normm

I removed the Siri button and remapped the Caps Lock key to be Esc.  My four general touchbar keys (on the right) are brightness, volume, mute, and play/pause.  These are all pretty useful.  Brightness and Volume are much nicer than real keys, since you can slide continuously to get exactly the value you want in a single motion---you just slide on the buttons themselves, without moving to the slider.  TouchID is also useful, but should work in more situations---I still have to type my password too much.  In general, I think more slider buttons will be the killer app for the touchbar, at least for me.

cgWerks said:

JWSC said:
I’m not disagreeing with what your wrote but, that’s a pretty depressing statement.  As Xi Jinping continues to unwind a lot of the freedoms that the widespread introduction of communications technology introduced to China, I wonder how far Tim Cook’s Apple is willing to go to facilitate the Communist Party’s increasing and stealthy stranglehold on its people.

At what point does Apple say ‘no?’  Or is that the wrong question to ask?  Maybe the better question is, when will the Communist Party realize they can tell Apple to do what ever they want and Apple will roll over and comply no matter how egregious the request.

I'm guessing the bar is pretty low. I think Apple would do about anything, unless it drew too much international outrage. Ethics have become more or less postmodern in the West, so it probably doesn't even cause much cognitive dissonance.

The only real alternative is to stop selling iPhones in China, which still leaves people without the apps that are banned.  A lot of people in the Chinese government would probably welcome this outcome, since it would allow Chinese companies to completely take over the Chinese market.

SpamSandwich said:

The media covers this moronic non-story that is a bunch of politically overblown hype, meanwhile Congress has done exactly nothing over the Equifax hack which affected half the country in a very real way.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is running that investigation, but these days it's being run by its biggest critic, and has completely stopped all actions.  Its head, Mick Mulvaney, requested a budget of $0 for the agency, which returned about $12 billion to consumers for illegal and fraudulent activities in 2016.

It might be more fun to have a series about the post-Foundation-series society of Donald Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis".

xbit said:

iCloud is missing some features that I can’t live without (e.g. selective sync) and OneDrive isn’t reliable enough.

If you select "optimize mac storage" in iCloud Drive preferences, it treats everything that's synced as a cache, and will remove it from local storage on a least-recently-used basis.  That isn't the same as selective sync, but it does mean that you can freely use iCloud Drive to sync big items with other devices, and you don't have to manage their removal from local storage.