BonesJustice

As a user, I am generally in favor of Apple requiring the option to purchase items and subscriptions through the App Store. I would never subscribe to, for example, HBO NOW if I thought I’d have to go through HBO (owned by AT&T) in order to unsubscribe. I want the guarantee of easy cancellation.

I am also fine with Apple collecting a modest fee for providing that service. That fee should probably be somewhere in the 2-3% range. Demanding what amounts to a 30% “introducer fee” is beyond absurd.

I also do not approve of how inconsistently Apple enforces their own rules.

They actually must be sent electronically now in NY, or at least that’s how my doctor explained it to me.

I’d assumed that was for all prescriptions, but it could just be controlled substances.

As someone who worked at investment bank for years, and would have had to go to the trouble of getting preapproval for any individual trades, it was far less troublesome just to rely on managed accounts.

So, yeah, just make them use managed accounts.

Why put in hard breaks when pretty much any email client should support soft/flexible line wrapping?

Seems more like an issue with the linked site to me.

If I were asked to impart one piece of advice to prospective CS students, it would be to take advantage of your school’s coop work program or, if there isn’t one, to try and find a recurring internship.

Nothing beats real world experience, and the sooner you can put theory into practice, the better.

Additional learning on your own is, of course, also a great idea. Pick a project you’d like to do, and then do it. Or find an interesting open source project, explore the code base, and try tackling a bug report or two.

Just an annoyance in the Consolas font metrics. It would look correct in the bitmapped old console font.

Unless your software can walk itself down to the courthouse, probably not. Courts are, to be generous, a bit behind the times.

Can you even imagine what an Oracle-built IDE would be like? Perish the thought. (shudder)

Good luck suing a call center in Bangalore when you live in the U.S.

More accurately, an entire bird colony > a single cat.

Indeed. Raise the cap to $300,000/day per facility, and this might actually have an effect. For most hospitals, a fine of $300 a day isn’t a fine at all, and I assume that’s by design.

If the scope of potential damage were limited to the assets owned by said corporation, perhaps.

In reality, a corporation so isolated would have no reason to exist.

I suppose it depends on whether expected future debt is considered ‘debt’.

If you have no savings, then it’s very likely you’ll still go into crippling debt eventually; at best, you’re staving it off until retirement. At that point, cheap credit is probably not going to be as readily available.

But I get your meaning. Yes, there is definitely an in-between where people can spend their entire income without accumulating immediate debt (social debt and future debt not withstanding).

As with many things in life, habits play a huge role.

People with low incomes have little choice but to budget responsibly or go into crippling debt. Once you get into the habit of spending responsibly, it’s easy to continue that habit even as your income rises. You’re used to making what you earn go a long way.

On the other hand, if your attitude is, “yeah, maybe I’m not making much now, but I should totally be making fat stacks in a couple years,” then your poor spending habits are likely to continue. You’ll go into debt with the expectation that you’ll be able to pull yourself out of it as your income rises. But living beyond your means is a very hard habit to break. You start to rationalize: “hey, I should have a much better lifestyle making $100k than I did at $50k.” Except, well, you weren’t really living off $50k; you were living off $50k plus a lot of high-interest credit.

I consider this a serious accessibility problem. Rather than complain to customer service, maybe we should be going straight to their corporate counsel. Frame it as a potential ADA violation. It's actively hostile to anyone who suffers from heightened anxiety, ADHD, etc.

If there's anyone who can push back against the marketing department, it's the legal department.

Perhaps it’s the case they can most easily prove, and/or find enough class members with standing who are willing to get involved.

Usually there are different driving modes. IIRC, in the Tesla sedans, "Chill" mode ups the 0-60 acceleration time to around 8 seconds.

I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.

I do not understand why it should be preferable to say "oh well, nothing to be done, time to quit" rather than be a force for change. The former is easy, but it does little to correct systemic problems that affect many of your peers.

Also, you make "accept paychecks" sound like you're accepting some sort of favor. Paychecks are not charity; they are compensation. You produce something of value, and you receive something of value in return.

It depends on which protections you're talking about (note: IANAL either). From what I can gather, it's true that the organizers may not be covered under laws protecting employees who report concerns internally or file EEOC or OSHA complaints. However, any activities related to collective bargaining (which may absolutely include organizing and participating in protests) are legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act, and would not be affected by "contractual duties" or "utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing."

Whether the organizers were covered by the NLRA is another matter; those with direct reports are likely excluded by the 'supervisors' exemption, which has been expanded over the years to cover pretty much anyone in a managerial role. For those who are covered, Google's actions could absolutely meet the legal definition of retaliation.

As an aside, the legal standards for what constitutes 'retaliation' are not the only ones that matter. They may manage to avoid a lawsuit, but they will suffer harm to their reputation regardless. I, for one, could not care less whether the law allows them to retaliate against the protest organizers. To me, this is just one in a long line of reasons why I scratched Google off my "short list" of potential employers.

The benefits are largely obscured by in-game currencies, which exist primarily to obfuscate the true cost of inane in-app purchases; maximize the odds of having a useless residual balance (thus encouraging more spending); and reduce barriers to spending.

