It's not residual, and it has less to do with their monopoly than with their business tactics. The monopoly just made their tactics much more abusive. They should have been disbanded as an abusive monopoly, instead they bribed the right politicians and were let off with their wrists being slapped gently with a single wet noodle.
That said (and agreed with) Firefox recently changed itself to favor Bing as the default search engine. It was reasonably easy to change back, but it was still a change in existing preferences.
My suspicion is that MS is paying various companies to do this kind of garbage, and several groups are willing to bend over.
I guess that manual window controls must be more expensive to install. They don't seem to be available on any recent car. I'm not thrilled with doors that electrically unlock. (I want to be able to unlock only the particular door I want unlocked.)
OTOH, automatic parallel parking is something that is worth putting up with several unnecessary automations in order to get.
Sorry, but parallel parking is a collection of skills. Some can be learned, others need to be built-in. I don't drive, I've never wanted to drive, I can only see out of one eye, and *I* am better at parallel parking than my wife. She has practiced carefully, but she just can't judge distances and angles well. She's a careful enough driver that only once in the 30 years I've known her has she had so much as a fender bender. (And then the truck, which was parked, didn't notice, though the trucker, who was in the drivers seat, did. It was at about 5 mph. She had to get a neighbor to get the car off the truck's bumper, but all that was involved was turning the steering wheel the correct direction and going forwards.)
So for some people automatic parallel parking is a desperately needed advance. Just because you don't need it, don't sneer at others. At least not as "lazy" or "unfocused".
You must have always had lots of disposable income. And never lived where housing was tight. Where I live it's quite often that when I would look for an apartment, I'd check a new listing, and by the time I got out to look at it, someone else would already have taken it. II'd analogize it to a parking space, but if you don't live where housing is tight, that probably wouldn't make sense either.
And as for buying instead of renting...you need a lot of cash and a stable residence for that to be a viable option. I'd think that you were too old to know better, but I'm already retired, so I'm going to guess that you bought a house 30 years ago. Either that or you live in a small town distant from any metropolitan area. (I'd guess that you were still living at home and had never had to find a place to live, but the tone of your comment indicates someone older.)
There's a problem here. The most likely first response is the cost of a place to live going up over $250/month. Those who have the power to set prices are likely to see that as just an opportunity to increase prices.
OK, some places already have rent control. In those places it's just the price at turnover that will increase. Which, of course, will be a great incentive to coerce turnover.
FWIW, I *am* in favor of a basic income, but it's not a straightforwards problem, and simple answers won't work. I think the first step needs to be a reform of the tax law so that the tax is a simple linear tax (y = mx + b) where m is the tax rate, x is the income, and b is the -1 * "basic income". y, of course, is the tax owed, and can be negative. And x, income, has NO exemptions. If you want to support some selected group, do it outside the tax law. (OTOH, losing money, say on the stock market, *is* a negative income, resulting as much negative tax as earning the same amount would have resulted in a positive tax.) There are problems here with, among many other things, interfaces to foreign tax laws. Algorithms without corner cases are rare.
The best possible result would be WalMart going bankrupt. They are a drain on all levels of government from city through federal. And they aren't too good for the private economy, either. They pay their people so little that if they worked full time they would qualify for general assistance and food stamps. But they won't let them work full time, because that might give them some rights.
Well, I'm unlikely to find that out, as I don't use portables. But if they're providing the "dial tone" aren't they a common carrier as well as being the ISP? (OTOH, I'll agree that their lawyers would probably find grounds to prove differently under the law.)
Sorry, but it was evident from the start that corn based ethanol production was grossly inefficient. It *did* turn out worse than it might have, based on what was known at the start, but even at the start it was clearly uneconomic.
What ethanol fuel via corn was, was pork for certain Senators that held important positions. And it could be painted green, so it had some political benefit. It wasn't a reasonable approach, and it wasn't prototyped as reasonable approaches have been.
