Not so. You jumped (for entirely understandable reasons) to a wrong conclusion.
Let's walk through what I actually said. I was answering the AC's question by providing a conjecture: 1) I think the OP's point is that it's illegal for Qualcomm to act as they are.
And three facts that were relevant to that conjecture: 1) Qualcomm agreed to FRAND terms 2) Doing so meant giving up some of their rights 3) The US government is suing them for violating the terms
While I can understand how you assumed I was shilling for Apple or against Qualcomm, re-read my comment again and you'll find that nowhere did I espouse any particular stance on the subject. That's because I don't have a particular stance on the subject. The closest I've come to taking sides was last week when I suggested that everyone seemed to be in the wrong, which is a generalization I still stand by (though my today-self would quibble with my past-self over some of the details in that post).
So, when you ask...
Care to explain how that fits in to FRAND?
...no, I wouldn't, because I don't align with either side right now. I was simply trying to help an AC understand what the OP was getting at by presenting a few relevant facts to what I think the OP was driving at. I never said I agreed with what the OP said, nor did I present them as my views.
As such, if the facts I mentioned are inconvenient to your preferred narrative, that doesn't make me a shill. It means you have facts you need to deal with.
Agreed. I never suggested otherwise. Honestly, I don't know enough about the specifics of this case to have formed any sort of opinion over whether or not Qualcomm is violating FRAND terms. Apple says they are, but Apple says a lot of things...
Yes, you're technically correct, but practically speaking, there's nothing stopping them from taking the money you just paid and loaning it to the next guy in line, restoring things to where they had been already. That was my point.
At the time the mortgage was set up, it was worth it to them as an investment vehicle that provided (generally) stable returns for the amount of risk involved. Simple as that. Having an investment that will provide an annual return of X%, potentially for the next few decades, is valuable. If the investment comes to an abrupt end (i.e. the homeowner pays off the loan), the bank doesn't lose the value they already got out of it, and the only way they would lose the future value out of it is if they did nothing with the cash you paid them back. But none of them do that. They instead initiate new loans or invest it in some other way in order to reap various benefits.
When you pay off a loan early the bank loses interest.
No they don't. They have your cash in hand and can gain interest on it directly, rather than waiting for you to pay it. In fact, if you financed your mortgage at a rate below the current rate, they stand to gain by having you pay early, since the interest they'll get on the cash is higher than the interest they'll get from your payments.
These particular patents were included in the industry standard on the condition that Qualcomm would provide them under FRAND terms. As such, Qualcomm has given up their right to leverage those patents as fully as their monopoly position would otherwise allow. The OP seems to be suggesting that by engaging in the sorts of practices mentioned in the summary, they're acting the part of an unrestricted monopoly, even though they gave up the right to do so when they agreed to FRAND terms. The fact that the US government is currently suing them over that exact issue adds an extra wrinkle to things.
I always struggle with understanding quantum computing concepts, but from the sound of things in the article, this is not some sort of general purpose quantum computer. Rather, it's a purpose-built computer dedicated to estimating the behavior of photons.
Why that specifically?
Based on what the article (and summary) said, modern computers struggle to estimate the behavior of 20 or more photons, but it's the sort of problem that quantum computers are theoretically capable of handling quite easily. Researchers are apparently suggesting that in order to disprove skeptics and bring in more support for quantum computing, we should build a quantum computer of this variety and then use it to estimate the behavior of 30 or more photons, because doing so would definitively prove to everyone that quantum computers can provide a massive advantage over traditional computing methods.
This is what's happening: 1) You receive a convincing looking e-mail from a known contact, apparently sharing a Google Doc with you.
2) Following the "Open the Doc" link directs you to Google's real pages for logging in, followed up by being prompted to grant permission to "Google Docs" to read, send, delete, and manage your e-mail, as well as your contacts. Clicking on "Google Docs" reveals that it's not the real app, but rather an app with the same name that's linked to some random gmail address. Again, all of this is still via Google's real pages.
