You are the proof of my point. You've literally got no fucking idea about local politics. You are so completely apathetic to it that you think these granted monopolies are not only multi-decade grants, but in fact you think that they are actually permanent.
Fuck fuck fuck and FUCK you you miserable sack of shit.
[R.O. 2009 111.011; Ord. No. 01-125, 6-20-2001] It shall be unlawful for any person to construct, operate or maintain a cable system or to provide cable service or other competing multi-channel video services in the City without a franchise, unless otherwise specifically authorized under applicable Federal or State law. [1]: Cross Reference—As to penalty, 670.850.
See that date? I didn't live here then. Now go fuck yourself.
That's no much as by design as it is the natural limit of what an unpressurized, gravity flow system can provide. The same system would provide for much fewer people nowadays, as our sanitation standards are considerably higher.
The subject is not developed countries. The subject is countries where 700,000 children die of cholera. And yeah, Roman standards of sanitation are a BIG step up.
Loved that story (and not for the obvious reasons). Heinlein tackled themes decades before they were mainstream, never mind acceptable. I guess that's one of the reasons his stories stand the test of time.
Little did he know his idle speculations would turn into a bona fide fetish, with a named category on porn sites.
I suppose that it's possible the movies writers just don't understand causality, but there's no possible way to have a causality loop in a single world universe. There would be no way for the loop to start in the first place.
Sure there is. There is no start. He/she will always be his/her own parents because he/she has always been his/her own parents.
If that bothers you, consider any circle. Where is the beginning of the arc?
The whole message of the Bible is that we're *ALL* subject to the "death penalty" (hell) for our sinful ways.
That's not the death penalty: that's the after-death penalty. And it's the number one reason I would spit in the face of the Christian god, if there was such an entity to be spat upon. Nearly all of the ranting about the Christian hell is in the New Testament, so it's at least nominally part of the new covenant. And the new covenant consigns little children who haven't been baptised to eternal torture in fire. Eternal. With no hope of redemption or respite. Ever.
Eternity is a long long long long time, and fuck the god who created such a place as the Christian hell.
There were eleven aqueducts supplying water to Rome...
Rome was an outlier, in all ways. The typical Roman planned city was much smaller, and required only one aqueduct. No, they didn't treat their sewage, but they had clean drinking water.
I'll repeat my suggestion to DerekLyons: read David MacCauley's book City.
No, it's that you completely fail to grasp the limited circumstances under which the aqueduct system work and the very real limits on their capacity.
There's a book by David Macaulay called City, about ancient Roman cities and their water systems. You should read it. Mountain springs are not required. A river will do. The upper limit on capacity as designed by Romans was typically about 50,000. Actual city populations were undoubtedly higher than that, but that was their planned capacity. Yes, it takes repeating the Roman cookie cutter method quite a few times to accommodate all 2 billion, but the ancient Romans were already in the habit of duplicating their method repeatedly, because it worked so well. It's quite well adapted to being repeated over and over again.
And those 2 billion people have nothing more important to be doing than securing a clean water supply. You don't need slaves when you have 2 billion with exactly one first priority.
Its tyranny because not all of us have asshat ISPs because not all of us have let our local government fuck us. You let your local government fuck you...
I'll echo the anonymous coward: I wasn't alive when that law passed locally. And add my own observation: had I been alive, I haven't always lived here. I've lived lots of other places too. You expect me to have control of local matters in 22 different places? (Yes, 22. That's how many different local jurisdictions I've lived in.) When I've had no control in any of those places, ever, because I'm not as rich as you apparently are to be able to buy the local city council? Nor am I rich enough to run the kind of propaganda campaign required to get enough of the apathetic locals to give a shit about something that hadn't even left labs yet. There WAS no Internet when those laws were passed.
So I'm supposed to be a millionaire clairvoyant who has never moved in my entire life, according to you.
Fuck you, you arrogant asshat. With the federal government. Sideways.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Don't be ridiculous. There are lots and LOTS of things that can stop a bad guy with a gun that aren't a gun at all. At least some of them are available in almost every office. I bet getting stabbed in both eyes by a pen would stop pretty much any bad guy with a gun.