Governments CAN do good economic development, but only when the politics is right. They can also pour money down a rat hole. And that's what corn-based ethanol was. (Now there ARE corn based systems under development that might be reasonable. But they are based around using the leaves and the stalks, not the ears of corn. The only ear's of corn -> ethanol system that makes economic sense is bourbon (or, whiskey, anyway).
"Windows" was widely used in technical contexts long before MS trademarked it. Which is why they lost the trademark battle against "Lindows" in the US court. They won in a European court where English was not the native language, and then they bought the US rights (to "Lindows") from the Lindows company.
MS should not be allowed the rights to the term windows in any English speaking country. Defending against them, however, is likely to be both expensive and challenging. Because the legal system is rigged. But "window" is a generic term for a section of a computer screen operated on by some particular application, and has been so since long before MS claimed the term. The technical term is still in use, and they have no right to the term.
OTOH, there are so many languages in the world that coming up with something pronounceable and memorable that *won't* be in conflict is quite difficult. Which is why one company ended up calling itself "Exxon".
It's not a situation that has an easy answer that doesn't involve changing the law in a way that will disadvantage *someone*.
It's not driven by government, of not mainly. Once there were the main enemies of the free press, and it largely survived them. Then newspapers became "uneconomic" and were bought up by various corporate groups, and the FCC ruled that it wasn't monopolistic for the same company to own the TV station and the newspaper in a single area. The free press hasn't survived the era of corporate buyouts. And, of course, the broadcast media always needed government approval, but since they also needed wealthy sponsors this didn't make much difference.
I think you can trace this back to the FCC decision in the...I think it was the 1960's...that the TV stations didn't need to provide equal access to all political parties. But you could also trace it back to that judges clerk in the 1840's who amended the judge's decision to include that corporations were legal persons. And to various other points of inflection.
Slight correction... Actually from 1950 until around 1962-65it was reasonable to believe thatthe US could have won a nuclear war with Russia without much damage.
Later analysis showed that even a much more minor nuclear exchange would probably lead to "nuclear autumn" with vast starvation, advancing glaciation, etc. The US vs. Russia would be a lot worse, though probably not up to the original "nuclear winter" estimate. The problem is that nuclear blasts in conjunction with fires loft fine ash particles up into the stratosphere where they do not settle quickly out, as that do at lower altitudes.
P.S.: Want to solve global warming? Start a large forest fire and then set off a nuclear blast in the same area. Calibrating this might prove a bit difficult, of course.
As I understand it, in her office she was not to have unlogged communication with governmental employees, either directly or indirectly. I could be misunderstanding things.
What you are talking about is what would be the law for an average citizen, not for a cabinet official. The law for a cabinet official is, as I understand it, much stricter. That, of course, doesn't say anything about enforcement.
She's not *just* a scapegoat. She wasn't supposed to HAVE governmental material on a private server. I'm not sure she was supposed to have a private server. What she did was also clearly a crime, despite excuses. There's reasonable question of why she isn't in jail. But it's also true that she didn't originate the emails that she received, and she received them over an unsecured network. Did she solicit those emails? Whether she did or not, the person sending them committed a crime. So there's plenty of criminal activity to go around, and one needs to wonder why she had a private email server when she wasn't supposed to have any communications from official parties that were not logged on a governmental server. This is consistent with a plan to engage in illegal activity. (A possible example is illegally discriminating against someone getting a job in government.) This isn't proof. We don't know why she had a private email server. We do know she wasn't supposed to get any governmental communications on it. I suppose it might have been legal if it used a whitelist to only allow communications from, say, campaign staff that weren't employed by the government...but I'm no lawyer.
It's a good joke, even though it's got a hint of truth behind it. Or perhaps because it has a hint of truth behind it. The number of scandals that are also crimes that show up and are then forgotten is so large that one has to suspect an ulterior motive in keeping this one alive. OTOH, there's also the question of why she isn't in jail.
