The bookstores wanted a lot of repeat business, so they pushed frequent buyer cards and book clubs (like Columbia House records in the '80s). Because they gave a "discount" price to frequent buyers, the publishers were free to jack up the price to keep margins high. When a casual buyer came in to get a book, it was priced at $16-20, which is just on the edge of an impulse buy. This was to push you into signing up for the frequent buyer club (which as others point out, wasn't free at B&N), even though you had no intention of using the card enough to make it pay. You may have bought that $20 book, but you weren't likely to go back either.
As for WalMart and Target, well, they found a niche and filled it. Now the casual buyer has a place to get a book once in a while. The high end book addict will eventually head to e-books. Or maybe sooner than later. I basically haven't bought a book for years, but suddenly I have the Amazon Kindle app on my new phone, which I used to get 3 books on the first day without even giving it a second thought... that's slippery economics. The quality of the screen is just fine for reading, too (Samsung Galaxy-S). The hardcore reader will give up the "paper experience" when they realize they no longer have to trudge down to the store, stand in line, and all the other stuff to get books. And if Amazon keeps beating up the publishers on price for all books, not just the popular ones, we should see a resurgence of reading.
And I don't buy the story that people don't read. They may not read novels, but given that the guest on The Daily Show is an author, and the first step in running for president of the US is to publish a book of some sort, there are readers out there.
Nicky Santoro: [voice-over] A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all frekin' night.
Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?
Yes, yes, and yes. And I'll add a few more:
1) site selection is next to impossible. 2) Westinghouse and GE used to compete on plants. GE absorbed Westinghouse's nuclear division years ago 3) Liability insurance. 4) Lack of qualified workers sends labor costs up. 5) (the big one) Fuel isn't recycled/reprocessed anymore. The design of our nuclear plants, using uranium, wasn't only to produce electricity. One of the byproducts of uranium fission is plutonium, which is useful in building nuclear warheads. The way the nuclear power industry was set up, all the fuel has to be purchased from the government (NRC/DOE), and the government was charged with taking care of the waste (so they could extract the plutonium). As long as the government wanted plutonium, it worked fairly well. But when several presidents signed executive orders to stop the processing of spent commercial fuel (Ford and Carter being the first), the stuff just started to pile up, becoming a big fat security risk for nuclear power plants. Now that Yucca Mountain is not available, it's just going to sit there that much longer.
There is a much safer nuclear fuel available, and even some tested designs, but there seems to be zero interest in building one in the US. Much of the cost of nuclear power is going to lawyers these days, and if you can build something that is at least as safe as a coal plant, but without CO2 emission, I would think you'd have people knocking down your door wanting to get in on it. But it has that nasty n-word (nuclear, not the other one), the third rail of power generation.
But that's slowly changing, mostly due to phantom power drain. What will really kickstart plug-in hybrids and other electric automobiles is a cleaver marketing campaign that gets people thinking about why a slow charging cycle is not a big deal. After all, we all have electrical power in our homes, but not many of us have a gasoline tank. I think people are against electric cars because they don't realize they can charge them up EVERY NIGHT, not just the once or twice a week they're used to going to the gas station.
If the masses realize what a big fundamental shift that is, they'll quickly learn to love the 200 mile all-electric range and save the gas engine for trips. Then we'll see a use for all that PM baseload that is now going to waste.
And what about pumping water in the night for peak time during the day? Storing water in an uphill reservoir and running it through turbines in the afternoon would take some of the strain off during peak times, and time of day metering could make it profitable.
Why not just pump seawater (or anything other that potential drinking water) uphill with wind turbines? Then only generate power with the falling water, not the wind turbines. This way if the wind generation spikes it only pumps more water into the reservoir instead of stressing the grid. The power generated by gravity is much more like baseload and easy to predict.
You could even use old mines to store the water, since most of them are flooded anyway.
Fiber to the premises is almost always an "all or nothing" service. This MAY be why this story is so interesting, that someone is leasing wavelengths to a building. But from the very sketchy info given it sounds more like a typical MAN with updated hardware. They didn't say anything that indicated they were providing last mile termination to this network, only backbone services.
