Dumbass school administrative types don't have mindlessly applied "zero tolerance" policies about fat people or the foods that they eat. Meanwhile, that same bunch of halfwits suspend students if, in the process of eating a pop tart, he bites it into an "L" shape that might, by some stretch of the imagination, vaguely be a similar shape to a gun.
I have no trouble at all imagining a situation where some twat of a principal confiscates a student's phone on a whim, demands under various threats that it be unlocked... since we've oh so brilliantly decided as a nation that minors have zero "secure in their persons", probable cause, privacy, or consent rights whatsoever, even when the invader isn't even a parent or LEO... sees that at some point in the past the student used the gun emoji, or perhaps even simply notices that the emoji is present on the keyboard, and suspends the hapless student.
Personally... I'd prefer to pack up every public school administrator, and anyone else who had any part whatsoever in formulating or implementing zero-tolerance policies, load them into the B-Ark, and shoot them off into space with the management consultants and public telephone sanitizers, never to be seen again. But since that's not yet a technologically possible option; I don't think it's unreasonable to take some nominal steps to protect students from the injudiciousness of that pack of clods.
The current generation MX-5 has 155hp in the US model, 129hp in the UK/Europe model; and it's verified by Guinness as the best-selling sports car of all time. It doesn't get 50mpg in the US though. Our version gets 27/34/30mpg (City/Highway/Combined.) https://www.fueleconomy.gov/fe...
Grandparent is most likely on the other side of the pond and has the has the European version, which is rated at 35.8/57.6/47.1mpg. (Holy crap!!!) https://www.mazda.co.uk/cars/m...
I have a Skyactiv Mazda 3. And I routinely beat the mileage I'm supposed to get according to the specs. It's rated 27/38/31, and I usually get about 42 on the freeway and 32 combined. So it's quite believable to me that the UK/EU MX-5 can beat it's rated combined driving MPG and top 50.
Seriously, just ban con-compete clauses nation-wide and void any contracts that include them. They're only ever used abusively on the part of the company that insisted on them as a way to screw over employees in revenge for leaving. And they don't benefit the overall economy. Just look at California. The illegality of non-competes certainly hasn't caused the tech industry here to collapse in on itself.
Apple and Google got in a world of hurt a few years ago for screwing their employees over with an informal no-poaching arrangement. Well... non-compete clauses screw the employee an order of magnitude worse. And we should drop the hammer... equally hard if not harder... on the companies using them.
And why shouldn't he be selfish vs a corporation? Because that's what we're really and truly talking about here. This is not some David vs Goliath situation. It's more like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Yellow Cab, Luxor Cab, Checker Cab, and so and and so on, are every bit the same sort of soulless, faceless, profit-above-all-else, corporations that Uber or Lyft are. The latter have simply "built a better mousetrap" and have been more successful of late. No corporation has an inherent right to my business or my money though. And the government should not be the one choosing winners.
And hell... Uber had my business almost from the day they launched... back when the app was called Ubercab and the only service available was the town cars. Back then, Uber cost a good 50% more versus a taxi. But the service was and still is so dramatically better that it was worth every penny. And honestly, I have a hard time believing Uber and Lyft's detractors have ever had to actually rely on the legacy taxi companies. The service really is just that much dramatically better. Yeah, Travis Kalanick is an utterly ruthless businessman and comes off kind of douchey. I probably wouldn't choose to socialize with him. But I DID rely on the legacy taxi companies before Uber came about. And that lot can all bite my shiny metal ass.
If whatever J. Random Hacker the FBI wound up paying to do so could have that iPhone, theres no way the NSA doesn't have the ability as well. So, really, the secret is out and everyone does know that they have the ability.
They just didn't want to do so. Whether that's because they're keeping their heads down for a while post-Snowden, or they didn't think it was worth their time, or they had some *other* backdoor they didn't want to reveal, or if it was political wrangling and/or acrimony between the two agencies, is the question.
