I think another big difference you're overlooking is the fact that the TVA received a lot of initial funding to build facilities, whereas many other places did not. TN also has a much smaller and easier to manage grid than CA does. I think costs for labor would likely be at least double that of TN, especially in the Bay Area.
They got a lot of initial funding to build the first facilities... almost a century ago. Since then, it has been an autonomous organization to the best of my understanding. After 83 years, any power generation system would have paid off its initial infrastructure costs, so that difference isn't likely to still have a meaningful effect on today's power rates.
Also, yeah, the grid is smaller, but I'm not sure about the easier to manage part. Tennessee's power grid is mostly above ground, much like California's grid, but unlike California, large parts of the state get hit by ice storms at least once or twice a year. You can safely assume that there will be a multi-hour blackout at least once a year during the storms, and there have been times when power has been out in some neighborhoods for the better part of a week, simply because it took that long to get all the lines repaired. A truly big storm in any southern state usually results in them bringing in people from at least five or six states to get things back up and running in under a week. California just doesn't have anything that compares with a typical icepocalypse....
Also, West TN (at least) has a regular tornado season that does tremendous damage. Case in point, my parents are having to have substantial repairs after their next-door neighbors' huge trampoline (very heavy, very well secured) with three-inch steel pipes went airborne, shattering bricks all the way up on the second floor, smashing shutters, flattening a gutter, bouncing off the house, and taking a chunk out of their holly tree before ending up in their front yard, and that was just a single straight-line wind gust, some thirty miles from the nearest tornado. Thirty-year-old pine trees were lying down on their sides nearby. Their full-size garbage can blew through the air, knocked over a pile of bricks, and then dented the side of their car. And this was a good year storm-wise. The worst year took the roof off the university in Jackson where my mother taught, knocked down all the dormitories with students inside (miraculously with no deaths), tossed pickup trucks against the buildings, and carried the university's sign almost forty miles before dropping it in a field somewhere near Huntingdon (or maybe McKenzie, I forget which).
If you've never seen high tension wires swinging through the air and creating huge arcs as they smack against one another in high winds, you've probably never seen a storm in Tennessee. So I can't imagine that the infrastructure is really easier to manage than California, unless you limit the discussion to the 350 days out of the year when 200-pound trampolines aren't flying through the air at 70 MPH....:-)
Now to be fair, California does have more earthquakes than Tennessee (by probably a factor of three or four). Of course, Tennessee's largest quakes were so big that the Mississippi river flowed backwards and created a rather sizable lake. They caused the Liberty Bell to ring all the way in Philadelphia, and were felt all the way up in Quebec. So... let's call it a wash.
In addition, how heavily are the electricity providers taxed in each setting? I believe the TVA doesn't pay corporate taxes, as it's a non-profit. For-profit companies have incentives to keep the end price high, but not the cost to produce. They do still want to be efficient - no sense wasting money if you can avoid it.
Depends on what you mean by corporate taxes. Corporations pay five kinds of tax (that I'm aware of, anyway), depending on location:
That delay only exists if you post using the older, non-JavaScript interface. With the JS post (where you type your post inline), there's little to no minimum time between posts, though IIRC there's still something like a 20 second minimum from when you click reply to when you can actually post, which only occasionally is annoying when a one- or two-word answer would suffice.
Also, you're currently limited to non-ASCII characters that have HTML names; if you need something like 💩 (Unicode pile of poo), you're hosed, because Slashdot strips unnamed character entities. (BTW, that last bit is probably a one-line fix, and would be most appreciated.)
Add moderator-driven IP-based bans that last for a week. Add a hidden Markov model that recognizes posts that are substantively similar to posts that triggered a ban, and auto-reject those posts and flag the IP for ban consideration by a moderator. Auto-reject posts that contain the n-word. Those three changes alone would significantly improve the noise level.
BBCode should also probably be on that list as an input option, ideally with a nice button-based interface for people who don't want to have to mess with typing markup while they write comments. And that interface should be mobile-friendly. If you've ever tried to post from an iPhone even once, you've probably developed a solid hatred for any sort of markup-based posting. The keyboard just doesn't work well for that. But there are ways to make at least semi-usable UIs for mobile devices.