This article from Ars Technica gives a great break down of the costs associated with building out a 100% fiber network (FTTH) and is also a darn interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing. The basic summary is that it is nearly impossible to compete with infrastructure that's already paid for and has cashflow. That's what Verizon is finding out with FIOS: even though the maintenance costs are the same (if not cheaper), even with slightly higher margins, it's nearly impossible in today's capital markets to raise enough funding for a new network.
We lease several wavelengths from Level 3 for parts of our backbone. I don't know if any others are in use on the fiber, but that's not our concern, and we hand off in a communications hut out in the middle of nowhere.
Or use Costco's uploader on their web site. You can even load up a printer profile in Photoshop or GIMP for you store's printer, and enlargement prices aren't too bad (at least compared to chemical process photolabs). Upload them tonight, pick up in the morning.
For the most part, the cell companies in the US are pushing THEIR content, not general web content. Their content is cached at an on-network data center, formated to fit their bandwidth constraints (320X200 video, 4KHz mono audio), and in some cases, content providers paying for access.
Going off their formula to 720p YouTube isn't what they want you to do.
Actually, they moved G-12, an older sat available as a spare, into 131 degrees W to take the place of G-11. The only action required by cable companies was to make sure their dishes were peaked so that while the transition was happening there was enough wiggle room to see both birds at the same time.
From my understanding, Cisco uses Finisar GBICs but burns a custom serial number that IOS looks for before bringing up the port. I've made the mistake of putting a Finisar SFP in a Cisco switch and not realizing it until the port doesn't come up.
Of course, you can put a Cisco SFP in just about anything and it will work.
Not saying it makes what this guy did right, but still, if you're that sort of person who'd try to counterfeit, it would be pretty tempting.
TECHNICALLY, a satphone only transmits up to the closest satellite. Single sideband (PSK31 if you want data) on the HF bands can transmit all over the world.
Before I started using my camera, I crossed that section out and initialed indicating that I don't agree to that term. I sent the document back to their legal department, and I'm still waiting for them to agree to the changes.
In the mean time, since I haven't heard from them, I'm going to proceed with using the camera.
It sounds like someone might be constantly changing the specifications. I'm sure like all things political in New York (see rebilding WTC), the contract likely requires EVERYONE who touches the payroll to have a say in how it works. That, along with different trade unions and their contracts' idiosyncrasies, work/shift/OT rules, and I could see how it can become a mess.
I'm paid hourly, and my company uses SAP for HR management. The idea is that all I should have to do is put my hours and on-call time in and the system should be able to figure out the rest. As it turns out, there's a drop down that has about 30 different line items to pick from. Each one will have an influence in my paycheck. Choose the wrong one and it can be a big problem. Then there's at least 2 levels of approval before my time is submitted to get a check cut. Every time I enter time, it has to be broken out by line item. In my case, it is usually 7:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00 since I have to indicate the lunch hour, except when I don't get a lunch. So I have at least 2 lines per day, but there's also on call, call-out, company holiday (which, if I'm on call, has to be broken out in 4 hours because for some strange reason just putting in 8 hours of holiday pay makes the system reject the on call pay). If I'm on vacation is it for medical reasons? Are those medical reasons eligible for FMLA rules? Have I used up my FLMA time?
We live with the bizarre nature of the system because someone, somewhere decided it was the best way to go, and if we want to get paid we'd better do what it says. At least once a month I enter something the wrong way and it gets rejected (usually when I come in at 23:00 doing night work... the system doesn't like crossing midnight for some reason). If you have a situation where everyone involved has a say in the matter, there's no way people would put up with this stuff. And according to the article, they wanted to use biometric systems to make it work. It sounds like someone wanted to be able to have a fingerprint scanner at the front door and employees would get scanned when they came in, scan when they leave and the system can figure out the rest. But there's a problem with that model as pointed out above. Is my scan a call-out when I'm on call or a call-out when I'm not? Straight overtime or call out time? What if I get called in early but continue working (when does call-out pay end and normal day begin)? That may affect my paycheck, depending on the work rules, so it darn well better get it right or there's going to be hell to pay.
