Wow! And you say Apple is trying to make money? Those bastards!!

Preemption – as long as the Congress says the feds can do it, the state cannot do anything.

Cotton Candy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I know you can use a 4K screen as a monitor to a smartphone using a special HDMI cable.

To get electrical power and their own fast networking in.
People tend to notice a set of CCTV like camera equipment to capture driver and passengers faces next to a citizenship question road stop with the citizenship alerting K9 units.
Workers for telcos also notice law enforcement requests for their city, states networks.
A "hide' lets all enforcement with federal funding get past local telco workers and any need for their new equipment to be seen in the open.

If you truly feel there's "no point" in supporting user-replaceable options, then tell me the fucking point of paying Apple $1400 for 64GB of Apple memory. Or $1400 for a 2TB SSD.

You're right. We're not in the 90's anymore. In the 90's, I didn't have to get a "gig" job just to afford this shit.

And consumers don't give a shit about reliability. If they did, they would demand their most expensive electronic investment (smartphones) have user-replaceable batteries to make them last more than a fucking year or two.

I didn't even bother to finish reading the summary, I have the flu and a hangover, which is turning out to be unpleasant, anyways just wanted to comment.
For the last year or so I have been working on Building Management Software (BMS).
Nice change for me since I have a long financial background, and tend to get head hunted by banks etc.
So since I am working with BMS I've started looking up a LOT more, because I need to talk to those camera's mounted in the ceiling, that fire detector over there etc. so I have just started paying more attention to shit mounted on the ceiling. There are camera's EVERYWHERE, it's actually fucking scary. I live in a 2nd world country (although I class it as 3rd, most others don't) so I can only imagine in first world countries it's even more prevalent. Do yourself a favor (or disfavor) and look up more, start paying attention to the shit above you, you will not be happy with what you find. We needed to check on a desktop PC that just happened to be deployed in my cities control center. Someone kicked the back of the PC and dislodged the network cable, usually we are not allowed in there, or more accurately I am not allowed in there, I'm a programmer not a desktop technician, but they were desperate and asked me to take a look. There were rows on rows of people sitting monitoring cameras from all around the city, from highway camera's to street camera's to camera's mounted outside public buildings and power lines. Each person had three video walls in front of them with different sized video tiles, I am not sure if that was the only camera's they could see, or just the ones they were currently monitoring, I wasn't in there long and when I started asking questions I didn't get any answers. There were easily a 100 people in there, probably more, all monitoring camera's all over the city. Most buildings have camera's in their elevators, think you are alone in the elevator and can scratch your balls? Think again, there is a camera in there somewhere. So now when I drive to work and get stuck in traffic I tend to look up, and spot the camera's. Look up more, you won't like what you find.

I am pretty sure that I've seen Perceptual Ad Blockers on Doctor Who. They're kind of like psychic paper, only in reverse.

My collection is a few tens of thousands of photographs from three families dating from 1880 or so to 1980. A proper scan that gets out the greatest amount of actual information has yielded an average of about a gigabyte per photograph, so far. That's a lot of information. So my pathetically small collection holds about ten or so terabytes of data.

I've absolutely no idea how I'm going to store that kind of volume of data, it's not like Google will offer.

But I bet you a dozen doughnuts that there are thousands of families in the same boat, who have vast collections of negatives that they'll destroy because they don't have room and don't see an immediate value in.

I also bet that if those thousands of families could be persuaded to get those images scanned, if they'd be willing to contribute to the cost of the collating and storage costs, that it would seriously change the way the past is seen by historians, family history fans and archivists.

And I'd bet that such an archive would have a profoundly greater impact than the NYT archive would.

It won't happen because those aforementioned families will be stubborn and prefer destruction over conservation, because none of the cloud vendors would be interested in helping disseminate information of individually uncertain value, and because most people see history as someone else's problem.

After you have money, other things become important. Status, especially relative status. The ability to harm others with impunity. Being above the law. Many others. Here I think Larry was just trying to demonstrate his high status. Oracle is so big it doesn't need Amazon. The customer is not always right. A big trend these days is firing your customers when they get out of line, the same as you would an employee.