Multiple credit card companies are already doing this. Our merchant services company offered us this same data. Of course Google is tracking everything you do. But they can only do it with the willing help of Visa/Mastercard.

It's too late for everybody who isn't named "Tesla". Tesla's got over 100,000 charging stations installed already. Tesla's chargers are going to be the de facto standard at this point.

Unless you buy brand new hardware, hardware is absurdly cheap. Our hardware costs are somewhere around 1/20 of our software costs. It might even be less. I don't see any costs savings on hardware.

What I do see with "microservices" is crossing your fingers that whoever you're buying from knows what they're doing (ie: backups, non-faulty hardware, non-faulty sysadmins, etc.)

The other thing is that you have to rely on Internet access, which, in most of the US, is spotty at best. We're in a major metropolitan, high-tech area, and neither of the ISP's can provide us with reliable service. Hence, all of our software is built to run off-line during our very regular Internet outages. With "microservices", we'd just be stopped from doing any business at all every time the Internet dropped out.

If these companies even tried to end "hate speech" or whatever nebulous crime where a specific group of pigs are more equal than another group of pigs, we will see the end of these platforms and companies full sail.

Banning trolls will hurt their business, how? As an employer, I'm MORE likely to advertise on a platform that wasn't full of screaming, stupid Trump people. Those are not people that I want to advertise to, anyway.

How can Uber have trouble turning a profit? What expenses do they have? Are they literally wiping their asses with money, or something? I can't imagine how maintaining a few little apps would cost billions of dollars a year.

Wow. That's neat. In return for those cute little gimmicks, Amazon has a complete recording of everything that happens in your house. And, then they sell that to other companies. You're OK with that? Really?

I feel bad for kids these days. The world is going to be a nastier place to live in than it is today in many ways, environmentally, notwithstanding. Go, Trump!

There are a lot of music systems where the iPod Classic is the “media.” Could be in a car or a home or a DJ setup. There is a spot where you attach an iPod Classic full of music and you are good to go. If you don't have an iPod Classic, then you have to do some re-architecture of that music system. So this post-retirement demand for iPod Classics is very much like if Duracell discontinued a particular battery. You would see people who have systems that use that battery go out and buy a bunch of them in order to extend the lives of those systems for the next few years.

> CIA Lied Over Brutal Interrogations

An “interrogation” is you sit someone down and ask them questions and they answer you or they don’t. When things are being shoved up someone’s ass, that is no longer an “interrogation” — it is an act of torture just like there are acts of rape and acts of murder. Torture has absolutely nothing to do with interrogations, just like rape and murder have nothing to do with interrogations. These people were tortured by agents of the US government solely for the gratification of those agents and the gratification of the architects of the torture program. “Interrogation” is simply the excuse they make, and you are making that excuse for them here for some reason.

So I'm not sure that is progress.

You add all those things you asked for to a Kindle and you get an iPad mini with Retina Display. How could you not know that?

There are a number of book reading apps for iPad that have the features you want. iPad even runs a Kindle app.

> think of the competition if [Apple] built [a Kindle competitor]

You are so right. Kindle hardware sells less than 1 million units per quarter, and iPads sell almost 20 million units per quarter. The Apple book reader totally blows the Kindle out of the water.

> handwriting
> great for note taking

No. No it's not. Handwriting is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW. It's so slow that we don't have time for it anymore. You can type exponentially faster on an iPad virtual keyboard, and faster again on a tiny mechanical keyboard. Even better, use one of the iPad apps that records what is going on around you as audio and timestamps it against what you are typing as notes, so that your notes not only have your own thoughts, but an actual audio recording of what you were taking notes about.

The first thing I do when editing a book is try to get the writer to switch from Microsoft Word (or equivalent word processor) to BBEdit (or equivalent UTF-8 text editor) and teach them to write italics in markdown, and also hyperlinks if they are necessary for the project. It makes the writing easier, it makes including characters from other languages easier, it makes the editing easier, it makes sharing documents easier, it makes backing up documents easier, it makes the original manuscript have longevity so that it can be read or revised years later, and it enables the writer and editor to work on their choice of hundreds of different devices instead of one or two.

There are hundreds of iPad text editors that take all of 15 minutes to learn and be comfortable with, and which just present you with an infinite page you can write UTF-8 text into. That is what a writer should be using to write. Or something very much like it. A quiet place to capture your typing as universally-compatible UTF-8 text.

An iPad with the Wi-Fi off and with a $5 writing app and your favorite Bluetooth keyboard (chosen from about 30,000 options) is a great “digital typewriter.” Many writers have moved their writing to an iPad and their Macs are just for Internet and research and so on. Just having your writing on the iPad screen 24/7, your writing app always frontmost, is a huge benefit. Being able to close the Mac and turn the world off and just write is also a huge benefit.

