However, many had the naive belief that a neutral Judiciacy, in particular the SCOTUS, acted as a bulwark against the tyrannical tendencies on the hill and in the White House.
To be fair, I don't think anyone ever believed that FISA was anything other than a kangaroo court with which the CIA and NSA could bureaucratically cover their asses. It's certainly disappointing that SCOTUS has so frequently declined even to hear PATRIOT-related cases: we deserve to have them make a final judgement whether bulk data collection/archiving constitutes search, or whether you really can bypass the 4th Amendment by claiming that it's only a search if a human looks at it.
The point is though that Tesla does not HAVE to have the laws change to start selling cars in Texas.
It just wants to for some reason. Probably increased profit most likely.
Of course the manufacturer-owned showroom/service centers mean more profit for Tesla. Traditional dealers gain a lot from the commodity nature of ICE vehicles - servicing a Toyota is not that much different from servicing a Ford or a Ferrari. Oil change, coolant change,... the parts may be different shapes or sizes, but they all have fundamentally the same function, and a decent mechanic can do a reasonable job on any of them.
Tesla is different, and general ICE knowledge will not help much. The battery cooling system and ICE cooling systems have very different requirements. Tesla does have hydraulic brakes to back up the regenerative system, and it has wheels and steering linkages like any car, but much of its performance is software and electronics that are outside of traditional auto mechanics. Tesla has little to gain and much to lose by working with existing dealers.
It helps that they can sell "bypassing dealerships" to the public as cutting out a middleman, cutting out some of the least trusted salespeople on the planet, and cutting out unreliable and overpriced service centers. Fundamentally, though, it's about brand-integrity and maintaining profit centers.
Bullshit. There's absolutely no reason why Tesla couldn't open a training program to begin certifying maintenance techs for their vehicles. If they are somehow able to service the car in such a "superior" way then they certainly have the ability to codify and document those "superior" procedures, then actually make techs who wish to become certified demonstrate an appropriate level of competency with the maintenance procedures. Then dealers wishing to provide "Tesla Certified" maintenance would simply require their techs to acquire that certification.
I don't think you understand the situation. Traditional dealers make a lot of their money selling warranties and overpriced service after the sale. Tesla operates a nationwide network of service centers and charges $600 for annual service. Why should Tesla be any more anxious to give up that service than your local Ford dealer is to recommend you use JiffyLube for oil changes?
Right now, Tesla has a de facto monopoly on the technical expertise required to service their vehicles. You can't take it down to the neighborhood mechanic for work, because they just don't know its systems. You'd have better luck with the local dryer repairman. It's in Tesla's interest to keep as much service in-house as possible, for exactly the same reasons as traditional dealers.
If those procedures don't exist, then the vehicle is not ready for mass market - Tesla WILL NOT be able to keep up with the maintenance work as their sales grow. Can you, for a minute, imagine if every time you needed anything done on your vehicle, you had to ship it to Nevada, and wait a couple weeks? Who's going to buy that shit?
You're not paying attention. Tesla has its own network of service centers, more-or-less equivalent to the traditional network of dealers. Tesla wants to maintain ownership, control, and share profits of those showroom/service centers, where traditional dealerships are legally required to be independent. Tesla is using the facts that their showrooms don't maintain an inventory and that their vehicles don't require exhaust, fuel, coolant, oil, and other extensive support systems to claim these locations are outside the traditional definition of "dealership" and may therefor remain Tesla-owned. They definitely have a scalable architecture for servicing their growing fleet. It's one of the reasons they're resisting the traditional independent dealer model.
All of this would not be necessary, if existing laws would be enforced the way they were intended to. What is here not to understand "... secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects".
The problem is that they cease to be your papers and effects if you give them to someone else. That letter you sent to your girlfriend - she's free to pass it on to the police or to post it on imagur if she likes. That request you sent to Comcast for a route to www.alquaeda.ir - they are free to give it to the NSA if they like.
Generally, one imagines that your girlfriend is not going to consent to a FBI request for all you past communications, because her privacy is at risk, too. But what motivates Time Warner to refuse the NSA? We need to close this conceptual loophole where data that traverses your ISP's network is considered the ISP's data.
