Why is it that worshipers label all atheists as 'raging' while they play no-true-scotsman fallacy games when challenged about atrocities done in the names of their religions?
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't try to disclaim the atrocities committed by my ancestors. Certainly some are religiously motivated, or at least justified. But that said, I don't believe for a second that even one fewer atrocity would have been committed in this world, if we magically went back and turned everyone atheist.
Certainly, religion has had positive effects, too. And furthermore, there's no denying that the absolute worst atrocities is history were committed for non-religious reasons. Religion often follows cultural lines, and people sadly conflate the cultural aspects with the religious aspects. The Nazi Holocaust, for example, would have happened if they were all converted Christians, like the Germans who were doing the torture and murder.
Every atheist is seen as being as bad as an evangelical activist, because simply not believing is considered a bad thing
No, atheists are seen as being as bad as evangelical activists, because a great many of them feel the need to go out of their way to interject their own ideology into the discussion as often as they can... Just like evangelicals. At leasts that's been the bulk of my personal experience, with both types of people.
I've had plenty of perfectly civil conversations about religion and related practices with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, and others. But when it comes to atheists, every one of them seems to define their atheism as their own superiority to all others. All such discussions I've ever had have very quickly devolved into one-sided antagonism, where it's insisted that everyone else must try and "prove" their God exists, and be judged. As I said, that's just my experience, but it's been invariable thus far.
I've certainly never seen this persecution of Atheists you claim exists. And I certainly don't see it being more lonely or challenging to be Atheist than, say, being a lone Hindu or Buddhist in the west.
-- People are surprised to learn that showing a movie to a bunch of school kids is "a performance".
No they aren't surprised at all. About playing movies in classrooms, I've heard many teachers say: "I don't know why we're not being sued." They just go along with it because it's so wide-spread that they assume it must be legal somehow, or at least significantly under the radar. It seems to be legally safe, because it's both non-profit, and educational, but those involved aren't so brainless as you make them out to be.
The Wikipedia article isn't obviously contradicting itself. It could be that most heat pumps don't work better than resistive heating at about -18C.
The quoted statement has no such qualifiers. The statement is vastly overly-broad, so it can never be correct. And I don't see why you're defending WP, since in any case, your statement was incorrect.
35C, and that's probably much too cool to heat a car well.
That's very unlikely.
whether modifying the A/C to serve as a general-purpose heat pump would be useful given cost, space, and weight constraints.
Only minimal modifications are needed. An A/C is already a heat-pump. And as I keep saying, these exist in cars already.
I have no interest in arguing about some theoretical issues you can come up with. If you think there are problems with heat-pumps in cars, you should go and actually FIND ONE, because they exist, and are in-use, which I said in my first reply.
Your final insult is uncalled for; you are criticizing what I said referencing Wikipedia, which you haven't shown is actually wrong, and so what I said is based on information I looked up.
Nowhere does the WP article (or any other) say a heat-pump will ever be less energy-efficient than resistive heating. As far as I can tell, you completely made that up, yourself.
below about -18C your typical air-source heat pump (and a moving vehicle isn't going to use ground-source) is about as efficient as the simpler resistive heating
It does say that... with no citations to back up that claim. And frankly, it's just simply wrong. The COP depends on the working pressure of the system, the refrigerant used, and the inside temperature you want. Honestly, no simplistic little number like that will ever be accurate.
If you bothered to read a little further into that article, you'd see the chart where they list the efficiency for two different existing heat-pump systems, based on an air temperature of -20C, and they get a COP of 2.2 and 2.4 respectively, meaning they're 2.2 to 2.4 times more efficient than resistive heating. And the theoretical limit at -20C is also listed... 5.6... So there's plenty of room for improvement, still. And those numbers are actually CITED! Hooray!
As I said, THESE ALREADY EXIST, and are in-use, so trying to say they won't work is a bad bet to make... And no, I won't get off your lawn.
a heat pump would be an unnecessary encumbrance
Umm.. So you're saying you remove the A/C from your car for part of the year, and put it back in when you need it? It's there... so there's no point in NOT using it.
a heat pump may be less efficient than resistive heating
That is utterly untrue, and certainly not based on any info you looked-up. Instead you're completely making this up.
