I recently finished reading His Majesty’s Airship, which focuses specifically on the R101 development and disaster, but also more broadly on the entire history of rigid airships through the 1930s. The recurring theme is that people want airships to work so they keep trying. A new design comes along that promises to fix the problems from before and it’s fine for a while, until there’s a problem like, say, a strong breeze, and dozens of people die in a horrible crash. I want airships to make a comeback. The basic idea of something that floats and you merely need to push around with some propellers sounds great. I’m not terribly optimistic about it though. The weather is a real problem. Planes and ships and trains and trucks can all function even in an outright storm; airships inevitably require fair weather. Worse still, if they’re outside a hangar when the weather starts getting bad, they're stuck. They can’t get into a hangar before it gets worse because the very act of getting in a hangar for protection requires extremely precise control with no chance of sudden gusts that could shove it into the ground or the sides of the hangar. Extra propellers to maneuver can do only so much; they’re not magic. Major advances in weather forecasting in recent years maybe mean there are more situations where an airship could be safely used, with greater confidence of agreeable weather for the duration of the trip, but you’re certainly not going to build a freight business model on “sorry, let’s try again next week."

And yet that provision is itself still part of the constitution so really an amendment just needs to have an initial sentence to override that limitation first. If there’s actually support for a change, anything can be changed.

Because we have an elected government. If the government causes somebody a loss, voters, and by extension their representatives, and by extension, the government itself, wants to make them whole. Without allowing lawsuits, the only option is passing individual laws for each possible claim, and also creating a way to adjudicate those claims. We already have courts to handle the exact same kinds of issues between private parties. Congress decided to let it apply to the government too, when appropriate.

How ‘Dark Fate’ Visual Effects Team Brought ‘Terminator’ Stars Back to the ’90s

For the flashback sequence in Dark Fate, the team did digital head replacement on younger actors who functioned as body doubles and were filmed on set. The digital work started with a scan of each original actor. Then the team used a markerless facial capture system called Anyma, developed by Disney Research, to capture each actor’s performance.

Apple Pay charges much higher rates than competing payment processors.

Apple Pay isn't a payment processor. It's a system for banks to provisional additional cards on their customer's devices, which are then processed the same way and for the same fees as tapping the physical card.

Banks want direct access to the NFC because they want to bully people into making their app the default handler for payment cards. One of the great things about Apple Pay is that all banks must compete as equals for every transaction. It's trivially easy to switch which card you use when you pay and every card gets the same best user experience.

Forcing NFC open is, paradoxically, anti-competitive, because it makes it easier for the biggest banks to stop competing and instead lock their customers in.

The whole argument is ridiculous because it's only the messages that you wrote and sent that are even on a blue or green color. The messages you read are always on the same light gray background regardless of how they sent.

RCS does not support end-to-end encryption, only Google's proprietary extension does. Google has been simultaneously promoting RCS as a "standard" while prominently advertising a non-standard feature.

I'm short of time so I haven't found the original complaint but according to the appeals court ruling, the plaintiffs never claimed any actual damages. The heading of the law in question is "Violating right of privacy—Civil action—Liability for damages."

Is this a privacy violation? Yes. Did these people suffer any actual damages under the law? Evidently not.

What a terrible idea. I'm glad they shelved this project. It also runs counter to Apple's other projects with Goldman Sachs. The Apple Card was supposed to make it easy to see what you were spending your money on and encourages you to pay off your debt and avoid paying interest. The savings account obviously encourages saving money. Encouraging people to invest in individual stocks is grossly irresponsible. Humans are not high-frequency trading computers; we're terrible at actively choosing stocks. Even full-time professionals are really bad at it. Broad portfolio index funds and similar instruments are not fun, but they are a sound place to actually invest your money.

I think it may have something to do with the fact that the UK is far along in a plan to effectively ban encrypted messaging, and many other countries are looking in the same draconian direction. They want non-techy users (AKA voters) to know about it and to understand that it's super important.

The criminal justice system is intended to be biased in favor of the defendants as innocent until proven guilty. Consequently, if everything were working perfectly, I'd expect prosecutors to only charge people if they were extremely confident that they could prove the person's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Taking cases without solid evidence and regularly losing at trial would be indicative of a major problem.

Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly?

Because it’s not? A low-power process on my phone is listening for the wake word. When it hears other stuff, it ignores it. When it hears the wake word, it processes my request, tied to a separate anonymous identifier used only for Siri itself. I’m not really losing any privacy at all.

And as a side note, is there a way to kill Siri completely on IOS (not just go trough all app settings and disable siri there)?

It’s just the first two toggles (Listen for “Hey Siri” and Press Side Button for Siri) in the Siri & Search menu that you’d need to turn off. There’s not much to it.