Sure... governments love cashless transactions (assuming they're traceable, and most are). But the real motivator for people to switch away from paying with cash is the convenience factor.

For example, this morning, I used a smartphone app to pay the parking meter in the garage I parked in before going in to work. It still lets you pay with coins, but that's so impractical. For starters, it costs about $8/day to park, and the meter won't even let you put that much money into it using coins, at one time. So you're forced to make a trip back out to the meter to re-fill it if you want to avoid a ticket. With the cashless payment system, you just point the phone's camera at the QR code sticker on the meter, and you get billed automatically based on when you tell the app to stop counting time (or when the max. daily parking rate is reached).

Same with the toll booths around here. Most have eliminated the option to pay tolls with cash except for one lane, and they're even discussing removing the baskets from those and going all electronic. Which is easier and more convenient? Making sure you've got a bunch of coins handy in your vehicle and having to stop and toss them into the toll basket, making sure it counted them all properly -- or just driving on through while an electronic pass device registers you going through it?

IMO, the real solution here is an *anonymous* cashless transaction system. (Cue the bitcoin fanatics insisting that's exactly what they've got ... but not quite, since people are able to go back through the block-chain and sleuth out who moved money between accounts at a certain time.) I'm talking more about an official government and banking system sponsored e-cash alternative though. But I know it'll never see the light of day since government would have no motivation to spend effort and money designing a system with the very properties that frustrate them now with cash.

Ah, sorry. Thanks for the clarification. That reply was apparently posted after I read the rest of the thread.

"I'd like to be dead."

I think it's pretty classy that the discoverer of Pluto has his ashes on-board the spacecraft about to do the fly-by of the planet.....

I'm born and raised in Missouri, despite working in the metro DC area and living in Maryland.

The difference I'm referring to has more to do with the overall size of the state, vs. how significant and crowded the cities are within it.

In Missouri, for example, you can clearly see that the roads and highways are congested in St. Louis, or in Kansas City ... yet even in those two cities, traffic never really rises to the level of the metro DC area. Meanwhile, you've got hundreds of miles of wide open space. In Maryland, sure -- you've got less congested places. But there's also much more of a situation where people do long commutes to and from those places to the congested parts, each day, for a career job that justifies the travel. In Missouri, you really just don't have people living out in central or southern MO who drive all the way in to St. Louis for a job. (Maybe a FEW exceptions, but typically no....)

For example, I live in a small town right by the borders of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland - yet I go to work in DC. Other people take the train in to work each day who live out in Martinsburg or Charles Town, WV. There's a pretty big difference in salary and availability of jobs in the metro DC area vs. all these other outlying areas that causes such a thing to make sense. That's not typical in the Midwest.

Yep, this!

As far as I understood it, the bumblebee population would have already gone nearly extinct a while back - if it weren't for human intervention and the commercial interest in keeping them around.

At the very least, it should be a no-brainer that they'll just be moved to more viable locations as it becomes necessary. Bee-keepers would prefer to keep making money at their profession.

I think these points contribute to the problem, but there's a lot to consider here.

For starters, we're talking about Iowa in this story. Iowa isn't exactly one of the states people flock to in droves to find employment. Don't get me wrong here... I have no grudge against Iowa. I think it just happens to be like other Midwestern states where except for a couple of major cities, it's primarily farm land and rural areas, where most of the car traffic is on interstates, traveling through the state to a destination elsewhere. It's quite possible they're just taking a good look at the situation and saying, "Hey... We could do drivers a favor by improving the quality of the roads that really matter, while just abandoning some of the lightly traveled alternate routes instead of wasting road money maintaining them."

Out here in the metro DC area, by contrast? Our roads are jam packed with traffic at seemingly all hours -- and that's despite having a pretty extensive light rail and commuter train system in place, linked to an extensive bus system, plus various options like rental bicycles.

Overall, I think it's short-sighted to write off the highway and road infrastructure as less important since "today's generation hates driving and can't afford decent cars anyway". (Not saying you did that in your post, but commenting in general here.) I think soon enough, we're going to see self-driving vehicles becoming commonplace. And that, in turn, is going to change a lot of things about transportation. (EG. If the car drives itself and knows how to safely get around, you no longer have to worry if it's "ok to let your friend borrow your car" over concerns he/she might wreck it.) So it'll lead to a lot more sharing of vehicles. People will buy one as more of an investment than a "huge but unfortunately necessary expense", as they make money using it to give other people rides when they're not using it themselves.

Valid point, but there actually are still some very popular choices out there in Corporate/Enterprise class laptops which would still take a 2.5" form factor drive.