Part of that is because most of the people who would participate in these boycotts would never have bought the product in the first place. In the case of Apple, for example, the company has been the subject of random and arbitrary anger and denigration ever since it's inception. Those people simply bounce from one reason to the next. And any given burst of outrage is easily dismissed as just more of the same:
"Who ARE those unwashed fools in California? IBM will crush them." "What kind of idiot uses a mouse to talk to their computer? GUIs are for idiots who can't grok the command line." "Shut the company down and refund the money to the shareholders." "No floppy drive? No SCSI? What a bunch of idiots." "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Any of that look familiar? Those people never were and never would be Apple's customers in the first place. So of course a boycott is ineffective.
The thing is, I don't want to have to goto Netflix for some things, Hulu for others, Amazon Prime for something else, HBO Go for the next, CBS All-access for the next thing, and so on. I especially don't want to have to keep track of what program is where or go hunting. I don't want to have to keep track of which service has the high-deff stream of a show and which one only has 480p. I just want to launch Netflix and watch my damn shows. And if I'm traveling, and want to kill some time in an airport or hotel by watching some Netflix, I want it to work. I don't think I'm alone in this outlook.
Fortunately, the VPN provider I use has been clever enough to stay ahead of the blocks on the latter point. Apple has been trying to solve the first problem with their cross-service search on the latest AppleTV. But that's thus far less than perfect, and they've not added the functionality to iOS or OS X yet, so it's of limited utility to me. Regardless, the bottom line is that anything not on Netflix is a headache. The average user doesn't care about what deals have been made in what country or region. They don't care about why geolocation is more difficult with IPv6, or even what IPv6 or IP geolocation is. They just want to watch their shows. And if the hollywood types continue to make it difficult to do so on Netflix, well... there're other services that make the experience easy.
Hell, that's what Apple said in the beginning when they released the first iPhone with no app store and told everyone that web apps were the proper way to do things, going forward. But everyone flipped their shit, castigated Apple over it, started jailbreaking their iPhones to run Cydia's app store, and generally demanding the ability to produce native apps, not web apps. Who knows whether Apple relented and changed course; or if apps were the plan all along but just weren't ready at the first iPhone's release.
I've no sympathy at all for the people who are now whining about apps. They asked for... demanded even... them. They got them. Live with your choices, people.
Matters of immigration and naturalization are powers explicitly reserved for the federal government under the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8). No state government has the right to overrule the federal on that. So those "attacks" (And let's be realistic. We're talking about court actions. The ATF wasn't burning Jan Brewer out of the Arizona state capitol Waco-style.), were 100% justified and proper.
USB is a standard. But you should recall that it was not originally *the* standard; and did not just "work with everybody". When Apple first switched to it with the iMac; support for USB on the Windows side was flakey and half-baked at best. And, at the time, the windows people widely criticized Apple for their "non-standard" choice to use this new-fangled USB thing that just barely worked outside the Apple ecosystem.
To some people, they will just never be able to do anything right.
Loss of the headphone jack on the iphone, not a problem. Loss of MagSafe on the new MacBook, huge problem. I'd have bought one already if it weren't for that. I mean... even if they've decided that USB-C is the new hotness and all, couldn't they have at least improved the connector on the MacBooks side to lose the friction plug and include the magnets?
The thing is, the "good and informative" comments are all just a rehash of the discussions from when MA370 went missing. There has been some amusement from the farcical discussions about retrieving these flash drives via trained turtles, dogs, and pigeons, I guess.
But still... sweet holy hell, at this point I think slashdot actually had better standards when it was inflicting us with Jon Katz's rambling pontifications.
> I see no difference in that law to the american 'cars > can only be sold by dealers' and other 'stupid' laws.
Neither do I. But, if you will recall, the car dealership protectionism laws are also nearly universally reviled; not just here on slashdot, but by pretty much anyone who's had the displeasure of doing business with their ilk.
Even as far back as when I still used MySpace though, I was already using a password manager and strings randomly generated gibberish for web passwords. It wasn't as nice a program back then as 1password is now. But still...
You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, and so on; to say nothing of the rest of your equipment list.
At that point you may as well just use homing pigeons. And bonus: if you can keep them excited enough to fly around their cages while the plane is in flight, you reduce the weight you have to carry. The turtles and dogs are deadweight until the plane hits water, after all.
