BTW, what's with the 'Czar' thing? Does that annoy anyone else as much as me? Did we run out of English words to describe the leader of a temporary task force?
How about Secretary? That's his job: To relay messages and take notes and present reports to his boss on what the other people in charge are doing. He himself is in charge of nothing.
That's exactly what Obama might need, so as to not be blindsided by Ebola again. Secretary of Ebola (hopefully a temporary position). Can't hurt. Good move, Obama.
Why can't we just say that? Stupid Czar. Reactionary Obama...
There are Republicans and Democrats in the primaries that are not in pockets. Difficult for them to win though, as those pockets are where the majority of campaign funds are. Pretty much the same as you point out for third parties.
Your chances of getting a good guy (or gal) elected, are better for one of the two real parties in the primaries, rather than a third party in the general election.
Good point, but now you've made me think that the police aren't so bad for trying. They want every tool they can get their hands on to do their job, which is maintain law and order; hard to hate them for that.
It's not supposed to be up to them, it's up to us, to tell them which tools are off limits. Right off the top of my head: Fighter jets, nukes, and mass surveillance are right off limits for police work...
And 'us', should mean more legislative, and less court action. I think we are really lazy lately about legislating anything that's uncomfortable. We just let the courts sort it out for us.
The courts deciding law, is supposed to be more of a failsafe, and not the go to every time for governing the nation.
Not sure why you're joking, that is absolutely true. Well, except the part about showering; showering hardly hurts your skin flora at all. (Unless you're showering in bleach or something.)
This whole experiment that is the USA is all about trading safety for liberty. King George said the same thing, and he was right, just like this FBI shrub is right. We simply don't care. I might rephrase that to say; we care, to a reasonable amount, but no more than that.
And I like the thing about encryption foiling the police 9 times, and yet they still got their man, but it only counts as an argument to make the FBI shrub look like an idiot. One can't consider that when discussing the rights of man. After we decide what our rights should be, then we can have whatever policing that fits within that.
I've been asking that genuine question since I picked my jaw up off the floor after hearing that we were invading Iraq.
What if: ISIS was inevitable?
If so: Which Iraq would we rather they inherit? Assuming that a decade after Saddam's death (or maybe after his son hung on a few years), scary fundamentalists were going to get their turn, no matter what we did; what could we do?
ISIS, in full control of a healthy, vibrant Iraq, (with it's million man army, remember?) could possibly unify/conquer the whole Middle East. We could probably beat the whole Middle East in World War III, if it came to that; today.
What about 50 years from now? And by that time, China might be willing to join them.
I swear you're the only other person who gets that. Saddam wanted the same deal that North Korea got.
Clinton bought off NK when they were pursuing WMD, with a nuclear reactor, food and gas. I want to say that Saddam's biggest mistake was that it was Bush, and not Clinton, he was dealing with, but is largely irrelevant. We could not invade NK and depose the government, whereas in Iraq, we had that option. Clinton had no choice but to make a deal. (I'm not saying he would have invaded anybody in any case) Saddam hadn't looked at the map lately, and perhaps he really thought that one of the reasons that Bush Sr. stopped had anything to do with him or his army.
Yes, there was a difference between the two men. Bush Jr. is somewhat of a Texan; once you've lied to him, you're probably not going to be able to make a deal. Clinton takes nothing personally in politics, especially lying, and whenever you're ready to come to the table, he'll deal. And he's likely to get the better end of it, because he's damn good at it.
But Saddam was playing games with Bush, and Bush basically fell for it, so maybe that tempers the ideologue part of the label. Yes, he doctored the 'evidence' to get us to sign off on the war, but in his heart; he knew he was going to find out what Saddam was up to, and it was something. The simple warmonger option makes no sense to me. Why? He got nothing out of it, and a whole lot of grief to boot. He can't do the speaking circuit and fundraisers like an ex-prez is supposed to. He's trapped painting in his compound. Cheney? He was already rich as shit. Blackwater? Please.
