"It will produce 50 million gallons of water per day and will provide 7% of the potable water needs for the San Diego region."

Cool. Now you only need to build another 14 of them to satisfy the water needs of the area...

Maybe robots could build desalination plants?

It''s pretty damn sure that humans never will; they'll plan them, and then shelve the plans, over and over. At least robots are single-minded enough to actually do the work.

It was definitely a "fuck you, this is a phone; this is not another fucking Newton".

Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I wrote 7% of the kernel that runs on the things.

That's a misdemeanor.

Fwiw I love the new maps. The new map updates itself as you search and lot more of the screen is used by the map. Plus it's got a version of Google earth that loads instantly which is pretty nice. But people who like the new thing rarely yell about it.

When someone preloads software that you request be preloaded on a device, that does *NOT* make the software vendor of that software a "subcontractor".

Unless, you know, (1) there was a contract between Apple and Pearson relating to contract line items, and (2) There was *no* contract between LA Unified and Pearson, and (3) LA Unified did not specify the curriculum software to use, and (4) Apple was acting as a slaes agent, rather than as an intermediary.

The breakdown they (LA Unified) gave was:

Special Case ($80);
3-year Apple Care warranty ($150);
Pre-loaded apps ($13-$21);
Pearson curriculum ($150-$300);
PD ($20); and
Buffer Pool ($20).

So it's pretty clear that they meet none of the criteria for subcontractor under the contract.

The felony wasn't.

It's my understanding that the gyrocopter in question was actually under the 250 pound limit that would require FAA registration.

This would mean the felony charge is bogus.

Can anyone confirm the vehicle total unladen weight?

OK I've read "various articles in the Seattle Times.

I read the one about the state auditor being indicted.

I read the one about the infant getting shot in the head in Kent in a drive-by.

I read the one about the whooping cough outbreak (which erroneously claims that herd immunity for Pertussis is mathematically even possible, given the diseases R(0) would require 94-96% immunization, and all unimmunized persons be uniformly distributed throughout the population.

I read the one about Shawn Kemp co-hosting a party because Thunder missed the playoffs.

None of these "various articles in the Seattle Times" supported your position.

Link one supporting article from the Seattle Times which is a post-analysis of the job market following the minimum wage being raised. I'll waive the numbers on the small businesses which have gone out of business over the minimum wage being raised (for now).

Sure we grok it. Do you not grok the idea that if you are not pulling numbers out of your ass, then you probably have the reference material right in front of you, and can therefore paste the information a hell of a lot easier than having us go looking for supporting numbers for your made up statistics for you?

Stupidest zombie movie ever. Seriously.

So.... #NotAllUnions ???

Citation needed. Preferably one with a post-analysis of the Seattle job market, with another graph showing impact (if any) on number of small businesses in the immediate area.

It's a grading system, based on three grading criteria, each of which can score up to an 'A':

Game success among critics/reviewers
"Innovative gameplay"
Financial success

Given the major reviewers comments on "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel", the fact that it's "Yet Another First Person Shoot", and the company being unable to afford to remain in business, rather than "AAA Studio", it'd probably be better to describe 2K as a "BCF" studio.

They definitely get an F on their financial success, and YAFPS is hardly innovative game play, so they get a grudging C there, and the reviews at the top sites give them generally in the neighborhood of an 80% approval by reviewers (only GameStop rates them higher than 80%), so that's a B.

I really hate that people hype studios themselves as "AAA", as if that means they are going to get A's in all three categories, just because of who they are, or because of the marketing hype behind their games contributing to a likelihood of good reviews or financial success.

In reality, you are only as good as your last release in all three categories. 2K blew it in at least two of the categories, and turned in B grade work in the third, so it's no surprise they failed.

They were actually unhappy with Pearson.

The article makes this very clear. It wouldn't matter if the Pearson Curriculum were on an iPad or an Android device, they'd still be unhappy with it. The attachment of Apple to the story is a means of click-baiting it. Pretty clear in the quotes from their attorney:

L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines “made the decision that he wanted to put them on notice, Pearson in particular, that he’s dissatisfied with their product,” said David Holmquist, general counsel for the nation’s second-largest school system. He said millions of dollars could be at stake.

In a letter sent Monday to Apple, Holmquist wrote that it “will not accept or compensate Apple for new deliveries of [Pearson] curriculum.” Nor does the district want to pay for further services related to the Pearson product.

Pretty ringing condemnation of Pearson's products by the school district; note that the Pearson products might not eve be at fault, given that the complaint was that it didn't help with the standardized testing scores.

We wish you luck, but if it breaks, dont come crying to us over it.

The history of mobile operating systems shows that your preferred strategy is a losing strategy. Users DO come crying over it, and developers cry twice as much. J2ME was basically Android 0.1 and took this approach - it was just a bunch of API specs and then phone vendors could license different implementations, write their own, etc.

J2ME sucked. I know this because I tried to write apps for it. Literally every freaking phone had its own unique combination of stupid, obvious bugs that rendered key APIs unusable without enormous piles of hacks. J2ME developers theoretically wrote Java, but often used a C style macro preprocessor because so many hacks required different source code to handle.

Android learned from J2ME and took a different approach - one single reference implementation that everyone builds off and is not pluggable except in very small, tightly controlled ways. You can modify the reference implementation to your hearts content unless you want access to the Play Store, in which case you have to pass the "Compatibility Test Suite" for core OS functionality, and for some other kinds of things that are impossible to unit test (e.g. Maps quality), agree to ship the Google implementation. This saves developers from J2ME hell making users and developers happy, and still lets manufacturers tweak things that aren't covered by the CTS, like reskinning things.

I see no evidence the EU has any understanding of the delicate balancing act Android represents, or the history of mobile phone operating systems. I fear this will be yet another bull-in-china-shop scenario. On the other hand, if Google are doing things like what Microsoft used to do by saying "if you sell any Google-services phone you cannot sell any non-Google-services phone" then that'd be a problem that is correctable without hurting developers.