Cmon: DTrace started out at Sun for Solaris in 2003, and was released in 2005 as part of Solaris 10. It was then ported to the FreeBSD and NetBSD Un*x operating systems.
Apple added DTrace support with OSX10.5 = Leopard in something they called "Instruments". Apple porting the solaris and bsd code tree onto Apple's hardware, and the "required changes" which "they pioneered" were the changes necessary for it to work on Apple's own OSX platform. Can you point me to what it is that they fed back and released into the BSD world?
.
Seriously, you are overstating it to put a one-word "D-Trace" as an isolated item #4 on your numbered list as if Apple had almost everything to do with the conception, creation/generation, and distribution of D-Trace. You are immensely overstating their contribution. Porting a package to your own system is not the same as a contribution, and is certainly not citeable as ``pioneer[ing] the required changes.''
yep, I cut-n-pasted the binary translation of the previous line's "you had text?" rather than "you had HEX?". That's why my later reply to myself includes the correction as pseudo-code:
This might also work akin to how if you've got a laptop hooked up to an HDMI-cable for a presentation using MS software, then sometimes if a presentation has a video embedded in it, it shows up on the projector as a blank-black spot if you're using a projector that is not HDCP-enabled (proving that you can't COPY the digital signal leaving your computer via HDMI-with-HDCP to the authenticated-and-not-allowing-copying-HDMI-output-display device. At least that's what's been surmised. If you go through the vga cable hookups, the MS video player works fine, though. Could have been something else, wasn't the av kid on the block.
Nope, not looking for kilowatts. Look up implanted cardioversion devices, which are implanted pacemakers with defibrillators circuits built in and fibrillation detectors and algorithms built in along with pacing ability.
Actually, that type of lock-in is exactly what happens at the beginning of commercial DVDs and Blu-ray discs:
-- thou shalt not fast-forward
-- thou shalt not skip ahead
-- thou shalt not be able to press menu to escape (in some foreign discs)
-- thy remote shall be as useless as a dodo's wings until the FBI message, the trailer teasers, the forced ads for other discs to buy and when to go to the mouse's house or cruiseship have all passed onto your screen
regarding "why don't we get residuals" Re Agents, not unions
(1) ducats
(2) You didn't negotiate everlasting residuals in your contract before you signed it.
(3) Did you even look over that contract before U signed it?
(4) That AOL-voice guy "you've got mail!" was smart-enough as a voice-talent to negotiate a "residual"-like piecemeal payment based upon each and every time a computer belted out "you've got mail!". He netted millions. But then again, he came from the entertainment industry and looked at the computer/audio system as yet another performance platform for music/audio, whereas Apple Records didn't notice Apple Computers sneaking into their bailiwick.
(5) That AOL guy and any actors who got residuals probably had managers and agents who went to bat for them and actually did the nitty-gritty contract negotiation and paid for lawyers who reviewed the contracts prior to pen being applied to paper for signature.
My opinion (from my vastly minimal understanding of it) is that the ABA and AMA are more like P.R. mouthpieces and P.A.C. funding systems (political action committee) and lobbyists who get the interests of their respective members in front of the appropriate legislators. They also fund yearly meetings for the entire membership (ABA has annual meetings in SD, I don't know about AMA) and for select subgroups, e.g. tax attorneys, cardiologists, neurologists, etc.) and send out press releases as PR about the great new research they've done and what good they do for the community.
.
I don't believe that either the ABA or the AMA can be considered as union-like in preserving "benefits" or "minimum salaries" or "right to overtime pay", etc., anymore than a general interest looking out for their welfare in regards to laws at the federal and state levels.
.
The other thing to notice is that lawyers/ABA and physicians/AMA are professionals who do work based upon their learned and professional opinion and knowledge. They tend to be "salaried" rather than hourly-pay employees. I notice that a lot of comments on this topic talk about programmers/developers wanting autonomy and self-management since they are professionals. Well, being a professional means probably not being part of a union or represented by a union. I think they've tried to unionize medical students / medical residents / surgical residents and fellows at various medical schools and hospitals around the country. I've also heard about the graduate students and teaching assistants trying to be union represented at UCSD.