There is just no way they wanted this kind of fallout from not finding WMDs, and thus, invading Iraq for no reason. So, of your two options, only the incompetent option is logically possible. It feels a bit weak, I admit, but the warmonger makes no sense at all. Also, there is actually a third option, a theory if you will... wayyy out there, that most perfectly fits everything that has happened so far. But it's just too crazy to post on/.
Heh. By golly, once it's in your agenda, whatever it takes, eh?
Giant, spinning blades of doom. But that's fine, because liberals like it, because conservatives hate it. Unless it's off the Massachusetts coast. I guess I'm not sure.
Of course they kill birds; they're giant spinning blades of doom, set up in such a way as to maximally extract energy from the air. Birds exist in the air. Therefore, if you're a bird, and you live there, sooner or later, you're likely to get extracted.
But fuck 'em. Price of Progress, eh?
Nuke plants, I would argue, are just tiny little concrete domes by comparison, and birds are free to nest and live among any nooks and airspace they might find. Not to mention the zero carbon. Energy, already stored here by past supernovas. All the energy you want, nobody and no creatures have to die, and the land looks nice with this little white building on it. I won't even go into the fact that we need a few just to burn up the waste we already have, since it can't be stored.
But keep justifying giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see...
The industrialization of America after the turn of the century began to bring sizable numbers of US Southern blacks into the ghettos of our northern cities. They replaced the Italians, the last white group out of the ghetto, who themselves followed Irish and Jews, among many others. This is around 1920, and there's still plenty of racism, everywhere; even in New York City. But from the very beginning of New York City, there was a small contingent of black people. Not descendants of US slaves, but Caribbean immigrants, mostly.
These Caribbean immigrants were themselves descendants of slaves from sugar plantations and such, mostly run by the British, but also some French and Spanish. Slaves in the US were stripped of all their African culture; not a shred of original names or language or customs or anything survived. Not so much with the British, and especially the French and Spanish. They let them keep a lot of their culture; voodoo flourishes to this day in Haiti. Many were not even slaves per se; more like indentured servants or serfs. But even British slaves had it better than US slaves.
One of the things Caribbean blacks held onto, was the recreational use of marijuana. Marijuana has been known to the white man forever, and was not a big deal for about 1900 of the last 2000 years. It was commonly prescribed by doctors in the 1800s certainly, and before. But the white man, pretty much, never smoked marijuana as a common recreational thing. The white man's drug is beer. Well, and scotch. I don't know that they get complete credit for wine, but I think they get most of it. The white man loves his alcohol. He's been working on it for about 2000 years, at least.
Now, you need that liver enzyme to be able to enjoy your alcohol; some of us have it; really, most of us don't. Well, most of us didn't. And those of us white people that didn't, well, there's a good chance we died in the gutter as alcoholics and didn't have babies. Fast forward 2000 years, and most of us alive today can handle our liquor. Still not 100%, as we are all well aware. Asians and American Indians; severely lacking the alcohol friendly liver. If you haven't seen a full blooded Asian chick drink a whole glass of champagne, well; she's falling down drunk for an hour and a half. In the white man's world of super cheap beer and liquor, that lack of ability to casually drink alcohol plagues our Native American population to this day.
The black man in America is generally somewhere in between those two extremes. Beer was not completely unknown in ancient Africa, but was not a common thing in the deep jungles where slaves came from. But, he has been pressed into our white man's society for more or less, the last 400 years, so the law of liver selection has done it's work there, somewhat. Certainly, Caribbean blacks know what rum is for a long time now. And weed. Actually, there is a slightly Christian mysterious religion with roots in Africa, that uses pot as a meditation tool. Surely everyone knows who I am talking about.
So, back to our story of US Southern blacks migrating into our northern ghettos, at first filling out, and mixing with, the existing Caribbean immigrants, who have been filtering in for hundreds of years at that point. It's their turn; Black People; the Italians just did it, the Irish did it, hell, even the English WASPs did it when they carved it out of the woods, when bears and Indians and brigands could kill you at your front door. Pretty ghetto. The ghetto is the gateway to American society. Beginning in the 20s, the ghetto started becoming black, and the racists began to panic. One of the first things they did was to make pot illegal. White people didn't even know what it was, until Reefer Madness and all the hype; completely made up political BS. A tool, to keep the black man in the ghetto, and prevent him from integrating as he would otherwise.