And then there's the "does it have to have a blue background" problem, and real or perceived UI issues, and people who generally hate change.
In the 1930s, all the power companies were happy to connect into downtown Nashville, but rural TN? No payback, no investors, no way.
In the 1950s, the Bell System was permitted to be a monopoly only if they agreed to build out to 100% of the country. There's places in rural Colorado that have no electricity, single track road, cell phones are offline, but you can get wireline telephone service. That copper hasn't made AT&T a dime, except that they could charge it off over decades (and the monopoly status has value of course).
Network build out is expensive. It's estimated that it costs Verizon between $3000-$5000 to install a FIOS customer. I'm sure that drops the more people on the street take the service, but if there's only 3 houses/mile, that cost can easily go through the roof. Cable construction is quite a bit lower, figure about $1/ft for aerial and $2-3/ft for underground if it isn't new construction/open trench.
I'm not exactly in favor of a TVA or Bell System solution, but it does get results. A compromise might be to let all comers have an accelerated depreciation schedule for rural build out, or maybe have the treasury back a 30 year bond issued by the provider. If a TVA style solution is proposed (and it usually is), there should be a clear exit strategy for the government to get out of the business after the capital is repaid, perhaps converting the business into a co-op or some such entity.
Digital readers are only seeing a small fraction of the advertising that the print reader sees. I know what you're going to say, that because digital readers are able to be tracked they are worth more, but for the local advertiser (I would guess most of the NYT print readers are still local), they don't have as much access to the tracking tools as a major ad agency (yet). The New York market may be an exception in this regard, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the print media advertisers still use the feedback of "run an ad today and check the register receipts tomorrow" method of tracking effectiveness.
Most ads you see in a local paper are placed by a "kitchen table" ad agency. They don't produce any copy, do any research beyond what the newspaper/media outlet tells them, and usually got their client list by stealing the Rolodex when they quit their ad sales job at the newspaper. These guys don't bother with doing any research as to effectiveness of ads, mostly because if they did, their client list would get smaller. They are great at playing businesses against each other, IE "Smith Ford is running a 10 spot a week rotator all year on KXYZ, so you need to be there too!" The last thing they want is someone to come along with a bunch of facts about who's looking at their client's ads, or worse, less inventory to sell. The Kindle's screen is mighty small when compared to a broadsheet paper. Less real estate means less inventory and higher rates that can't be justified in the current newspaper ad sales model.
This model works very well for the blogger though, and I could see a day when a newspaper is more like an agent for their reporters, getting sponsors for columnists. That's going to open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to impartial reporting, but that's really a somewhat recent phenomenon anyway.
Old media wants to protect its market. An easy way to do this is to discourage old media consumers from trying out new media. "Online scammers - we'll show you how to avoid them! Tonight after weather and sports." is a common teaser these days only because it helps re-enforce that the Internet is a wild, dangerous place (except for the TV station's web site, of course). Better just keep the TV on and relax, they can't get you here.
Are you kidding? Office 2007 was such a radical change in UI that it took me about 3X longer to put together a simple document over the prior version. And just to keep everyone who's ever used the product on an even level with the intern who's been there 6 months, there's no "classic mode" button!
I understand product managers get tired of just fixing bugs, but there's a reason we don't change keyboards and paper sizes every 20 years. Imagine buying a pen or pencil that now required you to hold it parallel to the paper instead of perpendicular. That's basically what MS did in Office 2007.
"Michael Bluth was taking his son to an interview at the prestigious Milford Academy, an institution once famous for its credo that children should be "neither seen nor heard"
Actually when the country was founded, only land-owning white men had the right to vote. It wasn't until the suffrage movement and eventually elimination of the Jim Crow laws (along with 6 amendments to the constitution) in the late 19th and early 20th century that everyone over 18 got the right to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
The bookstores wanted a lot of repeat business, so they pushed frequent buyer cards and book clubs (like Columbia House records in the '80s). Because they gave a "discount" price to frequent buyers, the publishers were free to jack up the price to keep margins high. When a casual buyer came in to get a book, it was priced at $16-20, which is just on the edge of an impulse buy. This was to push you into signing up for the frequent buyer club (which as others point out, wasn't free at B&N), even though you had no intention of using the card enough to make it pay. You may have bought that $20 book, but you weren't likely to go back either.
