Seems odd to me that the broadcasters are playing for time. If there is an Obama presidency beginning next year, I'd expect an FCC realignment much less likely to give big players whatever they want. At some point in this whole whitespace debate, I seem to remember hearing that they were seeking no triple-adjacency for any whitespace devices. No single adjacency is understandable, double-adjacency is pushing it, but triple adjacency is ridiculous. That was a snapshot - I have no idea where the debate went after that.
I also remember hearing that the devices used in the first - the one that failed interference requirements, used fatally flawed hardware, and was supposed to be considered invalid. I've heard nothing of a retest.
It's good to hear that the FCC is so attuned to the problems of RFI and TVI. Otherwise I'd be really worried about the practice in the Deep South where right-wing broadcasters manage to license frequencies adjacent to NPR stations, and effectively drown them off the air. Since the FCC is so concerned, of course they're going to address this.
Kind of like the way the Beatles/Apple Records and Apple both own the "Apple" trademark, because the former does music and the latter does computers.... Oops!
How did that ever turn out, anyway? Did Apple Records reopen their suit, once the iPod and iTunes hit the market?
Actually, this is the most damaging aspect of the whole thing. It's certainly easy to believe Cogent is simply getting slapped again and they deserve, except for this. In the network age, blackholing is almost a death penalty, except that it's reversible.
Any net neutraility legislation ought to include explicit provisions for blackholing - when it's allowed, how it's remediated, due process, etc.
Simple... You lay off 75% of the people, since you can get the work done with the 25% left. Furthermore, because you now have 3 unemployed or underemployed vying for every good job that's left, you can take additional liberties with at least some of those employees. Maybe some are irreplacable, but there's always going to be 5%-10% uncertainty around that 75/25 cut line, and those people are readily fungible. Beyond that, since there are fewer employees, costs have gone down and profitability is up, so give yourself a big raise and bonus.
Using today's society as an example, clearly the point is to make more money using fewer people.
Oh, and by the way, it's a feature that now you can grumble about the 75% lowlifes sapping your income through the support they get from your taxes.
We need to put our philosophers to work on problems like this, and I'm not kidding. The tactical responses we've been using have gotten us where we are today. Not even to advocate central planning - I'd just like to hear suggestions of a better way from some truly intelligent people, that doesn't coincidentally also happen to align with their personal power, comfort, and wealth.
The keystone of Bush 2's economic policy was to "adjust the tax code to favor capital and investment over labor." This is also one of the responses made to Joe the Plumber, by I believe it was Joe Biden. You want your customers to be able to afford your services. Likewise, GM should want people to be able to afford its cars and trucks.
A fundamental problem is that there is no succinct positive measure of the economic health of the nation, overall. The measures we have apply primarily to the financial health of corporations and those who live by capital and investment. You get what you measure, even if it's unsustainable.
Forget it. You win. I bow to your superior intelligence. Clearly if accumulation of wealth is the highest end, and community and society are nothing, your logic is flawless.
May you have many toys when you die.
If I've misread you, and you're not driven in that direction, please explain your method for enriching community and society, and how we get there from here. Someone else on this discussion, in a different subthread, tried to differentiate creating wealth from sucking wealth out of wherever you can find it. I "search for every legitimate deduction" on my taxes too, and I dread the day when the non-indexing AMT hits me, but I'm not in favor of getting rid of a progressive income tax.
If you don't have a 6 figure income, you get the break, not the increase. Who told you that people making $100k will have to pay more? For a married couple the number is supposed to be $500k. You ARE two of the people who are supposed to be lifted up under the Obama plan.
> Does someone who is wealthy receive more services because they pay more?
Yes. Unless you're a wealthy hermit living in a primitive hut, who made all of your wealth by the sweat of only your own brow, you use more services than the poor man. Likely your house is bigger, on a larger plot of land. From the local point of view, it takes more to go past you, with utilities, roads, and services like police and fire. From the national point of view, given that it takes a certain funding to protect the land, you could divide that funding by the acreage, and more land, bigger share.
Next, if you're wealthy, likely it isn't just by the sweat of your own brow, but also by others working for you. It's called a community, or a society. Furthermore, very likely you earn more than anyone working for you. Your reward for participating in that society is greater than theirs.
> Is someone who is wealthy drive on different roads?
Not on different roads, but almost certainly in different cars, and almost certainly if so inclined, they travel further. Since some portion of our national budget is spent securing our energy supply, if you're using a larger share of that energy supply, you're driving a larger share of that budget.
