As much as they're trying to terrify us about this cliff, about the best thing that could happen to this country is if gridlock takes us right over the edge of the cliff. Taxes would go up... Spending would go down... the public would lose even more faith in our 2 political parties and maybe the military cuts would help us decide to pull troops out of at least a few of the hundreds of countries we have them stationed in.
lol... these laws cover almost every product out there. Try and sell alcohol "Direct" to the consumer and you'll find out about them really quick. There is only one, count them ONE liqueur distributor for the entire Chigago metropolitan area... and the laws are such that it costs a fortune to apply for a distribution license and you are guaranteed not to get it.
Well, franchise laws should be thrown out all together... along with Liqueur distribution laws, and all the other nonsense left over from the 50s that was designed to keep out competition.
It's a tad more complicated than that sadly. What they tried to do was replace nuclear with renewable sources. Unfortunately they chose wind and solar. 2 sources that when used on a small scale are not so bad. Unfortunately when you have a huge portion of your power grid running off them they generate a lot of problems. During the day Solar obviously works... and it doesn't at night. Then you have wind, which fluctuates almost at random. So now your grid is spiking and crashing. But your usage is not. Their other sources like Geothermal and Hydro are constant. You can't really get more power out of either. So you're left with Oil and Coal/Lignite to burn when the wind dies down and its night time. The problem there is that we are very good at burning fossil fuels efficiently when we're doing it consistently... unfortunately ramping up a coal plant in the middle of the night is terribly inefficient. Just like your car gets better gas millage when it's warm. So because they are now ramping up and shutting down their coal plants, those very plants are operating at about the worst efficiency they possibly could.
Currently Germany has plans to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9559656/Germanys-wind-power-chaos-should-be-a-warning-to-the-UK.htmlhttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.htmlhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/08/31/germany-insane-or-just-plain-stupid/
And when china found out about this affair, threatened to tell his wife? Intelligence agents can't have secrets. Affairs, closet homosexuality, drug addictions are all primary ways for foreign governments to blackmail them.
I know the author was trying to tout renewable energy, but the fact of the matter is they turned off their nuclear plants, and ramped up how much coal their burning. Now, you might not like Nuclear, and I could argue with you on that... but coal is far far worse than Nuclear will ever be. This is a net loss for the environment. We need to turn off the coal, turn on the nuclear, and develop the renewable. Nuclear wont last forever, but it's the cleanest fuel we have for now.
Clearly these guys want money and adulation. And that makes sense given the type of guy the military wants to make into a seal. So give it to them. How many seals are there? Not that many... so pay them well... and when they've done something important like Bin Ladin, let them brag about it. Sit down with them, figure out what can get released and what can't. Then let them hit good morning America.
You're right... people over the age of 18 should keep their dicks out of people under 18s pants. I'll not disagree. But when some 16yr old has a 19yr old partner... lets say they were even drunk and hooked up at a party not even knowing each others ages... You're going to take that situation and tell someone that was jogging, attacked by someone hidden in the bushes, gagged, raped at knife point, had a coke bottle shoved into all their orifices, that their situation is the same as the former? Because, according to the courts, they ARE the same. Tracking the guy hiding in the bushes for the rest of his natural life makes sense. Tracking the 19yr old does not.
You completely misread that sentence. I could give a shit less about them as in, "They could die for all I care"
This article is about how sex offenders are losing more and more rights after they were already punished. We don't care about the rights of actual sex offenders. We do care about the rights of all the people inappropriately labeled as sex offenders. There are actually thousands of kids in the US busted every year for sending semi-nude photos via their cellphones. They are then entered into the sex offenders database for the rest of their lives and tracked where-ever they go... It's ridiculous. It needs to stop.
The real problem here isn't the increased loss of freedom for sex offenders. I personally could give a shit less about them. The real problem is the ever increasing creep of the term "Sex offender" Lets be clear, when you say "Sex offender" Most reasonable people would think that meant someone that had had some kind of sexual contact with a CHILD (not a teenager) or had committed actual physical rape. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people labeled as sex offenders by the courts these days are people that got busted when they were 19 for having a 16yr old girl/boyfriend... or were even the same age as their teenage partner but texted pictures of her boobs to their friends. Should they be punished for this stuff? Yes... labeled a sex offender for the rest of their lives? Fuck no. "statutory rape" is not fucking rape. Stop treating it like it is. It degrades the term "RAPE" and trivializes the true victims of this horrible crime. Should some 25yr old looser that nails a 16yr old at a party go to jail for it? YES... but rape? come on.
