Why not model regional ISPs on Credit Unions and Rural Electric Associations / Utility Cooperatives? Cooperative in nature, each member is also part owner, and they provide better service than the larger purely private equivalent (in my experience), and often at a lower price.
The biggest problem outside of funding would probably be to get right of way access from municipalities. Cable and telephone companies would naturally fight tooth and nail against it.
You lost at equating the slaughter of food animals to the torture of sentient, thinking people, who are pretty much just like yourself, with hopes and aspirations and families of their own. I think part of it is the empathic realization that you might have just as easily been in that person's place.
I've hunted, and had my hands in the blood and guts of my prey, which I later delighted in consuming. I've also witnessed people die terribly bloody and painful deaths. Animals may have a general sense of panic when you look them in the eyes as they die, but for me at least, it's not at all on the same level as when its a person looking back at you. Not even close.
I have an uncle who is going on 70 who will not eat pork, not because he's Jewish, but because his family on the farm made him watch the slaughter of 'his' pig when he was a child. He viewed that pig very much as people view their dogs and cats. Of course it's anecdotal evidence, but I'd say he was scarred by the experience.
Of course it is, and yet even seemingly smart people really just don't get it!
Oh, the oil industry makes too much money, let's tax 'em to fund the new animal orphanage! Three days later... Goddamn, the price of gas is killing me!
The thing most people never seem to get is that corporations do not pay taxes. Taxes which are levied against corporations are indirectly levied against their customers. They simply raise the prices of their goods and services to offset the difference, similarly to how they optimize their position in the marketplace through pricing strategies.
This makes corporations in general act as an invisible collection branch of the government, and an easy target for new taxes that the people would never vote to put on themselves. I've long said that there would be a overthrow of the government by next Thursday if people had to come up with just the difference in commercial property tax which most communities expect their local businesses to pay.
There was two or three people in this world who know approximately what happened in those few moments. One of them is dead, and the other is acquitted. None of them are the two of us, so any conversation about anything other than the material facts is pure speculation and mental masturbation. Did Zim take it in the shorts or did he just get ambushed? Who knows.
Not everyone can be goddamned $Hollywood_Martial_Artist, no fight is ever $Hollywood_Fight_movie, and even your formally trained fighters are capable of being unlucky. A firearm merely is a tool that allows more options for more people, in many circumstances. Like it or not. I for one, do not give a shit.
That's all true, and reasonable, of course. However, the only consensus that we really need is the idea that our two parties are walking hand in hand, and they're taking us all on on a one way trip to hell.
Divisiveness is the best weapon our enemy has, the more the people can be divided up into little chunks of intellectual minutia, the better for them. We all have more in common than we think we do.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a gun because he's a shitty fighter. If he wasn't such a useless lump of shit, maybe he could have fought back and controlled the situation.
I carry a gun, because 1) even though I'm a fit 6'+ man with boxing experience, I recognize that I truly am about as good as a 'useless lump of shit' when facing down multiple aggressors or those wielding deadly weapons like guns and others, and 2) bullets tend to fly further and do more damage than my fists. Fortunately, I was able to survive and learn from the above experiences which prompted me to get a carry license and buy the training to defend myself and my family in the first place.
He's lucky Trayvon didn't just take his gun and shoot him to death with it.
That's very likely the exactly reason Tray-Tray got shot. If you carry a gun and you're rolling on the ground in a struggle with someone, it becomes a life or death situation, or at least exponentially more quickly than otherwise; getting your head bludgeoned against the concrete notwithstanding.
Well, some people, and by some people I mean the people who have been pushing the panic button for the last decade, say the spooks are routinely looking out for up to three degrees of separation. Three sounds like an entirely plausible optimal number.
There was a relevant facebook study about the small world theory a couple years ago, and IIRC, the average distance between any two people (globally) on the network was 4.6 or some such. Of course, you have the people who have to friend anyone and everything even if they don't know them; probably skews the idea somewhat.
The idea that you and I could be as few as 1.6 additional degrees of separation from some suspected individual is...unsettling. How much longer until the lidless eye wanders further?
Thing is, they aren't too interested in the contents of the envelope at all, at least until you're a person of interest. What they really want is use all that juicy metadata (outside of the envelope, i.e. headers) to establish ties between everyone.
