On two different occasions I sold 5 year old MacBook on Craigslist for $500. I don't know what the expectation would be for an hp or whatever, but I was satisfied with this.
While I congratulate you on that sale, I really don't get it. You can get a refurbished MacBook Air, 13", latest model, better in any way imaginable and as new, with a year warranty, for $849. Why does anyone pay $500 for a five year old Mac?
I don't know how this compares to PayPal or Google Wallet as I don't use them. I do know that Apple has made it easy to add Apple Pay to apps and websites, and the user experience counts provided the security holds up. PayPal still looked a complex mess when I viewed the API last month.
The difference to Google Wallet is that Google Wallet transactions are visible to Google, and Apple Pay transactions are not visible to anyone (except the bank paying and the merchant getting money obviously).
Is Apple so embarrassed by their lack of meaningful CPU performance improvements that they feel the need to compare the latest iPad to a 5 year old obsolete brick to impress me? I think that they think I'm stupid.
Lack of meaningful improvements? 40% faster than the iPad Air. Which was a lot faster than the iPad 4. And trying out how fast I could make that run, i got 7 GFlops out of an iPad 4 with plain C code.
If you think that Apple showing the best possible numbers is a sign of "embarrassment" then you absolutely need your head examined.
How doesn't it? My understanding is that instead of paying by your credit card, your Apple Account gets hit for the charge and Apple pays the vendor and then Apple charges your linked credit card, just like for existing in-app purchases. Since it's your Apple Account doing the purchasing, Apple is in the loop and sees every transaction that you make.
Except that's not how it works. There's a special chip in the new iPhone that talks to an NFC payment terminal and presents itself as a virtual credit card. The terminal sends that information for example to Visa. Visa works together with Apple and figures out that this virtual credit card actually matches your real debit or credit card, and everything is done as if you had used your normal credit or debit card. The chip is locked away from the OS, even Apple couldn't read what's inside it.
The advantages are a minor bit of convenience (you pay by putting a finger on the fingerprint reader on the iPhone), but a big advantage in security because nobody knows your credit card number and therefore cannot lose it to hackers, and crooked employees cannot read it either.
First, I'm not 100% sure what he means by a "progressive" consumption tax, perhaps the more you consume, the higher your tax rate? How would that work?
Cheap car: $10,000 plus 2% tax.
Not so cheap car: $20,000 plus 5% tax.
Medium car: $50,000 plus 10% tax.
Expensive car: $100,000 plus 20% tax.
Bugatti Veyron: $1,000,000 plus 100% tax.
Of course _everyone_ will be complaining because they all dream of becoming rich enough to buy that Bugatti, and then it will cost 100% in tax!
I think the greater concern for consumption tax approach is that it could driven the emergence of a huge black market. But, since that might mostly include lower end items and benefit lower income folks, it might be an acceptable flaw.
You have that to some degree with Internet sellers like Amazon, who avoid collecting sales tax (and the customers who by law are required to put all the stuff they bought without sales tax into their tax returns obviously don't).
In the UK and basically anywhere in Europe, there is basically no black market for goods. Only things like cigarettes and alcohol that are taxed _massively_ in some countries and not in others, because it's impossible to get the goods without paying tax.
My first script idea is a planeload of weaponized Ebola patients blasted to smithereens over New York City, raining bodily fluids down on the terrified populace. I'm sure a real creative type could come up with something better.
Tom Clancy did, and the number of deaths wasn't very high.
CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Apple users are obviously not going to revolt if Apple turns it into an Apple-like program (anyway, the UI that I see is quite Apple-like).
And non-Apple users? They can be as revolting as they like. There is always the possibility to fork CUPS.
BTW, Apple is dual licensing CUPS: You can get it under the GPL, or under a license that allows you to keep your source code private, as long as you create a driver that works on Macs. Since many printer manufacturers for whatever reason didn't want to release their source code, this second license was responsible for a much bigger number of Mac printer drivers.
For starters, Ebola apparently has a 70% mortality rate. Additionally, Ebola kills people who are otherwise perfectly healthy. The flu does not.
The flu kills tens of thousands of people every year. Ebola has so far infected two, and that was at a point where nobody knew how to handle it - today these two wouldn't have been infected.
As Apple slowly looses market share in smartphones, how do you know the slow exodus isn't just due to the popularity of Android and Windows?
If you develop software, you don't look at market share, you look at the share of customers willing to pay money. If there is one guy spending $600 on a phone, and four guys spending $150, who is spending more on software?
What sales goals do you have if you are worried about a $600 instment? Your goal cannot be to write software and use the money to feed a family. For that goal, $50,000 profit a year is low (it won't make your family happy). If you worry about $600, then you are trying to make some beer money at best.
Since we can represent JSON in XML, we should be able to also represent XML in JSON. Once that is achieved the nuclear option is available: We define JSON(n) = JSON, represented as XML, represented as JSON, n times. JSONx(n) = JSON(n), represented as XML. XML(n) = XML, represented as JSON, represented as XML, n times. XMLj (n) = XML(n), represented as JSON.