How about: "We took a sample of 100 people who had lived in the Chernobyl area for 10-12 years and studied cancer rates and health problems against the general population."
This study examined cancer incidence (1986-2008) and mortality (1986-2011) among the Estonian Chernobyl cleanup workers in comparison with the Estonian male population.
These people generally worked at the site 1986-1991.
No clear evidence of an increased risk of thyroid cancer, leukaemia, or radiation-related cancer sites combined was apparent.
Twenty-six years of follow-up of this cohort indicates no definite health effects attributable to radiation, but the elevated suicide risk has persisted.
The WHO summary more or less states that cancer and reproductive effects have been seen in people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and in first-responding clean up teams ("liquidators"), but not in any other groups.
Some of this is surely regionalized: there are areas within the fall out zone where radiation remains quite high (hence the non-decaying trees), but this seems not to be a general feature of the whole downwind area. Therefore, it is not surprising that the nuclear alarmists can find anecdotes to support their fears, or that the nuclear apologists can find anecdotes to support their story. Anecdotes are a terrible basis for risk evaluation and policy making, but they're great for yellow journalism.
There are plenty of smokers who don't die of cancer, so that must also be safe, right?
See, this is why we try not to use anecdotes to test hypotheses. There are smokers who die of cirrhosis without ever getting cancer. There are even people who jump of buildings and survive (please do not try that at home). You can't determine whether smoking causes cancer, or whether drunk driving causes accidents by watching one individual.
If you survey the people who lived near Chernobyl, and who actually worked on the clean-up project, you find that they get 'radiation' cancers at the same rate as everyone else. That is, there is no additional cancer risk for having been a Chernobyl clean-up worker. (now, those folks do have a somewhat higher incidence of 'alcohol-related' cancers, but I don't think you can attribute them to high background radiation or Cs ingestion.
The only people who have documented cancer associated with the accident are people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and the immediate "liquidators." Among them, WHO estimates
the additional cancer deaths from radiation exposure correspond to 3-4% above the normal incidence of cancers from all causes.
I realize we're talking about the German STATE spying on its own people, which is different. My MIL lived in East Germany and tells stories of how you never knew which of your neighbors or friends was passing info on to the state
"If you see something, Say something." -US Department of Homeland Security
A "brick" home in the US is almost always a wood framed house with a brick facade. It's harder for the wind to tear off bricks than to tear off aluminum siding, but it doesn't really change the structural stability of the house much.
For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.
This argument is only valid for long-distance transmission lines, and failure of those lines contributes to very few outages (the 2003 NE US blackout comes to mind). Customer-perceived blackouts are almost all due to failure of metropolitan and suburban distribution networks. Areas where population density is as high as any other developed nation.
I submit to you that you do not know what happened. Don't feel bad- very few people outside of the 12 members of the Grand Jury have heard all of known facts of the case. I certainly don't know what happened.
9 members of the grand jury. They have not necessarily heard all of the known facts, either: they have heard the facts that the prosecutor elected to present. Outside of the grand jury members, there is no one to check or validate the case the prosecutor chose to make.
Grand juries can be an important part of our system of checks and balances. They can be a mechanism for restraining prosecutorial over-reach. But they can also be kangaroo courts.
Angry mob that does not have all the evidence vs a grand jury that does have the evidence.
A grand jury hearing is not a trial. Only one side presents. There are no external observers. The people are not angry that Wilson was found innocent, they are angry that (yet again) secret proceedings among a network of peers has declined even to hold an open, public hearing of the facts.
Instead, a closed, peer-review reports that they find no wrongdoing. Instead, the prosecutor, who works closely with police every day, fails even to present enough evidence to convince the grand jury that the evidence is worth discussing in public. Instead of an open hearing of both sides, there will be only the law enforcement side and a bunch of easily-dismissed protesters, civil rights activists, and conspiracy theorists.
Officer Wilson may or may not have done anything wrong, but without a real trial, we will only ever hear propaganda.
This is completely at odds with everything I've heard about US legal system, where the victims need to prove they didn't provoke the attacker ("stand your ground"), especially if the attacker is a cop, so citation needed.
Not quite sure what you need a cite on - That police in the US don't have the right to beat the shit out of you for no reason?
