I'm a grad student (pursuing PhD) and my classes used no cheat detection or surveillance (they even told us to turn our cameras off for bandwidth reasons; some students weren't necessarily even in the country at the time) and dealt with things in two pretty obvious ways:

1. Semester projects.
2. Open Note tests.

Now, this is probably easier for some classes than others; at grad level they can throw you a bunch of previously unanalyzed data and tell you to do analysis on it, and there's not going to be anything online you can just copy the way you could in say an English Literature class. But for tests doing open notes makes more sense. Especially compared to the Canvas detection methods used here, which are not going to catch (say) someone who just downloaded all the stuff that was on Canvas already.

When you clone an animal not related to the existing population, you do actually introduce genetic diversity; they cloned a ferret with no living relatives:

Dr. Ryder’s lab received more samples in 1988, one belonging to a ferret named Willa who was caught in the wild. Willa had offspring but they had died; by black-footed ferret standards, she was brimming with potential genetic diversity. The Frozen Zoo established a cell culture from Willa and stored it in their enormous freezer, which cradles the cells of 1,100 different species of animals including an extinct Hawaiian honeycreeper and the highly endangered vaquita, a porpoise species, at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. ...
The first trial began around Halloween. The Frozen Zoo sent Willa’s cryogenically preserved cell line to ViaGen’s lab in New York. ViaGen created embryos and implanted them into a domestic ferret surrogate. At day 14, an ultrasound confirmed heartbeats.

The surrogate was shipped to the conservation center and was watched 24 hours a day for signs of labor. On Dec. 10, Elizabeth Ann was delivered via C-section. “Our beautiful little clone,” Mr. Novak said.

Most species aren't going to have samples this straightforward, but this is a valuable first step for smaller populations (and eventually potential reintroduction of extinct ones).

Someone always posts this under every comics discussion, but they never show that it's the actual problem. Snowflake and Safespace are dumb, but not any dumber than (say) the average 90s Edgy McEdge Face hero or poorly thought out X-men character. And pinning the decline on poorly written comics featuring a bunch of previously existing characters acting in inane, out of character ways with new, generic personalities, stupid dialogue and an ignorance of continuity would be nice, but Bendis Team Books and Event Books sell, so that's not the problem.

Seriously, Bendis' Guardians was as bad as any of the stuff you linked, just as desperate a cash-in [big name writing comics for our new movie!], and sold truckloads. Same with most events.

The problem really is that Comics companies need to

1. 1. Diversify from their existing, stagnant customer base (the Direct Market).
2. 2. Find a way to sell comics consistently without events / relaunches.

They've kept their head above water by making a large number of comics lines (most of which fail) and marketing events heavily. But they haven't figured out how to get new comics readers; dumb attempts at wokeness are a symptom, not a cause.

Traditional comic & graphic novel channels sales (stores, newstands, etc) went from ~460 million in 2011 to peaking at ~590 million in 2015-2016 whereupon it has dropped slightly to ~550 million in 2019. The last one is a bit of an overestimate, as it includes kickstarters and some other stuff, but they're a small part. So this has been somewhat stagnant, and with higher costs (due to the number of lines).

Bookstore stales went from ~225 million in 2011 to ~570 million in 2019. It's been growing, and DC/Marvel/Image/Dark Horse are getting their asses kicked. Looking at Bookscan sales only (a subset of the comichron numbers above), there is a superhero comic taking up 8 of the top 10 and 16% of all Bookscan sales. It just happens to be Dav Pilkey's Dog Man series from Scholastic, which sold around 4.2 million books, compared to 3,469,789 for every DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse book combined - 6921 different books (excluding the ~500k Dark Horse manga sales). They have a backlist comprising decades; Scholastic has been in this for a few years at best, and is selling far more. And scholastic sells on other channels as well (book fairs, etc).

