I'm Australian (resident in Seattle) so I'm not eligible for global entry.

Maybe it's because my flights to Seattle are international from London, hence a large sudden influx of lots of people and lots of luggage all at once?

If I asked a cheater for a written assurance that they would never cheat on me again, and they provided a written assurance (i.e. a promise) that they'd never cheat on me again, then they'd have fulfilled exactly what I asked of them. Shame on me for asking for a dumb thing.

If I asked them for something and followed it with "in plain terms ", then shame on me for being duplicitous: I wasn't providing them with a plain terms restatement of my request, but instead sneaking in an escape hatch for myself.

It's clear that Epic did provide written assurance exactly per the letter of Apple's request. Apple asked for written assurance. A written assurance is an unsupported "trust us", nothing more, nothing less.

Apple's request was two-faced -- their "in plain terms" was not a restatement in plain terms of their request, but something new and altogether vague.

1. If you can get by with packing everything (including clothes) in carry-on, then you can buy a cheaper ticket which lacks checked baggage allowance. For my typical $1200 Atlantic flight, this saves about $250.

2. If you can avoid having to check in luggage, this saves me 30-60mins queuing at bag-drop upon departure. The frustrating thing is that the bag-drop queue times are unpredictable so you have to plan for the worst (wake up earlier, get to the airport earlier, ...). My experience of bag-drop queue times is primarily Seattle, Heathrow, Aberdeen.

3. Checked luggage adds average 30-45mins extra time upon arrival in Seattle and Aberdeen (the two airports I fly most frequently). In Seattle it's because there's a long wait for baggage, and after that you go through customs and immigration, so by the time you get your baggage then the customs-and-immigration queue is already awfully long.

4. If you can avoid having to check in luggage, you can get a tighter connecting flight without worry of the airline failing to get your luggage onto the connecting flight. When I fly Seattle -> Heathrow -> Aberdeen, a Heathrow -> Malta, I have to buy the Malta leg with a completely separate airline+ticket. If I had a checked bag then upon arrival in Heathrow (at 6am after a 9hr flight, i.e. tired) I'd have to go landside, queue, check in my luggage to Malta, go through security, and go to the gate. Even a 4hr connection window makes this risky, and having young unslept children makes it unfairly hard on them. But if there's no checked in luggage then you can stay airside, walk straight to the Malta boarding gate, and be confident that even just a 1hr window will be fine.

My carry-on is the wonderful "Tom Bihn Aeronaut 45" https://www.tombihn.com/collec... which is flexible, has backpack straps, and always fits under the seat in front of me. The checkin staff and gate staff are often wary of overhead carry-ons, but never give a second glance at a flexible backpack.

I fly into Seattle about 8x a year, half the time with baggage (family travel), half the time without (solo business travel). Waiting for baggage adds an average of 45mins.

Apple earlier claimed

I wonder which part of Apple's earlier statement was incorrect? (personally, I'd say "all of it"...)

If you're looking for documentation, does the (autocomplete-suggested) search term "confluence java jsoup documentation" provide the desired results on the first page?

It might be that Microsoft reckons people primarily search for comments about using the thing, and Google reckons people primarily search for official documentation of the thing? In Microsoft's Visual Studio, say you're coding in C# and got a compiler error and press F1 (help) to learn about it, they changed the behavior about 10 years ago. It used to take you to the official documentation for that error code which was typically dry and useless. They changed it to a bing-powered search for user comments, particularly stackoverflow. That came from UX research which showed that this ended up getting users unblocked quicker to fix their compiler error.

"Spousal testimonial privilege" says that the spouse can't be *compelled* to testify in proceedings relating to their spouse, not that they can't testify. (Wikipedia says that in the US sometimes it's the witness-spouse who has this privilege, sometimes the party-spouse).

"Witch hunt" is when someone did no wrong but you whip up hysteria to persecute them.

Do you believe that Tiktok is about as abusive as the other light entertainments? Do you believe that they all are abusive? Then it's not a witch-hunt.

What I want in the next generation is something powerful enough to do raytraced Minecraft, with a good view distance...

I think when progress is being made at the phenomenal rate it is right now, then it's exactly the right course of action to see just how versatile your hammer is.

Sarcasm aside, there isn't an objective thing called "merit". It's self-defining. Professors in college, business leaders, lawmakers, come up with self-serving definitions of merit "Merit is someone who is good in the same way that I was". It's self-reinforcing. It's easy to be self-deceptive about merit, to think there's some objective quality that your definition of merit is close to, but I don't think it truly is except in a tiny number of black-and-white cases ("had fewer patients die" or "won more court cases" or "made more money") and even those largely boil down to "played the current system well" rather than something more objective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.spiked-online.com/...

I've numerous times experienced my banks (Chase, and First Tech) make unsolicited telephone calls to me and, near the start, say "please confirm your address" before they proceed.

That's nonsense of course. (1) The verb "confirm" doesn't work that way; (2) I should never disclose my details to an unsolicited caller. Sometimes I tell them "I'm not going to give any information until you've confirmed a few things for me first... what is X? what is Y? what is Z?" to which they get flustered because I've deviated from their script. Other times I tell them I'm going to hang up and instead telephone them on the number publicly listed for their institution, to which they respond with irritation.

I keep getting emails from First Tech which contain links for me to click on. I've four times written back to various people in the company (from support staff up to VP) telling them that I'm never going to click on a link in an unsolicited email, and it's bad practice for them to send me such things, but again I've only been met with irritation.

I'm not going to side with the banks on this one until they've massively cleaned up their act.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...