In statistics, kernel density estimation (KDE) is a non-parametric way to estimate the probability density function of a random variable. Kernel density estimation is a fundamental data smoothing problem where inferences about the population are made, based on a finite data sample. In some fields such as signal processing and econometrics it is also termed the Parzen--Rosenblatt window method, after Emanuel Parzen and Murray Rosenblatt, who are usually credited with independently creating it in its current form.
So the X axis is the Geekbench score and the Y axis is the percentage of phones.
Now if you look at iPhone 6s devices with 10.2.0 they're one peak - i.e. all the phones cluster around some mean performance. Looking at devices upgraded to 10.2.1 you see some smaller peaks to the left and with 11.2.0 those peaks grow. It seems like iOS knows if it running on an older device - perhaps it checks the battery health. If the battery is worn out it can run in a low power/low performance mode to keep the battery life acceptable.
Now personally I'd never buy a device with non removable battery. But if you're selling an OS which auto upgrades and runs on devices with non removable batteries it sort of makes sense. It also pushes users to buy new hardware. Imagine if you had an iPhone 6s with 11.2.0. If your device is on the right it'll seem OK. If its one of the devices in the low power/low performance modes it will seem sluggish and you'll probably go out and buy a new one. What I'm not sure about is what happens if you replace the battery? Does that reset the device into high performance mode or are you still stuck in slow mode?
As for those who complain "I want a removable battery", well I much prefer having the water resistance that has saved my phone a few times than a removable battery that I only need after 3 years.
And I got replaced my Samsung Galaxy S5 with an LG V20 instead of V30 because I valued keeping a removable battery over keeping water resistance, i.e. not everyone shares your priorities.
There are things Trump can legally do for his Russian buddies, now that he's President, that he couldn't do before. He seems to have colluded with them before.
University Law trumped state law after the Dear Colleague letter, which obligated colleges to have their own Title IX hearings where guilt was decided on a 'preponderance of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt' if they wanted to continue to have Federal funding.
As noted above, the Title IX regulation requires schools to provide equitable grievance procedures. As part of these procedures, schools generally conduct investigations and hearings to determine whether sexual harassment or violence occurred. In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school's procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaints. The Supreme Court has applied a preponderance of the evidence standard in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), 42 U.S.C. SS 2000e et seq. Like Title IX,
In finding Warner guilty, UND used the weak "preponderance of the evidence" standard (50.01% certainty) to determine guilt or innocence-the very same standard recently imposed upon every federally funded college in the country under an April 2011 regulation from the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
UND's reliance on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard lowered the accuracy of the proceedings so much that the police and the university arrived at very different results. Using what the university later insisted was the very same evidence, UND's campus tribunal convicted Warner of sexual assault, while the Grand Forks Police Department determined that Warner's accuser had lied about what had happened.
In fact, on May 13, 2010, the Grand Forks County District Court formally charged Warner's accuser with "False information or report to law enforcement officers or security officials," a Class A misdemeanor, and issued a warrant for her arrest on May 17, 2010. To date, Warner's accuser has failed to appear to answer the charges against her.
"When you only have to be 50.01% sure about the evidence, it's easy to make a mistake or to let bias, conscious or otherwise, determine the outcome-especially in campus justice systems. Yet, the federal government is now mandating that this flaw be enshrined at practically every university in the country," said FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley.
Warner first requested a rehearing on July 28, 2010, but UND refused to grant it. In the spring of 2011, Warner asked for FIRE's help. On May 11, 2011, FIRE wrote UND President Robert O. Kelley, pointing out the university's procedural errors and criticizing its failure to reconsider the case. On May 20, UND responded to FIRE, once again denying Warner's request for a rehearing. This is when UND revealed that it had used the very same evidence to find Caleb Warner guilty of sexual assault that the police and prosecutor had used to charge his accuser with lying to law enforcement.
On July 15, an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal by FIRE Chairman Harvey A. Silverglate launched FIRE's national press campaign to encourage UND to give Warner a fair rehearing. Two weeks later, UND Provost Paul LeBel finally invited Warner to appeal the finding against him. With the help of attorney Nathan Hansen, Warner submitted a new appeal on August 31.