W-T-literal-F, editors? News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Who is Max_W and why should I care about his black box replacement idea? Is he an expert in aviation safety? Is he a search and recovery worker? Is he an aerospace engineer working for Boeing or Airbus or even Embraer? Is he a regulator with the FAA? An NTSB investigator? Or is he just some random poster whose idle musings you've turned into an article?
It's past time for the "vaping" industry to grow up, leave the head shops and gas-station quickie-marts behind, and generally knock off the semi-legitimate, fly-by-night, grey-market crap.
What they should have done is what we had here in San Francisco for several years before we forgot that we'd already done something better and jumped on the $15/hr bandwagon ourselves: Index the minimum wage to the consumer price index, let it raise automatically with inflation, and be done with it.
$12, $15, 4-years, 6-years; it's all academic. Setting it as a specific dollar value is dumb. Supposing the $15 wage goes through, it's going to stay there for long while. Legislative inertia and incompetence on the left, plus the screams of bloody murder at the notion of COMMUNISM and fighting any increase with tooth and nail on the part of the right, combine to pretty much guarantee it. So, eventually $15 will have the same purchasing power that $8 does now; and we'll be right back where we started.
What they should really do, is set it to automatically increment each year with the CPI; then STFU and forget about it. It'll get buried in the bureaucracy and go up on its own every year. And we can avoid having this same debate again down the road.
Even over four (or six) years, that's a rapid increase. Here in San Francisco... where I think we can all agree we're about as progressive as you can get... we voted in 2004 to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index, so that it would rise automatically with inflation. So, the $8.50 minimum wage from 2004 increased with the CPI to $11.05 at the beginning of 2015. In 2014, we voted Prop J into law. That's our four-year (not six) increase to $15.00 in 2018, starting with the boost to our current minimum of $12.25.
So, that's under a dollar per year increase. And a total increase of 26%. Businesses will feel it, sure. But business is booming. And if you do business in San Francisco, you've already decided to accept higher than usual costs.
Now, consider the federal minimum wage. That's $7.25. Take it just to $12 over four years; and that's $1.19/year for a total increase of 40%. That's somewhat more dramatic. And I can see where it would be more likely to shock a business owner into looking at cutting costs by cutting staff.
Besides, automated ordering kiosks are already a thing. There are many places where I can order with my iPhone. And who goes to a bank teller instead of an ATM anymore? The writing's been on the wall for a lot of low-level positions for a while. What's happening now, is mostly inertia being overcome.
Retro becomes a problem because it becomes excessively expensive, or even impossible, to maintain.
Consider just those 8" floppy disks. For starters, they're not exactly durable. And barring clumsiness, the oxide coating used for data storage continues to oxidize over time since they're not airtight. So every one of them is slowly going bad and needs to be periodically replaced. Vintage disks in a warehouse would also be exposed to oxygen and slowly going bad. So somewhere there's a production line running, still turning out 8" floppy drives. There's a certain minimum cost to keep any production line running. And how many customers besides the DoD do you suppose that vendor has? So those are some epically expensive 8" floppy disks.
The production line to make those 8" floppies needs maintenance and, critically, spare parts when something breaks. These are unlikely to be industry-standard machine parts... how many 8" floppy fabs still exist? So any replacement parts to the production line would need to be a custom job from a machine shop, at obscene pricing. (Skilled machinists are becoming more and more rare in the US and custom work demands a large premium.) And since the Air Force probably doesn't a steady supply of these floppies, and there are unlikely to be many, if any, other buyers, the production line probably starts and stops every so often to produce batches around replacement time. Starting or stopping a production line is a large expensive process itself; sometimes more expensive even than leaving it running at low volume for extended times. And what happens if, at the next contract renewal, the vendor decides it just doesn't want to be in the 8" floppy business anymore? What happens if the vendor goes out of business
And that's just one component of the "retro but still functional" design. Pretty much any and every replacement part is likely to be a custom job at this point. And, for obvious reasons, that production isn't something you can just job out to China.
I'm just disappointed that it took place in secret. I would have happily kicked in a few bucks to a kickstarter or gofundme for the endavour; especially if there were a tier where I could have gotten an "I helped put gawker out of business." t-shirt. (I'm picturing a nice caricature drawing of Jason Chen and Brian Lam getting steel-toed boots to the face and/or posterior here...)
