I live in an Ohio town of about 45,000 people. The town supplies water and sewage service. They provide electric transmission service to all the houses in the town and buy electricity in bulk from a local commercial power company. We pay lower electric rates than neighboring cities and get better service (fewer outages, lines fixed quicker after storms). I deal with a commercial natural gas company that handles transmission and billing. I use (my selection) a different company that is my supplier of natural gas. So, what's the problem with splitting up Internet service?
It's needed, but costly, heavily regulated (requires right of way, tearing up streets), and has a low ROI. Sounds like a reasonable function for local government (like roads and schools). But no, it doesn't get rid of the private ISP. Still a need for high availability service, billing, support, home installation of equipment, value add services, etc. All of which is not a reasonable function of government.
Here's what I would do: cities and towns provide the infrastructure for the last mile. They connect fiber to homes, schools, and businesses and run it to a neighborhood hub. In rural areas, counties could build towers for 4G wireless. Then the big carriers would connect to the hubs (multiple carriers per hub for maximum competition) and charge for service. Local government would be responsible for deploying and maintaining last mile service, private carriers would compete to supply internet connections and other services (telecomm, video) at the best possible prices. Of course, I don't expect any of this to actually happen...
Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures
Phil Jones has admitted that there has been no global warming since 1995. The CRU was massaging the data to show warming that wasn't there. NASA was cherry picking data from urban heat islands to show warming that wasn't there.
I've been a Sprint customer for quite a few years. My family has three phones on a family plan w. "unlimited" texts and data. I'd rate Sprint as follows:
Pros
1) Price - best pricing for the family plan of the major wireless carriers. 2) Network coverage - good. Good coverage everywhere I need it (home, work, daughter at university). Gotten coverage in some surprising places - like camping and hiking many miles from a major highway.
Cons
1) Customer service - horrible, truly horrible. Any time I have a problem, I can expect to make multiple calls, to get incorrect information, to be lied to. ALMOST as bad as AT&T. 2) Phone selection - AT&T has the IPhone, Verizon seems to be getting more interesting smart phones (like the Droid) before Sprint.
Just becasue someone tells you they are worried about a passenger is no reason to stop them
Agreed, you have to take the source into account. In this case, it was a well known respected international banker who met in person with officials to express concerns about his son being involved in terrorism. A very credible source that was ignored. Combine that with no passport, a one-way ticket paid for with cash, and no luggage and alarms should have gone off.
1) Don't let passengers on an international flight who don't have passports. 2) Question and search passengers who are on a terror watch list. 3) Don't let passengers on a flight when their father warns you that they're a terror risk. 4) Don't announce that "the system worked" when it was an epic failure.
Developing a service (perhaps SaaS) to compute local taxes from an address would be possible but complex. As has been pointed out you cannot simply map a zip code to a sales tax. There are state, county, and local tax jurisdictions, sometimes more than one in a given zip code. Rules vary widely depending on what is being purchased. Some items like groceries may have lower tax rates or be tax free. Others like beer and wine have higher tax rates. Purchased items would have to be categorized based on their tax liability and compared to rates for that class of item.
And assuming that such a service was available and it's underlying database was fully populated - it would have to be kept up to date. Every time a state, county, or city changed it's tax rates or rules, the database would have to be updated.
There's the issue of who has legal responsibility if the database gets out of date. Is it the merchant or the service provider. Either way, it could prove expensive, and that expense will no doubt be passed to the consumer.
Finally, there's the remittance issue - the merchant would have thousands of payment transactions ranging from millions of dollars to pennies to various taxing jurisdictions. Again, the overhead would be passed on to the consumer.
Congress could simplify this by creating a national tax on on-line transactions. They could pick an arbitrary rate - 6%, 8%, 10%... and charge that on all on-line transactions. The money could be collected by the federal government and distributed to the states. The states could re-distribute the money to counties and cities if they chose to.
The current Congress is fairly "tax friendly", so it should be relatively simple to pass. States are almost uniformly in budget crisis, so such a measure would have considerable support by many state and local politicians.
Whether such a solution is wise, or desirable by the citizens of the country - well I'll leave that to the reader.
Don't all apocalypse movies start with ominous scientific discoveries in remote geographical locations?