Speaking of Safari/WebKit, somebody needs to actually try to use this website on Safari on OS X, and fix everything that doesn't work... like the Options button (and, for that matter, most of the overlay views, if memory serves).
Just take a look at TVA rates (which are some of the lowest anywhere in the U.S.) and compare them with rates in states with deregulated power markets (e.g. California). My parents are paying a flat rate of about 8.75 cents per kWh in TN. Here in the Bay Area, the Tier 1 rate (charged on your first trickle of power) is a whopping 18.2 cents per kWh. The top tier is 34.9 cents per kWh. So it costs 2-4 times as much.
Now granted, not all power production is equal, but even the most expensive power (solar and offshore wind) costs only about three cents per kWh to actually produce; most power costs more like 0.5-1.5 cents per kWh. The rest of that 8.75 cents is going into grid maintenance, planned upgrades, and construction of a new nuclear plant. Even if we assume that all of the costs in California are double what they are in TN (which is likely to be a gross overestimate), that doesn't even justify an 18.2 cent flat rate, much less an 18.2 cent subsidized rate with rates that go into the stratosphere after your first few kWh.
The big difference, of course, is that in TN, the power companies are typically nonprofit municipal power companies that serve a single community, and buy most of their power from TVA, which is also a nonprofit. By contrast, PG&E is a decoupled power broker whose profits are assured whether they sell any actual power or not, which gives them no real incentive to keep prices down. And the power plants that produce the power are all for-profit companies, who have every incentive to keep prices high. It's just about the biggest train wreck you could possibly come up with.
No, take the license plates off of all the security vehicles. It's the only way to be sure that they aren't recognizable for the next step in the plan.
Oh bullshit. The government needs to reduce energy usage.
I reject that notion. Every hour and a half, enough sunlight hits Earth to supply our power needs for an entire year. Humanity's energy usage is noise.
The government doesn't even need to reduce peak energy usage. The utilities do. The fact that the government is having to force the utilities to encourage conservation to prevent blackouts during peak use tells me that the free market has completely and totally failed. As you said, the corporations want to maximize profits at all costs, which is contrary to public safety interests. The current model isn't working, and just about everybody said it wouldn't work way back when they first started deregulating the grid back in the 1990s.
Sure, you could patch the system by adding regulations that encourage conservation, but that only goes so far. You could also patch the system by adding regulations that provide huge penalties if the power supply fails because of overconsumption, ensuring that the penalties would greatly exceed the expected profits to be gained from pushing the envelope. Unfortunately, that approach is grossly inefficient, and requires constant adjustments to ensure that it remains unprofitable to take unnecessary risks with public safety. Otherwise, after a few years, you'll end up right back where you started. And even then, such an approach would only work until you get a CEO who decides to take short-term profits to pump his or her stock up, without caring whether the company is still around in five years.
In my opinion, the only way to truly fix our power infrastructure is to abandon the competitive energy market in favor of a nonprofit model. Basically, the government needs to nationalize energy production and the grid, then spin it off into a bunch of nonprofit organizations to ensure that it all gets run competently, without profit as a motive for getting people to overconsume, or as a motive to cut corners on infrastructure. Unlike regulatory approaches, the nonprofit model has actually been successful at lowering power costs and improving reliability.
You can say that a truly free market doesn't work because it is impossible or at least infeasible to achieve. There are fundamental obstacles that prevent a free market from being possible here:
The cost of the infrastructure (impractical to have dozens of grids)
The nuisance of installing the infrastructure (impractical to dig the streets repeatedly for dozens of power providers)
The inability for some equipment to cleanly switch from one provider to another that isn't in phase
So the closest you can realistically achieve is a highly regulated distribution grid and a free market of energy sellers on those wires. Of course, that often leads to the tragedy of the commons, where none of those energy sellers are responsible for the wires, and so none of them have any incentive to pay for repairs and improvements, and all of them fight any attempts by the grid providers to raise rates to cover those costs unless they are given no choice in the matter. This is basically what we have in many places, and there's still no evidence of competition driving rates down. In fact, rates are higher than ever.