3) If you grant permission, you're compromised, because you've effectively given a rogue app full access to your account via the app API. They have full access to your e-mails and contacts, and will send e-mails to all of your contacts indicating that you shared a doc with them, thus perpetuating the scam.
Notably, resetting your password will not revoke the scammer's access. Because you've granted the fake "Google Docs" app full permission to access your account via the app API, they have no need for your password. The best way to remove their access is by going to this Google page and removing access for the fake "Google Docs" app.
Touch ID is a killer feature for some (5 or 5s?). And a few people really like Apple Pay (6 and up). There was Portrait mode thanks to the dual cameras on the 7 Plus. But yeah, otherwise (and in all seriousness), mostly incremental improvements these last few generations. The 7 in particular was somewhat underwhelming.
The OP asked if people were leaving or holding off for a newer version. I was presenting a third possibility: that they were holding onto, rather than holding off. As I prefaced my last comment, it's an anecdote, so take it with the requisite grain of salt and move along. I wasn't arguing anything, other than that there may be more possibilities at play than the summary and OP listed.
You're reading WAY more into my comment than is actually there. If you think I was boasting when I provided an example of how my parent's phones have been able to remain relevant despite newer models coming out, I'd suggest it says more about you than me. I wasn't making a jab at whatever your mobile platform of choice is.
I know quite a few apple phone fans and none of them ever hold off
This is an anecdote, to be sure, but my parents are holding off until later this year, even though they haven't heard any rumors and even though their iPhone 5s has since been surpassed by the 6, 6s, and 7 generations.
The reason they're holding off is because their existing iPhones are simply good enough. The iPhone 5s still runs the latest OS, gets the latest patches, and runs apps nearly as well today as it did when it was first introduced in 2013. It's held up remarkably well. The fact that it was also the first 64-bit smartphone has helped to keep it on the good side of any compatibility cutoffs as well, as apps have dropped support for older architectures and devices.
Really though, none of this is surprising. Though my dad was in a line before dawn to get the iPhone 3G on launch day, he held off two generations before upgrading to the iPhone 4, three generations to get the iPhone 5s, and now holding off four generations for whatever comes out later this year.
All of which is to say, it has nothing to do with whatever's next, and everything to do with what they already have: something that's good enough.
3) As that link also shows, Apple is paying $2.28/year, not $1, so it's a better value than you suggested, though still below average across the market.
4) The reason the dividends aren't a great value at the moment is because their shares surged 20+% in the last quarter, shifting the value proposition. At the time the dividends were set last year, they were on par with the S&P 500 averages. It's likely Apple will adjust them when they announce their earnings for the quarter sometime this week (today maybe?).
All of which is to say, this suggestion that Apple isn't returning value to shareholders, despite being actively engaged in the largest program in history to do exactly that is either disingenuous or misinformed. And pointing out that their dividends aren't a great value at the moment is also a bit strange, given that they're neither the primary means by which Apple is returning value, nor has Apple had the opportunity to adjust their dividends since the value proposition shifted.
Apple is actually in the middle of the largest shareholder return program in history. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they've returned something like $150 billion already, with another $30 billion to go. Despite that, they're still acquiring cash faster than they can drain their reserves, and they're limited in how much they can return, simply because the cash is overseas. Even their current program is primarily being funded via loans they're taking out, rather than from their reserves.
I had actually typed up a joking paragraph about how if there was a 6GL, it'd mean that we were either living in the world of WALL-E or The Terminator, that is, because the machine would likely be choosing its own problems to solve, either we'd have nothing to do or we'd be struggling to remain relevant.
Before I say anything else, I'll shill by tossing in a glowing recommendation for Feedbin. I tested way too many clients after Google Reader went down, and it was far and away my favorite of the bunch. As a nice bonus, it's also open source and can be run on your own servers free of charge, but I've been a paid subscriber ever since Reader shut down. Well worth the $20/year I'm paying.
Speaking more generally, the problem we all have is with surfacing the content we want to see. The content we want to see is constantly being published all around the web, but we lack the ability to know when and where it's getting published, so we need help finding it.
