Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.
"How can the government of country A fine a company from country B any money when that company's dealing has NOTHING to do with country A in the first place ???"
Empire. Rules of an empire. We've thousands of nukes, hundreds of military bases in a hundred+ counties, and we create every single "treaty" that governs our actions. You are either a vassal, or a cooperating and subordinate power.
Americans are fine with this idea. They never leave home much, and even if they did, they would not mind the hate. We are the fhining City on the Hill, the Nation Favoured by Providence, the people chosen by God Almighty to lead the world to a perfect age, so that Jesuf can come back, deftroy the world, hurl the unbelieverf and the wicked into the Pit of Fire for ever and ever and build a new Fhining City of Gold for uf, the chofen, to live with Jefus forever, along with perhaps a few foreigners who listened to the Holy Word of America.
If you don't understand the news coming from America, the above is THE explanation. You need no others; it is not hyperbole. And it will get so much worse.
American incomes have been stagnant, or declining in real purchasing power for thirty years. That hasn't not happened in Germany, which allows unions to exist - and operate properly. A large number of the American middle class are months away from losing their homes, given a health cost issue or a job loss, a situation that doesn't happen often in Germany. We are adopting private solar plants at a slower rate primarily because a chunk of our middle class can't afford it, not with the hell that they've been taking since the "free marketers" took over. Germany's people are more secure and more prosperous, because they've made fewer ideological decisions about income distribution. Germany ain't perfect, but it's middle class is richer than ours. It's that simple.
It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer. They are an economic powerhouse with strong exports, a union-based worker's economy, and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun, in something less than ten-twenty years. WHILE they absorbed a pauperized East Germany after the Soviets finally gave up. Oh yep - they innovate like mad. With health care for everyone. Randites, avoiding the No True Scottman fallacy, examine why you are wrong on this. Seriously, before your wreck us beyond repair.
The universe is indeed full of life. And life becomes intelligent and thrives. And every ten million years or so... Gets hit by a meteor. Another meteor. Comet this time. Solar flare. Nearby nova, supernova or far-away hypernova fries them. Ice age. Heat age. Bacteria this time. Here comes some volcanoes. Food poisoning. Drought. Floods come. War. Mutations. And finally, time happens, if nothing else. The universe is full of life - BUT NOT ALL AT THE SAME TIME, and not all at a time that happens, in each case, to emit radiation that arrives at our sensors at this tiny opportunity of ours to detect it. The universe is full of little flashes of life in the dark that wink on and off like fireflies, and we can't possibly see them - in time. We are alone, and we had better damned well take care of ourselves. PS: what makes people think that successful life stays on a planet? That's a surefire way to die, by the list of events above. Successful life gets off the planet, builds terraria in orbit, and sends some off into the darkness to spread and survive the death of the home planet. At the very least. At the most, they spread into adjacent universes or dimensions. Or even travel in time, whatever that is. Life, successful life that lives a long time, grows up and gets out of the petri dish. Or dies with all the other failed flashes of life.
No smart anything. Just 1080p or 2196p, various sizes. Good prices. Good picture. No camera. No mic. No spyware. No need to hook it to the internet. A TV, not a computer, at least not the kind of computer the others want you to have. A 4K 30fps 39 inch display/TV for $499? Bit more for more screen space. Why not? Good enough for movies.
And bosses love employees who live in terror of losing their jobs at any time. Keeps the complaints and wages down. And you still get to sack them, in the end. And get a bonus and a raise.
The problems which ensue are the cloud company's problem, so win-win-win-win for the MBAs.
I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.
I replace the word "cloud" with mainframe. 'Cause that's what a mainframe is. Amazing to think that the Hollywood movie script writers are getting it right by accident now.
And yup, it means a lot of people are out of jobs. Nope, it doesn't mean they work for the mainframe companies, as they obviously don't require as much staff. And a boon for the NSA, FBI, IRS and other Three Letter Names, as now we are all nicely lined up like humans in a Matrix power tower, oblivious to the complete exposure of our data to any schmuck with power who wants to access it.
Republican states, almost invariably, pay less to the federal kitty than the federal kitty pays back. They've great roads because they're on federal road welfare.
We've too many roads going to too many places that don't justify the expense of dropping 40 million a mile. And it is about aging.
It's a rolling problem. We started out with town roads, then county roads, then state roads, then interstates. And we happily kept building more. But the roads fall apart on a steady schedule even as we merrily throw down more. What happens is you spend more every year just to keep up what your great-grandfather made, your grandfather made, your father made, and eventually the backlog of the rebuilding costs more than you can pay - and your infrastructure falls apart, slowly at first, then the process accelerates.
