The only time I've ever had to carry an actual pager, as opposed to receiving notifications to my phone, if it ever went off I'd be immediately on my way out anyway. It wasn't "life or death" but it was the top of the escalation chain after all other avenues had been exhausted. And it wasn't tied into PagerDuty or any other automated system. Other humans had to first be contacted, tried and concluded that they couldn't deal with the issue, before manually escalating to whoever had the pager. So... same result either way. Hell, I'd have been booking it out of there before anyone had a chance to come "escort" me.
There are plenty of professions, some "life or death", some not; that require after-hours reachability. Working in one of them should not mean that you sit at home all the time and never have a social life.
Meh. I would simply destroy whatever locking sack you made me use as a matter of general principle. You'd either get an empty & shredded one back at the door; or they wouldn't get it back at all and I'd cut it open at home, though I can't imagine that anything cheap enough to hand out in concert-goer numbers would be durable enough that I couldn't work out *some* way to open it quickly.
If you want to embrace some "Life isn't life unless you're living solely in the moment." or "The playa is your one true home; embrace radical self-reliance and discard the trappings of the default world." pseudo-spirituality, then fine. You do you. Don't presume to impose whatever hippy-dippy gobbledygook you've invented up on others though.
Which ones? No really... serious question. Can you think of any titles?
Don't get me wrong... I have a fair assortment of classic games. But most are purchased from GoG and run in dosbox, which I have no doubt will be updated to support 64-bit Macs, assuming it hasn't already. (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri still gets regular gameplay and is still much better than the disappointment that is Civ: Beyond Earth.) But in the last decade and a half, going from old versions of OS X that included Classic OS 9 emulation, to Intel, to 64-bit, to Cider ports, official and unofficial; I have had exactly *ONE* game that I cared about quit working. That game was Homeworld 2, which was a PPC title and quit working with whichever version (I forget) dropped Rosetta. But, go figure, an updated Homeworld 2 came out a few years back, with updated and remastered graphics for modern monitor resolutions, and a similarly updated remastered Homeworld 1 (Which, for some reason, I had never gotten around to playing, despite my great affection for the sequel.) thrown in as a bonus.
The reality is that California is not quite so liberal as it might appear from the outside. Remember, it's the state that gave the country both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It's just that, unless you're a universally-beloved, larger-than-life, action hero immigrant from Austria, the Republican *name* is political poison. Pete "How I hate the Hispanics; let me count the 187 ways." Wilson saw to that in the 1990s when he married the "R" on the ballot to a campaign of hate, discrimination, and bigotry against the state's fastest-growing demographic (I believe the word he was looking for afterward was: "oops".).
But at the end of the day, we *DID* vote to recall and depose a democratic governor in favor of a Republican not long ago at all. And Schwarzenegger handily accomplished much of his agenda and won re-election besides. We also keep re-electing DINOs like Pelosi and Feinstein to congress. And even here in San Francisco, the conservative candidate wins surprisingly (to outsiders, I guess) often. You simply have to ignore the stated party affiliations (Republican being a dirty word.) and compare-and-contrast the politics of the candidates themselves. Consider the mayoral office: Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom (Both the occupying the political right.) defeated Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez (the leftists) in their respective mayoral elections. (Their first elections, that is. We do seem to have a tradition of rosters of only complete space-cases running against mayoral incumbents.). Ed Lee was no progressive and was considered by many to be another DINO. And in my own district for state senate, Scott Wiener (the conservative) defeated Jane Kim (the liberal) for the seat in Sacramento. It's just that both of them had to run as Democrats because, as seen to by Pete Wilson, running as a Republican is political death for anyone who'd not a cyborg sent back in time to kill Sarah and/or John Connor.
Not just that, but Pichai had to end a vacation and return to Google early to deal with the fallout. California being an "at will" state; "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a perfectly legit reason for a termination.
> There are costs to hosting a large company. > Infrastructure updates to cope with traffic, or time > lost to traffic if not addressed, for example.
Those costs apply to any healthy and growing city & economy. Whether Amazon brings in 20,000 new jobs alone, or 200 startups create 100 new jobs each; that's still the same 20,000 more people using the infrastructure.So unless the preference is for your city to stagnate and wither like Detroit, I don't see the problem.
Did you, per chance, ever visit Seattle and wander the south Lake Union area before Amazon got big? I did. It was bad; perhaps not to the point that you could call it "urban decay", but undeniably rundown and decrepit. And two years ago I had the occasion to go back and see the changes. And the improvement is so dramatic it's almost beyond words. I'd just encourage you to go look at pictures. Having see the before and after personally, I'd say that any city should be thrilled for Amazon to move in. I'm just bummed that they sign;t consider coming here to San Francisco.
