltering scorchingly hot day, and 50 degrees being a nice and normal comfortably mild day, does make a decent amount of sense IMO. Pounds, feet, quarts, and the like though, I'd happily say good riddance.
The chip cards, OTOH, provide me with zero benefits without the PIN. And even with the PIN, the benefits would be minimal. And they waste a ridiculous amount of my time vs. swiping the mag stripe. So, I still maintain that they are an epic fail.
1) Even if it did take only 15 seconds every time, That's more than 3x as long as it takes me to swipe a magstripe card and put it back in my wallet. And, if I'm at a store that accepts ApplePay, that's about 4x as long as it takes to double-pop the button on my watch and hold my wrist up to the scanner. So either way, wasted time for no benefit.
2) It not take only 15 seconds all the time. There are definitely some implementations that are better or worst than others. Target seems to be the worst offender that I encounter with any regularity. It's rare for their terminals to take less than 30 seconds, 45 is more common, and I've had to leave my card in their terminal for over a minute before. And yes, I did time it. So, on the average, even more wasted time for no benefit.
3) Since we stupidly went with the chip but skipped the PIN, there's absolutely no additional protection for me if I get mugged or lose my card. The culprit can still use it just as easily as they could the mag stripe. So even if the transaction did take less time than the stripe or ApplePay, there is STILL absolutely ZERO benefit.
4) Even if we did implement the PIN, maximum liability under law for fraudulent charges is $50. And all but one of my cards waive that. So, divided out by the 7 cards, the only possible benefit to a full-out chip+PIN implementation would essentially be $7.14, which is essentially negligible. And if I were to divide my salary out to figure how much of my time equates to $7.14, I'll bet that the chip cards have already wasted more than $7.14 worth of my time just in this last year.
I'm not especially inclined to bother with a site when Cloudflare shoves a captcha in my face not just to create and account or make a post; but to view its front page in the first place. My "One more step" is nearly always my browser's "back" button. Cloudflare can take their precious snowflake of a half-assed CDN and bite my shiny daffodil ass.
Well... Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, maker of many voting machines has stated his commitment to deliver votes to the republicans. That's not infowars or indymedia rumor or speculation, that's his own words, in writing as part of a fundraising effort on the GOP's behalf.
That's about as blatant as you can get without going full-out Boss Tweed.
With any phone, you're constantly sending your daily movements back to the phone company so that they know what cell to route your incoming calls and text messages to, and to provide mandatory E911 data to the government. Every move you make is tracked, beamed to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile (and onward to the government), without your "consent" merely by turning the phone on.
And no, even if you inspect the entire source, compile it yourself on a compiler which you've similarly audited, then side-load it onto a rooted phone on which you also have access to the firmware's source and inspected that as well; it is not at all possible to configure an Android phone that doesn't send ANYTHING to the phone company and government. Not, anyway, unless you never power the thing on. At all.
Apple may or may not be saints in this matter. But anyone and everyone who owns a phone, including myself and almost certainly including you, has already made a deal with the devil. So cry me a bloody river about Siri's location-aware suggestions.
The frustrating thing about the SE is that Apple treats it as the bastard stepchild of the lineup that only people too poor to afford the 7 would buy. It's got *most* of the 6s' internals, but skimps in some places like the fingerprint scanner, which is the previous, slower, generation. If they had upgraded it this cycle and given it the exact same internals as the 7 (All of them, dammit, including the dual-lens camera they obnoxiously withheld from the non-plus 7), except with the smaller screen and form factor, I'd have upgraded without hesitation, even though my 6s is barely a year old.
Apple has always done this... assumed that people buy the smallest model in their lineup because they are to poor to afford the larger ones. I wish they'd get it through their skulls that, for some of us, small and light is a feature itself. I don't use an 11" Air because I can't afford a MBP. I use it because the whole damn point of a laptop is to be portable. So the smaller and lighter weight the better. But still... no retina display or discrete graphics chipset for me, even though I'd be willing and able to pay for it.
Same situation with the phone. If it doesn't fit comfortably in my front-left pants pocket; it's too damn big. My old 5s fit into everything. But I have jeans in which the 6s is marginal. And the plus sizes are right out, to say nothing about those beastly things on the Samsung/Android side. I really hate that Apple hopped on the gargantuan-sized-damn-near-an-iPad-size trend. Just give me the full feature set in the 5s/SE/whatever screen size and form factor.
By that standard, what president since 1945 is *NOT* a murderer? Even Gerald Ford, with his all of two and a half years in office, presided over the last year of the Vietnam (not declared) "War".