Yes, that's the part. Can you offer any statistics on what fraction of officers that beat or kill an unresisting subject are actually dismissed from their jobs and unable to find another posting? Because around here, they seem to hand out administrative leave with pay pretty liberally, slaps on the wrist pretty reluctantly, and terminations quite rarely. The SWAT team that dropped a grenade in a baby's crib are not even being reprimanded.
Trying to bring peace to the middle east is as futile as trying to stop the sun from shining.
Wow. I had no idea it was so easy - what's holding the solution back? I mean, have you seen Beijing? The "Stop the sun from shining" problem has been solved for a long time.
I'd think a libertarian government would not want anyone, owners of large corporations included, to take over governance.
Libertarians may not want there to be much structural government, but that's different from disclaiming any governance. For example, if Homeland Security says that people must go through backscatter detectors and bomb sniffers before getting on an airplane, that's government. If the monopoly airline says that passengers are only welcome after a backscatter test and bomb sniffer, the outcome is functionally identical.
Additionally, I'm having a hard time recalling the last occasion on which a company squashed my civil liberties
How about this example: there's no law against me running a web server from my home, but Comcast won't let me. Nor will AT&T. Are they "quashing my right to free speech?" When the police show up and tell me I'm free to protest...over there, are they quashing my right to free speech?
You're still obliged, in law, to deliver what you promised you would.
I'm pretty sure, if you look at the 'gifts' offered, they are all offered contingent on success of the project. Not success of the funding campaign, but success of the project. I'm pretty sure you'll find that the projects are all roadmaps or visions and subject to revision. So, E:D's kickstarter "promise" to deliver you a specific game is a lot like Comcast's promise to deliver up to 25 Mbps.
So far as I know, there is exactly one pending lawsuit aimed at testing the obligation to deliver promised goods. I don't expect it to be very successful, because funders are generally putting money into a risky venture without guaranteed success.
Even authentic, tax-deductible charities get away with diverting donations from their ostensible purposes. Look at a group like National Veterans Services Fund. Their administrative costs are 82% of their revenue. You can find 'charities' with administrative and fundraising costs as high as 95% of donations. The point is that "delivering" on marketing literature is very different than "delivering" on a contract.
Is it a donation? I don't think it is legal to donate to a for-profit entity. Kickstarter doesn't seem to think so either, which is why projects offer at least some sort of token for their lowest levels.
It's absolutely legal for you to give money to any entity (ok, maybe not Hamas or ISIL) you desire. It is not legal for you to claim a tax deduction for giving money to a for-profit entity. "Gifts" or tokens are offered because it turns out that very few humans will give money to someone else's project without something in return. Look at all of those actual, non-profit charities that offer postcards from the kids you've fed, souvenir mugs, or buttons in exchange for targeted donation levels.
Not much different from venture capital, except by giving $50 instead of $50M you don't get a board seat and massive returns if successful, you just get a possibly sketchy promise of a "reward" for your investment.
It's very different from venture capital. If you "invest" in a company or startup, you are very literally buying a piece of that company. It becomes yours, and you have (proportionally) as much right to say what that company does as any other owner. Venture capital is a terrible analogy for kickstarter.
A better analogy is charity. If you give money to PBS or Habitat for Humanity, they may send you some 'gift' in return. If they run out of the particular gift you asked for, they'll substitute something they feel is similar. Giving money to PBS doesn't give you the power to change their programming. It doesn't give you a vote on corp direction.
Kickstarter is charity, where kickstarter the company holds all donations in escrow until the success threshold is reached. That's actually quite nice, because it makes it less likely that donors will contribute to doomed projects. eg, if a project needs 100k to buy studio time, but they only get $50k, then their project will fail. Absent kickstarter, all those people who donated to get to $50k would be out their money. With kickstarter, they get it back and everyone walks away - disappointed, but financially whole.
Which, of course, opens the door to the simplest of international agreements : "I spy on yours, you spy on mine and we can share the results, all legally."
Children Act 1989 section 2, particularly:
(4)The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.