I like the portability of the iPad, too, but if you always write in the same room at the same desk, it doesn't matter if your digital typewriter is an old DOS machine.

For a long time now, I thought that Linux-on-the-desktop should stop trying to make yet another Mac clone and make novel devices using Linux instead. Like a digital typewrite that George R R Martin would switch to.

> I am a lesbian and I still think hounding Eich for standing for Prop. 8 and threatening to boycott
> a cornerstone of the internet and internet development if he was CEO of the Mozilla foundation
> is complete and utter intolerant bullshit. I am very disappointed with people doing such things
> and disappointed he caved to such.

The thing is, the fact that you are a lesbian doesn't prevent you from being blinded by the straight supremacy that is around you all the time. It doesn't prevent you from collaborating on your own second-class citizen status. It doesn't prevent you from being an Uncle Tom for a gaggle of anti-LGBT frat boys here on Slashdot.

Lucky for me, you can't harm me because:

* I have a constitutionally-protected right to marry
* Eich does not have a constitutionally-protected right to try and stop me

It seems like somehow you missed the results of all the court cases regarding Prop 8? The courts have spoken. The issue has changed radically since 2008 when maybe one could argue that Eich didn't know that what he was doing was 100% hate, 0% politics, and 100% unconstitutional. Now, we know.

The courts looked long and hard and all they found within the “political opinion” that LGBT marriages should be banned was gay-bashing. That's all. No benefit to families of straight people, no benefit to kids, no benefit to society, no nothing inside Prop 8 except straight hate attempting to make LGBT people into second-class citizens. Prop 8 was an organization equivalent to the KKK. We knew it all along, and it was proven in court.

So now Eich and others like him have no right to be pro- Prop 8 anymore and not get shunned for it. The court cases are over. After the divorce, you can't go into your ex-wife's home and get into bed with her like the divorce court case never happened. If you lose your house in court, you can't expect to go into that house tonight and sleep there. After Prop 8 was struck down as violating the Constitution, you don't have a right to continue to support it. Prop 8 has been shown to be nothing more than an attack on the equal Constitutional rights of a minority. Prop 8 is rounding-up-Jews stuff. It's not a legitimate political debate where we argue left-right and figure out a way for the entire community to provide fire fighting services or something that benefits everybody.

I know you think you are nobly defending free speech, but you are not. You are defending a non-existent right to make threats. You are defending a non-existent right to try and promote hatred against a minority. You're defending a non-existent right take other people's Constitutional rights away. And you are declining to defend equal rights. You're declining to defend court findings that told Eich and others like him very sincerely to knock off the hatred and stop threatening LGBT people. You're defending Eich's non-existent right to ignore the courts and the Constitution and continue his attack on LGBT people to this day.

Defending free speech is more complicated than just, “he said something, therefore I defend it.” You have to actually do a little thinking and make sure you're not accidentally defending hate or defending threats or defending an unconstitutional political view. In this case, you are defending all three of those.

Eich had to leave his job as CEO because he was turning Mozilla into a Straight Hate workplace. There would have been no LGBT workers at Mozilla within 6 months. You can't announced to your workers that even though the US Supreme Court has ruled that they all have equal rights, you don't recognize that ruling, and expect the workers to say, “well, I guess the CEO's right to let a brain fart rip trumps my right to equality.” Or, “I guess the CEO's right to ignore the Supreme Court trumps our right to be protected by the Supreme Court.”

Same with a CEO who was unapologetic about his KKK donation, or his NAMBLA donation. Before the court rulings, you could maybe argue that Prop 8 is not KKK or NAMBLA, but the actual court rulings themselves make it clear that it is. Prop 8 is all hate. It was purely about victimizing a minority. You don't have a right to do that in the United States and it is appalling that you would defend it. No matter what your sexuality is.

> Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech.
> And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard .

What kind of bullshit is this?

You don't have to figure anything out. There were YEARS of court cases, including a decision by the US Supreme Court, that figured it out for you. They could not find anything in Prop 8 but hate. There is no benefit that came to anyone from Prop 8. There is no harm that came to anyone from equal marriage. If you didn't know it was wrong to try and outlaw your neighbor's marriage before Prop 8, then you certainly know now. If you were unsure if it was unconstitutional to outlaw your neighbor's marriage before Prop 8, you are certainly sure of it now.

Therefore there is no free speech issue. The political opinion that LGBT people should be prevented by the government from getting married has now been removed from the chess board of American politics. It was never a legitimate political opinion, and that has been very, very well proven by years and years of court cases. You can no longer threaten LGBT people and try to justify it as being part of the political process. That is over. Now your threats are just threats. Threats are not protected by free speech.