My (camera department) cash register could be operated without power (stick a crank in the side.) The front registers were electronic, and we'd always walk out past a sad little line of teenaged cashiers when the power went off and the store had to close.
I could do sales tax faster in my head than by using the little card taped to the counter, too.
Soooo true. This could have been me (even the 40 or so years fits.)
I spent 4 years at a crappy little department store chain in the southeast, while in college. The music came on large reel to reel tapes, so no shuffle and the pops and cracks repeated exactly, and not nearly as many breakdowns as one would hope for. Oddly, I don't remember the rest of the year, just Christmas.
People who can afford European cars and keep them after the first 2 years/lease tend to spend what it takes to keep them running. They don't run that long without constant and horrendously expensive maintenance, unlike many Toyotas that routinely last that long with little or no work.
I have a BMW X5 commuter that is on the edge of that age range, and it's so unreliable that I won't drive it far from home, despite spending enough on it the last 2 years to buy a used Corolla (and doing most of the work myself.) BMW engineering has gone from great (my '83) to embarrassingly bad, and I've heard rumors about recent Mercedes. For all the jokes about Japanese plastic cars, they don't make cooling systems out of plastic, that self destruct every few years.
I look at CR for information, but don't put much faith in their "recommendations."
They like to rate things they don't understand. I recall a review of bicycles (no clue what made one better than another), and lawn mowers (rated by intuition, apparently never tried them to see what worked better.) Cars should be an exception, given CR's focus, which makes their ongoing treatment of Tesla even more... concerning.
I've seen nothing to suggest Tesla is worse than any other high end car. They're expensive but they also have good features, like performance, longevity, and a company that doesn't seem to see customers merely as wealthy prey. Very few German cars in Tesla's league have any appeal besides the mere fact of owning them, and cost as much or more to buy and much, much more to own. Japanese cars are better than European in pretty much every way, but don't outshine Tesla either.
In my day (submarines, 80's) it was a periodic check rather than real time (and definitely not wireless;-) ) It was considered valuable, because it really worked.
Motors, etc, all had little shiny disks glued on for the magnetic pickups; the sound guys got recordings and compared with previous ones (on paper.) They were working on a way to do it with reciprocating machines like compressors and maybe even diesels, which is probably possible now.
There was a short story (Asimov IIRC) about a future world where everyone had calculators, and then a man reverse engineered one and figured out that he could "simulate" its operations on paper. He finally convinced a skeptical general that it worked, who set in motion a plan to build a manned missile (suicide weapon) because a human pilot was cheaper than a computer.
The truly inventive part of this story is the new problem it found. Anyone could think of "No one knows how to use a table of logarithms anymore, or how to create one," after, e.g., an EMP war.
(Disclaimer: I'm an HP-41 fan myself, but I could create my own trig tables if I had to.)
You should have seen 'em in the 80's! The first PowerMac 8100/80 in '93 (IIRC) was built like a tank and I never heard of a problem with one (nor will I feed any trolls who did.)
The problems really started with Jobs' return. Those first iMacs sold like mad and helped save the company, but they weren't the machines Apple used to make. One rumor at the time was that Jobs decided to save money by slashing QA and expecting a few more warranty returns. The round mouse was Jobs too, and if any working device could be as bad as a nonfunctional keyboard, that thing was it.
Since then they've cared a little less every year, and it shows. The G5's were the last that really got built right (and mine wouldn't wake if it ever went to sleep...) That refurb G5 and a refurb laptop in 2008 were the last Apple gear I ever bought or ever will now.
>> average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb's presence
$400 / month over 6-7 years in NYC isn't that shocking (it wouldn't be in Seattle, $100 / year for apartments that only millionaires could afford in NYC is common in quick-growing areas.)
How do they attribute 21.6% of that to Airbnb again? TFA tried to make it sound all scientific, but really, guys? We need a doctor with a flashlight to explain it better.
I've been at several places that claimed they were Agile. A few even had a designated scrum master who'd been to training.
Not one really followed through: I've sat through hour long "standup" meetings, had a sprint's worth tasks assigned by managers and shifted around day by day, had constant interference ("Why aren't we under that line on the burndown chart?")
This plays right into the hands of the Agile inventors, who can point to any misstep and say we aren't doing Agile right, if/when it fails. Agile, like many other buzzwords, was at least partly invented to sell books, get tenure, and make gurus immune to outsourcing.