Source: England and Wales Statute Roll (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/41/section/2)
Thus abolishing prior law that denied the mother guardianship of her child. Note that father was "the" guardian. The older, paternalistic law was replaced with
(1) Where a child's father and mother were married to each other at the time of his birth, they shall each have parental responsibility for the child.
blame the anti nuke crowd for causing the mess. I mean we all dont want nukes but alas, we have them. so we need to take care of them, and the people maintaining them
Or, we could, you know, dismantle them if they no longer serve the purpose intended for them. Then we wouldn't have them, they wouldn't need maintaining, and there would be no risk of misuse or accident.
If Obama was really so serious about it, then why does he wait until he can't do anything about it to even SAY anything? Let alone do nothing the whole time, except appoint a former telecom lobbyist to the FCC?
Because Obama has spent the last year studiously doing nothing to upset conservative talk radio, in the desperate hope that Republicans might not make every campaign and anti-Obama campaign. This strategy failed miserably, and they ended up with nothing they could point to as a positive accomplishment.
Actually, it's quite simple. You create a non-profit corporation to implement and manage the "last mile." That organization would be funded by bond issues (just like every other public works project) and supported by user fees. Those user fees would be paid by ISPs who compete on price and features.
And the existing last-mile networks: what do you do with them? Maybe you expect your non-profit to buy them from Comcast, AT&T, and Quest. How exactly do you plan to figure pricing when you nationalize those networks? Or to compensate the companies when you dig up their wires and throw them away. I guarantee you will do it wrong. Taxpayers will overpay by 5-fold and the companies will be lucky to realize half of their fair value.
You proposal would be fine if internet were a blank slate, but any change you impose now will amount to nationalization of private enterprise, and there is no way people will stand for that.
Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?
It hardly seems like it should come from Netflix. If your usage rarely exceeds 1 Mbps, you should consider not paying for 50 Mbps service. If your neighbor wants to stream 3 simultaneous 1080p videos, he's going to suffer with anything less than 50 Mbps. That's pretty clearly a last-mile problem and resolvable by last-mile pricing. It has nothing to do with net neutrality.
The perp however knew he just robbed a place and that probably drove his action to attack the cop and try for his gun.
Because the way to 'get away with' petty theft is to dive through the window of a car, assault a cop, steal his gun and murder him? Someone's been playing too much GTA.
Slashdot Mirror
However, many had the naive belief that a neutral Judiciacy, in particular the SCOTUS, acted as a bulwark against the tyrannical tendencies on the hill and in the White House.
To be fair, I don't think anyone ever believed that FISA was anything other than a kangaroo court with which the CIA and NSA could bureaucratically cover their asses. It's certainly disappointing that SCOTUS has so frequently declined even to hear PATRIOT-related cases: we deserve to have them make a final judgement whether bulk data collection/archiving constitutes search, or whether you really can bypass the 4th Amendment by claiming that it's only a search if a human looks at it.
The point is though that Tesla does not HAVE to have the laws change to start selling cars in Texas. It just wants to for some reason. Probably increased profit most likely.
Of course the manufacturer-owned showroom/service centers mean more profit for Tesla. Traditional dealers gain a lot from the commodity nature of ICE vehicles - servicing a Toyota is not that much different from servicing a Ford or a Ferrari. Oil change, coolant change, ... the parts may be different shapes or sizes, but they all have fundamentally the same function, and a decent mechanic can do a reasonable job on any of them.
Tesla is different, and general ICE knowledge will not help much. The battery cooling system and ICE cooling systems have very different requirements. Tesla does have hydraulic brakes to back up the regenerative system, and it has wheels and steering linkages like any car, but much of its performance is software and electronics that are outside of traditional auto mechanics. Tesla has little to gain and much to lose by working with existing dealers.
It helps that they can sell "bypassing dealerships" to the public as cutting out a middleman, cutting out some of the least trusted salespeople on the planet, and cutting out unreliable and overpriced service centers. Fundamentally, though, it's about brand-integrity and maintaining profit centers.
Bullshit. There's absolutely no reason why Tesla couldn't open a training program to begin certifying maintenance techs for their vehicles. If they are somehow able to service the car in such a "superior" way then they certainly have the ability to codify and document those "superior" procedures, then actually make techs who wish to become certified demonstrate an appropriate level of competency with the maintenance procedures. Then dealers wishing to provide "Tesla Certified" maintenance would simply require their techs to acquire that certification.
