re: great British baking show - caster sugar is also hard to find in the US. (you can buy superfine but it only comes in very small bottles and is very expensive)
C&H has superfine sugar in 4 lb packages, but they're the old cardboard milk carton style rather than the paper bag bricks used for granulated. They also have "Bakers Sugar" in fairly large print. Domino also sells it, but the grocery store site I checked only shows it in 12oz plastic bottles.
Or give it a bit longer and you've got icing sugar (or powdered sugar, as I think it's called in the States).
In virtually everything I've baked, though, it works fine to just use granulated. You may have to work a little harder to make sure it's truly all dissolved, that's all.
The other thing you use caster/superfine sugar for is for some cocktails. Basically, it's a lot easier to dissolve in cold (or at least room temperature) liquids than regular granulated sugar is.
I think they've been steadily hollowing themselves out just like the every other American / global company that makes stuff. They don't spend on R&D like they used to, instead they've tried to acquire new products and technology.
It feels like the culture of innovation they built is lagging, and like for many American companies losing their way, I wish they could make a case for a real reinvestment in research with a 10 year payback instead of a next quarter result. This is anecdotal and I've only worked with one division of 3M in the past, but i've seen changes in how they support companies downstream. It may just be how everything is changing everywhere.
They still make good products, and they're consistently very good but always premium priced.
Why do research when you can spend the same amount of money just buying small companies that have researched and innovated?
I'm honestly asking. It doesn't seem like there's any substantial pros to doing the research in-house for a big company like 3m. A top down directive to make use of $new_acquisition's tech every now and then seems easier than fostering a culture of innovation at all times.
I am no expert, but one reason could be that there are certain avenues of research could only be viable for a company with large resources and funding not to mention patience (An example is pharma companies that spends billions and a decade developing a new drug).
It’s funny that you say that about pharmas - I’m not terribly informed but I’ve sure read a lot recently about big pharma following that model quite a lot actually.
A lot of that expensive, longer term research happens at public institutions via public funds. Which then gets commercialized by the university or by a spinoff company from the researchers.
Giving the benefit of expensive, longer term research but in a convenient form where the actual R&D was publicly funded, rather than internal.
One unintended consequence in my district is that we have two guys who trade seats back and forth between state senate and state house. They're totally interchangeable and neither one ever talks to their constituents (well, the ones who don't write big checks anyhow)
It doesn't appear that the quantity of laws on the books or the nanny state are preventing seed stage companies from leaving our stable mature market. There must be something else keeping them here in droves. hmm?
It seems to me the touchbar was just a clever way to get their own processor into their laptops for some large scale real-world testing before they ditch intel and build the entire thing themselves. 2020 is a good guess I'd say.
Maybe the Touchbar was just a "clever" way to prepare all of us for sole touch-based input, which is going to be included in the MBP in 2020. ;-)
P.S.: I don't even think touch-only input is neccessarily a bad idea. All Apple has to do to make it work is to implement some kind of really good haptic feedback which also allows to feel individual keys. I even expected that for this iteration of the MBP for the Touchbar.
Re: your P.S.: If a touch keyboard could give haptic feedback that let us distinguish between a "correct" keypress and a missed one, it might work. Perhaps a pleasant haptic vibration in proportion to how close to center your finger strikes would work.
I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen the "touchbar as a way to get the A-series chips into macbooks" take. It's the most sensible explanation.
Sure, there are downsides to the touchbar (I get it), but I'd suggest we ask this question: where does Apple want to go with the touchbar? Instead of focusing on where it is right now, think about what it could be.
With haptic feedback and perhaps different locations/placement, it has the potential to augment or even transform the ways we interact with the computer.
Put another way, the current problems are not insurmountable. Changing habits is not easy. What if there are better options than current keyboards? All I'm saying is consider what might be in the works.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should blindly accept anything Apple does. But we should not blindly assume that their decisions are based on the worst intentions, either.
Even without the Touchbar, using the T1 for securing the TouchID sensor (amongst the other duties it fulfills) would've been justification enough. So no, that's no excuse for the Touchbar.
Same here, I'm typing this with my late 2013 mbp, this was my first Mac. And it's amazing how it keeps working perfectly just like the first day, I haven't noticed any slowdown, it doesn't have any noticeable hardware issue. I never experienced this with other computer.
Doesn't matter. The crappier keyboard is probably .014mm thinner, which supersedes all other considerations because producing thinner hardware is really really REALLY important to apple.
It's kind of ironic that Marvin is dead and his particular brand of art is no longer progressing. He is silent on the matter and his estate brought the suit.
Ultimately anybody can bring a suit against anybody and this suit wouldn't even be a thing if that dumb blurred lines song wasn't a hit and there wasn't money to be made.
That also being said that song is a straight ripoff of Got to give it up. Everybody who was a fan of Marvin knew it instantly, but if you wrote out the score on a page and compared, the two songs wouldn't match up. Also if you objectively compared the audio files you wouldn't find any samples of the former song in the latter either. I thought they found a clever way around the copyright using the former track as inspiration. perhaps borrowing heavily, but if this is the precedent we really are headed toward a world where nobody can create something without paying a ransom to another copyright holder.
> * That also being said that song is a straight ripoff of Got to give it up. Everybody who was a fan of Marvin knew it instantly, but if you wrote out the score on a page and compared, the two songs wouldn't match up.*
As a fan of neither, I youtubed both songs when I heard about this ruling. If Blurred Lines is a rip off, then a lot of bands should be very worried.
How many times has someone told you "If you like X, you should listen to Y." I was listening to Triple J a couple days ago and a caller requested some song specifically because it reminded them of some other song. Pretty sure it was on Bridgette's program, but could have been Gen and Lewis[1].
The problem with ending it at death is that it gives an incentive to kill the author if you want to rip off their work. The 14+14 (as it originally was) is what I think it should be.
Copyright is a menace to the society. Authors should maybe have a right on their work similar to what 2-clause BSD licence gives: if you reuse or distribute this, mention me please. The complex web of influences on each word spoken and each gesture made, let aside artworks altogether, is so complex that a consistent and just enforcement of copyright is just impossible. It serves no other purpose than making some companies and some greedy agents like the suers here rich, exploiting artists worldwide.