Maybe. But it also provides the flexibility to have a thin and light phone when I want a thin and light phone (the majority of the time) and to switch to a case with additional battery power when I want it for extended outdoors activities or whatever.
> These serve mainly Amazon and other customers. > Many buyers are clueless about this difference and > review sellers by saying "I hated this product!" or > leave product reviews saying "It arrived late! 1 Star!". > C'est la vie.
Sometimes that's the only way to get attention and a response though. Unless you have the time to actually call their support.. and keep hanging up and re-calling until you get one of their non-outsourced call centers... the "Where's my stuff" process in their help section delivers empty platitudes these days, rather than results. This is especially the case if you accidentally order from one of their "affiliates", in which case even the phone support people refuse to help and shuffle you off to a third-party non-Amazon email address, usually with no actually phone number available, which will not garner a response.
A couple of 1-stars though, where publicly visible, will more often invoke a response and resolution.
It's worse than useless if you're in the car. At least with the iPhone, the amber alert alarm is a really loud screeching one that I don't believe it makes under any other circumstance and always fires off at full volume regardless of your settings. Very likely a "Holy crap WTF is that!?!?!?" moment when it goes off. Then you're distracted while you try to figure out where it's coming from and figure out it's your phone. Then you have to take a hand off the wheel and eyes off the road while you fumble to shut it off; with a bonus round of dangerous distraction if your phone is in your pocket, backpack, purse, or wherever instead of conveniently in your center console.
Honestly, I'm actually more than a little bit surprised that the amber alert "feature" hasn't caused deaths yet from car accidents when the thing suddenly fires off.
Yup. Amber alert from San Diego woke me up at 1am in San Francisco. I hunted down that setting and turned it off that same night. Though that is such a seldom-used setting that each new iPhone since then has had it's one amber alert to remind me that the "feature" still exists and I need to kill it.
Great. But does WhatsApp have operations or infrastructure in India? Does it even operate a subsidiary there? Honestly, that's not rhetorical. I don't know. But if not, then this is an overreach that should bloody well be considered intolerable by all. Various countries trying to export their will and laws beyond their own border is an increasing problem, and it needs to come to a stop. And I'm not exempting the US in that either. It's no less disgusting when we do it than when India, Brazil, or France does.
At least China, loathsome as their totalitarianism and censorship is, did the proper thing; and built their great firewall to filter the internet, rather than demanding that everyone everywhere in the world abide by their whims.
I would use the old "and nothing of value would be lost" cliche. But seriously, that doesn't even begin to cover it. I've found outsourced tier-1 support to actually be *worse* than useless over the years. Basically, aside from processing returns for outright defective kit, if you can't immediately get escalated to a tier that's not outsourced, or unless you have an on-site contract, you're better off just going to Stackexchange or similar.
FedEx gets their aircraft on the cheap because they buy used planes that the no one else wants anymore. For years, they were the last lingering operator of the 727 in the US. They replaced those with 757s likewise cast off by the passenger carriers. But they're also still actually flying other old tri-jets like the MD-11 and even the DC-10.
So yeah, anyone else who also wants to go down to Honest Joe's Used Airplane Lot and take their chances can get castoffs equally cheap. Hell, even John Travolta was able to get himself an old Boeing (a 707) to fart around with.
I wouldn't want to provide even the slightest aid or comfort, in any way, shape, or form, to the RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, Metallica, or any one of that particular basket of deplorables. And I would take great glee in refusing to do so, and doing anything within my power to subvert their desires.
Yes, CloudFlare for other reasons are a bunch of asshats. But the likes of Rosen, Valenti, Ulrich, and the rest of their loathsome ilk? Evil. Pure and simple by way of the eighth dimension. A pox upon all their houses and works, I say.
Remember who "Accenture" really is: the post-scandal-renamed Andersen Consulting, aka: Arthur Andersen. Accounting fraud is their very purpose for existing. And corrupting blockchains to destroy accountability is exactly the sort of thing you expect out of those people.
Tesla won't make many sales in Michigan anyway. Aside from the rampant criminality, crippling economic depression, toxic water supply, and outright crazy things like Devil's Night; people there tend to be highly partisan towards the legacy "big 3" manufacturers; with very little tolerance of even other traditional brand/dealership combos like Toyota, Honda, VW, and so on. It's hostile territory even if there were no legal obstacles.
So why make concessions? These laws have been slowly but surely falling. Just treat Michigan as another domino in the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is that the valley is every bit as expensive as the city, moreso in some cases. According to city-data.com, the median home price in San Francisco in 2013 was $778,000. The median in Palo Alto and Cupertino were over $1 million. San Mateo was $765,300. And even San Jose's median is a hefty $599,700.