Late last week, Warner received a ruling from LeBel announcing that "based on the specific fact of a law enforcement office filing an affadavit of belief that the complainant had provided false information to him" about the sexual assault accusation, a "continued fin
Calling europe corrupt while discussing law that has been passed down that actually benefits citizens and means huge investments and work for all businesses in and acting in europe.
Well I don't think this law does benefit citizens. It certainly doesn't mean 'huge investments' - in fact the most it could do is to convince Facebook and WhatsApp to close their EU offices. And even if a particular law did benefit citizens, that wouldn't change the fact that EU institutions are less accountable than the national institutions in EU countries.
You seem to gloss over the fact that proposals are still requested, debated and ultimately accepted or declined by the european parliament, which is democratically chosen.
Where, on multiple occasions your country is outvoted. And the UK is most often in the minority.
In which case why have votes on internal matters taken at the European level? I can see that trade between countries - the European equivalent of US 'interstate commerce' needs to have rules. However EU rules go much further than that. The larger the superstate, the more risk your views will be in the minority.
You can see these problems in the US, except that in the US Federal politicians are elected. So in principle they can be removed by the electorate even if in practice gerrymandering makes this unlikely.
The EU isn't particularly popular in opinion polls in any European country but it could be argued the UK is more Eurosceptic than for example France and Germany. France and Germany seeing merging into a superstate as the way to stop fighting each other. The UK doesn't see things this way.
European commisionars can actually be removed by the european parliament.
The European Commission can be removed. Not individual commissioners. And that has happened once. Due to corruption.
There's no way to get rid of individual commissioners by voting for someone else.
If you're so afraid of lobbying power, why single out the european commission? Look at the executive branch in nearly any country.
My point is that EU structures are designed to be less accountable than national structures. An individual commissioner voting for an unpopular law in return for a payoff is very unlikely to face any sanction. And turnout for EU Parliament election is low and no one really cares about the result compared to national elections. So MEPs are unlikely to face any sanction either.
You can make a case for UK or US national structures needing to be reformed to make politicians more accountable but the EU is designed to be step in the exact opposite direction. An individual good law or two doesn't change that.
The reason they can't show you your chat history is because they don't have it.
It's on the phone. There's a backup feature to Google drive or SD card, the problem is that sometimes (always?) a new phone will fail to restore the backups
and EU, which is arguably least corrupt organization in the world with any power at all to help privacy,
LOL. In the EU legislation is initiated by the European Commission, not the Parliament. European Commissioners are not elected and cannot be removed by a direct election. Now if you're a corrupt corporation that makes them absolutely ideal people to lobby - they can initiate legislation but don't need to worry about getting re-elected.
And once legislation goes through the European Parliament EU member states are legally required to transpose them into EU law, regardless of whether the politicians in the national parliament agree or not - rather than being forced to defend an unpopular law government can simply say 'yeah it sucks but we have to implement it'
When adopted, directives give member states a timetable for the implementation of the intended outcome. Occasionally, the laws of a member state may already comply with this outcome, and the state involved would be required only to keep its laws in place. More commonly, member states are required to make changes to their laws (commonly referred to as transposition) in order for the directive to be implemented correctly. This is done in approximately 99% of the cases.[4] If a member state fails to pass the required national legislation, or if the national legislation does not adequately comply with the requirements of the directive, the European Commission may initiate legal action against the member state in the European Court of Justice. This may also happen when a member state has transposed a directive in theory but has failed to abide by its provisions in practice.
I.e. the EU is what happens when corporations think "The US and UK have too many checks and balances on lobbying because even the most awful politician has to worry about a backlash if they vote for an unpopular law. It'd be so much easier if we could lobby unelected politicians at the supranational level, have the laws they make rubber stamped by a supranational parliament no one cares about and then pushed downstream, totally bypassing national parliaments with their pesky, accountable politicians".
So it's completely corrupt. It also doesn't have any power to help privacy because WhatsApp and Facebook could just shut down their EU offices and people would continue to use their apps. And if it were EU internet companies infringing privacy, all they need to do is lobby at European Commission level and they can stop any pesky regulation.
Another terrible thing is that when you change phones you lose your chat history. Technically there's a backup option to Google drive and SD card but when both fails you search and find it fails for loads of people and no one knows why or how to fix it.
