I drove a rental with some of these "safety features" I was on a highway traveling 65 (speed limit) with cruise control on. Someone on a side street nosed forward, probably to try and see better, and stopped about 6 foot from my lane. The car freaked and slammed on the brakes, almost causing the guy behind me to rear end me. All because something unexpected happened. I can guarantee that unexpected stuff happens daily. Humans are just pretty good at dealing with it, when computers with strict logic aren't.
On the flip side, if that car had continued into the lane and you had sideswiped it, you would have been very glad that the car was already braking before you even realized what was happening. So that sounds like just a minor tuning problem to me....
California has a goal of reaching 100% renewable energy by 2045. This is not a 2060 problem. At this point, we can't usefully increase our hydroelectric power production (and because of methane emissions, it is arguably not so green anyway). So you're talking about making up the entire rest of the base load with wind within 27 years. It might be possible, but I wouldn't count on it.
And we've already reached the point where the California ISOs sometimes have to actually pay other states to take our excess solar power during the day. This is problematic because it means the economic value of that energy actually becomes negative; we're producing that much more power during the day than we need. It is just a matter of time before we're producing more power than *anyone* needs, at which point we're pretty much screwed, and will end up shutting down some solar power generation on sunny days to prevent overload on the grid.
We need to start solving the storage problem now so that by the time it reaches a crisis point, the solutions will already be in place. Otherwise, a lot of that money we've spent on going green will just end up making the windmills spin faster.:-D (Insert obligatory Futurama joke here.)
playing games where they trade renewable energy that they produce during the day for non-renewable energy that they consume at night.
Since that results in real CO2 reduction, how is it "playing games"?
Because it only works for the first few companies that do it. If everybody did that, eventually, you would hit a point where the renewable power production during the day would greatly exceed demand, meaning that the renewable power wouldn't be reducing carbon emissions anymore but on paper, it still would be. And at night, you'd hit a point where demand for renewable power would greatly exceed the plausible supply, and the ISOs would end up using non-renewable power to meet demand.
Storing enough renewable energy to let you actually run exclusively on renewable energy is much less so.
This is just plain stupid. Why in the world should they store energy in expensive batteries when there are people on the grid that can use it RIGHT NOW? Storing is wasteful of energy due to charge/discharge inefficiencies, and wasteful of money that could be spent on even more PV panels or turbines.
Because that technology must exist and be viable before society as a whole can even begin to approach greenness, and in the absence of adequate demand for better, more efficient, cheaper storage hardware, there will never be enough R&D spending to drive the costs down and the efficiency up enough to make the technology affordable/usable by the general public.
We've already driven down the cost of solar power to the point that it is viable. Spending more money there isn't really driving technology forwards. Companies who have enough excess money that they can buy 100% renewable electricity just to "go green" would do far more good in the long term by spending some of that money on power storage. The more money that gets spend on power storage, the more R&D spending will happen in that area, and the faster the cost will go down and the efficiency will go up, and thus the sooner it will be viable for everyone else.
And Google. Facebook is a little bit late to the party.
That said, like most of these stories, I'd expect it to be only true on paper, i.e. involving either buying renewable energy credits or playing games where they trade renewable energy that they produce during the day for non-renewable energy that they consume at night. Buying as much renewable energy as you consume is easy. Storing enough renewable energy to let you actually run exclusively on renewable energy is much less so.
This seems like a situation where the Linux API is too rich, and developers over-rely on that richness, causing compatibility issues. The inotify API provides *way* more data than equivalent APIs on OS X, and Dropbox has no trouble with different filesystems over there.
All a backup app should care about is that something within a given directory changed. From there, it should be able to explicitly stat the files to find out what, specifically, changed, and coalesce nearby events to see if a file moved as-is from one directory to another by comparing the inode numbers and checksumming, as an optional efficiency improvement (i.e. if it fails, the backup still works; you just waste a little bit of bandwidth uploading the file twice).
This is why democracy does not work. People would rather offload that responsibility than to tend to it.
People would be more likely to tend to it if they had any real belief that their vote mattered. When you have a choice between two candidates, both of whom are long-term politicians with little concept of the real world outside of government, the best your vote can really do is get rid of the worst of the worst, and the best candidates you'll ever get are likely little better than a random number generator on most issues.
No I countered that there is no wide-ranging impact in the first place and by extension not an abuse of market power since Apple doesn't have market power in the area to begin with. They are a minority player in the mobile world with 20% market share.
