I'm not sure how it's even possible for an iOS device to connect to an unpaired Bluetooth device unless the device is designed wrong (not asking for authentication). So for that one, I'd put at least half of the blame on the device manufacturer. On the flip side, it is mainly designed for elderly folks who usually aren't tech savvy, so I can at least understand why they might do that, so there's plenty of blame on Apple for auto-connecting without asking as well.

I would even argue that this is a potential security bug at that point. Connecting to an unknown device now gives that device the ability to send data to the iOS device in ways that would otherwise be unavailable to it. If any of those code paths contains a security vulnerability, combining that vulnerability with this auto-connect behavior creates the opportunity for literal drive-by attacks on iOS devices.

If you're a developer, please file a bug against Apple and mark it as an urgent security bug. Maybe that will get the real root cause (Apple's lack of any sort of option for asking the user before connecting to Bluetooth devices) fixed.

No, but you see, I don't want any commission on apps that aren't sold by Apple, for which Apple has no role in the creation or distribution of the app. They're not doing anything to earn that money.

The cost of developing the OS is paid for by the people buying hardware. After all, you can't sell hardware without the OS.

And while you could argue that the cost of developing the developer tools should be borne by developers (including Apple, who use those tools to building the OS, of course), Apple's rules mandating the use of their tools makes doing so problematic from an antitrust perspective. And either way, a software license that effectively takes a cut of sales on anything developed with that software is problematic at multiple levels. Nobody in their right minds would choose a product under those terms, absent some sort of monopolistic restrictions that compel such a choice.

The correct percentage is zero, with, at absolute most, some small fixed annual fee for program participation to compensate Apple for the limited overhead incurred in signing developers' keys. Any higher cost is effectively holding users' devices hostage, and is fundamentally unjust from a consumer protection perspective.

The only question is how long it takes for various countries' governments to come to the same conclusion and demand that mobile devices be liberated from compulsory profit-sharing done under the guise of "security".

The nuclear waste silos were, though.

iOS does the same thing. Constantly. A Bluetooth device goes out of range and the back in, and the iPhone is like "Squirrel!" and switches. But on iOS, it is even more obnoxious. I have a home phone system that can take calls from your cell phone, but only if you pick up the handset and answer the call. Otherwise, when it tries to send the call over to that Bluetooth "speaker", the handset rejects the connection request and the audio switches back to the device. But worse, it switches OFF the speakerphone mode and switches back to phone-to-the-ear mode. So not only do you completely lose five seconds of audio during the failed handshake, but you also end up not being able to hear afterwards until you manually turn the speakerphone mode back on.

I filed a bug about this at least five years ago and Apple still hasn't fixed it. And it pisses me off so much that if I had more free time, I'd develop my own whole f**king mobile OS just so that I could have full manual control over when the device switches sound outputs. The number of times I have wanted my device to switch automatically to Bluetooth is EXACTLY zero, because the device has no idea if earbuds are actually in my ears or headphones are on my head. It has no idea whether I'm actually in the same room as the speaker or ten feet away. It has no idea if I want to use the earbuds with my Mac or my iPhone. It has no idea if I want my device to connect to the sound system in our rehearsal room, or if one of my colleagues is about to use it with her phone. The phone should not be in control. The user should.

How hard is it to just have a f**king headphones icon at the top of the screen that the user can tap to switch to a different audio input/output, and make that button show a list of sources, including silently discovered (but not connected) Bluetooth sources, and automatically connect to the Bluetooth device in the background when you select it, and wait to change audio over to that Bluetooth device until after it has successfully connected and verified that it can actually pass audio to the device?

Hell, at this point, I'd settle for a setting that disables automatic connection to a specific Bluetooth device. We can turn off automatic association for WiFi. Why the h*** don't we have that for Bluetooth? What a**hole thought to himself, "This Bluetooth device is suddenly just barely within range; let's switch to it and see if we can make the user so angry that he throws his phone across the room so we can sell him a new phone?"

Seriously, this is something that should have been 100% solved twenty-five years ago, and sure as h*** should have been solved before companies started ripping the headphone jacks off of devices, and instead, the entire f**king industry has a user experience that can only be described as absolute garbage because nobody at any of these companies who is making bug prioritization decisions apparently has any Bluetooth gear that is paired with more than one f**king device. How is this simple and obvious design pattern still so badly broken across every major mobile platform? Why do users tolerate such actively user-hostile behavior from their devices? And why isn't fixing this s**tshow a P1/P0 bug?

I just don't get it.

The feet operated as vertical rockets, so I'd say the designer was thinking along the same lines you are.

The landing pads are also vertical thrusters (which is how they can skim), so you need space for the nozzle, engine, and fuel. The size of the landing pads would seem fine, given everything that needs to be in them.