More to the point; Apple is far from the only or first company to contract out to Foxxconn or Chinese manufacturing in general. Considering that we never seem to see stories on slashdot about the working conditions where Cisco or Microsoft or Acer or Netgear or HTC or Panasonic or Visio or Samsung or Fitbit or Huawei produces are made; I smell the distinct aromas of double standards and hypocrisy today.
> Apple didn't pitch itself as the SJW's best friend
They do? Well... I must admit that I don't catch many Apple ads in the years since I've had a DVR. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen them mention "SJW"s in any that I've seen though. Perhaps you have links to the videos on YouTube that would support your claim?
> Lenovo the think pad line has consistently kept its quality.
Oh... ho... You've obviously forgotten how good ThinkPads were back when they were IBM branded and Armonk's QC people kept the factory people at Lenovo under their gaze and thumbs. Once IBM sold the brand and Lenovo was left to its own devices, ThinkPads have deteriorated big time. Want a decent windows pc lappy? Go with Toshiba. They've remained solid and reliable machines for nearly a quarter-century now. ThinkPads are crap since IBM abandoned them.
A friend of mine used to work for Yelp back in those days. What he told me was that the sales types absolutely did not have the ability to change anyone's reviews or score in exchange for ad purchases. There were no tools to allow them to do so. And they did not have write access to the data in any other capacity. And part of his job was to keep any unauthorized access, external or internal, from said data from happening.
He also told me that Yelp's sales people were the "slimiest pack of lying shit-weasels" (his words) that he'd ever met in his life, and that he wouldn't put it past them for a second to tell potential advertisers that they could pay to raise their ratings or make bad reviews go away.
Or, maybe slashdot should get with the times and accept the facts that:
1) Mobile devices and browsers exist and are good enough to actually use; for some people, as their primary means of accessing the internet.
2) Unicode is a thing.
It's not as if either of those developments is new. And I sure don't see work being done anywhere else on Slashdot that would reasonably be soaking up so much development time as to prevent them from correctly handling a worldwide-standard character encoding.
That's actually why I went with the 8 instead of the X. It's basically everything that's in the X besides the screen and the better camera. The smaller form factor is important to me, and not even a $20K DSLR would make *me* into a good photographer. So I went with the smallest full-featured package they offered. And yeah, if they'd put all of the guts into the 5/5s/5se form factor, I'd have bought that one instead. Hell, I'd probably even been willing to pay full 8 price. For anything meant to be portable, smaller is a feature for me, not a flaw.
Hell, my personal MacBook is still my trusty 11" Air. And though half the weight of what I used to lug around when I first wound up with a laptop, my work MacBook Pro feels like a brick in comparison; and I'm ever-tempted to be naughty and use the Air when I'm on-call but still out-and-about.
Nope. As someone who has had friends put out of work by their companies bring destroyed by the RIAA/Metallicaâ(TM)s reign of terror, and who once worked at a company whose demise was hastened by being forced to waste money and engineering effort dealing with their DMCA garbage; Iâ(TM)m 100% in favor of Spotify here... and I donâ(TM)t even have an account. The RIAA/MPAA/Metallica/HillaryRosen/JackValeni are all so entirely despicable and vile in every conceivable way I am pretty much always in favor of anything that harms any of them in any way great or small.
Zombie Shawn Fanning could rise out of the Napster graveyard to feast on their flesh and Iâ(TM)d cheer him on. Peter Thiel and Bill Gates could devote their fortunes to tag-teaming them with frivolous lawsuits until the the associations and all their members and minions were destitute, and Iâ(TM)d give them two thumbs-up. The jaundiced one could unleash Hellfire missiles from drones into all of their homes and offices and Iâ(TM)d actually tell Gallup I approve of him if I were to be polled immediately following. Darth Cheney himself could venture forth from his volcano lair to force-crush their larynxes and cast their still-slightly-living bodies into his pool of hungry piranha fish, and Iâ(TM)d be like: âoeGO DARK SIDE! WOOHOO!! SHOOT SOME OF THEM IN THE FACE!!!â
Do you think all of the alcohol bootleggers and speakeasies in the US just closed up shop the day the 21st Amendment was passed? Of course not. It took time... years even... for legitimate supply, distribution, retail, and service chains to get built and established after the end of prohibition and displace the illegal markets. And to this day, there are people still making moonshine, bathtub gin, home-brewed beer, and their own wine just because they can. Some of these people sell (illegally) their creations. But in the here and now, the vast majority of alcohol sales are legal and regulated and "speakeasies" are just a marketing gimmick on the part of plain old liquor-licensed bars. So too will it be with pot.
