"So why shouldn't the US be able to do it now?"
Why? "Regulation Nation." There's way too many people that have to be asked, "Mother may I?" Starting with environmental impact statements and going from there, it is delay, delay, delay. Each delay is expensive. Repeal 90% of the regulations, and you can then maybe get things done.
although it mixes tenses which is maybe what's confusing.
Yeah. I'd expect journalists to know basic grammar and not use present tense when talking about last year.
It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.
I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.
I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.
when they fired them in Mass.
I didn't even know they had operations in Massachusetts.
(try "en masse")
So many posts are clearly marketing campaigns, not sure that AI is needed to make it much worse.
I meant that the wider market. Even if Apple's strategy isn't going to be profitable, a subset of Meta's efforts can be (the devices can be profitable, but they spent way too much money on certain projects that will not pan out).
Apple may make a return to the market with an amended product that fit the business case.
Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.
There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.
Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.
So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.
But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.
There's a market, it's viable, but it's not set the world on fire. Apple's device aimed for a market that seemingly wasn't there (too expensive particularly for an unproven ecosystem). But other devices have done well enough to have a business justification.
KDE has been in Fedora a while, a lot of Fedora gets dropped on the way to RHEL. Fedora 34 would become RHEL9, and dropped KDE on the way.
I suppose I don't know the particulars of this protest, but *most* protests I see aren't standing up for Hamas but pointing out the broader treatment of Palestinians, whether it's as collateral damage in Gaza or continuing behavior in the West Bank, which is widely recognized as wrong by the UN/ICC/EU/various nations.
Broadly speaking, the muslims I have known personally are good folk. Extremists under any religious cover misbehave similar, though admittedly some Islamic extremists have more formally recognized power than is typical, but as it stands none of this is in evidence in the West Bank. Gaza may be more tricky by virtue Hamas, but most major powers have expressed a belief that Israel could have been more surgical but are instead inflicted way more collateral damage than should be acceptable.
2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
