Under Apple's old "iPhone Upgrade Program," it made more sense to use the program than to buy a phone outright, especially if you were likely to upgrade annually. There was no interest, you basically got a discount on AppleCare, and you could still get 3% back on the payments through an Apple Card. And there wasn't any Lojack on the phone. After a year, you could buy a new phone and they'd take the old one back as payoff value on the loan. Sure, you could do better with buying outright and selling the used phone, but the Upgrade Program was easy and had some value.

Now that's dead and we have this Klarna deal, which is straight-up shifty used-car-lot. No AppleCare bundled. Repo software on the phone. It's predatory on people who can't afford to straight-up buy an iPhone and don't have good enough credit to cover the cost with a credit card. If you can afford to buy the phone outright, it makes no sense—you're not getting anything out of it, unless you pay off your Apple Card in full every month. If you carry a balance, it's not really going to be interest-free, because it's gonna raise your average daily balance and that affects the interest charged.

I'm fortunate to be in a position where I could buy outright if I wanted to. But: with the old program, I upgraded more often than I really needed to, because it was easy and low risk to trade in. With this program, I'll probably skip a generation or two before upgrading, because there's more friction and more downside.

If this is how Ternus intends to go on, it doesn't bode well.

When Disney+ started, it was a great value: everything Disney ever made (aside from the stuff now so cringe it's been memory-holed) plus high-quality new content on a weekly basis. For a genre nerd who likes Marvel and Star Wars, it was rare that Disney+ didn't earn its pay in any given week.

But that was expensive and creatively difficult to maintain. So the price went up, the quality went down, and then the cadence of high-quality original content slowed. Library content disappeared to save on royalty checks. To spackle over the gaps, Hulu got dumped into the app, and now the high-quality Disney stuff is hidden by the deluge of cable-grade Fox programming from Hulu.

A few years ago, Disney+ was at the top of the "keep paying" list for me. Now, I can see dropping the subscription until something interesting comes out once or twice a year. AppleTV has claimed the "always something good this week" spot, and no one can compete with YouTube for "you'll find something that interests you, is the right length, and matches your current ability to concentrate."

Disney lost the plot (and the race) when they stopped trying to be Disney and started trying to be everything for everybody.

Is it that sitting causes cancer, or is it that being ill in a way that makes it uncomfortable to stand is a cause (or the result) of cancer?

1. Because he's so ill that moving him could kill him, and the stress of space travel would absolutely kill him. This is explicitly explained in the scene with the healer.
2. Because that first bar fight happens on a red-sun planet where Kara doesn't have any superpowers. This is a major plot point of the movie; were you even watching it...?
3. Tell me you're a sociopath without telling me...
4 and 5. You really weren't paying attention to the fact that Kara's powers aren't all-or-nothing, were you? Red sun = no power; yellow sun = powers but they need time and exposure to charge up. Poison = powers but too ill to use them effectively. Remember in the Superman movie's opening how the Fortress of Solitude droids had to expose him to concentrated yellow sunlight through a series of lenses to heal him quickly? Kara's just flying around in the open, it's gonna take a moment.
6. The tips are made of crystalline green Kryptonite, plus she's still visibly recovering from green-sun poisoning. Really, movies are more enjoyable when you open your eyes!
7. Why the fellow is so durable, well, beyond it being necessary to be a viable foil for a Kryptonian you've got me. But the sword? Were you not paying attention to the entire movie? The idea of the family having revenge through the use of the dead father's best sword as the instrument of death? The concept of an ironic death, death at the hands of the sword you so coveted? I'm guessing that when the trailer for The Odyssey played before the movie, you thought it was something Chris Nolan invented...

This movie's got issues, but you're complaining about plot points that the movie actually handled pretty well. Apparently they needed to be more ham-fisted in explaining them for you to get them; for me, that would've made the writing worse, not better. Ham-fisted dialogue is already the movie's biggest problem. Adding ham-fisted exposition wouldn't help. At some point, the filmmaker has to assume the viewer will actually put down their phone and pay attention to the movie...

Disappointed this article wasn't about students building biological birds as suggested by the headline "Robot Birds Deployed by Park to Attract Real Birds—Built by High School Students." Maybe the editors meant "Robot Birds Built By High School Students Deployed by Park to Attract Real Birds"?

Easily fixed, so long as the legislators don't try to overcook the law with too much complexity. The law should simply say, "You can have digital shelf price labels, but you can't change the price on those labels while the store is open to the public. If your store is open 24 hours a day, you can change the price between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., but you must make a clear announcement to everyone in the store immediately before the change and every five minutes until the change is completed, in every language commonly used in your area, stating that prices are about to change and the price displayed on the shelf when you picked up the item may not be the price you will be charged at checkout."

It preserves the supposed benefits of the digital labels, and ensures that customers have pricing transparency.

I'd even allow a carve-out for goods customarily sold at "market price," so long as the list of such goods is controlled by the state and price changes are limited to when the seller's wholesale price changes and current stock is exhausted.

DEFENSE Secretary. There has been no official name change from the Department of Defense to the Department of War. That requires an act of Congress, not some nebulous "executive order".

I mean a de-beaked headcrab could have posited that this was likley a thing

I read "Cadmium Zinc Telluride," and all that comes to mind is a large, bright yellow Kia SUV.

Checks are inconvenient and hideously insecure, but they remain the one way for an American to (sort of) safely send money to a person or company without both parties physically present that doesn't necessarily result in third-party fees for either party. That's the problem banks have to solve to get rid of paper checks.

In my town, you can pay your taxes in cash (at the town hall, during limited hours, in person), by mailing in a check for the exact amount, or via credit card—which results in a 2.5% surcharge to cover the cost of using the credit-card network. Paying in person isn't a realistic option for most folks, as you'd need to take time off from work to do it. For a $2,500 property-tax bill, that's an extra $62.50, which isn't a negligible fee. Even factoring in the cost of the stamp and the envelope, it's way cheaper to mail them a check. The stamp is even cheaper than the cost for fuel and lost time to drive down and pay in cash.

And it'll get worse now that credit-card companies can charge different processing rates based on the rewards tier of your credit card, and merchants can pass along that variable rate as a surcharge to your bill...

Is this what clanker apologetics looks like?

Instead of 'video wall paper' can we just get the After Dark screensavers back into existence?

A "Model M" keyboard without the singular defining feature that makes the Model M iconic—the buckling-spring key mechanism.

What's next? A new Big Mac clone that only comes without any sauce?

...so whatever it is, it'll be rolled out half-baked with great fanfare, get forced onto various users by the sheer weight of Google's not-a-monopoly on just about everything, limp along for a year or two, and then Google will discover that the problem is more difficult than it first appeared, get bored, and kill it off in favor of the next exciting new half-baked thing.

This could be the greatest idea ever; Google's involvement is the kiss of death for it regardless, until proven otherwise. The odds aren't in the project's favor.

Well, Instapaper has been doing a fine job reading CNN's articles for me, both desktop and mobile... an extra click or two, but worth the effort.