Since you don't use cheques in most of Europe, how do you manage large transactions for things like vehicles? There are certainly electronic means here, but they are far from ubiquitous and with every other company getting hacked, no one is inspired to shuttle their money through them.
My wife once bought a brand new car that was paid for with 17 banknotes showing a picture of the Grimm brothers..
My wife and I eloped. Our reason was that we had relatives in east coast, Mexico, pacific northwest, and we are in SoCal. The planning was getting too complicated and expensive, and finding a time when everyone could travel was next to impossible. So we got married in Spain, traveled in Europe, and we had a really nice reception party when we got back.
The two of you brought the average down from "13.5 times more likely" to "12.5 times more likely":-)
'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates.
In some places there is still quite a high stigma in divorce. There shouldn't be, a relevant quote is "Divorce isn't the death of a marriage. Divorce is the funeral", but still there are people who won't get divorced for some reason when there is no value in their marriage. This may be stronger among some Christians (and other religions where one of the couple isn't really asked about their opinion in the matter).
My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.
What if a licensed taxi driver would use the app to make some extra money in his spare time?
Uber pays its drivers really badly, so this isn't going to happen. There are also regulations about maximum working hours, you don't want to be driven by someone who already has been driving for 16 hours.
See the point here? Uber IS NOT RUNNING A TAXI SERVICE. All they are doing is providing an app that connects two parties, one of whom needs a ride and the other who doesn't mind giving a ride. So how do you make this illegal?
Germany has the nice law principle that it doesn't matter how you dress it up and what you put into your contracts, what matters is what actually happens. So it's clearly a taxi service.
At least in Germany the "proper credentials" do include e.g. a special driver license [wikipedia.org] which includes a medical analysis, a police clearance, a check of the driving penalty points registry, check of local knowledge,....
That would be a license that allows you to transport up to eight passengers commercially. No idea if you need such a license in the UK, never bothered to find out, but my UK car insurance doesn't cover commercial transport of passengers, and an insurance that does is _significantly_ more expensive than the one I have. Which means I would be illegally driving without insurance if I drove people around for money.
Slashdot Mirror
On two different occasions I sold 5 year old MacBook on Craigslist for $500. I don't know what the expectation would be for an hp or whatever, but I was satisfied with this.
While I congratulate you on that sale, I really don't get it. You can get a refurbished MacBook Air, 13", latest model, better in any way imaginable and as new, with a year warranty, for $849. Why does anyone pay $500 for a five year old Mac?
I don't know how this compares to PayPal or Google Wallet as I don't use them. I do know that Apple has made it easy to add Apple Pay to apps and websites, and the user experience counts provided the security holds up. PayPal still looked a complex mess when I viewed the API last month.
The difference to Google Wallet is that Google Wallet transactions are visible to Google, and Apple Pay transactions are not visible to anyone (except the bank paying and the merchant getting money obviously).
Is Apple so embarrassed by their lack of meaningful CPU performance improvements that they feel the need to compare the latest iPad to a 5 year old obsolete brick to impress me? I think that they think I'm stupid.
Lack of meaningful improvements? 40% faster than the iPad Air. Which was a lot faster than the iPad 4. And trying out how fast I could make that run, i got 7 GFlops out of an iPad 4 with plain C code.
If you think that Apple showing the best possible numbers is a sign of "embarrassment" then you absolutely need your head examined.
How doesn't it? My understanding is that instead of paying by your credit card, your Apple Account gets hit for the charge and Apple pays the vendor and then Apple charges your linked credit card, just like for existing in-app purchases. Since it's your Apple Account doing the purchasing, Apple is in the loop and sees every transaction that you make.
Except that's not how it works. There's a special chip in the new iPhone that talks to an NFC payment terminal and presents itself as a virtual credit card. The terminal sends that information for example to Visa. Visa works together with Apple and figures out that this virtual credit card actually matches your real debit or credit card, and everything is done as if you had used your normal credit or debit card. The chip is locked away from the OS, even Apple couldn't read what's inside it.
The advantages are a minor bit of convenience (you pay by putting a finger on the fingerprint reader on the iPhone), but a big advantage in security because nobody knows your credit card number and therefore cannot lose it to hackers, and crooked employees cannot read it either.
Apple's "Excel competitor" that sells for £13.99.
First, I'm not 100% sure what he means by a "progressive" consumption tax, perhaps the more you consume, the higher your tax rate? How would that work?
Cheap car: $10,000 plus 2% tax.
Not so cheap car: $20,000 plus 5% tax.
Medium car: $50,000 plus 10% tax.
Expensive car: $100,000 plus 20% tax.
Bugatti Veyron: $1,000,000 plus 100% tax.
Of course _everyone_ will be complaining because they all dream of becoming rich enough to buy that Bugatti, and then it will cost 100% in tax!
I think the greater concern for consumption tax approach is that it could driven the emergence of a huge black market. But, since that might mostly include lower end items and benefit lower income folks, it might be an acceptable flaw.
You have that to some degree with Internet sellers like Amazon, who avoid collecting sales tax (and the customers who by law are required to put all the stuff they bought without sales tax into their tax returns obviously don't).
