I'm aware of a few companies that do something like this. It's popular in some business circles. I think of it as a fancy Lease, basically. Here's how it essentially works:

-You get a 'current' device at all times, refreshed at a regular interval
-Often, you can upgrade at any time to a higher device class too. For a fee of course
-Things like an advanced warranty are baked into the price. Yes that includes accidental breakage as well. You get a replacement automatically when this happens.
-As a customer (ie larger corporation) you don't worry about the recycling or refresh planning so much, but
-At the back end, there's a repair/remarketing part of the business that's always got a pretty good forecast for used inventory that'll be coming back from your customers after a specified amount of time. This is the secondary revenue stream which helps keep costs competitive.

At least the way it's been presented to me, it's looked at as a win/win/win. It is appealing for some, to remove some hassles around device ownership. I'm not sure about the play for this on the consumer front, but this looks like Apple basically trying to accomplish the same thing that parts of the industry have already been doing more directly.

Quebec is sort of a nation within a nation. I do live elsewhere in Canada and have neither had a curfew nor a need to show a passport to buy booze at any point during all this. Folks outside of Canada seem to not understand that health matters are handled at the Provincial level.

Costco's a bit different though. I think they strike contracts with the payment company (in this case, Mastercard) to get a special deal for exclusivity. It wasn't that long ago that Amex had that exclusive contract, and then shockingly lost the deal on renewal. FWIW I don't mind the CapitalOne card that they issued after that - decent enough benefits on it.

Are you basically looking for something like Java’s DecimalFormat and/or SimpleDateFormat specifications? These use a String to define how you wish to translate a given number or time stamp input. Or am I misunderstanding what you are looking for?

If only he were kidding

I am, for one. It's a wonderful tool to build a knowledge base in for work, and on the personal side I use it as a recipe book, travel planner, grocery store list, etc etc.

It's an all-in-one general purpose app that synchs with mine and my wife's phones and is easy to use. I love the thing, except... I love the old version :)

It does what I need it to do, and it has done it rather well, actually. I'd argue that it's probably Microsoft's most underrated app.

Watch Netflix?

Totally reminded me of : Why do they put the food on these little sticks?

I liked it originally because it was fuss-free. Just nice pictures I could follow from anyone I'm interested in. If I want to search for something, I could search for something. It had its own recommendations contained within the search page should I have chosen to use it.

Now I find the app tedious. I hate that I can't just scroll down linearly back in history. If my wife browsed our Instagram before I did, I have to press the magic button before recommendations show up to see everyone's post history.

It was good. You shouldn't have fixed what wasn't broken. Now I use the app fairly sparingly compared to how much I used to, because it's turned what used to be a, enjoyable, mindless diversion into a chore.

AZ recipient here. Those receiving AZ for the first dose have the choice of AZ, Moderna or Pfizer for the second (depending on availability). Just received my second dose as Moderna over the weekend with no issues.

They are actively mixing Pfizer and Moderna to the public now, dosing based on availability. That doesn't stop people from vaccine shopping, but the difference is being likened to a "Coke vs Pepsi" decision. Aside from under-18s, both types of mRNA vaccines are being offered as if they're interchangeable now. The message is, get what you can as soon as you can.

Oh if I only had mod points today. Bravo, that was hilarious!

I would have thought that the actual -ride- into orbit and back down again would have changed more about the vines and wines than the 0g. Vines tend to react well to stressors, so it stands to reason that the ascent and descent might have programmed some survival traits into them.

As for the wine, who knows. I do not think that shaking helps it and unless the tasting was done blindly I would guess psychology plays a big role in the experience.

{shrug} I'm the opposite. Studied C in Univ and been using Java professionally for over 20 years. Right tool for right job. I suppose if we started our same application today it'd be written on .NET but it's been working out well for us. No issues migrating versions or platforms (from NT to Linux and back to Windows again, and a couple of database platform migrations to boot with fairly few issues).

Obviously we had to move away from Oracle's implementation but OpenJDK proved to be a good drop-in replacement.

I've started playing with an Arduino lately so that's scratching a little bit of that itch to try something new at least, if the sketches can be considered C (so far, at least in my case, rather simplified).

I’ll give you 750.

I thought the same thing, until I had my own use case. In my situation, as a Software guy I had an opportunity to take a CCNA course after hours. This consumed most of my evenings as well as my Sundays for several months.

I -like- to cook. I looked at our options and we chose HelloFresh (not the cheapest, but they seemed to have a lot of options that I liked). Being able to skip the shopping, and have clearly laid out ingredients and a recipe where I could just 'go' saved me a lot of time. It made it possible for my wife and myself to cook, and then sit down and eat, before I had to rush out for class. The planning was done for us, which was great. It was just 3 meals per week so we cooked our other ones from our regular repertoire, but basically it -supplemented-, and didn't replace, our regular cooking.

Fast forward to now - we saved the recipe cards that we like and now I just make those meals myself. We only order from HelloFresh if they're offering something new and novel, and skip the weeks where the food is boring or I can easily gather the ingredients myself.