Actually, thinking again, for propositions standard voting makes more sense. I was focusing too hard on alternatives for selecting candidates. For anything that's yes/no the only viable thing to adjust is the proportion of yes votes required for passage.
??? The Democratic party has been swinging right since... well, nearly 20 years. At this point they're somewhat to the right of Nixon. And despite claims both parties are also proponents of big government and centralized control, so that's nothing to choose between on their part.
Tbe Democrats *do* tend to try to return a little value to their the general populace, though not enough to repay the centralization that they demand in return. The Republicans also tend to return a bit of value to their supporters. This generally means intolerant laws and bacon for the wealthy. Being somewhere in the middle, neither side helps me much, but I dislike intolerance, so I'm less anti-Democrat than I am anti-Republican. I don't like either, however, so I generally vote 3rd party. (Not that I like most of them. Think of the kind of candidate that would devote the time and effort involved in running for office when they had no reasonable chance of winning.)
I really think elections have proven a failure. For propositions I'm in favor of either Condorcet or Instant Runoff voting, but for candidates I've become convinced that we'd get better candidates from a lottery.
The problem is regulatory capture. Solve that and I'll pretty much agree with you.
(Actually, the solution is easy. Just forbid the regulators to have private communications with those they regulate either directly or through intermediates. And forbid them to accept any gratuities, jobs, etc. from them either while in office or after retiring. And enforce those rules. The difficulty is in getting those rules in place.)
The problem is that though the code can be fixed, it can't be installed.
Honestly, however, most of the vulnerable Android devices aren't fixed even when it's possible, because their users don't understand what they're doing. And the system was designed under the premise that they shouldn't.
But the code can be fixed. And may be in next year's model.
It's always been tricky to define just what "Science Fiction" is. I can't really think of even one story that didn't play fast and loose with the laws of physics as known that I would consider science fiction, but if you are too fast and loose you don't qualify.
FWIW, Isasc Asimov had an anthology called "Earth is Room Enough" which was entirely composed of stories he'd written that has just happened to take place entirely on Earth. No rocket ships needed. There's a series called "Dance of the Gods" (don't remember the author offhand) that starts off as apparent swords and sorcery fantasy and slowly, over the course of four volumes, morphs into rather hard science fiction. (I don't really believe that physics allows what is proposed, but I'm not certain.)
And nearly anything can be done if you just invoke virtual reality nested sufficiently.
So "best Science Fiction story" is a totally ill-defined concept. You can't even exclude "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy. (I hated that in English Lit., but it attempted to be slice of life in the 1800's, or maybe 1700's.) You might, however, argue against "Finnegan's Wake" because it doesn't appear (on the surface) to have much plot.
Now when I was in my 20's I really liked "Cosmic Engineers", which is fantasy in the Science Fiction metaphor, but I also liked "Mission of Gravity" which attempted to be scientifically accurate (except for faster than light space ships). And I also liked "Sentinels from Space", which was another fantasy wrapped up to look like science fiction. The thing is, all of those were always described as just science fiction. I also liked the lensman series and the skylark series, which were politics wrapped in a science fiction metaphor. And were always described as science fiction. isn't something new.
Actually, the genesis probably goes back to the British "New Wave" science fiction of the 1960's or 70's. That was when science fiction authors started paying attention to characterization, etc. (Never mind that some authors had always done so, they'd been exceptions during the 1940's and 50's.)
If you organize slate voting, don't be surprised if some opposition arises. It will, if only as a fission within your existing slate. I rather hope that the rules amendment that has passed it's first vote passes the second vote and solves the problem. At least I hope it makes stuffing the nominations 5 times as difficult, as is its intention.
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When someone bribes someone else, both the giver and the recipient of the bribe have committed a crime.
It's not residual, and it has less to do with their monopoly than with their business tactics. The monopoly just made their tactics much more abusive. They should have been disbanded as an abusive monopoly, instead they bribed the right politicians and were let off with their wrists being slapped gently with a single wet noodle.
