In general I agree with you, though we differ on the merit of switching to "commodity" hardware. I think it was great and probably made Macs better for the end user. Intel makes fine CPUs and I'd rather be hitched to that wagon than something exotic.

I never worked for Apple but I have owned a Mac since Macs existed. In that time I have seen Apple promise, over and over, to get serious about games on Macs. This gave us a series of half-hearted efforts like Game Sprockets, but nothing ever came of it. Then we saw hard-core productivity apps killed off. Aperture was discontinued, and from what I read Final Cut shed its pro-level features and ceded the market back to guy like Avid, guys that Apple had been beating.

Tim Cook could come out on stage wearing a white iVR rig and I wouldn't believe they'd get serious about games. Lucy has yanked that football away a few times already. It feels like MacOS only exists now as the host body for the bloated parasite iTunes.

> From my perspective Apple is sucking the marrow out of the Macintosh until the bone is dry.

I can't disagree.

My good old 17" Macbook Pro just bit the dust. It's one of several machines of various OSs that I use daily. Hopefully, it's just the drive. If it's the logic board... My own Mac journey will have come to an end too. I can't see myself replacing it, since they don't make a computer that I want any more. Good grief, I am writing this on a Surface Pro... a device which is buggy as hell, but useful, fun and innovative, too... things I used to get from Apple.

> Because that's where we're heading. People afraid to criticize the government.

We're already there, to some degree. Or at least I am. The White House has those petitions, right? Sure, they have little chance of prompting change... but they are great for making lists of people who feel a certain way.

Why would I voluntarily put my name down on a list of those in opposition to the administration? The chance of that being used against me is greater than zero and probably increasing all the time.

If a petition was for something politically harmless, like promoting space exploration, maybe I'd sign one. But I am not going to volunteer myself as supporting any "radical" positions involving copyright reform, terrorism, drug policy, etc. In time, adding myself to those lists might keep me off an airplane, or even lead to a knock on my door.

I suppose they could already know everything about me since I post on public forums, but I am not going into the lion's den and writing my name down on a list of potential troublemakers.

I was doing this for a while, but realized that a sufficiently advanced attacker could learn things from the combustion products. I now throw the computer into a volcano.

I'm going to need the Hugh Pickens take on the Bennett Haselton situation.

> Make a law saying that independent repair shops must get the same software and codes that the dealers get and the software can't be locked down to only on dealer systems or be rent only.

Not a bad idea, but the government protects the secret sauce inside the machines we use to vote... it will be hard to pass something like this for cars.

> They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer.

To me it seems like when you talk about nuclear power the average person assumes that a nuke plant is super high tech, the pinnacle of engineering, the safest that it can be. I mean, it's NUCLEAR, right? That's got to be high tech! So we have most people believing that any current *or future* nuclear plant is a possible Fukushima disaster... not realizing there are different designs, more modern ones are safer, and it is possible to design and build plants that are safer still.

I don't think nuclear can have a big renaissance as long as the average person's understanding of nuclear power is a combination of The Simpsons and Chernobyl.

> Like speech recognition, which also seemed to always be 3-5 years out until it finally went mainstream a few years ago.

I feel like it went mainstream but only for limited use cases. You can use Siri or OK Google for some very useful things but we still seem to be a long way from truly smart long-form dictation. "OK google, play music by David Bowie" feels like the equivalent of self-park...Truly useful, mainstream, and yet not nearly realizing the full potential of the technology.

My doctor's office is actually going back to human medical transcription, too many errors from the computerized system they use.

> GP was right -- it IS all about greed, just on even more levels.

I think any system will, over time, evolve under pressure from the incentives that are part of that system. If the people who own the capital can enrich themselves at the expense of those who are powerless, well, that's human nature and absent a legal structure to prevent it, it's inevitable. There was plenty of exploitation going on in the old days for sure, but even with the legal protections labor has now, somehow we've seen the entire nature of the economy and class system change.

We see similar "optimizations" going on in other industries. Journalism is going down the drain, with maintstream media turning into political entertainment, and the Internet is overrun with 9 incredible headwriting techniques... You won't BELIEVE number 4!

Even video games... The $50 game-in-a-box is under attack from "freemium" games. More and more game studios are focusing on that model because it has lower risks and higher rewards... even though almost no one who likes games will say the freemium products are better.

I am not equating Candy Crush to the trouble with our economy, just observing that the relentless desire to squeeze out every dime damages lots of things. And how can you fix that? You're fighting human nature.

> Also, having a job gives meaning to your life.

I think that is an overly broad generalization. It certainly doesn't apply to me.

> Except many police depts will probably not bother.

That's a problem with the police that should be solved. The interim solution is not going to get in fights with strangers.

> That prevents you from harassing a guy who was doing something perfectly legal that you think ought to be illegal.

You've made an excellent point which should be modded up. Car analogies often suck but yours was perfect.

I live right by a school, and I have about a half dozen "drones" that need to be registered. They are all fixed-wing models. A couple of years ago they'd be "toys," not "OMG DRONES" but whatever.

I am worried that any time a parent at that school imagines an infraction putting their kid at risk, they'll come pound on my door thanks to the open Federal database. Little Timmy says he saw a drone? Parent thinks they saw a drone? Better go have a talk with that weird drone guy.

I'm considering exiting the hobby or only flying models below the weight cutoff.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...

> If so, what is it for? Blackmailing politicians? Blackmailing the wealthy and powerful?

Time and again we see that anything they have the *capability* to do, they *are* doing. This includes the CIA spying on Congress.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar that time, but what's to say that similar things aren't still happening? Merely their assurances, and how much are those worth?

Based on what we know about bulk data collection, our intelligence apparatus does seem to have the *capability* to influence the the legislative and executive branches in inappropriate ways. Based on their past behavior I feel like we can't just dismiss that possibility as crazy.

There's nothing so special about America that we cannot suffer from corruption, and we have built the technological toolbox to enable it.

I feel like a lunatic writing this down, but "they" truly could be manipulating our elected officials.

In my state you need to purchase a special parking pass to enter state parks. You can get the pass when you register your car, or you can buy it at a sporting goods store like a fishing license.

To buy the pass at a retail location, you must give the clerk your social security number. Why does my state government require my SSN for a parking pass... and who thought that a system requiring a Big 5 clerk to handle private information was a good idea? It's absurd.

I really want to like these products but my first foray into the field was a disaster. The Intel Compute Stick was my first cheap-o headless "full Windows" PC and it was total garbage.

It was so slow that installing Windows Updates took for-ev-er. And worst of all, in its shipping configuration, it just failed to install most updates. You'd watch it grind away for 30 minutes, throw an error, reboot, and then uninstall the partially complete update.

If a computer can't even successfully keep up with Microsoft's recommended patches without crapping itself, it isn't very useful.

I got some moderate use out of the Compute Stick by disabling WU entirely, but then its built in wifi started to fail, and then the provided 2 A USB power supply died, and then I gave up on it.