Games don’t have to prompt for confirmation to spend proprietary fake money. This removes an opportunity to reconsider a purchase, and dramatically increases the chance of accidental spending. And without a dollar value that players can easily reason about, it’s easy to not realize how much you’re spending. “35 crystal whatzits? Um, okay, that doesn’t sound like much.” Never mind the fact that you actually have to buy at least 50 whatzits to have 35, because the next lowest option is to buy 25.

I don’t have any data on this, but I’d be willing to bet that revenues from in-app purchases went through the roof when someone had the bright idea to switch to an in-game currency (and, eventually, multiple currencies).

I tend to think of the classes in terms of standard of living according to one's access to certain tiers of goods and services, but the resulting class divisions end up being pretty similar to yours.

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Tier 1 (basic necessities) consists of goods and services that are essential for living in good health: food with adequate nutrition; shelter; access to health care; at least a basic education. That sort of thing.

Tier 2 (basic extras) envelops those things which are not strictly necessary, but are reasonable expectations for living a fulfilling life: family vacations (nothing exotic, maybe ~once a year); access to a college-level education; at least a modest budget for entertainment; owning one's primary residence; enough savings to provide continued access to this tier of items post-retirement.

Tier 3 (luxuries) are those things in excess of what an 'average' person would reasonably feel entitled to. In essence, they are the rewards for above-average financial success: more exotic vacations more often; luxury cars in the sub-exotic range; a home with custom fit and finish; 'basic' part-time hired help (lawn care, tutors, perhaps a nanny).

Tier 4 (super-luxuries) are those things which an 'average' would see as unattainable, even in their best years: a sprawling mansion or luxury penthouse in the city; exotic cars; private or chartered jet service; full-time, on-site hired help (private chef, valet, that sort of thing).

So how do these fit into the class structure? I tend to model it like this:

Lower class people can only attain the basic necessities (tier 1) by working multiple jobs or excessive hours, and/or with social or government assistance. When spending responsibly, items in tier 2 are unattainable.

Lower-middle class people can provide tier 1 items without assistance, but their access to tier 2 is limited or nonexistent. For example, maybe they can enjoy a family vacation every few years, but they are probably relegated to renting a home, and their retirement prospects are meager.

Middle class people can, with responsible budgeting, provide everything in tier 1 and most of tier 2 without going into excessive debt. With responsible budgeting, they can continue to maintain this lifestyle through retirement.

Upper-middle class people work for their salary or own small businesses. They never have to worry about tiers 1 and 2; those are covered. Their budget focuses on which tier 3 items they can reasonably afford. Assuming responsible financial planning, they can more or less maintain this standard of living through retirement (some modest concessions may be in order). When spending responsibly, the upper-middle class have little or no debt beyond a mortgage and student loans.

There are a few ways to fall into the 'upper' class. If you're far from retirement age and don't have to work, yet your amassed wealth and investment income are sufficient to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle, then I'd put you in the upper class bucket. If you have access to tier 4, you are upper-class regardless of whether you choose to work. If your concept of a 'budget' revolves around how much money you give away, or which foreign jurisdiction makes the best tax haven, you're probably in this group.

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Note that not having to work for a living is itself a luxury. In general, if you have the means to maintain the standard of living a certain class without working (and being far from a typical retirement age), then I would put you in the next higher class. For example, if you're 45 years old and could maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle without working, I'd say that makes you upper-middle class.

I think the Touch Bar is an interesting tool with plenty of potential. My objection is that I'm forced to forego physical function keys to get it. When I'm stepping through code, I want physical keys with tactile feedback.

I would be thrilled if Apple offered an alternate "developer's configuration" with a row of physical function keys and a Touch Bar above it. There is plenty if room; they'd only need to shrink the almost comically oversized touchpad (which would still be plenty large).

Where in the southeast? I grew up around Knoxville, which had reasonably well defined seasons. Then I moved to Atlanta, which basically has “summer” and “not summer”.

I disagree that most people use ad blockers because they “don’t want to see [any] ads.”

Meaning, if advertisers hadn’t built more and more intrusive ads and had stuck with static ads that don’t severely harm the UX, then I doubt most users would bother with ad blockers.

In most cases, I don’t think it’s ads as concept that’s the problem. If websites only had static ads in the sidebar, I question how many people would bother with ad blockers.

But when ads block content; include flashing animations, audio, and video; and take up more layout space on a site than the actual content; then people have had enough.

I’m in NJ and had issues this morning as well. Figured it was a local outage and promptly forgot about it after I left for work. I never expected it was something so serious. Crazy.

In your example, Facebook lacks the ability to peer into a complete and (by design) persistent history of your spending activity. That's the biggest difference, and that's why they're pushing for this. Just like every other Facebook venture, it's all about gathering as much information about you as possible and using it to sell ads.

I have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too.

Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.

The headline makes it sound like they're dropping support for just the i386 architecture (as opposed to other x86 architectures, e.g., i686). The linked article makes it sound like they're dropping support for the 32-bit x86 platform entirely.

Are Ubuntu's 32-bit x86 packages limited to those targeting the i386 instruction set? As in, "we ship x64, or ancient i386, but nothing in between"?

Or do they use the i386 moniker used as an umbrella for all x86 architectures?

The value isn't for you; it's for Facebook and the participating financial institutions. They gain perfect visibility into your spending.

I guarantee you that this will not have the perceived level of anonymity that Bitcoin and other cryptos share. The publicly visible ledger may not reveal who you are, but Facebook and its partners will know.