Not waterproof, less grain than a Nomad. Lame. :-D

*blinks*

In the U.S. (Apple's biggest market at 44% of net sales), only 3% of people are vegan. About 57% of U.S. phone users use iPhones. Even if every single vegan who uses a cell phone at all uses an iPhone, that would still be *barely* over 5% of their customer base. They might be one of the more *vocal* parts of Apple's customer base, but they're certainly not a large percentage of it.

When so many spooks come out against it, that's how you know you're doing the right thing. Let's unpack their statements a bit.

You're not realistically going to magically prevent any of those things with more spying. At best, you might catch the occasional low-hanging fruit, and even then, only if you do incredibly invasive levels of widespread spying on everyone. The right way to prevent those things is by infiltrating the relevant community. People who say otherwise are kidding themselves.

First, their claim isn't even true at a superficial level. Since at least 1961, we have been compelled by law to recognize diplomatic couriers and the contents of their bags as beyond the reach of law enforcement.

Second, our societies have always tolerated spaces that are at least by default beyond the reach of law enforcement, which allow law enforcement to peer into those spaces only after establishing probable cause.

Recent behavior by law enforcement agencies has thrown out the entire notion of probable cause, creating mass spying programs that sniff all the traffic going into and out of various organizations en masse. That, combined with parallel construction and courts being lax at enforcing the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, has resulted in substantial violations of the public's right to privacy.

End-to-end encryption is necessary entirely because law enforcement has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to respect the bounds of privacy that a free society requires. And the fact that law enforcement's irrational "slurp everything up and sort through it later" approach has resulted in everyone encrypting everything is not the fault of the "everyone encrypting everything". It is the fault of law enforcement being utterly egregious and unscrupulous in their behavior.

There are consequences for actions, and when governments show that they are untrustworthy on an ongoing basis, people stop trusting them. Welcome to the real world, kids.

They're "getting into" power generation? That makes it sound like this is something brand new. I remember when Apple put in its first natural gas cogeneration plant to take its build infrastructure off the grid, back around 2002 or 2003, I think. Google has massive generators around a bunch of its buildings, presumably for the same reason. Big tech has been in the energy business quite literally for decades at this point.

That's *with* time-of-use metering. I'm pretty sure the price for EV metering has roughly tripled in the last five years. And only about 11 to 16 cents of that is the actual generation cost. The rest of it is profit for PG&E. The only way to get reasonably priced power in California is to build your own power plant, which will bring your price down to about 17 cents per kWh, and even that isn't much below the price of gasoline.

For a state that's desperate to push electrification, the state's utility regulators sure don't seem to be on board. That's probably why EV sales dropped last quarter for the first time in years.

We really need to break up the PG&E monopoly or let the state buy it and run it. It has never been more clear that regional-scale for-profit utility monopolies just don't work and can never work no matter how regulated they might be.

Alternatively, if, rather than arming both sides with missiles and other weapons that help create bloodbaths, everyone instead treated both sides like small children, put a wall around the country, didn't let any new weapons in, and just let them all pummel the crap out of each other until they tired themselves out, maybe both sides would eventually start to act like adults.

The thing is, there's a second part of the problem, which is that at least some parts of the U.S. government seem to see Israel as their proxy in the Middle East, and I get the feeling that Iran and possibly other countries see the conflict as an opportunity to cozy up to Russia by arming the enemy of America's proxy in the Middle East. And as long as both sides are getting armed by people who are more interested in being the friend of the winner than in actually achieving peace, the conflict will continue to rage on.

It's not really a proxy war, per se, because both sides have kind of hated each other since time immemorial, but even though there was always a fire, various world interests have elected to throw gasoline on it, and that makes the problem worse. Were it not for the realization that there's no good way to keep foreign political powers (Iran, etc.) from supporting groups that attack Israel, my inclination would be to believe that the right solution would be to stop arming Israel entirely. After all, if Israel weren't so confident that the U.S. would always have their backs and supply them with whatever weapons they needed no matter what they do, they might just be a bit more respectful towards the Palestinians as a people. But those foreign powers on the other side make that solution problematic.

Either way, I'm glad to see the U.S. being a lot less vigorous in their defense of Israel's missteps as of late, and a lot more critical. I hope this marks a turning point in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel that pressures Israel to stop taking unilateral actions in retribution against Palestine and to instead start asking other nations to help them get things back under control in a manner that complies with international law.