So it'll be no easier to find and subsidize space for the homeless down there than up here. What really just needs to happen is for people to get it through their skulls that you can't build *out* on the tip of a peninsula any more than you can on an island in New York harbor; so in both cases you have to build UP as the city grows.
Those studios are shooting themselves in the foot though. Who wants to have to deal with multiple accounts and hunt down the show they want to watch across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Go/Now, CBS whatever, Vudu, Crackle, FXnow, and so and so on and so on? For many, Netflix is the first and only stop, and if what they want to watch isn't there, they wont scour the ends of the internet for it. They'll goto the one place they know it will be available: The Pirate Bay.
I don't judge Trump on the spin his minions try to place on his statements when they're engaged in after-the-fact damage control; no matter whether they are copy-written prose on his web site or scripted palaver from Katrina Pierson or another. I judge Trump on the actual actions and statements of Trump himself.
Samsung is not about "pushing quality". They never have been. Samsung has always been about ripping off other companies' designs, using cheaper lower quality components and crappy software, and undercutting their betters.
And it's not just Apple by a long shot. Before the ripping off Apple, Samsung was all about ripping off Blackberry. They even had the chutzpah to name one of their Blackberry knock-offs the "Blackjack". Before that, they were copying Motorola with imitation RAZRs and SLVRs. Nor is it just mobile. At least as far back as the 1990s, if Sony had a product that was a bit on the pricy side for your tastes, you could count on a Samsung knockoff to be available within a year and 25% or so cheaper. And no one could ever do anything about it because they were protected by their government.
They're a sleazy company with a sleazy business model; and not one I'd prefer to see prosper.
It's the same reason science fiction rarely wins oscars and is lumped in with fantasy when it's acknowledged as a genre at all. Same reason, for that matter that comedy doesn't win book or movie awards, and for television the Emmys shuffles comedy to its own category away from the "serious" programming and doesn't acknowledge SciFi at all. It's the same reason that the "technical" Oscars and Emmys are shuffled off to their own non-broadcast semi-ceremonies. Hell, it's the very same reason the Spielberg was ignored by the academy until Schindler's List, in spite of the undeniable awesomeness of Jaws, ET, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The people making the decisions are pretentious stuck-up snobs with overly inflated opinions of their own fabulousness. And genres such as SciFi, comedy, adventure, and the like are not "serious" enough to be rewarded more than very rarely, and then only begrudgingly by those people.
> I am far more useful when I overhear and am in the
> middle of what's going on.
So very much this. I've experienced the extended telecommuting thing post-acquisition when the parent company shut down our local office and put those of us not laid-off on F/T work from home. And I know first-hand how much harder it is to effectively collaborate with your team when you only see them once a quarter, and just how valuable those everyday interactions are for generating and new ideas, and just how stir-crazy I went with no one around to talk to all day but the dogs. I'd have serious reservations about allowing telecommuting more than one or two days a week, should I find myself in the place to make that decision.
In general, that's true. But oddly enough, there are some sites that Firefox can handle just fine but drop out in both Safari and Chrome. My company's web portals to Peoplesoft and SAP are the first two that come to mind. I can login with any browser. But they work correctly only on Firefox. When I mentioned this to the SAP help desk, they told me the site is "optimized for IE 6" (Seriously, WTFH? This was in 2014, not 2002!.) and that if I'd already upgraded, there was a tool on the IT public shared drive that would let me run my browser in "IE6 Mode". Yeah, I'd upgraded already... to a MacBook with VMware Fusion for Ubuntu, CentOS, and Kali, as needed.
That was the last time I talked to that help desk, or IT team in general. And though it may be sub-par in general, Firefox is to this day the way I access SAP.
The only movie theater I'd be sorry to see go... the only movie theater that, so far as I can tell, gives a damn about making movie-going a pleasant experience... is the Alamo Drafthouse. And somehow, I very much doubt that the Alamo will go out with the rest of the chains.
The rest? They made their bed with surly, but neverltheless gutless in the face of screaming brats or prattling yackers, employees, extortionate prices for decidedly sub-par food and drinks, filthy theaters, uncomfortable chairs, and ticket prices damn near the cost to just own the BluRay or iTunes download outright. So now they can lie in that bed. Short of the Millennium Falcon, the USS Enterprise, or the Helicarrier; I'm much happier waiting and watching at home than I am going anywhere besides the Drafthouse.