As for WalMart and Target, well, they found a niche and filled it. Now the casual buyer has a place to get a book once in a while. The high end book addict will eventually head to e-books. Or maybe sooner than later. I basically haven't bought a book for years, but suddenly I have the Amazon Kindle app on my new phone, which I used to get 3 books on the first day without even giving it a second thought... that's slippery economics. The quality of the screen is just fine for reading, too (Samsung Galaxy-S). The hardcore reader will give up the "paper experience" when they realize they no longer have to trudge down to the store, stand in line, and all the other stuff to get books. And if Amazon keeps beating up the publishers on price for all books, not just the popular ones, we should see a resurgence of reading.
And I don't buy the story that people don't read. They may not read novels, but given that the guest on The Daily Show is an author, and the first step in running for president of the US is to publish a book of some sort, there are readers out there.
Nicky Santoro: [voice-over] A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all frekin' night.
Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?
Yes, yes, and yes. And I'll add a few more:
1) site selection is next to impossible.
2) Westinghouse and GE used to compete on plants. GE absorbed Westinghouse's nuclear division years ago
3) Liability insurance.
4) Lack of qualified workers sends labor costs up.
5) (the big one) Fuel isn't recycled/reprocessed anymore. The design of our nuclear plants, using uranium, wasn't only to produce electricity. One of the byproducts of uranium fission is plutonium, which is useful in building nuclear warheads. The way the nuclear power industry was set up, all the fuel has to be purchased from the government (NRC/DOE), and the government was charged with taking care of the waste (so they could extract the plutonium). As long as the government wanted plutonium, it worked fairly well. But when several presidents signed executive orders to stop the processing of spent commercial fuel (Ford and Carter being the first), the stuff just started to pile up, becoming a big fat security risk for nuclear power plants. Now that Yucca Mountain is not available, it's just going to sit there that much longer.
There is a much safer nuclear fuel available, and even some tested designs, but there seems to be zero interest in building one in the US. Much of the cost of nuclear power is going to lawyers these days, and if you can build something that is at least as safe as a coal plant, but without CO2 emission, I would think you'd have people knocking down your door wanting to get in on it. But it has that nasty n-word (nuclear, not the other one), the third rail of power generation.
Quote from TFA: "Criminals could find vulnerable ATMs by using open-source 'war-dialling' software"
Nice. Because closed source software could never be used for criminal activity, right?
you can not die from an overdose, you can not get addicted to it like hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, meth & etc)
Just you wait. Once it's legal, Monsanto will make it highly addictive and if you smoke enough you'll die. But it will be one hell of a high!
But that's slowly changing, mostly due to phantom power drain. What will really kickstart plug-in hybrids and other electric automobiles is a cleaver marketing campaign that gets people thinking about why a slow charging cycle is not a big deal. After all, we all have electrical power in our homes, but not many of us have a gasoline tank. I think people are against electric cars because they don't realize they can charge them up EVERY NIGHT, not just the once or twice a week they're used to going to the gas station.
If the masses realize what a big fundamental shift that is, they'll quickly learn to love the 200 mile all-electric range and save the gas engine for trips. Then we'll see a use for all that PM baseload that is now going to waste.
And what about pumping water in the night for peak time during the day? Storing water in an uphill reservoir and running it through turbines in the afternoon would take some of the strain off during peak times, and time of day metering could make it profitable.
Why not just pump seawater (or anything other that potential drinking water) uphill with wind turbines? Then only generate power with the falling water, not the wind turbines. This way if the wind generation spikes it only pumps more water into the reservoir instead of stressing the grid. The power generated by gravity is much more like baseload and easy to predict.
You could even use old mines to store the water, since most of them are flooded anyway.
If you're willing to wait another 5 years, Iridium is in the process of replacing their constellation:
http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/iridium/44300/
Fiber to the premises is almost always an "all or nothing" service. This MAY be why this story is so interesting, that someone is leasing wavelengths to a building. But from the very sketchy info given it sounds more like a typical MAN with updated hardware. They didn't say anything that indicated they were providing last mile termination to this network, only backbone services.