.
The academic world tends to try to beat down and bat at these unionization attempts with two conflicting/contradictory approaches: when they want to say that these people ought not to be union-represented or get an hourly wage or be paid for overtime, the university/academic argument is these are not employees, these are students who are learning in an educational environment and that this educational environment forces these "students" to work insanely long hours without compensation for excess labor or even adequate time to sleep for med/surgical residents in hospital training programs.
.
If, however, these people are requesting certain benefits that ought to accrue to them as students, the universities go out of their way to fight that "no no no, you're really employees, and as such must do this as employees would and you do not have those specific rights that students might have while you are doing those duties." I apologize for not knowing off the top of my head what the ludicrious example is that I heard about that the UCSD uses this in, or even what the search term is. perhaps medical student unionization, perhps michigan? Rant over. almost time to procrastinate on a paper and sleep.
Yes, I am aware that this device is wired directly into the myocardium. (And as for externally-applied defibrillators, it's probably usually wiser to remove any clothing getting in the way, and usually you apply conductive gel to the skin to decrease the circuit resistance as much as possible even in an emergency setting).
-- how much less power you need to apply directly to the heart as opposed to stimulating with an externally defibrillator applied to the chest wall,
.
externally-applied defibrillator to the chest wall, is what I meant to say, I switched applied and defibrillator around, but the meaning is the same. The power comparison I was asking about was power needed to provide pacing/pacemaker signal vs. the power required to generate an adequate defibrillating signal for a long enough period of time.
Thanks for the feedback. I hope I am clarifying what I said in the original statement. If you know any numbers or pointers/refs for
(1) the power requirements of a defibrillatory signal for an implanted cardioversion system vs
(2) the power output requirements for the standard pacing signal at SA node or at multiple sites, I would love to know. Thanks!
Re: geometric visualization of machine learning notation
.
What kind of geometric visualization do you mean/envision for machine learning? Or are there examples out there in the wild that you could perhaps point out to me? Thanks.
.
Also, what exactly do you intend the phrase "machine learning" to encompass? SVM? Neural nets trained on partial subsets of a dataset and tested/validated on other partial subsets? Supervised or unsupervised learning / algorithm modification techniques? Any pointers you have would be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, and I bet you the quality of their stitching and surgical magic would be such that you wouldn't even be able to see when the assembly edges were or where they cut you open. Then again, they don't really like modifying things do they? They tell you plan ahead of time to max out the RAM when you buy their iPeedPaadPodd or ultra-thin-airbook, because you won't be able to change the battery or add RAM to it later.
Nah, I guess they wouldn't want to operate on you; they'd rather be the OEM that makes you in the first place: humans 2.0, or since it's apple, iHumans 2.0, now with improved resolution and Retina (TM by apple don't use it it's our phrase) vision capable Retinas in each eye!
I did not "add the constraint that no battery is allowed" (quoting you there). Here's the quote of my GP post (quoting me now):
"i don't know the efficiency of the electrochemical battery system that could be used with it,"
.
I specifically mentioned electrochemical battery there, and in my original post I mentioned both using a capacitor and/or a rechargeable battery. So whomever you're complaining about adding that constraint, it certainly wasn't me. I got no problems with ze batteries, okay?
You don't need a citation. Walk up to most houses. You should be able to find the power meter on the side of the house. You should be able to read the numbers on the meter, no problem, even if it's also wireless, they tend to have LCD displays. If's it's got the little black-and-silver striped wheels on it, it's not too hard to figure out how to read the numbers: alternate clockwise and counter-clockwise and go down to the next lowest number: concatenate the numbers and you have a reading. Water meters are similar but situated close to the curb, probably on the right of way, with a little metal or concrete cover over it. Read meter the same way.
