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Hunters Shot Down Google Fiber
aesoteric writes "Google has revealed that aerial fiber links to its data center in Oregon were 'regularly' shot down by hunters, forcing the company to put its cables underground. Hunters were reportedly trying to hit insulators on electricity distribution poles, which also hosted aerially-deployed fiber connected to Google's $600 million data center in The Dalles. 'I have yet to see them actually hit the insulator, but they regularly shoot down the fiber,' Google's network engineering manager Vijay Gill told a conference in Australia. 'Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fiber will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it].'"
I work for a large utility holding company. Every new years and 4th of July we have transformers shot out across our system. They make pretty "sparks and arcs" while they die. Another stupid people trick is throwing chains across 2 live high voltage lines. Invariably, at least one person per year forgets to let go of the chain before it makes contact. Stupid people are everywhere. Darwin takes care of some...
--I like turtles...
To me it's now known for being as hicky as the south. People are idiots. Please stop giving them guns..
which is totally what she said
Where I live you can't have guns, but people still find ways to be fucktards. Popular passtimes are throwing pavement tiles from overpasses, cutting or shorting cables and stealing bikes, street signs and street lanterns. No, I don't know what they use the street lanterns for.
When I used to work in the wireless Internet world, I had an associate who had much the same problem with idiots shooting at his antennas. After he had been forced to change antennas on several occasions, I told to him that the simple way to fix the problem was to mount a bullseye somewhere else on his towers and give these lunatics something different to aim at. The last time I talked to him his antennas were bullet hole free but he did have to replace a few of the targets due to them taking some serious damage. Come on, Google, put some creative thought into solving these problems..
Thinning pests, and over population of grazing animals...
When someone wakes up to find their prized roses chewed up by starving deer or when their spouse t-bones a deer on the interstate and dies, it's amazing how "pro-hunting" they become.
That's what happens when people crowd in and destroy an ecosystem - all the deer's predators were wiped out: hunters who wanted cats, hysterical suburbanites who were afraid that the big bad cat was going to eat their dog fi-fi, dumb-asses who thought the cats were going to come into their house or something and eat their babies, etc....
A starving deer or any creature for that matter, is an incredibly pitiful site - much more pitiful than seeing its heart blown out by a shotgun slug or pierced by an arrow.
On another note: Deer is an incredibly wonderful tasting animal! Bambie for the win!!
Save the environment - eat Bambie!! Disney should make a cartoon about that.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Oh dear, so you understood that I meant yes to both, but you are still trying to force a false choice upon me. Perhaps you need the class in both English and logic?
Perhaps that course in English would teach you what an epithet is. Or perhaps not, miracles are not that common.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I dare you to list one single reason why a modern society _needs_ to _hunt_ for _food_. There are none.
Because they want to? No further justification necessary.
Otherwise you get stuck on the slippery slope to micromanagement madness. So, are cows more or less sentient than pigs? Is it more immoral to yank a living green onion out of the dirt and chop it up while its still alive, than to tear the dormant seeds off a fruit tree and eat them while they're "sleeping"? Is it more or less immoral to chop up an apple and then bake it into a pie, thus only torturing it for an hour or two, vs dehydrating apple slices slowly over a period of days?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is Slashdot and I'm prefectly comfortable with having a discussion, but there is a lot of blind hatred that came out in this thread against gun owners that was being modded very high and was really rather vitriolic.
I'm sorry if my post came across as something more than was intended.
With regard to firearms, I've been encouraged many times to never let on to the fact that I own any, or where I keep them. They are a high value target for thieves. As a result, unless I'm very familiar with the person, I don't bring up my ownership of firearms. (Not worried about Slashdot, the people I'm worried about wouldn't know this username)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Some good points.
The OP's line of "your utter submission to your governments, preference for the safety of lawbreakers over personal self-defense, and general sheeple tendencies aren't admirable either. You've traded freedom for (the perception of) security as is your right, but that only works in certain situations and assumes benign government." si crying out for analysis, too. I don't see how owning a gun and being a core part of the American rightwing (i.e. a cog in the military-industrial complex) marks you out as being free from the government's influence, either.
Some people own guns because no government fears an unarmed populace, and government only works in the interest of the people when the government fears the people and not the other way around.
Pro tip: Governments have tanks, helicopters, cruise missiles, GPS, satellites, and trained/disciplined armies. They don't fear your semi-auto shotgun.
Just look at Afghanistan - and they are armed to the teeth even compared to the US gun nuts. Were the US government to become so oppressive as to actually spawn a domestic uprising, they more than likely would be spinning PR, so it wouldn't matter how many civvies they killed, unlike now in Afghanistan.
I support responsible firearm ownership. I target shoot. I don't make the mistake of thinking I could take on a government with a couple of long guns and my personal ammo stash.
I am, however, entirely prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse.