Yes, burning hydrocarbons is much more economical. But when it comes to electricity, heat pumps are better. Of course resistive heating is still more popular, because it's a cheaper up-front cost (and some places have dirt-cheap electricity costs), but there's definitely a big power savings to be had.
Cellular telcos have a HUGE amount of spectrum, and they currently do a very poor job of spectrum reuse.
You're right that lower frequencies are worse for spectrum reuse, but cell cos have more than enough, at least for voice traffic (high-speed data can be restricted to higher frequencies that have less obstacle penetration and a shorter horizon).
(and heating the car with resistive heating is likely to dig into the range; electric cars don't have all that waste heat from the engine they can use on the passenger compartment)
Since the car is going to have an A/C unit anyways, you just run it in reverse to generate heat (see: heat-pump). This gives much better efficiency than resistive heating (3-to-1 or so). Even conventional cars are starting to do this, as efficiency improvements result in insufficient engine heat to also heat the passenger compartment.
I have no idea why the ACLU is getting involved. It's one thing to fight against government intrusion into privacy, and quite another to fight to have the government compel private companies to force updates on users' phones.
Cell phones are the modern day cameras and camcorders. Cops routinely use tools to break-in to phones and look for incriminating evidence.
The ACLU has released an android app to allow recording an incident, and automatically uploading it to ACLU's servers...
If phones are vulnerable, all public information gathering may be vulnerable, or suspect in courts. And private info leaking, particularly to hostile governments, is a serious concern, that will only get worse.
There was a time when people rode horses across the country, too... That doesn't mean horses (or a car with similar limitations) would stand a chance of replacing a significant percentage of cars.
42.3% of people took fewer than 20 minutes to get to work.
From that PDF, I count 14.6% of people, are potentially driving close to 100 miles per day (or they might all be stuck in traffic... hard to say from those numbers). It's not everybody, of course, but that that's an awfully significant percentage, and not all of them are "traveling salesmen."
And that's an average across the whole country... Local stats (*cough* *California* *cough*) are probably much, much higher.
Anytime you have a large population in a small area all wanting to make calls, the system will be overloaded.
That's not necessarily true. The lower the frequencies in-use, the further over the horizon your cell signal can go, and therefore be load-balanced by possibly numerous cell towers.
In a rural area, sure, there's probably only one other tower in range. But in an urban area like Boston, there's tons of cell towers around, which could absorb the sudden spike in demand from that "small area" if properly designed to do so.
Capacity is built for normal use (which is probably 95 or 99% of normal call volume). When there are spikes in demand exceeding this volume, the network will not work as well (or even fail).
If your network "fail[s]" because of traffic spikes, you're doing something horribly, horribly wrong! If that's your "common sesne", I guess common sesne is often wrong...
Besides, acting like cell towers are old telco switched circuits isn't remotely accurate, and doesn't make any sense. A phone call may only need 8Kbps of bandwidth, while with LTE, several customers (at the same time) expect to be able to download at ~50Mbps... That means for each LTE (data) customer you expect each tower to handle, you could alternately handle 6000 voice calls instead (eg. in an emergency, like this one)...
Also if the network is physically damaged (such as Hurricane Sandy) it won't carry even normal call volumes. How is this not common sesne ?
Depends on what you mean by "damaged". For power, on-site generators are fairly inexpensive, and fully automated. Fiber optics are sufficiently water-resistant, so flooding shouldn't knock them out. Stringing lines above ground has been known to be problematic for centuries, so I'd hope the important backhaul is buried, and not affected by storms. And even in the "backhoe" case, these are major telcos, and should be smart enough to have redundant links taking different physical paths.
So if you're talking about those, it's not unreasonable to expect telcos to do a better job, and avoid such "physical damage" in the future. If, however, you mean the cell towers actually being knocked out by winds and flying debris, then I'll concede the point, that significantly reduced cellular capacity is reasonable. However, the former have been the cause of a great many cell outages in the past, often lasting for days or weeks at a time, so I'm generally biased towards assuming most outages are caused by poor engineering, and extreme cost cutting at the expense of public safety, rather than reasonable, practical limitations.