What gawker does isn't journalism, it's vandalism. Stupid bullshit and sensationalism and tabloid-esque writing all aside, they irredeemably crossed the Rubicon with their "TV-B-Gone at CES" antics. I've been hoping for someone... anyone... to take them down ever since. And their behavior since (Including solicitation to purchase stolen prototype devices on the black market.), has done nothing to redeem them.
I'm a little "WTF?" that it took a washed-up ex-pro-wrestler from the '80s to do the job though, considering all of gawker's libelous and sometimes outright criminal behavior in the past. But one takes assistance where it's offered, I guess.
> If I want a weight lifting exercise I'll go to the gym. In > the mean time I'll take my computers in the smallest > format I can get.
^^^ This. So very much this.
I hate, Hate, HATE "desktop replacement" laptops. Even the 13" Retina MBP is just too damn big and too damn heavy. I have a nice, beefy, multi-monitor, stationary, desktop for primary productivity. Laptops are for mobility. My 11" MacBook Air is easily the best laptop I've ever used. All but silent, small enough to be usable in the air even in coach, wakes from sleep faster than I can open it, almost too light to even be noticeable... I'm sometimes just amazed that I ever tolerated anything larger. And for my normal mobile workflow, (mostly bash, a couple of browser tabs, and Sublime Text); I even get a full workday out of the thing. So I can usually save myself carrying around the power adaptor too! Granted, with the reduced screen real estate, I'm not as productive as on the desktop. But I neither expect, nor am expected, to be.
> I'd love to get a thinkpad that's built like a 2016 macbook
Oh, that's easy. Just goto a used computer store and find a pre-2005 (Lenovo takeover) Thinkpad. They didn't used to be the trash that they are now. Back when they were built by IBM, they were solid as a tank, and easily equal to a MacBook (Or were they still PowerBooks then?) in quality and reliability, if not aesthetics. You should be able to find plenty that are still in working order.
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Dumbass school administrative types don't have mindlessly applied "zero tolerance" policies about fat people or the foods that they eat. Meanwhile, that same bunch of halfwits suspend students if, in the process of eating a pop tart, he bites it into an "L" shape that might, by some stretch of the imagination, vaguely be a similar shape to a gun.
I have no trouble at all imagining a situation where some twat of a principal confiscates a student's phone on a whim, demands under various threats that it be unlocked... since we've oh so brilliantly decided as a nation that minors have zero "secure in their persons", probable cause, privacy, or consent rights whatsoever, even when the invader isn't even a parent or LEO... sees that at some point in the past the student used the gun emoji, or perhaps even simply notices that the emoji is present on the keyboard, and suspends the hapless student.
Personally... I'd prefer to pack up every public school administrator, and anyone else who had any part whatsoever in formulating or implementing zero-tolerance policies, load them into the B-Ark, and shoot them off into space with the management consultants and public telephone sanitizers, never to be seen again. But since that's not yet a technologically possible option; I don't think it's unreasonable to take some nominal steps to protect students from the injudiciousness of that pack of clods.
The current generation MX-5 has 155hp in the US model, 129hp in the UK/Europe model; and it's verified by Guinness as the best-selling sports car of all time. It doesn't get 50mpg in the US though. Our version gets 27/34/30mpg (City/Highway/Combined.)
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/fe...
Grandparent is most likely on the other side of the pond and has the has the European version, which is rated at 35.8/57.6/47.1mpg. (Holy crap!!!)
https://www.mazda.co.uk/cars/m...
I have a Skyactiv Mazda 3. And I routinely beat the mileage I'm supposed to get according to the specs. It's rated 27/38/31, and I usually get about 42 on the freeway and 32 combined. So it's quite believable to me that the UK/EU MX-5 can beat it's rated combined driving MPG and top 50.
Seriously, just ban con-compete clauses nation-wide and void any contracts that include them. They're only ever used abusively on the part of the company that insisted on them as a way to screw over employees in revenge for leaving. And they don't benefit the overall economy. Just look at California. The illegality of non-competes certainly hasn't caused the tech industry here to collapse in on itself.
Apple and Google got in a world of hurt a few years ago for screwing their employees over with an informal no-poaching arrangement. Well... non-compete clauses screw the employee an order of magnitude worse. And we should drop the hammer... equally hard if not harder... on the companies using them.
