The update is being withheld because Spotify has yet to agree to the terms for a developer entitlement they’re required to obtain with their update. The entitlement allows developers to bypass Apple Pay, but because they’re still benefitting from whatever other services Apple offers, the devs need to agree to terms that basically say they still owe Apple a 27% cut (the same 30% as before, minus 3% for credit card processing) for any out-of-app sales that occur as a result of a referral from within the app. Spotify wants to have its cake and eat it too (can’t say I blame them), so they submitted the app without the required entitlement, then withheld that info when they cried to the press, which strikes me as a bit disingenuous.

It seems like Spotify will be using the rejection to build a legal challenge against Apple, but this part of Apple’s compliance hasn’t yet been challenged or noted as being under scrutiny by regulators, so Spotify doesn’t have any precedent or regulators to back them up yet, which means that Apple is justified in continuing to enforce their published rules.

How about Nomore Numbnuts instead? Oh wait, that's not an animal...

I DO wish that would become Ubuntu's motto though - maybe then they'd stop ramming Snaps down users' throats.

FWIW there are some pre-packaged applications that I like and use. But a) I favour AppImage and Flatpak over Snap, and b) I want the choice between APT and standalone. That's a major reason for me running Mint instead of Ubuntu.

He's not being pedantic, but rather historically accurate. They were called programs back then. Referring to them as "applications" was rare, and the term "apps" was even less common, if it was used at all.

That was a long time ago, but IIRC my first computer - a Christmas gift from the boss - came with DOS 4.0. I "upgraded" it to Compaq DOS 3.31 - AFAIK Compaq was the only source for a '3.31' version. I only used 4.0 briefly - I remember not liking it but I don't remember why. It was generally treated with disdain by the programmers and other serious computer users I knew.

At that time I worked on analog hardware, so a computer was still a novelty and a toy for me. Then I got into CAD - no more drafting board needed to create mechanical drawings or schematics, nor to lay out a PCB. Good times...

Very little of an EV's weight comes from anything that's particularly rare.

The main components in a modern Tesla battery are lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Lithium is the rarest, at about .002% of the Earth's crust. There's "only" about a third as much of that as there is copper. Now think about how much we use copper. Iron makes up 6.3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fourth most abundant element behind only oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Phosphorus makes up about .1% of the Earth's crust (which is still 17x as common as copper, and only slightly behind hydrogen). And of course oxygen is the most common element in the Earth's crust.

The industry as a whole is built around a dealer network that depends on repairs and service charges to stay in business. Apart from stupid minor problems, EVs have far fewer major mechanical issues than ICE cars, so dealers don't really want to sell them. I would argue that there is every financial incentive for car dealers to ensure that EVs fail. Those dealers are the ones who help people decide what to buy, and if they're discouraging EV sales, you're not going to get any EV sales.

I believe that the word in all three cases is "won't" not "can't", for the reason stated above.

How do you figure? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023. And even in a really down quarter this year, they still made over a billion dollars in profit. That's not what I would call "struggling financially". Sales are down lately, but I think that's mostly the public's reaction to Tesla's really stupid and user-hostile design changes (e.g. no turn signal stalk, changing gears with the touchscreen, etc.) that they have made over the past few months, rather than because of anything specific to electric vehicles themselves. I love my 2017 Model X, but I wouldn't feel comfortable buying any car that Tesla is currently selling, and I doubt I'm in the minority here.

What efficiency problems? They're already vastly more efficient than ICE cars by any metric. Capacity problems? How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping? Endurance problems? Far fewer major mechanical problems than equivalent ICE cars also contradicts that theory.

EVs are already cost effective, and if Tesla would stop trying to be cute and f**king up their steering wheels in new and infuriating ways every year or two, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

Inflation isn't a deterrent to savings, it just means you have to put your savings somewhere that it also does work, i.e. invested in something. Having a non-zero inflation rate encourages investment, which encourages economic growth. This is good. But it's not the main reason we need constant inflation.

The reason we need constant inflation is because deflation is extremely harmful; it causes debts to grow which can make people and businesses insolvent. The Fed has a 2% inflation target because low inflation rates are manageable and because 2% is high enough that a decrease still won't go negative.

In general, documents are considered hearsay and are inadmissible. There are exceptions to the hearsay rule that allow them to be introduced, for example public records that are made in the normal course of business, but police reports are explicitly and specifically excluded from those exceptions. It might be possible to introduce a police report as evidence if the officer who wrote it is present to testify to its authenticity and accuracy, and to be cross-examined about its contents, but if the officer is there it's easier to avoid the hearsay question entirely by just having the officer testify.

Note that this applies not just to written police reports but also to bodycam footage. You still need someone to testify that the footage is authentic and accurate, and available to be cross-examined about it. With bodycam footage I suppose that could be either the officer or a technician responsible for collecting and archiving the footage.

In the case of an AI-generated summary of the footage, if the officer checked and edited the output I think it would be exactly the same as the officer's self-written report. If the officer didn't check and edit the output, then it would be a mechanical transformation of the bodycam footage and you'd need someone to testify to the accuracy of that transformation, as well as the authenticity of the footage. I don't think anyone could honestly testify that the transformation is guaranteed to be correct and accurate. In any case, though, the defense could always just review the footage to point out any inaccuracies in the summary. Most likely the summary would be ignored completely and the bodycam footage would be used directly, after appropriate testimony about its authenticity.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

This Apple has a big, gnarly worm at its core. It's the kind of fruit you polish up and give to someone you don't like.

Then again, it's really no different from any other major corporation, aside from perhaps having a bigger legion of fanbois and other customers who have suspended their critical thinking in favour of convenience, shininess, and/or hipness.

Sounded a lot like the reporters specified that WART was being used for the OEM’s tests.