This article from Ars Technica gives a great break down of the costs associated with building out a 100% fiber network (FTTH) and is also a darn interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing. The basic summary is that it is nearly impossible to compete with infrastructure that's already paid for and has cashflow. That's what Verizon is finding out with FIOS: even though the maintenance costs are the same (if not cheaper), even with slightly higher margins, it's nearly impossible in today's capital markets to raise enough funding for a new network.
We lease several wavelengths from Level 3 for parts of our backbone. I don't know if any others are in use on the fiber, but that's not our concern, and we hand off in a communications hut out in the middle of nowhere.
Or use Costco's uploader on their web site. You can even load up a printer profile in Photoshop or GIMP for you store's printer, and enlargement prices aren't too bad (at least compared to chemical process photolabs). Upload them tonight, pick up in the morning.
For the most part, the cell companies in the US are pushing THEIR content, not general web content. Their content is cached at an on-network data center, formated to fit their bandwidth constraints (320X200 video, 4KHz mono audio), and in some cases, content providers paying for access.
Going off their formula to 720p YouTube isn't what they want you to do.
Actually, they moved G-12, an older sat available as a spare, into 131 degrees W to take the place of G-11. The only action required by cable companies was to make sure their dishes were peaked so that while the transition was happening there was enough wiggle room to see both birds at the same time.
From my understanding, Cisco uses Finisar GBICs but burns a custom serial number that IOS looks for before bringing up the port. I've made the mistake of putting a Finisar SFP in a Cisco switch and not realizing it until the port doesn't come up.
Of course, you can put a Cisco SFP in just about anything and it will work.
Not saying it makes what this guy did right, but still, if you're that sort of person who'd try to counterfeit, it would be pretty tempting.
TECHNICALLY, a satphone only transmits up to the closest satellite. Single sideband (PSK31 if you want data) on the HF bands can transmit all over the world.
Before I started using my camera, I crossed that section out and initialed indicating that I don't agree to that term. I sent the document back to their legal department, and I'm still waiting for them to agree to the changes.
In the mean time, since I haven't heard from them, I'm going to proceed with using the camera.
My first thought was that Pris wasn't just trying to look good for Sebastian, she was trying to avoid detection.
It sounds like someone might be constantly changing the specifications. I'm sure like all things political in New York (see rebilding WTC), the contract likely requires EVERYONE who touches the payroll to have a say in how it works. That, along with different trade unions and their contracts' idiosyncrasies, work/shift/OT rules, and I could see how it can become a mess.
I'm paid hourly, and my company uses SAP for HR management. The idea is that all I should have to do is put my hours and on-call time in and the system should be able to figure out the rest. As it turns out, there's a drop down that has about 30 different line items to pick from. Each one will have an influence in my paycheck. Choose the wrong one and it can be a big problem. Then there's at least 2 levels of approval before my time is submitted to get a check cut. Every time I enter time, it has to be broken out by line item. In my case, it is usually 7:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00 since I have to indicate the lunch hour, except when I don't get a lunch. So I have at least 2 lines per day, but there's also on call, call-out, company holiday (which, if I'm on call, has to be broken out in 4 hours because for some strange reason just putting in 8 hours of holiday pay makes the system reject the on call pay). If I'm on vacation is it for medical reasons? Are those medical reasons eligible for FMLA rules? Have I used up my FLMA time?
We live with the bizarre nature of the system because someone, somewhere decided it was the best way to go, and if we want to get paid we'd better do what it says. At least once a month I enter something the wrong way and it gets rejected (usually when I come in at 23:00 doing night work... the system doesn't like crossing midnight for some reason). If you have a situation where everyone involved has a say in the matter, there's no way people would put up with this stuff. And according to the article, they wanted to use biometric systems to make it work. It sounds like someone wanted to be able to have a fingerprint scanner at the front door and employees would get scanned when they came in, scan when they leave and the system can figure out the rest. But there's a problem with that model as pointed out above. Is my scan a call-out when I'm on call or a call-out when I'm not? Straight overtime or call out time? What if I get called in early but continue working (when does call-out pay end and normal day begin)? That may affect my paycheck, depending on the work rules, so it darn well better get it right or there's going to be hell to pay.