And why shouldn't he be selfish vs a corporation? Because that's what we're really and truly talking about here. This is not some David vs Goliath situation. It's more like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Yellow Cab, Luxor Cab, Checker Cab, and so and and so on, are every bit the same sort of soulless, faceless, profit-above-all-else, corporations that Uber or Lyft are. The latter have simply "built a better mousetrap" and have been more successful of late. No corporation has an inherent right to my business or my money though. And the government should not be the one choosing winners.
And hell... Uber had my business almost from the day they launched... back when the app was called Ubercab and the only service available was the town cars. Back then, Uber cost a good 50% more versus a taxi. But the service was and still is so dramatically better that it was worth every penny. And honestly, I have a hard time believing Uber and Lyft's detractors have ever had to actually rely on the legacy taxi companies. The service really is just that much dramatically better. Yeah, Travis Kalanick is an utterly ruthless businessman and comes off kind of douchey. I probably wouldn't choose to socialize with him. But I DID rely on the legacy taxi companies before Uber came about. And that lot can all bite my shiny metal ass.
If whatever J. Random Hacker the FBI wound up paying to do so could have that iPhone, theres no way the NSA doesn't have the ability as well. So, really, the secret is out and everyone does know that they have the ability.
They just didn't want to do so. Whether that's because they're keeping their heads down for a while post-Snowden, or they didn't think it was worth their time, or they had some *other* backdoor they didn't want to reveal, or if it was political wrangling and/or acrimony between the two agencies, is the question.
Part of that is because most of the people who would participate in these boycotts would never have bought the product in the first place. In the case of Apple, for example, the company has been the subject of random and arbitrary anger and denigration ever since it's inception. Those people simply bounce from one reason to the next. And any given burst of outrage is easily dismissed as just more of the same:
"Who ARE those unwashed fools in California? IBM will crush them."
"What kind of idiot uses a mouse to talk to their computer? GUIs are for idiots who can't grok the command line."
"Shut the company down and refund the money to the shareholders."
"No floppy drive? No SCSI? What a bunch of idiots."
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Any of that look familiar? Those people never were and never would be Apple's customers in the first place. So of course a boycott is ineffective.
The thing is, I don't want to have to goto Netflix for some things, Hulu for others, Amazon Prime for something else, HBO Go for the next, CBS All-access for the next thing, and so on. I especially don't want to have to keep track of what program is where or go hunting. I don't want to have to keep track of which service has the high-deff stream of a show and which one only has 480p. I just want to launch Netflix and watch my damn shows. And if I'm traveling, and want to kill some time in an airport or hotel by watching some Netflix, I want it to work. I don't think I'm alone in this outlook.
Fortunately, the VPN provider I use has been clever enough to stay ahead of the blocks on the latter point. Apple has been trying to solve the first problem with their cross-service search on the latest AppleTV. But that's thus far less than perfect, and they've not added the functionality to iOS or OS X yet, so it's of limited utility to me. Regardless, the bottom line is that anything not on Netflix is a headache. The average user doesn't care about what deals have been made in what country or region. They don't care about why geolocation is more difficult with IPv6, or even what IPv6 or IP geolocation is. They just want to watch their shows. And if the hollywood types continue to make it difficult to do so on Netflix, well... there're other services that make the experience easy.
Hell, that's what Apple said in the beginning when they released the first iPhone with no app store and told everyone that web apps were the proper way to do things, going forward. But everyone flipped their shit, castigated Apple over it, started jailbreaking their iPhones to run Cydia's app store, and generally demanding the ability to produce native apps, not web apps. Who knows whether Apple relented and changed course; or if apps were the plan all along but just weren't ready at the first iPhone's release.
I've no sympathy at all for the people who are now whining about apps. They asked for... demanded even... them. They got them. Live with your choices, people.
Matters of immigration and naturalization are powers explicitly reserved for the federal government under the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8). No state government has the right to overrule the federal on that. So those "attacks" (And let's be realistic. We're talking about court actions. The ATF wasn't burning Jan Brewer out of the Arizona state capitol Waco-style.), were 100% justified and proper.