So Facebook have my chat history but WhatsApp won't let me see it on a new phone. Gee thanks, you utter fuckknuckles.
Back before Facebook owned the company of course it was actually a pretty decent application that effectively let you send free SMSs. Now it's a designed to make sure that FB have your data and you don't.
But as with Facebook Messenger, LINE and Skype you pretty much have to install it to talk to its captive user base. Funny thing is when telephones got to be essential to talk to people the telcos got regulated as common carriers. Of course Facebook and WhatsApp are not going to be regulated as common carriers, but ISPs are. Even though in most places I can switch from DSL to cable or mobile and not lose contact with people, but that's not true if I get rid of Facebook. Facebook bans people for having heretical opinions, and that's apparently fine. And to add insult to injury FB is lobbying heavily for ISPs to be regulated as common carriers and buying up companies like WhatsApp which would otherwise be competition. Brilliant.
As much as I hate Facebook/WhatsApp, that's bullshit. It's just the French shaking down/harassing a company because it's not French.
And they're wasting their time too - even if they outright banned WhatsApp it would make no real difference. People would still use it. They could still download it from Google Play or the iOS Appstore. Even if France/the EU got it pulled from there people could download it from WhatsApp.com.
All they'll achieve is that Facebook/WhatsApp shut down their physical office in France and operate from somewhere else instead, probably somewhere outside the EU.
Meanwhile France has no real competitor companies to Facebook and WhatsApp and persecuting American companies isn't going to change that.
Possible. Even when a firing is not actually the result, the mere hint of censure or disapproval from a boss will make it into your speech and decisions. This has a chilling effect on speech.
Wait, I thought the line on this was 'It's a private business. They don't have to give you a platform' and to link to this xkcd cartoon
If you're arguing on the Internet whether you're living in the world of Orwell's 1984 you're not living in the world of Orwell's 1984.
The whole point of 1984 is that truth has been abolished and people are unable to even explain what has happened. So if you're arguing about living in that world, you're not living in that world.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail - but these were child's play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point - the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable - even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a
No dude. The Democrats are bound to win if they run on
1) Gun control 2) Hate speech bans for people who use the wrong pronoun or argue with liberals on social media 3) Title II regulation for ISPs 4) Unlimited illegal immigration to force down working class wages 5) Punishing people who refuse to bake cake for gay weddings
Representative Democracy - you elect officials regularly but they're not beholden to public opinion in between elections. E.g. almost all modern 'democracies'.
Direct Democracy - there are no elected officials, decision are taken by the population voting directly. E.g. Classical Athens
Now a Direct Democracy officials taking decisions that the majority disagree with is a sign the system is broken. In a Representative Democracy, that's a feature not a bug - the whole point is that officials are not beholden to public opinion other than at election. It's designed to avoid the tyranny of the majority.
I.e. this
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise, then we no longer hold the status of a democracy, and should stop trying to proclaim we are.
Is true in a direct democracy. It's not true in a representative democracy. "Leaders" can go against public opinion on some issues, so long as they remain popular enough to get reelected. Or in Pai's case, reappointed as FCC head.
Funny thing is that the two things the left are complaining about - Trump winning the electoral college but not the popular vote and Pai deciding on Net Neutrality against public opinion are both examples of the US system doing exactly what it was intended to do.
The electoral college was designed to stop candidates favoured by populous, urban, coastal areas like NYC and LA dominating the choice for Presidency. And representative democracy was designed to avoid mob rule.
Slashdot Mirror
I am pretty sure Samsung had a phone model or two back in the removable battery era that was water proof, or at least water resistant.
Yeah, the Galaxy S5. Peak Galaxy really, it's been all downhill since then.
I think a Kernel Density Function is just a probability density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In statistics, kernel density estimation (KDE) is a non-parametric way to estimate the probability density function of a random variable. Kernel density estimation is a fundamental data smoothing problem where inferences about the population are made, based on a finite data sample. In some fields such as signal processing and econometrics it is also termed the Parzen--Rosenblatt window method, after Emanuel Parzen and Murray Rosenblatt, who are usually credited with independently creating it in its current form.
So the X axis is the Geekbench score and the Y axis is the percentage of phones.
