Who said anything about drinking from a cup? Not every convenience store has a fountain, and even if they do the performance is inconsistent. Vending machines are definitely not fountains. There's no "cup" a lot of times.

There were many times in my Coke-drinking days when I'd partially empty a 20 oz. I just hated wasting the stuff; but I knew I didn't want to drink all of it. It always went flat before I wanted any more.

BTW, the Mexican cokes are still a bit too big. 12 oz. (355 ml) or half-liter. I find 12 oz., poured over ice and shared with somebody is best; although I can tolerate 12 oz. The half-liter is a disturbing trend. The Mexicans certainly don't need it, since they just surpassed the US in obesity.

BTW, I knew the original coke bottle was smaller and found this article about 6.5 oz. bottles.. Sigh... apparently this was available in the UK not that long ago? Maybe they'll bring it back to the US and finally reverse the trend. The original size was just about right. Yes, I'd pay more per oz., but I'd pay the same per *serving*.

Can the Coke executives get that through their heads? Some of us are desiring a *serving*, not a "most ounces for the buck". Wondering what to do with the excess soda, or being suckered into finishing more than you need... is not a pleasant experience. Having a right-sized glass bottle with real sugar in it, that's what some of us want.

Firms often fail to supply products or services that are plainly in demand. Sometimes it's a regulatory perversion that interferes with capitalism. Other times the companies are just dicks. For example, CocaCola with real sugar. For years it was very hard to get because of government interference with the sugar market. Now due to NAFTA we can get Mexican Coke with real sugar. If you want a real American drink, you have to get it from Mexico? How fucked up is that? This would be an example of regulatory perversion.

Not to harp on the soda companies, but they also provide an example of companies being dicks. PepsiCo is a big offender. They buy up restaurants, and you can only get Pepsi there. Coke does this too; but not as aggressively. Both companies bully around small convenience stores. I once met an operator in Virginia who found a way to stock Coke and Pepsi. She actually told me that she was getting away with hiding the competing soda from a distributor when they came around. Possibly she trading wholesale lots with a friendly operator across town. This was a long time ago; but I bet it hasn't changed. These companies are dicks.

They also super-sized their beverages to the exclusion of those of us who wanted smaller portions. I really noticed this in my 20s, when suddenly 20 oz. was the only bottle size you could get a lot of places.

I was able to make the long-run decision to reduce soda consumption dramatically, all but eliminating it. I now enjoy the occasional Mexican coke and that's about it. Many others are not so disciplined, and we all know about proposed government fixes for this but really, you can't fix the fact that the companies are just dicks.

What kind of pockets do you have? I fit my wallet, keys, and Note all in 1 pocket.

How does PostGreSQL compare?

I work at a large government department with stupidly large scientific datasets being thrown in and out of databases and we're migrating as fast as we can from Oracle to Postgres. The only thing we can't really shake is bloody Oracle financials and a few crufted old Java apps that we don't have the code to rewrite.

Postgres handles beautifully, and on some things even better although on some nasty multi-join type things Oracle will still beat it.

But it doesn't even matter because we can just throw more hardware at it infinitely cheaper than the extortion racket that Oracle pricing represents.

MariaDB is surprisingly competent too and in fact even has a surprisingly complete GIS implementation (Although PostGIS is the gold standard as far as we are concerned). Just avoid the Oracle branded one (MySQL), its not as well tuned, doesn't play nice with packaging systems and is generally posessed of the Oracle odour.

I think that HTML5 would make it far worse. Where do most of these bad programmers start? Where the barriers to entry are lowest-- javascript. You'd be making the problem worse, not better.

I do think that there's much improvement to be made with permissions on mobile phones. But that's a separate problem, and one a lot of the Android custom ROMs do well.

Different requirements drive different designs. Before WW2 seaplanes were common because of the lack of runways. After WW2 airports proliferated, and seaplanes couldn't keep up with technical advances due to the compromises involved in allowing them to land and take off from water. But that doesn't mean there aren't applications for aircraft with a flying boat's capabilities, it just means there isn't enough of a market in places like the US to support an industry. Even so, here in North America there are some 70 year-old WW2 Catalinas being used in aerial firefighting. China is a vast country which is prone to many kinds of natural disasters that could make airlifting in supplies difficult, so they may see potential applications we don't.

It's also interesting to note that seaplanes were highly useful in the pacific theater of WW2, and there hasn't been a protracted struggle for sea control *since* WW2. Also, China is a country with no operational aircraft carriers; aside from its training ship the Liaoning, it has a handful of amphibious assault ships that can carry a few helicopters. The US by contrast has ten supercarriers and nine amphibious assault ships that dwarf the aircraft carriers of WW2. The technology and expertise to run a carrier fleet like America's would take many years for China to develop. It's conceivable that the manufacturers imagine a military market for aircraft like this in the interim.

...or if he's using shell style wildcards, he could mean "pure and utter sherbet."

Reports of trains *not* running on time certainly decreased, but that's not quite the same thing...

Design guidelines are just recommendations. Frequently bad ones. A developer should design the best UI he can, not follow what Google says regardless of whether it fits. And most developer guidelines, Google and Apple both, are crap.

The problem is that the whole app movement has brought in a whole slew of crappy developers who's idea of coding is to search stack overflow or git for stuff to copy paste. They don't read it, don't understand how to use it right, and expect it to magically work. Worse half of the people writing that code fall into the same category, so its the blind reading the blind. If you pick a library off of github and assume it will work, you deserve what you get. Unfortunately your users don't.

These people have been around for a while (they used to be "web developers" and program by copy pasting big chunks of javascript). The problem is that on a phone they can do more damage. In a world where the number of quality programmers is fixed and far less than the demand for programmers, how do you fix it? Making it easier to program actually hurts, you end up with those crappy coders trying to do even more. Maybe its time to raise the barriers to entry for a while.

Things win because they are "good enough", for a "reasonable enough" price, at the right time - but it helps if they are being pushed by a ruthless, anti-competitive monster monopoly.

Sure they are. My school had AP classes, but not everyone in the class takes the test- those who didn't think they would pass skipped it and save the 70 bucks. In each one the teacher suggested to a few people not to take the test because they didn't think they had the understanding to pass. In at least 1 case they talked someone into taking the test when they were borderline (I think he passed).

As for financial incentive- read the article. Google was paying teachers directly. It was going to the teachers, administrators not involved. With financial incentives I can easily see the teachers telling more/all of those tweeners to take it and see if they pass.

Lets be fair- its always been boring. Nobody gives a fuck about these sports for 3.9 years out of 4. Nobody should care about them the other .1 either. Or are you buying tickets to the local synchronized diving competition?

We are? Oh yeah, that age screening that none of us went through to use this site.

Personally, I don't think that life is better with such widespread "refreshing" use of profanity. Just coarser.

Anyway, even if you like profanity, how can it remain profane if everyone uses it? :) It loses force, while remaining coarse. Lose lose.

That's an odd perspective ... you can't have it both ways. If you want the freedom of the GPL, then you get ... the freedom of the GPL.