I support responsible firearm ownership. I target shoot. I don't make the mistake of thinking I could take on a government with a couple of long guns and my personal ammo stash.
Exactly. I grew up in a household with guns. I was introduced to guns at an early age. And although I don't own any guns, I do enjoy shooting skeet and trap whenever possible. And I have been thinking about getting a small-caliber handgun to do target-practice. But not for a second do I think that I need guns to "protect myself" either from criminals or from the government.
And if the shit really it the fan, me and my gun would be next to useless when facing tanks, gunships and artillery. And if we really did got an oppressive regime, it would mean that me and my fellow citizens had already failed. If you need guns to oppose your government, you have already failed. People usually get the government they deserve. If you don't want oppressive regime, make sure to vote, and stay educated about politics.
And as history shows, we have had lots and lots of revolutions by unarmed populace.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I know people in the Twin Cities carry concealed quite often--enough that the hospital I sometimes go to work has a "no guns allowed in building" sign and a locker where you can check-in your weapon is full.
Wisconsin is open carry (no concealed carry) and recently there's been some activity with people doing everyday things (pick up garbage, going out to dinner) while openly carrying. Police--especially the police-state type of police--of course freak out until after they arrest someone and realize it is within their right to openly carry.
Then the police are hit with a lawsuit (I believe that's what's going to happen in a recent Madison, WI case)
The pendulum of a government-sponsored police state has swung too far for people in my region to feel comfortable. The gun-rights advocates are pushing it back in their own way. When Obama was elected, you could not easily find ammunition to buy. It was being scooped up as fast as it could be delivered to sporting stores. It was not because a bunch a crazy citizens thought a black-man president was going to take away their weapons, it was because the message of $400 spent on 1000 bullets is heard much more clearly than any angry saying on a bumper sticker.
Why "hunters" need guns?
Because I'm in it for the food, not for the fun (it's okay if it's fun as well though) and because without guns hunting is a high-energy activity with a poor risk:reward ratio.
Explain to me please why you think the subject line is part of the comment. It's labeled, you'd think you could tell the difference.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I love how you assume that is even remotely possible. Its not like people are going to blithely accept something like that. There is a phrase that Charlton Heston used, that rings very true with a lot of gun owners. 'they can pry it from my cold dead fingers'.
Actually, I think that does help to show just how close gun ownership is to an addiction. Gun owners actually can experience withdrawal symptoms if they lose access to their weapons. And like most addicts, they can get agitated and violent if they feel cut off from their high - just ask any smoker who quit cold turkey.
And that, really, ist the problem with gun ownership in the USA: it is uncontrolled. When the Bill of Rights was framed, the writers still remembered warrantless searches and seizures by the British army before the war for independence, and since guns and ammo were naturally scarce they didn't consider the possibility of gluttonous gun consumption a serious concern. Coupled with how most of the western borders of the 13 original states really were the Wild West, with lots of dangerous wildlife, it was only natural then to declare gun ownership a right.
The rural midwest of the US of A needs to hunt for food. We had a deer over-population in my home town about 15 years back. Farmers had shot nearly all the coyotes that normally kept the deer in check as they were killing their livestock. It's nearly impossible to keep them out, coyotes are pretty smart and WILL find a way to get to your goats/chicken/whatever so I understand the farmers protecting their livelyhood. Adding to that hunting was also less popular than in previous decades and less deer were being taken in that manner. The overpopulation of deer was causing starvation, driving them to eat anything within 6ft of the ground including tree bark. It was also causing a large increase in deer/car collisions, resulting in multiple injuries and a couple deaths if memory serves.
The solution was to have an organized hunt/cull in which many people who wanted to try their hands at hunting but couldn't because they are disabled. Then they loosened the restrictions on regular hunting during the year and allowed people to take more deer. Now the you see in parks are much more healthy and less deer are hit on the roadways.
Plus, venison if cooked correctly is delicious! (Ok so nobody would starve if there was no hunting for food, but people were getting hurt/killed due to over population of deer. Tasty venison is a nice byproduct of solving that problem.)
Written like someone who has never driven or lived in a high population deer area. Hunters: 1) provide food in my home state for many less well-off people, 2) limit deer-car accidents and 3) prevent over-population.
I find it funny the GP's post was modded "insightful" while his second post was modded "flamebait", even though both messages are essentially the same thoughts.
If you want to see what happens to an unarmed populace, all you need to do is look at Germany during the 1930s and 40s. The unarmed enemies were rounded-up and jailed easily (or shot if they resisted). The armed enemies made the government's plans fall apart (see Jewish Uprisings and the defense of Switzerland by its own armed citizens).
Guns create problems for government leaders and slow down their ability to be tyrants.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Whatever. You try digging hundreds of kilometers of trenches for cabling in sparsely populated regions to reach perhaps only a few thousand houses or less. Try maintaining those trenches too. Then come back to us.