> Customers wanted physical keyboards No. *Blackberry* customers wanted physical keyboards. And they kept buying Blackberries until the company imploded. For the first several years of Android's existence, there were many available with physical keyboards. The first Android *EVER* had a physical keyboard. The models with touchscreens outsold the ones with keyboards by far; and Android manufacturers eventually quit making keyboard phones because they weren't selling. The iPhone just predicted the trend, that's all.
> to be able to add Apps from anywhere Even in the first several years when it was trivial to jailbreak an iPhone, only a tiny fraction of users bothered. A very few customers wanted this. The vast majority didn't.
> free ring tones and the ability to record your own Trivially easy and free out-of-the-box with GarageBand. I've added plenty of my own rightness and notification sounds. It's not Apple's fault you never bothered to read any documentation or even Google a howto.
> standard chargers Nope. MicroUSB connectors are crap in oh so many ways. My opinion on the matter may change once USB-C becomes ubiquitous. But I'd choose Lightning over Micro-USB any time.
> and being able to plug in audio devices with a universal jack Five years ago you may have had a point. Once I was gifted my first pair of Bluetooth headphones though, I was hooked; and the 3.5mm port on my 6s went unused throughout most of the phone's lifetime. Now, the only wired headphones I have left are for my Playstation (Because Sony refuses to play nice with standard Bluetooth.). And I don't miss the port on my 8 at all.
Or, if being able to carry extra batteries with you and swap them in is important to you, then you should buy a phone that meets your needs and desires by including that feature. They're apparently very common. Every time the topic of the iPhone and its battery come up in any capacity on Slashdot, people stumble over themselves to point out that, on their Android phones, they can very easily pop the back cover off, swap in a fresh battery, and add a microSD card for more storage.
And, for those of us who are okay with sacrificing a bit of ease in serviceability in exchange for a lighter and more compact device; how about you leave us alone to make our own purchasing decisions and stop trying to force your design preferences on others?
Nope. I don't work with or for Apple. And I'm a good hour or so (In good traffic, longer when 280 turns to crap.) away from Cupertino. I just have normal friends and a normal job in sys/dev/cloud/whateverOps, and live a pretty normal life.
Yeah. Try getting out of your parents' basement sometime. Out here in the real world, I'd estimate that at least 50% of my coworkers have Apple Watches. Probably 75% of my friends have them. (Just to be charitable, I'm leaving out the ones who actually work for Apple.) And if you go out and about in the city (shopping, dining, socializing, etc.) it's not at all uncommon for cashiers, baristas, waiters, and bartenders to have them.
Or, you know, people can very well celebrate the non-religious aspects of the civil holiday of Christmas like taking the day off work, exchanging gifts, eating too much ham, and getting tipsy on eggnog and port; without actually observing it religiously as christ's mass. After all, it's pretty well known and understood that the historical Jesus Christ, son of god or not, was definitely NOT born on December 25th, and that there early church moved just his birthday, in a PR campaign, so as to glom on to the solstice holiday that most religions already celebrated.
Hell, I don't consider myself christian, or religious at all really. But I celebrate Christmas, easter, and the like. Give me a day off work and a party to goto, and I'll happily celebrate Hannukah, Passover, Disting, Freyfest, Chinese New Year, and Eid too.
Russia can never become a 3rd-world country. They're 2nd-world and always will be, so long as they exist. That's literally the definition of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries:
1st world: The US, UK, and their allies. 2nd world: Russia and its satellite states 3rd world: Everyone else.
The only way Russia can cease to be 2nd world and enter the 3rd world is for it to collapse entirely and cease to exist as Russia.
To get to media sources that are slanted to the left as far as fox lists to the right you need to leave broadcast and mainstream print behind entirely, and sink to the levels of websites like Indymedia and DailyKos. And even then, those sites have the modicum of integrity to wear their bias in their sleeves and refrain from claiming to be either "news" or "fair and balanced".
Not just technically. He flat-out hasn't built that wall. All that exists are a handful of exorbitantly priced prototypes, and the existing border fence.