For example, HP has the Elitebook 840G2 out now, and I believe it's a "new for 2015" version of the Elitebook 840G1, which is still being sold until existing inventories of it dwindle. Both of these laptops have the option of using a M.2 format SSD, but still provide a regular internal 2.5" drive bay too.

Yeah..... this is true. Although it's ALSO true that at some point when Apple made the change to how iTunes sorted everything, they made it cleaner and easier to navigate. Because the change to putting things under "iTunes Media" vs. "iTunes Music" acknowledged people put a lot of different types of data into the software like video, ringtones, iOS apps, etc. With the older format, it ALL went under the main folder.

But yes, it was never all "in a glob". Now, iPhoto for Mac was another story ..... Compressing all your photos into one database file created a LOT of issues.

The movie takes place in the Northeastern U.S. but nobody heeded the warnings.

Huh? What do you mean by putting your music in a "big glob"?

If I tell iTunes to copy my music when adding tracks to it and to "manage my library", it creates what I think is a pretty sensible file structure for the songs under the main "iTunes media" folder and "Music" beneath that. Everything goes by folder with the artist's name, followed by sub-folders under each of those for the name of each album by that artist.

A long time ago, this didn't work the same way. (Originally, they didn't have a top level folder called "iTunes media", with folders under that for each of different categories of media.) But iTunes used to offer a way to convert the old format to the new one if you selected one of the options in a Preferences menu to do so. It's used the newer folder structure for at least 2 major versions now, though ....

Complaining about a failed hard drive is hardly something worth attacking Apple for, especially since they're covering the replacements for free.

The blame lies more with Seagate on those defective 3TB drives, IMO. They will fail the exact same way whether they get used in an iMac or a Windows PC.

Google Music, in my experience, has the exact same problem Apple Music does. It ignores your manually input album art and other metadata, and decides to substitute what it thinks your tracks should have attached to them instead.

The only good thing Google does that (so far), Apple doesn't is gives you a button to tell it the data is wrong for a given track so you can override it. (Still, that's a LOT of pointless extra work to put back what was there in the first place.) Well, that, and the fact they're not going to trash your "master library" of music since they don't act as the application all of your music is stored in. They just mess up the copies of the data they put up in the cloud for you to stream back down from your devices.

I *wish* these cloud music services would simply ASK FIRST if you'd like to replace all of your existing metadata, or if you'd rather they only add metadata to your tracks that don't yet contain any at all.

These studies are usually just wastes of time, intending to push one agenda or another. (EG. Electric car sales are sure slow... Let's list a bunch of minor reasons while ignoring the main ones, since these are ones we can get paid as consultants to help address!)

If electric cars cost a lot LESS than traditional cars, then you'd see a massive uptake. When they cost even "a similar price" (which is generally not the case yet), people will compare and contrast them vs. the traditional options before buying. When they cost MORE and the only way to get the price back into the same realm as equivalent traditional cars is via tax credits, people tend to choose other options.

I'd love to own an electric car someday, but the only ones I'd consider somewhat affordable today are electric versions of cheap econobox cars with corners cut all over the place to hit the desired price point (Nissan Leaf for example). Everyone loves the Tesla ... but they don't love the price tag.

I actually have 3 kids and I wasn't trying to say what he did was "simply ok" at all!

I'm just saying it's definitely a thought that runs through the heads of immature guys when they find themselves in those kinds of situations. I watched it happen with people I knew through the crazy "dot com" era.

I think Steve J. managed to turn his personal life around considerably as he got older but there's no doubt it took him a long time to address his issues. (On the flip side? At least he finally did.... More than I can say for most Hollywood actors/actresses and celebs out there.)

From everything I've read, Jobs reeked of immaturity. Denying your kid is your own? That's something I think a lot of younger guys can relate to, if they're scared about becoming a father and everything it involves. Doubly so if you actually have grand plans for something like a business venture and fear that becoming a parent would decimate the free time and dedication you'd have to devote to it, to make it work. Same with a lot of the explosive rants against good employees and the childish "I'm right because I'm always right!" attitude.

The often cited deal with him driving around without license plates, I have to sort of give him a pass on. As I understand it, he was technically within the law to do it because he simply swapped out vehicles so regularly, none of them were owned long enough to require a plate? And parking in a handicapped space? I *think* he was only caught doing that on Apple's own campus --- not out in grocery store lots or anyplace else? I'm not going to pretend to speak for him on it, but I definitely know of places where they have a bunch of pointless handicapped parking spaces thanks to legal requirements, despite not even employing a single handicapped person. It's pure wasted space to comply with regulations that don't take "common sense" into consideration. (In many businesses, you're not going to have much of any "walk up/in" traffic like you do with a retail store.)