That said (and agreed with) Firefox recently changed itself to favor Bing as the default search engine. It was reasonably easy to change back, but it was still a change in existing preferences.
My suspicion is that MS is paying various companies to do this kind of garbage, and several groups are willing to bend over.
I guess that manual window controls must be more expensive to install. They don't seem to be available on any recent car. I'm not thrilled with doors that electrically unlock. (I want to be able to unlock only the particular door I want unlocked.)
OTOH, automatic parallel parking is something that is worth putting up with several unnecessary automations in order to get.
Sorry, but parallel parking is a collection of skills. Some can be learned, others need to be built-in. I don't drive, I've never wanted to drive, I can only see out of one eye, and *I* am better at parallel parking than my wife. She has practiced carefully, but she just can't judge distances and angles well. She's a careful enough driver that only once in the 30 years I've known her has she had so much as a fender bender. (And then the truck, which was parked, didn't notice, though the trucker, who was in the drivers seat, did. It was at about 5 mph. She had to get a neighbor to get the car off the truck's bumper, but all that was involved was turning the steering wheel the correct direction and going forwards.)
So for some people automatic parallel parking is a desperately needed advance. Just because you don't need it, don't sneer at others. At least not as "lazy" or "unfocused".
You must have always had lots of disposable income. And never lived where housing was tight. Where I live it's quite often that when I would look for an apartment, I'd check a new listing, and by the time I got out to look at it, someone else would already have taken it. II'd analogize it to a parking space, but if you don't live where housing is tight, that probably wouldn't make sense either.
And as for buying instead of renting...you need a lot of cash and a stable residence for that to be a viable option. I'd think that you were too old to know better, but I'm already retired, so I'm going to guess that you bought a house 30 years ago. Either that or you live in a small town distant from any metropolitan area. (I'd guess that you were still living at home and had never had to find a place to live, but the tone of your comment indicates someone older.)
There's a problem here. The most likely first response is the cost of a place to live going up over $250/month. Those who have the power to set prices are likely to see that as just an opportunity to increase prices.
OK, some places already have rent control. In those places it's just the price at turnover that will increase. Which, of course, will be a great incentive to coerce turnover.
FWIW, I *am* in favor of a basic income, but it's not a straightforwards problem, and simple answers won't work. I think the first step needs to be a reform of the tax law so that the tax is a simple linear tax (y = mx + b) where m is the tax rate, x is the income, and b is the -1 * "basic income". y, of course, is the tax owed, and can be negative. And x, income, has NO exemptions. If you want to support some selected group, do it outside the tax law. (OTOH, losing money, say on the stock market, *is* a negative income, resulting as much negative tax as earning the same amount would have resulted in a positive tax.) There are problems here with, among many other things, interfaces to foreign tax laws. Algorithms without corner cases are rare.
The way it did so before created a rather high mortality rate among those replaced. Is this a good outcome?
The best possible result would be WalMart going bankrupt. They are a drain on all levels of government from city through federal. And they aren't too good for the private economy, either. They pay their people so little that if they worked full time they would qualify for general assistance and food stamps. But they won't let them work full time, because that might give them some rights.
Well, I'm unlikely to find that out, as I don't use portables. But if they're providing the "dial tone" aren't they a common carrier as well as being the ISP? (OTOH, I'll agree that their lawyers would probably find grounds to prove differently under the law.)
ISPs may not be common carriers under US law, but I believe that AT&T *is* a common carrier under US law.
Sorry, but it was evident from the start that corn based ethanol production was grossly inefficient. It *did* turn out worse than it might have, based on what was known at the start, but even at the start it was clearly uneconomic.
What ethanol fuel via corn was, was pork for certain Senators that held important positions. And it could be painted green, so it had some political benefit. It wasn't a reasonable approach, and it wasn't prototyped as reasonable approaches have been.