Maybe everyone starts out roughly the same, maybe they develop at a similar rate, and enjoy similar learning capacities. However, civilization has changed more in the last 100 years than it has in the last 3,000. I'm not even sure how you could quantify that statement.
If you told me that a London taxi cab driver, a jet fighter pilot, a race car driver, a farmer, a hunter, a world class table tennis player and a secretary all have the same overall brain 'data throughput', I'd say you're silly. Some of these professions have a strong tendency to weed out individuals who just cannot cope with the particular demands of the job.
Right now, we can measure reaction times, structural changes and activity in the brain. Until we have a much, much better idea of how the brain processes and stores information, I think this question is approximately unanswerable.
The human brain can only process so much information at once.
I agree, and I imagine it's a highly individual trait, to boot.
Anyway, do you suppose that's the reason why when I notice someone driving very noticeably slow compared to the normal flow of traffic, it's nigh invariably the person with their hand up to their ear? i.e. It's the same effect of turning down the radio: turning down driving stimulus because that other slice of brain is busy.
That's the thing... I'm willing to accept that perhaps statistically, the cell-phone drivers might not experience more accidents. I doubt it, but I'm open to the idea. However, I sure as hell bet they cause more accidents, and that being in proximity to a cell-driver is relatively more dangerous than otherwise.
Well, considering the ATF - in its infinite malice - has banned solid copper and brass hunting projectiles
I'm no friend of some aspects of the ATF, but let's be honest; that was congress's doing, and it applies only to handguns. The ATF isn't responsible for creating laws, even though they are sometimes tasked with figuring out how to apply them.
Oh, yeah, wanted to clarify; the storm drain service is billed as a fee, not as a tax--which would have to pass on a ballot. So, the county commissioners basically enacted several millions of dollars worth of tax without following the statutes and by-laws, no less the state constitution.
Some places in the US west also have taxes on impermeable surfaces, but we also have peculiar laws which dictate that one cannot collect said rainwater into a cistern (because all of that water is owned for use downstream), unless rainwater is your only source of water (i.e. they won't grant a well permit).
I actually had a tiff with one of the state water engineers about the very subject. In my county, all new developments are required to install runoff ponds with permeable bottoms, so as to allow rainwater to drain into the groundwater basin. To get a permit to built a new garage and driveway, I had to dig a rather huge dry hole, and install hundreds of feet of pipe and concrete leading to it. It all had to be engineered to account for all of my runoff in a 100-year storm (including that from a preexisting home).
Am I still taxed for the unnameable surface on my property? Of course! To add to the insanity, the state engineer actually had the gall to say that the very idea of a detainment/retention pond which is required by the county for every new development was illegal water catchment. So, according to him, by law, I cannot attempt to reduce or eliminate my negative impact on the public storm drain system, but I have to violate the law to actually use my property. And I'm still taxed for an externality which I arguably do not create. Lovely.
So, what we have is basically a property tax by some other name created in lieu of adding to property tax increases which need to be voted on.
Legislators' plates such as these are registered to a person, not to a particular vehicle, which is what we all expect. If the legislator has 1+ daily drivers (car / truck), he may receive more than one set.
I'd never argue that/. and the various forums and boards I troll are anything but statistically insignificant outlying, niche places. You postulated that there would be a large overlap of people who think the idea of the app is wrong i.e. presumably mostly conservative gun owners who don't want to have their privacy violated vs. gun owners who don't want their privacy violated, who also think Snowden is a traitor.
The point was, in my experience that assumption is wrong. Sure, it's just anecdotal evidence, but if you're so bothered about it, you can go to any large forum and search out Snowden threads, and you might see that significantly more than the parroted national average support the guy. Drawing inference between this subset of people and the national mob? Are you straw-manning?
Wanna bet there's a substantial overlap of people who can simultaneously believe Snowden is a traitor while believing this database and app are wrong?
I think you'd be surprised just how wrong you are about this idea, if you'd simply look into it. Among many such people, governments aren't trusted nearly as strongly as by other groups. The recent uncovering of nationwide spying? The non-privacy of internet activities long been assumed both at/. and various gun related forums; if not that these sites are at an elevated risk for such activities. It's not universal, but the sentiment many share in these places parallels your own.
