Yeah, buddy, you might be good at reading scientific papers and research, but you're not so good at reading lawsuits. The suit itself is just a bunch of claims. Evidence is the stuff you present in court. So if you're thinking, "But I'm not a party to this suit, so I don't have access to all the evidence attorneys are planning to present" ... now yer thinkin'.

It's a fair point. I use a Mac, but I pretty much automatically replace the functionality of any of the apps it comes with. It bugs me when Apple announces a major OS release and all the "new features" relate to the bundled apps, all of which, for me, rank no higher than "it'll get you there until you get something better." I even use iTerm instead of the built-in Terminal.

Still, the day-to-day use of macOS is still more pleasurable to me than Windows has been for years, and even though there aren't likely to be any showstoppers for me with Linux, I still don't want to deal with it.

As for Final Cut, years ago Apple did something to screw it up and piss off a lot of the professional video editors who were using it. Maybe they reversed themselves or came up with a fix, but the pro editors I know had no patience to wait for that and moved on to Adobe Premiere, which by then had improved by leaps and bounds.

Good point.

So here's my counter-offer: Instead of an Airtag, put a coupon for 20% off a box of donuts into the car. Make sure to let them know when you report the theft. Now they have double incentives.

No, that was all cars stolen. The point was: Airtag or not, 85% of cars are eventually recovered anyways, and the ones that are not you would most likely not recover even with an Airtag. Or do you really think that the cops will unload and search a container ship because you say there's a ping on your FindMy app?

Why?

First, police have been repeatedly reported as being reluctant to go where owners tell them their hardware has reported in. We've had this with notebooks and smartphones. Second, you don't need Airtags to get location data. My current car is 7 or 8 years old and I can ask it for current location via an App, or make it flash its headlights or honk if I lost it in a huge parking lot. That's ten times more useful than an Airtag. But if thieves were even one bit professional, they of course know these things. They will disable them first. As for Airtags - they have this anti-stalking feature, so if the thief is driving around in your car for a bit, he'll be told that there's an unknown Airtag following him. At which point he'll stop, locate it and you can send the cops to an empty ditch at the side of the road.

Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.

Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.

Along the outside wall you could have the largest graffiti ever. :-)

That's an interesting physics question. Over enough time (a couple years, say), would all the air inside the station spin along with it? My intuition says yes.

But we get away from the topic. It's been an interesting little discussion. Thanks.

We agree that The Line is silly, so not reason to argue that. And one of the reasons it is not just silly but idiotic is the "200m wide" part. There are tons of buildings in pretty much every major city on the planet that are longer than that. So I think we agree that for The Line to be even borderline reasonable, we should at least double that. Let's say 500m. That means if our transport (whatever form it has) runs roughly in the center nobody is further than 250m away from it. Which means with enough stations we can ensure that every place on this Wide Line has one within walking distance. If you're a slow walker or handicapped, just don't pick a home at the very edge.

I think if someone with more time actually thought this through, it could be salvaged as a somewhat working concept. Still silly, but not entirely unworkable.

But isn't that the main fun factor? You could literally skydive for 20 minutes because you only start falling fast near the end. :-)

Scanning or not, it still needs a cop car with at least one cop more motivated to go after a stolen car than after today's 10% off at the donut shop.

I mean yes, technically you are right that reporting it within a day is better than within a week.

But numbers don't lie. The statistics I pulled up just because I like facts say that 85% of stolen vehicles are eventually found and returned to their owners. Mostly because a large number are stolen either for joyrides - and abandoned after a day or two, often within hours - or to use in another crime, think getaway car, again usually abandoned after that.

The 15% that are never found are either stripped for parts or shipped off to another continent.

In other words: What the criminal intends to do with your car is the main factor in whether or not it is found and returned. Most cars are found and returned because the thieves abandon them, not because they are caught.

So yes, technically, you are right. But given the statistics, how much of a difference do you think it makes? By the time you report the theft, in both cases (within a day or within a week), your car most likely has either been abandoned already and is just waiting to be found, or is already in a bodyshop or container. In both cases, you reporting it timely makes little difference.

On the contrary; that's exactly how the entire industry of building contracting works.

Doubtless the Amazon delivery franchisees also absorb most of the liability for undelivered/misdelivered packages.

There's this excellent bridge I have, barely used, it's on sale only today, 30% off. Interested?

You seriously think the police will give a fuck beyond adding one more number plate to their database of "vehicles reported as stolen".

Neom is meant to be futuristic, right?

So here's a concept: Combine trains and pods. There's a high-speed train going every 10 minutes. It consists of carriages going to different destinations. At each destination, the relevant carriage detaches and is diverted to the station, while the rest of the train continues without stopping. The carriage decelerates, stops, people get off and on, and in 10 minutes it will attach itself to the next train passing by, after accelerating on the sidetrack.