And that racist BS persists to this day, although very few realize just how racist the anti-marijuana laws are
Obvious or not, I felt compelled to say something. And I didn't post AC either. I figure if I can't put my name on what I want to say, it probably didn't need saying.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
The energy available via fusion is exactly why you will never be able to contain it using any sort of force. It will always take more power to contain than it creates. Otherwise, you would see see self-contained fusion somewhere, under some circumstances, in nature.
You might think the Sun is an example, but it is not self contained. Gravity contains it, which you get for free simply by having mass. With or without fusion, the Sun would stay contained. Since the containment field is free, then yes, you end up getting net power out of the sun.
So I guess we could build an artificial fusion reactor that makes net power, but it would look a whole lot like the Sun, and would be exceedingly difficult to build on the surface of the Earth.
Jindal said that, although he also brought up a quarantine instead of a ban. 'The Conservatives' have said no such thing. But explain to us how limiting airline flights from there to here will spread Ebola more rapidly in Africa.
And don't forget the first conservatives to speak out on Ebola. Well, they didn't speak, per se; they just quietly went over there and did everything they could to help, with a few of them getting it themselves.
Well, we have civil law, which you guys don't really have, so it's not a criminal charge, and you'd have to get a lawyer. But, you can't swing a dead cat here the States without at least hitting a paralegal, so you got that. And age is easy to prove, and easy to won those; you better have a pretty good reason to fire somebody 55 when you got a lot of 20 year olds working for you. Race and gender (generally) don't change, so you didn't get that job for the racists in the first place.
I guess it's a downside of a free country. But the upside is, there's a job opening...
"An economic market is not a place or a thing it's a set of regulations governing trade."
No. That's like layer 2 or something. The very basic requirement of an economic market, or any other market, even a fruit market; is to have more than one seller.
'Market' means multiple sellers, and I think that is overlooked often. In this particular case, we don't even get to your regulations being good or bad; because it's just the one dude that gets to name his price.
Just, you know, in the spirit of nitpicking.
PS. Fox; the News portion, and all the rest of it, sells viewership to advertisers. For better or worse, they are only in it to make a buck. They care not about oxymorons or economics or fair or balanced or anything like that. If you really consider that, it should make you feel both better and worse at the same time.:)
Well, the government itself is a monopoly. And thinking a little harder, that is the definition of a 'natural monopoly'.
When something is new, and some company makes a fortune providing the new thing to everyone; well that's just great. But if things become incorporated into society, and become part of what we consider a basic standard of living, then that thing becomes public domain. Politics and business be damned.
Now, the government can't be aggressive in these things. Edison had his chance to make his fortune. When nobody had electricity, you obviously didn't need it to live. But at some point (the 50s?), it passed that threshold and became a 'right', if you will, to have electricity strung to your home. And it was the same way with water, and printing, and roads...
Nobody had internet 20 years ago; you surely didn't need it to live, and I'm glad we didn't step in early and standardize on ISDN. If I'm wrong, then fiber optic is going to suck 10 years from now, and I'll be glad the government let Comcast go where they are going...
I don't think I'm wrong - the internet is a public utility, and everybody has the 'right' to be on it. You and I might have to vote for the same guy to make that happen. One of us will have to hold our nose and do it. Is that possible?
A utility service is only a monopoly, natural or not, if it is a private company.
If the utility was not a company, but rather a public entity, owned by the city/state/people; then that whole problem goes away. It would be the same monopoly that the city has on our streets and sewers. I don't think you call that a monopoly, just government services.
Electric power has been standardized for a long, long time. Government control of electric utilities would not unduly hold back innovation or progress. And we have places where the electric is either government owned (voter owned) or a co-op (customer owned), and they love it. Independent companies 'providing' power to a region is the biggest crock of shit ever foisted upon the American people.
A lot of people throw around capitalism and free markets any way they want, and the terms end up meaning whatever the speaker wants them to. 2 things for a free market: Freedom, and a market. You have to have both of those things to have a free market.
