How do you tell exactly who commits how much more violent crime when the justice system is slanted one way? Arrests, prosecutions, verdicts, and sentences all partly depend on what color your skin is.
The stuff Franken was accused of is generally not that bad, and he did apologize and say he'd improve. If we start throwing everyone out of office who did anything in the least off-color, we're going to have an awfully hard time finding enough people to make up Congress.
In my state, deliberately grabbing someone's ass without consent is punishable by up to a year's imprisonment and/or a fine up to a number I don't remember. You may find it funny, but the people grabbed tend not to see it that way.
In what way was GP saying anything about women? (In the final paragraph, GP was talking about attitudes, not realities.) A relationship between two people, one of which has significant power over the other, is always suspect, and that's true no matter what whose sex and/or gender is what. You never really know whether the one without the power is going along out of desire or fear or intimidation.
Therefore, someone having a relationship with a subordinate is opening himself/herself/itself/whatever open to harassment charges that can't really be fully countered. It's a dumb thing to do, unless the intention is to harass a person of the appropriate sex and/or gender.
Companies may make the phone smaller if they can make the battery smaller, but they generally have incentive to put as much battery as possible in the device. Batteries are largely irrelevant in the product cycle, because approximately nobody buys a new phone because the battery has deteriorated. I'm using a four-year-old phone, and my sister-in-law just stopped using my wife's seven-year-old phone earlier this year, and the batteries were still satisfactory.
Neither my wife, my sister-in-law, nor I bother monitoring charging and discharging. If this would extend the service life of the battery, that's cute, because it's longer than necessary right now.
Odd. I have an iPhone 5S bought new, shortly after it came out, so it's four years old now, and with iOS 11 I'm starting to wonder if I might benefit from replacing the battery.
The IBM PC was not intended to be open, and openness had nothing to do with its success. It turned out that IBM hadn't actually put anything essential and uncopyable into the PC, and that's where this "openness" started, not because IBM wanted to allow competition in the IBM PC space. There were plenty of open hardware and software systems around, such as running CP/M on a Z80-based machine with the S-100 bus (the Exidy Sorcerer was that put into a nice Apple II-like package). They didn't really survive.
No social networking scheme is going to work if it requires a user to do more than download and install an application. Preferably, it should be easily accessible on the Web. Openness is not going to help much, since so few people care about that.
The value of a social media company is connectivity. Most of my family is very definitely not computer-savvy. I can use Facebook with them, but absolutely nothing like Diaspora.
Ratcheting everything back to 20 years would mean you could freely copy and run XP, or early versions of Vista (yay?). Google was founded about 19 years ago, and Facebook about 13 years ago, so they would be unaffected, except that they could incorporate more of what other people have done. You could run a pre-OSX version of the Macintosh OS, and maybe even get a Newton knockoff.
Personally, I think that copyrights would need to have something like twenty years' duration to be worthwhile, and patents really need that.
No social media company is going to ban me based on anything I say that's not on their service. I've seen plenty of right-wing idiots saying things on Facebook, so I'm not convinced that they ban on the basis of politics. It's possible that they ban based on other criteria and are more lenient if they like the politics, which isn't really the same thing, since in that case you can have whatever politics you want as long as you don't violate their ToS.
Phones are point-to-point and synchronous. Facebook is asynchronous broadcast. If I want to notify a lot of my friends of something, it's a lot more efficient to put it on Facebook than to call each and every one of them and leave a lot of messages on voice mail.
That's not the difference. The difference is that Apple makes its money selling stuff, and Google makes its money selling ads. Therefore, Apple has to make things good for the individual end users, while Google has to make things good for people who want to send advertisements to the individual end users. Both Apple and Google will collect all the personal information about you they can, but they will use it in considerably different ways.
The IBM PC wasn't very innovative. The Intel 4004 and 8008 were quite innovative. Early on, there were computer kits from Altair and Imsai, among others, and then computers from Apple, Radio Shack, and Commodore, and then a flood of others. This is the innovation that went into the IBM PC.
Putting the magic initials on the box was the key. Previously, in business, an Apple II was something your accountant bought with his own money and brought in to run that Visicalc thing. They weren't seen as "real" computers because they weren't what IBM did. There already were computers that were at least as open as the IBM PC, and the original PC didn't come bundled with a whole lot of software. The bundling-a-lot-of-software idea pretty much started with the Osborne I, and didn't catch on mainstream until later.
The idea of putting an 80xx chip into a computer and adding standard components was easy to copy. It was also not commercially viable, and the attempts were failures. Radio Shack produced something considerably more powerful than the original PC, and had all the standard business software available for it. It was somewhat more expensive, but a lot faster, and it had a color display I could read from without having to cover my eyes with my hands periodically to recover from. It went nowhere. People did think of copying them, but without actual compatibility it wasn't going to work.