Other than that, without any new or innovative stuff, you could have a high-speed train going the whole length with something like 10 stops, and local trains between those stops each with 10-20 local stops.

Is it the most efficient way? Probably not. But is it workable on the same level as current public transport? Yes, absolutely.

And if we ever want to build large-scale space stations, chances are they'll be a torus for artifical gravity, so that's essentially the same thing as The Line except that it's a closed loop.

Check his nightstand for books on how to kill your wife.

Assuming a mathematically idealized city. Meanwhile, in the real world, connectivity trumps distance. The original The Line concept had this linear transport system that might have worked, for two reasons: One, a dedicated high-speed transport is very efficient - compare subways to busses. Two, if everything is along the same axis, there are no missed connections or need to switch to a different line three times. If executed right, the amount of stuff you can access in a given time (instead of distance) could be higher in this concept than in a traditional city.

Basically, The Line takes the basic concept of an urban public transport planner to its extreme: Every location is within X metres of the closest subway station.

There are a hundred reasons why The Line was completely bonkers. But traffic and travel isn't one of them.

Oh, we couldn't agree more. I think smoking should be outright illegal and all tabaco companies need to be dissolved and nicotin added to the list of drugs right next to heroin and cocaine. And while I don't feel so strongly about alcohol, I do think that getting drunk should be shameful, not somehow "cool".

Because there's a whole industry built on diets, which all intentionally do not work because if you just withhold nutrition from the body, the thing your body learns is: "Food isn't always available. Therefore, when it is, eat as much as possible and store as much as possible as fat reserve."

I sincerely doubt that.
I think that you mean is: Nobody knew how to profit from it.

I get you, except that for me it's the other way around. I can forget to eat until I notice I'm hangry and light-headed and then I force myself to eat something. So yes, this is a personal thing that differs between people and I can totally get how that affects life. For me, not going to the office anymore had a huge effect, because in my home office there's no meal time where colleagues come over to ask if I want to join.

Respect.

What I'm not so sure about is if that really applies to everyone. I do see fat people eating large portions and downing one Cola after the other. I'm not sure how many really apply all of those common sense steps. Some, certainly. All? Certainly not.

Ah. I see we are pretty much on the same page there.

We agree on that. I would grant genetics to everything within a let's say +- 20% range. Say roughly the range from 65 to 100 kg for an adult male. Give or take a few kg. But anyone coming in at 150 kg or more - I refuse to believe that's genetics alone. Because normal distributions are a thing. And someone several sigma away from the average is so unlikely that the claim it's a personal deviation needs evidence to be credible.

Thanks. No, seriously. We learn from each other by exchanging opinions and experiences. We don't need to convince each other, but adding more data points to someone else's experiences will adjust their opinions if they are open. You won't convince me, but you've given me things to consider and you've likely moved my views at least some.

I doubt that. I think "genetics" or "medical issues" are a useful excuse more often than they are the actual reason. The known genetics that cause serious obesity are all in the range of "one in thousands", if not ten-thousands.

I'm not saying it's all the fault of the fat people. There is a HUGE part of the blame going to the food industry that creates and promotes stuff that is outright hostile to our health. There is another big share going to fast food and cinemas and other food establishments claiming one litre is a "normal" size for a sugary drink. And there's a share going to education in letting kids who are just starting to get fat off easily instead of forcing them to do sports and endure the humiliations for the chance that they decide it's better to eat less and be more fit than being the laughing stock of the class.

Because yes, some of us have genetics working against them and will fat up more easily than others. Heck, for most of my life I couldn't gain weight even if I tried. I can totally imagine someone having the opposite problem. And if drugs help, sure, why not. Though like all drugs, it should be part of a change, not a replacement. Because the biggest wet dream of the pharma industry is that you keep eating all that shit and become a life-long addic^H^H^Huser of their expensive drug.

It seems we agree on most of this.

I used to run IT at a graphic design firm. For years, the joke was that it was Adobe's market to lose, and they were working on it. However, the one crown jewel was always Photoshop. They could (and did) fuck up Illustrator, they could (and did) fuck up Acrobat, etc... but if they fucked up Photoshop, it would be like downing a whole bottle with a skull-and-crossbones label on it.

Photoshop seems to be doing well today, but there are legitimate alternatives. Clip Studio Paint is much cheaper and has tons of tools to suit illustration work.

I understand that a lot of video editing professionals made the move to Premiere after Apple bungled Final Cut Pro, just like a bunch of publishing pros switched to InDesign when QuarkXPress dropped the ball. But none of this is to indicate there's any shortage of resentment and animosity towards Adobe and how they do business.