In the case of electricity, there is no freedom. You have to have it, and you have to have exactly 240 volts at 60 Hz. There is no freedom to buy it or not, nor is there freedom to buy a cheaper or different kind of power. Nor is there any market. You have to buy power from the wires that are strung to your house. Whatever name is on the bill is irrelevant.
The internet is almost there, or got there recently. It is my opinion that a decent fiber optic cable to your house should be good for whatever internet we have for quite a few years into the future. if that is true, then it's time for government to step in (not necessarily Federal, although it may take their encouragement) and provide internet to every domicile in the same way that water, power, and road access are now. (And take back the damn electric while you're at it.)
I'm a small government conservative btw, if that matters.
So I was somewhat wrong. Samsung shouldn't be able to kill Apple's Siri with this move, even if they could use it to be a pain in Apple's ass for a while.
And that's just fine. Apple is a big boy these days; they can take it.
My point is that there is no 'other way' to do speech recognition on a computer. The method, is *ALL* speech recognition, using a computer.
So Apple paid Dragon. The so what is, if Samsung buys Dragon, and then decides not to sell speech recognition to Apple anymore. Or to keep the DOJ off of them, maybe just triple the price. And they don't have to license the new version to Apple, which makes their phones better for the next 20 or 50 years, however long the patent lasts.
Patents only spur innovation when they protect inventions. The steam engine being a perfect example. Speech recognition is not an invention, it's just one of many applications one can use the computer for, itself a physical invention.
Even if you could make the case that speech recognition on a computer was an invention, how long ago was that? They had it in the early days of the PC, certainly over 20 years ago. Given the rate of cellphone hardware innovation, how is that not holding things back?
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, what's with the 'Czar' thing? Does that annoy anyone else as much as me? Did we run out of English words to describe the leader of a temporary task force?
How about Secretary? That's his job: To relay messages and take notes and present reports to his boss on what the other people in charge are doing. He himself is in charge of nothing.
That's exactly what Obama might need, so as to not be blindsided by Ebola again. Secretary of Ebola (hopefully a temporary position). Can't hurt. Good move, Obama.
Why can't we just say that? Stupid Czar. Reactionary Obama...
I was thinking they set up a fall guy, just in case.
It's going to be so obvious though, in hindsight, if it turns out they need a fall guy. It's kind of obvious now.
But really, people are going to fall for that? Blame the shrub that Obama set there in front of us? Too obvious.
And look who's reacting to the reactionaries.
Not true.
There are Republicans and Democrats in the primaries that are not in pockets. Difficult for them to win though, as those pockets are where the majority of campaign funds are. Pretty much the same as you point out for third parties.
Your chances of getting a good guy (or gal) elected, are better for one of the two real parties in the primaries, rather than a third party in the general election.
Good point, but now you've made me think that the police aren't so bad for trying. They want every tool they can get their hands on to do their job, which is maintain law and order; hard to hate them for that.
It's not supposed to be up to them, it's up to us, to tell them which tools are off limits. Right off the top of my head: Fighter jets, nukes, and mass surveillance are right off limits for police work...
And 'us', should mean more legislative, and less court action. I think we are really lazy lately about legislating anything that's uncomfortable. We just let the courts sort it out for us.
The courts deciding law, is supposed to be more of a failsafe, and not the go to every time for governing the nation.
Not sure why you're joking, that is absolutely true. Well, except the part about showering; showering hardly hurts your skin flora at all. (Unless you're showering in bleach or something.)
Thank you.
This whole experiment that is the USA is all about trading safety for liberty. King George said the same thing, and he was right, just like this FBI shrub is right. We simply don't care. I might rephrase that to say; we care, to a reasonable amount, but no more than that.
And I like the thing about encryption foiling the police 9 times, and yet they still got their man, but it only counts as an argument to make the FBI shrub look like an idiot. One can't consider that when discussing the rights of man. After we decide what our rights should be, then we can have whatever policing that fits within that.
I've been asking that genuine question since I picked my jaw up off the floor after hearing that we were invading Iraq.
What if: ISIS was inevitable?
If so: Which Iraq would we rather they inherit? Assuming that a decade after Saddam's death (or maybe after his son hung on a few years), scary fundamentalists were going to get their turn, no matter what we did; what could we do?