Now if you look at iPhone 6s devices with 10.2.0 they're one peak - i.e. all the phones cluster around some mean performance. Looking at devices upgraded to 10.2.1 you see some smaller peaks to the left and with 11.2.0 those peaks grow. It seems like iOS knows if it running on an older device - perhaps it checks the battery health. If the battery is worn out it can run in a low power/low performance mode to keep the battery life acceptable.
Now personally I'd never buy a device with non removable battery. But if you're selling an OS which auto upgrades and runs on devices with non removable batteries it sort of makes sense. It also pushes users to buy new hardware. Imagine if you had an iPhone 6s with 11.2.0. If your device is on the right it'll seem OK. If its one of the devices in the low power/low performance modes it will seem sluggish and you'll probably go out and buy a new one. What I'm not sure about is what happens if you replace the battery? Does that reset the device into high performance mode or are you still stuck in slow mode?
As for those who complain "I want a removable battery", well I much prefer having the water resistance that has saved my phone a few times than a removable battery that I only need after 3 years.
And I got replaced my Samsung Galaxy S5 with an LG V20 instead of V30 because I valued keeping a removable battery over keeping water resistance, i.e. not everyone shares your priorities.
There are things Trump can legally do for his Russian buddies, now that he's President, that he couldn't do before. He seems to have colluded with them before.
Citation needed.
Yeah, it was outrageous when Trump was caught on an open mike promising Medvedev 'more flexibility' after the election. Collusion and treason!
Oh wait, that was Obama
In the same way that Hal Porter is a nom de souris for me, Porter Industries is one for my company.
Porter Industries will henceforth be known as Porter Blockchain Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Litecoin Dogecoin Much Crypto Hype Very Wow Industries.
University Law trumped state law after the Dear Colleague letter, which obligated colleges to have their own Title IX hearings where guilt was decided on a 'preponderance of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt' if they wanted to continue to have Federal funding.
https://www2.ed.gov/print/abou...
As noted above, the Title IX regulation requires schools to provide equitable grievance procedures. As part of these procedures, schools generally conduct investigations and hearings to determine whether sexual harassment or violence occurred. In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school's procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaints. The Supreme Court has applied a preponderance of the evidence standard in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), 42 U.S.C. SS 2000e et seq. Like Title IX,
Which led to cases like this
https://www.thefire.org/victor...
In finding Warner guilty, UND used the weak "preponderance of the evidence" standard (50.01% certainty) to determine guilt or innocence-the very same standard recently imposed upon every federally funded college in the country under an April 2011 regulation from the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
UND's reliance on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard lowered the accuracy of the proceedings so much that the police and the university arrived at very different results. Using what the university later insisted was the very same evidence, UND's campus tribunal convicted Warner of sexual assault, while the Grand Forks Police Department determined that Warner's accuser had lied about what had happened.
In fact, on May 13, 2010, the Grand Forks County District Court formally charged Warner's accuser with "False information or report to law enforcement officers or security officials," a Class A misdemeanor, and issued a warrant for her arrest on May 17, 2010. To date, Warner's accuser has failed to appear to answer the charges against her.
"When you only have to be 50.01% sure about the evidence, it's easy to make a mistake or to let bias, conscious or otherwise, determine the outcome-especially in campus justice systems. Yet, the federal government is now mandating that this flaw be enshrined at practically every university in the country," said FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley.
Warner first requested a rehearing on July 28, 2010, but UND refused to grant it. In the spring of 2011, Warner asked for FIRE's help. On May 11, 2011, FIRE wrote UND President Robert O. Kelley, pointing out the university's procedural errors and criticizing its failure to reconsider the case. On May 20, UND responded to FIRE, once again denying Warner's request for a rehearing. This is when UND revealed that it had used the very same evidence to find Caleb Warner guilty of sexual assault that the police and prosecutor had used to charge his accuser with lying to law enforcement.
On July 15, an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal by FIRE Chairman Harvey A. Silverglate launched FIRE's national press campaign to encourage UND to give Warner a fair rehearing. Two weeks later, UND Provost Paul LeBel finally invited Warner to appeal the finding against him. With the help of attorney Nathan Hansen, Warner submitted a new appeal on August 31.
Late last week, Warner received a ruling from LeBel announcing that "based on the specific fact of a law enforcement office filing an affadavit of belief that the complainant had provided false information to him" about the sexual assault accusation, a "continued fin
Yeah, but Theo was once rude to someone on email or something.
