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None of this woosy pushing and shoving they do today.

None of this woosy pushing and shoving they do today.

The AT&T breakup dealt with the long distance phone monopoly (MCI was using microwave transmitters to send voice over the long distance leg, turning a long distance call into two local calls plus their microwave hop; hence their name - Microwave Communications Inc). It didn't touch the government-granted local phone monopolies. Each region still had just one phone company which owned the lines and provided service. The AT&T breakup just made it so most long-distance calls went between two different phone companies, instead of within a single company.

Yeah they allowed local phone competition, but all the competitors had to use the monopoly phone company's phone lines. The monopoly company exploited this to drag service and repair requests for competing companies out for days, even weeks. And the customer would get mad at the competitor they were using, instead of at the monopoly phone company who owned the lines. I had to deal with this BS when setting up T1 service at a business. The service was with Speakeasy, but they leased the line from Verizon since Verizon was the monopoly phone provider in the area. The line had problems every time it rained. Speakeasy would take my service request immediately and submit a repair ticket with Verizon. Verizon would drag it out for a week, and when they tested the line a week later (when it was no longer raining), miracle of miracles! The line would test just fine and they would close the ticket. This went on for years until while upgrading service I just happened to get a call from Speakeasy and the Verizon service rep wiring the new line while it was raining. I immediately asked him to test it, and sure enough it was drowning in static. That got them to finally admit the line was faulty and send someone out to find the problem and fix it.

That's what's going on here. Frontier is the government-anointed monopoly service provider for the area. Because they own the lines, when their service quality sucks because of poor line quality, every DSL provider's service sucks equally because they're all using Frontier's lines. So Frontier has no incentive to repair or upgrade their lines. It doesn't impact the competitiveness of their business, and fixing things would just cost them more money The government agency regulating their monopoly (your state's public utilities commission) is supposed to make them behave, but they're largely ineffectual.

The way the local phone service should be done is like gas or electric service. You don't want a rat's nest of lines like India, so you do want only one company installing lines. That monopoly company installs and maintains the gas and power lines, but they're prohibited from selling gas or electricity. Instead, you can buy your gas and electricity from dozens/hundreds of companies selling those products. They all pay a transmission fee to the monopoly company, all of them paying the same fee. The fee is regulated by the PUC who looks into the monopoly company's financials each year to guarantee they're making only a certain percentage profit.

The failure of government regulators to set up phone service this way makes this squarely a failure of government regulation. If you were willing to have the rat's nest of lines and followed the Libertarian model allowing competing phone services, any company not maintaining and upgrading their lines would be committing economic suicide, and would die off. Only the companies which maintained their lines would survive.

If you look at diffusion tensor MRI volume scans, you get a set of voxel cubes that have direction gradients in them. With all those bundles of nerve connections, things can go wrong - disconnections, tumours, abnormal blood vessels. You could get an artist and some whizzy volume cube editing software to cut and paste some abnormality from one image to another in a Photoshop way. But it's quicker to use a pair of GAN's to generate these images.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-ph...

Travel to space with a holey space craft.

So that's what it was about... He added an extra character by mistake?

When I was in college, I did a semester abroad trip to Greece and Italy. One of the Greek guides explained that contractors dig up ruins all the time in Athens; it's impossible to dig a metro line without it happening. (Here's one example of a metro line running right through ruins of Ancient Athens.)

The guide told us that Greek law requires that contractors notify the Ministry of Culture immediately when ruins are found. They then come out, inspect the site, and after a couple years, either give the contractor a waver to remove the ruins or provide them an alternative plan for building around them. Contractors will often collect the ruins they find and keep them at their private residences, because it takes way too much time to let the Ministry of Culture to have their way.

This! This got me upset. I'm not a member of the IAU, but an amateur who has a degree in physics and has taken astronomy, astrophysics and planetary geology courses at the graduate level.

Astronomers play politics.... this one got nasty. Then NASA got involved, then celebrities and it snowballed. I still answer 9 when asked how many planets there are by a kid when he looks through my telescope. Most people I know do too... including professors of astronomy... but there is a small minority who loves beating you over the head when you make this error and somehow fail their mental Jeopardy game on a technicality. I call them dumb smart-asses.

If the classification system was logical, consistent and broadly accepted by the larger IAU, I would go along with it. But Pluto is a thorny subject... transneptunians are a problem of classification in general and will continue to be more so as we learn more about the solar system. Why not wait until we have a better classification system? Why play politics and demote Pluto in the popular consciousness so early?