Thanks to the architecture of cellular networks, it's actually practically possible for cells to be MORE RELIABLE than traditional land-lines, though that would obviously be an expensive proposition. As cellular prices fall, though (I'm paying $45/mo for unlimited everything), we should gradually be increasing the standards for cellular phone networks, rather than letting them completely race to the bottom, and cut costs to the bone at the expense of public safety.
(Disclaimer: I may or may not, work or have worked, for one or more major US cellular phone companies.)
I doubt it. Plenty of folks on the east coast commute, too. I'm sure plenty of them drive close to 100 miles each way... enough to give them severe range anxiety.
And that's just commuting... Start talking about weekend trips, and lots of people go way over that 100 mile trip range, and have to panic to find a station, and curse the extra time.
On the car side, 100 miles is plenty of range if I can charge in 10 minutes. That would give you a nice short break every 2 hours.
No, that would give you a nice short heart-attack every hour, as you rush to find the nearest freeway exist, and nearby charging station, before running completely out of power.
If we had Nascar-like service stations every 20 miles along every stretch of road, highway, freeway, and dirt path, everywhere... THEN 100 mile range would work just-fine. Otherwise, no. 200 is a pretty good minimum, assuming fast charging stations proliferating.
For all the really bad drivers supposedly out there, in a wide variety of road conditions, lighting, weather, etc... there's doesn't seem to be nearly as many accidents as all the handwaving and bile would lead an outside observer to believe.
Really bad drivers don't get in accidents as often as they normally would, because the OTHER driver(s) are driving at least somewhat defensively, and therefore compensating for the bad driver.
When you see someone not staying in his own lane. you stay back. When you see someone crowding the line, you assume they're about to change lanes. When you see them slow down, you pay extra attention, and assume they are about to turn without signaling.
I've had many, MANY incidents where I was ALMOST in an accident due to other bad drivers, but was able to swerve off the road, or brake just barely fast enough not to collide.
And besides that, in my commute, I see at least one accident every week, and usually many more, so there really are plenty.
But baby monitors and walkie-talkies can pick up interference and other communication which can cause the trigger to go prematurely
Ummm, no!
FRS/GMRS radios are sold in practically every retail store, for $10 each, and have a range of over a mile even with obstructions (and can cover miles if you get high ground, and dozens of miles if you've got line of sight). They commonly have 24 RF channels, and 100+ "privacy codes". That gives over 3,000 unique combinations, and is therefore unlikely to be accidentally triggered.,, I'd say a wrong number or telemarketer call is MUCH more likely to happen.
Those figures are for IIS 8 specifically, not IIS in general. That just means a new version was released, and while only one guy way using it 6 months ago, there's now a few hundred active instances, so the statistics fly all to hell...
you are also hard pressed to find a graph which shows less than 40% IIS usage.
Netcraft says all Microsoft web servers, combined, total just 12% of active sites, as of Feb 2013: Google's own custom, in-house web server may soon surpass IIS in market share.
Meanwhile, Apache and nginx total 67% of the market.
If the store is popular, asking people one at a time to hang up takes up too much time.
Obeying the speed limit takes too much time, too... But guess what? You still have to do it.
If customers want to use their phones, they have to go outside. If they don't like losing service while shopping, they can go elsewhere.
That logic will sound great during your "depraved indifference" manslaughter trial, after someone dies in your store, having been unable to call for help. Or perhaps a doctor, police officer, or similar, being unable to receive critical messages, causing someone else to die, unnecessarily.
The best way to handle it is to jam, preferably with a passive 'faraday cage' when possible. If not, then low power jammers should be used.
No, I'd call that they "worst way". Just because you're a control freak doesn't mean you should be allowed to interfere with legal, licensed communications. I'm glad the FCC has a blanket ban on jammers, so utterly insane folks like yourself can't do the kind of uncontrolled damage they feel entitled to do.
Selling merchandise takes up too much time. The best way is to draw people into your store, and then have robots go around, stealing their wallets. If customers don't want to have their wallets stolen, they're free to just not come into my store... Damn the FCC!
Should you have a right to use a radio on my property?
In what context? If I'm a renter, yes, I have certain legal rights, and a few are RF-related.
