Linked List: October 12, 2016

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Rene Ritchie:

You’ll be able to hear a deeper discussion on this between Michael Gartenberg, Serenity Caldwell, special guest James Thomson, and myself on the Apple Talk podcast very soon, but here’s the consensus: Restore the developer account associated with Dash and put Dash back on the App Store. Leave the linked account banned. Monitor Dash going forward the way any other app has been monitored. And that’s it.

I think Apple already threw him his lifeline and he decided to tie it around his neck. Apple offered to do just what Rene is asking them to do, and in return only wanted Popescu to explain the circumstances that led Apple to reasonably (and perhaps correctly) assume both accounts were his.

Update: Dash developer Bogdan Popescu has given his “full story” in a statement to iMore, blaming his mother for the App Store fraud.

Samsung’s Explosion-Proof Note 7 Return Packaging ★

Here’s a clever design that Samsung didn’t copy from Apple.

‘Packed It With So Much Innovation’ ★

The concluding paragraphs of Brian X. Chen and Choe Sang-Hun’s report for The New York Times on how Samsung came to the decision to completely abort the Galaxy Note 7:

“It was too quick to blame the batteries; I think there was nothing wrong with them or that they were not the main problem,” said Park Chul-wan, former director of the Center for Advanced Batteries at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute, who said he reviewed the regulatory agency’s documents.

It did not help that the hundreds of Samsung testers trying to pinpoint the problem could not easily communicate with one another: Fearing lawsuits and subpoenas, Samsung told employees involved in the testing to keep communications about the tests offline — meaning no emails were allowed, according to the person briefed on the process.

Mr. Park said he had talked with some Samsung engineers but none seemed to know what happened, nor were they able to replicate the problem. Replication would have been quick and easy if the problem was with the chip board and designs, he said.

“The problem seems to be far more complex,” Mr. Park said in a phone interview. “The Note 7 had more features and was more complex than any other phone manufactured. In a race to surpass iPhone, Samsung seems to have packed it with so much innovation it became uncontrollable.”

“Packed it with so much innovation it became uncontrollable” is a very odd quote to include. This sounds more like a statement from Samsung PR than from an objective outsider. And you would think that a company-wide edict to keep all communication about the investigation offline would merit more than a passing reference.

The Gender Divide ★

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight:

But it seems fair to say that, if Trump loses the election, it will be because women voted against him. I took a look at how men and women split their votes four years ago, according to polls conducted in November 2012. On average, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 7 percentage points among men, about the same as Trump’s 5-point lead among men now. But Romney held his own among women, losing them by 8 points, whereas they’re going against Trump by 15 points.

That’s the difference between a close election — as you’ll remember, those national polls in late 2012 showed the race neck-and-neck — and one that’s starting to look like a blowout.

Includes rather stark maps showing what the Electoral College would be like if only women voted (massive Clinton landslide) or if only men voted (solid win for Trump).

John Scalzi: ‘Trump, the GOP, and the Fall’ ★

John Scalzi:

But note well: Donald Trump is not a black swan, an unforeseen event erupting upon an unsuspecting Republican Party. He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon and to drive them by dangling carrots that they only ever intended to feed to the rich. Trump’s road to the candidacy was laid down and paved by the Southern Strategy, by Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, by Fox News and the Tea Party, and by the smirking cynicism of three generations of GOP operatives, who have been fracking the white middle and working classes for years, crushing their fortunes with their social and economic policies, never imagining it would cause an earthquake. […]

But they don’t control Trump, which they are currently learning to their great misery. And the reason the GOP doesn’t control Trump is that they no longer control their base. The GOP trained their base election cycle after election cycle to be disdainful of government and to mistrust authority, which ultimately is an odd thing for a political party whose very rationale for existence is rooted in the concept of governmental authority to do. The GOP created a monster, but the monster isn’t Trump. The monster is the GOP’s base. Trump is the guy who stole their monster from them, for his own purposes.

Remember that a year ago, no one in the Republican establishment thought Trump had a chance of winning the primary — and then he wound up winning it rather easily. His path to the Republican nomination was actually easier than Hillary Clinton’s.

Democracy is entirely based on political compromises. The Trumplican base sees any sort of compromise as a betrayal.

See also: Scalzi’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, every single word of which I agree with.