I hereby predict that within 4 or 5 years the UN will unveil a scheme to Save Mankind from, ummmmmmm, a passing neutron star. The scheme will feature several hundred billion dollars given to UN bureaucrats, corrupt NGO's and various tinpot dictators and tyrants
As an American, I'm sorry. We're not all idiots, and I promise you that those of us with at least a modicum of intelligence feel just as alienated and bewildered by the insanity that has apparently overtaken our country.
But don't worry we'll fix it in the next election. Or the one after that. Or the one after...
Interesting how the argument in favor of AGW has evolved.
First we had "They science is settled. The scientific community agrees about man-made global warming (cause we won't let contrary views get published). Besides anyone who denies it is a stupid poopy-head!".
Then when the climate-gate memos came out we had "No smoking gun. It's all taken out of context. Nothing to see here, move along".
Now that it appears serious scientific fraud was committed, we have "Even IF the data is fake, we should still spend several hundred billions dollars cause otherwise climate change will kill everyone on the planet".
That's exactly the point - CRU stonewalled for years on releasing their raw data and then conveniently 'lost' it. NASA is being sued for their data and have fought releasing it for two years. New Zealand researchers have been accused of fudging their data. Science is by nature an open enterprise - if these researchers refuse to release their raw data, refuse to release the source code for their models, stonewall the release of data, actively try to suppress critics in their field, and either ignore or corrupt the peer review process than they are NOT practicing science. Thus any 'results' they get should be put in the same class as 'cold fusion', 'creationism', and the 'Loch Ness Monter'.
Slashdot Mirror
They are saving money, because any off-the-shelf time-tracking software would cost much more than $722 million. Oh, wait ...
87.24% of statistics are made up.
I live in an Ohio town of about 45,000 people. The town supplies water and sewage service. They provide electric transmission service to all the houses in the town and buy electricity in bulk from a local commercial power company. We pay lower electric rates than neighboring cities and get better service (fewer outages, lines fixed quicker after storms). I deal with a commercial natural gas company that handles transmission and billing. I use (my selection) a different company that is my supplier of natural gas. So, what's the problem with splitting up Internet service?
It's needed, but costly, heavily regulated (requires right of way, tearing up streets), and has a low ROI. Sounds like a reasonable function for local government (like roads and schools). But no, it doesn't get rid of the private ISP. Still a need for high availability service, billing, support, home installation of equipment, value add services, etc. All of which is not a reasonable function of government.
Here's what I would do: cities and towns provide the infrastructure for the last mile. They connect fiber to homes, schools, and businesses and run it to a neighborhood hub. In rural areas, counties could build towers for 4G wireless. Then the big carriers would connect to the hubs (multiple carriers per hub for maximum competition) and charge for service. Local government would be responsible for deploying and maintaining last mile service, private carriers would compete to supply internet connections and other services (telecomm, video) at the best possible prices. Of course, I don't expect any of this to actually happen ...
Not surprisingly, the list of CAPS-approved products is quite short
PGP Whole Disk Encryption is on the 'CAPS-approved' list.
Why didn't the UK mandate TrueCrypt (or equivalent) on laptops holding sensitive data?
Yeah, you with the red shirt. Stop reading slashdot and pay attention to the lecture.
You could use long strips of paper with holes punched in it (or not punched). Or you could build one of these with a somewhat longer strip of paper.
Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures
Phil Jones has admitted that there has been no global warming since 1995. The CRU was massaging the data to show warming that wasn't there. NASA was cherry picking data from urban heat islands to show warming that wasn't there.
So where's Lynx?
Thomas Paine would not approve.
I've been a Sprint customer for quite a few years. My family has three phones on a family plan w. "unlimited" texts and data. I'd rate Sprint as follows:
Pros
1) Price - best pricing for the family plan of the major wireless carriers.
2) Network coverage - good. Good coverage everywhere I need it (home, work, daughter at university). Gotten coverage in some surprising places - like camping and hiking many miles from a major highway.
Cons
1) Customer service - horrible, truly horrible. Any time I have a problem, I can expect to make multiple calls, to get incorrect information, to be lied to. ALMOST as bad as AT&T.
2) Phone selection - AT&T has the IPhone, Verizon seems to be getting more interesting smart phones (like the Droid) before Sprint.