It's a little more fundamental that that, because it's all done with laws, because that's the tool that Congress has. Laws govern civil rights and budgets both. In the case of the way Congress works, the minority gets its power by its ability to prevent action, not to cause it. It's essentially a veto.
I think the biggest problem with corruption is the 2-party system, because it makes 2-stop shopping with your influen^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions.
I think the gp is referring to "Tyranny of the Majority." The founding fathers were very concerned, and that's part of why we have a Senate, and the Supreme Court is filled the way it is.
There are some tens of millions of voter registrations that have been thrown out over the past few years, predominantly by Republican secretaries-of-state, and predominantly from demographics that favor Democrats.
Throw out enough of the right (or is that left, or is that wrong) votes, and McCain can still win.
Chads and butterflies had little to do with the Florida results in 2000. Bush won because Katherin Harris, in the name of voter fraud, threw out some 30,000+ voter registrations in a wide dragnet looking for "black felons." Had they thrown out the registration of felons, without the desired false positives, Florida wouldn't have been close, and chads and butterflies never would have shown up on the media radar.
As an aside, several have pointed out that Obama's site didn't do decent credit card validation, leading to the possiblity of fraudulent donations. I guess I can't fight that allegation, but I will bring out an important point about it.
If there are fraudulent donations, there is no possibility for quid-pro-qou.
In other words, maybe Obama is getting extra money because fraudulent donors anticipate that they will prefer his policies, but that is completely different from the case of donors making large contributions, expecting something in return, even if it is only "access."
Bad is bad, but there are also degrees of bad, and quid-pro-quo is generally worse.
> I have to disagree. Companies find it cheaper to do basic research overseas. It cannot be > our comparative advantage. The comparative advantage of the US is bringing new products > to consumers because 3rd-world country consumers cannot afford cutting edge. (It's an > interesting discussion that would take more room here.)
I see that very statement as a problem, though I don't disagree with what you say, I see it as something that needs to be fixed.
> In my opinion, Obama's approach was brilliant: he *ignored* the point both times.
I noticed it, too. I rather wish that Obama had gone on the offensive, with the fact that US students are falling behind on math and science. His so-called overhead projector was part of an attempt to inspire children with science and engineering - something the nation badly needs right now - something corporate America and CEOs have been teaching us is a bad career path by exporting those jobs overseas. It dovetails with the rest of his message.
My point was that right now, nobody is authenticated to my wireless at all. Where there is no connect there can be no reconnect. My wireless router is simply sitting there broadcasting its SSID, and there are no conversations to sniff or de-authenticate. It's about as safe as unplugged.
To be honest, I forgot which wall-wart the wireless is on, and which wall-wart powers my main switch. I suppose I could trace the wires or trial-and-error, but so far I've been lazy, and it's been nice having a few extra ports.
So this means that though I'm using the longest key my router allows, because I only used a decent pseudorandom generator instead of a true random generator, I'm toast. Oh, Noooooooooo!
Incidentally, I've usually powered my wireless router off when I'm not going to be using it. But then at some point I realized that cracking requires snooping on a successful connection. If there's no successful connection, about all they can get is my SSID.
Then again, as considered by the planet Solaris, we all might be considered some mildly interesting semisolid crud crawling around the surface. Could the Turing Test be brought to its attention, it might think, "Oh, how trivial, why even bother?"
We did this with our kids, and some friends didn't. It made extra work early on, because young kids really aren't that competent yet, but it pays off as they become so. Fast forward a number of years... Our kids have been getting their own breakfast and lunch for years, with no help from us past the early times. Theirs still count on Mom and Dad to do it for them. Our kids do their own chores around the house, and divvy up on family chores, though occasionally some prodding is needed. Theirs were just starting on the "chore thing." Etc, etc, etc...
I've never watched that video, still haven't, maybe one of these days.
I've seen the green-screen version with Donny Osmond as a guest. Made me have a new level of respect for the guy, that he can laugh at himself and have fun doing it.
A bit over a year back, my wife and I went to Albany, NY to see Weird Al live, and we took our 21 yo son and a friend of his.
He puts on a heck of a show, and has multiple screens going to keep you busy during his (many) costume changes. Besides, "Weasel Stomping Day" is just plain better animated.
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Seems odd to me that the broadcasters are playing for time. If there is an Obama presidency beginning next year, I'd expect an FCC realignment much less likely to give big players whatever they want. At some point in this whole whitespace debate, I seem to remember hearing that they were seeking no triple-adjacency for any whitespace devices. No single adjacency is understandable, double-adjacency is pushing it, but triple adjacency is ridiculous. That was a snapshot - I have no idea where the debate went after that.