I would have been on the other side of the fence and allowed more objects into the planet club. It gets people excited and interested in astronomy. Then when it gets ridiculous (15+ planets), bring in a more rigid planet definition and end up with 8 or 9. I would have no problems with this approach.

But self important committee members being what they are, gave us a shock political demotion followed by a witch hunt for hold out heretics. Most astronomers remain heretical, but silent.

Just my two cents.

I leave you this for your enjoyment about the past political antics astronomers have been known to partake in when the discovery credit for a planet was at stake:

  Le Verrier vs Adams

A big issue is this: Coal has been steadily automating its mining systems. In 1950 underground mining was at the rate of 0.68 tons per man hour and surface mining was at the rate of 1.9 tons/manhour. By 2011 underground mining was at the rate of 2.76 tons/man hour and surface mining was at 8.8 tons/man hour. There were productivity peaks in 2003 of 4.04 and 10.75 tons/man hour.

Pretty much this. It is nothing short of amazing how quickly a few men can tear a mountain apart to extract the coal in it. I had a lot of relatives that worked in coal back in the day. Now, not one. Even jobs you would think were safe have been eliminated by just making the machines bigger. Like this http://www.mining.com/belaz-la...

A mere 450 tonne payload, twin turbo diesels, and 65 Km/Hr speed. These trucks can be filled by the likes of "Big Muskie" (no longer in service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which could do 220 cubic yards per scoop. We can build 'em as big as you want - in fact bigger than most mines will ever need

The only way that the Trumpian/Miner coal jobs wet dream will ever materialize is by returning to the good old days of this: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/af/2... , this, https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DAHJ... and this https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Gains in employment will be obtained by using mules in the mines, making the use of steam drills and jumbos and road headers illegal, just human and mule power, picks and shovels.

Otherwise, as you point out, coal mining is pretty darn automated. This is yet another "jerbs, Jerbs, JERBS! event, where people who might not think out the whole situation are promised jerbs, and are pursuaded to vote for people who have no intention of making jobs for them, or perhaps aren't thinking either.

The math is simply not there.

Are they labeled that way? No?

Yes they are, though they use words so I can see why you're confused.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki...

http://kfgo.com/blogs/ask-a-tr...

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/e889...

My taxes paid for that road as well.

You mean your mom's taxes, unless you have one heck of a paper round.

Have you tried walking into Area 51 or a nuclear sub base using the same logic?

"I don't think Chris is trying to make a "quick buck" here."

No, Chris, more like a "slow dime". Which you've done admirably.

"He spent three years building up a PM channel from scratch"

Yeah, and it looks like a hobby thing, Chris. Again, that's fine, but it's not this amazing retirement scheme, is it?

" before turning his attention back to his author channel."

Speaking of which, is this your third delay of your haiku book?

" That's dedication."

Sure, but so is this.

You must have a short driveway.

"hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums." Not so in this 1600's engraving of Isaac Newton. Nor in even older paintings. Even its wild progenitor, Malus sieversii is of similar size to modern apples.

American apples typically were smaller and sour. These are the apples that made Johnny Appleseed famous and they were mostly used for making apple cider, not eating. With prohibition, those apple trees got cut down and with supermarkets, the larger apples for eating became more popular.

"hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums."

Not so in this 1600's engraving of Isaac Newton. Nor in even older paintings. Even its wild progenitor, Malus sieversii is of similar size to modern apples.

And on a fortnight hike across the UK a couple of years ago, I encountered this one:
http://www.alamy.com/stock-pho...

This range of very active volcanoes have been discovered. Perhaps no one put the 2 together? Or maybe steam from one that is about to erupt could be sending heat beneath the ice pack.

One Island on Antarctica's shores has a Caldera supervolano similar to Yellowstone that produces hot springs for warm bathing by humans. Even if there is no eruption some steam and hot water ahead of one can give off an incredible amount of heat under an already stressed ice pack.

"You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star" is the example of "sexual harassment" obviously, she was wearing a bathing suit and he gave her a compliment.

Maybe he would have been better off if he said nothing (speech control rules 101) since that is what this B.S. is really about. Speech codes, thought control, and censorship.