In the UK and basically anywhere in Europe, there is basically no black market for goods. Only things like cigarettes and alcohol that are taxed _massively_ in some countries and not in others, because it's impossible to get the goods without paying tax.
My first script idea is a planeload of weaponized Ebola patients blasted to smithereens over New York City, raining bodily fluids down on the terrified populace. I'm sure a real creative type could come up with something better.
Tom Clancy did, and the number of deaths wasn't very high.
It only takes one stupid uncooperative idiot ( maybe from a certain news station) to spread the disease.
And when that stupid idiot is thrown into jail for manslaughter the other stupid idiots will think about it.
CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Apple users are obviously not going to revolt if Apple turns it into an Apple-like program (anyway, the UI that I see is quite Apple-like).
And non-Apple users? They can be as revolting as they like. There is always the possibility to fork CUPS.
BTW, Apple is dual licensing CUPS: You can get it under the GPL, or under a license that allows you to keep your source code private, as long as you create a driver that works on Macs. Since many printer manufacturers for whatever reason didn't want to release their source code, this second license was responsible for a much bigger number of Mac printer drivers.
I haven't turned on my printer in 5 years.
You must not work in an office then.
Strange enough, I haven't printed anything in the office for ages, but use my printer at home all the time. Well, my wife does mostly :-)
For starters, Ebola apparently has a 70% mortality rate. Additionally, Ebola kills people who are otherwise perfectly healthy. The flu does not.
The flu kills tens of thousands of people every year. Ebola has so far infected two, and that was at a point where nobody knew how to handle it - today these two wouldn't have been infected.
As Apple slowly looses market share in smartphones, how do you know the slow exodus isn't just due to the popularity of Android and Windows?
If you develop software, you don't look at market share, you look at the share of customers willing to pay money. If there is one guy spending $600 on a phone, and four guys spending $150, who is spending more on software?
The minimum you must spend is $600 on a Mac Mini.
What sales goals do you have if you are worried about a $600 instment? Your goal cannot be to write software and use the money to feed a family. For that goal, $50,000 profit a year is low (it won't make your family happy). If you worry about $600, then you are trying to make some beer money at best.
Since we can represent JSON in XML, we should be able to also represent XML in JSON. Once that is achieved the nuclear option is available: We define JSON(n) = JSON, represented as XML, represented as JSON, n times. JSONx(n) = JSON(n), represented as XML. XML(n) = XML, represented as JSON, represented as XML, n times. XMLj (n) = XML(n), represented as JSON.
Since you don't use cheques in most of Europe, how do you manage large transactions for things like vehicles? There are certainly electronic means here, but they are far from ubiquitous and with every other company getting hacked, no one is inspired to shuttle their money through them.
My wife once bought a brand new car that was paid for with 17 banknotes showing a picture of the Grimm brothers..
I remember seeing 1000 dollar bills as a small child, about 20-25 years ago. I don't think they exist anymore.
See this article for genuine current 1 million British Pound and 100 million British Pound notes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
is a blogger who thinks about stuff and posts it "news"?
My wife and I eloped. Our reason was that we had relatives in east coast, Mexico, pacific northwest, and we are in SoCal. The planning was getting too complicated and expensive, and finding a time when everyone could travel was next to impossible. So we got married in Spain, traveled in Europe, and we had a really nice reception party when we got back.
The two of you brought the average down from "13.5 times more likely" to "12.5 times more likely" :-)
'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates.
In some places there is still quite a high stigma in divorce. There shouldn't be, a relevant quote is "Divorce isn't the death of a marriage. Divorce is the funeral", but still there are people who won't get divorced for some reason when there is no value in their marriage. This may be stronger among some Christians (and other religions where one of the couple isn't really asked about their opinion in the matter).
My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.
What if a licensed taxi driver would use the app to make some extra money in his spare time?
Uber pays its drivers really badly, so this isn't going to happen. There are also regulations about maximum working hours, you don't want to be driven by someone who already has been driving for 16 hours.
See the point here? Uber IS NOT RUNNING A TAXI SERVICE. All they are doing is providing an app that connects two parties, one of whom needs a ride and the other who doesn't mind giving a ride. So how do you make this illegal?
Germany has the nice law principle that it doesn't matter how you dress it up and what you put into your contracts, what matters is what actually happens. So it's clearly a taxi service.
Are you seriously going to fall back to the appeal to law fallacy? Because that's what it looks like you're implying here.
"Appeal to law fallacy"? These drivers fought the law, and the law won :-)
At least in Germany the "proper credentials" do include e.g. a special driver license [wikipedia.org] which includes a medical analysis, a police clearance, a check of the driving penalty points registry, check of local knowledge, ... .
That would be a license that allows you to transport up to eight passengers commercially. No idea if you need such a license in the UK, never bothered to find out, but my UK car insurance doesn't cover commercial transport of passengers, and an insurance that does is _significantly_ more expensive than the one I have. Which means I would be illegally driving without insurance if I drove people around for money.