Although Apple has only 20% of the worldwide market share, it has nearly half of U.S, market share, which is where most app developer profit is made (statistically). Worse, iOS users are significantly more affluent than Android users, on average, to such an extent that in a recent analysis, researchers concluded that of all the brands out there, nothing is a better predictor of wealth than owning an iPhone.
If market share translated directly into money-making potential, Apple would be a minor player. But because of the demographic differences between the platforms, that isn't the case. With only 20% of the worldwide market, app developers get about 85% of their profits from iOS users. Thus, Apple is awfully close to being a monopoly in terms of mobile app revenue.
Ceramic superconductors would likely shatter if you bend them like you would a charge cord. Also, they are way too heavy. I'm not sure about the old-style metallic superconductors, but even those are significantly less flexible than wire at normal temperatures, as I understand it. So either way, you're replacing one flexibility problem with another, I think.
There are some experimental superconductors in development that might make what you're suggesting possible, but I doubt they are anywhere near being commercially feasible yet.
Hint: Apple just got their a**es handed to them in court over one of those
I assume you're talking about Apple v Pepper?
No, United States v. Apple Inc.
Because we're moving the goalposts, but the fact is that contractually blocking specific 3rd party services universally to all customers is only illegal when it is considered part of the abuse of market power.
And therein lies the question that determines whether this is actionable. Is this an abuse of Apple's market power? I would argue that the wide-ranging impact that extends far beyond Apple's ecosystem means that it is; you argue that it isn't, without giving any specific reasons.
Providing 1,200 kW (ten Tesla superchargers) over any sort of human-manipulatable cable would likely be infeasible. You'd either have to use an insane voltage, requiring even thicker jackets to reduce the safety risk, or use an insane amperage, resulting in a conductor diameter measured in inches. And imagine each charge station drawing as much power as the entire supercharger does now. The existing electrical infrastructure probably can't provide that much power in most places.
Realistically, if we got a 10x increase in storage, I would expect the car companies to divide the pack into sub-packs and charge them sequentially, resulting in a 10x increase in charge times (well, probably more like 6x to 8x, because you could probably start fast-charging the next group of cells long before the first group gets completely full). If we're lucky, they might provide one or two or more charge cords per car to offset some of the difference in some places, where the infrastructure permits.
This isn't about charging a third party to use the platform. This is about rules that require app developers to use their payment service when running apps on their platform.
This is most commonly known as a business arrangement with a third party and nothing to do with being anticompetitive.
By that standard, about half of the illegal anticompetitive practices would never be illegal (agreement not to deal, tying agreements, MFN agreements, etc.), because all of those are business agreements with third parties. (Hint: Apple just got their a**es handed to them in court over one of those, and settled the case a month ago when it became obvious that they were going to lose, long after other companies that actually are near monopolies settled, under a similarly incorrect belief that their non-monopoly status would make them immune. Not so much.)
In this case, Apple's agreement with app developers forces the use of a payment processor that, while possibly cheap for app developers that take micropayments, is downright extortionate when compared with normal payment processors for app developers that charge double-digit-per-month subscription fees, sell expensive digital downloads, etc.
Which would be a problem only if Apple had the market power of a monopoly. They don't. Take your business elsewhere.
Again, upon what are you basing that legal theory? Contracts can create illegal restraint of trade without monopolies being involved. Any claims to the contrary require citations, because most of the laws in question do not mention monopolies at all.
Of course you can, mainly because you can't be anticompetitve against people you don't compete with. Apple blocking Google maps when introducing their own service was anticompetitive. A general case where a bunch of people are whining that they don't like the terms of entering a closed ecosystem is not.
How does Apple's payment system not compete with other payment processors? Netflix has the ability to choose to allow iOS users to buy their services or simply tell them that they have to have an existing subscription and hope that users find their way to the website, which uses a different payment processor. I would call that competing. They might fight as hard as they can to keep from competing (because they want to charge usurious fees), but that doesn't make it so.
So under what legal theory are you arguing that this is not an anticompetitive restraint of trade?
Because there is no restraint of trade. There is no legal basis for opening up a closed platform to third parties.
