$230

My jaw drops, but then I split. Half of me remains smugly looking down on fuckwits, but the other half hears that Samuel Adams' Utopia, which costs about the same, is supposedly showing up in CostCos, and while I can't justify getting a bottle .. maybe I don't have to justify things.

No.

No, it would still be stupid to do.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Suck/not-suck aside, would you at least agree that it's as good as The Mandalorian?

Eyeball monster == Baby Yoda. So. Fucking. Cute.

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

Your honor, every smartphone currently in existence has tools built in to accommodate people with vision loss, ranging from 'increase the font size' to 'magnifying glass functionality' to 'screen reader' to 'attach a braille output screen.'

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

Me: you know, many businesses already change between summer and winter schedules; many retail stores, many services, many public transit operators.....

how the hell could they make the "just one administrator" mistake?

It's not a mistake, because it's not a 'permissions/who can be administrator' 'mistake.' It's the account owner. It's the person who's credit card is on file.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.

Why would Apple 'comply with a court order' that has nothing to do with them?

If the court ordered the father to disband the account, and he didn't disband the account, he needs to be taken back to court to force compliance.

That being said, the article DID make clear that there WAS a court order for him to disband the account, and even if he was using in all the right ways for all the right reasons, not-complying with a court order is extremely problematic.

Then her remedy is to go back to court and compel the target of the order, aka the ex-husband, to do as ordered, not to claim that a third party with no standing in the case is at fault.

If you and I contract that I will sell you may Ford Escape for five grand, and you give me five grand and I don't give you the keys, you don't go to Ford and ask them to make you a key. They will, correctly, say "....and what does this have to do with us?" when you wave the sale contract at them.

And nothing Apple did or didn't do prevented the mother from having that custody.

She had a remedy from day one: make new accounts for the kids. Inconvenient? Sure. But way less inconvenient than most of the stuff that goes along with 'we're separating.'

*Should* Apple develop a system to deal with this a big more gracefully? I'd say so. But to conflate this with 'they're violating a court order for custody' is utterly ridiculous.

Even if the people who know how didn't move on over the last few decades, surely they would have been fired some time in the last few months as part of the overall effort to weaken the US economy, health, and defenses.

Is there anyone left who knows how to do the job? Can they be hired back, after the Epstein shutdown is over?

Apple could just stop being evil.

Problem: adversary has you in a headlock.

Solution: wait for the adversary to change allegiance.