So the growth in the comics market is young new readers and bookstores in general, of which the standard comics publishers are getting precisely jack and shit. Meanwhile, new comics sold are driven by floppy-first plans and largely dependent on events, milestones and #1s. Compare April 2000 and April 2019. Comic characters are dominant in a way they've never been, and floppy sales are up overall, but look at all the events and #1 in 2019 compared to just random X-Men, Wolverine, and Spawn issues in 2000. This has been going on for a while but is all selling to existing, locked-in customers: people who are willing to buy a bunch of stuff to get in otherwise impenetrable combinations of events. And given the sales slowdown it may have hit a wall until everyone got shut in for a year; the events certainly drove me away. But they're stuck; it's what's selling to their existing customer base, even though it increases costs (due to a larger # of floppies), leading to an industry that is struggling despite higher raw revenue.

So that's the comics publisher's problem, and why they're trying all this weird new stuff. They need a way to get new customers but their primary comics lines are actively hostile to them, and the existing business model (#1 / Event Focused) is making sales come in. They could make smaller changes (they put all their marketing power behind the #1s and events, so it's not a shock they're the ones that sell) and do better jobs with the new comics (some work, like Ms. Marvel) by hiring new talent (there are even still a lot of good webcomic artists of the past and present - hell, D.C. Simpson is outselling any of the Big 4 authors in the bookshop market with her comic strip compilations - but the big 4 don't look there or arguably pay enough) but the leadership is old, calcified and clueless - the head of Marvel is a guy that pretended to be a Japanese man to write a comic while violating his own employment contract with Marvel, and then got promoted anyway. Of course their attempts at new readership are "How do you do, fellow kids?" failures.

It's less weird than when you know about what ballots have not been counted and why, although the Reuters website you describe is badly designed. It sounds like it's just listing the polling until a formal call is made. (Texas has been called for Trump by pretty much everyone).

The remaining votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia are very heavily both:

• Cities, because they take longer to count, since counting is done on a county level generally so city counties have orders of magnitude larger numbers of votes.

• Mail-in ballots, because state law said they couldn't be counted until Election Day, due largely to the Republican state legislatures, or additional technical issues (Georgia, who had a water main break in one of the counting rooms). See this map, for example.

Both of these heavily Democratic even individually, as cities are Democratic (can be >90% D for Presidential elections) and mail-in ballots were predominantly Democratic this year. North Carolina (which is almost certainly going Trump) has not been called because they allow ballots mailed by election day to arrive after election day.

Why? Section 230 protections were added specifically to allow companies to moderate and still retain protection. If those are removed, they're not going to go the way of an unmoderated hell-hole - 8chan isn't exactly a multibillion dollar company - they're going to censor the fuck out of everything. Two social networks don't control all of communication. If you want "uncensored content" go to Usenet. Even 4chan, let alone the line of "help help we're being repressed!" knockoffs like voat, gab, and parler censor all kinds of content.

And this isn't a liberal/conservative thing. Facebook is already in the tank for Republicans; the content police are Republican operatives and the whining here is just working the refs so that it stays that way.

Also, re: monopolies

I'm not 100% sure they're monopolies. I mean, you listed two things. And that ignores Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, reddit, tumblr (and probably several others I don't know about with mass #s of users) : All user-driven social networks with different audiences. And that ignores smaller sites (slashdot, etc). Several are owned by Facebook, which suggests an argument around barring cross-ownership, not censorship, but even in the absence of that there's competition. Are there network effects? Yes, and in broader ways than these two (google, etc). Ideally something should be done about this, but the most effective way would be to reinforce the ownership of user content - e.g. force interoperability, so that a direct Facebook competitor would have access to Facebook users that chose to follow them. Imposing liability for user generated content would make things worse, as only the entrenched monopolies would have the resources to withstand the barrage of resulting lawsuits.