I also remember hearing that the devices used in the first - the one that failed interference requirements, used fatally flawed hardware, and was supposed to be considered invalid. I've heard nothing of a retest.
Why answer with a cogent, technical solution when a simple insult will do:
FLATLANDER!
It's good to hear that the FCC is so attuned to the problems of RFI and TVI. Otherwise I'd be really worried about the practice in the Deep South where right-wing broadcasters manage to license frequencies adjacent to NPR stations, and effectively drown them off the air. Since the FCC is so concerned, of course they're going to address this.
Kind of like the way the Beatles/Apple Records and Apple both own the "Apple" trademark, because the former does music and the latter does computers.... Oops!
How did that ever turn out, anyway? Did Apple Records reopen their suit, once the iPod and iTunes hit the market?
Actually, this is the most damaging aspect of the whole thing. It's certainly easy to believe Cogent is simply getting slapped again and they deserve, except for this. In the network age, blackholing is almost a death penalty, except that it's reversible.
Any net neutraility legislation ought to include explicit provisions for blackholing - when it's allowed, how it's remediated, due process, etc.
Simple... You lay off 75% of the people, since you can get the work done with the 25% left. Furthermore, because you now have 3 unemployed or underemployed vying for every good job that's left, you can take additional liberties with at least some of those employees. Maybe some are irreplacable, but there's always going to be 5%-10% uncertainty around that 75/25 cut line, and those people are readily fungible. Beyond that, since there are fewer employees, costs have gone down and profitability is up, so give yourself a big raise and bonus.
Using today's society as an example, clearly the point is to make more money using fewer people.
Oh, and by the way, it's a feature that now you can grumble about the 75% lowlifes sapping your income through the support they get from your taxes.
We need to put our philosophers to work on problems like this, and I'm not kidding. The tactical responses we've been using have gotten us where we are today. Not even to advocate central planning - I'd just like to hear suggestions of a better way from some truly intelligent people, that doesn't coincidentally also happen to align with their personal power, comfort, and wealth.
Kept money in the hands of the middle class.
The keystone of Bush 2's economic policy was to "adjust the tax code to favor capital and investment over labor." This is also one of the responses made to Joe the Plumber, by I believe it was Joe Biden. You want your customers to be able to afford your services. Likewise, GM should want people to be able to afford its cars and trucks.
A fundamental problem is that there is no succinct positive measure of the economic health of the nation, overall. The measures we have apply primarily to the financial health of corporations and those who live by capital and investment. You get what you measure, even if it's unsustainable.
Forget it. You win. I bow to your superior intelligence. Clearly if accumulation of wealth is the highest end, and community and society are nothing, your logic is flawless.
May you have many toys when you die.
If I've misread you, and you're not driven in that direction, please explain your method for enriching community and society, and how we get there from here. Someone else on this discussion, in a different subthread, tried to differentiate creating wealth from sucking wealth out of wherever you can find it. I "search for every legitimate deduction" on my taxes too, and I dread the day when the non-indexing AMT hits me, but I'm not in favor of getting rid of a progressive income tax.
If you don't have a 6 figure income, you get the break, not the increase. Who told you that people making $100k will have to pay more? For a married couple the number is supposed to be $500k. You ARE two of the people who are supposed to be lifted up under the Obama plan.
> Does someone who is wealthy receive more services because they pay more?
Yes. Unless you're a wealthy hermit living in a primitive hut, who made all of your wealth by the sweat of only your own brow, you use more services than the poor man. Likely your house is bigger, on a larger plot of land. From the local point of view, it takes more to go past you, with utilities, roads, and services like police and fire. From the national point of view, given that it takes a certain funding to protect the land, you could divide that funding by the acreage, and more land, bigger share.
Next, if you're wealthy, likely it isn't just by the sweat of your own brow, but also by others working for you. It's called a community, or a society. Furthermore, very likely you earn more than anyone working for you. Your reward for participating in that society is greater than theirs.
> Is someone who is wealthy drive on different roads?
Not on different roads, but almost certainly in different cars, and almost certainly if so inclined, they travel further. Since some portion of our national budget is spent securing our energy supply, if you're using a larger share of that energy supply, you're driving a larger share of that budget.
It's a little more fundamental that that, because it's all done with laws, because that's the tool that Congress has. Laws govern civil rights and budgets both. In the case of the way Congress works, the minority gets its power by its ability to prevent action, not to cause it. It's essentially a veto.