Genocide, no, but I've been sensing for a few years that a lot of the war hawks in Washington D.C. (mostly people with an "R" by their name) are trying to come up with justification for bombing the crap out of Iran, which might not end the conflict, but would definitely reduce the amount of fuel being added to the fire. I could be wrong about that — it's just a feeling based on what politicians say — but if that happens, I won't be surprised.

I AOA Disagree. :-D

But seriously, yeah, it was Airbus that had airspeed sensor problems (pitot tubes).

But to play devil's advocate here, by that time, Israel had also been whittling away at their territory for decades, illegally taking land from Palestinians and giving it to Israeli settlers, all while denying the Palestinians any real say in the matter. They also occupied parts of Palestinian territory militarily until 2005, IIRC.

Don't get me wrong here. I agree that terrorism isn't an appropriate way to handle that situation, and I agree that Israel has a right to defend itself. But the Palestinians being angry at Israel over the situation isn't *entirely* unreasonable, and Israel's repeated disproportionate responses create martyrs and enmity, which is a bad outcome.

The Israeli people have a right to not be blown up by the Palestinians and vice versa. Both groups have a right to self-governance. Right now, it seems like neither side is willing to acknowledge those rights as applied to the other side. And that's the real problem. Both sides have to stop seeing the other side as a problem to be dealt with and start seeing them as fellow human beings before there can be any true and lasting peace. And that has to start with one side or the other stepping back from the extremist right-wing rhetoric and genuinely seaking peace. Until that happens, IMO, nothing short of outside intervention is going to solve the problem in any long-lasting way.

There's no reason in principle that you couldn't do this. Just stick a bunch of RAM on a PCIe bus and provide a driver that exposes it as a memory-mapped device under /dev/disk. I'm just not sure how to enable swap on a different device file. I think it used to be possible by replacing /var/vm with a symlink somewhere else, but with the way macOS is locked down these days, it might not be anymore.

I wonder if recompiling the FreeBSD swapctl command would make it possible to just add a huge swap file on such a device. Depends on whether they've kept the same syscall hooks under the hood, I guess.

Boeing: The sound your flying car makes when it unexpectedly lands on the roof of your neighbor's house.

I would argue that Israel also elected a hard-line government (Netanyahu) that has repeatedly acted towards the Palestinians in a manner intended to subjugate them, limit their right to self-governance, limit their freedom of movement, etc., and that Hamas becoming the government of Gaza more than a decade later was the entirely predictable effect. From the moment he was first elected, I predicted that he would end up radicalizing the Palestinians.

None of what's happening now should be a surprise to anyone. Some Israeli settler gets murdered, and Israel launches missiles. The disproportionality of Israel's response then radicalizes more Palestinians, who commit more atrocious attacks, and the cycle of hate is perpetuated, with both sides believing that they are justified. And that's what happens when you put hard-line right-wing leaders in charge.

IMO, there really are no clear good guys in this war, and plenty of bad guys on both sides. At this point, I think nothing short of the U.N. sending in peacekeeping troops and insisting that both sides disarm completely for the next hundred years is going to fix it, because both the Israelis and the Palestinians have consistently shown unwillingness to stop fighting, and have consistently elected leaders who spew anti-other-side rhetoric and foment war. And until everyone disarms and is under the protection of a neutral organization like the U.N., I don't see that changing.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by total incompetence just as well.

Of course, if it was incompetence, I'd also expect high-level military leaders to be fired, new training programs instituted, etc. to ensure that it never happens again. If that didn't happen, then the problem is systemic at the leadership level, and whether it was intentional or not stops being interesting at that point.

So as someone who hasn't followed any of this, the first question I would asked is who got fired for that incident.

Or elect not to enforce it at all, e.g. the free passage of people within the EU and the lack of physical impediments to doing so.

To be pedantic, ultimately, what makes a country is a defined border and a government that rules over the people within that defined border. Nothing inherently prevents a country from having only a police force and no military, so long as their neighbors aren't war mongers. But millennia of history shows that eventually one of them will become war mongers, so pretty much every country has a military so that it will *stay* a country. :-)

No, not necessarily. When a protest interferes with the rights of another person by physically attacking someone, that's an assault. Someone blocking a street for a protest parade, with police lines shutting down the street, etc., might be an inconvenience, but it clearly isn't an assault. Everything in between is shades of grey.

To be fair, it is private property owned by a company that employed at least some of the protesters, in a building that the protesters presumably worked in, so it's not quite as clear-cut as occupying someone else's yard. More like your teenage kid occupying your yard.