;>)
Here's a pointer to a crime blog for La Jolla: http://www.lajollalight.com/2011/07/19/la-jolla-crime-log/ : the details are usually known by the police and the victims and the neighbors, but otherwise the publicly cited crime-logs tend to be as terse as "Residential burglary." Get on your journalism hat, fly out, and investigate the truth!! Anyway, the point of the story was that there's no need to be paranoid about broadcasting your meter readings: they already exist in the clear and can be read with little effort by anyone interested in doing so. Just like the back of your car (and the front of your car in many states) also broadcasts optically/reflectively from the ambient light an identifying series of letters and numbers and symbols (CA allows symbols, check it out) that can also be seen by anyone caring to look. And it's against the law to block them out, though quite a few people put those weird supposedly IR-blocking filters over them as if that'll stop the traffic cameras from reading their plate.
also, that is why I put the phrase 'jump start' in double quotes as so: "jump start", to indicate that I was making little air-double-quotes around the phrase as I said it, so as to imply "no it's not really jump-starting, it's just resynchronizing the asynchronous non-entrained fibrillation occuring in the myocardiocytes so that once we've jolted them, an entrained signal can propagate in the correct direction and allow the correct temporal propagation of myocardial contractility so as to squeeze the blood through the atria and ventricles unless of course their is some dead myocardium around which a re-entrant circus rhythm can form leading to aberrant cardiac-signal propagation and irregular heart rhythms." But that seemed like too much to squeeze in.
;>)
Anyway, the key point is that the power needs might be great enough that such a mechano-electric harvester might take too long to store enough "juice" to be able to send out multiple defibrillatory stimuli. But I don't know about many of the numbers or parameters/variables involved in this particular system or other systems like it:
-- how much less power you need to apply directly to the heart as opposed to stimulating with an externally defibrillator applied to the chest wall,
-- I don't know what the efficiency of the piezo-electric system per heartbeat or the amount of current and voltage generated by it per heart-beat,
-- i don't know the efficiency of the electrochemical battery system that could be used with it,
but I'm wondering if it could generate enough power to be useful or not. C'est tout.
even so, the amount of power (voltage \times current) required for defibrillation is quite seriously more than the amount of voltage and current required for the basic sino-atrial node pacemaker replacement which only has to start or pace the cardiac electrical cycle when the pacemaker no longer performs adequately.
.
What I questioned was the ability of the piezoelectric energy harvester to cannibalize enough power to be able to do perhaps even one defibrillation attempt. This, of course, depends upon the amount of power it stores into the capacitive element used to store charge or the type of electro-chemical rechargeable battery used to store power.
The disastrous feedback loop I mean is that the heart stops beating, the reserve battery system does not have enough power, and since the heart isn't beating, the piezo-electric system cannot harvest any power to start a defibrillation pulse.
In our neighborhood in La Jolla, a couple of neighbors got burgled while they were away for a month or so, even though they had stopped mail delivery, stopped newspaper delivery, had people coming by to check on the house, had put the exterior and interior lights and even the television on electrical timers so it would appear that someone was still at home... What they'd forgotten about was water usage. When they caught the crooks two months later when they tried to pawn a particularly unique piece of silver jewelry and the cops traced and jailed them was that they had a notebook of water meter readings.
.
One of them had put on an orange vest like a construction worker or traffic worker guy and walked the choice neighborhoods and recorded the meter readings. They came back two weeks later, and la voila, anyone whose water had not budged too much was obviously not at home flushing or showering or cooking. (I guess water sprinklers could screw it up in some places, but here we've got two meters: the sprinkler meter only gets you billed for water usage, the house water meter gets you billed for water usage and for sewer usage.)
.
The meter reading trick does not require wireless access. Most meters are located in a position where the meter-reader does not have to enter a backyard or gated restricted portion of the property. And seriously, has anyone ever stopped or challenged a meter-reader and said "Hey, let me see you badge, and then call someone and verify it!". I don't think so. So after all this rambling, yes I agree with you, they are reaching pretty hard and being paranoid.