Governments CAN do good economic development, but only when the politics is right. They can also pour money down a rat hole. And that's what corn-based ethanol was. (Now there ARE corn based systems under development that might be reasonable. But they are based around using the leaves and the stalks, not the ears of corn. The only ear's of corn -> ethanol system that makes economic sense is bourbon (or, whiskey, anyway).
"Windows" was widely used in technical contexts long before MS trademarked it. Which is why they lost the trademark battle against "Lindows" in the US court. They won in a European court where English was not the native language, and then they bought the US rights (to "Lindows") from the Lindows company.
MS should not be allowed the rights to the term windows in any English speaking country. Defending against them, however, is likely to be both expensive and challenging. Because the legal system is rigged. But "window" is a generic term for a section of a computer screen operated on by some particular application, and has been so since long before MS claimed the term. The technical term is still in use, and they have no right to the term.
OTOH, there are so many languages in the world that coming up with something pronounceable and memorable that *won't* be in conflict is quite difficult. Which is why one company ended up calling itself "Exxon".
It's not a situation that has an easy answer that doesn't involve changing the law in a way that will disadvantage *someone*.
It's not driven by government, of not mainly. Once there were the main enemies of the free press, and it largely survived them. Then newspapers became "uneconomic" and were bought up by various corporate groups, and the FCC ruled that it wasn't monopolistic for the same company to own the TV station and the newspaper in a single area. The free press hasn't survived the era of corporate buyouts. And, of course, the broadcast media always needed government approval, but since they also needed wealthy sponsors this didn't make much difference.
I think you can trace this back to the FCC decision in the...I think it was the 1960's...that the TV stations didn't need to provide equal access to all political parties. But you could also trace it back to that judges clerk in the 1840's who amended the judge's decision to include that corporations were legal persons. And to various other points of inflection.
Slight correction...
Actually from 1950 until around 1962-65 it was reasonable to believe that the US could have won a nuclear war with Russia without much damage.
Later analysis showed that even a much more minor nuclear exchange would probably lead to "nuclear autumn" with vast starvation, advancing glaciation, etc. The US vs. Russia would be a lot worse, though probably not up to the original "nuclear winter" estimate. The problem is that nuclear blasts in conjunction with fires loft fine ash particles up into the stratosphere where they do not settle quickly out, as that do at lower altitudes.
P.S.: Want to solve global warming? Start a large forest fire and then set off a nuclear blast in the same area. Calibrating this might prove a bit difficult, of course.
As I understand it, in her office she was not to have unlogged communication with governmental employees, either directly or indirectly. I could be misunderstanding things.
What you are talking about is what would be the law for an average citizen, not for a cabinet official. The law for a cabinet official is, as I understand it, much stricter. That, of course, doesn't say anything about enforcement.
She's not *just* a scapegoat. She wasn't supposed to HAVE governmental material on a private server. I'm not sure she was supposed to have a private server. What she did was also clearly a crime, despite excuses. There's reasonable question of why she isn't in jail. But it's also true that she didn't originate the emails that she received, and she received them over an unsecured network. Did she solicit those emails? Whether she did or not, the person sending them committed a crime. So there's plenty of criminal activity to go around, and one needs to wonder why she had a private email server when she wasn't supposed to have any communications from official parties that were not logged on a governmental server. This is consistent with a plan to engage in illegal activity. (A possible example is illegally discriminating against someone getting a job in government.) This isn't proof. We don't know why she had a private email server. We do know she wasn't supposed to get any governmental communications on it. I suppose it might have been legal if it used a whitelist to only allow communications from, say, campaign staff that weren't employed by the government...but I'm no lawyer.
It's a good joke, even though it's got a hint of truth behind it. Or perhaps because it has a hint of truth behind it. The number of scandals that are also crimes that show up and are then forgotten is so large that one has to suspect an ulterior motive in keeping this one alive. OTOH, there's also the question of why she isn't in jail.
Actually, thinking again, for propositions standard voting makes more sense. I was focusing too hard on alternatives for selecting candidates. For anything that's yes/no the only viable thing to adjust is the proportion of yes votes required for passage.
??? The Democratic party has been swinging right since ... well, nearly 20 years. At this point they're somewhat to the right of Nixon. And despite claims both parties are also proponents of big government and centralized control, so that's nothing to choose between on their part.
Tbe Democrats *do* tend to try to return a little value to their the general populace, though not enough to repay the centralization that they demand in return. The Republicans also tend to return a bit of value to their supporters. This generally means intolerant laws and bacon for the wealthy. Being somewhere in the middle, neither side helps me much, but I dislike intolerance, so I'm less anti-Democrat than I am anti-Republican. I don't like either, however, so I generally vote 3rd party. (Not that I like most of them. Think of the kind of candidate that would devote the time and effort involved in running for office when they had no reasonable chance of winning.)
I really think elections have proven a failure. For propositions I'm in favor of either Condorcet or Instant Runoff voting, but for candidates I've become convinced that we'd get better candidates from a lottery.
I'm not sure it's racist, but it's certainly a *stupid* joke. (As opposed to a "stupid *joke*".)
The problem is regulatory capture. Solve that and I'll pretty much agree with you.
(Actually, the solution is easy. Just forbid the regulators to have private communications with those they regulate either directly or through intermediates. And forbid them to accept any gratuities, jobs, etc. from them either while in office or after retiring. And enforce those rules. The difficulty is in getting those rules in place.)
The problem is that though the code can be fixed, it can't be installed.
Honestly, however, most of the vulnerable Android devices aren't fixed even when it's possible, because their users don't understand what they're doing. And the system was designed under the premise that they shouldn't.
But the code can be fixed. And may be in next year's model.
It's always been tricky to define just what "Science Fiction" is. I can't really think of even one story that didn't play fast and loose with the laws of physics as known that I would consider science fiction, but if you are too fast and loose you don't qualify.
FWIW, Isasc Asimov had an anthology called "Earth is Room Enough" which was entirely composed of stories he'd written that has just happened to take place entirely on Earth. No rocket ships needed. There's a series called "Dance of the Gods" (don't remember the author offhand) that starts off as apparent swords and sorcery fantasy and slowly, over the course of four volumes, morphs into rather hard science fiction. (I don't really believe that physics allows what is proposed, but I'm not certain.)
And nearly anything can be done if you just invoke virtual reality nested sufficiently.
So "best Science Fiction story" is a totally ill-defined concept. You can't even exclude "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy. (I hated that in English Lit., but it attempted to be slice of life in the 1800's, or maybe 1700's.) You might, however, argue against "Finnegan's Wake" because it doesn't appear (on the surface) to have much plot.
Now when I was in my 20's I really liked "Cosmic Engineers", which is fantasy in the Science Fiction metaphor, but I also liked "Mission of Gravity" which attempted to be scientifically accurate (except for faster than light space ships). And I also liked "Sentinels from Space", which was another fantasy wrapped up to look like science fiction. The thing is, all of those were always described as just science fiction. I also liked the lensman series and the skylark series, which were politics wrapped in a science fiction metaphor. And were always described as science fiction. isn't something new.
Actually, the genesis probably goes back to the British "New Wave" science fiction of the 1960's or 70's. That was when science fiction authors started paying attention to characterization, etc. (Never mind that some authors had always done so, they'd been exceptions during the 1940's and 50's.)
If you organize slate voting, don't be surprised if some opposition arises. It will, if only as a fission within your existing slate. I rather hope that the rules amendment that has passed it's first vote passes the second vote and solves the problem. At least I hope it makes stuffing the nominations 5 times as difficult, as is its intention.
For more details about this from an author's point of view see:
Bad puppies, no awards under http://www.antipope.org/charli...
And if you your opinion none of the finalists deserved an award, who are you supposed to vote for?