True. Unfortunately for your argument, the iOS platform is not closed. It has already been opened to third parties. The moment Apple began contract agreements with those third party app developers, the contracts between Apple and third-party developers became governed by a giant pile of laws. And now, we now have a situation where Apple, through arbitrarily limiting what payment processing services app developers can use and preventing apps from directing users to their website for purchasing subscriptions through other mechanisms, is effectively manipulating the market for goods and services in a manner that extends far beyond their own ecosystem. This is, at best, legally problematic. At worst, it is illegal restraint of trade. Either way, that's not for me or you to decide, but rather a judge of appropriate jurisdiction.
Or alternate between several packs to extend life, and allow the user to charge up as needed. Recommend that the user keep it above 500 miles and below 1,000 miles, and change which packs are charged and which ones aren't. Periodically move charge around as needed to keep cells from getting too low.
But your third-party ECU has nothing to do with the sunroof's warranted operation.
Well, maybe. Depends on how the sunroof is controlled.
I had a defective rear body module (controlled by the ECU/front body module) that went bad and randomly would rapidly unlock and relock the doors while the car was driving. I fixed it after a year or so, but not before three of the five power door locks failed with broken gears. The fourth failed a couple of months later. The replacement part for the fifth was still in a plastic bag in the back last I heard.
In a car where the ECU doubles as a body module or otherwise controls the body module, I could easily see a situation in which an ECU swap causes the voltage to the sunroof to rapidly get reversed, causing any number of failures from cracked gears to burned out diodes. It probably isn't likely, but it could happen.
Charging a 3rd party to use your closed platform is not an anti-competitive practice unless you are in a monopoly situation and in a situation to provide the same thing that you are charging that party for.
This isn't about charging a third party to use the platform. This is about rules that require app developers to use their payment service when running apps on their platform. Whenever multiple companies collude in ways that harm consumers, that is an anticompetitive practice.
In this case, Apple's agreement with app developers forces the use of a payment processor that, while possibly cheap for app developers that take micropayments, is downright extortionate when compared with normal payment processors for app developers that charge double-digit-per-month subscription fees, sell expensive digital downloads, etc. Those high fees drive up the cost of those services for consumers. Consumer harm: check.
And because many app developers did not want to charge a premium for iOS users, this resulted in many companies raising their prices for everyone, in an effort to absorb Apple's high payment processing fees. Harm to the broader market: check.
And you cannot argue that it not an anticompetitive practice, because it directly harms merchant account providers and other payment processors whose services otherwise could be used on the iOS platform (making it a refusal to deal agreement and, arguably, a tying agreement).
Worse, Apple directly competes against some of the affected companies, with Apple's TV content competing against Netflix and Apple Music competing against Spotify. This means they are using their absolute control over their platform (preventing sideloading, competing app stores, etc.) in an attempt to drive up the prices that their competitors must charge, which puts this squarely in the danger zone for being a price fixing issue, too.
So under what legal theory are you arguing that this is not an anticompetitive restraint of trade?
Now that we've settled that question, the remaining question is whether that restraint of trade is legal or not. For restraint of trade to be legal, it must serve a legitimate interest, not be contrary to the public interest, and must be limited in scope to what is necessary to serve that legitimate interest. That analysis would go something like this:
Legitimate interest: Protecting consumers from fraud by having a trusted payment system. Apple wins points here.
Not contrary to the public interest: Significantly raises the cost of some services, makes others impossible to purchase without going to the company's website. Prohibits the company from linking to the company's website, thus making services that already exist outside the Apple universe considerably harder to use. Oops.
As narrow as necessary to achieve the objective: Nope. Apple makes no exceptions for companies that also provide services via the web. This one trivial exception would eliminate 99.999% of the objections. However, Apple doesn't want to do this because it makes them too much money. Oops again.
So it fails on two out of the three pillars of legality for anticompetitive behavior. I'm not saying that a lawsuit would win, but IMO, it isn't nearly as unlikely as you seem to believe.
ROFL. Keep telling yourself that, AC. There have been countless restraint of trade cases that didn't involve monopolies, particularly when it comes to contract law. In fact, app developers could actually bring a case without the government's help. All it takes is one class-action lawyer hoping to make a name for him/herself.
Go read the Sherman Antitrust Act again. See if you can find the word "monopoly" in it. Go ahead. I'll wait. (One of the two parts does contain "monopolize or attempt to monopolize", to be fair, but that is also not the part that would apply in this case, as it is predominantly concerned with mergers and conspiracy.)