The places with the lowest rates are usually places where the governments have started nonprofits like TVA to handle energy production. By taking the profit motive out of the equation entirely, the motivation to raise prices beyond what is needed to handle repairs and improvements goes away, and you get the cheapest energy you can get. For essential services like power, water, etc., nonprofits are inherently a better alternative to any form of competition, because they will almost invariably produce the best service at the lowest cost with the lowest overhead.
I guess we should scrutinize all the men who look at porn as they're more likely to rape a woman or in some cases, a man.
No, people who look at adult porn are more likely than average to have sex with adults, not more likely to rape adults. In much the same way, people who look at child porn are more likely than average to have sex with children, which is statutory rape, but not necessarily forcible rape. Terminology is important here.
They're also much more likely to be abusers as most rapists have looked at porn.
Most people have looked at porn. It is only a relevant predictor if the odds are significantly different from the norm.
Clearly if you don't log in as that user (assuming the system logs bear that out), then you can't see the user's wallpaper. So presumably you'd be okay.
With that said... somebody setting child porn as his/her wallpaper? Really? That would take a special kind of stupid.... I mean sure, someone somewhere might do it someday, if only because two things are infinite and all, but....
Given that (statistically speaking) most computer users are borderline computer illiterate, you'd also expect most child porn enthusiasts to be borderline computer illiterate. Now maybe they're more paranoid than average, and are more likely than average to take steps to hide content that they know is illegal, but even if they're twice as likely as an average person to use encryption, you'd still have 60% of them keeping child porn in an unencrypted volume....
More significantly, this will probably have the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than risk losing good employees who accidentally discover something and fail to report it, most companies will strengthen their policies to ensure that their employees do not discover anything.
DVDs are region-coded. Streaming services aren't. So your comparison is really off.
I was thinking more along the lines of "carry a DVD and watch it on your own laptop". Region-coded DVDs will still play on your U.S. laptop even if it isn't physically in the U.S.
Which ones? The ones who actually do the molesting or the ones who casually view it? Both need Mental Counseling but only one needs to be in Prison. Regardless of how awful it is, it is a Mental Disorder.
Of course, people who appear to be in the latter group are probably much more likely than average to actually be in the first group. It is certainly useful, therefore, for legal authorities to find out who the people in the latter group are, so that they can be subject to increased scrutiny (in a non-public way). And to the extent that some of them upload new content that hasn't been previously catalogued (and thus was probably produced by the uploader), taking over a site like this could be very effective at bringing to justice people who are actually harming children.
But you're right that locking up people for mere possession (as opposed to creation) is rather pointless unless those people can somehow identify the original source of some of that porn (which seems very unlikely unless the porn was exchanged in person). Basically, it's the war on drugs, if drug sales had moved entirely into the realm of the Silk Road....
It had to have been some terror group cutting the cables randomly to help them map out which cables are involved in providing service to emergency responders to the Bay Area, in preparation for an attack on the Super Bowl....:-D
This would still violate their distribution and licensing agreements with the content producers - you can't "ship" the streaming video outside the licensed area.
I would argue that this is no different from shipping a physical DVD to a customer in the U.S. who then chooses to carry it with him or her to watch while on vacation overseas, other than the need to carry a physical object around. You're shipping it to a customer in the U.S., and whether that customer chooses to then take the content outside the U.S. is the customer's decision, and shouldn't be in the hands of the IP owner. Were this anything other than a streaming service, this would be open-and-shut, and the IP owner would have no right to prevent such a temporary export. I think it is way past time for the public to demand that streaming be treated just like a physical sale or rental, with all the same consumer rights.
Customers shouldn't even need to use a VPN. The fact that they do is inexcusable. The fact that these companies are now trying to block customers who use VPNs to protect their most basic consumer rights is unconscionable.
Depends on what you mean by law breaking. If you mean criminal law, probably not, actually. Copyright law (as upheld by the SCOTUS in Kirtsaeng, DBA BlueChristine99 v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) doesn't recognize any right to block the import of something that was legally manufactured for sale under license somewhere else. It might, however, qualify as breach of contract, which brings the possibility of civil liability.