It actually can work, encapsulated at team level, with a lead who coordinates with other leads and excludes higher management as much as possible. The key is for velocity, etc., to never leave the team, only finished work.
I can relate! I had to learn to keypunch for several classes... I bet this snowflake would love to do his tests that way. I hope I get to give him his first whiteboard interview.
Writing everything out ahead of time was a great learning tool. I usually did the next day's assignment at home (no computer, not even embedded controllers in appliances) and it took forever, but I could make the most of my half hour or so on one of my college's 3 Apple II's the next day. It was a little better in BASIC (PDP-11, 8 or 10 terminals scattered around campus) but BASIC gets old.
OS X effectively keeps the empty title bar space he doesn't like (because Apple realized what a pain it would be without it.)
There was a thing a while back (Mozilla IIRC) to get rid of "unneeded" bars (title, URL, status) in web browsers. It didn't completely succeed, since most browsers are still usable, but it made life harder since you can't tell where the window ends and the next begins. The !@#$ translucent effect makes it hard too, that's one of the first things I turn off.
Title bars waste space, sure, but I can afford it. I often use more than a single window.
Assuming UFO's are aliens, why do we see so many? *We* can see enough from orbit that we don't need to fly through the atmosphere to look around. They're giving themselves away for nothing.
Declining to contact us makes sense: if they're advanced enough to get here, they're probably figured out the cultural problems that are destroying us; we'd look like a particularly poor, insane, and violent slum, and unlike us they'd know better than to try to "help." Most of our governments represent the absolute worst of us, so no mystery there.
I can't see how taking over and exploiting Earth makes sense either: if they can get here, they can get to our unexplored moons, plus the asteroid belt, which are much better for that purpose, assuming they're not after fossil fuels or agriculture. If they can get here so easily that colonization makes any sense at all they wouldn't need to wonder about us, they'd just use pesticide.
Maybe they're trying to help us survive by giving us hope? Let's hope it works, and also that they plan shoot down any armed ICBM's they see.
I don't really care about most of the new features. More speed is always nice.
But I can't live with multiple GB any time I leave a tab open more than an hour or two. It bogs down the whole computer until it takes forever to manually kill Firefox. And audio now comes and goes and crackles constantly.
Chrome isn't perfect either, but Quantum is unusable. Does it really work for anyone else?
Entering 17-108 or Proceeding 17-108 on the form does nothing, it gets blanked out when I try to get to the review page. Is there a secret? It was certainly a pain to figure out how to get to that form.
I started on Mac's in 1986, and refused to develop for anything else for years except for a brief curiosity fling on Windows in the late 90's.
There were hiccups: when the beautifully engineered early machines gave way to the "cheaper to fix than test" iMacs; a list of failed attempts to drive the future, like OpenDoc (dodged that one) and QuickDraw3D (burned a little.) I never objected to the price, because they really were that much better in those days.
Then OSX schlumpfed onto the stage and disappointed me where it hurt: horrendously slow, awkward to use, and an all-around marketing inspired product. The speed and polish got better, but it was never fun and now it's mostly lobotomized to look like an iPhone and most of the engineering is for "lifestyle" crapware. I even liked Objective-C, I just hated the platform that used it. iPhones? Okay I guess, not especially good and too much trouble and money. iPads? Never thought of a use for one.
By 2010 or so I stopped buying Apple. XP was better, Win7 is much better, and both are much cheaper. And I don't like giving money to shady organizations like the new Apple. I still have an Intel MBP that mostly runs Win7, and a few older machines (G3, G4 tower) that are fun to fire up once in a while.
For years, politicians were (publicly) in a state of denial about fossil fuel supplies while they proclaimed that fusion would soon solve all of life's problems.
Fusion using tokamaks as currently envisioned isn't sustainable even in theory, but they would be huge, centralized power sources that governments could easily control (thus, the only sort that gets any funding, whether viable or not. ) Fission power has too many problems, and would take a few decades to make a difference at best. No other source of utility scale power is more than a stopgap measure.
Somewhere in the last few years a lot of important people realized that business as usual will result in a collapsed civilization, soon. They had to do something, quickly but quietly. Admitting that we really are running out of petroleum or that practical fusion power is not going to happen in the foreseeable future would have bad social consequences.
The rush to renewables amounts to a last ditch hope of buying time, without admitting just how bad our situation actually is. They can only hope that owning one's own power source will be less popular if cheap commercial power is available again. Cheap that is, until the solar arrays and windmills rust away.