And then there's the "does it have to have a blue background" problem, and real or perceived UI issues, and people who generally hate change.
Or maybe the contractor is just incompetent.
Hell, sometimes "remote" can be one block away.
But that's always been the problem:
In the 1930s, all the power companies were happy to connect into downtown Nashville, but rural TN? No payback, no investors, no way.
In the 1950s, the Bell System was permitted to be a monopoly only if they agreed to build out to 100% of the country. There's places in rural Colorado that have no electricity, single track road, cell phones are offline, but you can get wireline telephone service. That copper hasn't made AT&T a dime, except that they could charge it off over decades (and the monopoly status has value of course).
Network build out is expensive. It's estimated that it costs Verizon between $3000-$5000 to install a FIOS customer. I'm sure that drops the more people on the street take the service, but if there's only 3 houses/mile, that cost can easily go through the roof. Cable construction is quite a bit lower, figure about $1/ft for aerial and $2-3/ft for underground if it isn't new construction/open trench.
I'm not exactly in favor of a TVA or Bell System solution, but it does get results. A compromise might be to let all comers have an accelerated depreciation schedule for rural build out, or maybe have the treasury back a 30 year bond issued by the provider. If a TVA style solution is proposed (and it usually is), there should be a clear exit strategy for the government to get out of the business after the capital is repaid, perhaps converting the business into a co-op or some such entity.
Digital readers are only seeing a small fraction of the advertising that the print reader sees. I know what you're going to say, that because digital readers are able to be tracked they are worth more, but for the local advertiser (I would guess most of the NYT print readers are still local), they don't have as much access to the tracking tools as a major ad agency (yet). The New York market may be an exception in this regard, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the print media advertisers still use the feedback of "run an ad today and check the register receipts tomorrow" method of tracking effectiveness.
Most ads you see in a local paper are placed by a "kitchen table" ad agency. They don't produce any copy, do any research beyond what the newspaper/media outlet tells them, and usually got their client list by stealing the Rolodex when they quit their ad sales job at the newspaper. These guys don't bother with doing any research as to effectiveness of ads, mostly because if they did, their client list would get smaller. They are great at playing businesses against each other, IE "Smith Ford is running a 10 spot a week rotator all year on KXYZ, so you need to be there too!" The last thing they want is someone to come along with a bunch of facts about who's looking at their client's ads, or worse, less inventory to sell. The Kindle's screen is mighty small when compared to a broadsheet paper. Less real estate means less inventory and higher rates that can't be justified in the current newspaper ad sales model.
This model works very well for the blogger though, and I could see a day when a newspaper is more like an agent for their reporters, getting sponsors for columnists. That's going to open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to impartial reporting, but that's really a somewhat recent phenomenon anyway.
Old media wants to protect its market. An easy way to do this is to discourage old media consumers from trying out new media. "Online scammers - we'll show you how to avoid them! Tonight after weather and sports." is a common teaser these days only because it helps re-enforce that the Internet is a wild, dangerous place (except for the TV station's web site, of course). Better just keep the TV on and relax, they can't get you here.
Are you kidding? Office 2007 was such a radical change in UI that it took me about 3X longer to put together a simple document over the prior version. And just to keep everyone who's ever used the product on an even level with the intern who's been there 6 months, there's no "classic mode" button!
I understand product managers get tired of just fixing bugs, but there's a reason we don't change keyboards and paper sizes every 20 years. Imagine buying a pen or pencil that now required you to hold it parallel to the paper instead of perpendicular. That's basically what MS did in Office 2007.
"Michael Bluth was taking his son to an interview at the prestigious Milford Academy, an institution once famous for its credo that children should be "neither seen nor heard"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367279/
Actually when the country was founded, only land-owning white men had the right to vote. It wasn't until the suffrage movement and eventually elimination of the Jim Crow laws (along with 6 amendments to the constitution) in the late 19th and early 20th century that everyone over 18 got the right to vote.
My first thought when I saw the title was "Great, now women can get men to stare at their chest AND charge the iPhone!"