As of today, we have a few options. We can rely on curated content (e.g. newspapers, BuzzFeed), which waste our time and attention with copious amounts of content that we have no interest in so that we can find the few nuggets that actually interest us. Alternatively, we can rely on content aggregators (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), but content aggregation is rarely a money-maker, so each of those serves numerous other purposes (e.g. sharing jokes, posting cat pics, relaying personal messages), all of which add noise that detracts from simply consuming the news. Moreover, each of those sites interferes with the news in some ways (e.g. reordering or hiding content), making them unreliable if we want to have a holistic and accurate view of matters.
Or, as a third option, we can rely on RSS and not have to make any of those compromises.
With a newspaper or BuzzFeed, if I feel like I have to sift through too much cruft, I can either take it or leave it. But with RSS, I can effectively make my own newspaper by subscribing to exactly as many sites I want to, each of which narrowly covers a small subset of the topics I'm interested in. As a result, I have exactly as much new content as I want, and nearly each piece of new content is tailored specifically to my interests. Plus, I gain all the fine-grained controls (e.g. mark as unread, applying rules to filter news, being able to look through update statistics) that come with having technology that's dedicated to solving a specific problem, rather than being one part of a much larger, general-purpose platform like those other content aggregators.
In fact, I've become so averse to sites that waste my time that if a site that posts new content doesn't offer an RSS feed, I simply don't visit it unless someone else links me to it. Nor do I apparently miss them, as I just learned when I went through my feeds and found that about a dozen of them hadn't had any updates in years, only one of which I had noticed was missing.
And what do I do with all of that time I've saved? Waste it commenting on Slashdot, apparently.
The Chrysler Imperial was the first car to feature all-wheel anti-lock brakes, but we wouldn't call it a first generation car, since it was clearly preceded by others. The iPhone 5 was the first to feature a Retina display, but no one's suggesting it's a first-gen iPhone, since the name alone tells you that it's part of a line that goes back before it.
So, why, then, do you refer to FORTRAN as a first generation language, just because it was the first to feature a high-level of abstraction? The fact that it's a "high-level" language should immediately suggest to you that it was preceded by "low-level" languages, as it was. The fact that it's a high-level language sets it apart from previous generations, but it doesn't make it the first generation. Rather, it's the first, third-generation language.
Neither Fortran, nor C are first generation languages
In fact, every language he mentions in the article is a textbook example of a third-gen language (3GL). I didn't see any mention of even a single first generation language.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was trying to keep his writing approachable, but "first generation languages" has had an established meaning in this field for the last several decades, so misusing the terminology just makes it look like he has no idea what he's talking about. A far better way to phrase it would have been "In early high-level languages like FORTRAN and C [...]", since that would have been accurate while also being descriptive enough for most lay people to understand well enough.
For anyone who doesn't know about them, programming language generations refer to the level of abstraction, NOT to when they were introduced:
1GL = Machine code. Flipping bits to issue machine-specific instructions
2GL = Assembly. Using human-readable text to issue basically the same instructions
3GL = Most high-level programming languages. Abstracting away machine instructions (e.g. using loops and function calls to abstract away jump instructions) to the point that it's both easier to use and mostly machine-independent (e.g. Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, Swift, etc.)
4GL = Languages that, among other things, abstract generating reports, generating UIs, and/or handling collections of information (e.g. SQL, some 3GLs with libraries, etc.)
5GL = Languages where you describe the problem and let the computer come up with the algorithm (e.g. Prolog)
All of which is to say, starting off an article with a glaring misuse of established terminology is a great way to get anyone with a passing awareness of the topic to immediately dismiss anything he has to say. As a professor, I'd hope he'd have a better awareness about the importance of using those terms correctly. And as the publisher, I'd hope that Scientific American would have an editor who would recognize when they were out of their depth and would need to call in a domain expert to proof the text.
whether importing hundreds of thousands of African slaves to toil on Cotton and Tobacco plantations,
History clearly isn't your strong suit. Historically speaking, the Republican Party has been staunchly ANTI-slavery. The Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists, and the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, signed into law a little document you may have heard of that addressed the topic of slavery.