It's OK, his goal is simply to create a better world. Or, it's "for the children". Or some other excuse favored by fascists.
Looking forward to the console port on the PS/5, the Xbox 1080, and the Wii III.
Just becasue someone tells you they are worried about a passenger is no reason to stop them
Agreed, you have to take the source into account. In this case, it was a well known respected international banker who met in person with officials to express concerns about his son being involved in terrorism. A very credible source that was ignored. Combine that with no passport, a one-way ticket paid for with cash, and no luggage and alarms should have gone off.
How 'bout using common sense:
1) Don't let passengers on an international flight who don't have passports.
2) Question and search passengers who are on a terror watch list.
3) Don't let passengers on a flight when their father warns you that they're a terror risk.
4) Don't announce that "the system worked" when it was an epic failure.
Developing a service (perhaps SaaS) to compute local taxes from an address would be possible but complex. As has been pointed out you cannot simply map a zip code to a sales tax. There are state, county, and local tax jurisdictions, sometimes more than one in a given zip code. Rules vary widely depending on what is being purchased. Some items like groceries may have lower tax rates or be tax free. Others like beer and wine have higher tax rates. Purchased items would have to be categorized based on their tax liability and compared to rates for that class of item.
And assuming that such a service was available and it's underlying database was fully populated - it would have to be kept up to date. Every time a state, county, or city changed it's tax rates or rules, the database would have to be updated.
There's the issue of who has legal responsibility if the database gets out of date. Is it the merchant or the service provider. Either way, it could prove expensive, and that expense will no doubt be passed to the consumer.
Finally, there's the remittance issue - the merchant would have thousands of payment transactions ranging from millions of dollars to pennies to various taxing jurisdictions. Again, the overhead would be passed on to the consumer.
Congress could simplify this by creating a national tax on on-line transactions. They could pick an arbitrary rate - 6%, 8%, 10% ... and charge that on all on-line transactions. The money could be collected by the federal government and distributed to the states. The states could re-distribute the money to counties and cities if they chose to.
The current Congress is fairly "tax friendly", so it should be relatively simple to pass. States are almost uniformly in budget crisis, so such a measure would have considerable support by many state and local politicians.
Whether such a solution is wise, or desirable by the citizens of the country - well I'll leave that to the reader.
Don't all apocalypse movies start with ominous scientific discoveries in remote geographical locations?
I hereby predict that within 4 or 5 years the UN will unveil a scheme to Save Mankind from, ummmmmmm, a passing neutron star. The scheme will feature several hundred billion dollars given to UN bureaucrats, corrupt NGO's and various tinpot dictators and tyrants
Fixed it for ya.
As an American, I'm sorry. We're not all idiots, and I promise you that those of us with at least a modicum of intelligence feel just as alienated and bewildered by the insanity that has apparently overtaken our country.
But don't worry we'll fix it in the next election. Or the one after that. Or the one after ...
Interesting how the argument in favor of AGW has evolved.
First we had "They science is settled. The scientific community agrees about man-made global warming (cause we won't let contrary views get published). Besides anyone who denies it is a stupid poopy-head!".
Then when the climate-gate memos came out we had "No smoking gun. It's all taken out of context. Nothing to see here, move along".
Now that it appears serious scientific fraud was committed, we have "Even IF the data is fake, we should still spend several hundred billions dollars cause otherwise climate change will kill everyone on the planet".
Bernie Madoff was an amateur.
I'm sure the top priority will be catching those EVIL copyright violators.
Take a look at the data for your fucking self
That's exactly the point - CRU stonewalled for years on releasing their raw data and then conveniently 'lost' it. NASA is being sued for their data and have fought releasing it for two years. New Zealand researchers have been accused of fudging their data. Science is by nature an open enterprise - if these researchers refuse to release their raw data, refuse to release the source code for their models, stonewall the release of data, actively try to suppress critics in their field, and either ignore or corrupt the peer review process than they are NOT practicing science. Thus any 'results' they get should be put in the same class as 'cold fusion', 'creationism', and the 'Loch Ness Monter'.
Here's a picture of five of them in action.
I'm somewhat wary of this: "IR Blaster to change the TV channels in your set top box". Seems like a bit of a hack.