The wall is just not going to happen. Almost all of the cost estimates are ludicrously low-balled. And the most realistic of the lot barely covers materials; omitting:
1) Labor: You need to find lots of people willing to move to, and work in, some of the most miserably hot and middle-of-nowhere parts of the southwestern desert states. And the companies employing that labor have to sacrifice any future business in, at the very least, California; the richest and most populous state in the US. California is especially profitable for construction firms; since everything has to be built to earthquake spec. That's a lot of potential profits to be asked to sacrifice. Plus, a few other states, and a good number of cities as well, are also working on laws banning any company that works on the border wall from bidding on government contracts. So 45 is going to have to pay a premium and princely sum for that labor.
2) Logistics: You have to get those aforementioned materials and people to the construction sites. The people have to be fed, sheltered, and amused. And it's not like you can pour the concrete in El Paso and truck it 8 hours somewhere. Concrete plants will need to be built in situ; adding to the expense. Oh, and you'll need to build roads to many of the construction sites as well.
3) Legalities: A lot of people, across four states, three federal circuit courts (Including, yes, the 9th.), and who knows how many counties, are going to fight the wall. Exempting the law from EIRs has been bandied about already. But you can bet that expensive and time-consuming lawsuits will ensue if 45 tries. And quite a lot of the land needed for the wall, worker housing and support, and roads and such, is private property. The mucilaginous morass of eminent domain suits alone brings a gleeful giggle to my throat. And it won't just be Cards Against Humanity's xmas project to buy land specifically for the purpose. It won't just be liberals either. Do you think for a second that ornery southwestern, and especially Texan and "sovereign citizen", rancher types are going to take kindly to the feds stomping in and taking their land from them? Hell, 45 will be fortunate if they ONLY fight back with expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. Remember, those Bundy peoples' feuding with the federal government didn't start with Obama. They've been at it since Bush #1.
Oh, and congress still has to allocate the money for the wall... not the fantasy-land sums 45 and his people have tossed around, but the real costs taking into account all of the above. You can take it to the bank that if the Democrats take either house in 2018, that's just not going to happen. And even a good number of republicans are ambivalent about the wall. It's a boondoggle that's going to waste a fantastic amount of money for no benefit; so any that genuinely believe in fiscal responsibility or small government are out. Some of them represent districts that will contain those soon-to-be-pissed-off victims of eminent domain attacks. And hispanics are still the fastest growing demographic in the US. I imagine at least a few republicans will look at what happened in California when former governor Pete Wilson decided to hitch his wagon to the "How I hate the Mexicans, let me count the 187 ways." train.
Apple is not breaking the law though. Tax avoidance (as opposed to tax evasion) is perfectly legal. And tax avoidance (structuring your finances so that the tax you're legitimately obligated to pay), is something that everyone, everywhere, does. Apple has merely done it better than you or I could each April.
The only example where it's actually been established that laws have been broken, with regard to taxation, has been the case recently where the EU ruled that Ireland set it's tax rate too low, giving Apple a larger incentive to locate there than what they were allowed under EU rules; for which the EU is trying to punish Apple, instead of Ireland. That is, of course, being appealed. And all that proves tho is that the US has no monopoly on xenophobia and jingoism.
Well then, perhaps they should pressure the world's governments to close the loopholes that make tax avoidance (This is NOT tax *evasion* we're talking about.) possible.
That will never happen though, because those loopholes are there on purpose. And closing them would anger the companies that actually payed for them to be there. The only reason various people are in a snit about Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like, is that these companies cleverly realized that, once on the books, those laws actually apply to everyone. So tech has been taking advantage of said laws without actually having lobbied and paid for them. And those pockets have to be lines, "gifts" given, and re-election coffers filled, after all.
That, and I've no doubt that plain old xenophobia (Yes, Europe is headed in that direction too, with Brexit, how close Le Pen came to the French presidency, and increasing anti-immigrant sentiment as fine examples.) is in play too. News abounds about Europe, and France in particular, taking on US companies like the aforementioned Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. But where are the stories about the EU or France taking the likes of EADS/Airbus, Total S. A., Dassault, or Royal Dutch Shell to task for their more than ample (And going far beyond mere tax avoidance.) shenanigans?
In both cases, this is nothing but rank hypocrisy.
> Did this man stay at home, in view of the pizza place?
I generally phone in pickup orders to places that are within walking distance of my home. This is because I hate waiting in line or sitting around at the take-out waiting for my food to be done. None of these places are actually *visible* from my house, or part of app-enabled chains.
But if they were, and one of those take-out orders was not available for take-out at the time they specified; I could certainly see myself doing some experimentation... including summoning a delivery when I could walk and monitoring the store to see if the driver left when specified... to see just what other lies they were in the habit of telling.