The difference is that there are actually benefits to the metric system, which is superior to imperial measurements in every way except perhaps for using Celsius in weather reports instead of Fahrenheit. Yeah, I know the freezing and boiling points of water make a lot of sense from a scientific point of view. But for the weather: 0 degrees being a horribly bone-chillingly frigid day, 100 degrees being an insanely and sweltering scorchingly hot day, and 50 degrees being a nice and normal comfortably mild day, does make a decent amount of sense IMO. Pounds, feet, quarts, and the like though, I'd happily say good riddance.
The chip cards, OTOH, provide me with zero benefits without the PIN. And even with the PIN, the benefits would be minimal. And they waste a ridiculous amount of my time vs. swiping the mag stripe. So, I still maintain that they are an epic fail.
1) Even if it did take only 15 seconds every time, That's more than 3x as long as it takes me to swipe a magstripe card and put it back in my wallet. And, if I'm at a store that accepts ApplePay, that's about 4x as long as it takes to double-pop the button on my watch and hold my wrist up to the scanner. So either way, wasted time for no benefit.
2) It not take only 15 seconds all the time. There are definitely some implementations that are better or worst than others. Target seems to be the worst offender that I encounter with any regularity. It's rare for their terminals to take less than 30 seconds, 45 is more common, and I've had to leave my card in their terminal for over a minute before. And yes, I did time it. So, on the average, even more wasted time for no benefit.
3) Since we stupidly went with the chip but skipped the PIN, there's absolutely no additional protection for me if I get mugged or lose my card. The culprit can still use it just as easily as they could the mag stripe. So even if the transaction did take less time than the stripe or ApplePay, there is STILL absolutely ZERO benefit.
4) Even if we did implement the PIN, maximum liability under law for fraudulent charges is $50. And all but one of my cards waive that. So, divided out by the 7 cards, the only possible benefit to a full-out chip+PIN implementation would essentially be $7.14, which is essentially negligible. And if I were to divide my salary out to figure how much of my time equates to $7.14, I'll bet that the chip cards have already wasted more than $7.14 worth of my time just in this last year.
I'm not especially inclined to bother with a site when Cloudflare shoves a captcha in my face not just to create and account or make a post; but to view its front page in the first place. My "One more step" is nearly always my browser's "back" button. Cloudflare can take their precious snowflake of a half-assed CDN and bite my shiny daffodil ass.
Well... Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, maker of many voting machines has stated his commitment to deliver votes to the republicans. That's not infowars or indymedia rumor or speculation, that's his own words, in writing as part of a fundraising effort on the GOP's behalf.
That's about as blatant as you can get without going full-out Boss Tweed.
Cluecheck:
With any phone, you're constantly sending your daily movements back to the phone company so that they know what cell to route your incoming calls and text messages to, and to provide mandatory E911 data to the government. Every move you make is tracked, beamed to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile (and onward to the government), without your "consent" merely by turning the phone on.
And no, even if you inspect the entire source, compile it yourself on a compiler which you've similarly audited, then side-load it onto a rooted phone on which you also have access to the firmware's source and inspected that as well; it is not at all possible to configure an Android phone that doesn't send ANYTHING to the phone company and government. Not, anyway, unless you never power the thing on. At all.
Apple may or may not be saints in this matter. But anyone and everyone who owns a phone, including myself and almost certainly including you, has already made a deal with the devil. So cry me a bloody river about Siri's location-aware suggestions.
The frustrating thing about the SE is that Apple treats it as the bastard stepchild of the lineup that only people too poor to afford the 7 would buy. It's got *most* of the 6s' internals, but skimps in some places like the fingerprint scanner, which is the previous, slower, generation. If they had upgraded it this cycle and given it the exact same internals as the 7 (All of them, dammit, including the dual-lens camera they obnoxiously withheld from the non-plus 7), except with the smaller screen and form factor, I'd have upgraded without hesitation, even though my 6s is barely a year old.
Apple has always done this... assumed that people buy the smallest model in their lineup because they are to poor to afford the larger ones. I wish they'd get it through their skulls that, for some of us, small and light is a feature itself. I don't use an 11" Air because I can't afford a MBP. I use it because the whole damn point of a laptop is to be portable. So the smaller and lighter weight the better. But still... no retina display or discrete graphics chipset for me, even though I'd be willing and able to pay for it.
Same situation with the phone. If it doesn't fit comfortably in my front-left pants pocket; it's too damn big. My old 5s fit into everything. But I have jeans in which the 6s is marginal. And the plus sizes are right out, to say nothing about those beastly things on the Samsung/Android side. I really hate that Apple hopped on the gargantuan-sized-damn-near-an-iPad-size trend. Just give me the full feature set in the 5s/SE/whatever screen size and form factor.