They had such a lock on their niche that they seemed unassailable, back in the day.
Lingo was the technology that convinced me that programmers are born, not made. It was arcane and had a lot of reserved words to learn, but it was pretty simple to understand. Completely beyond the comprehension of most of its target audience, though.
The lesson was hammered home a few years later by iShell, which simplified authoring to triviality: their inescapable graphical environment was enormously annoying for programmers, but their forums promptly filled up with baffled content creators who couldn't handle if statements, even 'graphical' ones.
Aside from a few games, and their tech support Nazis, that's how I'll remember Director.
The proposal also says that robots should always be identifiable as mechanical creations. That will help prevent humans from developing emotional attachments. "You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human," said Delvaux.
but then:
The proposal explores whether sophisticated autonomous robots should be given the status of "electronic persons."
Which is it, guys? And I thought US politicians were clueless.
a/. spinoff for these ludicrous stories about "experts" and their opinions? Maybe nationalenquirer.com could help host it?
I don't have time to scroll past this kind of thing at work, but I might enjoy it later after a few sixpacks.
(As if a robot with fully human intelligence and emotional capability would be available for marriage! They'd all be used as slaves by the companies that could afford them, or expendable cannon fodder by the government.)
CR has always had a reputation for "testing" things it doesn't know enough about and writing unintentionally hilarious reviews. (All I can think of, not having read CR in years, is bicycles and lawnmowers - sorry.)
They also do things like awarding Tesla the highest score ever, then dropping it to Not Recommended the next year because of "maintenance issues" that don't seem to reflect anyone else's experience.
Take CR with a grain of salt, particularly unless you know enough about the item being tested to validate their comments.
I worked for a startup once. Already gone public, nice building in the valley, etc. We had a conference call with the CEO, who said they'd just inked a big deal with a certain large PC maker and we were on track to be a $100M company in a year or two. Fast forward 2 months, and... We're broke! Almost everyone was laid off: I got 3 weeks severance.
Anyone who thinks Apple is different needs to read up on QuickDraw3D, OpenDoc, older Macs with DSPs, and x86 daughter cards to run Windows. For that matter, top secret Intel Macs, while they were still calling x86 junk. They won't breathe a word about what's going on while the old stuff still sells at a profit.
My all-time favorite IDE was CodeWarrior on classic Mac (the Windows version was the best on that platform at the time.) I tried Visual Studio 6 and wasn't impressed.
Then I had to use VS every day and got used to it. Most of its problems were/are horrific UI design (hidden/obfuscated settings!) and twitchiness (hangs; recreating projects from scratch when they refuse to build.) Overall usability is now quite good, and automation (intellisense, etc) is first rate.
I haven't tried XCode recently, last time it was still a mix of all the things I didn't like about the early VS's. It's free and I could get used to it if I had to work on Mac's: Apple got all the money they will ever get from me between 1986 and 2008 or so. (I still have one MacBook left, mostly running Windows, from the days when I still thought OS X would eventually suck less.)
I'd be delighted to have a modern VS on Macs for odd projects that need a text editor and project manager. I've experimented with Code for fiction writing, not bad (lots of customization.)
I'm sure Facebook contributed to the spread of phony news, but it's not like everyone else (i.e., ABC, NBC, etc) wasn't doing it too. Facebook wasn't as blatantly biased as the regular media, either (whether I agree with him or not, the anti-Trump media blitz shamed everyone involved, and they well deserved what they got.)
They had to say something before the convention, so they said no problem. Now the convention is over and the issue hasn't gone away, so they "reopen" the investigation.
In fairness, the FBI can't investigate a parking ticket before the election, but they can do it before Obama leaves office. Assuming they decide she's guilty, the FBI recovers some of its image and Obama can pardon her 2 years before the next national election. He can spin that well enough: "For the sake of our nation, it's time to forgive this minor mistake, put this behind us and unite...." If the Republicans still don't have a viable candidate in 2020, it won't matter if anyone remembers.
Or, the FBI could say no problem again, depending on how afraid they are of a vengeful President Clinton. Better to be an international laughingstock with the US behind you....
Quick conspiracy theory: HRC really is sick, and she's hiding it because she wants to be the first female president. Dying in office is always better than dying out of office, and what do the people or the country matter to her? As a bonus she can propose anything she wants, and not be there when her "legacy" is voted down and her VP embarrassed.
Slashdot Mirror
A story to warm Ned Ludd's heart!