Anticompetitive practices are more strictly regulated in monopoly situations, but nothing in any of the relevant laws precludes legal action against a company that is not a monopoly.
So, it appears internet traffic in the US has increased significantly, a horrible thing to happen since it undercuts all the NN supporter claims. Let the NN anti-science anti-fact people rage away at another Trump success.
Except that if true, the story is actually undeniable proof that the NN supporters were correct:
New fiber optic lines don't just appear overnight. Therefore, a dramatic speed increase on a nationwide scale over such a short period of time cannot possibly have been caused by infrastructure improvements.
Therefore, the total speed of Internet service did not increase nearly as much as speed test results would suggest.
No ISP in its right mind throttles connections to speed test sites, because that would make them look bad, so this improvement cannot realistically have been caused by the removal of existing throttling.
Therefore, if overall performance jumped significantly, that means that something else is being throttled sufficiently to improve the speed test results significantly.
Therefore, the repeal of net neutrality means that either A. all other sites are being somewhat throttled, B. some sites are being massively throttled, or C. both.
The correct question, then, is not whether the net neutrality folks are correct, nor whether browsing is being throttled, but rather what sites are being throttled, how much they are being throttled, and whether the amount of throttling is sufficient to cause actual consumer harm.
A very slow, methodical improvement to speed test results can be caused by more bandwidth being added. Big, rapid improvements are almost invariably caused by something else slowing down. That's just the harsh reality of computer networking. Unfortunately, that's a subtlety that is probably lost on anyone without at least a passing understanding of QoS and bufferbloat.
Technically, oats are big enough to be countable, though I'll grant you that it is closer to flour than to apples. When you're talking about it uncountably, it is often "oat", e.g. "oat cereal", "oat bran", etc. When you're talking about an entire crop, it is often "oat", though perhaps not universally. It blurs the line.
The rest are quite clearly exceptions. There are a few. The others I'm aware of are clothes (because of the way it came from "cloth" on both sides of a vowel shift, I think), arms (when used as a synonym for weapons, because it is short for armaments, and the singular form never got shortened for some reason), thanks, regards, and (arguably) names that describe groups of people, e.g. the Irish, the French, etc. I say arguably there because people are countable, but large enough groups might not be *practically* countable.
You can count types of flour. You can count "foodstuffs" (types of food). But if you say "stuffs", it's a verb, and if you say "flours", everyone will assume you are talking about daisies and roses and mums, oh my!
For example, you never say: "I found a data" just like you never say "I found a stuff".
I agree. However, the reason you would never say that is because "stuff" is uncountable. Using the article "a" is nonsensical, because that implies that there can be exactly one of something, and thus it must be countable. Just as you can't have exactly one, you can't have more than one, hence it is neither singular nor plural, per se. If "data" can't be used in that way for the same reason, then it, too, is an uncountable mass noun.
So no... the word "data" cannot be singular.
Except uncountable nouns in English always take a singular verb, e.g. "This stuff is gross," not "This stuff are gross". "The flour is in the cupboard," not "The flour are in the cupboard," and so on.
The only way "data" can be plural is if you treat it as the plural of datum, which only makes sense if you are talking about a specific, countable set of data points. The result of an experiment produces data that is a collection of datum, hence ostensibly countable, so using it in the plural form is acceptable. When we start talking about the flow of data across a network, that's not really countable in any meaningful sense, because it varies from moment to moment, so it is uncountable, and must take a singular verb.
The problem is that the word is more commonly used now as a synonym for "information". You would never say "informations". At this point, it is mostly treated as plural in scientific contexts, and even there, it has often been superseded by the compound word "data point", which is obviously and trivially pluralizable.
Still way ahead of Samsung on the "exploding in inconvenient places" index...
Presumably, this happened while replacing the battery. Other than during replacement, there should be no real danger of the packs getting punctured.
That said, this is why we keep complaining about Apple gluing in their LiPo packs. There's no reason for such a tiny pack to be glued in at all, much less glued so strongly that it makes the packs hard to remove. It is a serious safety issue while servicing the devices, because it greatly increases the risk of puncturing the packs, which tends to result in the release of hydrogen gas, which can self-ignite instantly upon contact with oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
On the flip side, if that car had continued into the lane and you had sideswiped it, you would have been very glad that the car was already braking before you even realized what was happening. So that sounds like just a minor tuning problem to me....