You can either let it die, or raise taxes, and of course lower costs by eliminating unions, using immigrant labor, removing health benefits from labor and taking advantage of new road-laying tech. But it's obvious by gross evidence that we can't keep up. We don't want to be taxed enough to maintain the backlog.
Question about this glass isn't about how much it costs - the first part of the cost accounting problem - but how much it saves over time. If the glass wears longer and as a grid produces three times more power than the entire nation requires, then it is worth more than the asphalt roads made of oil.
The road lasts longer. It self-lights. New energy grid. More power than we need, with over-production used to melt snow. Acts as a information highway, literally. Needs no new land. Could self-plow. Hell, it could power electric vehicles by induction. Remember, a stretch of highway can use more power than it produces because is part of a grid of all roads, some of which overproduce electricity.
Any commissioner with backbone will be fired by a, sorry to point out the obvious, Republican president in less than two years, probably. And then, poof! goes the man with the backbone, a new commissioner with more Comcastic ideas will be appointed, and all will be for nothing. Democracy sucks when one party is insane. Nothing remotely good can last for more than a decade or so. And we don't even have remotely good at this time. Image how much worse it will be.
Consider: radio interference is not a physical phenomenon, but a result of our limited abilities to process signals. Interference can be beaten with the right algorithms and fast signal processors.
We could, in theory, broadcast different streams on the same frequencies, and so open up the entire spectrum to anyone who wants to use it. Money, brains, and time, and it can be done. Channel 2 can broadcast on the same frequency as channel 7. All the TV channels can broadcast on one frequency. We are not limited by the problems of 1950.
What if that could be done? It means hundreds of TV channels on the air. Thousands. It means you don't need a wire to watch TV, or surf the internet. "New radio" could blow this monopoly straight to hell. And happily, we wouldn't need megacorporations anymore - it could be done locally. Bring back the towers.
Canada has freemarketitis, courtesy of a parliamentary system that invests a man with 15% of the popular vote to maintain an iron grip on the federal government for the foreseeable future. The damage that bastard and his neocon friends are doing. Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.
The US writes all the treaties. Amazing how that works.
"How can the government of country A fine a company from country B any money when that company's dealing has NOTHING to do with country A in the first place ???"
Empire. Rules of an empire. We've thousands of nukes, hundreds of military bases in a hundred+ counties, and we create every single "treaty" that governs our actions. You are either a vassal, or a cooperating and subordinate power.
Americans are fine with this idea. They never leave home much, and even if they did, they would not mind the hate. We are the fhining City on the Hill, the Nation Favoured by Providence, the people chosen by God Almighty to lead the world to a perfect age, so that Jesuf can come back, deftroy the world, hurl the unbelieverf and the wicked into the Pit of Fire for ever and ever and build a new Fhining City of Gold for uf, the chofen, to live with Jefus forever, along with perhaps a few foreigners who listened to the Holy Word of America.
If you don't understand the news coming from America, the above is THE explanation. You need no others; it is not hyperbole. And it will get so much worse.
American incomes have been stagnant, or declining in real purchasing power for thirty years. That hasn't not happened in Germany, which allows unions to exist - and operate properly.
A large number of the American middle class are months away from losing their homes, given a health cost issue or a job loss, a situation that doesn't happen often in Germany.
We are adopting private solar plants at a slower rate primarily because a chunk of our middle class can't afford it, not with the hell that they've been taking since the "free marketers" took over. Germany's people are more secure and more prosperous, because they've made fewer ideological decisions about income distribution.
Germany ain't perfect, but it's middle class is richer than ours. It's that simple.
It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer.
They are an economic powerhouse with strong exports, a union-based worker's economy, and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun, in something less than ten-twenty years. WHILE they absorbed a pauperized East Germany after the Soviets finally gave up. Oh yep - they innovate like mad. With health care for everyone.
Randites, avoiding the No True Scottman fallacy, examine why you are wrong on this. Seriously, before your wreck us beyond repair.
The universe is indeed full of life. And life becomes intelligent and thrives. And every ten million years or so...
Gets hit by a meteor.
Another meteor.
Comet this time.
Solar flare.
Nearby nova, supernova or far-away hypernova fries them.
Ice age.
Heat age.
Bacteria this time.
Here comes some volcanoes.
Food poisoning.
Drought.
Floods come.
War.
Mutations.
And finally, time happens, if nothing else. The universe is full of life - BUT NOT ALL AT THE SAME TIME, and not all at a time that happens, in each case, to emit radiation that arrives at our sensors at this tiny opportunity of ours to detect it. The universe is full of little flashes of life in the dark that wink on and off like fireflies, and we can't possibly see them - in time. We are alone, and we had better damned well take care of ourselves.
