By and large, I have to sadly agree. Even so, at least in the state where I live, we have prima facie speed limits, which more or less means that it's not illegal to drive over the speed limit if one can demonstrate that doing so was reasonable. A handful of other states also have prima facie limits or else have them for drivers who were caught with speeds that weren't excessively beyond the posted limit. So that's at least a small acknowledgement on the part of the legal system that these laws aren't just there for the sake of frustrating us.

But yeah, uneven enforcement is a major problem. I'm all for letting people off the hook with a warning or letting people off the hook when it simply makes sense, neither of which machines left to themselves understand, but when someone is being unsafe, it doesn't make sense. Thankfully, the laws about the passing lane being used for passing are actually enforced on the stretch of road near here where it's in effect, and it's helped to significantly improve the flow of traffic along that stretch of road, since previously the disproportionately large number of college students in this area would demonstrate their inexperience on the road by not using it how it is supposed to be used.

A fair question, but let's turn it around to get some perspective: if you are a good person, why don't you do something about all the bad people? Even if you were doing everything in your power (which you may be, for all I know), what measure do we use to determine your goodness? How hard you tried? How successful you were? I think the only answer is that good people aren't always in a position where they can do something about the bad people, and even if they are, we don't have an inside view to be able to tell whether the persistence of the problems is due to them doing their job poorly or because of other problems that are beyond their control.

I quite agree, and I'm not sure what I said that would have led you to believe otherwise. I was responding to the previous poster talking about checking a bag and needing to pick it up for the baggage carousel at his final destination, since I've never seen them do that at the gate, hence why I was pointing out that I wouldn't have referred to it as a gate check.

That right there is exactly what everyone I know calls a "gate check", except that it isn't only regional and turboprop flights like the ones you're describing that offer it. For instance, both the United non-stop from Houston to D.C. I flew last month (Airbus A320) and the return flight from Norfolk to Houston (Embraer ERJ145) did it, even though there was a vast difference in the size of the planes. Meanwhile, what you've described as a "gate-check" is what I'd describe as simply "checking your bag", and can only be done at the departing terminal, rather than at the gate.

Maybe this is some sort of regional dialect issue, akin to "rubber" being used in two very different ways, depending on if you're talking to an American or a Brit? Seems like there are a lot of people arguing for both sides of these definitions.

I didn't miss the story. I read it, in fact. It only mentioned Apple in passing as one of the members of the trade group in question, but because Apple makes for news, their name was plastered in the headline and summary on Slashdot. Meanwhile, the AC who responded to you pointed out that Apple took alternative practical steps to protect their user's privacy years ago, given that DNT was never an effective method to begin with.

Anyway, I too would likely trust UK banks over Apple...when they're willing to speak publicly, on-the-record, in clear language, as Apple did when it made its claims regarding how Apple Pay operates. But when negotiations are ongoing, any sort of off-the-record statements from unnamed sources claiming to represent one of the sides involved should always be assumed to be an attempt on their part to gain the upper hand. Given that that's what we're dealing with here—an unnamed source representing one of the sides, making unsupported claims while negotiations are ongoing—we shouldn't read anything into it, beyond that Apple is probably playing hardball and the banks feel a need to push back.

As for whether or not Apple is tracking users, they absolutely are. No doubt. They even admit as much in their terms of use/service for various things, such as iAd. But as the AC pointed out, Google and other companies are in a whole other league when it comes to tracking users (including illegal practices that resulted in fines from the FCC, such as the incident the AC referenced). Apple definitely tracks users, but in much more clearly defined ways (e.g. they publish white papers over exactly what data they collect, how they collect it, why they collect it, how they protect it, how they organize it, and for how long they keep it) that are much more limited in scope than their competitors.

Let's not lump them in with Big Data just yet.

You're correct that they're not all incompetent, so which is it: are they screwing travelers and lobbying government, or are they incompetent buffoons who don't know how to run their businesses?

I'd suggest it's a little of both. Take Southwest, for instance. It's the largest airline in the US in terms of passengers carried and it's doing perfectly well. Has been for years, even before it was the largest. Meanwhile, its competitors are, as an earlier poster put it, "teetering on the edge of bankruptcy". Despite the example it set, most of the other airlines have simply been doing a poor job of running their businesses and have failed to adopt better practices that have been put into place by their better-faring competitors. A prime example: not screwing the traveler was a key differentiator Southwest used to establish itself.