I don't think you understand the situation. Traditional dealers make a lot of their money selling warranties and overpriced service after the sale. Tesla operates a nationwide network of service centers and charges $600 for annual service. Why should Tesla be any more anxious to give up that service than your local Ford dealer is to recommend you use JiffyLube for oil changes?
Right now, Tesla has a de facto monopoly on the technical expertise required to service their vehicles. You can't take it down to the neighborhood mechanic for work, because they just don't know its systems. You'd have better luck with the local dryer repairman. It's in Tesla's interest to keep as much service in-house as possible, for exactly the same reasons as traditional dealers.
If those procedures don't exist, then the vehicle is not ready for mass market - Tesla WILL NOT be able to keep up with the maintenance work as their sales grow. Can you, for a minute, imagine if every time you needed anything done on your vehicle, you had to ship it to Nevada, and wait a couple weeks? Who's going to buy that shit?
You're not paying attention. Tesla has its own network of service centers, more-or-less equivalent to the traditional network of dealers. Tesla wants to maintain ownership, control, and share profits of those showroom/service centers, where traditional dealerships are legally required to be independent. Tesla is using the facts that their showrooms don't maintain an inventory and that their vehicles don't require exhaust, fuel, coolant, oil, and other extensive support systems to claim these locations are outside the traditional definition of "dealership" and may therefor remain Tesla-owned. They definitely have a scalable architecture for servicing their growing fleet. It's one of the reasons they're resisting the traditional independent dealer model.
All of this would not be necessary, if existing laws would be enforced the way they were intended to. What is here not to understand " ... secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects".
The problem is that they cease to be your papers and effects if you give them to someone else. That letter you sent to your girlfriend - she's free to pass it on to the police or to post it on imagur if she likes. That request you sent to Comcast for a route to www.alquaeda.ir - they are free to give it to the NSA if they like.
Generally, one imagines that your girlfriend is not going to consent to a FBI request for all you past communications, because her privacy is at risk, too. But what motivates Time Warner to refuse the NSA? We need to close this conceptual loophole where data that traverses your ISP's network is considered the ISP's data.
How about: "We took a sample of 100 people who had lived in the Chernobyl area for 10-12 years and studied cancer rates and health problems against the general population."
OK, how about this?
This study examined cancer incidence (1986-2008) and mortality (1986-2011) among the Estonian Chernobyl cleanup workers in comparison with the Estonian male population.
These people generally worked at the site 1986-1991.
No clear evidence of an increased risk of thyroid cancer, leukaemia, or radiation-related cancer sites combined was apparent.
Twenty-six years of follow-up of this cohort indicates no definite health effects attributable to radiation, but the elevated suicide risk has persisted.
The WHO summary more or less states that cancer and reproductive effects have been seen in people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and in first-responding clean up teams ("liquidators"), but not in any other groups.
Some of this is surely regionalized: there are areas within the fall out zone where radiation remains quite high (hence the non-decaying trees), but this seems not to be a general feature of the whole downwind area. Therefore, it is not surprising that the nuclear alarmists can find anecdotes to support their fears, or that the nuclear apologists can find anecdotes to support their story. Anecdotes are a terrible basis for risk evaluation and policy making, but they're great for yellow journalism.
There are plenty of smokers who don't die of cancer, so that must also be safe, right?
See, this is why we try not to use anecdotes to test hypotheses. There are smokers who die of cirrhosis without ever getting cancer. There are even people who jump of buildings and survive (please do not try that at home). You can't determine whether smoking causes cancer, or whether drunk driving causes accidents by watching one individual.
If you survey the people who lived near Chernobyl, and who actually worked on the clean-up project, you find that they get 'radiation' cancers at the same rate as everyone else. That is, there is no additional cancer risk for having been a Chernobyl clean-up worker. (now, those folks do have a somewhat higher incidence of 'alcohol-related' cancers, but I don't think you can attribute them to high background radiation or Cs ingestion.
The only people who have documented cancer associated with the accident are people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and the immediate "liquidators." Among them, WHO estimates
the additional cancer deaths from radiation exposure correspond to 3-4% above the normal incidence of cancers from all causes.