My (camera department) cash register could be operated without power (stick a crank in the side.) The front registers were electronic, and we'd always walk out past a sad little line of teenaged cashiers when the power went off and the store had to close.
I could do sales tax faster in my head than by using the little card taped to the counter, too.
Soooo true. This could have been me (even the 40 or so years fits.)
I spent 4 years at a crappy little department store chain in the southeast, while in college. The music came on large reel to reel tapes, so no shuffle and the pops and cracks repeated exactly, and not nearly as many breakdowns as one would hope for. Oddly, I don't remember the rest of the year, just Christmas.
People who can afford European cars and keep them after the first 2 years/lease tend to spend what it takes to keep them running. They don't run that long without constant and horrendously expensive maintenance, unlike many Toyotas that routinely last that long with little or no work.
I have a BMW X5 commuter that is on the edge of that age range, and it's so unreliable that I won't drive it far from home, despite spending enough on it the last 2 years to buy a used Corolla (and doing most of the work myself.) BMW engineering has gone from great (my '83) to embarrassingly bad, and I've heard rumors about recent Mercedes. For all the jokes about Japanese plastic cars, they don't make cooling systems out of plastic, that self destruct every few years.
I look at CR for information, but don't put much faith in their "recommendations."
They like to rate things they don't understand. I recall a review of bicycles (no clue what made one better than another), and lawn mowers (rated by intuition, apparently never tried them to see what worked better.) Cars should be an exception, given CR's focus, which makes their ongoing treatment of Tesla even more... concerning.
I've seen nothing to suggest Tesla is worse than any other high end car. They're expensive but they also have good features, like performance, longevity, and a company that doesn't seem to see customers merely as wealthy prey. Very few German cars in Tesla's league have any appeal besides the mere fact of owning them, and cost as much or more to buy and much, much more to own. Japanese cars are better than European in pretty much every way, but don't outshine Tesla either.
In my day (submarines, 80's) it was a periodic check rather than real time (and definitely not wireless;-) ) It was considered valuable, because it really worked.
Motors, etc, all had little shiny disks glued on for the magnetic pickups; the sound guys got recordings and compared with previous ones (on paper.) They were working on a way to do it with reciprocating machines like compressors and maybe even diesels, which is probably possible now.
There was a short story (Asimov IIRC) about a future world where everyone had calculators, and then a man reverse engineered one and figured out that he could "simulate" its operations on paper. He finally convinced a skeptical general that it worked, who set in motion a plan to build a manned missile (suicide weapon) because a human pilot was cheaper than a computer.
The truly inventive part of this story is the new problem it found. Anyone could think of "No one knows how to use a table of logarithms anymore, or how to create one," after, e.g., an EMP war.
(Disclaimer: I'm an HP-41 fan myself, but I could create my own trig tables if I had to.)
You should have seen 'em in the 80's! The first PowerMac 8100/80 in '93 (IIRC) was built like a tank and I never heard of a problem with one (nor will I feed any trolls who did.)
The problems really started with Jobs' return. Those first iMacs sold like mad and helped save the company, but they weren't the machines Apple used to make. One rumor at the time was that Jobs decided to save money by slashing QA and expecting a few more warranty returns. The round mouse was Jobs too, and if any working device could be as bad as a nonfunctional keyboard, that thing was it.
Since then they've cared a little less every year, and it shows. The G5's were the last that really got built right (and mine wouldn't wake if it ever went to sleep...) That refurb G5 and a refurb laptop in 2008 were the last Apple gear I ever bought or ever will now.
>> average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb's presence
$400 / month over 6-7 years in NYC isn't that shocking (it wouldn't be in Seattle, $100 / year for apartments that only millionaires could afford in NYC is common in quick-growing areas.)
How do they attribute 21.6% of that to Airbnb again? TFA tried to make it sound all scientific, but really, guys? We need a doctor with a flashlight to explain it better.
I've been at several places that claimed they were Agile. A few even had a designated scrum master who'd been to training.
Not one really followed through: I've sat through hour long "standup" meetings, had a sprint's worth tasks assigned by managers and shifted around day by day, had constant interference ("Why aren't we under that line on the burndown chart?")
This plays right into the hands of the Agile inventors, who can point to any misstep and say we aren't doing Agile right, if/when it fails. Agile, like many other buzzwords, was at least partly invented to sell books, get tenure, and make gurus immune to outsourcing.