You don't even have to get that brutal, though brutal always works. One bad guy with a gun at the bottom of a pile of 20 guys is pretty well stopped, and not one of them has to have a gun to do it.
Not that you made any such claim, but those are all Old Testament scriptures...
No they're not. Romans is in the New Testament.
One of the other responders commented that Christians use the Bible to justify anti-gay bigotry, and usually reference Leviticus when they do. They could as easily reference the New Testament. That passage from Romans maintains the death penalty for gay behaviors, for disobeying parents, for worshiping idols, and for oathbreaking, among other things.
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
And the ancient Romans figured this out, and solved it.
It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power. The fact that 2 billion people (with far more muscle power at their disposal than the ancient Romans ever had) haven't speaks volumes about the 2 billion people.
If the "things" in question have an operating system, they're both too expensive and too vulnerable to being hijacked. Most of the "things" in an internet of things (the Smart Home from 2 decades ago, go X10!) need to be as simple and dumb and therefore cheap as possible. Most are the functional equivalent of a single sensor or a single switch. They had better not have an operating system. They need to be as dirt simple as possible, so they're cheap to acquire, cheap to install, cheap to replace if they fail or get struck by lightning, and most of all, do my bidding and not someone else's.
So no OS. It can run a micro IP stack like IPic (all 256 bytes of machine code) and the barest of bare bones beyond that, and that'll do just fine.
Good movies are still being made, some on budgets so low that a shoestring would be an improvement, but mainstream Hollywood is just turning into one homogeneous steaming pile of dreck.
There's a reason for that.
Hollywood has too much money.
Seriously. If you want art, you practically have to have starving artists. Fat and happy artists get lazy. Worse, in the case of Hollywood, there's so much money the art is buried in parasites. It's gotten so the bloated bloodsuckers are bigger than the host, and because they control the money, they think they deserve to have a say in the art. When that's about the worst possible outcome.
Abolish copyright. For the good of art and the subsequent benefit of humanity.
Every free-market preaching tool that has said "The next Google FIber won't happen with Title II!" Can now procede to eat crow.
The first preaching tools were mouthpieces of Comcast, and only using the "free market" phrase as a cloak, an insta-pass to get into the consciousness of the 36% of the population that has successfully been conditioned to respond to it like Pavlov's dogs. Including that part of the media that barks on command when those words are uttered. The barking will continue precisely as before. They can't hear anything else. They certainly can't hear this filing. It doesn't fit in their worldview, therefore it doesn't exist.
When Google starts rolling out fiber in rural Idaho, where the need really is, then it'll be interesting. But I have a feeling that'll never happen.
Why would it, when people in rural Idaho think it's a moral imperative to shoot at people from the California Bay Area? They're afraid "teh gey" will get on them and make them all sticky.
Stop promoting greater tyranny in order to solve lesser tyranny.
Telling a tiny minority of people to stop being asshats to the vast majority of us is not tyranny. It's what democratic government is FOR. If you don't like it, go on and keep pushing your oligarchy's interest. It will end in blood, like it has plenty of times before. Or have you not noticed history?
A thousand years ago people tolerated oligarchies for generations, because they were the anointed of God. These days, not so much. Comcast is run by oligarchs. A lot of us are getting really tired of it.
In that case, we are in a good situation, because human demand is infinite. The more we have, the more we want. There's no end to it. I want my own planet.
No, it's not.
This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.
Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).
Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.
So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.
People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?
Correct, except for the part about the US. Not sure why you're misinformed about that.
The GP phrased it a little funny. What was meant is that developed nations have a declining population growth rate, except for the US, where the population growth rate hasn't fallen because of ongoing immigration, despite the decline in birth rates. Sloppy phrasing.
Also, first generation immigrants continue having larger families, which keeps the birth rate up higher than it might otherwise have been. Japan is an example of what a developed nation with essentially no immigration looks like: Average children per woman of 1.4, a long way below the 1.88 of the US.
