Soon to be freaking out in front of several governmental bodies: Your HMO
They will claim the treatment is worse than the cancer. They'll want the feds to recommend that people not take this test because it will "mislead" 9inform) the public and cause them to seek unnecessary (expensive) treatment for a condition that might just go away on its own. Then they'll use the governments recommendations as an excuse to deny people coverage.
The biggest problem with health care in this country are HMOs. The second your doctor works for the same company that pays for your treatment, his paycheck is directly affected by any increased treatment he suggests. This impairs his judgment, leads to reduced treatment and ironically leads to increased cost down the road.
You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.
Because Amiga, C64, Early DOS and UNIX's were great and successful. For me, all that stuff was my childhood and messing around with it is like going to a garage sale and finding my old favorite GI Joe figure or something. PalmOS5 failed right out of the gate. There's nothing to be nostalgic about.
If you want to do some cool hobby stuff (and I don't blame you, I do that sort of thing all the time) I recommend the following: RaspberryPI or one of the several 3rd party variants out there: It's basically a small PC with a UART (hardware interface with buttons) You can turn it into a media player, an Audio DSP, a "car computer" whatever you can think of. http://www.raspberrypi.org/ http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Arduino is a micro controller. Not to be confused with the RPI. An arduino will teach you how to solder:-) You can run scripts written in C, and control lights, relays, sensors, etc... You can build something that automatically waters your garden, turns on your lights, feeds your pets... basically anything you can script. http://www.arduino.cc/
AX84 is a website that has a host of amplifier projects. They are all tube based. Why tube? Well a lot of us think it sounds better, but that's a long argument. Even if they don't, it's how electronics started and if you want to know how things were done originally... and why that lead to how things are done now, Tubes are a great way to start. It's like learning to build a campfire by rubbing 2 sticks together. Yea, you could just throw a road flare on a dead tree, but somethings are just worth doing the old way. If you're not a musician, there's a Stereo amp near the bottom. http://www.ax84.com/sel.html
Then there's steam engines... There's no collective site for that, but I've done them and they are fun. No codding involved unless you count the valves;-) These are super fun though. Imagine a device that can generate power from any source of heat. Even mirrors reflecting the sun. I recommend starting on youtube.
Anyways, there are lots of "useless" projects you can do that will have a far larger community and be far less of a waste of time in the end. Good luck.
Adopt. That's what we did. My sons birth mother could hardly afford food, much less cigarettes. The 3rd world may suck for many things but they don't chain smoke and there sure as hell aren't any crack addicted parents.
Kidding aside, you should adopt. There are children in need, and I love my kid as much, if not more than any kid I could have gotten the old fashion way. We were very lucky he needed parents.
Egads! Are you telling me there was a political referendum somewhere that would have cost local businesses money and they sent out misleading political fliers!?!? Holy shit the sky is falling!!!
Seriously folks, can we stop pretending to be outraged when the thing we normally have no problem with... exagerating our the negatives of our political opponents... is suddenly used against us?
How is this any more misleading than: ISPs want to throttle our connections so they can force us to only watch their content! ISPs have a menopoly! They don't want competition! ISPs are conspiring with the NSA to spy on us!
All of that nonsense is just as much of an exaggeration and misleading as what was on those post cards yet I see in on slashdot all day long. And just like those misleading post cards there are real problems with municipal broadband we could all discuss if everyone wasn't so busy throwing FUD back and forth.
Here is a flow chart to decide whether to buy Oracle products:
<Do you enjoy being utterly fucked over?> Yes--> Buy Oracle. No--> Run for the hills.
I've been at two places which have been Oracle'd. It's like being pwn3d except you end up $10,000,000 poorer. You also end up with less dignity than the inevitable tebagging you might get in Halo.
I'd just like to confirm... the OP is not exagerating at all here. Oracle is today, what Microsoft was 10yrs ago. They're big. Their customers are currently trapped. Oracles Management think that this situation will last forever and can't imagine a time when customers would move to something else. They are using that power in such a drastic and barbaric way that, as painful as it may be, there's just no way they are going to continue using them in the future.
In 10yrs we'll all have moved on, and Oracle Execs will be scratching their heads wondering what happened to the gravy train. Just like MSFT is doing now.
Silicon Valley problem? No... it's an American problem. Is there anyone here that doesn't know someone with an addiction problem? It's part of our culture. Who we are, and what we have is never good enough. There's always someone better on TV, the movies, the internet, and why aren't our bodies like that? Why am I not that calm? Why am I not that strong? Why can't I deal with stress that well? We're spoon fed lies via a screen and then find there is no natural way for us to meet our fictitious ambitions so we turn to unnatural means.
It's like the High Striker hammer game at the fair. The bells not the goal. Try, do your best, then be proud you had the opportunity to attend a fair and waste some time trying to hit a bell. Injecting yourself with steroids just so you can hit a damned bell is insanity. And yes, the majority of our life goals in this country are about as inane has trying to hit that bell.
Because this was never about independence. Russia installed their own primer minister to prevent Ukrain from joining the EU. But he sucked. The EU and the US helped stage a Coup and installed their own pro-west leader in the hopes of getting Ukrain in the EU. No way Russia is letting that happen. The EU has its own problems but they pale in comparison to Russias. The last thing Putin wants is a country with a lot of relatives of Russians getting the EU treatment and finding out how nice it is to be out of their largely lawless, virtual dictatorship of a state.
I don't care. Sports is (are?) stupid. They are, by default, exclusionary. The entire point of sports is to be sexist, elitist and show others that you're better than they are. Now, low and behold, a group that has bee excluded for thousands of years from the hobby has found a way to use their disability as an advantage. Call me a jerk for not feeling sympathy for the rich, steroid ladened, kids whose parents gave them every advantage in the world suddenly feel disadvantaged.
Having said that... the Israeli apartheid state needs a wake up call... because they are doing what the south african's did before them.
And, yes I am going there... and what the Nazis did before that.
Except, you know, that part where Hamas has 1st world military hardware that they're using to target civilians. Not saying that Israel isn't being stupid in many ways but Hamas is horrifically evil. Their goal is literally to exterminate Jews, and to that end no means is too extreme. They're sacrificing their own people who have an understandable hatred for Israel that, unfortunately, the rest of the middle east is using to exploit them in a proxy war.
unlike traditional manufacturing of titanium jaws, it doesn't waste any materials. Traditional manufacturing wastes up to 80% of the titanium block used in the process...
Um... bullshit? There is no waste in milling. You just sell the turnings back to smelter. Or smelt them yourself if you have the equipment.
that aside... sintering is awesome. Growing up I used to get to visit the company my father worked for and one of their main product lines were all sintered parts. You lay down powdered metal and then bake it to melt the powder together. They've been doing that for decades. The new innovation is being able to sinter on the fly with lasers instead of an oven.
What they fear isn't the criminals finding out about it...
Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house To put his nest on high, To be delivered from the hand of calamity! You have devised a shameful thing for your house By cutting off many peoples; So you are sinning against yourself. Surely the stone will cry out from the wall, And the rafter will answer it from the framework.
Routing traffic via the VPN changes the path the traffic flows over, possibly avoiding routes that are saturated and (who knows) pending upgrade.
It's tempting to imagine the internet as a giant blob of fungible bandwidth, but in reality it's just a big mess of cables some of which are higher capacity than others. Assuming malice is fun, but there isn't enough data here to say one way or another.
I suspect that whats going on is that Netflix put the majority of their traffic on Level3 and Level3 is trying to charge Verizon an exorbitant rate for enough bandwidth to handle that peer. Verizon said "No" and told Netflix to go with another peer. So Verizon has plenty of bandwidth, Netflix has plenty of bandwidth... it's where those peers are located that's the problem. Level3 has been giving Netflix huge discounts to try and force ISPs into unfriendly peer agreements.
So yes, if you VPN'd out to somewhere else... somewhere that's not an ISP and place where Level3 isn't trying to screw people, then yes, you'd avoid the route in question and get great service. Move all of Verizons traffic that way and see what happens. Ignoring saturation of the peers... It would work until that VPN services peering agreements ran out and then they'd be getting the same treatment.
The FCC, ISPs and Netflix need to stop screwing with net neutrality and fix the god damn peering agreement process. I've been involved with them peripherally and they're like the wild west when the 2 sides can't agree on something.
All joking aside... Donald Rumsfeld is 82. He's about as open minded as most other 82yr olds in this country. Our problem is that Donald Rumsfeld is a bad guy. Or problem is we put people into positions of power who developed their sense of morality at a time when "The Nazis" were still a valid political party and we didn't generally allow African Americans into the military yet.
As someone that works on engines all the time... the rule is: You need Air, Fuel and Spark All engines have electrical systems and depending on how complex (efficient) the engine is the electronics can be as minor as a magnet and magneto all the way up to vastly complex computer controlled ignition systems.
But more importantly, neatly all the valves in those plants are controlled by electricity. So losing power would be a problem if it weren't fixed fairly soon.
Vote out the scumbags at the state capitol that passed such a law
This is a very complex issue and has very little to do with the topics you're probably concerned with.
I'll burn up even more Karma educating the ill-informed.
Back when Telephones were a new thing, the government wanted to push their expansion to everyone in the country. It was seen in the same light that we see the internet today. A huge economic boost that would be the most beneficial in rural areas.
First the government just mandated "If you serve here you have to serve rural areas!!!" That went over like a lead balloon. Businesses just refused to install anything. The problem is that one company would come in and do what the government wanted, install service in the profitable city centers, then raise prices for those people to offset the costs of servicing rural customers who are extremely unprofitable to serve. But, rural customers having telephone service is, in the long run, more profitable for society as a whole. But then a competitor would come in and install only for the profitable business centers and drag their feet on installing the rural customers. Able to offer the business parks a cheaper rate, they'd drive the first company out.
So an agreement was struck. The local municipality would sell the telephone company a "franchise" or whatever the term in your local area is. Often this is called a "Monopoly" by the ill informed, but it's anything but that. This agreement comes with heavy burdens for the telephone company. They agree to provide service to everyone, at the same price. (differences exist for commercial and residential) They can not charge you more based on where you live. They also agree to provide service for a period of time, and they cannot abandon this obligation without approval from the municipality. In return, they retain exclusive rights to provide twisted pair copper service in that area.
They do have competitors... LOTS of competitors. Your local cable company, other phone companies, wifi providers, and on and on. It may seem as if there is a monopoly because where you live there is only one option.
Here's the key point to all of this: If you only have one option for a phone company that's because it's unprofitable to serve the area you live in. The only reason you have a phone company option at all, is because they are forced by that franchise agreement to serve you. If the Monopoly you're complaining about did not exist, you would have no phone service at all. None. There are hundreds of phone companies in this country, if it were profitable to provide you service, you'd have a lot of options. Go to any telephone company website, find their get a quote section and put in an address for the local buisness park around you. You'll have dozens of options for service. Alternatively, the easiest way to see where its profitable to provide service is to simply look at your local cable companies footprint. Cable companies are not under the franchise obligations. They only serve areas that are profitable. That footprint is very tightly held within the profitable part of town. Outside that the phone company is losing money.
Now, recently, some municipalities have tried to start their own fiber services. The fact that they are leaving out in these projects is where they are targeted. I've seen dozens of them (I work for a telco) and in every single case the local town is trying to instal Fiber to a local business park to attract new business. A noble idea, but the fact of the matter is, that business park in almost every case is the only profitable part of the entire town. (most towns that try this are relatively small) The park is paying for everyone elses phone service! If they suddenly had virtually free fiber service, the town suddenly becomes a huge expense to the telco. They'll refuse to sign the next franchise agreement and the town will be stuck with maintaining the infrastructure themselves.
If you support this sort of thing you have to realize that what you're supporting is lower prices for businesses, poorer service for everyone else and probably a lot of rural service loosing standard pots service and internet all together.
It is a lot. Why car industry does not make cars like this?
The people that would be interested in this already have very fuel efficient cars. Therefor the effect would be negligible on the types of vehicles they're buying. Where-as the effect would have the most dramatic effect on the SUV buyers... who clearly don't give a shit about efficiency. It's a Catch-22.
in miles per hour. No but seriously, Bq is disintegrations per second. It's a convenient way to quantify radiation if you have one isotope or it's contained in a small area, but is absolutely ass for a situation like this.
God damn you!!! You just don't understand science! If we were to take those becquerels and put them into a right triangle... we divide 1 trillion by 2 for the a and b... so we get 500billion Bq... so thats 2*500,000,000,000^2 that means the hypotenuse of the radiation is 50 Quintillion becquerels! By my back of the envelope numbers by next year news stories about fukishima will have release more radiation than a small supernova. A year after that even Andromeda is going to be pissed at Japan.
Agreed. Most of the country doesn't have a problem. The people living in the Arizona desert watering their Golf courses are running out of water... well surprise surprise. Let them run out. They can move... pretty much anywhere else in the country to avoid that problem. The solution to this problem is simple... ignore it.
Because they don't have a giant fucking hole drilled strait through the middle of them? The waters at 1 PSI and the Frack well is at 15,000 PSI. The Fracking solution is designed to erode those very geologic structures... Should I go on? or are you getting the idea?
Until your well collapses one day and you need to get approval to drill a new one and that approval is not forth-coming because there's now a water-coop that you need to join instead; paying them lots of money to run a pipe to your house and charging you per cubic meter...
Seen it happen; it's coming.
My well collapsed and fortunately a permit to drill a new one was a rubber stamp and I have a nice clean (albeit very hard) 10gpm well. Hopefully this well will last until I'm too old to care...
I've never gotten a permit to drill a well. There are some things the government can't regulate because they're impossible to regulate. Granted, I'm lucky that I live in an area where I know people that will borrow me the equipment to do such things. If you're living in the middle of town the rig might become obvious...
Slashdot Mirror
Soon to be freaking out in front of several governmental bodies: Your HMO
They will claim the treatment is worse than the cancer. They'll want the feds to recommend that people not take this test because it will "mislead" 9inform) the public and cause them to seek unnecessary (expensive) treatment for a condition that might just go away on its own. Then they'll use the governments recommendations as an excuse to deny people coverage.
Sound crazy? They already did it! http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The biggest problem with health care in this country are HMOs. The second your doctor works for the same company that pays for your treatment, his paycheck is directly affected by any increased treatment he suggests. This impairs his judgment, leads to reduced treatment and ironically leads to increased cost down the road.
You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.
Because Amiga, C64, Early DOS and UNIX's were great and successful. For me, all that stuff was my childhood and messing around with it is like going to a garage sale and finding my old favorite GI Joe figure or something. PalmOS5 failed right out of the gate. There's nothing to be nostalgic about.
If you want to do some cool hobby stuff (and I don't blame you, I do that sort of thing all the time) I recommend the following:
RaspberryPI or one of the several 3rd party variants out there: It's basically a small PC with a UART (hardware interface with buttons) You can turn it into a media player, an Audio DSP, a "car computer" whatever you can think of.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Arduino is a micro controller. Not to be confused with the RPI. An arduino will teach you how to solder :-)
You can run scripts written in C, and control lights, relays, sensors, etc... You can build something that automatically waters your garden, turns on your lights, feeds your pets... basically anything you can script.
http://www.arduino.cc/
AX84 is a website that has a host of amplifier projects. They are all tube based. Why tube? Well a lot of us think it sounds better, but that's a long argument. Even if they don't, it's how electronics started and if you want to know how things were done originally... and why that lead to how things are done now, Tubes are a great way to start. It's like learning to build a campfire by rubbing 2 sticks together. Yea, you could just throw a road flare on a dead tree, but somethings are just worth doing the old way. If you're not a musician, there's a Stereo amp near the bottom.
http://www.ax84.com/sel.html
Then there's steam engines... There's no collective site for that, but I've done them and they are fun. No codding involved unless you count the valves ;-)
These are super fun though. Imagine a device that can generate power from any source of heat. Even mirrors reflecting the sun. I recommend starting on youtube.
Anyways, there are lots of "useless" projects you can do that will have a far larger community and be far less of a waste of time in the end. Good luck.
Adopt. That's what we did. My sons birth mother could hardly afford food, much less cigarettes. The 3rd world may suck for many things but they don't chain smoke and there sure as hell aren't any crack addicted parents.
Kidding aside, you should adopt. There are children in need, and I love my kid as much, if not more than any kid I could have gotten the old fashion way. We were very lucky he needed parents.
Egads! Are you telling me there was a political referendum somewhere that would have cost local businesses money and they sent out misleading political fliers!?!? Holy shit the sky is falling!!!
Seriously folks, can we stop pretending to be outraged when the thing we normally have no problem with... exagerating our the negatives of our political opponents... is suddenly used against us?
How is this any more misleading than:
ISPs want to throttle our connections so they can force us to only watch their content!
ISPs have a menopoly! They don't want competition!
ISPs are conspiring with the NSA to spy on us!
All of that nonsense is just as much of an exaggeration and misleading as what was on those post cards yet I see in on slashdot all day long. And just like those misleading post cards there are real problems with municipal broadband we could all discuss if everyone wasn't so busy throwing FUD back and forth.
Here is a flow chart to decide whether to buy Oracle products:
<Do you enjoy being utterly fucked over?> Yes--> Buy Oracle. No--> Run for the hills.
I've been at two places which have been Oracle'd. It's like being pwn3d except you end up $10,000,000 poorer. You also end up with less dignity than the inevitable tebagging you might get in Halo.
I'd just like to confirm... the OP is not exagerating at all here. Oracle is today, what Microsoft was 10yrs ago.
They're big.
Their customers are currently trapped.
Oracles Management think that this situation will last forever and can't imagine a time when customers would move to something else.
They are using that power in such a drastic and barbaric way that, as painful as it may be, there's just no way they are going to continue using them in the future.
In 10yrs we'll all have moved on, and Oracle Execs will be scratching their heads wondering what happened to the gravy train. Just like MSFT is doing now.
Silicon Valley problem? No... it's an American problem. Is there anyone here that doesn't know someone with an addiction problem? It's part of our culture. Who we are, and what we have is never good enough. There's always someone better on TV, the movies, the internet, and why aren't our bodies like that? Why am I not that calm? Why am I not that strong? Why can't I deal with stress that well? We're spoon fed lies via a screen and then find there is no natural way for us to meet our fictitious ambitions so we turn to unnatural means.
It's like the High Striker hammer game at the fair.
The bells not the goal.
Try, do your best, then be proud you had the opportunity to attend a fair and waste some time trying to hit a bell.
Injecting yourself with steroids just so you can hit a damned bell is insanity.
And yes, the majority of our life goals in this country are about as inane has trying to hit that bell.
Because this was never about independence. Russia installed their own primer minister to prevent Ukrain from joining the EU. But he sucked. The EU and the US helped stage a Coup and installed their own pro-west leader in the hopes of getting Ukrain in the EU. No way Russia is letting that happen. The EU has its own problems but they pale in comparison to Russias. The last thing Putin wants is a country with a lot of relatives of Russians getting the EU treatment and finding out how nice it is to be out of their largely lawless, virtual dictatorship of a state.
It's still a question in most of eastern Europe. Russians got their propaganda machine in full spin mode... and it's working.
You mean like these?
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
I don't care. Sports is (are?) stupid. They are, by default, exclusionary. The entire point of sports is to be sexist, elitist and show others that you're better than they are. Now, low and behold, a group that has bee excluded for thousands of years from the hobby has found a way to use their disability as an advantage. Call me a jerk for not feeling sympathy for the rich, steroid ladened, kids whose parents gave them every advantage in the world suddenly feel disadvantaged.
Having said that... the Israeli apartheid state needs a wake up call... because they are doing what the south african's did before them.
And, yes I am going there... and what the Nazis did before that.
Except, you know, that part where Hamas has 1st world military hardware that they're using to target civilians. Not saying that Israel isn't being stupid in many ways but Hamas is horrifically evil. Their goal is literally to exterminate Jews, and to that end no means is too extreme. They're sacrificing their own people who have an understandable hatred for Israel that, unfortunately, the rest of the middle east is using to exploit them in a proxy war.
unlike traditional manufacturing of titanium jaws, it doesn't waste any materials. Traditional manufacturing wastes up to 80% of the titanium block used in the process...
Um... bullshit?
There is no waste in milling. You just sell the turnings back to smelter. Or smelt them yourself if you have the equipment.
that aside... sintering is awesome. Growing up I used to get to visit the company my father worked for and one of their main product lines were all sintered parts. You lay down powdered metal and then bake it to melt the powder together. They've been doing that for decades. The new innovation is being able to sinter on the fly with lasers instead of an oven.
What they fear isn't the criminals finding out about it...
Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house To put his nest on high, To be delivered from the hand of calamity! You have devised a shameful thing for your house By cutting off many peoples; So you are sinning against yourself. Surely the stone will cry out from the wall, And the rafter will answer it from the framework.
Habakkuk 2:9-11
Routing traffic via the VPN changes the path the traffic flows over, possibly avoiding routes that are saturated and (who knows) pending upgrade.
It's tempting to imagine the internet as a giant blob of fungible bandwidth, but in reality it's just a big mess of cables some of which are higher capacity than others. Assuming malice is fun, but there isn't enough data here to say one way or another.
I suspect that whats going on is that Netflix put the majority of their traffic on Level3 and Level3 is trying to charge Verizon an exorbitant rate for enough bandwidth to handle that peer. Verizon said "No" and told Netflix to go with another peer. So Verizon has plenty of bandwidth, Netflix has plenty of bandwidth... it's where those peers are located that's the problem. Level3 has been giving Netflix huge discounts to try and force ISPs into unfriendly peer agreements.
So yes, if you VPN'd out to somewhere else... somewhere that's not an ISP and place where Level3 isn't trying to screw people, then yes, you'd avoid the route in question and get great service. Move all of Verizons traffic that way and see what happens. Ignoring saturation of the peers... It would work until that VPN services peering agreements ran out and then they'd be getting the same treatment.
The FCC, ISPs and Netflix need to stop screwing with net neutrality and fix the god damn peering agreement process. I've been involved with them peripherally and they're like the wild west when the 2 sides can't agree on something.
You realize Siberia wasn't above the arctic circle 160million years ago right? Also... the whole planet was a lot hotter.
Really? People wasted mod points on this?
All joking aside... Donald Rumsfeld is 82.
He's about as open minded as most other 82yr olds in this country.
Our problem is that Donald Rumsfeld is a bad guy. Or problem is we put people into positions of power who developed their sense of morality at a time when "The Nazis" were still a valid political party and we didn't generally allow African Americans into the military yet.
They've been doing this for close to 20 years, you think that would be plenty of time to actually make money.
This is the internet... Hype = Profit
As someone that works on engines all the time... the rule is:
You need Air, Fuel and Spark
All engines have electrical systems and depending on how complex (efficient) the engine is the electronics can be as minor as a magnet and magneto all the way up to vastly complex computer controlled ignition systems.
But more importantly, neatly all the valves in those plants are controlled by electricity. So losing power would be a problem if it weren't fixed fairly soon.
Vote out the scumbags at the state capitol that passed such a law
This is a very complex issue and has very little to do with the topics you're probably concerned with.
I'll burn up even more Karma educating the ill-informed.
Back when Telephones were a new thing, the government wanted to push their expansion to everyone in the country. It was seen in the same light that we see the internet today. A huge economic boost that would be the most beneficial in rural areas.
First the government just mandated "If you serve here you have to serve rural areas!!!" That went over like a lead balloon. Businesses just refused to install anything. The problem is that one company would come in and do what the government wanted, install service in the profitable city centers, then raise prices for those people to offset the costs of servicing rural customers who are extremely unprofitable to serve. But, rural customers having telephone service is, in the long run, more profitable for society as a whole. But then a competitor would come in and install only for the profitable business centers and drag their feet on installing the rural customers. Able to offer the business parks a cheaper rate, they'd drive the first company out.
So an agreement was struck. The local municipality would sell the telephone company a "franchise" or whatever the term in your local area is. Often this is called a "Monopoly" by the ill informed, but it's anything but that. This agreement comes with heavy burdens for the telephone company. They agree to provide service to everyone, at the same price. (differences exist for commercial and residential) They can not charge you more based on where you live. They also agree to provide service for a period of time, and they cannot abandon this obligation without approval from the municipality. In return, they retain exclusive rights to provide twisted pair copper service in that area.
They do have competitors... LOTS of competitors. Your local cable company, other phone companies, wifi providers, and on and on. It may seem as if there is a monopoly because where you live there is only one option.
Here's the key point to all of this: If you only have one option for a phone company that's because it's unprofitable to serve the area you live in. The only reason you have a phone company option at all, is because they are forced by that franchise agreement to serve you. If the Monopoly you're complaining about did not exist, you would have no phone service at all. None. There are hundreds of phone companies in this country, if it were profitable to provide you service, you'd have a lot of options. Go to any telephone company website, find their get a quote section and put in an address for the local buisness park around you. You'll have dozens of options for service. Alternatively, the easiest way to see where its profitable to provide service is to simply look at your local cable companies footprint. Cable companies are not under the franchise obligations. They only serve areas that are profitable. That footprint is very tightly held within the profitable part of town. Outside that the phone company is losing money.
Now, recently, some municipalities have tried to start their own fiber services. The fact that they are leaving out in these projects is where they are targeted. I've seen dozens of them (I work for a telco) and in every single case the local town is trying to instal Fiber to a local business park to attract new business. A noble idea, but the fact of the matter is, that business park in almost every case is the only profitable part of the entire town. (most towns that try this are relatively small) The park is paying for everyone elses phone service! If they suddenly had virtually free fiber service, the town suddenly becomes a huge expense to the telco. They'll refuse to sign the next franchise agreement and the town will be stuck with maintaining the infrastructure themselves.
If you support this sort of thing you have to realize that what you're supporting is lower prices for businesses, poorer service for everyone else and probably a lot of rural service loosing standard pots service and internet all together.
It is a lot. Why car industry does not make cars like this?
The people that would be interested in this already have very fuel efficient cars. Therefor the effect would be negligible on the types of vehicles they're buying. Where-as the effect would have the most dramatic effect on the SUV buyers... who clearly don't give a shit about efficiency. It's a Catch-22.
in miles per hour. No but seriously, Bq is disintegrations per second. It's a convenient way to quantify radiation if you have one isotope or it's contained in a small area, but is absolutely ass for a situation like this.
God damn you!!! You just don't understand science! If we were to take those becquerels and put them into a right triangle... we divide 1 trillion by 2 for the a and b... so we get 500billion Bq... so thats 2*500,000,000,000^2 that means the hypotenuse of the radiation is 50 Quintillion becquerels! By my back of the envelope numbers by next year news stories about fukishima will have release more radiation than a small supernova. A year after that even Andromeda is going to be pissed at Japan.
Agreed. Most of the country doesn't have a problem. The people living in the Arizona desert watering their Golf courses are running out of water... well surprise surprise. Let them run out. They can move... pretty much anywhere else in the country to avoid that problem. The solution to this problem is simple... ignore it.
Because they don't have a giant fucking hole drilled strait through the middle of them?
The waters at 1 PSI and the Frack well is at 15,000 PSI.
The Fracking solution is designed to erode those very geologic structures...
Should I go on? or are you getting the idea?
Until your well collapses one day and you need to get approval to drill a new one and that approval is not forth-coming because there's now a water-coop that you need to join instead; paying them lots of money to run a pipe to your house and charging you per cubic meter...
Seen it happen; it's coming.
My well collapsed and fortunately a permit to drill a new one was a rubber stamp and I have a nice clean (albeit very hard) 10gpm well. Hopefully this well will last until I'm too old to care...
I've never gotten a permit to drill a well.
There are some things the government can't regulate because they're impossible to regulate.
Granted, I'm lucky that I live in an area where I know people that will borrow me the equipment to do such things. If you're living in the middle of town the rig might become obvious...