So yeah, a little of A and a little of B.

Regarding the drivers being the judge of what's considered safe, some states (including mine) have prima facie speed limits, which basically means that drivers can defend themselves in court for driving in excess of the posted speed limit by demonstrating that doing so was reasonable (i.e. that they weren't unsafe). More or less, what's considered illegal is the act of driving at unreasonable speeds, rather than the act of driving above the speed limit.

Related to that, I've actually heard some third- and fourth-hand accounts of people being pulled over for driving at the speed limit when it was unsafe for them to be doing so (e.g. because the rest of traffic was going much faster), though I've never heard those accounts first-hand, so definitely take it with a massive grain of salt.

Really, I'm just a proponent of driving at whatever speed is appropriate for the conditions on the road, be it a lower speed due to poor conditions or a higher speed due to surrounding traffic. In the absence of conditions that can be cited, I abide by the notion that speed limits provide the best guide for safe speeds to follow.

Traffic laws don't exist for their own sake. Their primary purpose, above all else, is to keep drivers safe. Likewise, the entire purpose of fining someone is to encourage safe driving behavior (the only ticket I've ever received even said so right on it). Most importantly, no one should have to choose between being safe and being fined for breaking the law, nor should there be automated systems put in place that exacerbate the problem by fining drivers for safe driving habits.

Take, for instance, Interstate 10 through Houston. It's well-marked, Its lanes are wide, its lines of sight are clear, its curves are gradual, and its traffic (usually) moves at a brisk pace since the road was designed to run at around 70 mph, yet its speed limit is 10 mph beneath that for reasons unrelated to safety (i.e. city ordinances related to smog). As you might imagine, the speed limits along I-10 are routinely ignored by the vast majority of drivers, since the roads were designed for higher speeds, yet some drivers take it on themselves to impede the flow of traffic by going 10-20 mph below everyone around them, simply because that's what the speed limit sign says. The inevitable result is a less safe road for everyone as the other drivers are forced to react to the obstruction in their path.

In fact, I-10's speed limits are so out of whack with what makes sense that Wikipedia even details the changes to its speed limits over the years on the other side of Texas as a paradigmatic example of the arbitrariness of speed limits.

Besides the validity of the limits themselves, there's also the question of whether or not policing them with stationary sentinels creates a safer road. One unsafe driving habit that's common in many areas is slamming on brakes at the top of a hill because drivers have been trained to assume that there's an overzealous cop with a radar gun on the other side, waiting to chase down anyone foolish enough to go even a fraction above the speed limit. If speed traps are causing that response, are they serving the public good? Hell no! In fact, just a few weeks ago I saw an accident and was in a near-collision myself because of exactly that driving habit.

At least with cops, many of them understand the distinction between "legal" and "safe" and know that these laws are intended to serve public safety, so they'll ignore someone safely driving with traffic at a speed that's technically breaking the law. I'll routinely see good cops like those going 10-20 mph over the posted speed limit, along with the rest of traffic. A speeding camera, however? At best, it'll determine the average speed of traffic and will pick out the outliers. But who are we kidding? In practice, these will be configured to get people who go X over the speed limit, where X is some value between 0 and whatever is far enough above the limit that the politicians don't have to deal with a public outcry. They're little more than automated versions of the worst kind of cop.

They aren't keeping drivers safe. They're just keeping us in line.

Note the context in which I said that comment: "these big HDDs". I wasn't talking about HDDs in general. I was talking about the sorts of leading edge, big drives being discussed in the summary. They aren't ending up in typical consumer machines as boot drives. They are the sorts of drives that are being purchased as an add-on to an existing system. Moreover, some of these drives, such as the WD Reds, are being specifically targeted at the NAS market. So, at least in the context in which my comment was intended, I stand by it.

But even if we discuss the industry in general, I'll admit that my thinking is pretty much how you painted it, since I do think that you're overestimating how long the majority of PCs will ship with HDDs as their primary drive (no doubt, they'll linger on for many, many years, much like the floppy drive). Thinking ahead a bit, until the next shift in media formats occurs (i.e. until optical media dies and typical media distribution moves to downloading/streaming), we're probably pretty safe in assuming that most consumers will continue to only need around the same 150-500GB they need today, though many will obviously buy 1TB. That's where it's been for quite awhile, and it's been pretty stable for quite some time.

