Yes, it absolutely is a shit format, but for distributing documents it's a widely deployed lowest common denominator that works for everyone. Unless you're suggesting we go back to fixed width text files (or you can figure out how to get the entire world to immediately start using LaTex) it's probably the best distribution format you're going to see without falling into the xkcd 927 trap.
Ford Mobile Service isn't just for a King Ranch, it applies to anything--it doesn't even have to be a Ford vehicle. They also do concierge pickup/drop off service--when I need an oil change, I just call the dealership, they schedule a pickup, come get the truck out of the parking lot while I'm at work, and bring it back. I typically don't even talk to the the driver, it's full no contact.
They do not charge for this service, and the drivers don't even ask for/expect tips.
The problem is, those rules only applied to "cars". Almost all US car manufacturers have stopped making cars, and the ones they are building are largely big muscle cars, and not fuel efficient ones. Instead, they are building SUVs that aren't "cars" but are classed as "trucks" and exempt
The 1990s called, they want their talking point back. CAFE applies to light trucks (up to 8500lbs GVWR) and was expanded under both the Dubya and Obama administrations, and light trucks are included in the fleetwide averages.
The Microsoft case was brought by the DOJ, which is a far different beast than a class action suit brought by one private entity against another.
It was always said that someone should start pushing against the grotesquely unbalanced copyright laws by just breaking stuff and challenging the norms
Come on. I agree wholehearted that the current copyright regime is horribly broken, but the morons at the Archive didn't "start pushing against unbalanced copyright laws" they simply decided those laws were null and void because reasons. This did nothing to advance their mission and everything to undermine it, that's fucking stupid.
The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending.
That's certainly one way of describing what happened. Another, more accurate, way would be to point out that the morons at the Archive decided to ignore that whole "one copy at a time" bit "because Covid" and gave the publishers a set of facts for their lawsuit that would not have supported their position any better if they'd been purposefully designed to do so.
Your romanticizing of "the government only allows so many yellow cabs so the artificial scarcity leads to medallion costs spiraling ever upward" is fucking bizarre.
Before the 'ride share' apps, taxi cab drivers was a highly paid position.
That's horseshit. People who owned the medallions made money leasing them to people who would work their fingers to the bone to cover the costs of their leases and support their families. You also ignore that most taxi companies weren't running medallion taxies with the right to pick up a hail, but rather "private cars" that had to be dispatched to a pickup location by law. More on those later.
The badge that let you drive a cab in NYC sold for $1 million dollars. You would drive it yourself 1/3 the day, then hand the cab off to employees. You would make enough in 10 years to buy another badge, then in 5 years get a third, etc etc. Your employees would save up for 15 years to buy their first badge and start the process over again.
Ignoring that "employee driving a taxi has a million dollars in savings after 15 years" would be the exception and not the rule, that sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.
The apps charge you money which you think goes to the driver. Nope, most of it goes to the company. They pay the driver barely enough for the gasoline, car payment, and insurance. They expect the driver to make a profit from their 'tip', treating them as a waiter, rather than the owner of the equipment that makes the business possible.
Remember those "private car" services I mentioned above? Other than them typically owning the vehicles rather than the drivers, this is exactly how they operated. My mother drove for one in the mid 80s after her brokerage went bankrupt and she was looking for a new firm. My aunt was a dispatcher for another one for years. The drivers got shit pay and no benefits.
Despite your claims, the "ride sharing" (I think we can at least agree that part is total bullshit) companies have not meaningfully enshitified taxi services. They were always shitty.
I'm trying to wean myself off it, honestly !
Good luck with that, I've been trying for decades.
Buy they can make an 11-inch ipad and sell it for $350. Are you really suggesting that they can't put that into a clamshell form factor for $600?
I live in semi-rural eastern Tennessee and our schools have 1:1 laptop policies with district provided and managed equipment. What school district out there is requiring parents to buy devices like that in this day and age?
Why not just plug your phone into a monitor/keyboard/Ethernet dock via a Thunderbolt connection?
That would work, except the SSD is too small,
the screen is too small, those aren't full keyboards,
and uh oh yeah WRONG OPERATING SYSTEM.
Phones won't run 90% of the apps I use.
But CPU-wise, it would be plausible.
I mean, Thunderbolt in phones isn't a thing, but the rest? iPhone 17's SSD is 256GB which is the same size as our standard corporate laptops (and without the 100GB of Windows bloat) so claiming "SSD is too small" is an odd claim to make. If you're docked to external peripherals, "screen too small, shitty on screen keyboard" is similarly a strange complaint. "Wrong OS" is only applicable if you have some specific application stack you need to run. If it's just "I sent email and push spreadsheets around" then ios and android are totally fine.
There is a very large swath of office type workers who "dock your phone" would work fine for.
A USB hub is just annoying to lug around and even more annoying to assemble.
I like still having one or two USB-A ports on my laptop, but I can't say I've ever been annoyed by having to "lug around" a USB hub (with a gigabit ethernet interface) in my laptop bag. It weighs around an ounce.
I also think the article complaining about shit like mice, keyboards, and headsets is a bit out there, since any of this crap connected to my laptop is connected via bluetooth which has been around over a quarter of a century and has been ubiquitous in laptops for at least 15 years.
"There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone,"
Bullshit. **cough** Israel's "Pegasus" **cough**
I agree that the claim is eye-roll inducing, but you could have at least read the next sentence before replying with the exact thing that it references.
As I said, that's decidedly possible, and I agree that knowing who is actually doing useful work is definitely more important that knowing that you have bloat in the first place. Taking a chainsaw to the org is probably not going to have a positive outcome.
The more likely truth in this case, is that the CEO simply doesn't realize what he'll be doing to his company, until it's too late.
That's decidedly possible, but when it involves one of these multi-billion dollar "startups" I'm very inclined to believe most of their employees aren't actually doing anything useful. Uber having >30k employees would be an example of this.
"Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Winston Churchill