It actually can work, encapsulated at team level, with a lead who coordinates with other leads and excludes higher management as much as possible. The key is for velocity, etc., to never leave the team, only finished work.
I can relate! I had to learn to keypunch for several classes... I bet this snowflake would love to do his tests that way. I hope I get to give him his first whiteboard interview.
Writing everything out ahead of time was a great learning tool. I usually did the next day's assignment at home (no computer, not even embedded controllers in appliances) and it took forever, but I could make the most of my half hour or so on one of my college's 3 Apple II's the next day. It was a little better in BASIC (PDP-11, 8 or 10 terminals scattered around campus) but BASIC gets old.
OS X effectively keeps the empty title bar space he doesn't like (because Apple realized what a pain it would be without it.)
There was a thing a while back (Mozilla IIRC) to get rid of "unneeded" bars (title, URL, status) in web browsers. It didn't completely succeed, since most browsers are still usable, but it made life harder since you can't tell where the window ends and the next begins. The !@#$ translucent effect makes it hard too, that's one of the first things I turn off.
Title bars waste space, sure, but I can afford it. I often use more than a single window.
Assuming UFO's are aliens, why do we see so many? *We* can see enough from orbit that we don't need to fly through the atmosphere to look around. They're giving themselves away for nothing.
Declining to contact us makes sense: if they're advanced enough to get here, they're probably figured out the cultural problems that are destroying us; we'd look like a particularly poor, insane, and violent slum, and unlike us they'd know better than to try to "help." Most of our governments represent the absolute worst of us, so no mystery there.
I can't see how taking over and exploiting Earth makes sense either: if they can get here, they can get to our unexplored moons, plus the asteroid belt, which are much better for that purpose, assuming they're not after fossil fuels or agriculture. If they can get here so easily that colonization makes any sense at all they wouldn't need to wonder about us, they'd just use pesticide.
Maybe they're trying to help us survive by giving us hope? Let's hope it works, and also that they plan shoot down any armed ICBM's they see.
I don't really care about most of the new features. More speed is always nice.
But I can't live with multiple GB any time I leave a tab open more than an hour or two. It bogs down the whole computer until it takes forever to manually kill Firefox. And audio now comes and goes and crackles constantly.
Chrome isn't perfect either, but Quantum is unusable. Does it really work for anyone else?
Entering 17-108 or Proceeding 17-108 on the form does nothing, it gets blanked out when I try to get to the review page. Is there a secret? It was certainly a pain to figure out how to get to that form.
I started on Mac's in 1986, and refused to develop for anything else for years except for a brief curiosity fling on Windows in the late 90's.
There were hiccups: when the beautifully engineered early machines gave way to the "cheaper to fix than test" iMacs; a list of failed attempts to drive the future, like OpenDoc (dodged that one) and QuickDraw3D (burned a little.) I never objected to the price, because they really were that much better in those days.
Then OSX schlumpfed onto the stage and disappointed me where it hurt: horrendously slow, awkward to use, and an all-around marketing inspired product. The speed and polish got better, but it was never fun and now it's mostly lobotomized to look like an iPhone and most of the engineering is for "lifestyle" crapware. I even liked Objective-C, I just hated the platform that used it. iPhones? Okay I guess, not especially good and too much trouble and money. iPads? Never thought of a use for one.
By 2010 or so I stopped buying Apple. XP was better, Win7 is much better, and both are much cheaper. And I don't like giving money to shady organizations like the new Apple. I still have an Intel MBP that mostly runs Win7, and a few older machines (G3, G4 tower) that are fun to fire up once in a while.
For years, politicians were (publicly) in a state of denial about fossil fuel supplies while they proclaimed that fusion would soon solve all of life's problems.
Fusion using tokamaks as currently envisioned isn't sustainable even in theory, but they would be huge, centralized power sources that governments could easily control (thus, the only sort that gets any funding, whether viable or not. ) Fission power has too many problems, and would take a few decades to make a difference at best. No other source of utility scale power is more than a stopgap measure.
Somewhere in the last few years a lot of important people realized that business as usual will result in a collapsed civilization, soon. They had to do something, quickly but quietly. Admitting that we really are running out of petroleum or that practical fusion power is not going to happen in the foreseeable future would have bad social consequences.
The rush to renewables amounts to a last ditch hope of buying time, without admitting just how bad our situation actually is. They can only hope that owning one's own power source will be less popular if cheap commercial power is available again. Cheap that is, until the solar arrays and windmills rust away.