Slashdot Mirror
The only time I've ever had to carry an actual pager, as opposed to receiving notifications to my phone, if it ever went off I'd be immediately on my way out anyway. It wasn't "life or death" but it was the top of the escalation chain after all other avenues had been exhausted. And it wasn't tied into PagerDuty or any other automated system. Other humans had to first be contacted, tried and concluded that they couldn't deal with the issue, before manually escalating to whoever had the pager. So... same result either way. Hell, I'd have been booking it out of there before anyone had a chance to come "escort" me.
There are plenty of professions, some "life or death", some not; that require after-hours reachability. Working in one of them should not mean that you sit at home all the time and never have a social life.
Meh. I would simply destroy whatever locking sack you made me use as a matter of general principle. You'd either get an empty & shredded one back at the door; or they wouldn't get it back at all and I'd cut it open at home, though I can't imagine that anything cheap enough to hand out in concert-goer numbers would be durable enough that I couldn't work out *some* way to open it quickly.
If you want to embrace some "Life isn't life unless you're living solely in the moment." or "The playa is your one true home; embrace radical self-reliance and discard the trappings of the default world." pseudo-spirituality, then fine. You do you. Don't presume to impose whatever hippy-dippy gobbledygook you've invented up on others though.
Which ones? No really... serious question. Can you think of any titles?
Don't get me wrong... I have a fair assortment of classic games. But most are purchased from GoG and run in dosbox, which I have no doubt will be updated to support 64-bit Macs, assuming it hasn't already. (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri still gets regular gameplay and is still much better than the disappointment that is Civ: Beyond Earth.) But in the last decade and a half, going from old versions of OS X that included Classic OS 9 emulation, to Intel, to 64-bit, to Cider ports, official and unofficial; I have had exactly *ONE* game that I cared about quit working. That game was Homeworld 2, which was a PPC title and quit working with whichever version (I forget) dropped Rosetta. But, go figure, an updated Homeworld 2 came out a few years back, with updated and remastered graphics for modern monitor resolutions, and a similarly updated remastered Homeworld 1 (Which, for some reason, I had never gotten around to playing, despite my great affection for the sequel.) thrown in as a bonus.
The reality is that California is not quite so liberal as it might appear from the outside. Remember, it's the state that gave the country both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It's just that, unless you're a universally-beloved, larger-than-life, action hero immigrant from Austria, the Republican *name* is political poison. Pete "How I hate the Hispanics; let me count the 187 ways." Wilson saw to that in the 1990s when he married the "R" on the ballot to a campaign of hate, discrimination, and bigotry against the state's fastest-growing demographic (I believe the word he was looking for afterward was: "oops".).
But at the end of the day, we *DID* vote to recall and depose a democratic governor in favor of a Republican not long ago at all. And Schwarzenegger handily accomplished much of his agenda and won re-election besides. We also keep re-electing DINOs like Pelosi and Feinstein to congress. And even here in San Francisco, the conservative candidate wins surprisingly (to outsiders, I guess) often. You simply have to ignore the stated party affiliations (Republican being a dirty word.) and compare-and-contrast the politics of the candidates themselves. Consider the mayoral office: Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom (Both the occupying the political right.) defeated Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez (the leftists) in their respective mayoral elections. (Their first elections, that is. We do seem to have a tradition of rosters of only complete space-cases running against mayoral incumbents.). Ed Lee was no progressive and was considered by many to be another DINO. And in my own district for state senate, Scott Wiener (the conservative) defeated Jane Kim (the liberal) for the seat in Sacramento. It's just that both of them had to run as Democrats because, as seen to by Pete Wilson, running as a Republican is political death for anyone who'd not a cyborg sent back in time to kill Sarah and/or John Connor.
Not just that, but Pichai had to end a vacation and return to Google early to deal with the fallout. California being an "at will" state; "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a perfectly legit reason for a termination.
> There are costs to hosting a large company.
> Infrastructure updates to cope with traffic, or time
> lost to traffic if not addressed, for example.
Those costs apply to any healthy and growing city & economy. Whether Amazon brings in 20,000 new jobs alone, or 200 startups create 100 new jobs each; that's still the same 20,000 more people using the infrastructure.So unless the preference is for your city to stagnate and wither like Detroit, I don't see the problem.
Did you, per chance, ever visit Seattle and wander the south Lake Union area before Amazon got big? I did. It was bad; perhaps not to the point that you could call it "urban decay", but undeniably rundown and decrepit. And two years ago I had the occasion to go back and see the changes. And the improvement is so dramatic it's almost beyond words. I'd just encourage you to go look at pictures. Having see the before and after personally, I'd say that any city should be thrilled for Amazon to move in. I'm just bummed that they sign;t consider coming here to San Francisco.