Cool! It can harvest enough energy to at least start the pacemaker signal for the heart cells, but how much standby time would it have in case the heart stops beating for too long? (Remember that rechargeable cells and capacitors slowly decay over time in their charge-keeping ability).
.
It's probably not a "defibrillator" type of heart-restarter in case the heart starts fibrillating: defibrillators require too much power in order to be able to "jump start" the heart. (At least I think that's the kind Cheney got). If it's just an automaticity regulator, than a piezo-electric harvester with a good-internal-rechargeable battery / capacitor system might be good for a long time. Don't kids need a redo-surgery as their bodies grow, though?
My parents still pay way way too much to keep a landline in the house and at the office. Here's the reason why: they got to see the effects of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake just north of Los Angeles. The cell phone towers did not work well and jammed up very fast. Texting could work, but the landlines actually did work very well. The cell phone towers do NOT have more than a 24-hour battery backup system, whereas the telephone system of landlines is a regulated public utility and they are required to maintain at least 48 hours of viable battery power in their circuits.
.
Even in a power outage, landlines often keep working while the power is out (at least if you have a hard-wired landline, cordless phones at home will need a home-based UPS battery backup system). Any students or professors who depended on cellular only access could NOT get through in the first 8 hours or so of the quake, whereas the landline students COULD get through, and helped the students without landlines by letting them use the phones.
.
I believe the standard excuse for police to pull out public payphones is to label them as a "hazard" used by drug dealers who can make phone calls without being traced. I've seen pay phones disappear from beside the 7-11's and the little mini-malls you see all over southern california. It's ridiculous to get rid of them when they can be a valuable lifeline in case of an emergency.
Thanks for clearing up the message for me. I really don't think they have any humans directly listening (!), they probably have some nice voice->text algorithms parsing the speech and saving the textual results as annotations along with the raw audio files. Also re the "do" and "does", I wasn't trying to make fun of you. I thought you just made an honest typo. I believe it depends on the Third person present tense, singular vs. plural.
.
My understanding of the conjugation of "to do" in the present tense is that in this case, "Google" is taken as being a singular noun rather than a plural noun, or at least I took it to be a singular noun referring to the singular corporate identity of Google. I think if you conjugate to do in the present tense in USA English :
I do
you do (singular)
he does, she does, it does (singular for masuline, feminine, nongendered)
we do
you do (plural, in most of USA) or y'all do (~"you all do" for plural in South-eastern USA)
they do, they do, they do (plural masc/fem/neuter gender)
.
So the only use of "does" is for the singular third person present tense, and "Google" referred to as a company or corporate entity is a single person. So you can also see my "they do... offer" as an incorrect response, "Google does" and "it does" matches tense. But I was only saying "they do" to use the "do" you had used. I believe third person singular is the correct pronoun for a company. (aside, I believe corporations have achieved"corporate personhood" according to the SCOTUS, though I do not believe the Supreme Court made any decision on whether to refer to the corporate entity as a singular entity or as a plural entity composed of the stockholders.)
.
If you do a search for +"google do", you get 400k results with the majority being the questioning future tense as in "What will Google do?". If you do a search for +"google does", you get more than a million results for present tense in the form "Google does XYZ" or "Google does it". I know we should not bow to the wisdom of the masses, but my understanding as a "native speaker" (of English.American.USA, subdialect Southern California teenager) is that "Google does this" is more appropriate than "Google do this" (unless that is meant in a command form and voiced to Google as a request or command for something to be done.
I am sure that the Grammar police lurking on slashdot will come to correct me if I am wrong, or possibly even if I am right.;>)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple added DTrace support with OSX10.5 = Leopard in something they called "Instruments". Apple porting the solaris and bsd code tree onto Apple's hardware, and the "required changes" which "they pioneered" were the changes necessary for it to work on Apple's own OSX platform. Can you point me to what it is that they fed back and released into the BSD world?
.
Seriously, you are overstating it to put a one-word "D-Trace" as an isolated item #4 on your numbered list as if Apple had almost everything to do with the conception, creation/generation, and distribution of D-Trace. You are immensely overstating their contribution. Porting a package to your own system is not the same as a contribution, and is certainly not citeable as ``pioneer[ing] the required changes.''