There's plenty of grey area here, and I'm sure we could argue about a lot of it. But there's plenty that's not in a grey area, and destroying someones life over a stupid mistake they made when they were barely out of highschool is detrimental to everyone involved. Including the victim.
95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born
And since, based on all the studies we've done, the universe is flat... and therefor infinite... 5% * infinity is what? Infinity. So perhaps star formation will be less dense going forward, but I believe back when it was a lot more active, the universe was probably a lot less hospitable to those of us that don't find gamma ray bursts good for our health.
We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe.
There's also the fact that if we took the largest, most powerful radio telescope we have, put it on a planet orbiting our nearest star, pointed it directly at earth with the most powerful broadcast it could generate... by the time the signal got to us, there is no equipment on earth that could detect it. That should give you some idea of how insignificant our technology is on an interstellar scale. Faster than light travel is impossible, leaving your own solar system impractical at best. Traveling at even 1% the speed of light will likely be beyond our grasp for hundreds if not thousands of years. We are ants. We don't even know if there's life in THIS solar system outside our atmosphere. To start pretending we know whats around another star is foolish to say the least.
Bullshit. Apple uses their patents to prevent competition by refusing to license them even though they are for ridiculous things like rectangles and such. If you're preventing innovation by using patents for your own commercial gain, you're a patten troll. There are many ways to do this, apple is very good at their brand. VirnetX is very good at theirs. The fact that 2 patent trolls are battling it out doesn't make one the good guy. The sad state of affairs is that our system is so broken its turning companies that really don't want to be a part of this nonsense into trolls themselves. It's getting to be the only way to do business anymore.
Generators for data-centers usually run on propane. It's not going to do the locals much good. They likely still have natural gas service without interruption, but their furnaces wont run without electricity. They too could have purchased propane or natural gas generators for their homes for just a couple of hundred dollars. But they didn't.
Gasoline powered generators for emergencies are about the stupidest thing you can buy. It's expensive and runs out REALLY fast when there's any sort or service interruption.
And how much does it cost to bury the fiber feeding that DSLAM? How much do the right-of-ways cost? The building the equipment is in is going to cost more than $20k. Ok, you want to put it inside a cabinet... fine... And when a farmer hits it with his tractor? Federal subsidies for rural broadband are based on customers served... so doing things cost effectively is the name of the game. ADSL cards are around $200 to $400 per card. So, I'm not sure where you're getting your info but you basically wrong on all counts.
I work for an ISP that focuses on Rural broadband. There's a reason people don't do this... It's not profitable. We get large subsidies from the feds and still barely make any money at it. The way this works is, you obviously need equipment to service your customers. When using copper to deliver service you have a limited distance you can send your signal. So you'll have a minimal cost for your equipment and then that equipment can only reach customers that are within a certain radius of that equipment. At the bare minimum we're talking about $200,000. Now you've got a density of customers that can be service by that equipment... In a rural town, you'll be very lucky to get 200 customers. We have remotes that have less than 10 people on them. Customers will not pay more than $50 to $100/month for internet service. So do the math... how long will it take you just to pay off the equipment, much less pay for service?
Microwave doesn't work. We've tried it.
Wide area wifi doesn't work. We've tried it.
Fiber works, but costs a fortune and you'd have to dig up your entire town to do it.
Your local ISP will also likely sue you. They have exclusivity rights in your town. You might win, but it'll cost you.
This is the state of broadband in this country. Other countries deal with it by nationalizing the phone network, but that has its own problems that are arguably even worse.
There's no difference between the 2 candidates we're "allowed" to vote for... so who the hell cares? Will we still be attacking Iran sometime next year? Will surveillance cameras still be going up on every street corner? Will my taxes AND national debt continue to climb while public services and infrastructure continue to dwindle? The answer to all of that is "yes", irrelevant of who wins the election.
If you're voting democrat or republican, YOU are the problem. Wake up.
Tornados don't generally hit the same town ever 5 to 10 years. They're a true random natural disaster. Flood plains? Well, that's kind of the same issue as the hurricanes isn't it? Lastly, droughts don't destroy your house.
Federal relief for hurricane and flood damage should be the same everywhere. The feds should offer to buy your house for the difference between what the insurance company is paying you and its assessed tax appraisal. Not a great deal but better than nothing. Then the government should knock down your house and turn it into a green way, park, beach, general public lands or whatever... The problem is permanently solved. Personally, I don't think there should be any relief and the government should stop forcing insurance companies to insure people insane enough to live in these places... but whatever.