I would be convinced that there was a definite conspiracy to hold women down and subjugate them through companies failed attempts to incorporate girls toys (Legos)
Failed attempts, eh. The Friends line of LEGO is the best selling LEGO theme, and has been all year. It's beating Star Wars, for the love of Mike. The LEGO Group has made failed attempts in the past to make sets appealing to young girls, it is true. That streak is broken, and LEGO is selling a phenomenal number of Friends sets to girls. If that's subjugation, I wish I could be subjugated like that. Please, bury me in money.
Which just goes to show she knows nothing about what she rants about.
... he had an agenda, and his agenda was not to surface the NSA's illegal activities in the US, his agenda was to burn down the NSA completely.
If that actually was his agenda, then I am doubly pleased with him and nominate him for two Beanies and a Nobel (category doesn't seem to matter much to that committee).
The NSA must be burned to the ground and the ground salted. It can not be repaired, it can not be cured, it can not fulfill any part of its nominal mission. It is corrupt to the core, and so secretive and so well-funded that it can not be fixed. An organization whose representatives routinely lie to Congress and get away with it is completely and totally out of control. It must be ended. It must be hunted down. It must be extinguished. Its installations must be destroyed, its cash accounts must be seized, its assets must be auctioned off. It is a plague upon the Earth, and the sooner it is gone, the sooner the dignity of humanity can be repaired, even a little.
If Edward Snowden helped even a little with that task, he is a hero worthy of awards far more notable than Slashdot's editors can bestow.
Who'd have thought. The gamepolitics.com link is Slashdotted.
I clicked on it because I'm a suspicious bastard. I want to read it and see if it's a real apology. Hopefully somebody who makes it through the press of bodies will quote from it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are the proof of my point. You've literally got no fucking idea about local politics. You are so completely apathetic to it that you think these granted monopolies are not only multi-decade grants, but in fact you think that they are actually permanent.
Fuck fuck fuck and FUCK you you miserable sack of shit.
[R.O. 2009 111.011; Ord. No. 01-125, 6-20-2001]
It shall be unlawful for any person to construct, operate or maintain a cable system or to provide cable service or other competing multi-channel video services in the City without a franchise, unless otherwise specifically authorized under applicable Federal or State law.
[1]:
Cross Reference—As to penalty, 670.850.
See that date? I didn't live here then. Now go fuck yourself.
That's no much as by design as it is the natural limit of what an unpressurized, gravity flow system can provide. The same system would provide for much fewer people nowadays, as our sanitation standards are considerably higher.
The subject is not developed countries. The subject is countries where 700,000 children die of cholera. And yeah, Roman standards of sanitation are a BIG step up.
Dipshit.
Loved that story (and not for the obvious reasons). Heinlein tackled themes decades before they were mainstream, never mind acceptable. I guess that's one of the reasons his stories stand the test of time.
Little did he know his idle speculations would turn into a bona fide fetish, with a named category on porn sites.
I suppose that it's possible the movies writers just don't understand causality, but there's no possible way to have a causality loop in a single world universe. There would be no way for the loop to start in the first place.
Sure there is. There is no start. He/she will always be his/her own parents because he/she has always been his/her own parents.
If that bothers you, consider any circle. Where is the beginning of the arc?
Reading comprehension fail... I completely missed what you had in parenthesis...
I will take my beatings
*flog* *flog* *flog*
and they are wrong aren't they? see, we're done with this one. christians being bad doesn't justify muslims being bad.
I didn't justify anything, on anybody's part. I pointed out a factual error, with a little commentary.
Settle down, Beavis.
The whole message of the Bible is that we're *ALL* subject to the "death penalty" (hell) for our sinful ways.
That's not the death penalty: that's the after-death penalty. And it's the number one reason I would spit in the face of the Christian god, if there was such an entity to be spat upon. Nearly all of the ranting about the Christian hell is in the New Testament, so it's at least nominally part of the new covenant. And the new covenant consigns little children who haven't been baptised to eternal torture in fire. Eternal. With no hope of redemption or respite. Ever.