USB is a standard. But you should recall that it was not originally *the* standard; and did not just "work with everybody". When Apple first switched to it with the iMac; support for USB on the Windows side was flakey and half-baked at best. And, at the time, the windows people widely criticized Apple for their "non-standard" choice to use this new-fangled USB thing that just barely worked outside the Apple ecosystem.
To some people, they will just never be able to do anything right.
Loss of the headphone jack on the iphone, not a problem. Loss of MagSafe on the new MacBook, huge problem. I'd have bought one already if it weren't for that. I mean... even if they've decided that USB-C is the new hotness and all, couldn't they have at least improved the connector on the MacBooks side to lose the friction plug and include the magnets?
The thing is, the "good and informative" comments are all just a rehash of the discussions from when MA370 went missing. There has been some amusement from the farcical discussions about retrieving these flash drives via trained turtles, dogs, and pigeons, I guess.
But still... sweet holy hell, at this point I think slashdot actually had better standards when it was inflicting us with Jon Katz's rambling pontifications.
> I see no difference in that law to the american 'cars
> can only be sold by dealers' and other 'stupid' laws.
Neither do I. But, if you will recall, the car dealership protectionism laws are also nearly universally reviled; not just here on slashdot, but by pretty much anyone who's had the displeasure of doing business with their ilk.
Even as far back as when I still used MySpace though, I was already using a password manager and strings randomly generated gibberish for web passwords. It wasn't as nice a program back then as 1password is now. But still...
You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, and so on; to say nothing of the rest of your equipment list.
At that point you may as well just use homing pigeons. And bonus: if you can keep them excited enough to fly around their cages while the plane is in flight, you reduce the weight you have to carry. The turtles and dogs are deadweight until the plane hits water, after all.
W-T-literal-F, editors? News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Who is Max_W and why should I care about his black box replacement idea? Is he an expert in aviation safety? Is he a search and recovery worker? Is he an aerospace engineer working for Boeing or Airbus or even Embraer? Is he a regulator with the FAA? An NTSB investigator? Or is he just some random poster whose idle musings you've turned into an article?
We already have bodies like Underwriters Labs and Conformité Européenne which certify consumer products as safe to use. Additionally, the FDA has an even more stringent regime of compliance and certification for durable medical equipment; which is where these "vape pens" logically fit, given that their purpose is to provide humans a non-disposable means to ingest a drug. Tellingly, the "vaping" industry has not seen fit to build their products to standards for UL or CE approval, much less that of the FDA.
It's past time for the "vaping" industry to grow up, leave the head shops and gas-station quickie-marts behind, and generally knock off the semi-legitimate, fly-by-night, grey-market crap.
What they should have done is what we had here in San Francisco for several years before we forgot that we'd already done something better and jumped on the $15/hr bandwagon ourselves: Index the minimum wage to the consumer price index, let it raise automatically with inflation, and be done with it.
$12, $15, 4-years, 6-years; it's all academic. Setting it as a specific dollar value is dumb. Supposing the $15 wage goes through, it's going to stay there for long while. Legislative inertia and incompetence on the left, plus the screams of bloody murder at the notion of COMMUNISM and fighting any increase with tooth and nail on the part of the right, combine to pretty much guarantee it. So, eventually $15 will have the same purchasing power that $8 does now; and we'll be right back where we started.
What they should really do, is set it to automatically increment each year with the CPI; then STFU and forget about it. It'll get buried in the bureaucracy and go up on its own every year. And we can avoid having this same debate again down the road.
Even over four (or six) years, that's a rapid increase. Here in San Francisco... where I think we can all agree we're about as progressive as you can get... we voted in 2004 to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index, so that it would rise automatically with inflation. So, the $8.50 minimum wage from 2004 increased with the CPI to $11.05 at the beginning of 2015. In 2014, we voted Prop J into law. That's our four-year (not six) increase to $15.00 in 2018, starting with the boost to our current minimum of $12.25.
So, that's under a dollar per year increase. And a total increase of 26%. Businesses will feel it, sure. But business is booming. And if you do business in San Francisco, you've already decided to accept higher than usual costs.
