> 1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars.

I don't know if that's realistic or necessary. There's a lot to be said for being able to skip the hassle of driving, parking and etc. I'd even be fine with a 20% time penalty vs. driving. More than that, though, and the car really starts to look preferable.

> 2) Convenient public transportation

This. Plus, it needs to be convenient for all of my travel needs, not just going to and from a job downtown (For which it works fine for me.) It also needs to be able to get me to and from the supermarket and run often enough that there's room for me to bring two grocery bags home with me. Otherwise, car. Likewise for other errands and transit needs.

I'll throw in a third requirement:

3) Accurate timetables that are adhered to. A big problem here in San Francisco is that MUNI operators/drivers consider the published timetable to be somewhere between merely a suggestion and an open joke; and their union is so strong it's basically impossible to punish them for failing to adhere to it. So on-time performance is appalling on most routes, meaning that you can't count on items 1 or 2.

> Otherwise, you need to start imposing costs on
> using the car - as in expensive parking.

This is what San Francisco is trying. They're taking away parking and raising prices on what's left. They tried charging on Sundays, but that caused much outrage and got canned. And they're taking away traffic lanes on many roads. City Hall *claims* to be practicing a "transit first" policy. But what they are NOT doing is reforming and rebuilding MUNI into a service that people would happily choose to use.

> WTF happened to the basic American principle of
> dying for the right of the offensive to be offensive...
> not just when we don't agree but especially when we
> don't agree??

That's not really relevant. Your right to free and offensive speech does not impose on anyone else, person or corporation, an obligation to provide you with a platform for said speech.

What I have to wonder, though, is when in the history of the internet has this sort of thing actually worked? Every example I can recall of a site or service that established itself as a seedy, politically incorrect, or overly juvenile corner of the internet, that has then tried to sanitize itself and purge the trolls, douchebags and irreverent, and make itself all family-friendly and leave-it-to-beaver-ish, has wound up eventually collapsing and fading into obscurity. Indeed, It already looks like an exodus from reddit to voat has already begun.

To be fair this was Canada. And while I'm not 100% up to speed on their police procedures; the impression I get from the news media that trickles down south of the border is that their police are not so much the thuggish, trigger-happy, militarized loonies that go into the house with guns blazing and dropping flash-bangs into babies' cribs (Yes, the police actually do that here in the US.) as our own.

> Companies of this size are able to write of a lot of
> their own legislation to legalize their desired
> behavior. Once the tail wags the dog like that you
> can no longer use the letter of the law to argue that
> big companies like MS are being responsible
> corporate citizens.

The difference is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the various tech companies that people are attacking lately over these tax issues are not the ones that wrote those laws. Tech in general, until very recently, has done remarkably little lobbying compared to most major industries. Those laws were bought and paid for by the likes of Halliburton, Texaco, GE, and the Koch Brothers. What we're seeing is a manufactured controversy. The old-school establishment companies aren't happy that newcomers are playing with the laws without having paid for them. Those pinko upstart left-coast companies just happened to realize that once a law is on the books, it is available to everybody.

Apple does it too. IBM used to do so (when they still made PCs & AIX workstations). Juniper does it at the community-college level. And, back in the day, you used to see a LOT of Sparc/Solaris machines in academic settings where they were definitely overkill.

Nothing sinister here.

I despise Microsoft as much as anyone. But it's, at best, a strawman (non-)argument to call them a tax dodge or to claim they owe your hypothetical billions. Tax evasion and tax avoidance are two entirely different things. Learn the difference, and maybe you can sit at the adult table.

If you think the tax laws are broken, advocate for whatever changes you think are appropriate. But if you're going to attack someone else for not paying more tax than they are legally obligated to; then put your money where your mouth is, file a new W-4 with an extra $1000/cycle withholding yourself, and don't cash the refund check when it comes to you next year. I'll bet a dollar that says you won't though.

Or you could try Singapore, or Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or Sydney, or Berlin or Taipei. The difference is, of course, that those cities actually have and exercise the political will to ENFORCE their gun laws (Well... their parent governments do, aside from the one that doesn't *have* a parent government.) and proactively imprison offenders instead of turning a blind eye until someone gets killed.