California has a goal of reaching 100% renewable energy by 2045. This is not a 2060 problem. At this point, we can't usefully increase our hydroelectric power production (and because of methane emissions, it is arguably not so green anyway). So you're talking about making up the entire rest of the base load with wind within 27 years. It might be possible, but I wouldn't count on it.
And we've already reached the point where the California ISOs sometimes have to actually pay other states to take our excess solar power during the day. This is problematic because it means the economic value of that energy actually becomes negative; we're producing that much more power during the day than we need. It is just a matter of time before we're producing more power than *anyone* needs, at which point we're pretty much screwed, and will end up shutting down some solar power generation on sunny days to prevent overload on the grid.
We need to start solving the storage problem now so that by the time it reaches a crisis point, the solutions will already be in place. Otherwise, a lot of that money we've spent on going green will just end up making the windmills spin faster. :-D (Insert obligatory Futurama joke here.)
Because it only works for the first few companies that do it. If everybody did that, eventually, you would hit a point where the renewable power production during the day would greatly exceed demand, meaning that the renewable power wouldn't be reducing carbon emissions anymore but on paper, it still would be. And at night, you'd hit a point where demand for renewable power would greatly exceed the plausible supply, and the ISOs would end up using non-renewable power to meet demand.
Because that technology must exist and be viable before society as a whole can even begin to approach greenness, and in the absence of adequate demand for better, more efficient, cheaper storage hardware, there will never be enough R&D spending to drive the costs down and the efficiency up enough to make the technology affordable/usable by the general public.
We've already driven down the cost of solar power to the point that it is viable. Spending more money there isn't really driving technology forwards. Companies who have enough excess money that they can buy 100% renewable electricity just to "go green" would do far more good in the long term by spending some of that money on power storage. The more money that gets spend on power storage, the more R&D spending will happen in that area, and the faster the cost will go down and the efficiency will go up, and thus the sooner it will be viable for everyone else.
And Google. Facebook is a little bit late to the party.
That said, like most of these stories, I'd expect it to be only true on paper, i.e. involving either buying renewable energy credits or playing games where they trade renewable energy that they produce during the day for non-renewable energy that they consume at night. Buying as much renewable energy as you consume is easy. Storing enough renewable energy to let you actually run exclusively on renewable energy is much less so.
This seems like a situation where the Linux API is too rich, and developers over-rely on that richness, causing compatibility issues. The inotify API provides *way* more data than equivalent APIs on OS X, and Dropbox has no trouble with different filesystems over there.
All a backup app should care about is that something within a given directory changed. From there, it should be able to explicitly stat the files to find out what, specifically, changed, and coalesce nearby events to see if a file moved as-is from one directory to another by comparing the inode numbers and checksumming, as an optional efficiency improvement (i.e. if it fails, the backup still works; you just waste a little bit of bandwidth uploading the file twice).
People would be more likely to tend to it if they had any real belief that their vote mattered. When you have a choice between two candidates, both of whom are long-term politicians with little concept of the real world outside of government, the best your vote can really do is get rid of the worst of the worst, and the best candidates you'll ever get are likely little better than a random number generator on most issues.
Although Apple has only 20% of the worldwide market share, it has nearly half of U.S, market share, which is where most app developer profit is made (statistically). Worse, iOS users are significantly more affluent than Android users, on average, to such an extent that in a recent analysis, researchers concluded that of all the brands out there, nothing is a better predictor of wealth than owning an iPhone.
If market share translated directly into money-making potential, Apple would be a minor player. But because of the demographic differences between the platforms, that isn't the case. With only 20% of the worldwide market, app developers get about 85% of their profits from iOS users. Thus, Apple is awfully close to being a monopoly in terms of mobile app revenue.
Ceramic superconductors would likely shatter if you bend them like you would a charge cord. Also, they are way too heavy. I'm not sure about the old-style metallic superconductors, but even those are significantly less flexible than wire at normal temperatures, as I understand it. So either way, you're replacing one flexibility problem with another, I think.
There are some experimental superconductors in development that might make what you're suggesting possible, but I doubt they are anywhere near being commercially feasible yet.
No, United States v. Apple Inc.
And therein lies the question that determines whether this is actionable. Is this an abuse of Apple's market power? I would argue that the wide-ranging impact that extends far beyond Apple's ecosystem means that it is; you argue that it isn't, without giving any specific reasons.