I'm calculating mass in terms of filled volume. The entire mid-section of the Eagle was a mesh of girders, rather than a solid hull. Since the total space filled is 1/Nth that of a solid hull that has to be able to handle the same rotational forces, the total mass is reduced. The cross-hatch patterning is likely to be good there, as it's strong along those lines. We don't need to specifically know what the material is, or the specific mass, as long as we can use engineering techniques to figure out the percentage of material we need relative to having a solid hull.

That's true of all sci-fi, by nature. The challenge, though, is to make it as plausible as possible. The "traditional" rule (variously ascribed to Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov) was that good sci-fi was allowed to violate one law of physics (although this had to be justified and explained) but everything else shoud be as plausible as possible. S:1999, as a whole, certainly did not comply with that, but if we restrict ourselves to the Eagle, then I'd say that it would just about pass muster there.

Were you expecting bubbles to sink?

Yeah, pretty much.

I'm mostly an Apple user. I own a Mac. I own an iPhone. This has been true since late last century and 2007, respectively. I do not own an Apple tablet.

I was shopping for a tablet the other day to use for viewing sheet music, and the only hard requirement for that sort of thing is that it must not be significantly smaller than 8.5x11. The smallest Apple device that met that requirement was the iPad Air 13-inch for $750.

So I decided to see what sort of Android tablets existed. I ended up buying a bottom-tier Android tablet that cost just $179.98, complete with a case (which would add another $70 to the iPad price earlier. Up until the Android 17 release two days ago, it was running the latest version of Android (16), so it isn't a security disaster waiting to happen. And it costs about one fifth of what Apple's low-end tablet costs. And for what I'm doing, there's no real difference. And it's no slouch. It has 128 GB of storage, same as the Air, and 40 GB of RAM; 5x more RAM, one fifth the cost. Both have an IPS display; the Android tablet has slightly lower resolution — about two-thirds that of the iPad in each direction — but half again faster refresh rate, so no clear winner there; both are more than adequate. And a tablet that costs under $200, I don't have to care about. If I break it or lose it, it is borderline disposable. At $820 (with case), that's not even remotely true.

So despite ostensibly being an Apple guy, I've reached the point where I own at least four Android tablets that are in active use, and zero Apple tablets. If it were not for momentum, I probably would not own an iPhone, either at this point. The half decade waiting for Apple to finally adopt USB-C while cheap Android phones could share a charger with my Mac showed me that Apple cares more about profits than about delivering a quality product, and that's an epic fail from my perspective that soured my perspective on iOS in a big way.

IMO, the company needs a real direction change. I'm not saying they should build low-end garbage, but when your low end product costs almost 5x as much as the competition and isn't obviously massively better, you have a real problem. Buying a better quality product that will last longer seems to make sense up to a point, but when the difference in price is so large that you can replace it annually for about the same as the 5-year typical replacement cost for the iPad, that argument doesn't hold water, either.

So no, Mr. Cook, jacking up the prices is not inevitable. It's only inevitable if you hold up the short-term stock price as the only worthwhile metric while ignoring the fact that you're losing long-term customers by being so overpriced compared with the competition. Customer loyalty only goes so far, and I think we've passed the point where it is good enough, as demonstrated by Apple giving up and finally releasing a Crhomebook-class laptop. Here's hoping they do the same with tablets and phones.

But either way, if I can buy an Android tablet for a fifth the cost of an iPad that has 5x as much RAM as an iPad, any claims that RAM price increases justify a price increase warrant very little credence. It just isn't believable. The stockholders might eat it up, but your customers are already looking at alternatives. This is why iPad sales have been in continuous decline for years. Crank up the iPhone price enough, and you'll likely see the same thing happening there.

Not smart. Just saying.

BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.

Did *she* want to die? Did *she* want to be "released"?

Did she have an eye tracker, to allow her to communicate naturally?

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

Let's look at the various aspects of the Eagle design.

1. It was "designed to work in space" so wasn't designed to be aerodynamic
2. It was modular
3. Mass was kept to a minimum without compromising strength, which is precisely what you would want if your job is to carry a significant mass in space and be able to manoever without ripping apart
4. Cockpits were functional and minimal, not glamorous or more advanced than necessary to do the job

There were terrible aspects as well (nowhere to keep fuel, for example), but if you were going to design a sci-fi ship that is intended to be a simple short-range transport, then the design for the Eagle is close to perfect in a way that most sci-fi vessels really aren't.

Brian Johnson really did a superb job of actually making something LOOK like a practical workhorse.

Nah. There are plenty of small businesses whose CEOs are normal people. Same with most nonprofit CEOs. I guarantee you won't find very many local arts organizations whose CEOs are psychopaths, for example.

The real problem, IMO, is that corporations are allowed to grow so big that only lunatics are able to run them.

Sorry, I just realized that was worded ambiguously. I meant that it has two-thirds the population of any of those three countries individually. So I should have worded that as:

Mea culpa.