> The F-35 seems to have a maximum g-load of 9g,
> while the PAK-FA has one of over 9g.

I'm not sure that's a big deal though. It's not too hard to build an airframe that can pull better than 9g. The thing is, no one's really figured out how to build a *pilot* that can take more than 9 (positive) g's. That's the limit for sustained human g endurance; and that's with g-suits and special muscle training to force blood back into the brain.

So until we remove the pilot from the aircraft entirely (And how far away from that are we, really?) 9g is pretty much the limit for *any* aircraft, no matter what the airframe itself could theoretically handle.

Not actually true, as Aero uses your graphics card to do the compositing, whereas the older desktop renderer was entirely CPU-based. Disabling Aero just means more work for your CPU.

What app do you use in the backcountry? I've honestly never found one that I've thought to be a satisfactory substitute for my Garmin.

That's the thing that drive me nuts about this.

If something is legitimately libelous or defamatory, pretty much every country has a mechanism to have said content removed at the source. Remove the false content, and the next time Google spiders the site, it's gone from Google too. All the "right to be forgotten" is, is a method to censor the truth.

That's actually a situation where you *wouldn't* use a smartphone at all.

Wilderness applications like backpacking, camping, climbing, hiking, or whatever, (Not just jogging in the park.) really call for a dedicated GPS unit. Smartphone GPS chipsets have severe limitations that limit their utility when they have no data connection. Specifically, they use aGPS (Assisted GPS) to "cheat" in order to get and maintain their fix quickly and with less power consumption. And they tend to be utterly terrible at getting a "pure" GPS fix. I've also never seen a app that's really full-featured enough to use outside civilization. There could be one I've missed, of course, but that still wouldn't correct the deficiencies of the hardware.

On the other hand, my second-from-their-lowest-end Garmin (Etrex 20) uses GPS, GLONASS, and WaaS with no data connection required to cheat the fix. It's rugged and waterproof to 2 meters. The software is specifically designed for real outdoors applications and not just driving directions. It's lightweight and designed to be both held and operated in a one hand... no mucking about with a touchscreen. There's a huge variety of maps, both free and paid, I can load on it either vis USB or MicroSD card. And it will run continuously for better than 24 hours on a pair of AAs.

(Also, if you're smart, you'll still bring a paper map and compass as a backup.)

In most cases, I get a full day out of my iPhone with GPS and Bluetooth on, email set to push, and all the other battery-hungry settings enabled. About the only time I adjust the settings is when I know I'm going to be out and about all day somewhere with very poor, or no, cell coverage. That, in my experience, is the worst energy-vampire of all for any phone; as they all ramp up their own transmission power to max in a desperate attempt to reach and maintain contact with a cell.

Occasionally though there are certain apps that, either through a bug or poor design, will drain excessive battery via location services. Annoyingly enough, a while back Facebook's app was especially battery-hungry in the background, and would be one to explicitly kill after exiting.

Free trial periods are fairly common and standard though; not just for internet services but in everything from telecoms to consumer products ("If you're not completely satisfied in 30-days return it for a full refund") to drug dealers. Some states even have a "cooling off period" where you are able to return a new car for a full refund within a certain period of time. So why is Taylor Swift, or anyone else, singling out Apple; besides the standard-issue irrational BS dating all the way back to "what kind of an idiot talks to a computer with a mouse?" (Or, as she herself put it: Haters gonna hate.)

Three months is longer than most, sure. But I suspect that the calculation is that those three months will convince more users to convert to paying customers than a normal 15 or 30 day trial would be. Though I notice that Spotify's $1 trial period is also three months. And Swift had her Spotify-hate thing going on a while back. So maybe she is not privy to those projections and really is just butt-hurt about the length of the trial.

Also, Apple can't unilaterally do a free trial of any length. They need the permission and support of the rights holders, be they major labels or minor. Not that that bunch is in any way virtuous themselves. But again, free trial periods are fairly common across the board. And why would they make this one three months unless the business types HAVE predicted that it would result in more paying post-trial customers than a shorter one?