I have been to Orlando (so DisneyWorld/Universal Studios) several times in the last few years. Last month I went to Disneyland for the first time and got to experience Star Wars Land.

I was not at all impressed with Star Wars Land. I turned to the friend I was with and said "Yeah, this is cool, but does not hold a candle to Harry Potter World" (in Orlando).

Harry Potter World is probably the best thing to compare it to, and HPW is completely immersive. Yes, you are in an amusement park, but it really feels like you are on set. There are several rides in HPW. The train between the two parks is amazingly well done. SWL, on the other hand, feels... artificial. It feels hastily put together, without any sense of flow or identity. You still feel like you are in an amusement park.

I am a huge Star Wars fan. That said, I would go back to HPW many times before I consider returning to SWL.

I worked Apple retail before going on to work at two different Apple Specialists (the highest level of AASP - Apple Authorized Service Provider). I now work for a another company and one of my tasks is the occasional job of taking Apple machines in for repair.

At this point, the number of Apple machines I have dealt with that were going through the AppleCare repair process number in the tens of thousands, I would guess. In all of that time, I have not once seen an AppleCare coverage denied because of third-party RAM installed by the end user. Not a single time.

Your statement is verifiably incorrect by the thousands of other people who have had the same experience as mine.

California receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid

It's a "donor" state, but not by much.

Get off my lawn!

I belive I signed up 3 Sept 1998. I have another 11 months until my 20th anniversary of my account. I had been reading for a bit before that though.

Every now and then there is an article like this and us two, three, and four digit UID users come out of the attic to yell at all the Johnny-come-latelys.

And where did the "government agency" get the money from?
That's right, the taxpayers.

Generally, no. The business is fined a multiple of the wages illegally not paid, and the employee is paid from those.

So, the employee is paid by the employer, and the rest of the fine goes towards funding the government agency.

How exactly does one "plan on going" private in Ontario with health care when providing private health care is essentially illegal?

Private dental, mental, and prescription coverage, but you can go private for many doctors, too.

I use EQ virtual, but there are other apps that can basically do the same thing. It's illegal to see Ontario doctors for a fee, but it's perfectly fine to see doctors from any other province, and for $50 I can be seen in an hour or two. I also see clinics when I travel to the US - it's cheaper to pay the doctors to prescribe me medication there and fill it there than it is to fill it here. Plus, the clinics are willing to actually prescribe things like migraine medication and ADHD medication without simply telling me that I'll have to see a specialist, where I have to wait 3 months just to get an appointment.

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.

Reimplementation also gives people the option to choose their own license. As developers, it's all too easy to succumb to "not invented here" syndrome, but there are sometimes very legitimate reasons to re-write things, even if they do exactly the same thing as existing solutions.

I have started declining to tell my current salary. I explain that my offer should be related to the value I bring to the company, not based on previous work at another company.

I went through a screening process a couple of years ago with an enterprise level company. A recruiter reached out to me about a position that looked appealing to me. One of my first questions to the recruiter was the salary range for the position. It was right in line with what I was expecting, and I replied that the range was satisfactory.

During the phone screen (done by the recruiter, not the hiring manager), I passed all of her questions. Towards the end she had some background questions, including my current salary. I explained that I was unwilling to divulge that information, but that I found the agreed salary range to be acceptable.

The recruiter explained that she could not continue the screen without that information. When I explained that I declined again, she hung up on me.

Since then I have spoken to other people that work for the company, and they have nothing good to say about working for the company. So I guess my policy paid off.

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!