I realize we're talking about the German STATE spying on its own people, which is different. My MIL lived in East Germany and tells stories of how you never knew which of your neighbors or friends was passing info on to the state
"If you see something, Say something." -US Department of Homeland Security
A "brick" home in the US is almost always a wood framed house with a brick facade. It's harder for the wind to tear off bricks than to tear off aluminum siding, but it doesn't really change the structural stability of the house much.
For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.
This argument is only valid for long-distance transmission lines, and failure of those lines contributes to very few outages (the 2003 NE US blackout comes to mind). Customer-perceived blackouts are almost all due to failure of metropolitan and suburban distribution networks. Areas where population density is as high as any other developed nation.
I submit to you that you do not know what happened. Don't feel bad- very few people outside of the 12 members of the Grand Jury have heard all of known facts of the case. I certainly don't know what happened.
9 members of the grand jury. They have not necessarily heard all of the known facts, either: they have heard the facts that the prosecutor elected to present. Outside of the grand jury members, there is no one to check or validate the case the prosecutor chose to make.
Grand juries can be an important part of our system of checks and balances. They can be a mechanism for restraining prosecutorial over-reach. But they can also be kangaroo courts.
Angry mob that does not have all the evidence vs a grand jury that does have the evidence.
A grand jury hearing is not a trial. Only one side presents. There are no external observers. The people are not angry that Wilson was found innocent, they are angry that (yet again) secret proceedings among a network of peers has declined even to hold an open, public hearing of the facts.
Instead, a closed, peer-review reports that they find no wrongdoing. Instead, the prosecutor, who works closely with police every day, fails even to present enough evidence to convince the grand jury that the evidence is worth discussing in public. Instead of an open hearing of both sides, there will be only the law enforcement side and a bunch of easily-dismissed protesters, civil rights activists, and conspiracy theorists.
Officer Wilson may or may not have done anything wrong, but without a real trial, we will only ever hear propaganda.
This is completely at odds with everything I've heard about US legal system, where the victims need to prove they didn't provoke the attacker ("stand your ground"), especially if the attacker is a cop, so citation needed.
Not quite sure what you need a cite on - That police in the US don't have the right to beat the shit out of you for no reason?
Yes, that's the part. Can you offer any statistics on what fraction of officers that beat or kill an unresisting subject are actually dismissed from their jobs and unable to find another posting? Because around here, they seem to hand out administrative leave with pay pretty liberally, slaps on the wrist pretty reluctantly, and terminations quite rarely. The SWAT team that dropped a grenade in a baby's crib are not even being reprimanded.
Trying to bring peace to the middle east is as futile as trying to stop the sun from shining.
Wow. I had no idea it was so easy - what's holding the solution back? I mean, have you seen Beijing? The "Stop the sun from shining" problem has been solved for a long time.
I don't think you understand how monopolies work.
I'd think a libertarian government would not want anyone, owners of large corporations included, to take over governance.
Libertarians may not want there to be much structural government, but that's different from disclaiming any governance. For example, if Homeland Security says that people must go through backscatter detectors and bomb sniffers before getting on an airplane, that's government. If the monopoly airline says that passengers are only welcome after a backscatter test and bomb sniffer, the outcome is functionally identical.
Additionally, I'm having a hard time recalling the last occasion on which a company squashed my civil liberties
How about this example: there's no law against me running a web server from my home, but Comcast won't let me. Nor will AT&T. Are they "quashing my right to free speech?" When the police show up and tell me I'm free to protest...over there, are they quashing my right to free speech?
You're still obliged, in law, to deliver what you promised you would.
I'm pretty sure, if you look at the 'gifts' offered, they are all offered contingent on success of the project. Not success of the funding campaign, but success of the project. I'm pretty sure you'll find that the projects are all roadmaps or visions and subject to revision. So, E:D's kickstarter "promise" to deliver you a specific game is a lot like Comcast's promise to deliver up to 25 Mbps.
So far as I know, there is exactly one pending lawsuit aimed at testing the obligation to deliver promised goods. I don't expect it to be very successful, because funders are generally putting money into a risky venture without guaranteed success.
Even authentic, tax-deductible charities get away with diverting donations from their ostensible purposes. Look at a group like National Veterans Services Fund. Their administrative costs are 82% of their revenue. You can find 'charities' with administrative and fundraising costs as high as 95% of donations. The point is that "delivering" on marketing literature is very different than "delivering" on a contract.