Personally, I think Google's approach is flawed because they make a flawed assumption: That the driver will, as automation increases, stop paying attention even faster and thus have increasing numbers of accidents. This is flawed because there is nothing preventing the automation from simply being offline until the last moment when it can prevent the collision. ie: The driver must remain fully engaged.
This logic is flawed because most people own more than one car. As soon as you add any safety feature, drivers will become used to those features. Even if they only prevent the collision, drivers will realize that the computer prevented the collision, and will be less afraid of collisions in the future. And when they switch back to driving their older vehicle (or a rental car or whatever) that lacks those features, they'll have a greatly increased risk of collisions.
Slashdot Mirror
They got a lot of initial funding to build the first facilities... almost a century ago. Since then, it has been an autonomous organization to the best of my understanding. After 83 years, any power generation system would have paid off its initial infrastructure costs, so that difference isn't likely to still have a meaningful effect on today's power rates.
Also, yeah, the grid is smaller, but I'm not sure about the easier to manage part. Tennessee's power grid is mostly above ground, much like California's grid, but unlike California, large parts of the state get hit by ice storms at least once or twice a year. You can safely assume that there will be a multi-hour blackout at least once a year during the storms, and there have been times when power has been out in some neighborhoods for the better part of a week, simply because it took that long to get all the lines repaired. A truly big storm in any southern state usually results in them bringing in people from at least five or six states to get things back up and running in under a week. California just doesn't have anything that compares with a typical icepocalypse....
Also, West TN (at least) has a regular tornado season that does tremendous damage. Case in point, my parents are having to have substantial repairs after their next-door neighbors' huge trampoline (very heavy, very well secured) with three-inch steel pipes went airborne, shattering bricks all the way up on the second floor, smashing shutters, flattening a gutter, bouncing off the house, and taking a chunk out of their holly tree before ending up in their front yard, and that was just a single straight-line wind gust, some thirty miles from the nearest tornado. Thirty-year-old pine trees were lying down on their sides nearby. Their full-size garbage can blew through the air, knocked over a pile of bricks, and then dented the side of their car. And this was a good year storm-wise. The worst year took the roof off the university in Jackson where my mother taught, knocked down all the dormitories with students inside (miraculously with no deaths), tossed pickup trucks against the buildings, and carried the university's sign almost forty miles before dropping it in a field somewhere near Huntingdon (or maybe McKenzie, I forget which).
If you've never seen high tension wires swinging through the air and creating huge arcs as they smack against one another in high winds, you've probably never seen a storm in Tennessee. So I can't imagine that the infrastructure is really easier to manage than California, unless you limit the discussion to the 350 days out of the year when 200-pound trampolines aren't flying through the air at 70 MPH.... :-)
Now to be fair, California does have more earthquakes than Tennessee (by probably a factor of three or four). Of course, Tennessee's largest quakes were so big that the Mississippi river flowed backwards and created a rather sizable lake. They caused the Liberty Bell to ring all the way in Philadelphia, and were felt all the way up in Quebec. So... let's call it a wash.
Depends on what you mean by corporate taxes. Corporations pay five kinds of tax (that I'm aware of, anyway), depending on location:
That delay only exists if you post using the older, non-JavaScript interface. With the JS post (where you type your post inline), there's little to no minimum time between posts, though IIRC there's still something like a 20 second minimum from when you click reply to when you can actually post, which only occasionally is annoying when a one- or two-word answer would suffice.
I read it as "try and gouge" at first, and had flashbacks to the Dice era.
Also, you're currently limited to non-ASCII characters that have HTML names; if you need something like 💩 (Unicode pile of poo), you're hosed, because Slashdot strips unnamed character entities. (BTW, that last bit is probably a one-line fix, and would be most appreciated.)
Because right now, you have to write ñ as ñ instead of just hitting option-n followed by n.
Weird. They work for me. Or do you mean that they don't hide the Dice.com posts? :-D
Add moderator-driven IP-based bans that last for a week. Add a hidden Markov model that recognizes posts that are substantively similar to posts that triggered a ban, and auto-reject those posts and flag the IP for ban consideration by a moderator. Auto-reject posts that contain the n-word. Those three changes alone would significantly improve the noise level.