They had such a lock on their niche that they seemed unassailable, back in the day.
Lingo was the technology that convinced me that programmers are born, not made. It was arcane and had a lot of reserved words to learn, but it was pretty simple to understand. Completely beyond the comprehension of most of its target audience, though.
The lesson was hammered home a few years later by iShell, which simplified authoring to triviality: their inescapable graphical environment was enormously annoying for programmers, but their forums promptly filled up with baffled content creators who couldn't handle if statements, even 'graphical' ones.
Aside from a few games, and their tech support Nazis, that's how I'll remember Director.
TFA says:
The proposal also says that robots should always be identifiable as mechanical creations. That will help prevent humans from developing emotional attachments. "You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human," said Delvaux.
but then:
The proposal explores whether sophisticated autonomous robots should be given the status of "electronic persons."
Which is it, guys? And I thought US politicians were clueless.
a /. spinoff for these ludicrous stories about "experts" and their opinions? Maybe nationalenquirer.com could help host it?
I don't have time to scroll past this kind of thing at work, but I might enjoy it later after a few sixpacks.
(As if a robot with fully human intelligence and emotional capability would be available for marriage! They'd all be used as slaves by the companies that could afford them, or expendable cannon fodder by the government.)
Integrity... right.
CR has always had a reputation for "testing" things it doesn't know enough about and writing unintentionally hilarious reviews. (All I can think of, not having read CR in years, is bicycles and lawnmowers - sorry.)
They also do things like awarding Tesla the highest score ever, then dropping it to Not Recommended the next year because of "maintenance issues" that don't seem to reflect anyone else's experience.
Take CR with a grain of salt, particularly unless you know enough about the item being tested to validate their comments.
I worked for a startup once. Already gone public, nice building in the valley, etc. We had a conference call with the CEO, who said they'd just inked a big deal with a certain large PC maker and we were on track to be a $100M company in a year or two. Fast forward 2 months, and... We're broke! Almost everyone was laid off: I got 3 weeks severance.
Anyone who thinks Apple is different needs to read up on QuickDraw3D, OpenDoc, older Macs with DSPs, and x86 daughter cards to run Windows. For that matter, top secret Intel Macs, while they were still calling x86 junk. They won't breathe a word about what's going on while the old stuff still sells at a profit.
brew a cup that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee
My all-time favorite IDE was CodeWarrior on classic Mac (the Windows version was the best on that platform at the time.) I tried Visual Studio 6 and wasn't impressed.
Then I had to use VS every day and got used to it. Most of its problems were/are horrific UI design (hidden/obfuscated settings!) and twitchiness (hangs; recreating projects from scratch when they refuse to build.) Overall usability is now quite good, and automation (intellisense, etc) is first rate.
I haven't tried XCode recently, last time it was still a mix of all the things I didn't like about the early VS's. It's free and I could get used to it if I had to work on Mac's: Apple got all the money they will ever get from me between 1986 and 2008 or so. (I still have one MacBook left, mostly running Windows, from the days when I still thought OS X would eventually suck less.)
I'd be delighted to have a modern VS on Macs for odd projects that need a text editor and project manager. I've experimented with Code for fiction writing, not bad (lots of customization.)
I'm sure Facebook contributed to the spread of phony news, but it's not like everyone else (i.e., ABC, NBC, etc) wasn't doing it too. Facebook wasn't as blatantly biased as the regular media, either (whether I agree with him or not, the anti-Trump media blitz shamed everyone involved, and they well deserved what they got.)
They had to say something before the convention, so they said no problem. Now the convention is over and the issue hasn't gone away, so they "reopen" the investigation.
In fairness, the FBI can't investigate a parking ticket before the election, but they can do it before Obama leaves office. Assuming they decide she's guilty, the FBI recovers some of its image and Obama can pardon her 2 years before the next national election. He can spin that well enough: "For the sake of our nation, it's time to forgive this minor mistake, put this behind us and unite...." If the Republicans still don't have a viable candidate in 2020, it won't matter if anyone remembers.
Or, the FBI could say no problem again, depending on how afraid they are of a vengeful President Clinton. Better to be an international laughingstock with the US behind you....
Quick conspiracy theory: HRC really is sick, and she's hiding it because she wants to be the first female president. Dying in office is always better than dying out of office, and what do the people or the country matter to her? As a bonus she can propose anything she wants, and not be there when her "legacy" is voted down and her VP embarrassed.