It wasn't until well into the 1900s that the Republican Party migrated more to the South and was adopted by the sorts of crowds youre likely thinking of.
Blame the modern Republicans all you want, but get your history right, especially when it comes to accusing people of being pro-slavery.
Perhaps because Qualcomm (voluntarily) legally bound itself to provide licenses under FRAND terms as a condition for including their patents in the standard? Apple did no such thing.
I'm not saying Apple is in the right here. It actually sounds like they're screwing their suppliers, since their suppliers are the ones who have the licenses from Qualcomm, and it's those suppliers who are withholding royalty payments to Qualcomm on account of Apple not paying the money owed to them to cover their licensing fees. That said, Qualcomm is currently being investigated and/or sued by regulatory agencies around the globe for failing to abide by the FRAND terms they agreed to, so it seems safe to suggest that everyone's in the wrong at this point: Qualcomm for not abiding by its legal obligations, and Apple for not abiding by its contractual obligations.
Or does Congress only have that power when it's something you agree with?
I'm not sure which part of this you think I agree with. I certainly don't agree with what the FCC is doing here.
It sounds as if you're challenging whether Congress even has the authority to create independent agencies in the first place, which is an entirely unrelated discussion, and one for which I don't have a particularly strong opinion (I've just taken it as fact that it's something that they do, without ever really questioning it, honestly). That said, I will point out that if you take issue with Congress delegating its authority to independent agencies, then you'd need to account for the existence of NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and even the United States Postal Service, all of which are also independent agencies. Again, I don't have a strong opinion, but there's clearly a necessity that those services be provided in some form or function, and the 538 members of Congress are clearly not up to the task of managing all of that on their own, especially once you consider that most of those agencies are far larger than Congress itself.
They did. It was the FCC charter. It explicitly gave the FCC the task of and granted them the authority to make decisions about how to classify companies. If Congress wants to pass a law doing what you say, they can, but in the meantime they've said that it is the FCC's job to make those decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, the shill is strong in this one. ....
Not so. You jumped (for entirely understandable reasons) to a wrong conclusion.
Let's walk through what I actually said. I was answering the AC's question by providing a conjecture:
1) I think the OP's point is that it's illegal for Qualcomm to act as they are.
And three facts that were relevant to that conjecture:
1) Qualcomm agreed to FRAND terms
2) Doing so meant giving up some of their rights
3) The US government is suing them for violating the terms
While I can understand how you assumed I was shilling for Apple or against Qualcomm, re-read my comment again and you'll find that nowhere did I espouse any particular stance on the subject. That's because I don't have a particular stance on the subject. The closest I've come to taking sides was last week when I suggested that everyone seemed to be in the wrong, which is a generalization I still stand by (though my today-self would quibble with my past-self over some of the details in that post).
So, when you ask...
Care to explain how that fits in to FRAND?
...no, I wouldn't, because I don't align with either side right now. I was simply trying to help an AC understand what the OP was getting at by presenting a few relevant facts to what I think the OP was driving at. I never said I agreed with what the OP said, nor did I present them as my views.
As such, if the facts I mentioned are inconvenient to your preferred narrative, that doesn't make me a shill. It means you have facts you need to deal with.
Agreed. I never suggested otherwise. Honestly, I don't know enough about the specifics of this case to have formed any sort of opinion over whether or not Qualcomm is violating FRAND terms. Apple says they are, but Apple says a lot of things...
Yes, you're technically correct, but practically speaking, there's nothing stopping them from taking the money you just paid and loaning it to the next guy in line, restoring things to where they had been already. That was my point.
At the time the mortgage was set up, it was worth it to them as an investment vehicle that provided (generally) stable returns for the amount of risk involved. Simple as that. Having an investment that will provide an annual return of X%, potentially for the next few decades, is valuable. If the investment comes to an abrupt end (i.e. the homeowner pays off the loan), the bank doesn't lose the value they already got out of it, and the only way they would lose the future value out of it is if they did nothing with the cash you paid them back. But none of them do that. They instead initiate new loans or invest it in some other way in order to reap various benefits.
