I don't have mod points but 100% agree. I actually turned down a job offer from Peloton about 5 years ago, partly because I thought it was a fad. Wife was addicted to Soul Cycle, I went with her a few times and learned I HATE group fitness and vowed to never go back. She decides she wants a Peloton, she had been going to Soul for about 10 years regularly and it was starting to feel a bit stale. I roll my eyes, figure its going to be a dust collector but say whatever lets give it a go, this was a few months before the pandemic started. I am mostly sedentary at this point- I get all of my daily activity from commuting more or less.

Today, I am at a 105 week streak and have lost weight and am actually fit and look good- I am not quite six pack abs but close enough. The "gamification" with the leaderboard, the engaging enough instructors, the quantitative ranges that tell you exactly how fast to turn the pedals and exactly how much resistance you need (Soul Cycle would just say "alright two turns to the right and now we are going 1-2 1-2 1-2" and I would get scolded for not being able to match the cadence from that) the tracking of stats over time so you can see just how much you have improved, the library of classes so you can choose the people you really like... its all gotten me over the edge and exercising regularly.

It just frustrates me because people hate on the idea and have never even seen one- and this shows most because those critics don't even realize that there is far more available than just the bike- yoga, strength, running, bootcamp classes... etc. I guess people can hate, but it absolutely brought value for me, and even saved my household money- the wife has not been to Soul Cycle since we got it (and Soul classes are about $40 each after water and shoe rental). I looked into pricing out a DIY setup with a decent bike (which alone can easily cost more than a Peloton bike), a zwift trainer, and a tablet and all that, and it came out to more than the Peloton for a hacked DIY solution. I am pretty sure the types that are like OMG so expensive what idiots!!!- don't even realize how expensive a bike you actually want to ride for real periods of time are.

The only thing I disagree with is the IPhone/Treo comparison- I knew in 2007 when I was rocking my Treo 650 that I was willing to pay big bucks for a device that could combine an Mp3 player, an e-reader, a pda, a phone and GPS into one package. I didn't even realize with an Iphone I would also get a decent camera a basic web experience, and how much location bases services would allow useful apps...

The idea of going to a gym is ghastly to me. All that time getting there and back, dealing with locker rooms and such... ugh. Even when I had one in my building I felt it was fairly inconvenient to go.

So, I actually turned down an offer from Peloton a bit over 4 years ago. I thought it was a fad, I didn't like the group fitness cycle classes I took at Soul Cycle that my wife asked me to join her in. I really rolled my eyes when in November 2019 my wife said she wanted to get one. I thought it would be a clothes hanger and a waste of money. Luckily, my company let me expense the subscription portion in lieu of paying for a gym membership. Yet.. here I am on a 64 or so week streak on the thing. The draw is I just go down the hall and get on the thing and get right off and get in the shower and its not a real even out of my day that requires planning around. The instructors are engaging enough and do a good job of keeping me out of my comfort zone, even though I now routinely finish in the 10-20% of the class. The fact they keep "score" helps motivate a bit too.

And its not just about the bike, though that is the primary draw. There are yoga, strength, walking/running classes, and probably a bunch more. I have done a "power yoga" and a bunch of bodyweight strength classes. But I am never going to a gym, and will be on the Peloton. I mean clearly its not the same workout, I would much prefer to get my cardio doing some intense treadmill running and then do some weights for more focused strength training, but I look better than I have ever in my life, and its entirely due to Peloton. I might be somewhat unusual, but all those parents out there, and those that feel that Peloton is good enough are likely to going to keep it and may not even go back to a gym.

I know many people in NYC that pay $30+ for each individual class they take. Peloton is a bargain for them.

I have gone through the same cycle- but you know what? Monoprice and amazon exists today, and I can get those cords often the next day for a reasonable price when I need them.

Its also becoming more prevalent that just because you have a cord that fits, it may not be the one you want. I learned this the hard way with HDMI cables that while retaining the same interface, have gone through standards upgrades and that old cord may not support 4k, or CEC, etc. Same with USB cables- I had some old USB cables around, used one to charge my phone, and after it took 5x as long found about all the wonderful ways in which seemingly identical USB cables can differ in terms of fast charging support, data rates and such.

Another way to look at it is- those cables are costing you money of sorts in terms of rent they should be paying for the square footage they take up. This is a very real thing in space constrained places like NYC. I ditched all my cords a few years ago.

I am on wifi 95+% of the day. I switched to Google Fi about a year ago because it was cheaper for my use case, and also much better for international stuff, and I travel frequently. But, I pay for literally every byte I use. Still, my phone bill is usually only $40/month so its a win in the end.

My comment is the transcript of what he actually said- the full context makes his comment look a little less worse than the snippet itself, but not much. It took him a full 48 hours to make that statement which was almost certainly not written by him- it was far too polished and eloquent compared to anything else he has ever said- when he routinely tweets his reactions to events around the clock.

I provided the full context- and watched that press conference live. That quote comes off to me as disingenuous and more along the lines of "look I said the thing you wanted" so that all of his other actions and statements can be disregarded. Its like pointing out that your dog who just attacked another dog is

Why would one of Putin's trolls ever call out their puppet's lies? Unless.... care to explain that large gap in posting between 2014 and 2016- where you then become increasingly more politically oriented in your posting and more radically conservative? https://slashdot.org/users2.pl...

You think its perfectly ok to allow rallies where people chant "Jews will not replace us!" and bear the same signs of a violent and criminal organization that illegally murdered people because of the color of their skin? It's one thing to promote your idea, its another to threaten another group. These "fine people" were carrying confederate and nazi flags.