PS: what makes people think that successful life stays on a planet? That's a surefire way to die, by the list of events above. Successful life gets off the planet, builds terraria in orbit, and sends some off into the darkness to spread and survive the death of the home planet. At the very least. At the most, they spread into adjacent universes or dimensions. Or even travel in time, whatever that is. Life, successful life that lives a long time, grows up and gets out of the petri dish. Or dies with all the other failed flashes of life.
A TV that's just a TV:
http://www.seiki.com/
buy 'em here:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb...
Robert Heron reviews:
http://www.heronfidelity.com/b...
No smart anything. Just 1080p or 2196p, various sizes. Good prices. Good picture. No camera. No mic. No spyware. No need to hook it to the internet. A TV, not a computer, at least not the kind of computer the others want you to have. A 4K 30fps 39 inch display/TV for $499? Bit more for more screen space. Why not? Good enough for movies.
No one. But the blame isn't the CEO's, which is all that matters.
And bosses love employees who live in terror of losing their jobs at any time. Keeps the complaints and wages down. And you still get to sack them, in the end. And get a bonus and a raise.
The problems which ensue are the cloud company's problem, so win-win-win-win for the MBAs.
The decision will be made by MBAs. Sanity has little to do with it.
I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.
I replace the word "cloud" with mainframe. 'Cause that's what a mainframe is. Amazing to think that the Hollywood movie script writers are getting it right by accident now.
And yup, it means a lot of people are out of jobs. Nope, it doesn't mean they work for the mainframe companies, as they obviously don't require as much staff. And a boon for the NSA, FBI, IRS and other Three Letter Names, as now we are all nicely lined up like humans in a Matrix power tower, oblivious to the complete exposure of our data to any schmuck with power who wants to access it.
Their bosses.
Let's build a few miles of solar roads and find out.
The road-surface lights go on in an emergency situation, I'd think. Not really necessary. But the roads could power the overhead lights at night.
Rush Limbaugh posts here?
Republican states, almost invariably, pay less to the federal kitty than the federal kitty pays back. They've great roads because they're on federal road welfare.
We've too many roads going to too many places that don't justify the expense of dropping 40 million a mile. And it is about aging.
It's a rolling problem. We started out with town roads, then county roads, then state roads, then interstates. And we happily kept building more. But the roads fall apart on a steady schedule even as we merrily throw down more. What happens is you spend more every year just to keep up what your great-grandfather made, your grandfather made, your father made, and eventually the backlog of the rebuilding costs more than you can pay - and your infrastructure falls apart, slowly at first, then the process accelerates.
You can either let it die, or raise taxes, and of course lower costs by eliminating unions, using immigrant labor, removing health benefits from labor and taking advantage of new road-laying tech. But it's obvious by gross evidence that we can't keep up. We don't want to be taxed enough to maintain the backlog.
Question about this glass isn't about how much it costs - the first part of the cost accounting problem - but how much it saves over time. If the glass wears longer and as a grid produces three times more power than the entire nation requires, then it is worth more than the asphalt roads made of oil.
The road lasts longer. It self-lights. New energy grid. More power than we need, with over-production used to melt snow. Acts as a information highway, literally. Needs no new land. Could self-plow. Hell, it could power electric vehicles by induction. Remember, a stretch of highway can use more power than it produces because is part of a grid of all roads, some of which overproduce electricity.
Rain.
Glass is a lot tougher than people think. This glass especially - it takes a quarter million tons to crack it. They broke the testing machine.
Any commissioner with backbone will be fired by a, sorry to point out the obvious, Republican president in less than two years, probably. And then, poof! goes the man with the backbone, a new commissioner with more Comcastic ideas will be appointed, and all will be for nothing. Democracy sucks when one party is insane. Nothing remotely good can last for more than a decade or so. And we don't even have remotely good at this time. Image how much worse it will be.
He understands it just fine. They are re-setting up the groundwork to steal every penny they can, once again.
Consider: radio interference is not a physical phenomenon, but a result of our limited abilities to process signals. Interference can be beaten with the right algorithms and fast signal processors.
We could, in theory, broadcast different streams on the same frequencies, and so open up the entire spectrum to anyone who wants to use it. Money, brains, and time, and it can be done. Channel 2 can broadcast on the same frequency as channel 7. All the TV channels can broadcast on one frequency. We are not limited by the problems of 1950.
What if that could be done? It means hundreds of TV channels on the air. Thousands. It means you don't need a wire to watch TV, or surf the internet. "New radio" could blow this monopoly straight to hell. And happily, we wouldn't need megacorporations anymore - it could be done locally. Bring back the towers.
Canada has freemarketitis, courtesy of a parliamentary system that invests a man with 15% of the popular vote to maintain an iron grip on the federal government for the foreseeable future. The damage that bastard and his neocon friends are doing. Damn.