When you pay off a loan early the bank loses interest.
No they don't. They have your cash in hand and can gain interest on it directly, rather than waiting for you to pay it. In fact, if you financed your mortgage at a rate below the current rate, they stand to gain by having you pay early, since the interest they'll get on the cash is higher than the interest they'll get from your payments.
These particular patents were included in the industry standard on the condition that Qualcomm would provide them under FRAND terms. As such, Qualcomm has given up their right to leverage those patents as fully as their monopoly position would otherwise allow. The OP seems to be suggesting that by engaging in the sorts of practices mentioned in the summary, they're acting the part of an unrestricted monopoly, even though they gave up the right to do so when they agreed to FRAND terms. The fact that the US government is currently suing them over that exact issue adds an extra wrinkle to things.
I always struggle with understanding quantum computing concepts, but from the sound of things in the article, this is not some sort of general purpose quantum computer. Rather, it's a purpose-built computer dedicated to estimating the behavior of photons.
Why that specifically?
Based on what the article (and summary) said, modern computers struggle to estimate the behavior of 20 or more photons, but it's the sort of problem that quantum computers are theoretically capable of handling quite easily. Researchers are apparently suggesting that in order to disprove skeptics and bring in more support for quantum computing, we should build a quantum computer of this variety and then use it to estimate the behavior of 30 or more photons, because doing so would definitively prove to everyone that quantum computers can provide a massive advantage over traditional computing methods.
This is what's happening:
1) You receive a convincing looking e-mail from a known contact, apparently sharing a Google Doc with you.
2) Following the "Open the Doc" link directs you to Google's real pages for logging in, followed up by being prompted to grant permission to "Google Docs" to read, send, delete, and manage your e-mail, as well as your contacts. Clicking on "Google Docs" reveals that it's not the real app, but rather an app with the same name that's linked to some random gmail address. Again, all of this is still via Google's real pages.
3) If you grant permission, you're compromised, because you've effectively given a rogue app full access to your account via the app API. They have full access to your e-mails and contacts, and will send e-mails to all of your contacts indicating that you shared a doc with them, thus perpetuating the scam.
Notably, resetting your password will not revoke the scammer's access. Because you've granted the fake "Google Docs" app full permission to access your account via the app API, they have no need for your password. The best way to remove their access is by going to this Google page and removing access for the fake "Google Docs" app.
one has to wonder
Have they left anything to our imaginations at this point? I thought it was already widely accepted as fact that they've been rotting from the top.
Touch ID is a killer feature for some (5 or 5s?). And a few people really like Apple Pay (6 and up). There was Portrait mode thanks to the dual cameras on the 7 Plus. But yeah, otherwise (and in all seriousness), mostly incremental improvements these last few generations. The 7 in particular was somewhat underwhelming.
The OP asked if people were leaving or holding off for a newer version. I was presenting a third possibility: that they were holding onto, rather than holding off. As I prefaced my last comment, it's an anecdote, so take it with the requisite grain of salt and move along. I wasn't arguing anything, other than that there may be more possibilities at play than the summary and OP listed.
You're reading WAY more into my comment than is actually there. If you think I was boasting when I provided an example of how my parent's phones have been able to remain relevant despite newer models coming out, I'd suggest it says more about you than me. I wasn't making a jab at whatever your mobile platform of choice is.
I know quite a few apple phone fans and none of them ever hold off
This is an anecdote, to be sure, but my parents are holding off until later this year, even though they haven't heard any rumors and even though their iPhone 5s has since been surpassed by the 6, 6s, and 7 generations.
The reason they're holding off is because their existing iPhones are simply good enough. The iPhone 5s still runs the latest OS, gets the latest patches, and runs apps nearly as well today as it did when it was first introduced in 2013. It's held up remarkably well. The fact that it was also the first 64-bit smartphone has helped to keep it on the good side of any compatibility cutoffs as well, as apps have dropped support for older architectures and devices.
