kefka

I would accept the accusation of defense of vigilantism, but I only highlighted the issue. I see it as a "Pot calls Kettle Black", but I do not advocate a response, other than that the courts handled it incorrectly.

I can have fault with both Google/Alphabet and Yelp. They each can have their own form of hypocrisy and potentially illegal behaviors. Me calling one out doesn't lessen the other's actions.

Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies.

However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".

The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.

Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.

(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )

Honestly, I'd say longer than that. The Democrats have very little impetus to do them either, given their corporate funding record.

It's been about 30 years since the Democrats gave up on the working classes to cater to "Cause of the Week", "Big Media", and associated areas. Even Obama, with the ACA, set it up that we're required to pay for-profit companies for insurance. He even had a super-majority to enable Medicare for All... but didn't.

Republicans claim they're for the "Common Working Man", but time and again we see policies that ascribe to 'Socialism for the Rich, and Capitalism for the Poor'. And that's not discussing Trump, who has been criticized by both US parties for his actions. (I'm focusing on R-Congress and state governors.)

Something's got to give, and I don't see this going well at all. The fact that regulators and congress refuse to do anything is just a symptom.

I like the better question: "What is a measurement?"

What does the measurement actually entail? If a computer reads the contents, does that mean the computer is entwined with it? What does our consciousness do to the measurement?

What does the double-slit experiment show if only computers read its result? Does the result compare when we observe it?

Crazier yet, do different human observers see the same results? Has this even been tested?

> There are a dozen different possibilities for what the photon has done - a dozen different universes, if you like. As long as the photon never interacts with anything else, this bundle of a dozen universes can act much the same as a single universe. Certainly if you're just looking at a telescope, all dozen versions of that telescope are behaving the same, so they behave like a single unified instance.

Well that's interesting you bring it up this way.

If what you said is possibly true, then light could be a carrier of things like multi-dimensional spin, or possibly where dark matter really comes from (inter-dimensional interference).

I know Greg Egan has discussed the possibility of infinite orthogonal dimensions that energy can leak into. And by energy conservation, the result would be things like dimensional rotation and other effects we cannot yet perceive.

One theory is that the EM-Drive uses a rudimentary version of this effect. We're all still awaiting the results.

Yeah, that may be true.. But Scihub is an onion site. That means there's not much in the way of "who", but in the way of last hop before hitting the onionsite.

And I would daresay that one should probably not trust logs when going through Tor.

Speaking of this, Utamaro's artwork is featured in one of the Freer Sackler Smithsonian Museum of Art on the Mall in Washington DC.

They have an extensive amount of his artwork on display, including 3 of his largest paintings.

I'm unsure when they're going to take it down. The exhibit was exquisitely done... But my own personal tastes - I dont like the artform. But there definitely is tremendous skill.

> Well, I can see that's a factor, but not necessarily an overriding one. As someone who's taught at uni myself (not pure maths) we are not usually that cynical or fond of serving up "detritus". It's not as if we lack for valuable and interesting stuff to teach if we go through foundations too quickly, and we aren't paid just for teaching. Anyway, I think most do benefit from a quite painstakingly incrementalist approach to maths; me taking that too far and sometimes getting stuck is a personal failing.

Possibly so, but I never went in any of the grad programs. Most of the lower classes are taught by AI's and contract-based "instructors" paid by the uni on a per credit-hour basis. And much of the time, the department shovels the syllabus and required areas to them for the students.

And unfortunately, this avenue of teaching very much shows. You have instructors who have some semblance of caring, but not terribly much. They teach weeder classes with the intent of failing much of the class. Whomever is teaching isn't always able to explain what's going on in an area - they can do the process, but can't explain why their actions work.

Perhaps it is a jaded viewpoint. But after spending way too much money in "Higher Ed", along with working at an institution, I know the game. And I'm sure it's better if you're a post-doc with prestige or on that track. But the rest of us are spoon-fed bland crumbs these days, and pumped-and-dumped for excessive scholastic loans to get a job to pay the loans back with.

> If you go to a good uni, at least by postgrad level you do have that kind of access, and, if you get along, you retain it for free after you leave.

Yep, and if you're not on that track, the access isn't there. I'd be willing to pay for it directly. Google had a program quite a while back, of paying experts for direct guidance in specific fields. Too bad they cancelled it.

My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Who actually runs a single DB server, with no replication, no slaves, no nothing other than the primary?

CA is the correct way to understand a single un-replicated DB instance. And it's really really wrong :)