Providing 1,200 kW (ten Tesla superchargers) over any sort of human-manipulatable cable would likely be infeasible. You'd either have to use an insane voltage, requiring even thicker jackets to reduce the safety risk, or use an insane amperage, resulting in a conductor diameter measured in inches. And imagine each charge station drawing as much power as the entire supercharger does now. The existing electrical infrastructure probably can't provide that much power in most places.
Realistically, if we got a 10x increase in storage, I would expect the car companies to divide the pack into sub-packs and charge them sequentially, resulting in a 10x increase in charge times (well, probably more like 6x to 8x, because you could probably start fast-charging the next group of cells long before the first group gets completely full). If we're lucky, they might provide one or two or more charge cords per car to offset some of the difference in some places, where the infrastructure permits.
By that standard, about half of the illegal anticompetitive practices would never be illegal (agreement not to deal, tying agreements, MFN agreements, etc.), because all of those are business agreements with third parties. (Hint: Apple just got their a**es handed to them in court over one of those, and settled the case a month ago when it became obvious that they were going to lose, long after other companies that actually are near monopolies settled, under a similarly incorrect belief that their non-monopoly status would make them immune. Not so much.)
Again, upon what are you basing that legal theory? Contracts can create illegal restraint of trade without monopolies being involved. Any claims to the contrary require citations, because most of the laws in question do not mention monopolies at all.
How does Apple's payment system not compete with other payment processors? Netflix has the ability to choose to allow iOS users to buy their services or simply tell them that they have to have an existing subscription and hope that users find their way to the website, which uses a different payment processor. I would call that competing. They might fight as hard as they can to keep from competing (because they want to charge usurious fees), but that doesn't make it so.
True. Unfortunately for your argument, the iOS platform is not closed. It has already been opened to third parties. The moment Apple began contract agreements with those third party app developers, the contracts between Apple and third-party developers became governed by a giant pile of laws. And now, we now have a situation where Apple, through arbitrarily limiting what payment processing services app developers can use and preventing apps from directing users to their website for purchasing subscriptions through other mechanisms, is effectively manipulating the market for goods and services in a manner that extends far beyond their own ecosystem. This is, at best, legally problematic. At worst, it is illegal restraint of trade. Either way, that's not for me or you to decide, but rather a judge of appropriate jurisdiction.
Or alternate between several packs to extend life, and allow the user to charge up as needed. Recommend that the user keep it above 500 miles and below 1,000 miles, and change which packs are charged and which ones aren't. Periodically move charge around as needed to keep cells from getting too low.
Well, maybe. Depends on how the sunroof is controlled.
I had a defective rear body module (controlled by the ECU/front body module) that went bad and randomly would rapidly unlock and relock the doors while the car was driving. I fixed it after a year or so, but not before three of the five power door locks failed with broken gears. The fourth failed a couple of months later. The replacement part for the fifth was still in a plastic bag in the back last I heard.
In a car where the ECU doubles as a body module or otherwise controls the body module, I could easily see a situation in which an ECU swap causes the voltage to the sunroof to rapidly get reversed, causing any number of failures from cracked gears to burned out diodes. It probably isn't likely, but it could happen.
This isn't about charging a third party to use the platform. This is about rules that require app developers to use their payment service when running apps on their platform. Whenever multiple companies collude in ways that harm consumers, that is an anticompetitive practice.
In this case, Apple's agreement with app developers forces the use of a payment processor that, while possibly cheap for app developers that take micropayments, is downright extortionate when compared with normal payment processors for app developers that charge double-digit-per-month subscription fees, sell expensive digital downloads, etc. Those high fees drive up the cost of those services for consumers. Consumer harm: check.
And because many app developers did not want to charge a premium for iOS users, this resulted in many companies raising their prices for everyone, in an effort to absorb Apple's high payment processing fees. Harm to the broader market: check.
And you cannot argue that it not an anticompetitive practice, because it directly harms merchant account providers and other payment processors whose services otherwise could be used on the iOS platform (making it a refusal to deal agreement and, arguably, a tying agreement).
Worse, Apple directly competes against some of the affected companies, with Apple's TV content competing against Netflix and Apple Music competing against Spotify. This means they are using their absolute control over their platform (preventing sideloading, competing app stores, etc.) in an attempt to drive up the prices that their competitors must charge, which puts this squarely in the danger zone for being a price fixing issue, too.
So under what legal theory are you arguing that this is not an anticompetitive restraint of trade?