Really though, none of this is surprising. Though my dad was in a line before dawn to get the iPhone 3G on launch day, he held off two generations before upgrading to the iPhone 4, three generations to get the iPhone 5s, and now holding off four generations for whatever comes out later this year.
All of which is to say, it has nothing to do with whatever's next, and everything to do with what they already have: something that's good enough.
There's a lot to unpack in that one sentence.
1) Dividends aren't their primary means for returning value. 70% of their capital return program is via stock buybacks.
2) I understated the size of the program in my last comment. It's worth $250 billion through March 2018, rather than the $150 billion I previously said.
3) As that link also shows, Apple is paying $2.28/year, not $1, so it's a better value than you suggested, though still below average across the market.
4) The reason the dividends aren't a great value at the moment is because their shares surged 20+% in the last quarter, shifting the value proposition. At the time the dividends were set last year, they were on par with the S&P 500 averages. It's likely Apple will adjust them when they announce their earnings for the quarter sometime this week (today maybe?).
All of which is to say, this suggestion that Apple isn't returning value to shareholders, despite being actively engaged in the largest program in history to do exactly that is either disingenuous or misinformed. And pointing out that their dividends aren't a great value at the moment is also a bit strange, given that they're neither the primary means by which Apple is returning value, nor has Apple had the opportunity to adjust their dividends since the value proposition shifted.
Apple is actually in the middle of the largest shareholder return program in history. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they've returned something like $150 billion already, with another $30 billion to go. Despite that, they're still acquiring cash faster than they can drain their reserves, and they're limited in how much they can return, simply because the cash is overseas. Even their current program is primarily being funded via loans they're taking out, rather than from their reserves.
I had actually typed up a joking paragraph about how if there was a 6GL, it'd mean that we were either living in the world of WALL-E or The Terminator, that is, because the machine would likely be choosing its own problems to solve, either we'd have nothing to do or we'd be struggling to remain relevant.
Likewise, I got here via RSS.
Before I say anything else, I'll shill by tossing in a glowing recommendation for Feedbin. I tested way too many clients after Google Reader went down, and it was far and away my favorite of the bunch. As a nice bonus, it's also open source and can be run on your own servers free of charge, but I've been a paid subscriber ever since Reader shut down. Well worth the $20/year I'm paying.
Speaking more generally, the problem we all have is with surfacing the content we want to see. The content we want to see is constantly being published all around the web, but we lack the ability to know when and where it's getting published, so we need help finding it.
As of today, we have a few options. We can rely on curated content (e.g. newspapers, BuzzFeed), which waste our time and attention with copious amounts of content that we have no interest in so that we can find the few nuggets that actually interest us. Alternatively, we can rely on content aggregators (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), but content aggregation is rarely a money-maker, so each of those serves numerous other purposes (e.g. sharing jokes, posting cat pics, relaying personal messages), all of which add noise that detracts from simply consuming the news. Moreover, each of those sites interferes with the news in some ways (e.g. reordering or hiding content), making them unreliable if we want to have a holistic and accurate view of matters.
Or, as a third option, we can rely on RSS and not have to make any of those compromises.
With a newspaper or BuzzFeed, if I feel like I have to sift through too much cruft, I can either take it or leave it. But with RSS, I can effectively make my own newspaper by subscribing to exactly as many sites I want to, each of which narrowly covers a small subset of the topics I'm interested in. As a result, I have exactly as much new content as I want, and nearly each piece of new content is tailored specifically to my interests. Plus, I gain all the fine-grained controls (e.g. mark as unread, applying rules to filter news, being able to look through update statistics) that come with having technology that's dedicated to solving a specific problem, rather than being one part of a much larger, general-purpose platform like those other content aggregators.
In fact, I've become so averse to sites that waste my time that if a site that posts new content doesn't offer an RSS feed, I simply don't visit it unless someone else links me to it. Nor do I apparently miss them, as I just learned when I went through my feeds and found that about a dozen of them hadn't had any updates in years, only one of which I had noticed was missing.
And what do I do with all of that time I've saved? Waste it commenting on Slashdot, apparently.