If I'm a casual visitor, no, not really. However, YOU STILL CAN'T USE JAMMERS, no matter what. The FCC has made this very clear, and they have extremely good reasons:
Your purely theoretical argument is pretty contrived, and pointless, as the reality of the situation is that you can NEVER block RF signals on your property in any way that will guarantee that you aren't interfering with your neighbors. Even with "passive" methods like faraday cages around buildings, you're creating a large obstacle to any RF coming from that particular direction. You have the right to do that, though. With jammers, not only can you do far more damage very easily, there's also practically no way you can mitigate the risk... RF isn't static, and every little temperature or humidity change can suddenly cause your weak little signal to interfere with folks many miles away.
Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is awesome, and how all of America should be connected.
Meh. Fiber vs copper is an inside-ball decision. Both are capable. Whether telcos want to invest the money in fiber for the benefit of lower operating costs is up to them, and of no interest to consumers.
Just as the first half of the 20th century was spent wiring all of the homes for the telephone, the first half of the 21st century should be spent wiring for broadband.
"Broadband" means multiple frequencies. Phone and cable lines are broadband. Fiber doesn't necessarily qualify. You'd be just as happy with baseband internet service.
Gigabit (and higher, in the future) over fiber is what will enable the really interesting applications
Why does it need to be fiber? We can deliver gigabit speeds over coax as well. The end user isn't going to care what the backhaul is.
How many phone lines? How many cable lines?
Ah, but we have both telephone and cable, yet either of those lines can provide phone, TV, and internet service. The fact that we can have both, means we can have multiple fiber lines just as easily.
Besides, stringing fiber across telephone poles is pretty inexpensive... Far less than coax or telephone lines. With lower losses mean longer spans between repeaters.
There are really two choices moving forward. We will either end up with FTTH providers with government granted monopolies similar to telephone and cable, or with "municipal fiber" where government provides the fiber infrastructure (similar to water, sewer and roads). There is no other viable end game.
Very high speed internet service over coax cable is just as viable. DSL can currently provide up to 100Mbps service, so in a few years technology just might be able to get that up to gigabit speeds as well, and continue to make fiber unnecessary.
And it's far from assured that any of these will even be viable... Demand for wireless internet service is exploding, and 4G LTE even offers speeds in excess of most wired options. Right now, people accept that they need wired internet access at home, in addition to paying for their wireless service, but that may change at any time. What happens when you build out your municipal fiber network, and nobody signs up? What happens to your investment when everyone is just as happy to depend on the high-speed cellular service they're already paying for, in their home?
Does having "our closest ally" constantly threaten to nuke Iran count?
Israel hasn't ever admitted to having nukes, so it's pretty hard to claim they've threatened to use them.
In addition, it's quite different, since Iran started the threats, repeatedly talking about wiping Israel off the map (no, it wasn't just one mistranslation, so stfu you ill-informed morons).
It takes a tiny fraction of this speed to send a HD movie.
A significant fraction, though. 1x Blu-ray is 36Mbps. That means waiting 1 hour for a 2.5 hour movie to download, or running out of bandwidth if 3 people want to stream different movies at the same time.
Admittedly, content from Netflix, Hulu, etc., is re-compressed to sizes that are considerably lower than that, but that's mainly because they HAVE TO.
Off-site backups are a big one, too.
And with services like dropbox or mega, these speeds could seem slow, when you click on that DVD iso, and have to sit around for several minutes, waiting for it to transfer. If cloud storage is the way we're going, even gigabit isn't going to be fast enough pretty soon.
Verizon has been advertising their FIOS Quantum, with 300Mbps speeds, at astronomical prices.
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I don't know about anyone else, but I don't try to disclaim the atrocities committed by my ancestors. Certainly some are religiously motivated, or at least justified. But that said, I don't believe for a second that even one fewer atrocity would have been committed in this world, if we magically went back and turned everyone atheist.
Certainly, religion has had positive effects, too. And furthermore, there's no denying that the absolute worst atrocities is history were committed for non-religious reasons. Religion often follows cultural lines, and people sadly conflate the cultural aspects with the religious aspects. The Nazi Holocaust, for example, would have happened if they were all converted Christians, like the Germans who were doing the torture and murder.
No, atheists are seen as being as bad as evangelical activists, because a great many of them feel the need to go out of their way to interject their own ideology into the discussion as often as they can... Just like evangelicals. At leasts that's been the bulk of my personal experience, with both types of people.
