Sounds great. Let me know when I can install one of these on my Apple smartphone and I'll be one of the first!

Sigh, why does everyone on the internet do this? Ask rhetorical questions that are intended to show stupidity of the person they are responding to, but instead show their own lack of understanding of the idea?

I'm talking about the old FirefoxOS idea of JavaScript apps that get downloaded to a phone to run locally/quasi-natively. There is no app store - your phone downloads the app when you go to the web site, and uses that downloaded app for future "runs" of the app.

Just for the record, I don't use any Apple smartphones, for the same reason as you. I was using the royal "my".

You still didn't address my point though. Why is an app store app any different than any other app?

It will be interesting if some web-only app takes off and runs well enough that no one ever has to use the iPhone Store or whatever it's called.

Jailbroken is absolutely not the same thing as "different app store". I didn't ask for "root" or "totally security-broken", I asked for a different app store that runs user-mode apps, not for raw access to the modem. iOS can continue to enforce policies and security measures for user programs, like any OS does.

Why can't I install a different app store app on my Apple smartphone? I want access to Google Play Store. Why does Apple control which app store app I use? Do I own the phone or not?

Cities are made up of people, are governed by people, on behalf of people. If there are laws that do this, it's because the majority of people in the city voted for representatives who made such laws, or at least the majority voted for representatives who do not repeal these laws. Thus, implicitly, it's that way because that's what people want: taxpayer subsidies for reads and parking.

You're apparently not part of that majority that wants taxpayer subsidies for those things, but that's how it works. You might think your ideas on how to spend money, land, and other resources are better, but it doesn't matter unless you convince a majority of people to agree with you and then vote for a candidate that will implement your policies.

The same French group behind the original 40-patient study just released a second study yesterday, this time with 80 patients. The results were as impressive as the first study. Here is the second study report: https://www.mediterranee-infec... Of course it hasn't been peer-reviewed, that takes months under normal circumstances. We don't have the luxury of that kind of time. Maybe someone will find time to review it sooner given the urgency of the situation.

The Chinese study found no benefit over "standard treatment", but "standard treatment" in their study included other antiviral drugs. And all of the patients in the Chinese study (both the control group and non-control group) recovered so I'm not sure how you are drawing the conclusion that it definitely doesn't work from that study. The most you can say is that it doesn't work better than other antiviral drugs.

Yes, but the vast majority of criminals and terrorists didn't have access to cheap, easy, and fast cryptographically secure communications and data storage 20 years ago either.

The vast majority of a criminal's data and communications was unencrypted (it was likely on paper in a readable language, maybe in a safe that could be cracked with enough effort or specialized equipment) and thus was realistically possible to access. Yes, state-supported agents had manual one-time pads, and maybe there were some computers that did some stuff, but the amount of data you could realistically secure wasn't that much or wasn't fast enough to run a full criminal or terrorist enterprise on it.

Coordinating a criminal or terrorist enterprise thus was not realistically possible without some risk of your data or communications being seen by law enforcement. One person gets caught, and law enforcement would look at any related stuff in their apartment or house or whatever, and that's how law enforcement followed leads.

Today, assuming that criminals adopt cryptographic best practices, it's impossible for law enforcement to follow leads the same way. Nothing is accessible without a password. They would need to "extract" the password from a human, which the EFF also gets up in arms about.

Backdoors aren't the solution but (again assuming criminals adopt best practices) I don't see that there is a solution at all.

Electricity generation isn't 95+% efficient, not even close. Wikipedia says it's rougly 40% efficient, with 60% going to heat. In co-generation plans, a couple percent of the waste heat is used for, you guessed it, actual heating, which is what I proposed to do with the natural gas in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's more wasteful because there are losses associated with generating and distributing electric energy. Electric energy is one of the highest quality (exergy) forms of energy possible. Natural gas is fairly low quality energy because basically all you can do is burn it to generate heat - but heat is exactly what you need for cooking and drying clothes, so it's a perfect fit and no intermediate steps are required. It's wasteful to generate electricity only to later use it to generate heat, when you could generate heat directly from burning fuel. That's exactly why electricity is more expensive than natural gas. If electric energy ever becomes as cheap as natural gas, then it will make sense to use it to generate heat, but we aren't there yet.

Having "apps" just be cached mobile websites was such a great idea, and it would be a perfect way to get around this sort of platform-specific nonsense. Maybe one day we will be able to work that way and no one will care what "platform" you are using. Until then, ugh.

You know those people who like to brag about how much money they have and how many vacations and shit they can do because they have no kids? You tax the shit out of those people.

I'm actually 100% serious. You'd pay a "childfree" tax starting at age 40 until death unless you list some under-18 dependents on your tax form.

Trip time reduction is not the point! The point is that the total throughput of the road (total number of trips) increases. That means more people can get where they want or need to go - for example you can build more housing and have those people get to and from jobs in a job center like a downtown area. In the same amount of time as before, of course, because the extra capacity gets filled up. But again, trip time reduction is not the point, and it's okay that trip time remains the same because the total number of trips increases.

Using the #metoo hashtag without any further explanation means that you have had a personal experience. If you were just referencing the "#metoo movement", your comment was misleading.