Your window problem would be solved with steel shutters. The well should be sealed and high off the ground to prevent flood water from draining into it. The problem however, is all of your neighbors with un-protected wells into the same Aquifer. So you'll need to live rural, away from other people. Rather than High ground, I'd just not live anywhere near the coast. It's a nice place to visit but not a good place to keep all your stuff.
I love this guy. His point is entirely valid. The most hilarious thing about this entire situation is that all the people that are hating him, that think he should get arrested, he completely agrees with. And all the people that excuse what he's doing and try to defend him completely disagree with his point. It's the most fucked up thing ever. He shouldn't be able to do this, and neither should businesses, the government or anyone else. He's pointing out just how creepy it is and saying wake the fuck up.
I do not share your rabid Google fanboyism... But I do like what they are doing in the smartphone/Tablet sector. Their profit model is in-line with my goals, so we're good. The whole "track everything I do, everywhere" however... is annoying to say the least.
No, the telephone company knows trunking information. Remember that, the "Recieving" customer isn't getting billed... so our phone system was never designed to care who initiated the call. All your local switch knows is that the call is coming in on Trunk XYZ from some neighboring phone company... that company got it from somewhere else... and on and on. Caller ID was introduced much later and is just basically extra data tacked onto the call. It was designed not to be all that accurate intentionally. Imagine working at a bank and calling one of your customers. You want the banks phone number to show up, not your desk phone.
Now that we're in the situation that we're in, it all looks very short sighted... but remember when all these systems were designed there was no VOIP systems. In order to initiate a call you needed a phone company to do that for you, and they would need to be complicit in your fraud. But now with VOIP services everywhere, with a little bit of knowledge you can do just about anything you want.
There's a house in California that's built in an old abandon mineshaft. It's nearly a mile deep and an elevator is required for access. Inside there's a natural spring that the home owner can use for water. It even has its own water fall and such. I've always wanted to get something like that. Get enough food down there and you could survive just about anything. Want to expand? Get a pickaxe. I'm sure he could have waited down there long enough for his lawyers to get this taken care of. lol
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As much as they're trying to terrify us about this cliff, about the best thing that could happen to this country is if gridlock takes us right over the edge of the cliff. Taxes would go up... Spending would go down... the public would lose even more faith in our 2 political parties and maybe the military cuts would help us decide to pull troops out of at least a few of the hundreds of countries we have them stationed in.
lol... these laws cover almost every product out there. Try and sell alcohol "Direct" to the consumer and you'll find out about them really quick. There is only one, count them ONE liqueur distributor for the entire Chigago metropolitan area... and the laws are such that it costs a fortune to apply for a distribution license and you are guaranteed not to get it.
Well, franchise laws should be thrown out all together... along with Liqueur distribution laws, and all the other nonsense left over from the 50s that was designed to keep out competition.
It's a tad more complicated than that sadly. What they tried to do was replace nuclear with renewable sources. Unfortunately they chose wind and solar. 2 sources that when used on a small scale are not so bad. Unfortunately when you have a huge portion of your power grid running off them they generate a lot of problems. During the day Solar obviously works... and it doesn't at night. Then you have wind, which fluctuates almost at random. So now your grid is spiking and crashing. But your usage is not. Their other sources like Geothermal and Hydro are constant. You can't really get more power out of either. So you're left with Oil and Coal/Lignite to burn when the wind dies down and its night time. The problem there is that we are very good at burning fossil fuels efficiently when we're doing it consistently... unfortunately ramping up a coal plant in the middle of the night is terribly inefficient. Just like your car gets better gas millage when it's warm. So because they are now ramping up and shutting down their coal plants, those very plants are operating at about the worst efficiency they possibly could. Currently Germany has plans to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9559656/Germanys-wind-power-chaos-should-be-a-warning-to-the-UK.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/08/31/germany-insane-or-just-plain-stupid/
And when china found out about this affair, threatened to tell his wife? Intelligence agents can't have secrets. Affairs, closet homosexuality, drug addictions are all primary ways for foreign governments to blackmail them.
I know the author was trying to tout renewable energy, but the fact of the matter is they turned off their nuclear plants, and ramped up how much coal their burning. Now, you might not like Nuclear, and I could argue with you on that... but coal is far far worse than Nuclear will ever be. This is a net loss for the environment. We need to turn off the coal, turn on the nuclear, and develop the renewable. Nuclear wont last forever, but it's the cleanest fuel we have for now.