BBCode should also probably be on that list as an input option, ideally with a nice button-based interface for people who don't want to have to mess with typing markup while they write comments. And that interface should be mobile-friendly. If you've ever tried to post from an iPhone even once, you've probably developed a solid hatred for any sort of markup-based posting. The keyboard just doesn't work well for that. But there are ways to make at least semi-usable UIs for mobile devices.
Speaking of Safari/WebKit, somebody needs to actually try to use this website on Safari on OS X, and fix everything that doesn't work... like the Options button (and, for that matter, most of the overlay views, if memory serves).
Just take a look at TVA rates (which are some of the lowest anywhere in the U.S.) and compare them with rates in states with deregulated power markets (e.g. California). My parents are paying a flat rate of about 8.75 cents per kWh in TN. Here in the Bay Area, the Tier 1 rate (charged on your first trickle of power) is a whopping 18.2 cents per kWh. The top tier is 34.9 cents per kWh. So it costs 2-4 times as much.
Now granted, not all power production is equal, but even the most expensive power (solar and offshore wind) costs only about three cents per kWh to actually produce; most power costs more like 0.5-1.5 cents per kWh. The rest of that 8.75 cents is going into grid maintenance, planned upgrades, and construction of a new nuclear plant. Even if we assume that all of the costs in California are double what they are in TN (which is likely to be a gross overestimate), that doesn't even justify an 18.2 cent flat rate, much less an 18.2 cent subsidized rate with rates that go into the stratosphere after your first few kWh.
The big difference, of course, is that in TN, the power companies are typically nonprofit municipal power companies that serve a single community, and buy most of their power from TVA, which is also a nonprofit. By contrast, PG&E is a decoupled power broker whose profits are assured whether they sell any actual power or not, which gives them no real incentive to keep prices down. And the power plants that produce the power are all for-profit companies, who have every incentive to keep prices high. It's just about the biggest train wreck you could possibly come up with.
No, take the license plates off of all the security vehicles. It's the only way to be sure that they aren't recognizable for the next step in the plan.
I reject that notion. Every hour and a half, enough sunlight hits Earth to supply our power needs for an entire year. Humanity's energy usage is noise.
The government doesn't even need to reduce peak energy usage. The utilities do. The fact that the government is having to force the utilities to encourage conservation to prevent blackouts during peak use tells me that the free market has completely and totally failed. As you said, the corporations want to maximize profits at all costs, which is contrary to public safety interests. The current model isn't working, and just about everybody said it wouldn't work way back when they first started deregulating the grid back in the 1990s.
Sure, you could patch the system by adding regulations that encourage conservation, but that only goes so far. You could also patch the system by adding regulations that provide huge penalties if the power supply fails because of overconsumption, ensuring that the penalties would greatly exceed the expected profits to be gained from pushing the envelope. Unfortunately, that approach is grossly inefficient, and requires constant adjustments to ensure that it remains unprofitable to take unnecessary risks with public safety. Otherwise, after a few years, you'll end up right back where you started. And even then, such an approach would only work until you get a CEO who decides to take short-term profits to pump his or her stock up, without caring whether the company is still around in five years.
In my opinion, the only way to truly fix our power infrastructure is to abandon the competitive energy market in favor of a nonprofit model. Basically, the government needs to nationalize energy production and the grid, then spin it off into a bunch of nonprofit organizations to ensure that it all gets run competently, without profit as a motive for getting people to overconsume, or as a motive to cut corners on infrastructure. Unlike regulatory approaches, the nonprofit model has actually been successful at lowering power costs and improving reliability.
You can say that a truly free market doesn't work because it is impossible or at least infeasible to achieve. There are fundamental obstacles that prevent a free market from being possible here:
So the closest you can realistically achieve is a highly regulated distribution grid and a free market of energy sellers on those wires. Of course, that often leads to the tragedy of the commons, where none of those energy sellers are responsible for the wires, and so none of them have any incentive to pay for repairs and improvements, and all of them fight any attempts by the grid providers to raise rates to cover those costs unless they are given no choice in the matter. This is basically what we have in many places, and there's still no evidence of competition driving rates down. In fact, rates are higher than ever.