ISIS, in full control of a healthy, vibrant Iraq, (with it's million man army, remember?) could possibly unify/conquer the whole Middle East. We could probably beat the whole Middle East in World War III, if it came to that; today.
What about 50 years from now? And by that time, China might be willing to join them.
Just a thought...
Insightful.
I swear you're the only other person who gets that. Saddam wanted the same deal that North Korea got.
Clinton bought off NK when they were pursuing WMD, with a nuclear reactor, food and gas. I want to say that Saddam's biggest mistake was that it was Bush, and not Clinton, he was dealing with, but is largely irrelevant. We could not invade NK and depose the government, whereas in Iraq, we had that option. Clinton had no choice but to make a deal. (I'm not saying he would have invaded anybody in any case) Saddam hadn't looked at the map lately, and perhaps he really thought that one of the reasons that Bush Sr. stopped had anything to do with him or his army.
Yes, there was a difference between the two men. Bush Jr. is somewhat of a Texan; once you've lied to him, you're probably not going to be able to make a deal. Clinton takes nothing personally in politics, especially lying, and whenever you're ready to come to the table, he'll deal. And he's likely to get the better end of it, because he's damn good at it.
But Saddam was playing games with Bush, and Bush basically fell for it, so maybe that tempers the ideologue part of the label. Yes, he doctored the 'evidence' to get us to sign off on the war, but in his heart; he knew he was going to find out what Saddam was up to, and it was something. The simple warmonger option makes no sense to me. Why? He got nothing out of it, and a whole lot of grief to boot. He can't do the speaking circuit and fundraisers like an ex-prez is supposed to. He's trapped painting in his compound. Cheney? He was already rich as shit. Blackwater? Please.
There is just no way they wanted this kind of fallout from not finding WMDs, and thus, invading Iraq for no reason. So, of your two options, only the incompetent option is logically possible. It feels a bit weak, I admit, but the warmonger makes no sense at all. Also, there is actually a third option, a theory if you will... wayyy out there, that most perfectly fits everything that has happened so far. But it's just too crazy to post on /.
Heh. By golly, once it's in your agenda, whatever it takes, eh?
Giant, spinning blades of doom. But that's fine, because liberals like it, because conservatives hate it. Unless it's off the Massachusetts coast. I guess I'm not sure.
Of course they kill birds; they're giant spinning blades of doom, set up in such a way as to maximally extract energy from the air. Birds exist in the air. Therefore, if you're a bird, and you live there, sooner or later, you're likely to get extracted.
But fuck 'em. Price of Progress, eh?
Nuke plants, I would argue, are just tiny little concrete domes by comparison, and birds are free to nest and live among any nooks and airspace they might find. Not to mention the zero carbon. Energy, already stored here by past supernovas. All the energy you want, nobody and no creatures have to die, and the land looks nice with this little white building on it. I won't even go into the fact that we need a few just to burn up the waste we already have, since it can't be stored.
But keep justifying giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see...
"My Mandarin speaking spouse said the most difficult English word for her is "twelfth".
My Mid-South redneck speaking self agrees with your spouse. I think the English were just showing off with that one.
Allow me, please. :)
The industrialization of America after the turn of the century began to bring sizable numbers of US Southern blacks into the ghettos of our northern cities. They replaced the Italians, the last white group out of the ghetto, who themselves followed Irish and Jews, among many others. This is around 1920, and there's still plenty of racism, everywhere; even in New York City. But from the very beginning of New York City, there was a small contingent of black people. Not descendants of US slaves, but Caribbean immigrants, mostly.
These Caribbean immigrants were themselves descendants of slaves from sugar plantations and such, mostly run by the British, but also some French and Spanish. Slaves in the US were stripped of all their African culture; not a shred of original names or language or customs or anything survived. Not so much with the British, and especially the French and Spanish. They let them keep a lot of their culture; voodoo flourishes to this day in Haiti. Many were not even slaves per se; more like indentured servants or serfs. But even British slaves had it better than US slaves.