What made the clones possible was not that IBM did anything open, but that they hadn't put any real work into the design. It depended on the 16K BIOS, which was a ROM of some sort that had all the basic functionality that the actual issued software interfaced with. They got PC-DOS from a prominent microcomputer software company and didn't sign an exclusivity agreement (unlike Microsoft, which did get an exclusive deal from the Seattle Computer Club).
The BIOS could be reverse engineered, and the entry points to the routines were known. Once reverse engineered, teams of engineers who had not participated in the reverse engineering wrote BIOSes to the functional specs, in a "clean room" approach to avoid the possibility of copying IBM code. When the clones first appeared, Microsoft was always happy to sell copies of MS-DOS. As might be expected, IBM didn't like this, and started making threats about patents and lawsuits, which they didn't follow through on (at least not in general). Eventually, you stopped seeing IBM PCs, and saw "PC-compatibles" or "clones"
.I lived through those times, and watched with interest. We used TRS-80s until we bought our first Macintosh, so nothing of this directly affected me, but I was reading all the magazines.
You know, this continual FIND THE CREIMER burst of postings is getting old. If he posts something stupid, that's not exceptional here. If he posts something halfway intelligent, why should I care who wrote it?
The study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million.
and, on the other hand,
carnivores have about the same ratio of neurons to brain size as that of herbivores.... The ratios of brain size to body weight of the domestic species they analyzed -- ferret, cat and dog -- did not scale in a significantly different manner from those of their wild relatives
We have one statement about the absolute number of cortical neurons by species. We have one statement about the ratio of neurons to brain size. We have one statement that implies that brain size relates to body weight.
When we're talking about dogs, do we mean those little fit-in-the-purse dogs, or St. Bernards? Not only is the average dog a lot bigger than the average cat, the body size, the range in dog size is tremendous, while domestic cats have a much smaller variance.
We have a reasonably constant ratio of brain mass to body mass, and brain mass to total neurons. The average St. Bernard is maybe twenty times the body mass of an average housecat, and would therefore be expected to have twenty times the neurons. This needs explanation.
Both our current cats like to snuggle down with us under the covers sometimes. One knows how to dig into the covers. The other pokes my wife in the nose until she holds up the covers for the cat. Problem-solving in action.
I had some bright red pom-poms and a cat that liked to chase them and bring them back so I could throw them again. I've never seen a cat pant before or since. When she was through, she'd come back, sit a distance away, and hold the pom-pom between her front paws and under her chin.
I've wondered whether the pom-poms were particularly bright in the infra-red. I once had that cat sniff my infrared TV remote, and I pressed a button, She flinched.
Dogs thought they were smarter than cats because they herded animals and guided people and other things and cats just lay in the sun and relaxed. Cats thought they were smarter for the very same reasons.
Dogs like these sorts of experiments. Cats are often just uninterested, and don't perform. It's like having a particularly intelligent student who doesn't care about grades.
For a long time, people believed that cats had no color vision. Researchers would take cats and run tests on them that they were sure would show if the cats had color vision. Then, someone dissected a cat eye and found it had cones as well as rods. Armed with the knowledge that cats do have color vision, researchers found ways to get cats to show that they did indeed have it.
I knew a cat that kept trying to let himself out of his human's apartment. He knew how to release the chain, and he could turn the doorknob, but the deadbolt knob was flat, and he couldn't quite get the deadbolt to disengage before he physically couldn't get the leverage to turn it.
I also knew a cat that had figured out how humans opened the microwave, but couldn't physically manage it.
I'm rather glad that the cats I've had and have lack high intelligence.
Because in most places there is precisely one cable company and one phone company. Nobody seems to want to build out another. If there's two cable companies in an area, they generally avoid competing directly with each other without performing provable anti-competitive collusion.
If you have a way to get more companies wanting to provide cable services, I'm listening. I'd like it to be actually demonstrated to work reasonably reliably, as opposed to some libertarian dream like "repeal it and they will come", particularly when we've already seen what happens when we repeal it.
Flint was a special abhorrent case. You might as well say that it's too dangerous to go out at night because someone in the country got murdered last night. For another special abhorrent case, see the Bhopal disaster, which was a private sector mass homicide.
The historical reasons are why a natural monopoly turned into a duopoly.
There can be meaningful competition in a duopoly, but it's nowhere near a sure thing. You can easily see that in the US airlines and cell phone services, and those have more than two players in a market. What seems to foster competition in a limited market is ease of entry, so someone can come into a moribund field and offer something new and different.
The emergence of fiber is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Fiber does not fall as the gentle rain from heaven. It has to be installed, needs a lot of connections and branches, and needs rights of way. Fiber doesn't mean that there's new competition; it means that the phone company can sell me something better than DSL.
