I've started moving away from their search, too, now that they decide for me what constitutes "mobile friendly" and what doesn't. Fact is, some "desktop" work better on my phone than a lot of the "mobile" sites do.

I don't want a nanny-search moving the things I'm looking for down the page. Just give me what I searched for, nothing more, nothing less, no "judgment" about what I want to see.

FWIW, I think it was the "single real name policy" that actually killed Google+. At that point I stopped commenting on YouTube, stopped using Google+, and in fact just stopped "signing in" to anything at all Google.

Of course. But when you don't have competition anyway, nor any good way to create any, regulation is a better-then-the-alternative last resort.

No... more like 480 BC. It seems reasonable to think that "Spartan" refers to "Sparta" which in turn implies (with deference to Slashdot's notably horrible character handling): "Molon labe"... which would mean in this context: "Come and get it." The reply to Xerces when he demanded they lay down their weapons was "come and get them".

The historical reference hit me right away, and if Microsoft didn't really intend it, they screwed up bigtime. Because the name of their browser is historically a challenge to "try to go through me". So...

Let's go try it. I kind of doubt if seriously attacked it would stand as they did.

And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.

Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?

However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.

The GURPS_NPC Law: Sooner or later every difficult problem in physics is attributed to Gremlins.

Mod up.

Because your original statement

Can be interpreted at least two ways:

"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."

or

"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."

I admit, I read it pretty fast, but it struck me the second way. I could have thought about it more. I did wonder why you were saying I was in a position of power. :)

But just FYI, I didn't claim to be any particular gender, or belong to a minority, or be in a position of power.

I repeat: my Tungsten at 320x480 was very nice, pretty fast, and the graphics were pretty impressive for their day. As I mentioned before, Bejeweled (for one example) played and looked great.

My point -- which you still seem to be not getting -- is that if they'd simply stuck a phone in it, we'd have CLOSE TO what we have today, years before it actually happened. No, the screen was not AS big. No, it did not have AS HIGH a pixel size. But neither did anything else. It would have been a phone that decently ran apps, AND had pretty good (again for its day) handwriting recognition.

The problem is precisely that often nobody knows who they are. THEY get protected, but the people they abuse do not.

Well, my comment was really meant in the context of ISPs.

Sure, there are small innovative companies. Like Instagram and even Netflix (it didn't start out big). BUT... what about companies that bring those services to the consumer? The ISPs? That's where Net Neutrality really comes in, and they have erected huge barriers to entry for anybody small (or innovative).

No, I don't believe that's true. While they might know the words, they haven't really studied it, or its history, enough to UNDERSTAND the intent of the words when they were written.

Further, many of them think they don't have to... that it's a "living document" that changes meaning over time.

I call bullshit.

---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, founding father

I could be wrong, but I took your "SJW" comment to be a reference to those who abuse the "report for abuse" button.

This is a real phenomenon. Twitter has a history of suspending people for reported abuse, when in fact the "offending" party hadn't abused anyone or anything at all. For some people, like modding "troll" rather than "disagree", it has become synonymous for "I don't like this person, so I'm going to do something nasty".

To compound the problem further, Twitter doesn't tell the "offending" party what they did wrong. Occasionally -- not always by any means -- they will let people know what the "offending" Tweet was, but not specifically what was wrong with it or why anyone objected.

Twitter could easily do that without revealing the name or names of the complainants. But insisting that people stop "abuse" when they don't even know WHAT people complained about, is completely unreasonable in an atmosphere of "report abuse because I don't agree".

Point is noted. There isn't much difference between them, so why should one have rights but not the other?

Yes, the out-of-context issue is a very real danger, what with comments people make in one conversation taken out and presented in the context of something else, making it seem as if that person meant one thing when they really meant another.

I know this one well; it has been pulled on me many times.