Now that we've settled that question, the remaining question is whether that restraint of trade is legal or not. For restraint of trade to be legal, it must serve a legitimate interest, not be contrary to the public interest, and must be limited in scope to what is necessary to serve that legitimate interest. That analysis would go something like this:
So it fails on two out of the three pillars of legality for anticompetitive behavior. I'm not saying that a lawsuit would win, but IMO, it isn't nearly as unlikely as you seem to believe.
ROFL. Keep telling yourself that, AC. There have been countless restraint of trade cases that didn't involve monopolies, particularly when it comes to contract law. In fact, app developers could actually bring a case without the government's help. All it takes is one class-action lawyer hoping to make a name for him/herself.
Go read the Sherman Antitrust Act again. See if you can find the word "monopoly" in it. Go ahead. I'll wait. (One of the two parts does contain "monopolize or attempt to monopolize", to be fair, but that is also not the part that would apply in this case, as it is predominantly concerned with mergers and conspiracy.)
Anticompetitive practices are more strictly regulated in monopoly situations, but nothing in any of the relevant laws precludes legal action against a company that is not a monopoly.
Last I heard, the worst-case cost was only $10.6 billion for that 119 miles of track. Did it somehow grow by an order of magnitude since January?
Except that if true, the story is actually undeniable proof that the NN supporters were correct:
The correct question, then, is not whether the net neutrality folks are correct, nor whether browsing is being throttled, but rather what sites are being throttled, how much they are being throttled, and whether the amount of throttling is sufficient to cause actual consumer harm.
A very slow, methodical improvement to speed test results can be caused by more bandwidth being added. Big, rapid improvements are almost invariably caused by something else slowing down. That's just the harsh reality of computer networking. Unfortunately, that's a subtlety that is probably lost on anyone without at least a passing understanding of QoS and bufferbloat.
Technically, oats are big enough to be countable, though I'll grant you that it is closer to flour than to apples. When you're talking about it uncountably, it is often "oat", e.g. "oat cereal", "oat bran", etc. When you're talking about an entire crop, it is often "oat", though perhaps not universally. It blurs the line.
The rest are quite clearly exceptions. There are a few. The others I'm aware of are clothes (because of the way it came from "cloth" on both sides of a vowel shift, I think), arms (when used as a synonym for weapons, because it is short for armaments, and the singular form never got shortened for some reason), thanks, regards, and (arguably) names that describe groups of people, e.g. the Irish, the French, etc. I say arguably there because people are countable, but large enough groups might not be *practically* countable.
Heh. Yes.
You can count types of flour. You can count "foodstuffs" (types of food). But if you say "stuffs", it's a verb, and if you say "flours", everyone will assume you are talking about daisies and roses and mums, oh my!
Sorry. I'm new here. :-D
I agree. However, the reason you would never say that is because "stuff" is uncountable. Using the article "a" is nonsensical, because that implies that there can be exactly one of something, and thus it must be countable. Just as you can't have exactly one, you can't have more than one, hence it is neither singular nor plural, per se. If "data" can't be used in that way for the same reason, then it, too, is an uncountable mass noun.
Except uncountable nouns in English always take a singular verb, e.g. "This stuff is gross," not "This stuff are gross". "The flour is in the cupboard," not "The flour are in the cupboard," and so on.
The only way "data" can be plural is if you treat it as the plural of datum, which only makes sense if you are talking about a specific, countable set of data points. The result of an experiment produces data that is a collection of datum, hence ostensibly countable, so using it in the plural form is acceptable. When we start talking about the flow of data across a network, that's not really countable in any meaningful sense, because it varies from moment to moment, so it is uncountable, and must take a singular verb.
The problem is that the word is more commonly used now as a synonym for "information". You would never say "informations". At this point, it is mostly treated as plural in scientific contexts, and even there, it has often been superseded by the compound word "data point", which is obviously and trivially pluralizable.
BTW, Oxford weighed in a while back.
Presumably, this happened while replacing the battery. Other than during replacement, there should be no real danger of the packs getting punctured.
That said, this is why we keep complaining about Apple gluing in their LiPo packs. There's no reason for such a tiny pack to be glued in at all, much less glued so strongly that it makes the packs hard to remove. It is a serious safety issue while servicing the devices, because it greatly increases the risk of puncturing the packs, which tends to result in the release of hydrogen gas, which can self-ignite instantly upon contact with oxygen.