A somewhat simplified version:

The core issue is jurisdiction - different parts of the US political system have different powers, and they can't exercise powers that are held by other branches. This flows in two ways:

Top->Bottom:

• Federal [the US]
• State [e.g. Oregon]
• Local [e.g. Portland]

And between different branches of government:

• Legislative [Congress]
• Judicial
• Executive [The President]

There a couple special cases off to the side, which only apply to people that are a part of them, and don't fit neatly into the above:

• Tribal [Authority over tribal members on tribal lands]
• Military [Authority over on-duty military members and on military bases]

Each branch and level of government can only exercise the powers it has. Judges can overrule executive orders because the President can only issue Executive Orders that fall within the Executive Branch's power, and it's the Judicial Branch's job to have the final word on whether an action by a part of the government is exerting powers it doesn't have. In some cases this renders Executive Orders pretty meaningless, such as Trump's order on Section 230 this year, because he cannot just change a law - that's Congress's job. In other cases, the President has very wide latitude, particularly certain aspects of foreign policy, hiring / firing people in the executive branch, and national security. Here, the judge has ruled (temporarily, at least) that the Executive Order in question violated the constitution - exerting a power the President doesn't actually have - despite allegedly being about national security.

As for the mayor's case, federal troops can only enforce federal laws unless invited in by the state, while state and local troops can enforce state and local law (The lines between state and local are thinner than between them and the federal government), but not federal law. So that's why the mayors could reject them - they couldn't prevent US marshals from showing up and enforcing federal law (protecting federal property, as they did in Portland), and their practical ability to stop them overreaching is limited (e.g. the unmarked van "arrests"), but they can prevent them from showing up and policing the protests in general, because that's a state and local issue.

Well, I was more responding to Texmaize's assertions, but assuming you're suggesting a change in the law, which is reasonable:

Who decides what "extreme" means?
Who decides what the "sides" are?
Who decides who they are biased against?

I mean, I've seen clear evidence of anti-gay bias by youtube but there are the conservative complaints as well.

Who decides what even qualifies as "unbiased"?

A government panel? (There's a recipe for partisanship.) A court? (By what standards?) What kind of records would a company need to keep to win a case, and how much money would it take?

Facebook has been making noises about changes in section 230 to instead require something like a good faith effort; maybe even require a good faith effort to be "unbiased". Which, of course, they will have the money and legal power to ensure they always qualify for - but competitors wouldn't. Even if you manage to get an unbiased arbiter, it'll just favor the incumbent with money to survive the blizzard of lawsuits against the (inevitably underfunded) competitor. Even gab bans more than enough people that it would have to start defending itself (and it'd fail, miserably). Youtube isn't pulling down bitchute; it doesn't even have to try. (The needless copyright crap is a side effect of our terrible copyright laws, which definately need to change).

The fundamental issue is always going to be the issue that caused the consolidation in the first place - network effects. Straight competitors (Mastodon, Google+, dreamwidth) can't outcompete because they can't get enough people to leave, and the unlimited free speech oriented ones (voat, gab; not that they don't both ban people themselves) both can't outcompete and get drowned in the people who were banned for good reason.

Strengthening anti-monopoly laws would be a better bet; giving people more rights over their data and the requirement that it be exportable; requirements for interoperability even. But they'd still need a reason for people to leave, and mediocre moderation doesn't really cut it (or it would have worked by now for someone).

Quite apart from the fact that this is wrong (47 USC 230), that wasn't the argument Prager was using, so it won't get brought up.

They used an even worse one, arguing that Youtube's monopoly makes it a state actor. The decision the "jokiest joke that ever joked" applied to overrule this, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, was decided last July. With the conservatives in the majority. And a dissenting opinion that said that they only disagreed because the private entity was running a public access channel fully funded by the government, which does not apply to Youtube. If Prager appeals the Supreme Court will ignore him; it already rejected his argument 9-0.

This is a lie, and and a particularly obtuse one. The governing law (used by Facebook and everyone else) for interactive computer services is 47 CDA 230, which makes no platform/publisher distinction, and explicitly allows the thing you say it doesn't:

Any interactive computer service that supplies information posted by anyone else is not liable for that content, regardless of any removal of content it finds "otherwise objectionable" for any reason. The platform / publisher distinction does not exist for this; there is no requirement of neutrality.