I've had plenty of perfectly civil conversations about religion and related practices with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, and others. But when it comes to atheists, every one of them seems to define their atheism as their own superiority to all others. All such discussions I've ever had have very quickly devolved into one-sided antagonism, where it's insisted that everyone else must try and "prove" their God exists, and be judged. As I said, that's just my experience, but it's been invariable thus far.
I've certainly never seen this persecution of Atheists you claim exists. And I certainly don't see it being more lonely or challenging to be Atheist than, say, being a lone Hindu or Buddhist in the west.
Is there ANY reason for this to be an article on /.
Or is this just just a blatant example of editors posting flame-fodder?
Nope.
Or at least, they could still only account for a small fraction of observed dark-matter.
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/node6.html
-- People are surprised to learn that showing a movie to a bunch of school kids is "a performance".
No they aren't surprised at all. About playing movies in classrooms, I've heard many teachers say: "I don't know why we're not being sued." They just go along with it because it's so wide-spread that they assume it must be legal somehow, or at least significantly under the radar. It seems to be legally safe, because it's both non-profit, and educational, but those involved aren't so brainless as you make them out to be.
The quoted statement has no such qualifiers. The statement is vastly overly-broad, so it can never be correct. And I don't see why you're defending WP, since in any case, your statement was incorrect.
That's very unlikely.
Only minimal modifications are needed. An A/C is already a heat-pump. And as I keep saying, these exist in cars already.
I have no interest in arguing about some theoretical issues you can come up with. If you think there are problems with heat-pumps in cars, you should go and actually FIND ONE, because they exist, and are in-use, which I said in my first reply.
Nowhere does the WP article (or any other) say a heat-pump will ever be less energy-efficient than resistive heating. As far as I can tell, you completely made that up, yourself.
This is where you went wrong...
It does say that... with no citations to back up that claim. And frankly, it's just simply wrong. The COP depends on the working pressure of the system, the refrigerant used, and the inside temperature you want. Honestly, no simplistic little number like that will ever be accurate.
If you bothered to read a little further into that article, you'd see the chart where they list the efficiency for two different existing heat-pump systems, based on an air temperature of -20C, and they get a COP of 2.2 and 2.4 respectively, meaning they're 2.2 to 2.4 times more efficient than resistive heating. And the theoretical limit at -20C is also listed... 5.6... So there's plenty of room for improvement, still. And those numbers are actually CITED! Hooray!
As I said, THESE ALREADY EXIST, and are in-use, so trying to say they won't work is a bad bet to make... And no, I won't get off your lawn.
Umm.. So you're saying you remove the A/C from your car for part of the year, and put it back in when you need it? It's there... so there's no point in NOT using it.
That is utterly untrue, and certainly not based on any info you looked-up. Instead you're completely making this up.
Yes, burning hydrocarbons is much more economical. But when it comes to electricity, heat pumps are better. Of course resistive heating is still more popular, because it's a cheaper up-front cost (and some places have dirt-cheap electricity costs), but there's definitely a big power savings to be had.
Cellular telcos have a HUGE amount of spectrum, and they currently do a very poor job of spectrum reuse.
You're right that lower frequencies are worse for spectrum reuse, but cell cos have more than enough, at least for voice traffic (high-speed data can be restricted to higher frequencies that have less obstacle penetration and a shorter horizon).
Since the car is going to have an A/C unit anyways, you just run it in reverse to generate heat (see: heat-pump). This gives much better efficiency than resistive heating (3-to-1 or so). Even conventional cars are starting to do this, as efficiency improvements result in insufficient engine heat to also heat the passenger compartment.
Cell phones are the modern day cameras and camcorders. Cops routinely use tools to break-in to phones and look for incriminating evidence.
The ACLU has released an android app to allow recording an incident, and automatically uploading it to ACLU's servers...
If phones are vulnerable, all public information gathering may be vulnerable, or suspect in courts. And private info leaking, particularly to hostile governments, is a serious concern, that will only get worse.
There was a time when people rode horses across the country, too... That doesn't mean horses (or a car with similar limitations) would stand a chance of replacing a significant percentage of cars.
From that PDF, I count 14.6% of people, are potentially driving close to 100 miles per day (or they might all be stuck in traffic... hard to say from those numbers). It's not everybody, of course, but that that's an awfully significant percentage, and not all of them are "traveling salesmen."
