I think we have more recently determined their skin was actually covered with colourful feathers.

I don't understand what the problem is with having winter vs summer schedules. Many industries (shops etc) already do it. It NEVER makes sense to change the time itself, rather than having winter/summer schedules. Rush hour follows schedules not nominal time...

It really does not make sense to have a cap only for out-of-network, when in-network arguably are less cost for the institutions. But of course banks are spending a lot of money on both parties so...

I'm Not Sure.

The Slashdot Tenor API integration seems sadly broken, otherwise I would post an animated gif here to demonstrate how sad I am. Maybe a tiny violin playing a sad song...

Ugh why the ObjC hate. As someone who has had to use about a dozen languages for work and always thought C++ is a demented way to expand C to to OO (although I am fine with a subset if C++), I found ObjC a delight to use. Yes, the syntax may seem a bit silly/verbose and compiler people tend to dislike it, but many developers love it and I don't remember anyone in my ObjC teams being "stressed" about it. I am old school of course, so I am very comfortable with C and find it being a clean C superset an advantage, not a complication.

The software continues to "work", it's not an OS thing at all. There is internal logic built in that checks and if the certificate is out of date switches your software functions to a read-only mode. It's nothing to do with MacOS not allowing to run, the same executable will continue running, just behaving differently due to what it was programmed to do. It was an early decision for it to work that way, when they shipped the "final" update they knew when it was programmed to stop working, they could have instead left allowed it to continue working in full mode, but they thought they could get away with disabling it.

You seem to be talking about something different? I never said we should nationalize anything private...

It's not that the US government is bad at it. Privatization is inherently bad. For profit companies by definition care about profits. Those who run them, in addition, care for short term profits. So give them an infrastructure that cost billions to build and tell them to manage it, do you think they are going to put serious effort on maintaining it or going to lengths to serve the least profitable customers (that have already paid their share towards building the infastructure). The worst example where I currently live (UK) is water companies who have figured out it is cheaper to pay the penalties for dumping raw sewage into rivers and seas rather than maintain and expand the infrastructure that prevented this. Of course governments make it even worse as politicians get kickbacks. There is no other explanation I can think of for the privatization of ONLY profitable airports in Greece. The ones that make money they sell to (usually German) companies "for stimulating the economy and attracting investment", the ones that are not making money are bankrolled by the taxpayer. I would understand the "attracting investment" part if they at least bundled some unprofitable ones to the 14 they gave to Fraport on the first round for example...

I am not sure they are destroying functional devices though. You just can't buy new books from Amazon directly. Calibre will work as always, you can copy over any books from any other source as you wish...

First of all, I can get garbage from Gemini just fine (although it is a very useful tool if you are aware of the limitations). I've never used copilot, but I am pretty sure it is not deterministic. AFAIK all such models are probabilistic, and since they use randomness for generation, you can also call them stochastic, but definitely not deterministic. I don't know if I am missing something about copilot in particular, so correct me if I am wrong, but it does sound like a garbage post ;)

I develop apps on the side as a hobby. Apple takes 15% if your annual income is under 1 million. They also provide a lot of infrastructure and good development tools. I would say it's a bargain.

I remember my company developing BREW apps (Verizon's Get It Now), which was basically the only way to make apps for the majority of US phone users. I have forgotten the cut Verizon took, it was over 30% IIRC, but what's worse you could not just publish an app, it had to be "selected". For it to be eligible for selection, you needed to support the majority of their devices (you needed about 40 phones). To "support" a phone you needed to submit extensive documentation (we had to write programs to generate them) and pay $1000 PER DEVICE. So you made a $40k payment FOR A CHANCE to be in the app store, where Verizon would take a 40% cut or something. And programming for BREW was horrible too.

I am sorry, I was never an Apple fan, especially in the pre-Apple Silicon days, but the App Store is like a utopia for developers compared to the past...

I mean it may be a valid explanation of why they take longer. The fact that their checks are useless is a separate issue...

I find it amusing that you categorise "waste and abuse" separate to military spending ;)

It is not a problem of theoretical physics though, which is what I was replying to. It is a matter of engineering, technology and some applied physics. As I was saying , it needs lots of resources thrown to it. And, yes, using the Sun more in the meantime is not a bad thing, but it's not nearly as transformative.