I'm guessing that Vic Gundotra is not a beautiful man ~ Brad Pitt, lacking the hard muscles, or height of a Rock or Chris Hemsworth, the unabashed charisma of Samuel L Jackson, or the accent of an Antonio Banderas

Suspicions confirmed: http://www.alamy.com/stock-pho...

Vic is a little beta short average guy despite his excellent programming brains

The first flight simulators consisted of tricycles with wings:

http://c7.alamy.com/comp/C7BWR...

It's not just street signs. I've seen double decker buses decorated with advertising in the style of street signs and other vehicles:
http://l450v.alamy.com/450v/cb...

http://www.atmediaoutdoor.com/...
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/42e4...
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_...
Some countries actually hire artists to decorate roads and buildings with optical illusion style art:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tra...

It's not just street signs. I've seen double decker buses decorated with advertising in the style of street signs and other vehicles:
http://l450v.alamy.com/450v/cb...

http://www.atmediaoutdoor.com/...
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/42e4...
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_...
Some countries actually hire artists to decorate roads and buildings with optical illusion style art:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tra...

No. I didn't even realize that was the question you were asking. No. Of course not.

Ok then, so you stand shoulder to shoulder with progressives "defending Sharia law".

That being said I think we - as citizens - need to actively convince show proponents of Sharia Law that blasphemy laws have no place here

But again, that's just equating "defending Sharia law" with "wanting to implement all Sharia law", which isn't the same. It's a strawman. How many instances can you find of progressives specifically asking for blasphemy laws? Probably not many..?

The prayer in public squares have no place here.

How would that work? You gonna start arresting people for saying "please god" in public now?

that the full face must be shown when walking down the street

Again this one is hard to actually implement. Should this guy be arrested? Is this now illegal?

that sharia courts cannot be used in place of civil courts

But you just said the government shouldn't prevent private individuals from entering in to otherwise legal contracts. Why shouldn't private individuals have the option of using whatever arbitration service they choose as long as it also adheres to secular laws? Can you devise a law that would ban "sharia courts" without using the word "sharia" and without banning all other arbitration services?

I presume this rat AI will be used to drive cars.

... Israel has some prior art in this area.

I have already designed a network security device to do exactly that:

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/BMF9B...

Plus a version that offers double the security:

https://thumb7.shutterstock.co...

Where can I get my check?

What I used when I needed it was a box like this, with a padlock hasp welded to one of the latches, and a length of (welded-link) chain threaded through the carrying handle, both chain ends through my letter box, then the chain ends padlocked through a bike-frame in the hallway inside. Not impossible to break into, or to steal. But enough to discourage casual theft while still able to get into the house. Large enough for any deliveries I've had which weren't furniture.

(Plus, casually leaving lumps of military hardware laying around on the driveway puts ideas into the neighbour's minds which add up to "I don't want to steal from his doorstep." Quite inaccurate, but useful nonetheless.)

The point about the programmable (mechanical, not digital) padlock is that (1) we had them at work, for toolboxes, special supplies at remote work sites, etc,, so I could borrow a good one from Stores for a few days and (2) it's easier to email (etc) a 4-digit code than it is to email a physical key. After a time, I got a good padlock for myself, with a hasp big enough to go round a spring in the car's suspension and a box on the hasp large enough to keep the car key in. Great for SCUBA diving without frying the electronics in the car key.

It most certainly is. Tougher than Dacron anyway...

Keyboard with no keys. Can I claim, prior art on this?

I'd rush home to what is on his arm and just call it a year.

This 'duty' doesn't exist for the photographer. It's always the responsibility of the final client to ensure that a model release exists. Just because the photograph in this case was free does not mean that Virgin / their advertising agency can suddenly forget about that.

Model releases aren't required in all countries. For instance, they are *not* required in the UK (see here), and according to this discussion board thread are not required in Australia either.

IANAL either, but I am a still photographer. I don't know if the same laws apply to motion picture filming, but generally you need a property release when photographing private property. It's not black-and-white (no pun intended), because if you photograph something like the New York or San Francisco skyline which is full of private property, you don't need a release. See more information on releases. Note this is referring to commercial photography, not vacation shots.

I'm not sure what a judge would rule, but I would hazard a guess that if the buildings and signs in question are 'part of the scene', it would be OK, but if they took a Samsung building and morphed it into Sony HQ and made it a key part of the film, it wouldn't.

Regardless, I can understand Samsung, et al, being a little miffed, but I also find the idea of taking this to court absurd. I guess I wouldn't make a very good lawyer...