And that's an average across the whole country... Local stats (*cough* *California* *cough*) are probably much, much higher.
That's not necessarily true. The lower the frequencies in-use, the further over the horizon your cell signal can go, and therefore be load-balanced by possibly numerous cell towers.
In a rural area, sure, there's probably only one other tower in range. But in an urban area like Boston, there's tons of cell towers around, which could absorb the sudden spike in demand from that "small area" if properly designed to do so.
If your network "fail[s]" because of traffic spikes, you're doing something horribly, horribly wrong! If that's your "common sesne", I guess common sesne is often wrong...
Besides, acting like cell towers are old telco switched circuits isn't remotely accurate, and doesn't make any sense. A phone call may only need 8Kbps of bandwidth, while with LTE, several customers (at the same time) expect to be able to download at ~50Mbps... That means for each LTE (data) customer you expect each tower to handle, you could alternately handle 6000 voice calls instead (eg. in an emergency, like this one)...
Depends on what you mean by "damaged". For power, on-site generators are fairly inexpensive, and fully automated. Fiber optics are sufficiently water-resistant, so flooding shouldn't knock them out. Stringing lines above ground has been known to be problematic for centuries, so I'd hope the important backhaul is buried, and not affected by storms. And even in the "backhoe" case, these are major telcos, and should be smart enough to have redundant links taking different physical paths.
So if you're talking about those, it's not unreasonable to expect telcos to do a better job, and avoid such "physical damage" in the future. If, however, you mean the cell towers actually being knocked out by winds and flying debris, then I'll concede the point, that significantly reduced cellular capacity is reasonable. However, the former have been the cause of a great many cell outages in the past, often lasting for days or weeks at a time, so I'm generally biased towards assuming most outages are caused by poor engineering, and extreme cost cutting at the expense of public safety, rather than reasonable, practical limitations.
Thanks to the architecture of cellular networks, it's actually practically possible for cells to be MORE RELIABLE than traditional land-lines, though that would obviously be an expensive proposition. As cellular prices fall, though (I'm paying $45/mo for unlimited everything), we should gradually be increasing the standards for cellular phone networks, rather than letting them completely race to the bottom, and cut costs to the bone at the expense of public safety.
(Disclaimer: I may or may not, work or have worked, for one or more major US cellular phone companies.)
I doubt it. Plenty of folks on the east coast commute, too. I'm sure plenty of them drive close to 100 miles each way... enough to give them severe range anxiety.
And that's just commuting... Start talking about weekend trips, and lots of people go way over that 100 mile trip range, and have to panic to find a station, and curse the extra time.
No, that would give you a nice short heart-attack every hour, as you rush to find the nearest freeway exist, and nearby charging station, before running completely out of power.
If we had Nascar-like service stations every 20 miles along every stretch of road, highway, freeway, and dirt path, everywhere... THEN 100 mile range would work just-fine. Otherwise, no. 200 is a pretty good minimum, assuming fast charging stations proliferating.
Really bad drivers don't get in accidents as often as they normally would, because the OTHER driver(s) are driving at least somewhat defensively, and therefore compensating for the bad driver.
When you see someone not staying in his own lane. you stay back. When you see someone crowding the line, you assume they're about to change lanes. When you see them slow down, you pay extra attention, and assume they are about to turn without signaling.
I've had many, MANY incidents where I was ALMOST in an accident due to other bad drivers, but was able to swerve off the road, or brake just barely fast enough not to collide.
And besides that, in my commute, I see at least one accident every week, and usually many more, so there really are plenty.
Ummm, no!
FRS/GMRS radios are sold in practically every retail store, for $10 each, and have a range of over a mile even with obstructions (and can cover miles if you get high ground, and dozens of miles if you've got line of sight). They commonly have 24 RF channels, and 100+ "privacy codes". That gives over 3,000 unique combinations, and is therefore unlikely to be accidentally triggered.,, I'd say a wrong number or telemarketer call is MUCH more likely to happen.
There are tons and tons of internal web servers run on Apache / Nginx as well. I'd expect the breakdown to be pretty much the same.