Before I go any further, let's just look at some actual numbers. I popped over to PCPartPicker's listings, grabbed the first 10ish drives when I sorted them by price per GB, and have provided the range of prices below to give us both a representative sampling of what sorts of prices are realistic right now for cheap drives:
Best Overall: $0.03/GB for 3TB vs. $0.31/GB for 240GB
1TBish GB capacity: $0.05-$0.06 vs. $0.36-$0.47
500ish GB capacity: $0.08-$0.10 vs. $0.31-$0.40
250ish GB capacity: $0.12-$0.20 vs. $0.31-$0.40
150ish GB capacity: $0.15-$0.25 vs. $0.41-$0.50

What we can see from these numbers is that a typical consumer buying a typical HDD with a typical capacity can typically expect to pay 2-5x more per GB than someone buying a high-end drive with a massive capacity, whereas the variance in cost per GB across SSDs is much smaller and has uniformly been dropping at a steady pace. I.e. While a price advantage does still exist for HDDs, that advantage is smallest in the segment of the market where the everyday consumer is located and is rapidly shrinking. That fact has allowed SSDs to position themselves as one of the simplest, cheapest, and most significant performance upgrades a consumer can choose when buying or upgrading a computer (even my non-techie father insisted on an SSD as his primary drive when I was helping him configure his last computer), and as the gap continues to close between the two, HDDs will soon be relegated to nothing more than bulk storage.

Already, computer manufacturers are starting to drop HDDs from their product lines (e.g. Apple's entire product line, sans the Mac Mini, has already switched), and the HDD manufacturers clearly see the writing on the wall, which is why they're starting to market specifically towards the prosumer market with products like the WD Red.

I do think that we're still a few years away from the tipping point, but I'd peg it at around 3-5 years out, rather than the "many, many years" you suggest. Though, as I said, I expect HDDs to be with us for many, many years.

As the summary said, negotiations are ongoing. The fact that these claims are showing up right now and fly in the face of everything we've previously heard regarding Apple Pay seems to suggest that they are nothing more than a feeble attempt on the part of the banks to gain some better leverage in the negotiation process. They're hoping for outrage. Unfortunately, the only ones who give a crap about this stuff (i.e. us) are the ones who also know that Apple Pay is differentiating itself with its lack of collecting information.

As for why they'd want more leverage, the real reason is buried in the article:

Which is to say, the UK banks are concerned by the rapid uptick of Apple Pay in the US, are beginning to realize that it's gaining real traction, and are worried that it could be the means by which Apple establishes a toehold in the financial industry that allows them to begin exerting the sort of influence they have in other non-technology industries (e.g. music).

Even for home-based use, these big HDDs are increasingly being relegated to little more than mass media storage (oftentimes NAS-based), while SSDs are taking over everything else. Caching or not, rotational speeds (and the seek times they affect) end up being non-factors for a home user when all the drives are used to do is deliver video or audio content, particularly so if they're connecting to it over a LAN, since they'll in many cases spend orders of magnitude more (yet still not much) time buffering the content across the network than they will seeking it on the platter.

Because addressing problems like solvability, computational complexity, or even how one goes about simply defining a problem are all mental masturbation? Come on. Those spill over into mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and numerous other fields, providing immeasurable utility to the practitioners in them and those who benefit from their research and work.

You've acknowledged that "Computer Science" is more than just the study of the physical aspects of modern computing, and you've also managed to avoid the common mistake of conflating programming for computer science, but what you've failed to apprehend is that computer science isn't merely "how computers operate". It's much more than that. That subject is merely one small aspect of what makes the field what it is.

Oh, no doubt there would have been additional tests necessary, so a delay of a few years would certainly make sense and would be warranted. What we saw instead, however, was a delay well beyond when the tests would have been completed, and which was in place simply due to marketing reasons. After all, if you're already ahead of your competition, why tip your hand for what's still two generations out? Why not instead simply dominate the market for two generations?

A few decades back, I knew a researcher/university professor who had developed a ready-for-market, one-day yeast infection treatment when seven-day (or longer) treatments were still the norm. A major pharmaceutical showed extreme interest, purchased the rights from him, then sat on it for the better part of a decade, much to the consternation of the researcher, who was hoping society could benefit from the treatment more rapidly.

