Because they have half a clue ...

Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the ability to innovate and change it. They aren't always first movers, but they DO bring innovation and of course profits to any segment they enter.

The magic is in saying "NO" to doing things that don't make sense... entering a crowded, unimaginative, razor-thin margin, mature TV market doesn't make sense for Apple. That's why they said no.... No more, no less.

Uber drivers aren't sharing a damned thing. They're charging for a service. That's called doing business, and if you want to do business, you need to follow certain rules, just like anything else in life. You can't just jump up and say "nuh-uh, this is sharing!" when you're really requiring people to pay you before you "share" anything.

If I open a gas station and call it a "fuel sharing service", does that mean that I get to bypass all those pesky rules and regulations for making sure my tanks don't leak into the ground? Or that I don't need to spend all that extraneous money to install safety cutoff switches (like anyone ever -uses- those, amirite?)

If y'all are still telling yourselves that services like Uber and Lyft are "rideshares", you're not paying attention, and haven't been for a long time.

Ridesharing suggests that people are sharing a ride from point A to point B--that is, they're both going that way, and thus are going to slug together to save gas/cost.

Uber and Lyft are effectively taxi services that uses an app instead of a dispatcher. The driver seeks out a fare, starts the timer, drives the fare to their destination, and then seeks out another fare.

The driver is not "sharing" anything, nor is the passenger. This is a taxi service.

This is a level of tin-foil hattery I am not going to touch with even a ten-foot pole.

He's allowed to say anything he wants. That does not mean other people can't just point out that self-declaration is not proof of anything.

I suggest you do some self-examination on why you so vehemently protest the bloody obvious.

First of all, Aaron Clarey himself says he's not an MRA

Yes, and East Germany was a democracy.

It's not my responsibility as an end user to uphold someone else's broken revenue model. I'm responsible for the safety and security of several hundred PCs, not the salaries and expenses of advertising companies.

I don't really understand why Apple wants to sell iMacs. They're a huge PITA to service, cost a fortune to ship and aren't particularly more capable than Mac Minis.If there were an Apple product line with a definite justification to end, it would be that one.

You can get an entry-level Mac Mini, sure. It'll be physically larger and it'll be slower. You can also get slower Broadwell NUCs if you're actually price-sensitive enough to make that comparison. Figure that you'll pay $100 for 16GB RAM and $120 for an m.2 SSD + $25 for an Intel or Broadcom wireless card if you think you need one + whatever the barebones box costs ($300 for the Broadwell i3 up to $535 for the Broadwell i7). Apple's pricing on the Haswell Mac Minis is $500, $700, $1000 for an at-best 2.8GHz i5 with 8GB RAM or for a slug-like 1.4GHz ULV i5 with 4GB RAM and a magnetic drive on the low end.
To me it looks like the late 2014 Mac Minis lose out all the way around unless you're THAT hung up on getting OSX preinstalled or think Apple support is magic.

Any mITX rig with stock Intel cooling, a PicoPSU and an mSATA/m.2 SSD actually has plenty of room for airflow since the bulky metal boxes of hard disk and power supply are out of the way. I also find the Antec NSK150, which has a front-mounted PSU, to work well enough for mainstream desktops.

Pixel art has a lot going for it, and it's not really "artsy fartsy."

"Artsy fartsy" is when too much emphasis is placed on the styling rather than substance. See "Oni and the Blind Forest" as a recent example: HD graphics, very pretty, story is pretentious as fuck. The pretty graphics are really the only thing that game has going for it.

That doesn't mean HD graphics are artsy either, I'm just saying that art style is not the only measure of pretentiousness.

On the other hand, pixel art games have a more minimalist feel to them and so often (not always) rely more on content and gameplay. You're not constantly distracted by fancy lighting, particle effects and polygon count, and you become absorbed by what's actually happening. Action takes priority over presentation. I'm playing a game for the action - if I want fancy visuals I'll watch a movie instead. I don't think it's a coincidence that many AAA titles seem to be more cutscene than gameplay, with pretty minimal player involvement, because they're basically movies that require the audience to press some buttons every now and again to make sure they're still awake - don't you dare get up for a snack during my long unskippable cutscene! (How pretentious is that?)

I also like pixel art because it leaves something to the imagination. Well done sprites may have low "resolution" but still have exquisite detail.

Lastly, I feel pixel art has a more "hand made" feel to it. Someone has to sit down and fiddle with each individual pixel to craft those sprites. There's no photoshop tool that will do an adequate job. You can't use blur or smudge or the heal tool to cover your mistakes and you often have a very small area in which to make something easily recognizable because you can't scale the sprites arbitrarily. It takes skill and time, and good pixel art is a sign that someone put a lot of effort into the project and actually gave a shit.
=Smidge-

"Despite the monitoring, Hitchens files have nothing on the hundreds of pages the FBI had on Richard Feynman."

No shit. I'd expect a world class physicist who was involved in the top-secret development of the nuclear bomb would attract a bit more scrutiny than a vocal anti-religious advocate and author. One of these things is not like the other things...
=Smidge=

"Parking is a nightmare."

This statement implies parking is even possible.

Last time I went there to pick someone up, I drove around in circles in a holding pattern comparable to the planes themselves. "Parking" is not something that actually occurs at La Guardia.
=Smidge=