Not being tolerant of hate speech and promoting violence somehow puts me in the same category as a religious extremist who shoots up cartoonists, all the while you are indirectly defending a group that actually killed a young woman and injured about 30 in total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Ok Boomer" does not go far enough here, this is mental illness.

You can read a transcript of everything he said here:

https://www.politifact.com/tru...

He starts off with utter bullshit:
"Trump: "I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct -- not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement. But you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don’t know the facts. And it’s a very, very important process to me, and it’s a very important statement."

This has been proven time and again that this is the actual opposite of his ethos. At the time, the inauguration nonsense was still fresh on everyone's minds. The context here is important: He failed to condemn the white nationalists for a period of time, caught a LOT of heat for it, then came out with what appeared to be some half-hearted forced statement condemning them- only to then in this conference get in front of reporters and say:

Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."

These rallyers were chanting "You will not replace us... Jews will not replace us" while carrying torches that alluded to the KKK.There is nothing fine about this at all, and if you think there is anything redeeming in that, I can't agree with you one bit.

Its much more attention grabbing to show when it makes mistakes, but there are people using this successfully, though I will be the first to admit this first cut seems to be super clunky and slow. I can only assume that it tries to be super cautious and the fact that it is "off the map" in a parking lot and has to map the area out. I still think this is progress and a step in the right direction though, don't you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Except there are videos out there showing the considerable capabilities of auto pilot?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you don't trust Tesla, how about some other people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I took an interest in your account though- I noticed you on a few threads today. You posted a bit in 2008 and 2010, where you had two posts that were on topic and reasonable, and then in May 2017 you all of a sudden just started posting multiple times a day pushing forth conservative viewpoints: https://slashdot.org/users2.pl...

How much does a hacked age slashdot account cost?

A better way to put this IMHO is that automobile transportation just isn't scalable enough.

I came to this realization that this is really a scale problem a few months ago. I generally citibike (bike share) to work, and was feeling pretty smug about it for a period of time. I still use mass transit on occasion though, and one time I was on a packed train and some dude comes on with a bike. It took up the space of about 4, maybe 5 people. Biking, while far better than a car-which I also noticed that 5 bikes took up the space of 1 car, while taking up a space of approximately 5 cars, which clogged 3 lanes for almost the entirety of 2 rows, still just did not have anywhere near the density or scale of mass transit. Getting the entirety of the population on a bike isn't going to work either (at least not for megascale cities like NYC). A typical subway train can and does, fit about 1200 people on it during rush hour. Next time you are stuck in traffic (or just look on google images for pictures of traffic jams: https://daily.jstor.org/wp-con... ) try and count the number of cars you can see in front of you. For me it was about 200-250. At least when I was driving, it was safe to assume that most of these were only singly occupied, some had 2, a few had more in them, but the vast majority of these cars had only a driver. That means that this massively expensive piece of infrastructure, for as far as the eye could see, still did not have the capacity of a single NYC subway train. That blew my mind a bit.

I am not saying that we need to ban cars, or bikes, but we certainly need to encouraging and *improving* mass transit.

I was really hoping they would go to Newark, NJ. You still get access to the NYC talent market. Newark is a town that always seems on the cusp of being reborn, but its been rocky at best. If anything would push it forward, Amazon would. There is tons of under utilized space available there (though I heard they wanted 500k sq ft, newly built and ready to occupy ASAP). I don't know long term how many people would commute from NYC to Newark, but the trains are pretty much empty going in the opposite direction towards Newark out of NYC, this could help even out the commute and ease a bit of the stress on the transit system. Its much more accessible to those wanting to live in both an urban or suburban location with a major major airport nearby, with commercial and residential real estate being much cheaper.

Its unfortunate and I believe a real missed opportunity for both Amazon and the region. Instead you are cramming in more density on an already overcrowded transit infrastructure in a location that while slightly cheaper than Manhattan proper, is still very expensive and you are effectively land locked there.

I believe the key is that you didn't play it when it came out... Quake was the first truly 3d shooter, and came out 3 years later. Myst for the time was stunning visually, and personally I found the story/mysteriousness immersive. By 1998 it was definitely old hat and felt restrictive/primitive.

The puzzles... hard to say. I was 14 when I first played? I found them challenging without being so absurdly so that I had to resort to looking in a cheat manual in a game store or spend some of my few precious minutes of internet time looking them up on an aol board. After Myst I played a bunch of others in the genre, Phantasmagoria, Shivers, some had puzzles that were quite obscure, and that wasn't fun either.

This probably depends a lot on the airport, but I traveled over 100k miles last year, but checking vs not checking can be the difference of an hour+ in your total travel time. I have been forced to gate check going to Newark and literally waited an hour for the carousel to start moving. This is not insignifcant. This is (another) missed dinner with your family, or an hour of lost sleep or decompression time. This is an hour later to the office, which may be a big problem depending on whether you have an important meeting to attend.

Newark is an extreme case, but even waiting an extra 30 minutes when you are a frequent business traveler is really irritating (think about when you are doing 30+ flights a year... for work...)

I am teaching this curriculum right now (as a volunteer for https://www.tealsk12.org/ ) and I can tell you that 90% of our time is spent teaching coding, either HTML or CSS. We wrap the fluff stuff into the curriculum to break up the harder stuff.

The point of this class is to teach basic programming skills and computer concepts so that the regular AP CS class in Java (which I also teach) isn't such a culture shock. Kids drop out of that class at a very high rate and they are trying to give a sanctioned path to learning the real stuff. The regular class was very similar to my first semester CS class in content.