As for Snowden, the legality and morality of the snooping and of the leaking, well, the common thought I've seen is this: some people are conflicted about it, but most think he has diamond encrusted testicles, most think he upheld his oath the only way he could, and that POTUS, both the current and former are a far greater threat to liberty and the American Way than a bunch of pissed off goat farmers 5000 miles yonder.
Also, I'll leave you a parting thought: I think the whole popularity of the zombie apocalypse meme and being prepared at some level for large scale disaster (pervasive in this community in particular) can be appropriately described as a subconscious cultural / political allegory. Given the context, I'll let you work out what it symbolizes.
As far as I can see, their innovation can be accurately summed up thus:
They've decoupled the power turbine (the one which provides power to the rotors via a gears and such) from the engine, and mix cooler air into the exhaust stream. They've done away with the transmission and drive train by forcing this much cooler exhaust stream through a power turbine directly coupled to the main rotors, and they have also eliminated all of the complexity of a tail rotor and associated drive train by going with co-axial counter-roating rotors to provide necessary anti-torque.
It's the laws of thermodynamics I'm most concerned about, since most thermodynamic cycles suffer when cold fluids are introduced. Maybe eliminating the losses in mechanical transmission and weight offset that? Who knows, but if it works like they claim, that's pretty cool.
Maybe we could have Danny John-Jules play The Cat Doctor, an extravagantly dressed and infinitely more vain Time Lord stranded from an alternative universe. I'd watch it.
Presumably all of the designs have so far only been pistols because they're going after the 'liberator' philosophy of having a semi-concealable type of a thing. Having a longer barrel compromises that idea, and plus they're at least trying to be legal.
The IRS doesn't need to outsource to the DoJ or DHS for jackboots, as of last year they've started assembling their very own paramilitary task force, rumored to consist in large part of special operators returning from war. If that doesn't make you feel all warm inside, two to the chest and one to the head might.
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Why not model regional ISPs on Credit Unions and Rural Electric Associations / Utility Cooperatives? Cooperative in nature, each member is also part owner, and they provide better service than the larger purely private equivalent (in my experience), and often at a lower price.
The biggest problem outside of funding would probably be to get right of way access from municipalities. Cable and telephone companies would naturally fight tooth and nail against it.
You lost at equating the slaughter of food animals to the torture of sentient, thinking people, who are pretty much just like yourself, with hopes and aspirations and families of their own. I think part of it is the empathic realization that you might have just as easily been in that person's place.
I've hunted, and had my hands in the blood and guts of my prey, which I later delighted in consuming. I've also witnessed people die terribly bloody and painful deaths. Animals may have a general sense of panic when you look them in the eyes as they die, but for me at least, it's not at all on the same level as when its a person looking back at you. Not even close.
I have an uncle who is going on 70 who will not eat pork, not because he's Jewish, but because his family on the farm made him watch the slaughter of 'his' pig when he was a child. He viewed that pig very much as people view their dogs and cats. Of course it's anecdotal evidence, but I'd say he was scarred by the experience.
Of course it is, and yet even seemingly smart people really just don't get it!
Oh, the oil industry makes too much money, let's tax 'em to fund the new animal orphanage!
Three days later...
Goddamn, the price of gas is killing me!
The thing most people never seem to get is that corporations do not pay taxes. Taxes which are levied against corporations are indirectly levied against their customers. They simply raise the prices of their goods and services to offset the difference, similarly to how they optimize their position in the marketplace through pricing strategies.
This makes corporations in general act as an invisible collection branch of the government, and an easy target for new taxes that the people would never vote to put on themselves. I've long said that there would be a overthrow of the government by next Thursday if people had to come up with just the difference in commercial property tax which most communities expect their local businesses to pay.
Hell, I'm a righty and I use the right hand function keys, but only when my right hand isn't mousing. I'm probably some kind of mutant.
There was two or three people in this world who know approximately what happened in those few moments. One of them is dead, and the other is acquitted. None of them are the two of us, so any conversation about anything other than the material facts is pure speculation and mental masturbation. Did Zim take it in the shorts or did he just get ambushed? Who knows.