At the end of the day, poles are surprisingly more robust and resilient and cost effective than people give them credit for. Yes power cuts occur, but they can be fixed promptly if the right systems are in place. I've lived in rural areas for years and while power outages happen (~1 every 2 years), they are usually fixed within a day or perhaps two. Even following nationwide gale-force winds and 100,000 homes without power, the juice is usually back on for almost everyone within a few days. Meanwhile, the state has saved itself billions over the years by not digging expensive trenches under every boreen up and down the country.
This is in Ireland. A small but sparsely populated country on the whole. I cannot fathom what herculean labours North American network engineers have to perform to keep their systems up and running. But even despite the tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and hunting parties, given the scale of the continent I doubt they've given up on poles just yet.
May the Maths Be with you!
Is it just me or does it seem as if "fucktards" are the only people buying guns in the US?
No, they are the ones getting all the headlines but the reality is that the typical gun owner tends to be a very responsible, level-headed, person. It's like how most people can enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine without causing any commotion but alcohol still has a bad reputation because some idiot overdoes it and then drives and kills a bunch of people.
I've been around guns my entire life and have many friends who had the same kind of upbringing. At no point have I EVER seen a legal gun owner brandish his weapon or use it in some sort of unsafe or idiotic manner. In fact most hunters and gun owners that I know are extremely responsible, civically-minded, kind-hearted people - MUCH more so than the average public.
On the other hand illegal gun owners tend to be unsavory and uncaring about the damage they do with their weapons. They are the ones likely to shoot the gun in the air on New Year's Eve, shoot out signs and lights, brandish it at any provocation, keep it unsafely around minors, etc. Any illegal gun ownership or usage should be harshly punished.
Sapere aude!
I so agree.
The worst incursion I have had on myself or my living area stemmed from a misunderstanding of epic proportions, was at my home, and went so far as to get to fisticuffs until sanity was restored. Bruises were sustained, egos were bruised and stuff had to be discussed (and I even declined to press charges even when it was within my right to do so. No harm, no foul).
Notice that nobody got shot dead.
I live in Sweden, in the worst neighborhood within a few hundred kilometer radius. I know that somebody got beaten up with a bat a few months ago in the neighborhood (reportedly a drug debt, happened after he let the drug dealers he owed money to into his apartment).
Hunting weapons are widely owned in Sweden, and there's a large army base in the town. But people don't keep loaded 9mm pistols or semi-automatics in the glove box. This is a possible influencing factor why a misunderstanding did not get elevated to homicide. Neither party had a weapon which pierces human bodies easily with a feather light pull on the trigger at a time when fear and tempers flared high.
Most excellent.
A shooting is a national headline in a country which has 31 guns per 100 residents (Sweden). USA does have 90 guns per 100 residents (according to wikipedia) but 31 is not a low number. Why is gun crime not just 1/3 of what it is in the USA?
Different rules and different mentality?
Or are the other 60 guns per 100 persons mostly handguns and sprayfire weapons specialized for killing people and no good for hunting?
As a WW2 history buff I say to thee respectfully the history of WWII contradicts EVERY POINT you've made.
"At which point did WWII partisans ever become a threat the third reich"?
When they were killing soldiers left and right, blowing up transport and supplies, generally holding up whole divisions that could have been at the front?
"They were, at no point, capable of even attempting to attack any significant groups of German soldiers".
Really, read a book or two. There where literally thousands of attacks on significant German forces, in Russia, in the Balkan, in France.
"And the groups collaborating with the Nazi's dwarfed, in almost all of Europe, the resistance".
And the group that did nothing whatsoever dwarfed all the combined Nazi's AND the resistance.
Your point?
As for Roman and other Fascist tactics in population decimation, complete control and massive retaliations against any and all resistance;
That works so well that these Empires still thrive and survive, and are seen as admirable examples we should look up to.
Idiot.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Can someone explain this to me? Do insulators have some kind of shape or feature or position that awakens some kind of primal instinct or something? Are people somehow compelled to shoot them down? Should they be painted a special colour or something, because it seems that people cannot be relied upon to resist the urge to shoot them down.
May the Maths Be with you!
You carry a compound bow as a sidearm? Do you go about your daily business with a strung bow? Or keep one by the bed just in case?
Obviously I was making a point, but moderators felt I was trolling. Either way I'm not really planning to shoot anyone with a bow. My point was, he said he would NEVER defend himself with it. That is just pathetic. You can call me flamebaiter, but you can't call me troll.
The bow IS of course always strung, because it's a compound. I keep it in a case with arrows in the attached quiver.
I don't know if you were being light-hearted in your comment, since typing carries so little nuance, but if you read the GP's comment it's one I would agree with (if I owned either weapon): it's only for actual target sports, hunting or such.