Calling europe corrupt while discussing law that has been passed down that actually benefits citizens and means huge investments and work for all businesses in and acting in europe.
Well I don't think this law does benefit citizens. It certainly doesn't mean 'huge investments' - in fact the most it could do is to convince Facebook and WhatsApp to close their EU offices. And even if a particular law did benefit citizens, that wouldn't change the fact that EU institutions are less accountable than the national institutions in EU countries.
You seem to gloss over the fact that proposals are still requested, debated and ultimately accepted or declined by the european parliament, which is democratically chosen.
Where, on multiple occasions your country is outvoted. And the UK is most often in the minority.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
However the problem is more fundamental than that. There is no European demos
http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanI...
In which case why have votes on internal matters taken at the European level? I can see that trade between countries - the European equivalent of US 'interstate commerce' needs to have rules. However EU rules go much further than that. The larger the superstate, the more risk your views will be in the minority.
You can see these problems in the US, except that in the US Federal politicians are elected. So in principle they can be removed by the electorate even if in practice gerrymandering makes this unlikely.
The EU isn't particularly popular in opinion polls in any European country but it could be argued the UK is more Eurosceptic than for example France and Germany. France and Germany seeing merging into a superstate as the way to stop fighting each other. The UK doesn't see things this way.
European commisionars can actually be removed by the european parliament.
The European Commission can be removed. Not individual commissioners. And that has happened once. Due to corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's no way to get rid of individual commissioners by voting for someone else.
If you're so afraid of lobbying power, why single out the european commission? Look at the executive branch in nearly any country.
My point is that EU structures are designed to be less accountable than national structures. An individual commissioner voting for an unpopular law in return for a payoff is very unlikely to face any sanction. And turnout for EU Parliament election is low and no one really cares about the result compared to national elections. So MEPs are unlikely to face any sanction either.
You can make a case for UK or US national structures needing to be reformed to make politicians more accountable but the EU is designed to be step in the exact opposite direction. An individual good law or two doesn't change that.
I haven't got Titanium Backup because I haven't rooted either device. Tried both Google Drive and copying the Whatsapp Folder and neither worked.
If you moved to a new computer and lost all your old emails/files would you consider that a feature?
Maybe *you* would, but some of us actually like having the option of keeping our data until we decide to delete it.
The reason they can't show you your chat history is because they don't have it.
It's on the phone. There's a backup feature to Google drive or SD card, the problem is that sometimes (always?) a new phone will fail to restore the backups
https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/an...
and EU, which is arguably least corrupt organization in the world with any power at all to help privacy,
LOL. In the EU legislation is initiated by the European Commission, not the Parliament. European Commissioners are not elected and cannot be removed by a direct election. Now if you're a corrupt corporation that makes them absolutely ideal people to lobby - they can initiate legislation but don't need to worry about getting re-elected.
And once legislation goes through the European Parliament EU member states are legally required to transpose them into EU law, regardless of whether the politicians in the national parliament agree or not - rather than being forced to defend an unpopular law government can simply say 'yeah it sucks but we have to implement it'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When adopted, directives give member states a timetable for the implementation of the intended outcome. Occasionally, the laws of a member state may already comply with this outcome, and the state involved would be required only to keep its laws in place. More commonly, member states are required to make changes to their laws (commonly referred to as transposition) in order for the directive to be implemented correctly. This is done in approximately 99% of the cases.[4] If a member state fails to pass the required national legislation, or if the national legislation does not adequately comply with the requirements of the directive, the European Commission may initiate legal action against the member state in the European Court of Justice. This may also happen when a member state has transposed a directive in theory but has failed to abide by its provisions in practice.
I.e. the EU is what happens when corporations think "The US and UK have too many checks and balances on lobbying because even the most awful politician has to worry about a backlash if they vote for an unpopular law. It'd be so much easier if we could lobby unelected politicians at the supranational level, have the laws they make rubber stamped by a supranational parliament no one cares about and then pushed downstream, totally bypassing national parliaments with their pesky, accountable politicians".
So it's completely corrupt. It also doesn't have any power to help privacy because WhatsApp and Facebook could just shut down their EU offices and people would continue to use their apps. And if it were EU internet companies infringing privacy, all they need to do is lobby at European Commission level and they can stop any pesky regulation.
