My plain-old 5 seemed a little sluggish for like a day afterwards, but I assume that was because all my auto-udating apps were auto-updating and pulling down a crapton of data. So far I haven't really seen much of a difference, except in a few older esoteric apps I occasionally use that have crashed on me. I'm keeping an eye on that. I was worried for that first day, but it hasn't really made a difference. It's probably slightly slower but I don't notice because I don't type fast enough.

My iPad Air has been stellar thus far.

I'm not touching my old iPad 2, unless one of my MIDI controller apps requires the update for something.

Whoa! You mean Apple made a technology on one of their devices *proprietary*??!?!??!?!??!

HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS WHY ISN'T THIS A HEADLINE AROUND THE WORLD? /sarcasm

They sure are pretty. A bit big, though. Would look fine on my wrist, but probably not on my wife's.

That's been one issue with wearables so far - while some of them have decent industrial design, they've all been positioned as "computers that you wear as an accessory", when the mass market would much rather go for "accessories that are also computers." They've all been either too big or too unstylish to make a fashion statement beyond "I read Slashdot", and frankly have been pretty biased towards male wearers.

I dunno if Apple's cracked the code on that yet, but it's interesting to see a wearable that acknowledges that (more than just customize-able faces and bands, actual different form factors and designs).

Verify me.

Man I'm glad I'm not the only person who remembers that movie.

I don't think so. But I think they're expecting this to moves hardware units and tech licenses and promote the Apple brand, whcih while not probably as lucrative immediately as a small transaction fee, has the potential to draw a lot of people into their ecosystem.

...unless he's a fan of the author for whom Bester is named.

B%'s dialogue was mostly awful and heavy-handed, because JMS (at least at the time) wrote a LOT of expository, comic-booky stuff. Given over the years he's matured having been a script editor for a lot of bigger name, subtler stuff, one would hope he's got a grasp of it now. BUt back then, whooweee there was a lot of leaden phrasing. It took actors with a lot of gravitas, like Katsulas and Jurasik to make some of that stuff work. Unfortunately most of the actors lacked that.

And then there's the whole thing that 90% of the foreshadowing was done by either time-jump flashforwards or a riddle-talking alien.

I also found the central conceit of the Vorlon/Shadow conflict, and the resolution thereof, deeply unsatisfying. Millions-of-years-old ultrapowerful Type IV civilisations and their endless conflict reads like a 1st-year philosophy paper - and is resolved by some dude yelling "Shut up! Go away! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, DAD!" Buh.

> The same thing a train does when it arrives at a train station.

Blow through at high speeds, jump the track and maim dozens of passerby?

For standard operations, it basically makes little difference. Movies, games, etc - unless you're dealing with an acoustically treated space and really good speakers, mobo audio exceeded the necessary standards a long time ago.

If you're an audio pro, though, then you generally need something else. But that tends to be specialized - high-end converters, mic preamps, multichannels, ADAT/TOSLink, yadda yadda. Eventually you start worrying about what brand of transformer is in your mic pre and how to impedance match your mics.

But that's pretty rarefied.

The standalone sound card has kind of been squeezed out on both ends. No significant benefit for your average user, not good enough for your prosumer.

Yeah, they went and got the disability, so they should be willing to pay for it. /sarcasm

"Mensa Match: The Dating Site For the Insufferably Smug."

It's the urdu (loaned from arabic) for "foreigner", generally "westerner?"

Okay so maybe their characterization was pretty awful but I don't see the beef with the name.

The modifier is "who has had (often historical) power in the situation."

This is really hard for white folks to get, because they've pretty much always had the power in this country, and with the exception of some ethnic groups (irish, italians, jews to name a few, although that situation has for the most part changed in the past century) there's never been a term used by groups in power for us that basically means "we're reducing you and everything in your culture to a single attribute that intends to justify our treatment of you as less-than-human." Yeah, "honkey", "redneck" and "cracker" are epithets, but there weren't tacit (or explicit in some cases) endorsements of honkey-lynchings or cracker-scalping throughout our country's history.

Vikings don't get offended because vikings don't exist anymore, and their descendants got to pick the team name for themselves. When a white dude calls a team full of white dudes the "Redskins" because he can with impunity, it's pretty much indicative of the imbalance of the situation.

What about "Semprini?"

Where I'm living, we're having some controversy with Uber and Lyft and the taxis. We do *not* have the super-high license costs of NY or even Victoria, and most cabbies own all their licenses. Most of our cab companies are employee owned, as well.

The regulations we do have, though: criminal background checks, commercial insurance, requirement of training to support the disabled (and subsequent participation in subsidized transport programs for the disabled), 24/7 operation (for the company, not individual cabbies), and required service to the entire city.

Both Uber and Lyft started operating here without any of those requirements being met, so the city said "um, no." Lyft sent a rep (who was not from their legal team, just a sales rep or...something) to a town hall meeting about it whose primary argument was "we're not a cab company, so it doesn't apply to us." The city's argument was "not directly, but you're operating like a cab company, so you're subject to our regulations." And back and forth it goes.

I'm not entirely sure who's right (although the whole "hey look you can't just skip picking up disabled people" part seems kind of important) but what does strike me as distasteful and a little sketchy is that nobody from either company either researched any of this before they started operating, or if they did, they didn't bother to have a discussion with the city beforehand. Seems like due diligence, and they probably could've gotten an exception if they'd made their case beforehand (there are enough tech-friendly alderpeople to lobby on their behalf) but unfortunately the shoot first, ask questions later methodology set up a lot of ill-will.

It's just weird that they're working that way.