More to the point; Apple is far from the only or first company to contract out to Foxxconn or Chinese manufacturing in general. Considering that we never seem to see stories on slashdot about the working conditions where Cisco or Microsoft or Acer or Netgear or HTC or Panasonic or Visio or Samsung or Fitbit or Huawei produces are made; I smell the distinct aromas of double standards and hypocrisy today.
> Apple didn't pitch itself as the SJW's best friend
They do? Well... I must admit that I don't catch many Apple ads in the years since I've had a DVR. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen them mention "SJW"s in any that I've seen though. Perhaps you have links to the videos on YouTube that would support your claim?
> Lenovo the think pad line has consistently kept its quality.
Oh... ho... You've obviously forgotten how good ThinkPads were back when they were IBM branded and Armonk's QC people kept the factory people at Lenovo under their gaze and thumbs. Once IBM sold the brand and Lenovo was left to its own devices, ThinkPads have deteriorated big time. Want a decent windows pc lappy? Go with Toshiba. They've remained solid and reliable machines for nearly a quarter-century now. ThinkPads are crap since IBM abandoned them.
A friend of mine used to work for Yelp back in those days. What he told me was that the sales types absolutely did not have the ability to change anyone's reviews or score in exchange for ad purchases. There were no tools to allow them to do so. And they did not have write access to the data in any other capacity. And part of his job was to keep any unauthorized access, external or internal, from said data from happening.
He also told me that Yelp's sales people were the "slimiest pack of lying shit-weasels" (his words) that he'd ever met in his life, and that he wouldn't put it past them for a second to tell potential advertisers that they could pay to raise their ratings or make bad reviews go away.
Or, maybe slashdot should get with the times and accept the facts that:
1) Mobile devices and browsers exist and are good enough to actually use; for some people, as their primary means of accessing the internet.
2) Unicode is a thing.
It's not as if either of those developments is new. And I sure don't see work being done anywhere else on Slashdot that would reasonably be soaking up so much development time as to prevent them from correctly handling a worldwide-standard character encoding.
That's actually why I went with the 8 instead of the X. It's basically everything that's in the X besides the screen and the better camera. The smaller form factor is important to me, and not even a $20K DSLR would make *me* into a good photographer. So I went with the smallest full-featured package they offered. And yeah, if they'd put all of the guts into the 5/5s/5se form factor, I'd have bought that one instead. Hell, I'd probably even been willing to pay full 8 price. For anything meant to be portable, smaller is a feature for me, not a flaw.
Hell, my personal MacBook is still my trusty 11" Air. And though half the weight of what I used to lug around when I first wound up with a laptop, my work MacBook Pro feels like a brick in comparison; and I'm ever-tempted to be naughty and use the Air when I'm on-call but still out-and-about.
Nope. As someone who has had friends put out of work by their companies bring destroyed by the RIAA/Metallicaâ(TM)s reign of terror, and who once worked at a company whose demise was hastened by being forced to waste money and engineering effort dealing with their DMCA garbage; Iâ(TM)m 100% in favor of Spotify here... and I donâ(TM)t even have an account. The RIAA/MPAA/Metallica/HillaryRosen/JackValeni are all so entirely despicable and vile in every conceivable way I am pretty much always in favor of anything that harms any of them in any way great or small.
Zombie Shawn Fanning could rise out of the Napster graveyard to feast on their flesh and Iâ(TM)d cheer him on. Peter Thiel and Bill Gates could devote their fortunes to tag-teaming them with frivolous lawsuits until the the associations and all their members and minions were destitute, and Iâ(TM)d give them two thumbs-up. The jaundiced one could unleash Hellfire missiles from drones into all of their homes and offices and Iâ(TM)d actually tell Gallup I approve of him if I were to be polled immediately following. Darth Cheney himself could venture forth from his volcano lair to force-crush their larynxes and cast their still-slightly-living bodies into his pool of hungry piranha fish, and Iâ(TM)d be like: âoeGO DARK SIDE! WOOHOO!! SHOOT SOME OF THEM IN THE FACE!!!â
Do you think all of the alcohol bootleggers and speakeasies in the US just closed up shop the day the 21st Amendment was passed? Of course not. It took time... years even... for legitimate supply, distribution, retail, and service chains to get built and established after the end of prohibition and displace the illegal markets. And to this day, there are people still making moonshine, bathtub gin, home-brewed beer, and their own wine just because they can. Some of these people sell (illegally) their creations. But in the here and now, the vast majority of alcohol sales are legal and regulated and "speakeasies" are just a marketing gimmick on the part of plain old liquor-licensed bars. So too will it be with pot.