Not everyone can be goddamned $Hollywood_Martial_Artist, no fight is ever $Hollywood_Fight_movie, and even your formally trained fighters are capable of being unlucky. A firearm merely is a tool that allows more options for more people, in many circumstances. Like it or not. I for one, do not give a shit.
That's all true, and reasonable, of course. However, the only consensus that we really need is the idea that our two parties are walking hand in hand, and they're taking us all on on a one way trip to hell.
Divisiveness is the best weapon our enemy has, the more the people can be divided up into little chunks of intellectual minutia, the better for them. We all have more in common than we think we do.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a gun because he's a shitty fighter. If he wasn't such a useless lump of shit, maybe he could have fought back and controlled the situation.
I carry a gun, because 1) even though I'm a fit 6'+ man with boxing experience, I recognize that I truly am about as good as a 'useless lump of shit' when facing down multiple aggressors or those wielding deadly weapons like guns and others, and 2) bullets tend to fly further and do more damage than my fists. Fortunately, I was able to survive and learn from the above experiences which prompted me to get a carry license and buy the training to defend myself and my family in the first place.
He's lucky Trayvon didn't just take his gun and shoot him to death with it.
That's very likely the exactly reason Tray-Tray got shot. If you carry a gun and you're rolling on the ground in a struggle with someone, it becomes a life or death situation, or at least exponentially more quickly than otherwise; getting your head bludgeoned against the concrete notwithstanding.
Well, there is a lot of pussy on the net.
Well, some people, and by some people I mean the people who have been pushing the panic button for the last decade, say the spooks are routinely looking out for up to three degrees of separation. Three sounds like an entirely plausible optimal number.
There was a relevant facebook study about the small world theory a couple years ago, and IIRC, the average distance between any two people (globally) on the network was 4.6 or some such. Of course, you have the people who have to friend anyone and everything even if they don't know them; probably skews the idea somewhat.
The idea that you and I could be as few as 1.6 additional degrees of separation from some suspected individual is...unsettling. How much longer until the lidless eye wanders further?
Thing is, they aren't too interested in the contents of the envelope at all, at least until you're a person of interest. What they really want is use all that juicy metadata (outside of the envelope, i.e. headers) to establish ties between everyone.
Maybe everyone starts out roughly the same, maybe they develop at a similar rate, and enjoy similar learning capacities. However, civilization has changed more in the last 100 years than it has in the last 3,000. I'm not even sure how you could quantify that statement.
If you told me that a London taxi cab driver, a jet fighter pilot, a race car driver, a farmer, a hunter, a world class table tennis player and a secretary all have the same overall brain 'data throughput', I'd say you're silly. Some of these professions have a strong tendency to weed out individuals who just cannot cope with the particular demands of the job.
Right now, we can measure reaction times, structural changes and activity in the brain. Until we have a much, much better idea of how the brain processes and stores information, I think this question is approximately unanswerable.
The human brain can only process so much information at once.
I agree, and I imagine it's a highly individual trait, to boot.
Anyway, do you suppose that's the reason why when I notice someone driving very noticeably slow compared to the normal flow of traffic, it's nigh invariably the person with their hand up to their ear? i.e. It's the same effect of turning down the radio: turning down driving stimulus because that other slice of brain is busy.
That's the thing... I'm willing to accept that perhaps statistically, the cell-phone drivers might not experience more accidents. I doubt it, but I'm open to the idea. However, I sure as hell bet they cause more accidents, and that being in proximity to a cell-driver is relatively more dangerous than otherwise.
Well, considering the ATF - in its infinite malice - has banned solid copper and brass hunting projectiles
I'm no friend of some aspects of the ATF, but let's be honest; that was congress's doing, and it applies only to handguns. The ATF isn't responsible for creating laws, even though they are sometimes tasked with figuring out how to apply them.
Oh, yeah, wanted to clarify; the storm drain service is billed as a fee, not as a tax--which would have to pass on a ballot. So, the county commissioners basically enacted several millions of dollars worth of tax without following the statutes and by-laws, no less the state constitution.
Some places in the US west also have taxes on impermeable surfaces, but we also have peculiar laws which dictate that one cannot collect said rainwater into a cistern (because all of that water is owned for use downstream), unless rainwater is your only source of water (i.e. they won't grant a well permit).