*sigh*
Fact-checking myself: it was the iPhone 4, apparently, that introduced the Retina display. Mea culpa.
The Chrysler Imperial was the first car to feature all-wheel anti-lock brakes, but we wouldn't call it a first generation car, since it was clearly preceded by others. The iPhone 5 was the first to feature a Retina display, but no one's suggesting it's a first-gen iPhone, since the name alone tells you that it's part of a line that goes back before it.
So, why, then, do you refer to FORTRAN as a first generation language, just because it was the first to feature a high-level of abstraction? The fact that it's a "high-level" language should immediately suggest to you that it was preceded by "low-level" languages, as it was. The fact that it's a high-level language sets it apart from previous generations, but it doesn't make it the first generation. Rather, it's the first, third-generation language.
Neither Fortran, nor C are first generation languages
In fact, every language he mentions in the article is a textbook example of a third-gen language (3GL). I didn't see any mention of even a single first generation language.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was trying to keep his writing approachable, but "first generation languages" has had an established meaning in this field for the last several decades, so misusing the terminology just makes it look like he has no idea what he's talking about. A far better way to phrase it would have been "In early high-level languages like FORTRAN and C [...]", since that would have been accurate while also being descriptive enough for most lay people to understand well enough.
For anyone who doesn't know about them, programming language generations refer to the level of abstraction, NOT to when they were introduced:
All of which is to say, starting off an article with a glaring misuse of established terminology is a great way to get anyone with a passing awareness of the topic to immediately dismiss anything he has to say. As a professor, I'd hope he'd have a better awareness about the importance of using those terms correctly. And as the publisher, I'd hope that Scientific American would have an editor who would recognize when they were out of their depth and would need to call in a domain expert to proof the text.
Shhh! You'll summon APK!
whether importing hundreds of thousands of African slaves to toil on Cotton and Tobacco plantations,
History clearly isn't your strong suit. Historically speaking, the Republican Party has been staunchly ANTI-slavery. The Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists, and the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, signed into law a little document you may have heard of that addressed the topic of slavery.
It wasn't until well into the 1900s that the Republican Party migrated more to the South and was adopted by the sorts of crowds youre likely thinking of.
Blame the modern Republicans all you want, but get your history right, especially when it comes to accusing people of being pro-slavery.
why one rule for you and another for others ?
Perhaps because Qualcomm (voluntarily) legally bound itself to provide licenses under FRAND terms as a condition for including their patents in the standard? Apple did no such thing.
I'm not saying Apple is in the right here. It actually sounds like they're screwing their suppliers, since their suppliers are the ones who have the licenses from Qualcomm, and it's those suppliers who are withholding royalty payments to Qualcomm on account of Apple not paying the money owed to them to cover their licensing fees. That said, Qualcomm is currently being investigated and/or sued by regulatory agencies around the globe for failing to abide by the FRAND terms they agreed to, so it seems safe to suggest that everyone's in the wrong at this point: Qualcomm for not abiding by its legal obligations, and Apple for not abiding by its contractual obligations.
Or does Congress only have that power when it's something you agree with?
I'm not sure which part of this you think I agree with. I certainly don't agree with what the FCC is doing here.
It sounds as if you're challenging whether Congress even has the authority to create independent agencies in the first place, which is an entirely unrelated discussion, and one for which I don't have a particularly strong opinion (I've just taken it as fact that it's something that they do, without ever really questioning it, honestly). That said, I will point out that if you take issue with Congress delegating its authority to independent agencies, then you'd need to account for the existence of NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and even the United States Postal Service, all of which are also independent agencies. Again, I don't have a strong opinion, but there's clearly a necessity that those services be provided in some form or function, and the 538 members of Congress are clearly not up to the task of managing all of that on their own, especially once you consider that most of those agencies are far larger than Congress itself.
Let Congress pass a law [...]
They did. It was the FCC charter. It explicitly gave the FCC the task of and granted them the authority to make decisions about how to classify companies. If Congress wants to pass a law doing what you say, they can, but in the meantime they've said that it is the FCC's job to make those decisions.