Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:
"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."
For sure, and I don't personally recommend that anyone jump on a dot-0 release of anything. But Apple aggressively attacks dot-0 bugs — iOS 11 is already at 11.1.2[1], and I'm running an 11.2 dev release that's been nicely boring for me.
Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.
Motley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-generated.
I was seeing credible copy produced for financial reporting in the late 1990s.
The underlying data are available, the vocabulary is distinctly limited, and the reporting was already highly pro-forma. Mad-libbing a few variants of language and selecting the best of the lot does work fairly well.
That actually raises the underlying question: why publish narrative copy at all in cases such as this, rather than data tables or charts? News and journalism are curiously allergic to data or presenting it in a usable fashion -- I've seen tables essentially written out over several paragraphs that could have been expressed in a few grid squares.
Routine financial news, sports... Anything that can be largely churned out in boilerplate fashion based on some standard facts. This has been done for a while now and it will only increase as long as there's a business model for quickly published, largely undifferentiated, rote stories. It's a low-cost, high-volume game.
I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers).
Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
New York to Chicago via Toronto and Detroit is certainly not the most direct route, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of what is already in place.
VIA Rail advertises that its Toronto to Windsor service is a great alternative to driving and flying. It is 1 hour slower than flight and about equal to driving. Surely they can make some good improvements. EDIT - I just discovered that Ontario has committed to bring the Toronto to Windsor line to 200 km/h by 2025 and 300 km/h by 2031.
A brand-new bridge between Windsor and Detroit has already been approved. Canada is paying for 100% of it, why not add rail capabilities (like the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark)?
The Detroit to Chicago Amtrak line runs at > 100 mph for almost the entire length already (paid for by the "car-friendly" state of Michigan). The major bottlenecks are two counties in Indiana that Pence hates. With him in Washington, he might still find a way to block construction, but then again he might be too busy to get involved in such piddly things anymore.
So basically, you just need to find a good way to speed up the current New York to Toronto Amtrak, which is 12.5 hours to go 350 miles!
Putting rail over the new Detroit/Windsor bridge isn't a particularly good idea (you're not really connecting the stations), but actually crossing the river (neither the Saint Clair nor the Niagara) isn't the problem. The hard problem is solving the border control issue.
You could just put the Toronto HSR station in Hamilton and connect from there to the Toronto metro system assuming it has one. That saves you the "jog". Also I think that the second time you mention Lake Ontario you mean to mention Lake Erie which is the real NY-Detroit obstacle, which is what motivates going through Canada.
Reaching the absolute minimum NY-Chicago travel time isn't necessarily the highest priority because at that distance you're not going to beat a plane and you're probably not going to see same day round trips. Instead making the line economical by including as many people as possible would make the trip cheaper for people who can't afford flying. You could even add stops in Philadelphia and Toledo, which aren't too far off course.
There could also be a desire to push partial-autonomy features in the short term, when Model 3 owners are making the decision day-by-day whether to drive the car completely manually or whether to rely on whatever level of Autopilot is available now or in 2 years. If driving the car without Autopilot is deliberately made to feel weird and akward, more people will turn on Autopilot in more situations.
Partial autonomy really sucks in less than ideal conditions. Like it's raining like mad in poor visibility, the road is atrocious, the marking is weird, ...
Those are the times you don't have the choice but drive yourself and that's also the time you have to fiddle with a lot of option like finding the right speed for the wipers. Nobody like driving in those conditions, and if Tesla makes the experience even worse that will indeed make people regret Autopilot but maybe not in a good way.
Driving manual in a sunny day in country side twisty roads ? You really don't need anything else than the brake, the wheel and accelerator, no matter the car.
I'm more concerned about whether the streetcar running on top of there will ever be more than just a sketch. An extension of the streetcar network in that direction has been proposed, canceled, procrastinated, debated for years but nothing actually happening so far.
"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."