The norm now is use the device anywhere: home, office, car, bathroom, supermarket, elevator, hospital, wherever. The world is your telephone booth. We all want to hear (one side of) your conversation. It's OK to force that on us. It's OK to threaten our lives and safety with it (the research shows that it's incompatible with safe driving, period). Go ahead. Do it. Anywhere. Everywhere. It's normal.
We can change that norm. A good place to start would be where it's just plain unsafe: driving while talking on your cell. The new norm: we regard that exactly as we would drunk driving: completely unacceptable. We treat it like that. We make law that treats it like that. Over time, that would save lives and limbs. A good new norm.
How to start changing the norm: stop talking on your cell while driving. You. Right there. You too. All of you. Now. From this day forward. Don't do it. When you see others doing it, be appropriately horrified. Have the same attitude you would towards someone's drunk driving. Not cool. Not acceptable.
We have no tech fix for drunk driving. But we have reduced it dramatically by changing norms.
Tech fix sounds great to techies. Probably not the solution here. If you put in tech fixes and don't change norms, you'll probably just see a lot of evasion of the tech fix.
The plasticity of the brain was already known to be very high. Now we have reason to believe it's even higher than previously known. Genes are great, I love 'em, but a lot happens after conception.
What is really meant here is news. More specifically news gathering which is done by humans known as reporters, and editing, which is done by humans called editors. They are not "creating content"; they are writing the news.
Now: Google doesn't do any of that. We can have a discussion on whether Google is distributing the results without helping pay for the feet on the street and the fingers on the keys. Seems like a good discussion to have, since there are now fewer feet on the street and fingers on the keys, and hard news reporting is on the decline. Consider a world with all the "content" anyone wants but little real news.
What may be rising is the share of that cost shouldered by the companies that make money by warehousing data about individuals, as compared to the share shouldered by the individuals concerned. If that's true, that would be wonderful. It would create the right incentive for said companies to get real about data security.
Texas as far as I can see takes no position on what specifically currently is accepted by scientific community as science, leaving that once again as it had always been before, up to publishers of science books. That seems a wise choice.
And Texas likewise makes no limitations on what may be presented in courses on history, literature, comparative religion, anthropology, and so on. That also seems wise. The only problem was teaching religion in a science course. That problem is now solved.
It's pretty difficult to have illegal content. You mean "expression" or more specifically, "video". Content is pretty much impossible to own.
So let's rewrite this correctly: "not only video posted by owners, but also video posted illegally by others".
My last three consumer electronics purchases (DVR, car audio, component HD radio) all fail that test handily. Not even close.
So 25 years later, there's a lot of room for improvement toward meeting that standard.
Congrats Apple on meeting it earlier and more often than most.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken