Trump is working under the worst conditions a president has ever had. The media is all out against him from the get go, biased to hell. The left refuses to even acknowledged he won and is an impediment to progress at every turn.
Your "liberals" are NOT IN POWER. Please get at least that one thing straight. Republicans control the House and Senate, case closed. Trump's failures to date are on them, not some "liberal" media.
That's Trump's own Party, supposed to be his friends, and they could care less about some "media... all out against him from the get go". They regularly bash this "biased" media of yours.
Yet even John McCain gives the thumbs-down to Trump. Why? Chiefly, because Trump picks fights with leaders of his own Party. Nevermind whatever views or causes he may or may not have, bottom-line Trump can't behave like a grown-up. That makes for great TV, and maybe it makes some people feel good ("Yeah! You tell 'em Trump!") but it doesn't get anything done.
Trump supporters need to stop asking whether they love the way-so-awesome tough shit he says and tweets, and instead ask whether they'd trust him enough, honest to God, to pay cash to buy a used car from him. Seriously. Be honest. Would you buy a used car from that man?It's the greatest, let me tell you, and don't believe those lies from the liberals at the CarFax - they're losers, this ride has never been in no accident, never been totaled, that puddle of oil is from something else, believe me.
Where I live, more and more "grown-up" buses are going hybrid or natural-gas, much much kinder when you're stuck behind one in traffic. But all the school buses are the same stamped-metal yellow tanks they've been using since the Korean War, blasting out as much diesel soot as a dump truck. When the school budget comes up, there's always a jaw-dropping-huge chunk set aside to fuel these horrid things. Maybe as much could be saved by upgrading these monsters to something modern as eliminating routes and cramming more kids on the inside?
Hey, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and college-debt-hounded MIT nerds... how about solving THIS problem on the back of a napkin!
Yes!! "clean" coal shoveled into a roaring furnace by children covered in grime and soot, a fat drunkard whipping them when they slack off, red and sweaty from the steam belching from the engine as it wheezes down the alley to the workhouse!!! Why read Dickens, when you can LIVE IT!!! Coal - it's not just for breakfast anymore.
What is wrong with saying Rural users are better served by cellular internet, when they can get MUCH faster speeds? Sure the data caps are bad, but the why not push to get those raised for rural users instead of damning rural users to an even worse cable model hell than city users have... At least you can choose cellular providers!
That would be fine... if anyone did any pushing. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that. There's also the problem of cellular dead zones, bandwidth saturation, even weather can drop your LTE to 2G, or a tornado might knock out your tower and there's no plans to fix it until whenever. Wireless is no miracle cure... it's a profit-center for four corporations, until such time as Ajit Pai approves a merger to make them three, two, and finally just one (because DSL's all the competition any American needs).
"Ajit Pai" should now be the technical term for extremely painful and angry jock-itch between the upper thigh and testicles. . ..
a lovely thought, truly, but the world also needs "Ajit Pai" as a term for a political ass-kisser who happily accepts a position of authority over something, only to deliberately cripple that thing... yet still say with a straight face in public that he's made it better. No conscience, no sense of irony, no imagination, no moral compass, no sense for potential, and fuck-well no thought for making life better for anyone other than himself. Not a fucking thing, so long as he's first in line to catch the scraps off whatever politician he's sucking up to.
That's an Ajit-Pai. Easier to pronounce and less elitist than "sycophantic hypocrite", and with more meaning.
I was being half-snarky... the GOP health bill hasn't passed yet. But for real, the Canada thing simply means that a cop is empowered to DO something if he sees a driver with a cell phone in his/her hand while driving, and the driver can't weasel out of it simply by claiming it was turned off, requiring the cop to prove he could tell whether it was on or off from the vantage point of his cruiser.
It's just a legal attempt, democratically passed, to get around the fact that cell phones impair drivers as much as being rip-roaring drunk, but there's no blood-alcohol test they can run on a texter to prove that he was actually texting and not just allegedly holding a switched-off phone while driving (yeah, right), particularly if the texter ditched or destroyed his phone at or just after being pulled-over or engaging in an accident.
That's right, some damn fool can kill your sister, but by raising his hand swearing in court that his phone was off just before it was thrown from his car and destroyed, there's reasonable doubt to that vehicular manslaughter charge.
Yeah, maybe there's evidence out there in cyberland, but what's to compel that knucklehead to serve up his Facebook password? Does the district have the money to subpoena the carrier, the provider, Facebook, and to carry out the cyber-forensics to prove he was texting, and not just ordinary driver careless oh gosh I didn't see the light change. Accidents happen, sorry about your sister, think of how my insurance is gonna go up and thank god my airbag worked right.
So, given that the risk of being T-Boned and instantly transformed into a quadriplegic by an asshole texter is veryfuckingreal, please do enumerate the hardships and dangers of the so-called "nanny-state" that outweigh this attempt to put some teeth into no-texting-while-driving laws, particularly with respect to Canada. I mean, is there evidence of waves of depressed Molson-drinking immigrants flooding over from the great North, thirsting for the Freedom to text and drive without oppression from storm-trooping Mounties? I don't think so, I haven't seen it. But maybe I'm wrong. Any Canadians in slashdot-land want to weigh in? Any youse guys feeling repressed up North up there? or are you guys just so chill you can live fine with your hands off your phones while driving?
You seem to be referring to the principle of a law being arbitrary and capricious, but laws are very rarely struck down on these grounds. More likely, someone with a good lawyer appeals a conviction based on what satisfies "careless or imprudent", cites that there's nothing to be cited, and therefore no basis for establishing the existence of "careless or imprudent", the judge shrugs and throws out the conviction. Once this catches on, cases will be dismissed outright unless a cop presents evidence that's really compelling that might persuade a judge to go on record that "careless or imprudent" is satisfied (i.e., judge-made law, as a result of poorly worded law passed by the legislature), or the legislature gets its act together, tells the wireless lobby to "stuff it", and amends the law to define what the hell "careless or imprudent" actually means. But that's just my opinion.:P
I'd rather live in a socialist nanny state then get T-Boned by some damn fool texting his way straight through a red light. Shucks, that nanny state might come in handy at the hospital for patching you back up after an accident like that. In Trump country with the GOP in charge, first responders will be checking your credit rating before even bothering with expensive equipment like the jaws of life. Hell, you might not even be worth the foam to put the fire out - let it burn out on its own, haul off your dead ass together with your ruined car, send the towing bill with the collection agency after your next of kin.
The NSA doesn't report bugs and vulnerabilities back to the tech company.
If I had a choice of disclosing my source code to either the Russians or the NSA, I would pick the Russians.
Be careful what you wish for. The NSA may bust your neighbor for hoarding bomb-making material, or fink you to the FBI for your 15-year collection of kiddy-pr0n. The Russians, OTOH, will cut the power to your town on the hottest day of the year, brick the machine in the hospital that's keeping you alive, make your bank account disappear, make ships, drones and planes crash into each other, and turn your home router into a trove of kiddy-pr0n while finking you out to the FBI, and even rig media and election machines to put a failing businessman turned reality-TV show host into the White House. Why? For a laugh at our expense (what else is there to do fun in Russia?), and to show Big Boss Putin what they can do in hopes of catching a few scraps from his table.
It ain't a great choice, nor do I have it, but I'll take the NSA, thank you.
Truly. If they're sharing them with Russia, they should share with EVERYONE - draw an open-source license.
IBM et al. are biting the bullet because they want to sell to the Russian market... perhaps because if they don't, someone else will and make lots of oil-soaked rubles and countless Russian intangibles. But if they give away these "secrets" to the Russians, we can pretty much assume such secrets are in the wild, perhaps immediately handed to the teams of patriotic but not-at-all-affiliated with the government Russians (wink, wink) who are taking down Ukrane's power grid. The point of keeping them secret is so that other people won't copy what you've done and sell it and compete with you. But for sure that's exactly what the Russians will do with this... build their own so they don't have to give up their oil rubles to Western companies. And there's no guarantee the Russians won't sell what they've learned to the Chinese (or any other highest bidder), who will be happy to pass it on to some half-state-owned conglomerate to build their own equipment for 1/1000 of what the Western companies would sell for.
The only people NOT getting in on the source code is the open-source community who might do something good with it, like find bugs.
Put short, if you're going to have to open your code to Russia to sell to Russia, draw an open-source license first. If you can't afford the open-source community to see and copy your code, you damn well can't afford the Russians to do it.
Me, if I want to purchase "secure" equipment from these companies, I damn-well want to make they're products that have NOT been sold and opened-up to the Russians, or for my money such equipment is de-facto NON-secure. Should have some kind of NOT OPENED TO RUSSIANS certification or something.
The source of all of this is the back-room, corner-office rants of Comcast, AT&T, Charter and other carriers that Google, Amazon, Uber and Netflix have made billions over their pipes. It's the same thing that if the mafia boss hadn't been scaring off the petty thieves from robbing your store, you wouldn't be successful today, so pay up the protection racket and be happy with it. I suppose building out an internet from backbone to last mile is a thankless, un-sexy job compared to making movies and selling stuff. Why shouldn't they get a piece of that action? I'm sure major Activest Investors are pressuring CEO's with that question all the time. Comcast, at least, put the question a little bit to bed by buying NBC/Universal and becoming content-creators themselves.
But Net Neutrality will never be quite as simple as common-carrier was with the plain-old telephone system (POTS). No, Comcast shouldn't be able to extort more money out of Netflix, even though Netflix may be the service that's choking up their antiquated lines somewhere, generating complaints and forcing them to pay for upgrades in a region they weren't planning to upgrade for a while. But what about E911? or catastrophe alerts? Should that get prioritized? What about when surgeons start running robots on the operating table over the internet... should they get the opportunity to arrange for a near-real-time point-to-point pipe? Wall Street will pay big bucks for that kind of throughput, if that means they can robo-trade just one nano-second ahead of their competitors.
These are policy questions that need smart, thoughtful far-sighted people to work out in a way that benefits everyone in the right way. But our current political climate is a lot of shouting, short-sighted fake-news FUD, coupled with I'm-just-looking-out-for-me bullshit. So, I'm not holding my breath for any resolution soon. "Net Neutrality" will keep coming up, generate a lot of shouting, followed by confused looks, and then out-and-out falsehoods on Fox and Friends:
what is this "neutrality" anyway? isn't this just a way to shut down the bloggers? this is a free country, I have strong opinions and I shouldn't be forced to be "neutral" on the Internet if I don't want to be...
whereupon Net Neutrality will go dormant for a month or two before another big tech CEO brings it back up again.
and it's not the desktops you should be worried about. It's the ATM's, cash registers, medical/hospital machines, metro/subway kiosks, traffic-light controllers, maybe even devices used by Army field personnel or on Navy ships and submarines (horrors...), uncounted masses of machines in use every day that you'd never guess are running Windows XP with no viable means of upgrading short of scrapping them entirely. XP lived long enough to become the go-to OS for way too much stuff.
But we were smart enough...that's the key. You can still be a kid and be smart about things you do when it comes down to it....at least if you have parents that raise you right.
Sure, there were some people that took it too far, but for 99% of the large group I ran with and grew up with, we all survived, have kids, good jobs, etc.
Ya know, I'm cool with what you say. Just don't be cruel with that "natural selection" bit, because mistakes happen, particularly with kids. And these days, drugs are a lot more about powders and pills than natural-looking sticky green leafy stuff, buttons of sticky putty stuff, or funny-looking brown foul-smelling fungal stuff picked off cow-shit. Today's reality is you can't eyeball a potency of a powder or pill. That's why fentanyl is killing people. It's ten fucking times more potent than heroin, but in its way, more easily available than heroin, so it makes sense to senseless dealers to mix in with heroin and pass on as heroin, and a kid hitting a little bit won't know the difference before she's collapsed after one snort and can't get back up, all while her friends bolt the hell out of there because they don't wanna go to jail.
I had a healthy fear of hard drugs growing up. The story of Janis Joplin going down because her last hit had way more potency than she expected struck me hard. SRV fell off the stage spitting blood because cocaine and bourbon had crystalized in his stomach and cut him the hell up. That was enough for me. But kids today wanna go to raves, not acid tests, and by that age they (or someone they know) have already been sharing ritalin and other study drugs, in pill form, every cram season. Crush it and snort it to get it going faster. Is the needle so out of the question, particularly when you're girlfriend is Type-I diabetic and hits insulin several times a day? Welcome to 2017: overdosing is not just for "junkies" anymore.
And....natural selection will continue to clean the gene pool.
Cute. Clever. Until it's your daughter, baby sister, cousin or best friend who was just out with friends one night and took a dose of something 'cause people she trusted were giving it a try and the dose looked small and it didn't seem to be doing any harm and she didn't want to be the one pissing on the fun. Yep, it's sure easy to feel superior by requiring everyone else in the world to be perfect at all times and then there wouldn't be any problems anymore anywhere ever.
Forget Nuclear power. It's not going to happen because when you break ground for a new plant thousands of crazy people
Some nuclear-friendly federal regulation and funding could fix that. Research funding into next-gen safer designs? Streamlined permit approvals toward pilot programs? Tax incentives, perhaps to convert aging coal plants? A little DARPA action, enough to encourage universities to offer nuclear engineering degrees again?
When the Soviets were around, propagandizing a nuclear world with nuclear plants that fit on trucks to show off how nuclear they were, the U.S. was red hot to show how nuclear it could be. Now with the Soviets and their propaganda gone, U.S. politicians have no balls for moon-shot beat-the-russians tech stuff.
Or maybe it's not completely gone. The Russians and the Chinese are getting back into nuclear, even in spite of the Russians sitting on shit-tons of fossil fuels. The Chinese want to quickly power up these little islands they're building in the China Sea to claim as their new territory. The Russians want to fill the melting Arctic with flag-flying nuclear ice-breakers to get at all the stuff up there (the U.S. hasn't built an ice-breaker since the late 1970s). Gosh, if we would only elect Congress-people who gave a fuck, we might be able to get in on this while there's something still to get got.
Some people live in apartments. You know, those tall things - some with covered parking and some without. Management doesn't take kindly to running 100-yard cables out your window to a car parked 3 floors below.
Even townhome-living people are SOL for EVs if they don't have a garage or at least have their own driveway.
Even if you're not a Deadhead, Amir Bar-Lev's Long Strange Trip, just released on Amazon Prime, is a really excellent documentary about the band, the times that produced them, and how the times changed. If for nothing else, it's amazing to see the film footage of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and other figures from the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for whom the then-called Warlocks were the original house band.
The Big Short is the best conversion of a non-fiction book I've seen dramatized into a movie, as it somehow manages to teach you the financial math that led to the housing bubble and how a few people foresaw it and cashed in huge on it. The same author, Michael Lewis, is also behind the non-fiction book that became Moneyball. Along the same lines, also recommend Margin Call and Boiler Room.
Also recommend Hamiltons America, both for the history, which is very real, and as a means of getting the feel of the musical without having to shell out a crazy-high ticket price:)
To be fair, this is actually a tactic that works politically. It doesn't work at making the world a better place, but it does work at staying popular because you are simply tapping into already popular opinion and re-enforcing it. It is the great flaw with democracy, you end up with the leadership you deserve rather than what you need.
OTOH, I completely agree that, for whatever reasons he does what he does, it works, for now at least, tapping into an already popular opinion and re-enforcing it. The great flaw with democracy? Well, this sure is one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
So THAT'S why my PlayStation is full of quarters!
Trump is working under the worst conditions a president has ever had. The media is all out against him from the get go, biased to hell. The left refuses to even acknowledged he won and is an impediment to progress at every turn.
Your "liberals" are NOT IN POWER. Please get at least that one thing straight. Republicans control the House and Senate, case closed. Trump's failures to date are on them, not some "liberal" media.
That's Trump's own Party, supposed to be his friends, and they could care less about some "media... all out against him from the get go". They regularly bash this "biased" media of yours.
Yet even John McCain gives the thumbs-down to Trump. Why? Chiefly, because Trump picks fights with leaders of his own Party. Nevermind whatever views or causes he may or may not have, bottom-line Trump can't behave like a grown-up. That makes for great TV, and maybe it makes some people feel good ("Yeah! You tell 'em Trump!") but it doesn't get anything done.
Trump supporters need to stop asking whether they love the way-so-awesome tough shit he says and tweets, and instead ask whether they'd trust him enough, honest to God, to pay cash to buy a used car from him. Seriously. Be honest. Would you buy a used car from that man? It's the greatest, let me tell you, and don't believe those lies from the liberals at the CarFax - they're losers, this ride has never been in no accident, never been totaled, that puddle of oil is from something else, believe me.
Can you imagine fast-food with a 25% failure rate? One out of four Big Macs got food poisoning. One out of four Wendy's Chilis got a finger in it.
NOT acceptable (in Trump's America).
Where I live, more and more "grown-up" buses are going hybrid or natural-gas, much much kinder when you're stuck behind one in traffic.
But all the school buses are the same stamped-metal yellow tanks they've been using since the Korean War, blasting out as much diesel soot as a dump truck. When the school budget comes up, there's always a jaw-dropping-huge chunk set aside to fuel these horrid things.
Maybe as much could be saved by upgrading these monsters to something modern as eliminating routes and cramming more kids on the inside?
Hey, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and college-debt-hounded MIT nerds... how about solving THIS problem on the back of a napkin!
Yes!! "clean" coal shoveled into a roaring furnace by children covered in grime and soot, a fat drunkard whipping them when they slack off, red and sweaty from the steam belching from the engine as it wheezes down the alley to the workhouse!!!
Why read Dickens, when you can LIVE IT!!!
Coal - it's not just for breakfast anymore.
What is wrong with saying Rural users are better served by cellular internet, when they can get MUCH faster speeds? Sure the data caps are bad, but the why not push to get those raised for rural users instead of damning rural users to an even worse cable model hell than city users have... At least you can choose cellular providers!
That would be fine... if anyone did any pushing. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that. There's also the problem of cellular dead zones, bandwidth saturation, even weather can drop your LTE to 2G, or a tornado might knock out your tower and there's no plans to fix it until whenever. Wireless is no miracle cure... it's a profit-center for four corporations, until such time as Ajit Pai approves a merger to make them three, two, and finally just one (because DSL's all the competition any American needs).
"Ajit Pai" should now be the technical term for extremely painful and angry jock-itch between the upper thigh and testicles. . . .
a lovely thought, truly, but the world also needs "Ajit Pai" as a term for a political ass-kisser who happily accepts a position of authority over something, only to deliberately cripple that thing... yet still say with a straight face in public that he's made it better.
No conscience, no sense of irony, no imagination, no moral compass, no sense for potential, and fuck-well no thought for making life better for anyone other than himself. Not a fucking thing, so long as he's first in line to catch the scraps off whatever politician he's sucking up to.
That's an Ajit-Pai. Easier to pronounce and less elitist than "sycophantic hypocrite", and with more meaning.
Only if it has a button "up and out". That works.
(and, powered by candy?)
I was being half-snarky... the GOP health bill hasn't passed yet.
But for real, the Canada thing simply means that a cop is empowered to DO something if he sees a driver with a cell phone in his/her hand while driving, and the driver can't weasel out of it simply by claiming it was turned off, requiring the cop to prove he could tell whether it was on or off from the vantage point of his cruiser.
It's just a legal attempt, democratically passed, to get around the fact that cell phones impair drivers as much as being rip-roaring drunk, but there's no blood-alcohol test they can run on a texter to prove that he was actually texting and not just allegedly holding a switched-off phone while driving (yeah, right), particularly if the texter ditched or destroyed his phone at or just after being pulled-over or engaging in an accident.
That's right, some damn fool can kill your sister, but by raising his hand swearing in court that his phone was off just before it was thrown from his car and destroyed, there's reasonable doubt to that vehicular manslaughter charge.
Yeah, maybe there's evidence out there in cyberland, but what's to compel that knucklehead to serve up his Facebook password? Does the district have the money to subpoena the carrier, the provider, Facebook, and to carry out the cyber-forensics to prove he was texting, and not just ordinary driver careless oh gosh I didn't see the light change. Accidents happen, sorry about your sister, think of how my insurance is gonna go up and thank god my airbag worked right.
So, given that the risk of being T-Boned and instantly transformed into a quadriplegic by an asshole texter is very fucking real, please do enumerate the hardships and dangers of the so-called "nanny-state" that outweigh this attempt to put some teeth into no-texting-while-driving laws, particularly with respect to Canada.
I mean, is there evidence of waves of depressed Molson-drinking immigrants flooding over from the great North, thirsting for the Freedom to text and drive without oppression from storm-trooping Mounties?
I don't think so, I haven't seen it.
But maybe I'm wrong. Any Canadians in slashdot-land want to weigh in? Any youse guys feeling repressed up North up there? or are you guys just so chill you can live fine with your hands off your phones while driving?
You seem to be referring to the principle of a law being arbitrary and capricious, but laws are very rarely struck down on these grounds. :P
More likely, someone with a good lawyer appeals a conviction based on what satisfies "careless or imprudent", cites that there's nothing to be cited, and therefore no basis for establishing the existence of "careless or imprudent", the judge shrugs and throws out the conviction. Once this catches on, cases will be dismissed outright unless a cop presents evidence that's really compelling that might persuade a judge to go on record that "careless or imprudent" is satisfied (i.e., judge-made law, as a result of poorly worded law passed by the legislature), or the legislature gets its act together, tells the wireless lobby to "stuff it", and amends the law to define what the hell "careless or imprudent" actually means.
But that's just my opinion.
I'd rather live in a socialist nanny state then get T-Boned by some damn fool texting his way straight through a red light.
Shucks, that nanny state might come in handy at the hospital for patching you back up after an accident like that.
In Trump country with the GOP in charge, first responders will be checking your credit rating before even bothering with expensive equipment like the jaws of life. Hell, you might not even be worth the foam to put the fire out - let it burn out on its own, haul off your dead ass together with your ruined car, send the towing bill with the collection agency after your next of kin.
The NSA doesn't report bugs and vulnerabilities back to the tech company.
If I had a choice of disclosing my source code to either the Russians or the NSA, I would pick the Russians.
Be careful what you wish for. The NSA may bust your neighbor for hoarding bomb-making material, or fink you to the FBI for your 15-year collection of kiddy-pr0n. The Russians, OTOH, will cut the power to your town on the hottest day of the year, brick the machine in the hospital that's keeping you alive, make your bank account disappear, make ships, drones and planes crash into each other, and turn your home router into a trove of kiddy-pr0n while finking you out to the FBI, and even rig media and election machines to put a failing businessman turned reality-TV show host into the White House. Why? For a laugh at our expense (what else is there to do fun in Russia?), and to show Big Boss Putin what they can do in hopes of catching a few scraps from his table.
It ain't a great choice, nor do I have it, but I'll take the NSA, thank you.
Truly. If they're sharing them with Russia, they should share with EVERYONE - draw an open-source license.
IBM et al. are biting the bullet because they want to sell to the Russian market... perhaps because if they don't, someone else will and make lots of oil-soaked rubles and countless Russian intangibles. But if they give away these "secrets" to the Russians, we can pretty much assume such secrets are in the wild, perhaps immediately handed to the teams of patriotic but not-at-all-affiliated with the government Russians (wink, wink) who are taking down Ukrane's power grid. The point of keeping them secret is so that other people won't copy what you've done and sell it and compete with you. But for sure that's exactly what the Russians will do with this... build their own so they don't have to give up their oil rubles to Western companies. And there's no guarantee the Russians won't sell what they've learned to the Chinese (or any other highest bidder), who will be happy to pass it on to some half-state-owned conglomerate to build their own equipment for 1/1000 of what the Western companies would sell for.
The only people NOT getting in on the source code is the open-source community who might do something good with it, like find bugs.
Put short, if you're going to have to open your code to Russia to sell to Russia, draw an open-source license first. If you can't afford the open-source community to see and copy your code, you damn well can't afford the Russians to do it.
Me, if I want to purchase "secure" equipment from these companies, I damn-well want to make they're products that have NOT been sold and opened-up to the Russians, or for my money such equipment is de-facto NON-secure. Should have some kind of NOT OPENED TO RUSSIANS certification or something.
The source of all of this is the back-room, corner-office rants of Comcast, AT&T, Charter and other carriers that Google, Amazon, Uber and Netflix have made billions over their pipes. It's the same thing that if the mafia boss hadn't been scaring off the petty thieves from robbing your store, you wouldn't be successful today, so pay up the protection racket and be happy with it. I suppose building out an internet from backbone to last mile is a thankless, un-sexy job compared to making movies and selling stuff. Why shouldn't they get a piece of that action? I'm sure major Activest Investors are pressuring CEO's with that question all the time. Comcast, at least, put the question a little bit to bed by buying NBC/Universal and becoming content-creators themselves.
But Net Neutrality will never be quite as simple as common-carrier was with the plain-old telephone system (POTS). No, Comcast shouldn't be able to extort more money out of Netflix, even though Netflix may be the service that's choking up their antiquated lines somewhere, generating complaints and forcing them to pay for upgrades in a region they weren't planning to upgrade for a while. But what about E911? or catastrophe alerts? Should that get prioritized? What about when surgeons start running robots on the operating table over the internet... should they get the opportunity to arrange for a near-real-time point-to-point pipe? Wall Street will pay big bucks for that kind of throughput, if that means they can robo-trade just one nano-second ahead of their competitors.
These are policy questions that need smart, thoughtful far-sighted people to work out in a way that benefits everyone in the right way. But our current political climate is a lot of shouting, short-sighted fake-news FUD, coupled with I'm-just-looking-out-for-me bullshit. So, I'm not holding my breath for any resolution soon. "Net Neutrality" will keep coming up, generate a lot of shouting, followed by confused looks, and then out-and-out falsehoods on Fox and Friends:
what is this "neutrality" anyway? isn't this just a way to shut down the bloggers? this is a free country, I have strong opinions and I shouldn't be forced to be "neutral" on the Internet if I don't want to be...
whereupon Net Neutrality will go dormant for a month or two before another big tech CEO brings it back up again.
Yep. Reported right here, one month ago.
and it's not the desktops you should be worried about. It's the ATM's, cash registers, medical/hospital machines, metro/subway kiosks, traffic-light controllers, maybe even devices used by Army field personnel or on Navy ships and submarines (horrors...), uncounted masses of machines in use every day that you'd never guess are running Windows XP with no viable means of upgrading short of scrapping them entirely. XP lived long enough to become the go-to OS for way too much stuff.
Ya know, I'm cool with what you say. Just don't be cruel with that "natural selection" bit, because mistakes happen, particularly with kids. And these days, drugs are a lot more about powders and pills than natural-looking sticky green leafy stuff, buttons of sticky putty stuff, or funny-looking brown foul-smelling fungal stuff picked off cow-shit. Today's reality is you can't eyeball a potency of a powder or pill. That's why fentanyl is killing people. It's ten fucking times more potent than heroin, but in its way, more easily available than heroin, so it makes sense to senseless dealers to mix in with heroin and pass on as heroin, and a kid hitting a little bit won't know the difference before she's collapsed after one snort and can't get back up, all while her friends bolt the hell out of there because they don't wanna go to jail.
I had a healthy fear of hard drugs growing up. The story of Janis Joplin going down because her last hit had way more potency than she expected struck me hard. SRV fell off the stage spitting blood because cocaine and bourbon had crystalized in his stomach and cut him the hell up. That was enough for me. But kids today wanna go to raves, not acid tests, and by that age they (or someone they know) have already been sharing ritalin and other study drugs, in pill form, every cram season. Crush it and snort it to get it going faster. Is the needle so out of the question, particularly when you're girlfriend is Type-I diabetic and hits insulin several times a day? Welcome to 2017: overdosing is not just for "junkies" anymore.
And....natural selection will continue to clean the gene pool.
Cute. Clever. Until it's your daughter, baby sister, cousin or best friend who was just out with friends one night and took a dose of something 'cause people she trusted were giving it a try and the dose looked small and it didn't seem to be doing any harm and she didn't want to be the one pissing on the fun. Yep, it's sure easy to feel superior by requiring everyone else in the world to be perfect at all times and then there wouldn't be any problems anymore anywhere ever.
Forget Nuclear power. It's not going to happen because when you break ground for a new plant thousands of crazy people
Some nuclear-friendly federal regulation and funding could fix that. Research funding into next-gen safer designs? Streamlined permit approvals toward pilot programs? Tax incentives, perhaps to convert aging coal plants? A little DARPA action, enough to encourage universities to offer nuclear engineering degrees again?
When the Soviets were around, propagandizing a nuclear world with nuclear plants that fit on trucks to show off how nuclear they were, the U.S. was red hot to show how nuclear it could be. Now with the Soviets and their propaganda gone, U.S. politicians have no balls for moon-shot beat-the-russians tech stuff.
Or maybe it's not completely gone. The Russians and the Chinese are getting back into nuclear, even in spite of the Russians sitting on shit-tons of fossil fuels. The Chinese want to quickly power up these little islands they're building in the China Sea to claim as their new territory. The Russians want to fill the melting Arctic with flag-flying nuclear ice-breakers to get at all the stuff up there (the U.S. hasn't built an ice-breaker since the late 1970s). Gosh, if we would only elect Congress-people who gave a fuck, we might be able to get in on this while there's something still to get got.
You have zero outlets in your home? Is it a tent?
Some people live in apartments. You know, those tall things - some with covered parking and some without. Management doesn't take kindly to running 100-yard cables out your window to a car parked 3 floors below.
Even townhome-living people are SOL for EVs if they don't have a garage or at least have their own driveway.
Even if you're not a Deadhead, Amir Bar-Lev's Long Strange Trip, just released on Amazon Prime, is a really excellent documentary about the band, the times that produced them, and how the times changed. If for nothing else, it's amazing to see the film footage of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and other figures from the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for whom the then-called Warlocks were the original house band.
The Big Short is the best conversion of a non-fiction book I've seen dramatized into a movie, as it somehow manages to teach you the financial math that led to the housing bubble and how a few people foresaw it and cashed in huge on it.
The same author, Michael Lewis, is also behind the non-fiction book that became Moneyball.
Along the same lines, also recommend Margin Call and Boiler Room.
Full title: Note By Note - The Making Of Steinway L1037. Amazing. Makes you want to move to Brooklyn just to sweep the floors in the factory.
Also recommend Hamiltons America, both for the history, which is very real, and as a means of getting the feel of the musical without having to shell out a crazy-high ticket price :)
The mini-series John Adams starring Paul Giamatti was rivetting and revealing (available on Amazon Prime).
To be fair, this is actually a tactic that works politically. It doesn't work at making the world a better place, but it does work at staying popular because you are simply tapping into already popular opinion and re-enforcing it. It is the great flaw with democracy, you end up with the leadership you deserve rather than what you need.
I'm not convinced that this is a "tactic" that T or a crony actually thought through before he did it. I'm still of the barely-informed opinion that T's just winging-it up there, and these tweets and phone calls are childish and/or desperate attempts to get some positive feedback for doing something he's already decided to do.
OTOH, I completely agree that, for whatever reasons he does what he does, it works, for now at least, tapping into an already popular opinion and re-enforcing it. The great flaw with democracy? Well, this sure is one of them.