One of the things Caribbean blacks held onto, was the recreational use of marijuana. Marijuana has been known to the white man forever, and was not a big deal for about 1900 of the last 2000 years. It was commonly prescribed by doctors in the 1800s certainly, and before. But the white man, pretty much, never smoked marijuana as a common recreational thing. The white man's drug is beer. Well, and scotch. I don't know that they get complete credit for wine, but I think they get most of it. The white man loves his alcohol. He's been working on it for about 2000 years, at least.
Now, you need that liver enzyme to be able to enjoy your alcohol; some of us have it; really, most of us don't. Well, most of us didn't. And those of us white people that didn't, well, there's a good chance we died in the gutter as alcoholics and didn't have babies. Fast forward 2000 years, and most of us alive today can handle our liquor. Still not 100%, as we are all well aware. Asians and American Indians; severely lacking the alcohol friendly liver. If you haven't seen a full blooded Asian chick drink a whole glass of champagne, well; she's falling down drunk for an hour and a half. In the white man's world of super cheap beer and liquor, that lack of ability to casually drink alcohol plagues our Native American population to this day.
The black man in America is generally somewhere in between those two extremes. Beer was not completely unknown in ancient Africa, but was not a common thing in the deep jungles where slaves came from. But, he has been pressed into our white man's society for more or less, the last 400 years, so the law of liver selection has done it's work there, somewhat. Certainly, Caribbean blacks know what rum is for a long time now. And weed. Actually, there is a slightly Christian mysterious religion with roots in Africa, that uses pot as a meditation tool. Surely everyone knows who I am talking about.
So, back to our story of US Southern blacks migrating into our northern ghettos, at first filling out, and mixing with, the existing Caribbean immigrants, who have been filtering in for hundreds of years at that point. It's their turn; Black People; the Italians just did it, the Irish did it, hell, even the English WASPs did it when they carved it out of the woods, when bears and Indians and brigands could kill you at your front door. Pretty ghetto. The ghetto is the gateway to American society. Beginning in the 20s, the ghetto started becoming black, and the racists began to panic. One of the first things they did was to make pot illegal. White people didn't even know what it was, until Reefer Madness and all the hype; completely made up political BS. A tool, to keep the black man in the ghetto, and prevent him from integrating as he would otherwise.
And that racist BS persists to this day, although very few realize just how racist the anti-marijuana laws are
Obvious or not, I felt compelled to say something. And I didn't post AC either. I figure if I can't put my name on what I want to say, it probably didn't need saying.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
The energy available via fusion is exactly why you will never be able to contain it using any sort of force. It will always take more power to contain than it creates. Otherwise, you would see see self-contained fusion somewhere, under some circumstances, in nature.
You might think the Sun is an example, but it is not self contained. Gravity contains it, which you get for free simply by having mass. With or without fusion, the Sun would stay contained. Since the containment field is free, then yes, you end up getting net power out of the sun.
So I guess we could build an artificial fusion reactor that makes net power, but it would look a whole lot like the Sun, and would be exceedingly difficult to build on the surface of the Earth.
Modding you down is not enough. (I'll let somebody else burn their mod points)
If I ran /., this is one of the few times I'd peek in, figure out who you were, and ban your IP for life.
Jindal said that, although he also brought up a quarantine instead of a ban. 'The Conservatives' have said no such thing. But explain to us how limiting airline flights from there to here will spread Ebola more rapidly in Africa.
And don't forget the first conservatives to speak out on Ebola. Well, they didn't speak, per se; they just quietly went over there and did everything they could to help, with a few of them getting it themselves.
Pretty much.
Well, we have civil law, which you guys don't really have, so it's not a criminal charge, and you'd have to get a lawyer. But, you can't swing a dead cat here the States without at least hitting a paralegal, so you got that. And age is easy to prove, and easy to won those; you better have a pretty good reason to fire somebody 55 when you got a lot of 20 year olds working for you. Race and gender (generally) don't change, so you didn't get that job for the racists in the first place.
I guess it's a downside of a free country. But the upside is, there's a job opening...
"An economic market is not a place or a thing it's a set of regulations governing trade."
No. That's like layer 2 or something. The very basic requirement of an economic market, or any other market, even a fruit market; is to have more than one seller.