Eternity is a long long long long time, and fuck the god who created such a place as the Christian hell.
There were eleven aqueducts supplying water to Rome...
Rome was an outlier, in all ways. The typical Roman planned city was much smaller, and required only one aqueduct. No, they didn't treat their sewage, but they had clean drinking water.
I'll repeat my suggestion to DerekLyons: read David MacCauley's book City.
No, it's that you completely fail to grasp the limited circumstances under which the aqueduct system work and the very real limits on their capacity.
There's a book by David Macaulay called City, about ancient Roman cities and their water systems. You should read it. Mountain springs are not required. A river will do. The upper limit on capacity as designed by Romans was typically about 50,000. Actual city populations were undoubtedly higher than that, but that was their planned capacity. Yes, it takes repeating the Roman cookie cutter method quite a few times to accommodate all 2 billion, but the ancient Romans were already in the habit of duplicating their method repeatedly, because it worked so well. It's quite well adapted to being repeated over and over again.
And those 2 billion people have nothing more important to be doing than securing a clean water supply. You don't need slaves when you have 2 billion with exactly one first priority.
Its tyranny because not all of us have asshat ISPs because not all of us have let our local government fuck us. You let your local government fuck you...
I'll echo the anonymous coward: I wasn't alive when that law passed locally. And add my own observation: had I been alive, I haven't always lived here. I've lived lots of other places too. You expect me to have control of local matters in 22 different places? (Yes, 22. That's how many different local jurisdictions I've lived in.) When I've had no control in any of those places, ever, because I'm not as rich as you apparently are to be able to buy the local city council? Nor am I rich enough to run the kind of propaganda campaign required to get enough of the apathetic locals to give a shit about something that hadn't even left labs yet. There WAS no Internet when those laws were passed.
So I'm supposed to be a millionaire clairvoyant who has never moved in my entire life, according to you.
Fuck you, you arrogant asshat. With the federal government. Sideways.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Don't be ridiculous. There are lots and LOTS of things that can stop a bad guy with a gun that aren't a gun at all. At least some of them are available in almost every office. I bet getting stabbed in both eyes by a pen would stop pretty much any bad guy with a gun.
You don't even have to get that brutal, though brutal always works. One bad guy with a gun at the bottom of a pile of 20 guys is pretty well stopped, and not one of them has to have a gun to do it.
Not that you made any such claim, but those are all Old Testament scriptures...
No they're not. Romans is in the New Testament.
One of the other responders commented that Christians use the Bible to justify anti-gay bigotry, and usually reference Leviticus when they do. They could as easily reference the New Testament. That passage from Romans maintains the death penalty for gay behaviors, for disobeying parents, for worshiping idols, and for oathbreaking, among other things.
Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
And the ancient Romans figured this out, and solved it.
It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power. The fact that 2 billion people (with far more muscle power at their disposal than the ancient Romans ever had) haven't speaks volumes about the 2 billion people.
If the "things" in question have an operating system, they're both too expensive and too vulnerable to being hijacked. Most of the "things" in an internet of things (the Smart Home from 2 decades ago, go X10!) need to be as simple and dumb and therefore cheap as possible. Most are the functional equivalent of a single sensor or a single switch. They had better not have an operating system. They need to be as dirt simple as possible, so they're cheap to acquire, cheap to install, cheap to replace if they fail or get struck by lightning, and most of all, do my bidding and not someone else's.
So no OS. It can run a micro IP stack like IPic (all 256 bytes of machine code) and the barest of bare bones beyond that, and that'll do just fine.
Good movies are still being made, some on budgets so low that a shoestring would be an improvement, but mainstream Hollywood is just turning into one homogeneous steaming pile of dreck.
There's a reason for that.
Hollywood has too much money.
Seriously. If you want art, you practically have to have starving artists. Fat and happy artists get lazy. Worse, in the case of Hollywood, there's so much money the art is buried in parasites. It's gotten so the bloated bloodsuckers are bigger than the host, and because they control the money, they think they deserve to have a say in the art. When that's about the worst possible outcome.