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How do you tell exactly who commits how much more violent crime when the justice system is slanted one way? Arrests, prosecutions, verdicts, and sentences all partly depend on what color your skin is.
The stuff Franken was accused of is generally not that bad, and he did apologize and say he'd improve. If we start throwing everyone out of office who did anything in the least off-color, we're going to have an awfully hard time finding enough people to make up Congress.
In my state, deliberately grabbing someone's ass without consent is punishable by up to a year's imprisonment and/or a fine up to a number I don't remember. You may find it funny, but the people grabbed tend not to see it that way.
In what way was GP saying anything about women? (In the final paragraph, GP was talking about attitudes, not realities.) A relationship between two people, one of which has significant power over the other, is always suspect, and that's true no matter what whose sex and/or gender is what. You never really know whether the one without the power is going along out of desire or fear or intimidation.
Therefore, someone having a relationship with a subordinate is opening himself/herself/itself/whatever open to harassment charges that can't really be fully countered. It's a dumb thing to do, unless the intention is to harass a person of the appropriate sex and/or gender.
Companies may make the phone smaller if they can make the battery smaller, but they generally have incentive to put as much battery as possible in the device. Batteries are largely irrelevant in the product cycle, because approximately nobody buys a new phone because the battery has deteriorated. I'm using a four-year-old phone, and my sister-in-law just stopped using my wife's seven-year-old phone earlier this year, and the batteries were still satisfactory.
Neither my wife, my sister-in-law, nor I bother monitoring charging and discharging. If this would extend the service life of the battery, that's cute, because it's longer than necessary right now.
Odd. I have an iPhone 5S bought new, shortly after it came out, so it's four years old now, and with iOS 11 I'm starting to wonder if I might benefit from replacing the battery.
So what happens if I want to get something from XYZ corporation and they tell me I'd be one customer too many?
The IBM PC was not intended to be open, and openness had nothing to do with its success. It turned out that IBM hadn't actually put anything essential and uncopyable into the PC, and that's where this "openness" started, not because IBM wanted to allow competition in the IBM PC space. There were plenty of open hardware and software systems around, such as running CP/M on a Z80-based machine with the S-100 bus (the Exidy Sorcerer was that put into a nice Apple II-like package). They didn't really survive.
No social networking scheme is going to work if it requires a user to do more than download and install an application. Preferably, it should be easily accessible on the Web. Openness is not going to help much, since so few people care about that.
The value of a social media company is connectivity. Most of my family is very definitely not computer-savvy. I can use Facebook with them, but absolutely nothing like Diaspora.
Ratcheting everything back to 20 years would mean you could freely copy and run XP, or early versions of Vista (yay?). Google was founded about 19 years ago, and Facebook about 13 years ago, so they would be unaffected, except that they could incorporate more of what other people have done. You could run a pre-OSX version of the Macintosh OS, and maybe even get a Newton knockoff.
Personally, I think that copyrights would need to have something like twenty years' duration to be worthwhile, and patents really need that.
Considering what our brains evolved doing, I'm pleased that we have some people who can make rational philosophical arguments.
No social media company is going to ban me based on anything I say that's not on their service. I've seen plenty of right-wing idiots saying things on Facebook, so I'm not convinced that they ban on the basis of politics. It's possible that they ban based on other criteria and are more lenient if they like the politics, which isn't really the same thing, since in that case you can have whatever politics you want as long as you don't violate their ToS.
Phones are point-to-point and synchronous. Facebook is asynchronous broadcast. If I want to notify a lot of my friends of something, it's a lot more efficient to put it on Facebook than to call each and every one of them and leave a lot of messages on voice mail.
That's not the difference. The difference is that Apple makes its money selling stuff, and Google makes its money selling ads. Therefore, Apple has to make things good for the individual end users, while Google has to make things good for people who want to send advertisements to the individual end users. Both Apple and Google will collect all the personal information about you they can, but they will use it in considerably different ways.
The IBM PC wasn't very innovative. The Intel 4004 and 8008 were quite innovative. Early on, there were computer kits from Altair and Imsai, among others, and then computers from Apple, Radio Shack, and Commodore, and then a flood of others. This is the innovation that went into the IBM PC.
Putting the magic initials on the box was the key. Previously, in business, an Apple II was something your accountant bought with his own money and brought in to run that Visicalc thing. They weren't seen as "real" computers because they weren't what IBM did. There already were computers that were at least as open as the IBM PC, and the original PC didn't come bundled with a whole lot of software. The bundling-a-lot-of-software idea pretty much started with the Osborne I, and didn't catch on mainstream until later.