I actually had a tiff with one of the state water engineers about the very subject. In my county, all new developments are required to install runoff ponds with permeable bottoms, so as to allow rainwater to drain into the groundwater basin. To get a permit to built a new garage and driveway, I had to dig a rather huge dry hole, and install hundreds of feet of pipe and concrete leading to it. It all had to be engineered to account for all of my runoff in a 100-year storm (including that from a preexisting home).
Am I still taxed for the unnameable surface on my property? Of course! To add to the insanity, the state engineer actually had the gall to say that the very idea of a detainment/retention pond which is required by the county for every new development was illegal water catchment. So, according to him, by law, I cannot attempt to reduce or eliminate my negative impact on the public storm drain system, but I have to violate the law to actually use my property. And I'm still taxed for an externality which I arguably do not create. Lovely.
So, what we have is basically a property tax by some other name created in lieu of adding to property tax increases which need to be voted on.
Legislators' plates such as these are registered to a person, not to a particular vehicle, which is what we all expect. If the legislator has 1+ daily drivers (car / truck), he may receive more than one set.
I'd never argue that /. and the various forums and boards I troll are anything but statistically insignificant outlying, niche places. You postulated that there would be a large overlap of people who think the idea of the app is wrong i.e. presumably mostly conservative gun owners who don't want to have their privacy violated vs. gun owners who don't want their privacy violated, who also think Snowden is a traitor.
The point was, in my experience that assumption is wrong. Sure, it's just anecdotal evidence, but if you're so bothered about it, you can go to any large forum and search out Snowden threads, and you might see that significantly more than the parroted national average support the guy. Drawing inference between this subset of people and the national mob? Are you straw-manning?
Wanna bet there's a substantial overlap of people who can simultaneously believe Snowden is a traitor while believing this database and app are wrong?
I think you'd be surprised just how wrong you are about this idea, if you'd simply look into it. Among many such people, governments aren't trusted nearly as strongly as by other groups. The recent uncovering of nationwide spying? The non-privacy of internet activities long been assumed both at /. and various gun related forums; if not that these sites are at an elevated risk for such activities. It's not universal, but the sentiment many share in these places parallels your own.
As for Snowden, the legality and morality of the snooping and of the leaking, well, the common thought I've seen is this: some people are conflicted about it, but most think he has diamond encrusted testicles, most think he upheld his oath the only way he could, and that POTUS, both the current and former are a far greater threat to liberty and the American Way than a bunch of pissed off goat farmers 5000 miles yonder.
Also, I'll leave you a parting thought: I think the whole popularity of the zombie apocalypse meme and being prepared at some level for large scale disaster (pervasive in this community in particular) can be appropriately described as a subconscious cultural / political allegory. Given the context, I'll let you work out what it symbolizes.
As far as I can see, their innovation can be accurately summed up thus:
They've decoupled the power turbine (the one which provides power to the rotors via a gears and such) from the engine, and mix cooler air into the exhaust stream. They've done away with the transmission and drive train by forcing this much cooler exhaust stream through a power turbine directly coupled to the main rotors, and they have also eliminated all of the complexity of a tail rotor and associated drive train by going with co-axial counter-roating rotors to provide necessary anti-torque.
It's the laws of thermodynamics I'm most concerned about, since most thermodynamic cycles suffer when cold fluids are introduced. Maybe eliminating the losses in mechanical transmission and weight offset that? Who knows, but if it works like they claim, that's pretty cool.
Yeah. Better tell Capt. Sullenberger how a flesh and bone based craft 1/5 of the weight of this drone can't cause catastrophic failure of an airliner.
Maybe we could have Danny John-Jules play The Cat Doctor, an extravagantly dressed and infinitely more vain Time Lord stranded from an alternative universe. I'd watch it.
Presumably all of the designs have so far only been pistols because they're going after the 'liberator' philosophy of having a semi-concealable type of a thing. Having a longer barrel compromises that idea, and plus they're at least trying to be legal.
Because it becomes a title 2 device, "Any Other Weapon", and you legally have to go through all of the hullabaloo of registering it with the feds.
The IRS doesn't need to outsource to the DoJ or DHS for jackboots, as of last year they've started assembling their very own paramilitary task force, rumored to consist in large part of special operators returning from war. If that doesn't make you feel all warm inside, two to the chest and one to the head might.