Clearly these guys want money and adulation. And that makes sense given the type of guy the military wants to make into a seal. So give it to them. How many seals are there? Not that many... so pay them well... and when they've done something important like Bin Ladin, let them brag about it. Sit down with them, figure out what can get released and what can't. Then let them hit good morning America.
You're right... people over the age of 18 should keep their dicks out of people under 18s pants. I'll not disagree. But when some 16yr old has a 19yr old partner... lets say they were even drunk and hooked up at a party not even knowing each others ages... You're going to take that situation and tell someone that was jogging, attacked by someone hidden in the bushes, gagged, raped at knife point, had a coke bottle shoved into all their orifices, that their situation is the same as the former? Because, according to the courts, they ARE the same. Tracking the guy hiding in the bushes for the rest of his natural life makes sense. Tracking the 19yr old does not.
You completely misread that sentence. I could give a shit less about them as in, "They could die for all I care" This article is about how sex offenders are losing more and more rights after they were already punished. We don't care about the rights of actual sex offenders. We do care about the rights of all the people inappropriately labeled as sex offenders. There are actually thousands of kids in the US busted every year for sending semi-nude photos via their cellphones. They are then entered into the sex offenders database for the rest of their lives and tracked where-ever they go... It's ridiculous. It needs to stop.
The real problem here isn't the increased loss of freedom for sex offenders. I personally could give a shit less about them. The real problem is the ever increasing creep of the term "Sex offender" Lets be clear, when you say "Sex offender" Most reasonable people would think that meant someone that had had some kind of sexual contact with a CHILD (not a teenager) or had committed actual physical rape. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people labeled as sex offenders by the courts these days are people that got busted when they were 19 for having a 16yr old girl/boyfriend... or were even the same age as their teenage partner but texted pictures of her boobs to their friends. Should they be punished for this stuff? Yes... labeled a sex offender for the rest of their lives? Fuck no. "statutory rape" is not fucking rape. Stop treating it like it is. It degrades the term "RAPE" and trivializes the true victims of this horrible crime. Should some 25yr old looser that nails a 16yr old at a party go to jail for it? YES... but rape? come on. There's plenty of grey area here, and I'm sure we could argue about a lot of it. But there's plenty that's not in a grey area, and destroying someones life over a stupid mistake they made when they were barely out of highschool is detrimental to everyone involved. Including the victim.
95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born
And since, based on all the studies we've done, the universe is flat... and therefor infinite... 5% * infinity is what? Infinity. So perhaps star formation will be less dense going forward, but I believe back when it was a lot more active, the universe was probably a lot less hospitable to those of us that don't find gamma ray bursts good for our health.
We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe.
Source: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html
There's also the fact that if we took the largest, most powerful radio telescope we have, put it on a planet orbiting our nearest star, pointed it directly at earth with the most powerful broadcast it could generate... by the time the signal got to us, there is no equipment on earth that could detect it. That should give you some idea of how insignificant our technology is on an interstellar scale. Faster than light travel is impossible, leaving your own solar system impractical at best. Traveling at even 1% the speed of light will likely be beyond our grasp for hundreds if not thousands of years. We are ants. We don't even know if there's life in THIS solar system outside our atmosphere. To start pretending we know whats around another star is foolish to say the least.
Bullshit. Apple uses their patents to prevent competition by refusing to license them even though they are for ridiculous things like rectangles and such. If you're preventing innovation by using patents for your own commercial gain, you're a patten troll. There are many ways to do this, apple is very good at their brand. VirnetX is very good at theirs. The fact that 2 patent trolls are battling it out doesn't make one the good guy. The sad state of affairs is that our system is so broken its turning companies that really don't want to be a part of this nonsense into trolls themselves. It's getting to be the only way to do business anymore.
Generators for data-centers usually run on propane. It's not going to do the locals much good. They likely still have natural gas service without interruption, but their furnaces wont run without electricity. They too could have purchased propane or natural gas generators for their homes for just a couple of hundred dollars. But they didn't. Gasoline powered generators for emergencies are about the stupidest thing you can buy. It's expensive and runs out REALLY fast when there's any sort or service interruption.
And how much does it cost to bury the fiber feeding that DSLAM? How much do the right-of-ways cost? The building the equipment is in is going to cost more than $20k. Ok, you want to put it inside a cabinet... fine... And when a farmer hits it with his tractor? Federal subsidies for rural broadband are based on customers served... so doing things cost effectively is the name of the game. ADSL cards are around $200 to $400 per card. So, I'm not sure where you're getting your info but you basically wrong on all counts.