The idea of putting an 80xx chip into a computer and adding standard components was easy to copy. It was also not commercially viable, and the attempts were failures. Radio Shack produced something considerably more powerful than the original PC, and had all the standard business software available for it. It was somewhat more expensive, but a lot faster, and it had a color display I could read from without having to cover my eyes with my hands periodically to recover from. It went nowhere. People did think of copying them, but without actual compatibility it wasn't going to work.
What made the clones possible was not that IBM did anything open, but that they hadn't put any real work into the design. It depended on the 16K BIOS, which was a ROM of some sort that had all the basic functionality that the actual issued software interfaced with. They got PC-DOS from a prominent microcomputer software company and didn't sign an exclusivity agreement (unlike Microsoft, which did get an exclusive deal from the Seattle Computer Club).
The BIOS could be reverse engineered, and the entry points to the routines were known. Once reverse engineered, teams of engineers who had not participated in the reverse engineering wrote BIOSes to the functional specs, in a "clean room" approach to avoid the possibility of copying IBM code. When the clones first appeared, Microsoft was always happy to sell copies of MS-DOS. As might be expected, IBM didn't like this, and started making threats about patents and lawsuits, which they didn't follow through on (at least not in general). Eventually, you stopped seeing IBM PCs, and saw "PC-compatibles" or "clones"
You know, this continual FIND THE CREIMER burst of postings is getting old. If he posts something stupid, that's not exceptional here. If he posts something halfway intelligent, why should I care who wrote it?
and, on the other hand,
We have one statement about the absolute number of cortical neurons by species. We have one statement about the ratio of neurons to brain size. We have one statement that implies that brain size relates to body weight.
When we're talking about dogs, do we mean those little fit-in-the-purse dogs, or St. Bernards? Not only is the average dog a lot bigger than the average cat, the body size, the range in dog size is tremendous, while domestic cats have a much smaller variance.
We have a reasonably constant ratio of brain mass to body mass, and brain mass to total neurons. The average St. Bernard is maybe twenty times the body mass of an average housecat, and would therefore be expected to have twenty times the neurons. This needs explanation.
Both our current cats like to snuggle down with us under the covers sometimes. One knows how to dig into the covers. The other pokes my wife in the nose until she holds up the covers for the cat. Problem-solving in action.
I had some bright red pom-poms and a cat that liked to chase them and bring them back so I could throw them again. I've never seen a cat pant before or since. When she was through, she'd come back, sit a distance away, and hold the pom-pom between her front paws and under her chin.
I've wondered whether the pom-poms were particularly bright in the infra-red. I once had that cat sniff my infrared TV remote, and I pressed a button, She flinched.
Dogs thought they were smarter than cats because they herded animals and guided people and other things and cats just lay in the sun and relaxed. Cats thought they were smarter for the very same reasons.
Dogs like these sorts of experiments. Cats are often just uninterested, and don't perform. It's like having a particularly intelligent student who doesn't care about grades.
For a long time, people believed that cats had no color vision. Researchers would take cats and run tests on them that they were sure would show if the cats had color vision. Then, someone dissected a cat eye and found it had cones as well as rods. Armed with the knowledge that cats do have color vision, researchers found ways to get cats to show that they did indeed have it.
I knew a cat that kept trying to let himself out of his human's apartment. He knew how to release the chain, and he could turn the doorknob, but the deadbolt knob was flat, and he couldn't quite get the deadbolt to disengage before he physically couldn't get the leverage to turn it.
I also knew a cat that had figured out how humans opened the microwave, but couldn't physically manage it.
I'm rather glad that the cats I've had and have lack high intelligence.
Because in most places there is precisely one cable company and one phone company. Nobody seems to want to build out another. If there's two cable companies in an area, they generally avoid competing directly with each other without performing provable anti-competitive collusion.
If you have a way to get more companies wanting to provide cable services, I'm listening. I'd like it to be actually demonstrated to work reasonably reliably, as opposed to some libertarian dream like "repeal it and they will come", particularly when we've already seen what happens when we repeal it.
Flint was a special abhorrent case. You might as well say that it's too dangerous to go out at night because someone in the country got murdered last night. For another special abhorrent case, see the Bhopal disaster, which was a private sector mass homicide.
The historical reasons are why a natural monopoly turned into a duopoly.
There can be meaningful competition in a duopoly, but it's nowhere near a sure thing. You can easily see that in the US airlines and cell phone services, and those have more than two players in a market. What seems to foster competition in a limited market is ease of entry, so someone can come into a moribund field and offer something new and different.
The emergence of fiber is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Fiber does not fall as the gentle rain from heaven. It has to be installed, needs a lot of connections and branches, and needs rights of way. Fiber doesn't mean that there's new competition; it means that the phone company can sell me something better than DSL.