Is it a donation? I don't think it is legal to donate to a for-profit entity. Kickstarter doesn't seem to think so either, which is why projects offer at least some sort of token for their lowest levels.
It's absolutely legal for you to give money to any entity (ok, maybe not Hamas or ISIL) you desire. It is not legal for you to claim a tax deduction for giving money to a for-profit entity. "Gifts" or tokens are offered because it turns out that very few humans will give money to someone else's project without something in return. Look at all of those actual, non-profit charities that offer postcards from the kids you've fed, souvenir mugs, or buttons in exchange for targeted donation levels.
Not much different from venture capital, except by giving $50 instead of $50M you don't get a board seat and massive returns if successful, you just get a possibly sketchy promise of a "reward" for your investment.
It's very different from venture capital. If you "invest" in a company or startup, you are very literally buying a piece of that company. It becomes yours, and you have (proportionally) as much right to say what that company does as any other owner. Venture capital is a terrible analogy for kickstarter.
A better analogy is charity. If you give money to PBS or Habitat for Humanity, they may send you some 'gift' in return. If they run out of the particular gift you asked for, they'll substitute something they feel is similar. Giving money to PBS doesn't give you the power to change their programming. It doesn't give you a vote on corp direction.
Kickstarter is charity, where kickstarter the company holds all donations in escrow until the success threshold is reached. That's actually quite nice, because it makes it less likely that donors will contribute to doomed projects. eg, if a project needs 100k to buy studio time, but they only get $50k, then their project will fail. Absent kickstarter, all those people who donated to get to $50k would be out their money. With kickstarter, they get it back and everyone walks away - disappointed, but financially whole.
Which, of course, opens the door to the simplest of international agreements : "I spy on yours, you spy on mine and we can share the results, all legally."
This program is known as Five Eyes
Children Act 1989 section 2, particularly:
(4)The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.
Source: England and Wales Statute Roll (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/41/section/2)
Thus abolishing prior law that denied the mother guardianship of her child. Note that father was "the" guardian. The older, paternalistic law was replaced with
(1) Where a child's father and mother were married to each other at the time of his birth, they shall each have parental responsibility for the child.
ibid.
blame the anti nuke crowd for causing the mess. I mean we all dont want nukes but alas, we have them. so we need to take care of them, and the people maintaining them
Or, we could, you know, dismantle them if they no longer serve the purpose intended for them. Then we wouldn't have them, they wouldn't need maintaining, and there would be no risk of misuse or accident.
If Obama was really so serious about it, then why does he wait until he can't do anything about it to even SAY anything? Let alone do nothing the whole time, except appoint a former telecom lobbyist to the FCC?
Because Obama has spent the last year studiously doing nothing to upset conservative talk radio, in the desperate hope that Republicans might not make every campaign and anti-Obama campaign. This strategy failed miserably, and they ended up with nothing they could point to as a positive accomplishment.
Actually, it's quite simple. You create a non-profit corporation to implement and manage the "last mile." That organization would be funded by bond issues (just like every other public works project) and supported by user fees. Those user fees would be paid by ISPs who compete on price and features.
And the existing last-mile networks: what do you do with them? Maybe you expect your non-profit to buy them from Comcast, AT&T, and Quest. How exactly do you plan to figure pricing when you nationalize those networks? Or to compensate the companies when you dig up their wires and throw them away. I guarantee you will do it wrong. Taxpayers will overpay by 5-fold and the companies will be lucky to realize half of their fair value.
You proposal would be fine if internet were a blank slate, but any change you impose now will amount to nationalization of private enterprise, and there is no way people will stand for that.
Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?
It hardly seems like it should come from Netflix. If your usage rarely exceeds 1 Mbps, you should consider not paying for 50 Mbps service. If your neighbor wants to stream 3 simultaneous 1080p videos, he's going to suffer with anything less than 50 Mbps. That's pretty clearly a last-mile problem and resolvable by last-mile pricing. It has nothing to do with net neutrality.
The perp however knew he just robbed a place and that probably drove his action to attack the cop and try for his gun.
Because the way to 'get away with' petty theft is to dive through the window of a car, assault a cop, steal his gun and murder him? Someone's been playing too much GTA.