> Customers wanted physical keyboards
No. *Blackberry* customers wanted physical keyboards. And they kept buying Blackberries until the company imploded. For the first several years of Android's existence, there were many available with physical keyboards. The first Android *EVER* had a physical keyboard. The models with touchscreens outsold the ones with keyboards by far; and Android manufacturers eventually quit making keyboard phones because they weren't selling. The iPhone just predicted the trend, that's all.
> to be able to add Apps from anywhere
Even in the first several years when it was trivial to jailbreak an iPhone, only a tiny fraction of users bothered. A very few customers wanted this. The vast majority didn't.
> free ring tones and the ability to record your own
Trivially easy and free out-of-the-box with GarageBand. I've added plenty of my own rightness and notification sounds. It's not Apple's fault you never bothered to read any documentation or even Google a howto.
> standard chargers
Nope. MicroUSB connectors are crap in oh so many ways. My opinion on the matter may change once USB-C becomes ubiquitous. But I'd choose Lightning over Micro-USB any time.
> and being able to plug in audio devices with a universal jack
Five years ago you may have had a point. Once I was gifted my first pair of Bluetooth headphones though, I was hooked; and the 3.5mm port on my 6s went unused throughout most of the phone's lifetime. Now, the only wired headphones I have left are for my Playstation (Because Sony refuses to play nice with standard Bluetooth.). And I don't miss the port on my 8 at all.
Or, if being able to carry extra batteries with you and swap them in is important to you, then you should buy a phone that meets your needs and desires by including that feature. They're apparently very common. Every time the topic of the iPhone and its battery come up in any capacity on Slashdot, people stumble over themselves to point out that, on their Android phones, they can very easily pop the back cover off, swap in a fresh battery, and add a microSD card for more storage.
And, for those of us who are okay with sacrificing a bit of ease in serviceability in exchange for a lighter and more compact device; how about you leave us alone to make our own purchasing decisions and stop trying to force your design preferences on others?
Nope. I don't work with or for Apple. And I'm a good hour or so (In good traffic, longer when 280 turns to crap.) away from Cupertino. I just have normal friends and a normal job in sys/dev/cloud/whateverOps, and live a pretty normal life.
Yeah. Try getting out of your parents' basement sometime. Out here in the real world, I'd estimate that at least 50% of my coworkers have Apple Watches. Probably 75% of my friends have them. (Just to be charitable, I'm leaving out the ones who actually work for Apple.) And if you go out and about in the city (shopping, dining, socializing, etc.) it's not at all uncommon for cashiers, baristas, waiters, and bartenders to have them.
Or, you know, people can very well celebrate the non-religious aspects of the civil holiday of Christmas like taking the day off work, exchanging gifts, eating too much ham, and getting tipsy on eggnog and port; without actually observing it religiously as christ's mass. After all, it's pretty well known and understood that the historical Jesus Christ, son of god or not, was definitely NOT born on December 25th, and that there early church moved just his birthday, in a PR campaign, so as to glom on to the solstice holiday that most religions already celebrated.
Hell, I don't consider myself christian, or religious at all really. But I celebrate Christmas, easter, and the like. Give me a day off work and a party to goto, and I'll happily celebrate Hannukah, Passover, Disting, Freyfest, Chinese New Year, and Eid too.
Umm. No.
Russia can never become a 3rd-world country. They're 2nd-world and always will be, so long as they exist. That's literally the definition of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries:
1st world: The US, UK, and their allies.
2nd world: Russia and its satellite states
3rd world: Everyone else.
The only way Russia can cease to be 2nd world and enter the 3rd world is for it to collapse entirely and cease to exist as Russia.
Um... no.
To get to media sources that are slanted to the left as far as fox lists to the right you need to leave broadcast and mainstream print behind entirely, and sink to the levels of websites like Indymedia and DailyKos. And even then, those sites have the modicum of integrity to wear their bias in their sleeves and refrain from claiming to be either "news" or "fair and balanced".
Not just technically. He flat-out hasn't built that wall. All that exists are a handful of exorbitantly priced prototypes, and the existing border fence.
