It might turn out to be the final nail for apple as a computer manufacture.

And they're perfectly OK with that. For better or worse, Apple is an appliance company, not a computer company. It's as if no one noticed when Jobs renamed the company from "Apple Computer" to "Apple, Inc."

It seems obvious enough that the MacOS and iOS product lines will eventually converge. It's equally obvious that the Mac's DNA will take a lot of damage when that happens, if it survives at all.

Uh, OK. So every time I mail a letter, I'm supposed to feel guilty?

And at the current rates they are losing money per Amazon delivery. Multiple sources have given actual numbers for this.

I'm missing the part where the "multiple sources" explain how this is Amazon's fault.

Is there perchance a source, or even multiple ones, for that?

If the US is ever invaded by a foreign power... they will take over without firing a shot.

Significant evidence suggests that this has, in fact, just occurred.

Thanks, "rednecks."

Outlook versions prior to 2010 were terrible, all right. 2010 is great. When/if the .PST file becomes corrupt, it should be easy enough to deal with.

That was indeed a massive, massive problem with older versions of Outlook. But 2010 has been rock-solid for years, and has remained surprisingly fast as well.

Nevertheless, my .PST file is backed up on a journaling file system very frequently. If Outlook shits the bed at 50 gigabytes or whatever, I'll roll it back and split off an archive. No biggie.

And yet, like I said, I'm the only one of my peers who ever seems to actually be able to retrieve stuff when it's needed. It's probably a good thing I don't work at the White House.

There always seems to be a reason why IMAP users can't put their hands on the message they're looking for. Usually it's somebody else's fault, which I guess is the whole idea.

Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive. My .PST file is about 22 GB in size at the moment, consuming about 80 cents' worth of disk space at current prices. It doesn't go back to 1999, but it goes back about 12 years.

People are always trying to sell me on everything from IMAP to GMail, telling me how great the experience of using server-side email is compared to Outlook. It's funny, though... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago, they always come to me.

Great. Now that we've heard from the designated APC representative, we can get on with the thread.

Have you seen the way people drive? They (we) suck.

You said you drive like a grandma. The guy in the McLaren you saw the other day? He can't drive much faster than you do most of the time, due to congestion, speed limits and road-hogging morons in the left lane. Even if he could, some other moron with a texting addiction will eventually swerve into him or push him through a red light at a busy intersection.

It's inconceivable to me that we couldn't double our traffic capacity and halve travel times if we had the necessary combination of political and technical leadership to do self-driving cars right. All while saving tons of energy, not to mention about 30,000 lives a year. Instead, our best and brightest techies ride a bus to their workplace where they are tasked with finding new and better ways to sell ads on the Internet. Meanwhile, our best and brightest automakers are busy building half-assed "autopilots" that will only encourage people to text each other while camping out in the left lane. To this motly mix, we've added yet more morons who think choo-choo trains are somehow the answer.

Oh, well. The important thing is how easy it is to feel superior to everyone involved. :-P

A fleet of networked self-driving cars *is* a train. It's a bad idea to build a new new fixed-rail system from scratch. It will cost a ton of money, take forever... and even when finished, it will be just another choo-choo train, good for transporting people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be.

For some reason, people around here only like trains if they run on dedicated railbeds. Weird.

How does Quicken benefit from a governmental assault on AirBnB?

*This is more a case of big brother saying centralized approach is the only way, more like single payer health care than anything.*

I'm very confused. Are you agreeing with me, or disagreeing?

And the truth is, I agree with your point of view entirely. I like driving as much as anybody. If I listed the cars I've owned it would sound like a pointless exercise in online douchebraggery.

But our "hobby" -- and make no mistake, that's what it is -- gets about 30,000 people killed every year in the US alone. There will be immense social and political pressure to fix this as soon as technology allows. And as usual, we Americans will do the right thing only after trying everything else first.

... that we will not realize the full benefit of self-driving cars unless they are networked to communicate with each other and with the regional traffic control infrastructure. This is not a good area for individual empowerment. Rogue vehicles that don't play by the rules -- whatever those rules turn out to be -- will ruin it for everybody else.

In most sane societies, it would be the role of the government to regulate many aspects of automated vehicle development and deployment, from communication and navigation protocols to congestion avoidance to the standardized swappable battery packs that (should) power those vehicles. But we've collectively decided that government should be run by the weakest and dumbest among us. That leaves corporations to supply the necessary leadership.

So, don't blame Uber and Lyft for taking a self-interested authoritarian stance. Blame the voters who put Bible-thumping idiots in charge of the interests that we all share.