.
yep, I cut-n-pasted the binary translation of the previous line's "you had text?" rather than "you had HEX?". That's why my later reply to myself includes the correction as pseudo-code:
_ _ binary-encode{you had HEX?0x0a}
This might also work akin to how if you've got a laptop hooked up to an HDMI-cable for a presentation using MS software, then sometimes if a presentation has a video embedded in it, it shows up on the projector as a blank-black spot if you're using a projector that is not HDCP-enabled (proving that you can't COPY the digital signal leaving your computer via HDMI-with-HDCP to the authenticated-and-not-allowing-copying-HDMI-output-display device. At least that's what's been surmised. If you go through the vga cable hookups, the MS video player works fine, though. Could have been something else, wasn't the av kid on the block.
Nope, not looking for kilowatts. Look up implanted cardioversion devices, which are implanted pacemakers with defibrillators circuits built in and fibrillation detectors and algorithms built in along with pacing ability.
-- thou shalt not fast-forward
-- thou shalt not skip ahead
-- thou shalt not be able to press menu to escape (in some foreign discs)
-- thy remote shall be as useless as a dodo's wings until the FBI message, the trailer teasers, the forced ads for other discs to buy and when to go to the mouse's house or cruiseship have all passed onto your screen
.
0: Re: You had disks?
_ _ YOU HAD LOWERCASE?
1: Re: YOU HAD LOWERCASE?
_ _ _ hex-encode{you had ASCII?0x0a}
2 :
_ _ _ binary-encode{you had HEX?0x0a}
3:
_ _ _ _ stream-of-electrons-encode{you had switches to flip?}
4:
_ _ _ _ _ M-x-butterfly-encode{you had electrons? why i had to create the universe... get off my dark-matter lawn, you damn dirty apes!}
1: Re: YOU HAD LOWERCASE
_ _ hex-encode{you had ASCII?0x0a}
2 :
_ _ binary-encode{you had HEX?0x0a}
3:
_ _ stream-of-electrons-encode{you had switches to flip?}
4:
_ _ M-x-butterfly-encode{you had electrons? why i had to create the universe... get off my dark-matter lawn, you damn dirty apes!}
:>)
Anyways, here's the translated for those who don't want to parse away:
hexdump -C msg
00000000 79 6f 75 20 68 61 64 20 74 65 78 74 3f 0a |you had text?.|
01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01100101 01111000 01110100 00111111 00001010
79 6f 75 20 68 61 64 20 74 65 78 74 3f 0a
(1) ducats
(2) You didn't negotiate everlasting residuals in your contract before you signed it.
(3) Did you even look over that contract before U signed it?
(4) That AOL-voice guy "you've got mail!" was smart-enough as a voice-talent to negotiate a "residual"-like piecemeal payment based upon each and every time a computer belted out "you've got mail!". He netted millions. But then again, he came from the entertainment industry and looked at the computer/audio system as yet another performance platform for music/audio, whereas Apple Records didn't notice Apple Computers sneaking into their bailiwick.
(5) That AOL guy and any actors who got residuals probably had managers and agents who went to bat for them and actually did the nitty-gritty contract negotiation and paid for lawyers who reviewed the contracts prior to pen being applied to paper for signature.
. :>)
.
I don't believe that either the ABA or the AMA can be considered as union-like in preserving "benefits" or "minimum salaries" or "right to overtime pay", etc., anymore than a general interest looking out for their welfare in regards to laws at the federal and state levels.
.
The other thing to notice is that lawyers/ABA and physicians/AMA are professionals who do work based upon their learned and professional opinion and knowledge. They tend to be "salaried" rather than hourly-pay employees. I notice that a lot of comments on this topic talk about programmers/developers wanting autonomy and self-management since they are professionals. Well, being a professional means probably not being part of a union or represented by a union. I think they've tried to unionize medical students / medical residents / surgical residents and fellows at various medical schools and hospitals around the country. I've also heard about the graduate students and teaching assistants trying to be union represented at UCSD.