I think the biggest problem with corruption is the 2-party system, because it makes 2-stop shopping with your influen^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions.
I think the gp is referring to "Tyranny of the Majority." The founding fathers were very concerned, and that's part of why we have a Senate, and the Supreme Court is filled the way it is.
There are some tens of millions of voter registrations that have been thrown out over the past few years, predominantly by Republican secretaries-of-state, and predominantly from demographics that favor Democrats.
Throw out enough of the right (or is that left, or is that wrong) votes, and McCain can still win.
Chads and butterflies had little to do with the Florida results in 2000. Bush won because Katherin Harris, in the name of voter fraud, threw out some 30,000+ voter registrations in a wide dragnet looking for "black felons." Had they thrown out the registration of felons, without the desired false positives, Florida wouldn't have been close, and chads and butterflies never would have shown up on the media radar.
As an aside, several have pointed out that Obama's site didn't do decent credit card validation, leading to the possiblity of fraudulent donations. I guess I can't fight that allegation, but I will bring out an important point about it.
If there are fraudulent donations, there is no possibility for quid-pro-qou.
In other words, maybe Obama is getting extra money because fraudulent donors anticipate that they will prefer his policies, but that is completely different from the case of donors making large contributions, expecting something in return, even if it is only "access."
Bad is bad, but there are also degrees of bad, and quid-pro-quo is generally worse.
> 1984 was against government control over culture,
And corporate control is better than government control how?
But I guess once you cross the line into corporate control, the correct warning literature becomes different - something like Neuromancer.
> I have to disagree. Companies find it cheaper to do basic research overseas. It cannot be
> our comparative advantage. The comparative advantage of the US is bringing new products
> to consumers because 3rd-world country consumers cannot afford cutting edge. (It's an
> interesting discussion that would take more room here.)
I see that very statement as a problem, though I don't disagree with what you say, I see it as something that needs to be fixed.
> In my opinion, Obama's approach was brilliant: he *ignored* the point both times.
I noticed it, too. I rather wish that Obama had gone on the offensive, with the fact that US students are falling behind on math and science. His so-called overhead projector was part of an attempt to inspire children with science and engineering - something the nation badly needs right now - something corporate America and CEOs have been teaching us is a bad career path by exporting those jobs overseas. It dovetails with the rest of his message.
My point was that right now, nobody is authenticated to my wireless at all. Where there is no connect there can be no reconnect. My wireless router is simply sitting there broadcasting its SSID, and there are no conversations to sniff or de-authenticate. It's about as safe as unplugged.
To be honest, I forgot which wall-wart the wireless is on, and which wall-wart powers my main switch. I suppose I could trace the wires or trial-and-error, but so far I've been lazy, and it's been nice having a few extra ports.
So this means that though I'm using the longest key my router allows, because I only used a decent pseudorandom generator instead of a true random generator, I'm toast. Oh, Noooooooooo!
Incidentally, I've usually powered my wireless router off when I'm not going to be using it. But then at some point I realized that cracking requires snooping on a successful connection. If there's no successful connection, about all they can get is my SSID.
Then again, as considered by the planet Solaris, we all might be considered some mildly interesting semisolid crud crawling around the surface. Could the Turing Test be brought to its attention, it might think, "Oh, how trivial, why even bother?"
We did this with our kids, and some friends didn't. It made extra work early on, because young kids really aren't that competent yet, but it pays off as they become so. Fast forward a number of years... Our kids have been getting their own breakfast and lunch for years, with no help from us past the early times. Theirs still count on Mom and Dad to do it for them. Our kids do their own chores around the house, and divvy up on family chores, though occasionally some prodding is needed. Theirs were just starting on the "chore thing." Etc, etc, etc...
> People drive to get to a set destination. Fuel savings are on miles driven, not miles able to be found on a tank of gas.
Except for a teenager with a new driver's licence. They tend to drive to what's in their wallet plus whatever Mom and Dad left in the tank.
Agreed. It's really great to see the 20-somethings laughing right alongside the grey-hairs.
Maybe there's a lesson here for Congress about helping people get along. But then again, laughter is generally supposed to help.
I've never watched that video, still haven't, maybe one of these days.
I've seen the green-screen version with Donny Osmond as a guest. Made me have a new level of respect for the guy, that he can laugh at himself and have fun doing it.
A bit over a year back, my wife and I went to Albany, NY to see Weird Al live, and we took our 21 yo son and a friend of his.
He puts on a heck of a show, and has multiple screens going to keep you busy during his (many) costume changes. Besides, "Weasel Stomping Day" is just plain better animated.