'Market' means multiple sellers, and I think that is overlooked often. In this particular case, we don't even get to your regulations being good or bad; because it's just the one dude that gets to name his price.
Just, you know, in the spirit of nitpicking.
PS. Fox; the News portion, and all the rest of it, sells viewership to advertisers. For better or worse, they are only in it to make a buck. They care not about oxymorons or economics or fair or balanced or anything like that. If you really consider that, it should make you feel both better and worse at the same time. :)
Well, the government itself is a monopoly. And thinking a little harder, that is the definition of a 'natural monopoly'.
When something is new, and some company makes a fortune providing the new thing to everyone; well that's just great. But if things become incorporated into society, and become part of what we consider a basic standard of living, then that thing becomes public domain. Politics and business be damned.
Now, the government can't be aggressive in these things. Edison had his chance to make his fortune. When nobody had electricity, you obviously didn't need it to live. But at some point (the 50s?), it passed that threshold and became a 'right', if you will, to have electricity strung to your home. And it was the same way with water, and printing, and roads...
Nobody had internet 20 years ago; you surely didn't need it to live, and I'm glad we didn't step in early and standardize on ISDN. If I'm wrong, then fiber optic is going to suck 10 years from now, and I'll be glad the government let Comcast go where they are going...
I don't think I'm wrong - the internet is a public utility, and everybody has the 'right' to be on it. You and I might have to vote for the same guy to make that happen. One of us will have to hold our nose and do it. Is that possible?
A utility service is only a monopoly, natural or not, if it is a private company.
If the utility was not a company, but rather a public entity, owned by the city/state/people; then that whole problem goes away. It would be the same monopoly that the city has on our streets and sewers. I don't think you call that a monopoly, just government services.
Electric power has been standardized for a long, long time. Government control of electric utilities would not unduly hold back innovation or progress. And we have places where the electric is either government owned (voter owned) or a co-op (customer owned), and they love it. Independent companies 'providing' power to a region is the biggest crock of shit ever foisted upon the American people.
A lot of people throw around capitalism and free markets any way they want, and the terms end up meaning whatever the speaker wants them to.
2 things for a free market: Freedom, and a market. You have to have both of those things to have a free market.
In the case of electricity, there is no freedom. You have to have it, and you have to have exactly 240 volts at 60 Hz. There is no freedom to buy it or not, nor is there freedom to buy a cheaper or different kind of power.
Nor is there any market. You have to buy power from the wires that are strung to your house. Whatever name is on the bill is irrelevant.
The internet is almost there, or got there recently. It is my opinion that a decent fiber optic cable to your house should be good for whatever internet we have for quite a few years into the future. if that is true, then it's time for government to step in (not necessarily Federal, although it may take their encouragement) and provide internet to every domicile in the same way that water, power, and road access are now. (And take back the damn electric while you're at it.)
I'm a small government conservative btw, if that matters.
The reason they included that capability was to bring back particular Soviet spy satellites, which were that large.
And they wouldn't have told us if they had brought one back...
"Curiosity is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
My advice: Don't waste a lot of time studying things that are already known to be true. (Pretty much everything he said, I take at face value.)
Thank you.
So I was somewhat wrong. Samsung shouldn't be able to kill Apple's Siri with this move, even if they could use it to be a pain in Apple's ass for a while.
And that's just fine. Apple is a big boy these days; they can take it.
My point is that there is no 'other way' to do speech recognition on a computer. The method, is *ALL* speech recognition, using a computer.
So Apple paid Dragon. The so what is, if Samsung buys Dragon, and then decides not to sell speech recognition to Apple anymore. Or to keep the DOJ off of them, maybe just triple the price. And they don't have to license the new version to Apple, which makes their phones better for the next 20 or 50 years, however long the patent lasts.
Patents only spur innovation when they protect inventions. The steam engine being a perfect example. Speech recognition is not an invention, it's just one of many applications one can use the computer for, itself a physical invention.
Even if you could make the case that speech recognition on a computer was an invention, how long ago was that? They had it in the early days of the PC, certainly over 20 years ago. Given the rate of cellphone hardware innovation, how is that not holding things back?