You debunked your own comment, there's nothing for me to do here :)

I loved my mini, I just wish it wasn't made with the crappier low-end components. I'd guess that's part of why the sales were so low, people wanted a small powerful phone, not a small gimped one. A Mini Pro would have been amazing. I finally upgraded my 12 mini to a 16 Pro, the phone is too damn big to comfortably hold and use one handed.

What you're missing, as usual, is that IT DOESN'T EXIST YET but you're claiming that it does, as usual.

FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"

Yes, this place really has gone to shit.

Yes, but we could also develop the same technologies and then not spend the money going to space, and instead implement them here, and think about space exploration once we're sure we have a future.

People do it to me constantly (a day without a 3-5 comment serial downmod is unusual) and I don't have to post AC to keep my Karma in the excellent range.

I've been saying this for a while as well. My spotify playlist has roughly 2,000 songs in it, but it continually plays the same 100 or so over and over. It's obviously not anything remotely close to a true random shuffle, and it's obvious that they've put work into making it not truly random.

The only thing I can think of is the royalties are cheaper for 2 plays of the same song than two plays of two unique songs.

And in researching alternate platforms, it seems that they all do this, making this an industry-wide issue, which screams that it's some BS licensing thing shitting up the experience for the end users.

Wrongo, but funny story. I did get a debit card a couple of years ago and eventually got rid of all my credit cards. Last month I tried to buy something to discover that it is ONLY possible to buy it with a credit card. So far I've wasted a couple of weeks trying to find out why, but my top theory is that they insist on having an "active" credit rating for reasons still unclear. Or might be a PI abuse scam? Also spent some of that time researching the options for credit cards, but that's paradox-of-choice territory now. I remember one particular credit card company website with a list of 70 different credit cards... Talk about head games.

However I was mostly thinking about grocery stores. There are four local ones that I do business with, and each of them has wildly different loyalty card schemes with various kinds of points and bogus incentives. Lesser thinking was about Rakuten Mobile, which uses a bizarre mix of coupons and points and special offers to confuse the bejesus out of wannabe customers. (Or a former wannabe customer in my case, but one who can't yet find a better option...)

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Funny deserved, but I think the real problem is with human clones. I'm "pert' shure" some of those rich puppeteers have cloned themselves already. The first clone to take over will claim to be a son who just looks unusually like his father, but after he has a string of clones in the pipeline he'll just start swapping in a fresh one every year or two. The rest of them will be hiding on an island somewhere...

Quoted against censor trolls with mod points.

However my take on this stuff is that I'm sick and tired of playing games when I want to buy something. All of these points and bonus loyalty programs and time-limited coupons and kitchen sinks are just false economy. If you didn't actually want to buy it, then it's a waste of money at ANY price and it doesn't matter how you paid for it.

Small world syndrome? Just a few pages from finishing A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. No, the name is not a joke, though he does do a rather funny webcomic. So any excuse for a short book review? Any Slashdotters still read books?

Summary is that they want space colonies with humans but are quite persuasive in arguing that it's a bad idea at this time. Basic premise is that anything we can do to live in space is much more likely to succeed on earth and we are still quite far away from space colonies that will be able to sustain themselves if earth is destroyed. But a desperate grab for outer space at this time might make things much worse on earth, possibly even destroying the earth. The book covers a lot of turf, and a lot of interesting history in particular, but there were two omissions that did bother me.

Minor one is that their power options didn't include steam turbines using solar power. Solving the water problem is a prerequisite for any space settlement and turbine technology is quite machine and much less expensive than the options they discussed.

Major omission involves the Fermi Paradox. Barely touched on in the book, but I think there probably are some civilizations that survived past our current crises. However I think they did that by becoming AIs, and if so, then they are already here and watching us. Curiosity and insurance against a paperclip crisis.

Not just the Web. But there are too many examples to pick from... However just recently I was meditating on how cosmetic and beauty product advertisements have harmed women in particular. Easy to create fake demand using comparisons against the extremes of beauty.

Yeah, I'm "pert' shure" you were focusing on the business model of advertising for "free" websites. TANSTAAFL, and businesses always wrap themselves around their revenue streams, but I just want a joke and I'm not seeing any good angles.

"Whatever you can do, AI can do better." Is that funny yet? Or still premature? The joke should wait for Elon to get his $1-trillion bonus for unleashing the robot hordes (controlled by AI, of course)?

People believe what they want to believe. He believe iPhones are super-sexy.

Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops. Good intentions under the old motto of "Justice delayed is justice denied." Instant "justice" for each of our crimes, and homo sapiens should be extinct within a week or two.

Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.

NAK