Sure, he wasn’t an engineer, so no, Jobs never personally “invented” anything. But Jobs at least knew what was good and what was shit when he saw it. Under Tim Cook, Apple just keeps putting out shitty unimaginative products, Cook is allowing Apple to stagnate, a dangerous thing to do when they have under 10% market share.

I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t forced to go ARM when I built that machine.

Officially, it didn’t, but actually it did. Officially it was the OS updates that made everything incompatible (and it did make more than half of my steam library incompatible) but it was those OS updates that were needed to support the new arm hardware.

So look at it however you want I guess, but there are a bunch of 4-15 year old games that run just fine on my windows PC, but no longer launch on my iMac. That’s not impressive backwards compatibility.

Oh yeah, render most of their already small software library incompatible for a 50% performance boost. It’s a sizable boost for sure, but not exactly looking at the big picture…

Die apple. All your innovation and vision died with Steve Jobs, now you’re a shambling corpse infecting everything you touch. Just die, it’s time…

We can start farming these computers to feed our ever growing population. We just need to build a simulation they can live in, so they don’t get stale.

Yeah, OLED isn’t really the best choice for an e-reader.

There’s a reason e-ink is a thing.

Which is a good argument for regulation. Regulation prevents industry from doing things that may be in their individual best interest but are against public best interests or the best interests of the industry as a whole.

In my experience, as you increase the quality level of a jpeg, the compression level drops significantly, much more than with some other formats, notably PNG. I’d be curious to see comparisons with png and gif. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new jpeg compresses better at some resolutions, but not all, or with only some kind of images.

We are in space near the sun… And we have successfully used solar as far out as Jupiter.

Haha, no I didn’t account for lunar eclipses, but that lasts what, 2 hours?

But yeah, not falling over definitely improves the whole mission. No argument there.

Would it barely work, or would it always work?

If you plan to land on the pole, at a high altitude, you could potentially have direct line of sight to the sun 24/7 all year round. From the ground, the sun would appear to travel left to right along the horizon, making a full circle over the course of a month. You just need your solar panels pointed to the sides, not up.

However, if they aren’t directly on the pole, they could still plan their landing to be in a location that gets sunlight for 15 earth days straight, with 0 interruption. As that might be more than the necessary time period for their experiments, that’s probably perfect. And that doesn’t even require being at a high elevation.

Also, being on the pole doesn’t result in dimmer sunlight than on the equator like it would on earth. No atmosphere means the poles get the same completely unfiltered sunlight.

Look, the vast majority of lunar landers (and there have been quite a few) have used solar power, it’s the obvious choice in space.

I really don’t understand the tall moon lander strategy… I mean, if you’re going to design it with a high center of gravity, then design it to fall over… Just use two landing legs instead of four, to ensure it falls over the right way. Then you put the solar panels on the side, so that when it topples over they’re facing up.

I’ve literally done this in Kerbal space program, it’s a pretty reliable landing system if your probe is tall.

Eh… I think they should stick to solar power. Given how much trouble they’ve been having, let’s not give them any weapons grade isotopes…

For what it’s worth, just last week, Firefly stuck the landIng on their first attempt. They’re seriously killing it these days, I’m happy for them.

But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?

Apple has a history of being the good guys when it comes to issues of encryption. As a rule, they want to keep your privacy (and theirs). But they also want to continue operating in many countries, and when something like this happens, they may fight it in court, but if they lose, they won’t pull out of the region, they’ll find a way to comply.

In other words, this is a problem with national governments. They need to stop asking app and os developers to do unethical things, there’s enough pressure for them to do that already.

And who knows maybe it also shuffles these developers down a slippery slope… Maybe developers figure “if we must spy on users, we’ve already lost their trust, we might as well make a profit from it”. And that leads us to the relationship we have with technology today, our tech is untrustworthy, we feel the oppression of the surveillance state and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Why do people keep trying to do this? The fact is, you can’t beat good encryption and you can’t beat the Internet.

As soon as a country outlaws an app like this, users will simply not be able to download it “officially”. They’ll have to set up an Internet proxy or vpn, and then download it… It may take an extra 10 minutes to install.

They can’t block this… So why try?

I don’t deny the utility of a smartphone or PCs for that matter. My issue is with framing a techology device as a sort of metaphysical source of “liberty” and “empowerment”. Any tool can be used for bad or for good, it’s all up to us. There are pro/cons to digital hardware and services.

Hmm, that’s kinda interesting. I mean, I wonder what your definition of personal empowerment is? Like, to me if a tool isn’t the perfect example of empowerment, then I didn’t know what is. Like, on a desert island, once you have a blade, you can start to build yourself a shelter, etc. The blade can certainly be used for ill pursuits, but isn’t it still empowering? Hell, isn’t giving you the option of using it for evil also empowering? (Albeit empowering you to commit evil)

But I do see what you mean, the smartphone is a double edged sword. It’s easy to see all the ways that it did not change society for the better.

Also, I like your analogy to industrialization, spot on.

I mean, a smartphone is a computer that people can afford and anyone can figure out how to use. Computers are definitely tools of empowerment and liberty. As a computer it’s a general purpose information tool, you can do nearly anything with it. For instance, you could look up information, communicate with people, take a class, design a website, run a business, do your taxes, keep a journal, borrow books, apply for a job, play games, sign forms, watch movies, read the news, write a book, check the weather, and literally thousands of other things. You might even say, whatever you want to do, there’s an app for that.

I don’t think calling smartphones a tool for empowerment and liberty isn’t really a stretch at all. Some people may not be old enough to remember when nobody had one, if that’s the case, then trust me, it was a different society then.

You can’t legislate piracy away…

For what it’s worth, this is how Google maps has always worked. Use Google maps in China and you’ll notice that borders are in different places, HK, Tibet Bhutan, the whole China sea, those are within China’s borders. It’s the same with Russia, crimea is just part of Russia if you use Google maps in Russia. If your country recognizes different borders or different names for places, that’s what Google shows you in your country. It’s basically either that or they can’t operate in that country, so they don’t really have a choice if they want to exist in that region.