By that standard, what president since 1945 is *NOT* a murderer? Even Gerald Ford, with his all of two and a half years in office, presided over the last year of the Vietnam (not declared) "War".
Maybe. But it also provides the flexibility to have a thin and light phone when I want a thin and light phone (the majority of the time) and to switch to a case with additional battery power when I want it for extended outdoors activities or whatever.
> These serve mainly Amazon and other customers.
> Many buyers are clueless about this difference and
> review sellers by saying "I hated this product!" or
> leave product reviews saying "It arrived late! 1 Star!".
> C'est la vie.
Sometimes that's the only way to get attention and a response though. Unless you have the time to actually call their support.. and keep hanging up and re-calling until you get one of their non-outsourced call centers... the "Where's my stuff" process in their help section delivers empty platitudes these days, rather than results. This is especially the case if you accidentally order from one of their "affiliates", in which case even the phone support people refuse to help and shuffle you off to a third-party non-Amazon email address, usually with no actually phone number available, which will not garner a response.
A couple of 1-stars though, where publicly visible, will more often invoke a response and resolution.
It's worse than useless if you're in the car. At least with the iPhone, the amber alert alarm is a really loud screeching one that I don't believe it makes under any other circumstance and always fires off at full volume regardless of your settings. Very likely a "Holy crap WTF is that!?!?!?" moment when it goes off. Then you're distracted while you try to figure out where it's coming from and figure out it's your phone. Then you have to take a hand off the wheel and eyes off the road while you fumble to shut it off; with a bonus round of dangerous distraction if your phone is in your pocket, backpack, purse, or wherever instead of conveniently in your center console.
Honestly, I'm actually more than a little bit surprised that the amber alert "feature" hasn't caused deaths yet from car accidents when the thing suddenly fires off.
Yup. Amber alert from San Diego woke me up at 1am in San Francisco. I hunted down that setting and turned it off that same night. Though that is such a seldom-used setting that each new iPhone since then has had it's one amber alert to remind me that the "feature" still exists and I need to kill it.
Great. But does WhatsApp have operations or infrastructure in India? Does it even operate a subsidiary there? Honestly, that's not rhetorical. I don't know. But if not, then this is an overreach that should bloody well be considered intolerable by all. Various countries trying to export their will and laws beyond their own border is an increasing problem, and it needs to come to a stop. And I'm not exempting the US in that either. It's no less disgusting when we do it than when India, Brazil, or France does.
At least China, loathsome as their totalitarianism and censorship is, did the proper thing; and built their great firewall to filter the internet, rather than demanding that everyone everywhere in the world abide by their whims.
I would use the old "and nothing of value would be lost" cliche. But seriously, that doesn't even begin to cover it. I've found outsourced tier-1 support to actually be *worse* than useless over the years. Basically, aside from processing returns for outright defective kit, if you can't immediately get escalated to a tier that's not outsourced, or unless you have an on-site contract, you're better off just going to Stackexchange or similar.
FedEx gets their aircraft on the cheap because they buy used planes that the no one else wants anymore. For years, they were the last lingering operator of the 727 in the US. They replaced those with 757s likewise cast off by the passenger carriers. But they're also still actually flying other old tri-jets like the MD-11 and even the DC-10.
So yeah, anyone else who also wants to go down to Honest Joe's Used Airplane Lot and take their chances can get castoffs equally cheap. Hell, even John Travolta was able to get himself an old Boeing (a 707) to fart around with.
I wouldn't want to provide even the slightest aid or comfort, in any way, shape, or form, to the RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, Metallica, or any one of that particular basket of deplorables. And I would take great glee in refusing to do so, and doing anything within my power to subvert their desires.
Yes, CloudFlare for other reasons are a bunch of asshats. But the likes of Rosen, Valenti, Ulrich, and the rest of their loathsome ilk? Evil. Pure and simple by way of the eighth dimension. A pox upon all their houses and works, I say.
Remember who "Accenture" really is: the post-scandal-renamed Andersen Consulting, aka: Arthur Andersen. Accounting fraud is their very purpose for existing. And corrupting blockchains to destroy accountability is exactly the sort of thing you expect out of those people.
Why bother though?
Tesla won't make many sales in Michigan anyway. Aside from the rampant criminality, crippling economic depression, toxic water supply, and outright crazy things like Devil's Night; people there tend to be highly partisan towards the legacy "big 3" manufacturers; with very little tolerance of even other traditional brand/dealership combos like Toyota, Honda, VW, and so on. It's hostile territory even if there were no legal obstacles.
So why make concessions? These laws have been slowly but surely falling. Just treat Michigan as another domino in the line.