the company that makes them should be able to determine the course of any conversation that you have with it, and steer you away from any topics that might disagree with the company's values

AKA lie. The company - those programming the AI know the true answers and intentionally want the AI to provide different answers. The AI is lying to you. The intent may not be in the AI but in the people controlling the AI, but it is still a lie. There is still intent.

As a shareholder, I'd rather have the cash given to me as dividends if Apple can't think of anything better to do with it. Let me and other shareholders decide what charitable causes we want to support.

Congress should be doing one thing, and one thing only: working to end the shutdown. Those 800,000 employees need their paychecks to live their lives. Even if Congress wants to keep a "stop work" in place to show the President who's boss, the employees should not suffer.
Imagine if GM or Walmart decided not to pay their employees because the CEO & BOD were having a spat.
It's an utter embarrassment that the federal government isn't paying its employees.

Or, "I sit in a chair 8 hours a day staring at a screen & typing". My cushy tech job may beat digging ditches or working in a coal mine, but it has its own set of health hazards.

As the AC wrote, the key is to make exercise your "quality time". Biking, kayaking, hiking, running, surfing, falling trees, and construction are activities that require a high level of exertion. Exercise does not need to be done locked in a gym.

The entire population of the USA does not have a "first world" standard of living. Are we developing too?

What percentage of a country should be "first world" before they are no longer "developing"? China has a space program, aircraft carriers, huge modern cities, and also rice farmers living in mud huts. The population living at first world levels is probably as large or larger than the population of the USA. And that first-world population is actively competing with/against the USA. Why should the USA give that country any concessions?

1000 times this. Wish I had mod points.

I've been to China and they certainly have subsistence farmers who live in mud huts. They also have a huge population that lives in modern cities. When their population is 3x that of the USA, they have a much broader economic spread.

But as a nation, they left "developing" a long time ago.

When I upgraded to 10.13.4 my machine went into safe mode upon reboot. It said the OS failed to install. A look at the error logged showed complaints about some file missing from the installer directory. Sent me into quite a panic for a while. I finally did a fresh, complete install.

If you live in the USA, you are the 1% - globally speaking.

My parents (70ish) just bought a new Mac after having OS 9 & early OS X machines for many years. They called me to help get them set up. Wow! Explaining user interface elements over the phone was PAINFUL. Flat UI design has totally removed the visual identity of a button. A big rectangle with a word in it is not recognizable as a button. A circle is not a button. A word floating in space is not a button.

There were so many things that as a person who uses a computer daily & many different application, I just "knew" while they were lost.

And, hey, thanks to the genius at Apple who decided to make the scroll bars disappear. Wouldn't want a user to know there was more to view in a window.

ex-GEnie user here, too.

Discussion boards, online games - with graphics! Eventually access to Usenet.

The graphics have gotten prettier, and UIs fancier, but it's basically all still people having conversations and yammering on about this and that.

I wish I could believe that this is more than partisan witch hunting. Party A comes into power and immediately starts investigations of actions taken when Party B was in power.

Personally, I believe there is a lot of smoke around Clinton's handling of classified material. If any average citizen did the same things they would probably be in jail or at the least lose their clearance. But I also understand the further up the food-chain one goes the squishier the rules become.

At this point I'd like to see the Clintons fade into the background and for the government to move forward with an agenda of "positive" action, not revenge-seeking for past actions.