What he didn't know at the time was that the pharma company had already developed a three-day treatment that they were getting ready to introduce within the next year or two. They stood to gain a significant competitive advantage in introducing the three-day treatment, since they'd be the first-to-market with it. When they saw the researcher's one-day treatment, they realized that a competitor could leapfrog them if it got ahold of the treatment, so they knew they had to buy it out, but rather than introduce the one-day treatment immediately (i.e. leapfrog themselves) and give up any advantage the three-day treatment could have afforded them in the market, they decided to sit on the one-day treatment for several years. Doing so allowed them to benefit from being first-to-market with the three-day treatment, giving them a few years of market dominance, and then as their competitors started to catch up, they were able to be first-to-market with a one-day treatment which they could sell at a premium price. In essence, it allowed them to double the length of their lead in the market and command a higher price for the faster treatment.

All of which is to say, these aren't conspiracy theories. You're absolutely correct that these companies want to make even more money than they already have, but there are plenty of sound, financial reasons for them to sit on better technologies rather than introducing them immediately. I've highlighted merely one of them here.

Neither of those are issues for me.

As I said, because I'm pushing my pictures and videos off my phone immediately, they aren't taking up any space on it. Apps are basically the only thing taking up any space, and it's easy to clean a few out if necessary, though I've never had to purposefully do so (I do delete apps that I don't expect to ever use again, such as games I've beaten already, but I can't recall the last time I deleted apps just to clear up space).

As for a botched upgrade, I still have backups, so I don't see what the problem is there. Just restore the phone to factory default, punch in your Apple ID info, and it will immediately restore everything, just the same as if you had a new phone. Easy peasy.

At this point, for most people, there's really no need to use iTunes if you have an iDevice. For my part, I still use iTunes for listening to audio when I'm at my desk, since I'm used to it at this point and don't want to bother learning something new, but even for me all of the tacked-on iDevice management stuff has always made it feel like a bloated piece of crap, so I eagerly ditched using those to manage my iDevices as soon as it became reasonable to do so years ago.

Backups: Use iCloud Backup in Settings > iCloud > Backup. It automatically backs up in the background when you do your regular charging of the device and have WiFi access, meaning that you never need to remember to do it. The 5GB free option was always enough for my backups, but the upgrade prices are reasonable ($1/mo. = 20GB, $4/mo. = 200GB, $10/mo. = 500GB, $20/mo. = 1TB), and that space can also be used for iCloud's other services, like iCloud Drive (their alternative to Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/Google Drive/whatever that can be used on iOS, Windows, and OS X). If you buy a new iDevice later, all you need to do is give it your iCloud login info and it can automatically restore from the latest backup. Makes getting a new device super simple.

Apps: Buy directly from the App Store app on iOS. No need to ever use iTunes to sync apps.

Music: If you've already made the move to streaming services (e.g. Pandora or Spotify), this is a non-issue. If you're someone like me who prefers to own his own music, then you can use something like Amazon Music, Google Drive, iTunes Match, or a similar service to sync your music from your PC to the cloud, then from the cloud to your iDevice (either with streaming or downloading). I use iTunes Match ($25/year), which, despite its name, only requires iTunes to be used for the uploading process (e.g. the initial upload, then any subsequent uploads of music you purchased from places other than iTunes). After that, you can uninstall iTunes on your PC and continue to use the service just fine. For me, it won out since it's built into iOS (Settings > iTunes & App Store), and once you enable it and tell iOS to Show All of your media, you can play any of those uploaded tracks directly from the cloud (freeing up all of that space on your device), or else download them to keep locally. Amazon Music and Google Drive can do similarly, I believe, though they run in their own apps. I'll let others provide details regarding them.

Photos: Use IFTTT or one of a number of other services that can run in the background and automatically upload your pictures to your Dropbox/Instagram/Flickr/Google Drive/whatever. You'll never need to remember to back them up again since they'll automatically be wherever you want them.

Video: Between all of the sources for streaming video (e.g. YouTube, Netflix) and all of the ways to load your own video onto an iDevice (e.g. VLC), there isn't a need to use iTunes at all. You can still rent/purchase stuff from the iTunes Store vide your iDevice, without ever launching iTunes on your PC, if you're so inclined.

Of course, all of this stuff is specific to iOS devices, so it won't help you at all with the non-touch iPods. I don't have an answer for you when it comes to those.

TL;DR: Ditch iTunes, but keep the iOS device and use third party services or built-in iOS functionality to provide those features. You should be able to do everything just as well or better.