Another terrible thing is that when you change phones you lose your chat history. Technically there's a backup option to Google drive and SD card but when both fails you search and find it fails for loads of people and no one knows why or how to fix it.
https://forums.oneplus.net/thr...
So Facebook have my chat history but WhatsApp won't let me see it on a new phone. Gee thanks, you utter fuckknuckles.
Back before Facebook owned the company of course it was actually a pretty decent application that effectively let you send free SMSs. Now it's a designed to make sure that FB have your data and you don't.
But as with Facebook Messenger, LINE and Skype you pretty much have to install it to talk to its captive user base. Funny thing is when telephones got to be essential to talk to people the telcos got regulated as common carriers. Of course Facebook and WhatsApp are not going to be regulated as common carriers, but ISPs are. Even though in most places I can switch from DSL to cable or mobile and not lose contact with people, but that's not true if I get rid of Facebook. Facebook bans people for having heretical opinions, and that's apparently fine. And to add insult to injury FB is lobbying heavily for ISPs to be regulated as common carriers and buying up companies like WhatsApp which would otherwise be competition. Brilliant.
As much as I hate Facebook/WhatsApp, that's bullshit. It's just the French shaking down/harassing a company because it's not French.
And they're wasting their time too - even if they outright banned WhatsApp it would make no real difference. People would still use it. They could still download it from Google Play or the iOS Appstore. Even if France/the EU got it pulled from there people could download it from WhatsApp.com.
All they'll achieve is that Facebook/WhatsApp shut down their physical office in France and operate from somewhere else instead, probably somewhere outside the EU.
Meanwhile France has no real competitor companies to Facebook and WhatsApp and persecuting American companies isn't going to change that.
Possible. Even when a firing is not actually the result, the mere hint of censure or disapproval from a boss will make it into your speech and decisions. This has a chilling effect on speech.
Wait, I thought the line on this was 'It's a private business. They don't have to give you a platform' and to link to this xkcd cartoon
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Hey if a ram identifies as a sheep who are you to call her 'fake'.
Bigot.
If you're arguing on the Internet whether you're living in the world of Orwell's 1984 you're not living in the world of Orwell's 1984.
The whole point of 1984 is that truth has been abolished and people are unable to even explain what has happened. So if you're arguing about living in that world, you're not living in that world.
E.g.
http://orwell.ru/library/essay...
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail - but these were child's play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point - the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable - even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a
No dude. The Democrats are bound to win if they run on
1) Gun control
2) Hate speech bans for people who use the wrong pronoun or argue with liberals on social media
3) Title II regulation for ISPs
4) Unlimited illegal immigration to force down working class wages
5) Punishing people who refuse to bake cake for gay weddings
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-c...
All this 'sticking up for the working man' stuff is so last century.
Yeah, it's almost like the whole thing was written to be tongue in cheek or to troll the "BUSH=PALPATINE" idiot left or something.
Who knows what bondage goes with metal eyes?
OpenMP is where it's at, cat
https://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/h...
lynx https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/b...
Representative Democracy - you elect officials regularly but they're not beholden to public opinion in between elections. E.g. almost all modern 'democracies'.
Direct Democracy - there are no elected officials, decision are taken by the population voting directly. E.g. Classical Athens
Now a Direct Democracy officials taking decisions that the majority disagree with is a sign the system is broken. In a Representative Democracy, that's a feature not a bug - the whole point is that officials are not beholden to public opinion other than at election. It's designed to avoid the tyranny of the majority.
I.e. this
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise, then we no longer hold the status of a democracy, and should stop trying to proclaim we are.
Is true in a direct democracy. It's not true in a representative democracy. "Leaders" can go against public opinion on some issues, so long as they remain popular enough to get reelected. Or in Pai's case, reappointed as FCC head.
Funny thing is that the two things the left are complaining about - Trump winning the electoral college but not the popular vote and Pai deciding on Net Neutrality against public opinion are both examples of the US system doing exactly what it was intended to do.
The electoral college was designed to stop candidates favoured by populous, urban, coastal areas like NYC and LA dominating the choice for Presidency. And representative democracy was designed to avoid mob rule.