I was in Barcelona when this happened, trying to hail a taxi to get to the airport for a flight to Madrid. Taxis essentially stopped picking up rides because the card readers did not work. I had some euros on me (typical cost was 34 euros to the airport from where I was staying). He won't do it until I offered him 45. On the ride there, I understood- roads were a mess. Ended up taking a long route there to get to BCN. Most of the restaurants/stores were open, but they only wanted cash (and, of course, most didn't have hot food).

Amazingly, the flight from BCN to Madrid did happen, albeit a few hours late (w/ a rather long delay on a fully boarded plane). Madrid airport was still working. Both airports were running on generators. Cellular was flakey and wifi was worse. My ride from the airport may have shown up, who knows, the app I was suppose to use wasn't working and phone calls didn't connect. Ended up standing in a line for a taxi (four hour line, mind you). By that time, the power had come back on in Madrid. Mostly, Still had to pay cash for the taxi since the readers still were not working and that was 11pm local time. BCN lost power early afternoon.

All in all, I was impressed. No one seemed to panic and just took it in stride. Many seemed happy to have a day off, actually. The tourists, on the other hand, bitched a lot. One old Brit lady started bitching at me for the taxi line. I smiled and said, no one else is complaining as much as you. She looked at me with disgust and wandered away.

I saw something I haven't seen in 20 years. I was at the Rambla Raval plaza (trying to hail a taxi) and there were a lot of people. No one was looking at a phone. It was a delight.

The latest macOS update (15.3.2) did not turn on AI (unlike 15.3.1 which did). Not sure if I like the inconsistency or not. I'll ask Siri... sigh.

If you can read, I don't have a problem with people finding and downloading the app. And I refuse to grow up, since I would then be rude like you.

I worked w/ a guy from Harvard. He was dumber than a door knob. So, I challenge the idea Harvard educates. I say reduce to 100 freshmen a year.

Why is no one mentioning the Apple tax: 30% take on anything (which you can get down to 15% if you jump through numerous hoops with Apple) and $99/year developer fee? The later so you can have the privilege of submitting an app for review and, assuming it doesn't get rejected, Apple will host it for you while burying it the App Store so it's impossible to find.

I write apps because there is an itch to scratch. All of them are free (and source hosted on GitHub). One, ironically the most popular, was rejected from the App Store because, quote "limited user appeal". Yeah, ok. That app has been download over 40,000 times and it basically fixes an Apple bug of wondering icons on the Desktop. That taught me Apple doesn't really understand their (Mac) user base.

That app, along w/ others, has a discrete Donate link to PayPal. Since I added that link, I've brought in about 4k over three years. Nothing to retire on, but other than 3-7% cut to PayPal, I get the rest. Apple would want 30% of donations on a free app (in addition to their $99/year). Yeah, no. At least the donations have covered the annual Apple fee and my hosting costs. While Xcode may be free (so what, gcc/clang is too), the requirement of having a Mac certainly isn't.

While I agree most apps are useless, there are gems. But the Store owners have no incentive to highlight these. I almost miss the days when Apple would 'soon be out of business' and the users gathered together to support each other and Apple by writing tons of free software. How quickly the company forgot.

Honest

No, just kidding. They need to settle the writers' strike so they can stop this nonsense. Only thing I watch on broadcast TV is PBS, old reruns of Star Trek/Columbo and sports. The rest just numbs the mind too much.

Even worse than saying NIF is going to produce electricity. How about getting a scientist to run DOE?

Teller continued to push for SDI (ie Star Wars) in 1996 after congress swung to the republicans. I actually had an email exchange with him at the time. I argued SDI was a bad idea: 1) no way to test the software required if a full scale launch was made and so 2) it would give political people an unrealistic idea that nuclear war was survivable/winnable thereby increasing the risk of such a war. He never addressed either point directly, though he implied the software wasn't the problem. Bit later Scientific America had an article making the same point about the software.

As for Oppenheimer, he didn't publish much, but he was quite brilliant. At that time, there wasn't many Americans who knew quantum mechanics well, but he did know who knew what. Herding a bunch of cats is not an easy task.

He couldn't get Teller to concentrate on the bomb once Teller realized the 'super' (i.e. hydrogen fusion bomb) was possible.

so, we should not remove cancerous cells? they are living, are they not? who are you to draw the line?

from the guardian: "Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”."

So the publisher and the owners of the story decided to change it. Leftists! Grow up.

yeah, Burbank is a hot bed of leftists. did you read the Newsweek article? rich white boy acting bad and so blames a book.

At least the leftists could ban the Bible in Utah. woo woo, progress everyday.

it's called a fetus. infanticide was and still is illegal. go buy a dictionary AC.

I spent almost 2 months roaming around in Spain late last year. In the five AirBNB/VRBO we rented, they all had smart TVs and everyone one, except one, had someone logged into Netflix (and no, it wasn't the owner), HBOMax, or etc.. So, some of this is not 'sharing', it's simply people forgetting to tell the smart TV to forget their credentials.

It was a minor adventure to find out what free streaming services we would get when we got to the next rental.

Richard Feynman came to the conclusion that quantum computers could spend zero energy for computation. The only energy expense was to input the data and extract the result. I believe all QC algorithms are reversible. His Lectures on Computation have the details...