The places with the lowest rates are usually places where the governments have started nonprofits like TVA to handle energy production. By taking the profit motive out of the equation entirely, the motivation to raise prices beyond what is needed to handle repairs and improvements goes away, and you get the cheapest energy you can get. For essential services like power, water, etc., nonprofits are inherently a better alternative to any form of competition, because they will almost invariably produce the best service at the lowest cost with the lowest overhead.
No, people who look at adult porn are more likely than average to have sex with adults, not more likely to rape adults. In much the same way, people who look at child porn are more likely than average to have sex with children, which is statutory rape, but not necessarily forcible rape. Terminology is important here.
Most people have looked at porn. It is only a relevant predictor if the odds are significantly different from the norm.
Clearly if you don't log in as that user (assuming the system logs bear that out), then you can't see the user's wallpaper. So presumably you'd be okay.
With that said... somebody setting child porn as his/her wallpaper? Really? That would take a special kind of stupid.... I mean sure, someone somewhere might do it someday, if only because two things are infinite and all, but....
And I thought I had a dim view of humanity....
Wiped? Nothing. You can wipe a disk without looking at the contents....
Given that (statistically speaking) most computer users are borderline computer illiterate, you'd also expect most child porn enthusiasts to be borderline computer illiterate. Now maybe they're more paranoid than average, and are more likely than average to take steps to hide content that they know is illegal, but even if they're twice as likely as an average person to use encryption, you'd still have 60% of them keeping child porn in an unencrypted volume....
More significantly, this will probably have the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than risk losing good employees who accidentally discover something and fail to report it, most companies will strengthen their policies to ensure that their employees do not discover anything.
I was thinking more along the lines of "carry a DVD and watch it on your own laptop". Region-coded DVDs will still play on your U.S. laptop even if it isn't physically in the U.S.
Flamebait? Somebody clearly didn't get the joke.
Of course, people who appear to be in the latter group are probably much more likely than average to actually be in the first group. It is certainly useful, therefore, for legal authorities to find out who the people in the latter group are, so that they can be subject to increased scrutiny (in a non-public way). And to the extent that some of them upload new content that hasn't been previously catalogued (and thus was probably produced by the uploader), taking over a site like this could be very effective at bringing to justice people who are actually harming children.
But you're right that locking up people for mere possession (as opposed to creation) is rather pointless unless those people can somehow identify the original source of some of that porn (which seems very unlikely unless the porn was exchanged in person). Basically, it's the war on drugs, if drug sales had moved entirely into the realm of the Silk Road....
It had to have been some terror group cutting the cables randomly to help them map out which cables are involved in providing service to emergency responders to the Bay Area, in preparation for an attack on the Super Bowl.... :-D
I would argue that this is no different from shipping a physical DVD to a customer in the U.S. who then chooses to carry it with him or her to watch while on vacation overseas, other than the need to carry a physical object around. You're shipping it to a customer in the U.S., and whether that customer chooses to then take the content outside the U.S. is the customer's decision, and shouldn't be in the hands of the IP owner. Were this anything other than a streaming service, this would be open-and-shut, and the IP owner would have no right to prevent such a temporary export. I think it is way past time for the public to demand that streaming be treated just like a physical sale or rental, with all the same consumer rights.
Customers shouldn't even need to use a VPN. The fact that they do is inexcusable. The fact that these companies are now trying to block customers who use VPNs to protect their most basic consumer rights is unconscionable.
Depends on what you mean by law breaking. If you mean criminal law, probably not, actually. Copyright law (as upheld by the SCOTUS in Kirtsaeng, DBA BlueChristine99 v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) doesn't recognize any right to block the import of something that was legally manufactured for sale under license somewhere else. It might, however, qualify as breach of contract, which brings the possibility of civil liability.
This logic is flawed because most people own more than one car. As soon as you add any safety feature, drivers will become used to those features. Even if they only prevent the collision, drivers will realize that the computer prevented the collision, and will be less afraid of collisions in the future. And when they switch back to driving their older vehicle (or a rental car or whatever) that lacks those features, they'll have a greatly increased risk of collisions.
Personally, I'm looking forward to buying my 2020 Volvo Titanic, but maybe it's just me.