I work for an ISP that focuses on Rural broadband. There's a reason people don't do this... It's not profitable. We get large subsidies from the feds and still barely make any money at it. The way this works is, you obviously need equipment to service your customers. When using copper to deliver service you have a limited distance you can send your signal. So you'll have a minimal cost for your equipment and then that equipment can only reach customers that are within a certain radius of that equipment. At the bare minimum we're talking about $200,000. Now you've got a density of customers that can be service by that equipment... In a rural town, you'll be very lucky to get 200 customers. We have remotes that have less than 10 people on them. Customers will not pay more than $50 to $100/month for internet service. So do the math... how long will it take you just to pay off the equipment, much less pay for service? Microwave doesn't work. We've tried it. Wide area wifi doesn't work. We've tried it. Fiber works, but costs a fortune and you'd have to dig up your entire town to do it. Your local ISP will also likely sue you. They have exclusivity rights in your town. You might win, but it'll cost you. This is the state of broadband in this country. Other countries deal with it by nationalizing the phone network, but that has its own problems that are arguably even worse.
Those are some pretty hilarious excuses for why you can't get laid. I know it's hard for virgins to understand, but seriously, AIDs is worth it.
There's no difference between the 2 candidates we're "allowed" to vote for... so who the hell cares? Will we still be attacking Iran sometime next year? Will surveillance cameras still be going up on every street corner? Will my taxes AND national debt continue to climb while public services and infrastructure continue to dwindle? The answer to all of that is "yes", irrelevant of who wins the election. If you're voting democrat or republican, YOU are the problem. Wake up.
Tornados don't generally hit the same town ever 5 to 10 years. They're a true random natural disaster. Flood plains? Well, that's kind of the same issue as the hurricanes isn't it? Lastly, droughts don't destroy your house. Federal relief for hurricane and flood damage should be the same everywhere. The feds should offer to buy your house for the difference between what the insurance company is paying you and its assessed tax appraisal. Not a great deal but better than nothing. Then the government should knock down your house and turn it into a green way, park, beach, general public lands or whatever... The problem is permanently solved. Personally, I don't think there should be any relief and the government should stop forcing insurance companies to insure people insane enough to live in these places... but whatever.
I dunno, ask the east and gulf coast of the united states. Our government even pays people to rebuild every year. How dumb is that?
Your window problem would be solved with steel shutters. The well should be sealed and high off the ground to prevent flood water from draining into it. The problem however, is all of your neighbors with un-protected wells into the same Aquifer. So you'll need to live rural, away from other people. Rather than High ground, I'd just not live anywhere near the coast. It's a nice place to visit but not a good place to keep all your stuff.
I love this guy. His point is entirely valid. The most hilarious thing about this entire situation is that all the people that are hating him, that think he should get arrested, he completely agrees with. And all the people that excuse what he's doing and try to defend him completely disagree with his point. It's the most fucked up thing ever. He shouldn't be able to do this, and neither should businesses, the government or anyone else. He's pointing out just how creepy it is and saying wake the fuck up.
I do not share your rabid Google fanboyism... But I do like what they are doing in the smartphone/Tablet sector. Their profit model is in-line with my goals, so we're good. The whole "track everything I do, everywhere" however... is annoying to say the least.
No, the telephone company knows trunking information. Remember that, the "Recieving" customer isn't getting billed... so our phone system was never designed to care who initiated the call. All your local switch knows is that the call is coming in on Trunk XYZ from some neighboring phone company... that company got it from somewhere else... and on and on. Caller ID was introduced much later and is just basically extra data tacked onto the call. It was designed not to be all that accurate intentionally. Imagine working at a bank and calling one of your customers. You want the banks phone number to show up, not your desk phone. Now that we're in the situation that we're in, it all looks very short sighted... but remember when all these systems were designed there was no VOIP systems. In order to initiate a call you needed a phone company to do that for you, and they would need to be complicit in your fraud. But now with VOIP services everywhere, with a little bit of knowledge you can do just about anything you want.
There's a house in California that's built in an old abandon mineshaft. It's nearly a mile deep and an elevator is required for access. Inside there's a natural spring that the home owner can use for water. It even has its own water fall and such. I've always wanted to get something like that. Get enough food down there and you could survive just about anything. Want to expand? Get a pickaxe. I'm sure he could have waited down there long enough for his lawyers to get this taken care of. lol