The wall is just not going to happen. Almost all of the cost estimates are ludicrously low-balled. And the most realistic of the lot barely covers materials; omitting:
1) Labor: You need to find lots of people willing to move to, and work in, some of the most miserably hot and middle-of-nowhere parts of the southwestern desert states. And the companies employing that labor have to sacrifice any future business in, at the very least, California; the richest and most populous state in the US. California is especially profitable for construction firms; since everything has to be built to earthquake spec. That's a lot of potential profits to be asked to sacrifice. Plus, a few other states, and a good number of cities as well, are also working on laws banning any company that works on the border wall from bidding on government contracts. So 45 is going to have to pay a premium and princely sum for that labor.
2) Logistics: You have to get those aforementioned materials and people to the construction sites. The people have to be fed, sheltered, and amused. And it's not like you can pour the concrete in El Paso and truck it 8 hours somewhere. Concrete plants will need to be built in situ; adding to the expense. Oh, and you'll need to build roads to many of the construction sites as well.
3) Legalities: A lot of people, across four states, three federal circuit courts (Including, yes, the 9th.), and who knows how many counties, are going to fight the wall. Exempting the law from EIRs has been bandied about already. But you can bet that expensive and time-consuming lawsuits will ensue if 45 tries. And quite a lot of the land needed for the wall, worker housing and support, and roads and such, is private property. The mucilaginous morass of eminent domain suits alone brings a gleeful giggle to my throat. And it won't just be Cards Against Humanity's xmas project to buy land specifically for the purpose. It won't just be liberals either. Do you think for a second that ornery southwestern, and especially Texan and "sovereign citizen", rancher types are going to take kindly to the feds stomping in and taking their land from them? Hell, 45 will be fortunate if they ONLY fight back with expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. Remember, those Bundy peoples' feuding with the federal government didn't start with Obama. They've been at it since Bush #1.
Oh, and congress still has to allocate the money for the wall... not the fantasy-land sums 45 and his people have tossed around, but the real costs taking into account all of the above. You can take it to the bank that if the Democrats take either house in 2018, that's just not going to happen. And even a good number of republicans are ambivalent about the wall. It's a boondoggle that's going to waste a fantastic amount of money for no benefit; so any that genuinely believe in fiscal responsibility or small government are out. Some of them represent districts that will contain those soon-to-be-pissed-off victims of eminent domain attacks. And hispanics are still the fastest growing demographic in the US. I imagine at least a few republicans will look at what happened in California when former governor Pete Wilson decided to hitch his wagon to the "How I hate the Mexicans, let me count the 187 ways." train.
Apple is not breaking the law though. Tax avoidance (as opposed to tax evasion) is perfectly legal. And tax avoidance (structuring your finances so that the tax you're legitimately obligated to pay), is something that everyone, everywhere, does. Apple has merely done it better than you or I could each April.
The only example where it's actually been established that laws have been broken, with regard to taxation, has been the case recently where the EU ruled that Ireland set it's tax rate too low, giving Apple a larger incentive to locate there than what they were allowed under EU rules; for which the EU is trying to punish Apple, instead of Ireland. That is, of course, being appealed. And all that proves tho is that the US has no monopoly on xenophobia and jingoism.
Well then, perhaps they should pressure the world's governments to close the loopholes that make tax avoidance (This is NOT tax *evasion* we're talking about.) possible.
That will never happen though, because those loopholes are there on purpose. And closing them would anger the companies that actually payed for them to be there. The only reason various people are in a snit about Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like, is that these companies cleverly realized that, once on the books, those laws actually apply to everyone. So tech has been taking advantage of said laws without actually having lobbied and paid for them. And those pockets have to be lines, "gifts" given, and re-election coffers filled, after all.
That, and I've no doubt that plain old xenophobia (Yes, Europe is headed in that direction too, with Brexit, how close Le Pen came to the French presidency, and increasing anti-immigrant sentiment as fine examples.) is in play too. News abounds about Europe, and France in particular, taking on US companies like the aforementioned Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. But where are the stories about the EU or France taking the likes of EADS/Airbus, Total S. A., Dassault, or Royal Dutch Shell to task for their more than ample (And going far beyond mere tax avoidance.) shenanigans?
In both cases, this is nothing but rank hypocrisy.
> Did this man stay at home, in view of the pizza place?
I generally phone in pickup orders to places that are within walking distance of my home. This is because I hate waiting in line or sitting around at the take-out waiting for my food to be done. None of these places are actually *visible* from my house, or part of app-enabled chains.
But if they were, and one of those take-out orders was not available for take-out at the time they specified; I could certainly see myself doing some experimentation... including summoning a delivery when I could walk and monitoring the store to see if the driver left when specified... to see just what other lies they were in the habit of telling.