If I'm holding a chicken sandwich and someone attacks me I'm going to throw the sandwich at them in spite of the fact that it's only for eating. If someone attacks me and I own a gun I'm going to put a big fucking hole in them because fighting is dangerous. People die in fistfights every day. Just let me say fuck that. There is one and only one time violence is permissible; to prevent violence. Frankly, I have no problem killing someone who is taking an action likely to result in my death or maiming. Anyone who does is an enabler of evil, period, the end. Of course you may disagree, but this is what I believe. Fucking shit head mods.
As a side note, bows have always had more power in the hands of a trained bowman in comparison to gonnes and muskets.
Yes, of course. But today I can take my 1898-designed belgian Mauser, rebarrelled in Peru to shoot US military surplus ammo, and point and click at something very very far away, so far that my bow can't put an arrow anywhere near it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, it generally is uneconomical to hunt for food. Hunting normally takes too much time. Likewise it was exactly the commercial hunting for food which nearly wiped out most North American animals about a century ago, before the recreational hunters were able to get the conservation laws passed. The first, and most enduring conservation movement is that of sport hunters. Modern lobbying organizations like Ducks Unlimited, are some of the largest voices protecting habitat and environment. Hunters have a direct interest in protecting the biodiversity and strength of habitats, as both are integral to continuing the sport. Hunting (like fishing) license fees are there to support the wilderness.
The justification for hunting is population control as part of a overall environmental management strategy. Since large predators are generally dangerous (and therefore suppressed by humans), hunting fills in this gap in the predator-prey relationship, limiting prey populations. If this did not happen, prey populations would grow to an unsustainable point, resulting in destruction of habitat and eventual mass starvation. Hunting is used as a management tool. Additionally, hunting seasons are normally in the fall with the idea that culled animals would have likely starved over the winter anyways.
As a hiker, mountain biker, cross country skier, and occasional hunter, I notice that hunting puts you in a different relation with your surroundings. When you hike (or ski, or bike), you can easily pass through the country, paying only attention to the path in front of you, and be wrapped up in your own world of concerns and worries. When you are hunting, you must pay attention to the entire world around you and be in-tune with it, otherwise you will be unsuccessful. It is different relation between man and nature than any other activity.
And yes, there are idiots who go hunting. This is like most endeavors which are accessible to the populace as a whole. Most of the time, when wrapped up in our professional lives, we do not realize that half the population (by definition) has an IQ of less than 100. That being said, the grandparent is guilty of the basic statistical problem of selection bias. Of course he would only notice the hunters who are unsafe or otherwise anti-social: those who act properly are generally no different than hikers and he would have no reason to remember them. Having been a part of many community shooting-range cleanups, I can attest that most firearms sportsmen act in a responsible manner. Unfortunately the few that don't can have a large impact.
The parent poster is from the UK, and as I understand it, hunting there was restricted to members of the upper class. Overall being anti-hunting is part of their broad culture war against the upper class. While I sympathize with his populist viewpoint, in the US it is the reverse. Because hunting is more accessible to rural people, but still relatively accessible to everyone, anti-hunting initiatives are spearheaded by the upper classes against the populist sport.
Miles
I don't know about that. From all the spew coming out of them lately, at least the stuff getting press, it appears to me that, whatever the original intention, the current Tea Party is composed primarily of Republican cheerleaders being pissy that their team lost and the other guy is fucking things up (instead of their guy fucking things up).
The longest existing democracy is Iceland - 930 to 1799, then 1845 to present.
30 generations is 600-900 years, there was never stability of that type in the Roman Republic or Roman Empire.
Four to six generations of stability in the western Roman Empire perhaps and maybe in the East, but never even 10 generations of stability.
Can someone explain this to me? Do insulators have some kind of shape or feature or position that awakens some kind of primal instinct or something?
They're glass or ceramic. They shatter spectacularly.
Did this work for the Soviets in Afghanistan? No, of course not. It didn't work for the Germans in France either.
Actually it was working for the Soviets. The mujahadeen were losing and dying off until the US intervened with massive financial and material aid based out of Pakistan.
And it was working in France too until the allied invasion. The resistance was more of an intelligence gathering operation until the invasion.
Note the common thread. It was massive external forces that led to the failure of the invaders employing brutal tactics.
Oregon is that a lot of it is nature. With animals. Real animals. That will eat you .
... we had a pack of coyotes hunting the area ... When I hike, I regularly come across bear and cougar tracks and cougar kills.
Take in mind that I live in Alaska when I say that you guys are fucking pansies. Wild animal attacks are rare, even here and much more so in Oregon. No cougar has eaten a human in Oregon. Nor for coyotes.Likewise for bears. Meanwhile, Alaska, a state with a fifth the number of residents had 10 fatal bear attacks in the last 30 years. Oregon does not have "Real animals, that will eat you".