The only holes carved in this law were for sex trafficking via FOSTA/SESTA (which, of course, has had the opposite of the intended effect).

The only thing OP assumed is that everyone else is as ignorant as you and he are.

That's because it is, because that's what the district and appeals court decided on and that's the question before the Supreme Court.

Your sane ruling is probably out of the picture. The Federal Circuit absolutely ruled in a way that put "muh APIs" at risk by ruling that google copying those descriptions is both a copyright violation and not fair use; neither how it was coded nor what it did internally were part of the analysis and the JVM/Dalvik issue were factors. The questions before the Supreme Court are:

On occasion the Supreme Court does go out on tangents, but as there doesn't appear to be any argument or briefing at all on what you're talking about (from checking Oracle's, the Government's (pro-Oracle) and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (neither side), the only non-pro-google briefs; I didn't read all 34 pro-Google briefs), it's extremely unlikely it will, if it even understood computers that much.

What makes books in print magically better? Holocaust Deniers have books in print. And working for an encyclopedia company doesn't make your biases magically disappear. Are you suggesting that the old Soviet Encyclopedias have more accurate information on a hot-button topic like Hitler or Stalin than heavily edit-protected pages on Wikipedia?

There's nothing magical about print books that makes those that work on them without bias. There's no perfect source of information. And at least Wikipedia articles are heavy on citations so you can check their work much more easily.

From the article:

Google planned to use its cloud service to publicly host the images, according to the person and the records. Li wanted to showcase how Google’s tool for teaching machines to learn, called TensorFlow, could be used to solve some of the most complex problems in medicine, the person said. TensorFlow could train computers to understand which images contained the markings of different diseases. Google would also make the raw X-ray data available to outside AI researchers via its cloud.

Google has been trying to get into health for a while, and bioinformatics in general is working with large big data / cloud datasets, another market google is trying to get into. So it would be an advertisement for their AI / cloud data products.

You can sell the keys to other users, or use them to unlock chests whose contents you can also sell to other users, including on 3rd party websites to "cash out" of the Steam ecosystem - google "CS:GO Skin Selling" for (many, many) examples. They've been trying to crack down it for a while, and even had problems with gambling connected to all this.

Except it wasn't, quite, as Philips (the baker) wasn't turning people away because they requested a product with a specific message, but because they requested a product for a same-sex wedding. Philips rejected them before any actual message (whether dependent on words or design) on the cake was discussed:

and this was part of a larger policy of not selling to same-sex couples for certain kinds of events:

(Both from the decision (pdf)).

The followup argument here is of course that even if Philips would have sold an identical cake for non-gay weddings, the fact that it was for a gay wedding is inherently communicative; that wedding cakes are communicative in that they "endorse" the wedding and therefore, in context, gay marriage. But how is this different than selling food at an integrated drive-thru "endorsing" integration (shot down in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises) by participating in it? Or a "Sandwich Artist" at subway making food for a gay couple "endorsing" homosexual relations by feeding the couple?

In each case the product isn't communicating anything, it's the context. And while that can be important (and the line to draw isn't trivial), I don't have any compunction in saying that a drive thru owner - or the "Sandwich Artists" at Subway - have to create and sell to even customers they don't like. And I don't have any problem with that line extending to Masterpiece Cakeshop, under the facts underlying the decision.

The baker shouldn't have to create a rainbow flag wedding cake or the like. But cupcakes or a generic wedding cake? That he would make and sell to non-gay customers in a heartbeat? Yes, he should.

Language changes with usage, so hard and soft g both seem to be reasonable conclusions. If not, we can always keep going back, all the way to Old English:

(from a completely unrelated article about entries for the Universal Coded Character Set that has, of course, bounced around the internet since).