.
The academic world tends to try to beat down and bat at these unionization attempts with two conflicting/contradictory approaches: when they want to say that these people ought not to be union-represented or get an hourly wage or be paid for overtime, the university/academic argument is these are not employees, these are students who are learning in an educational environment and that this educational environment forces these "students" to work insanely long hours without compensation for excess labor or even adequate time to sleep for med/surgical residents in hospital training programs.
.
If, however, these people are requesting certain benefits that ought to accrue to them as students, the universities go out of their way to fight that "no no no, you're really employees, and as such must do this as employees would and you do not have those specific rights that students might have while you are doing those duties." I apologize for not knowing off the top of my head what the ludicrious example is that I heard about that the UCSD uses this in, or even what the search term is. perhaps medical student unionization, perhps michigan? Rant over. almost time to procrastinate on a paper and sleep.
.
Please see the first item in my indented and dashed list above written 5 hrs ago which reads:
-- how much less power you need to apply directly to the heart as opposed to stimulating with an externally defibrillator applied to the chest wall,
.
externally-applied defibrillator to the chest wall, is what I meant to say, I switched applied and defibrillator around, but the meaning is the same. The power comparison I was asking about was power needed to provide pacing/pacemaker signal vs. the power required to generate an adequate defibrillating signal for a long enough period of time.
Thanks for the feedback. I hope I am clarifying what I said in the original statement. If you know any numbers or pointers/refs for
(1) the power requirements of a defibrillatory signal for an implanted cardioversion system vs
(2) the power output requirements for the standard pacing signal at SA node or at multiple sites, I would love to know. Thanks!
:>)
.
What kind of geometric visualization do you mean/envision for machine learning? Or are there examples out there in the wild that you could perhaps point out to me? Thanks.
.
Also, what exactly do you intend the phrase "machine learning" to encompass? SVM? Neural nets trained on partial subsets of a dataset and tested/validated on other partial subsets? Supervised or unsupervised learning / algorithm modification techniques? Any pointers you have would be greatly appreciated.
Nah, I guess they wouldn't want to operate on you; they'd rather be the OEM that makes you in the first place: humans 2.0, or since it's apple, iHumans 2.0, now with improved resolution and Retina (TM by apple don't use it it's our phrase) vision capable Retinas in each eye!
.
I specifically mentioned electrochemical battery there, and in my original post I mentioned both using a capacitor and/or a rechargeable battery. So whomever you're complaining about adding that constraint, it certainly wasn't me. I got no problems with ze batteries, okay?
;>)
Here's a pointer to a crime blog for La Jolla: http://www.lajollalight.com/2011/07/19/la-jolla-crime-log/ : the details are usually known by the police and the victims and the neighbors, but otherwise the publicly cited crime-logs tend to be as terse as "Residential burglary." Get on your journalism hat, fly out, and investigate the truth!! Anyway, the point of the story was that there's no need to be paranoid about broadcasting your meter readings: they already exist in the clear and can be read with little effort by anyone interested in doing so. Just like the back of your car (and the front of your car in many states) also broadcasts optically/reflectively from the ambient light an identifying series of letters and numbers and symbols (CA allows symbols, check it out) that can also be seen by anyone caring to look. And it's against the law to block them out, though quite a few people put those weird supposedly IR-blocking filters over them as if that'll stop the traffic cameras from reading their plate.
;>)
Anyway, the key point is that the power needs might be great enough that such a mechano-electric harvester might take too long to store enough "juice" to be able to send out multiple defibrillatory stimuli. But I don't know about many of the numbers or parameters/variables involved in this particular system or other systems like it:
-- how much less power you need to apply directly to the heart as opposed to stimulating with an externally defibrillator applied to the chest wall,
-- I don't know what the efficiency of the piezo-electric system per heartbeat or the amount of current and voltage generated by it per heart-beat,
-- i don't know the efficiency of the electrochemical battery system that could be used with it,
but I'm wondering if it could generate enough power to be useful or not. C'est tout.