Those figures are for IIS 8 specifically, not IIS in general. That just means a new version was released, and while only one guy way using it 6 months ago, there's now a few hundred active instances, so the statistics fly all to hell...
Netcraft says all Microsoft web servers, combined, total just 12% of active sites, as of Feb 2013: Google's own custom, in-house web server may soon surpass IIS in market share.
Meanwhile, Apache and nginx total 67% of the market.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/02/01/february-2013-web-server-survey.html
Obeying the speed limit takes too much time, too... But guess what? You still have to do it.
That logic will sound great during your "depraved indifference" manslaughter trial, after someone dies in your store, having been unable to call for help. Or perhaps a doctor, police officer, or similar, being unable to receive critical messages, causing someone else to die, unnecessarily.
No, I'd call that they "worst way". Just because you're a control freak doesn't mean you should be allowed to interfere with legal, licensed communications. I'm glad the FCC has a blanket ban on jammers, so utterly insane folks like yourself can't do the kind of uncontrolled damage they feel entitled to do.
Selling merchandise takes up too much time. The best way is to draw people into your store, and then have robots go around, stealing their wallets. If customers don't want to have their wallets stolen, they're free to just not come into my store... Damn the FCC!
In what context? If I'm a renter, yes, I have certain legal rights, and a few are RF-related.
If I'm a casual visitor, no, not really. However, YOU STILL CAN'T USE JAMMERS, no matter what. The FCC has made this very clear, and they have extremely good reasons:
https://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/jammer-enforcement
Your purely theoretical argument is pretty contrived, and pointless, as the reality of the situation is that you can NEVER block RF signals on your property in any way that will guarantee that you aren't interfering with your neighbors. Even with "passive" methods like faraday cages around buildings, you're creating a large obstacle to any RF coming from that particular direction. You have the right to do that, though. With jammers, not only can you do far more damage very easily, there's also practically no way you can mitigate the risk... RF isn't static, and every little temperature or humidity change can suddenly cause your weak little signal to interfere with folks many miles away.
Meh. Fiber vs copper is an inside-ball decision. Both are capable. Whether telcos want to invest the money in fiber for the benefit of lower operating costs is up to them, and of no interest to consumers.
"Broadband" means multiple frequencies. Phone and cable lines are broadband. Fiber doesn't necessarily qualify. You'd be just as happy with baseband internet service.
Why does it need to be fiber? We can deliver gigabit speeds over coax as well. The end user isn't going to care what the backhaul is.
Ah, but we have both telephone and cable, yet either of those lines can provide phone, TV, and internet service. The fact that we can have both, means we can have multiple fiber lines just as easily.
Besides, stringing fiber across telephone poles is pretty inexpensive... Far less than coax or telephone lines. With lower losses mean longer spans between repeaters.
Very high speed internet service over coax cable is just as viable. DSL can currently provide up to 100Mbps service, so in a few years technology just might be able to get that up to gigabit speeds as well, and continue to make fiber unnecessary.
And it's far from assured that any of these will even be viable... Demand for wireless internet service is exploding, and 4G LTE even offers speeds in excess of most wired options. Right now, people accept that they need wired internet access at home, in addition to paying for their wireless service, but that may change at any time. What happens when you build out your municipal fiber network, and nobody signs up? What happens to your investment when everyone is just as happy to depend on the high-speed cellular service they're already paying for, in their home?
Israel hasn't ever admitted to having nukes, so it's pretty hard to claim they've threatened to use them.
In addition, it's quite different, since Iran started the threats, repeatedly talking about wiping Israel off the map (no, it wasn't just one mistranslation, so stfu you ill-informed morons).
A significant fraction, though. 1x Blu-ray is 36Mbps. That means waiting 1 hour for a 2.5 hour movie to download, or running out of bandwidth if 3 people want to stream different movies at the same time.
Admittedly, content from Netflix, Hulu, etc., is re-compressed to sizes that are considerably lower than that, but that's mainly because they HAVE TO.
Off-site backups are a big one, too.
And with services like dropbox or mega, these speeds could seem slow, when you click on that DVD iso, and have to sit around for several minutes, waiting for it to transfer. If cloud storage is the way we're going, even gigabit isn't going to be fast enough pretty soon.
Verizon has been advertising their FIOS Quantum, with 300Mbps speeds, at astronomical prices.