Instead of just trolling facebook, they are now able to troll the streets. And they don't even have to pay for it!

Great idea.

Um. No.

Profit is what's left when every expense has been subtracted. If you don't have anything left after paying your employees, you made no profit and don't have to pay tax for it.

Unless it's really different in the UK; which I doubt.

So you hold an embargo against a nation for decades and now they don't fall over themselves to buy from you?

What an ungrateful bunch!

You can sort of use it like RSS.

What I don't understand is the 'modernized' bit ...

The biggest problem of Twitter is that it's proprietary. Twitter tells you what you can and cannot do with data from the Twitter stream.
That is what broke it for me right from the beginning. I wanted to integrate it into my normal data flow, but they disallowed taking tweets and showing them in another context. And I really do not care about using yet another application to get to my news.
So the idea of Twitter is intriguing; but that fact that you can only get it as a stand alone app/service breaks it.

Really? Can you tell us your source please?

I watched the WWDC session on ad blocking. Apple will not be blocking anything by itself. Instead the feature allows apps to add content blocking rules which Safari will then use. There was no mention of an exception for iAd.

Here is a more technical explanation: https://www.hackingwithswift.c...

I guess I should check the wikipedia article ...

What?

I have had half several Macs in the last ten years and have reinstalled OS X once. Even on the new machines I carried over everything via Migration Assistent. I don't know what it is, but you seem to be doing something wrong. Do you run some non-standard utility application(s)?

As for the iCloud keychain problem: Did you try disabling and reenabling iCloud keychain?

Works fine for me. *shrug*

I thought that science made conclusions based on observations, not that it made observations based on conclusions

It is completely normal that conclusions lead us to doubt our observations and do new measurements. Observations can be misleading unless we have a proper theory with appropriate measurements.

As for the current problem: Computer models are not reality, but - apart from data from the past - they are the best we have.

Science works like this:
First you observe something.
Then you try to come up with an explanation. That explanation needs to make some predictions (or it would be useless).
Then you test those predictions. Usually by making experiments.

Now, here we have a problem. We don't have a second earth to experiment with. And even if we had, the timescales involved are too large to make experiments in real-time.

So instead we use climate models. But these models are not reality. These are models we come up with on our own. How do we do that? Well, people that are generally learned about the subject try to think about anything that could possibly affect the climate. They then create a mathematical model and see if it's predictions fit the known data (i.e. data from the past must predict the present). The better it does, the better the model.

Now it turns out that we have some wrong data. Obviously that wrong data will have lead to climate models that do not predict reality.

This means we have to alter our current climate models to fit the new data. Someone will have to come up with an idea what exactly is wrong with the models and how to fix them, of course. But that is no different from how the models were created in the first place.

It also does not mean the models are not useful. They are. As long as they accurately predict current climate from past data, we can assume that they will also predict *future* climate from *present* data.

But, yes, our predictions can at best be as accurate as our observations. And if we measure wrong, that is a problem.

Disclaimer: IANACS - I am not a climate scientist

They don't do that, so I don't see a problem. (Giving some people a discount is not the same thing as penalizing everyone else.)

No idea.

But now you know, and if you absolutely need ice with your food, just go somewhere else.

Why? Maybe I simply only review things I like. Why would that devalue my reviews?

The problem are not people who supposedly 'love' a corporation. The problem are people who think someone loves a corporation just because he likes some of their products.

It's probably a mix of both.

Of course operating systems have matured. Today they do practically everything we can think about. There are no obvious features left to add. So development, especially from an end user's perspective, seems slow.

On the other hand, I don't agree that there is no development like you seem to imply. I'm using OS X, so that's the only OS I can really talk about. Some of the things we got the last few years:
- Spotlight.
A fast global search can really change some workflows. Gone are the days when I had to trawl through nested folders to find that file from a week ago. Now I can search for name or content or even the date I did use it last.
- Time Machine
Switching machines? Just restore from the last Time Machine backup and everything is like it was before.
That new version of application X sucks? Accidentally clobbered some file? No worries. Restore from Time Machine backup.
- iCloud Sync
OK, so not everyone wants that. But it is nice if data is kept in sync between devices automatically.

Of course there is much more, many of it not directly visible. (There's a reason MacBooks have great battery live. And it's not just better hardware.)

So, I agree with you up to a point. OS development is not as exciting as it used to be. But it didn't stop either. Interesting things still happen.

I never understood the focus on file managers. Is moving files around really such a big part of your computer use?