Abolish copyright. For the good of art and the subsequent benefit of humanity.
Every free-market preaching tool that has said "The next Google FIber won't happen with Title II!" Can now procede to eat crow.
The first preaching tools were mouthpieces of Comcast, and only using the "free market" phrase as a cloak, an insta-pass to get into the consciousness of the 36% of the population that has successfully been conditioned to respond to it like Pavlov's dogs. Including that part of the media that barks on command when those words are uttered. The barking will continue precisely as before. They can't hear anything else. They certainly can't hear this filing. It doesn't fit in their worldview, therefore it doesn't exist.
When Google starts rolling out fiber in rural Idaho, where the need really is, then it'll be interesting. But I have a feeling that'll never happen.
Why would it, when people in rural Idaho think it's a moral imperative to shoot at people from the California Bay Area? They're afraid "teh gey" will get on them and make them all sticky.
Stop promoting greater tyranny in order to solve lesser tyranny.
Telling a tiny minority of people to stop being asshats to the vast majority of us is not tyranny. It's what democratic government is FOR. If you don't like it, go on and keep pushing your oligarchy's interest. It will end in blood, like it has plenty of times before. Or have you not noticed history?
A thousand years ago people tolerated oligarchies for generations, because they were the anointed of God. These days, not so much. Comcast is run by oligarchs. A lot of us are getting really tired of it.
In that case, we are in a good situation, because human demand is infinite. The more we have, the more we want. There's no end to it. I want my own planet.
No, it's not.
This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.
Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).
Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.
So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.
People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?
Correct, except for the part about the US. Not sure why you're misinformed about that.
The GP phrased it a little funny. What was meant is that developed nations have a declining population growth rate, except for the US, where the population growth rate hasn't fallen because of ongoing immigration, despite the decline in birth rates. Sloppy phrasing.
Also, first generation immigrants continue having larger families, which keeps the birth rate up higher than it might otherwise have been. Japan is an example of what a developed nation with essentially no immigration looks like: Average children per woman of 1.4, a long way below the 1.88 of the US.
I would be convinced that there was a definite conspiracy to hold women down and subjugate them through companies failed attempts to incorporate girls toys (Legos)
Failed attempts, eh. The Friends line of LEGO is the best selling LEGO theme, and has been all year. It's beating Star Wars, for the love of Mike. The LEGO Group has made failed attempts in the past to make sets appealing to young girls, it is true. That streak is broken, and LEGO is selling a phenomenal number of Friends sets to girls. If that's subjugation, I wish I could be subjugated like that. Please, bury me in money.
Which just goes to show she knows nothing about what she rants about.
... he had an agenda, and his agenda was not to surface the NSA's illegal activities in the US, his agenda was to burn down the NSA completely.
If that actually was his agenda, then I am doubly pleased with him and nominate him for two Beanies and a Nobel (category doesn't seem to matter much to that committee).
The NSA must be burned to the ground and the ground salted. It can not be repaired, it can not be cured, it can not fulfill any part of its nominal mission. It is corrupt to the core, and so secretive and so well-funded that it can not be fixed. An organization whose representatives routinely lie to Congress and get away with it is completely and totally out of control. It must be ended. It must be hunted down. It must be extinguished. Its installations must be destroyed, its cash accounts must be seized, its assets must be auctioned off. It is a plague upon the Earth, and the sooner it is gone, the sooner the dignity of humanity can be repaired, even a little.
If Edward Snowden helped even a little with that task, he is a hero worthy of awards far more notable than Slashdot's editors can bestow.
It got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
Who'd have thought. The gamepolitics.com link is Slashdotted.
I clicked on it because I'm a suspicious bastard. I want to read it and see if it's a real apology. Hopefully somebody who makes it through the press of bodies will quote from it.
tortious.
The original spelling describes what the airlines do...
It's a good thing I don't have mod points right now. I would have to hold my nose... and mod you up. Instead, I will just hold my nose.