Proof that years of astronaut training and astronaut psychological evaluations should be required before purchase for all gun owners. There'd be no more gun accidents or murders.

I hate to bring it up but there was the astronaut who went loopy and drove 500 miles in adult diapers to kill her ex-boyfriend. (I forget her name.)

I went on a few dates with this girl who used to work at NASA, in engineering at Goddard and at Houston, she used to know a bunch of astronauts and she said while none of them were totally nuts, they were all a little weird and totally neurotic about doing anything that might get them bumped from the rotation, particularly when the shuttle program was EOLd and there were no more mission slots forthcoming. The pressure of being an astronaut in space was one thing; the pressure of being selected as an astronaut, but then never going into space was quite another. Layer on that the inevitably weird macho/"Right Stuff"/elite competition stuff...

Well, maybe not yelling, anyway...

You can get at pretty much the whole thing now. The only thing you can't do in Swift is create a C function pointer to a Swift code block, so some of the callback-based tasks in CoreAudio and CoreMIDI can't be used. But apart from that calling into C and using C data structures pretty much just works.

The existing APIs aren't very idiomatic to Swift, you gotta do more casts than you probably should have to and there are some really common patterns in Cocoa that are a pain.

I know, that LINC is an underground sensation...

I want to punch that guy. How does this happen!?!?

His actions saved the documents from certain destruction. Punch something else.

If Apple sells me $300 in hardware as a $600 cellphone, it's still a bargain, because the phone is easily worth more than $600 to me.

Anyways, final sale price of the the flagship phones is always about the same, it's not like there's some incredible alternative to an iPhone that's significantly better and significantly cheaper. Apple's profits in this case come from selling units to resellers at close to sale price, where a Samsung will give away half the end sale price of a phone in rebates and sales incentives to resellers and carriers.

On the sell side Apple makes most of its profits be squeezing middlemen, because they know people actually want their phone. Samsung and HTC phones are good but are effectively commodities, something to have in stock when people walk in and ask for an Android phone. Thus, Samsung and HTC have to sell them at wholesale prices.

Does not bode well for the Note...

Technically if you adjust for inflation Standard Oil still has the market cap crown. Who gives a flying fuck?

The New York Times does, they made the dumb comparison.

And yes, comparing the historical market cap of a company with the present market cap of another is meaningless, companies compete and operate in the present, under present conditions, and these conditions (of which the value of nominal dollars is a minor one) do not hold over time.

They had quarterly earning to make and doing a marketing tie-in with Norton made some money and didn't cost a dime. And anyways why would they bother spending money trying to "improve" their computer when Microsoft owned most of the actual user experience?

The PC clone industry collapsed because when it was broke no one took the blame, and when it worked the wrong people got the credit. The problem with commodities is brands become meaningless, and maybe PCs weren't as much of a commodity as Microsoft had everyone believe...

This is a stupid hill to die on, Chas.

Yeah, but what political system made it possible for such a person to do that better than the richest nation of the planet?!

The AC is sarcastic, but I'd point out that Elon Musk is a South African who got most of his education in Canada. As a matter of fact, of the five founders of PayPal listed on the Wiki page, only one of them is from the US...

This is approximately the same arrangement "our" astronauts use at the moment.

Boeing makes a lot of passenger planes, and the US has really expensive new fighter jets, but apart from that the US aerospace establishment is kinda earning a C+ at the moment. The US doesn't make any of the current highest/fastest/heaviest aircraft, our military procurement system is completely sclerotic and over-managed, the best thing we have going for us is a PayPal billionaire who's building rockets effectively as a hobby...

Hollywood job pays on average 27K. (Using the numbers in the summary).

I'm not sure about the methodology in the summary, but if you look at the scale rates for most Hollywood entertainment unions you'll see the weekly rates even for entry-level job classifications will be around $2000/week. Actors are only a small part of the puzzle and they aren't really representative of the entire employment picture of the film industry. For every professional actor in the film industry there's gotta be a dozen people in behind-the-scenes crew positions.

Even then I'm not really sure how much more "broad" the App economy is, since it seems to be dominated by "star" apps, particularly in gaming, productivity and social networks. Also consider that Apple takes a 30% agency fee for all apps while CAA and William Morris Endeavor only take 10% of their client's salary, and even then Hollywood talent agents are seen as the acme of largess and venality.

I honestly don't think "wannabee" counts towards these things. :-P

There are a lot of professional actors that still wait tables. You can be SAG, book semi-regular walk-ons on TV and the occasional film and still need a second gig-- people wait tables, but they also code, sell stuff on Etsy, write, work as realtors...

Even really successful actors end up having a lot of free time, Josh Brolin is known for, apart from acting, being a really successful high-frequency trader in the mid-aughts.

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