Finally diving into smartphone world: picking a phone

My phone for years has been the kind with half the face taken up with a non-touch screen and the other half with physical phone buttons, with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard hidden behind. I'm finally taking seriously the idea of getting a non-sliding-or-flipping touchscreen with all them fancy-shmancy extra programs in them. But how do I narrow it down beyond that? Looking at the collection of phones that one carrier offers as compatible with their services, Cricket for example, I see prices from $10 to $800 on the same page (HTC Desire 550 & Samsung Galaxy S10). What causes people to want phones that cost more?

Is there any real difference in the user's experience between iOS and Android? (I have an Android tablet and have had no problem figuring out how to use it, but I've never tried an Apple.)

Cameras... I don't care. But I presume there's more to these differences than that.

Pictures of the different models are usually from the front, but they seem to have different combinations of buttons around the edges. Do some manufacturers/models feature different physical buttons that you'd want to make sure you have (or don't have)?

Size, or screen size... I can see the relevance, but most of them don't announce their sizes. Is this the main driver of price, so price could be used as a proxy of size, or would I need to chase down their specifications wherever they might be hiding in order to really compare them? (Also, the most expensive I've seen lately, the Samsung Galaxy S10, has the screen covering so much of one surface that there's not much room left for the speaker & microphone, which seems like a bad idea for phone call quality. Are we to think they've found a way around that, or just that having such a vast screen is worth the sacrifice in sound (at least if your use for it is more pocket-computer than portable-phone)?)

What else is left? Is it just some being faster or having more memory or such than others, like with computers? Are there any specific tricks that some up their sleeves and others just don't at all no matter how smoothly they might handle everything else?

Beans destroy a nice old bridge

Way too many beans here. Next time fewer beans please!


Big rig carrying 43 tons of beans collapses historic 100-year-old bridge that had a weight restriction of just 14 tons

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daily Mail An overweight semi-truck carrying beans completely crushed a historic bridge on Monday. Michael Dodds was transporting dry beans in a 2005 Peterbilt truck in Northwood, North Dakota when he decided to cross the Goose River by bridge. Around 1.15pm, Dodd attempted to navigate the 56-foot-long bridge before it collapsed under the truck's weight. The back end of the truck became stuck on the 'west abutement', officials said in a post of Facebook. Grand Forks County Sheriff's officials say the historic, 113-year-old bridge has a 14 ton restriction and this is information is marked on the structure. At the time of the incident, Dodd's truck weighed a whopping 43 tons, or 86,750 pounds, making the large vehicle 29 tons overweight. Nobody was injured in the crash, but Dodd's has been hit with an overload citation of $11,400... Police officials say the cost to repair the bridge is substantial, running anywhere from $800,000 to $1,000,000. The bridge was built in 1906 and is featured in the National Register of Historic Places...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...t-14-tons.html

Has Boris gone yet?

No.

Russian stooge in Downing St

He's literally called Boris; you couldn't make it up.

"Executive", in Government, Business, and Language

I found myself thinking about the separation of powers in government. Within that thought, I was thinking of the executive branch. The executive branch in America consists of the President, and other such functionaries that assist the President (i.e. the Cabinet Secretaries, and all the federal workers who actually do the work of the executive branch.

More or less, the executive is the big cheese. The head honcho. The guy in charge. We see the same thing in business. The Chief Executive Officer is the guy who runs the business.

Whether in government or in business, the buck stops at the chief executive's desk.

I find that kind of ironic.

I strongly suspect that the very name, executive, was chosen specifically to indicate a certain subordination of that branch to the legislative branch. They could have used some other term for the branch. It could have been the chief branch, the managerial branch, the controlling branch. (All of those were given as synonyms for "executive" in an online dictionary.) Why executive?

I think they chose that word to emphasize that the executive branch executed the instructions of the legislature. My suspicion is that at the time Locke and Montesquieu were publishing, the word "executive" probably wasn't even synonymous with those other words, about managing and controlling. I suspect they chose that word to indicate that important decisions about how the country would be run originated in Parliament , the legislative branch, and were merely put into action by the executive branch. It's more like an administrative position than a controlling position. I suspect it was actually a specific intention to call it "executive" in order to emphasize that the king had to do (execute) what Parliament told him to do.


However, that doesn't seem to fit very well with the way that we think. We expect there to be a "guy in charge", and that guy is the most important, the most powerful, the one who calls the shots. At most he might be constrained in some ways by legislative action, but they certainly don't make the rules. Surely some committee with Nancy Pelosi as chairman doesn't exist to the Donald Trump what he has to do, does it? Over the decades and centuries, the very meaning of the word itself has morphed. The word "executive" is now listed as synonymous with "controlling", where it once was more likely to mean "controlled" or "directed". We, as humans, seem drawn to the idea of a leader, a guy in charge, and if we have to change the meaning of language to make that happen, so be it.

Artificial Intelligence thinks mushroom is a pretzel

The mushroom that AI thinks is a pretzel

Quote:

Originally Posted by BBC News Butterflies labelled as washing machines, alligators as hummingbirds and dragonflies that become bananas. These are just some of the examples of tags which artificial intelligence system have given images. Now researchers have released a database of 7,500 images that AI systems are struggling to identify correctly. One expert said it was crucial to solve the issue if these systems were going to be used in the real world... The researchers from UC Berkeley, and the Universities of Washington and Chicago, said the images they have compiled - in a dataset called ImageNet-A - have the potential to seriously affect the overall performance of image classifiers, which could have knock-on effects on how such systems operate in applications such as facial recognition or self-driving cars...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49084796

Of course AI doesn't "think" that a mushroom is a pretzel because it doesn't think anything and it has no intelligence. Further, AI doesn't understand what it means to be wrong and that there are consequences for making mistakes. Artificial intelligence doesn't understand anything and what is troubling is that it can't care about anything.

Making Staff up While Black

Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas was left in a right old state after she blatantly ignored the 10 items or less instruction in a local store and was called out on it.

She was called a "lazy bitch" by Eric Sparkes then went on to claim he told her to "go back to where you came from." She later appeared on video visually upset.

Except he didn't and strenuously denies it. In fact the only person that was told to "go back" was Sparkes..... by Thomas!

She was on camera when;

Quote:

The following day, as Thomas spoke to reporters about her claim, the accused man confronted her in front of the store while the cameras were rolling. The man, Eric Sparkes, claimed that Thomas was using him to manipulate a political stunt and that he was in no way 'racist,' as Thomas had alleged. Sparkes, an outspoken Democrat of Cuban heritage, admitted that he did confront the pregnant lawmaker in anger after she violated the store policy of bringing too many items to the express checkout lane, but never told her to "go back" to where she came from.

Once she was outed as not only lazy but a liar she said;

Quote:

"I don't know if he said 'go back,' or those types of words ... I don't know if he said 'go back to your country' or 'go back to where you came from,' but he was making those types of references is what I remember." "So you don't remember exactly what he said?" a reporter asked Thomas. "No, no, definitely not. But I know it was 'go back' because I know I told him to 'go back,'" the lawmaker responded.

She adamantly refuses to backtrack.

This is a lawmaker?