.
What I questioned was the ability of the piezoelectric energy harvester to cannibalize enough power to be able to do perhaps even one defibrillation attempt. This, of course, depends upon the amount of power it stores into the capacitive element used to store charge or the type of electro-chemical rechargeable battery used to store power.
The disastrous feedback loop I mean is that the heart stops beating, the reserve battery system does not have enough power, and since the heart isn't beating, the piezo-electric system cannot harvest any power to start a defibrillation pulse.
.
One of them had put on an orange vest like a construction worker or traffic worker guy and walked the choice neighborhoods and recorded the meter readings. They came back two weeks later, and la voila, anyone whose water had not budged too much was obviously not at home flushing or showering or cooking. (I guess water sprinklers could screw it up in some places, but here we've got two meters: the sprinkler meter only gets you billed for water usage, the house water meter gets you billed for water usage and for sewer usage.)
.
The meter reading trick does not require wireless access. Most meters are located in a position where the meter-reader does not have to enter a backyard or gated restricted portion of the property. And seriously, has anyone ever stopped or challenged a meter-reader and said "Hey, let me see you badge, and then call someone and verify it!". I don't think so. So after all this rambling, yes I agree with you, they are reaching pretty hard and being paranoid.
.
It's probably not a "defibrillator" type of heart-restarter in case the heart starts fibrillating: defibrillators require too much power in order to be able to "jump start" the heart. (At least I think that's the kind Cheney got). If it's just an automaticity regulator, than a piezo-electric harvester with a good-internal-rechargeable battery / capacitor system might be good for a long time. Don't kids need a redo-surgery as their bodies grow, though?
.
Even in a power outage, landlines often keep working while the power is out (at least if you have a hard-wired landline, cordless phones at home will need a home-based UPS battery backup system). Any students or professors who depended on cellular only access could NOT get through in the first 8 hours or so of the quake, whereas the landline students COULD get through, and helped the students without landlines by letting them use the phones.
.
I believe the standard excuse for police to pull out public payphones is to label them as a "hazard" used by drug dealers who can make phone calls without being traced. I've seen pay phones disappear from beside the 7-11's and the little mini-malls you see all over southern california. It's ridiculous to get rid of them when they can be a valuable lifeline in case of an emergency.
.
My understanding of the conjugation of "to do" in the present tense is that in this case, "Google" is taken as being a singular noun rather than a plural noun, or at least I took it to be a singular noun referring to the singular corporate identity of Google. I think if you conjugate to do in the present tense in USA English :
I do
you do (singular)
he does, she does, it does (singular for masuline, feminine, nongendered)
we do
you do (plural, in most of USA) or y'all do (~"you all do" for plural in South-eastern USA)
they do, they do, they do (plural masc/fem/neuter gender)
.
So the only use of "does" is for the singular third person present tense, and "Google" referred to as a company or corporate entity is a single person. So you can also see my "they do ... offer" as an incorrect response, "Google does" and "it does" matches tense. But I was only saying "they do" to use the "do" you had used. I believe third person singular is the correct pronoun for a company. (aside, I believe corporations have achieved "corporate personhood" according to the SCOTUS, though I do not believe the Supreme Court made any decision on whether to refer to the corporate entity as a singular entity or as a plural entity composed of the stockholders.)
.
If you do a search for +"google do", you get 400k results with the majority being the questioning future tense as in "What will Google do?". If you do a search for +"google does", you get more than a million results for present tense in the form "Google does XYZ" or "Google does it". I know we should not bow to the wisdom of the masses, but my understanding as a "native speaker" (of English.American.USA, subdialect Southern California teenager) is that "Google does this" is more appropriate than "Google do this" (unless that is meant in a command form and voiced to Google as a request or command for something to be done.
I am sure that the Grammar police lurking on slashdot will come to correct me if I am wrong, or possibly even if I am right. ;>)