Now, consider the federal minimum wage. That's $7.25. Take it just to $12 over four years; and that's $1.19/year for a total increase of 40%. That's somewhat more dramatic. And I can see where it would be more likely to shock a business owner into looking at cutting costs by cutting staff.
Besides, automated ordering kiosks are already a thing. There are many places where I can order with my iPhone. And who goes to a bank teller instead of an ATM anymore? The writing's been on the wall for a lot of low-level positions for a while. What's happening now, is mostly inertia being overcome.
Retro becomes a problem because it becomes excessively expensive, or even impossible, to maintain.
Consider just those 8" floppy disks. For starters, they're not exactly durable. And barring clumsiness, the oxide coating used for data storage continues to oxidize over time since they're not airtight. So every one of them is slowly going bad and needs to be periodically replaced. Vintage disks in a warehouse would also be exposed to oxygen and slowly going bad. So somewhere there's a production line running, still turning out 8" floppy drives. There's a certain minimum cost to keep any production line running. And how many customers besides the DoD do you suppose that vendor has? So those are some epically expensive 8" floppy disks.
The production line to make those 8" floppies needs maintenance and, critically, spare parts when something breaks. These are unlikely to be industry-standard machine parts... how many 8" floppy fabs still exist? So any replacement parts to the production line would need to be a custom job from a machine shop, at obscene pricing. (Skilled machinists are becoming more and more rare in the US and custom work demands a large premium.) And since the Air Force probably doesn't a steady supply of these floppies, and there are unlikely to be many, if any, other buyers, the production line probably starts and stops every so often to produce batches around replacement time. Starting or stopping a production line is a large expensive process itself; sometimes more expensive even than leaving it running at low volume for extended times. And what happens if, at the next contract renewal, the vendor decides it just doesn't want to be in the 8" floppy business anymore? What happens if the vendor goes out of business
And that's just one component of the "retro but still functional" design. Pretty much any and every replacement part is likely to be a custom job at this point. And, for obvious reasons, that production isn't something you can just job out to China.
I'm just disappointed that it took place in secret. I would have happily kicked in a few bucks to a kickstarter or gofundme for the endavour; especially if there were a tier where I could have gotten an "I helped put gawker out of business." t-shirt. (I'm picturing a nice caricature drawing of Jason Chen and Brian Lam getting steel-toed boots to the face and/or posterior here...)
What gawker does isn't journalism, it's vandalism. Stupid bullshit and sensationalism and tabloid-esque writing all aside, they irredeemably crossed the Rubicon with their "TV-B-Gone at CES" antics. I've been hoping for someone... anyone... to take them down ever since. And their behavior since (Including solicitation to purchase stolen prototype devices on the black market.), has done nothing to redeem them.
I'm a little "WTF?" that it took a washed-up ex-pro-wrestler from the '80s to do the job though, considering all of gawker's libelous and sometimes outright criminal behavior in the past. But one takes assistance where it's offered, I guess.
> If I want a weight lifting exercise I'll go to the gym. In
> the mean time I'll take my computers in the smallest
> format I can get.
^^^ This. So very much this.
I hate, Hate, HATE "desktop replacement" laptops. Even the 13" Retina MBP is just too damn big and too damn heavy. I have a nice, beefy, multi-monitor, stationary, desktop for primary productivity. Laptops are for mobility. My 11" MacBook Air is easily the best laptop I've ever used. All but silent, small enough to be usable in the air even in coach, wakes from sleep faster than I can open it, almost too light to even be noticeable... I'm sometimes just amazed that I ever tolerated anything larger. And for my normal mobile workflow, (mostly bash, a couple of browser tabs, and Sublime Text); I even get a full workday out of the thing. So I can usually save myself carrying around the power adaptor too! Granted, with the reduced screen real estate, I'm not as productive as on the desktop. But I neither expect, nor am expected, to be.
> I'd love to get a thinkpad that's built like a 2016 macbook
Oh, that's easy. Just goto a used computer store and find a pre-2005 (Lenovo takeover) Thinkpad. They didn't used to be the trash that they are now. Back when they were built by IBM, they were solid as a tank, and easily equal to a MacBook (Or were they still PowerBooks then?) in quality and reliability, if not aesthetics. You should be able to find plenty that are still in working order.