They want to sell "bandwidth expansion solutions" to the parts of the business that actually want more bandwidth available.
They will then turn around and sell "bandwidth constraining" solutions to the parts of the business that don't.
It's just like John Chamber's & Cisco -- stand in front of Congress demanding their corporate constitutional right to influence American politicians in the name of freedom, while at the same time selling products to the Communist Chinese to enable censorship and repression.
You're right in the most pedantic sense, but I think where this kind of thing becomes a larger rights issue is the fact that we have a shrinking public space and more and more of our lives are spent tied to corporations and "private" spaces where the kind of "if you don't like it, don't do it" thinking stops being rational unless your name is Ted Kaczynski.
Participation in most of modern life requires going along with all manner of rights-sacrificing agreements -- credit cards, banks,
Now the Apple agreement may possibly be an extreme example of this (since you don't need to be an Apple developer), but the point remains valid.
I bought an Intermatic in-wall digital timer from Home Depot. Actually, several of them. After six months, I had three failures.
After the first failure I had no receipt anymore and went and replaced the entire timer. After the second failure I used the receipt from the new purchase to return the second failure. I repeated this after the third failure.
I guess its a not-nice thing to do, but these were expensive timers (which are great when they work) and I assume that Home Depot is just going to warranty the timers with the manufacturer anyway. It's not like I was returning something claimed to be in good shape, it was broken and that's why it was returned.
The postscript is that I found out that Intermatic stopped selling that model because of a faulty relay design that burned out prematurely and they were giving away replacements of an updated model. I got all 4 of my timers replaced with updated models and have had no failures since.
Take it to the politicians who oversee your hospital and provide funding and ultimately governance.
My guess is that Democrats would be the most likely to care about this, either from a public interest perspective, a conflict of interest or possibly even kickback basis, or even a freedom of speech basis (yes, you don't have freedom of speech at work but the rules are often more fluid when you work for the government).
I'd like for Republicans to care about this from a government-money-being-wasted basis, but AFAICT the general trend seems to be Republicans generally being in favor of corporate alignment, sweetheart deals, executive preference and suppressing workers.
The right politician on this case might actually put the fear of God in the executives responsible for this.
Clever rhetoric, but unlike your dragons, we have concrete evidence of terrorism/terrorists exist. You'll need to prove the dragons exist before your amethyst argument starts to hold water.
FWIW, I agree with the parent poster; nuclear power plants, refineries, chemical plants, rail networks are all juicy targets. That they have not been hit before says something about either the magnitude & capabilities of the terrorist threat or the quality of counter-intelligence work.
Probably both. Islamic radicals seem great at symbolism but pretty lousy at strategy; hitting 4 major refineries on 9/11 would likely have done far more to damage the US than bringing down two office towers, a chunk of the Pentagon, and a swath of forest in Pennsylvania. But regardless of their strategy, they did show a startling ability to plan and execute.
But I'm sure intelligence work did a fair amount to thwart follow-on attacks; fairly or not, a lot of Muslims got their nuts in a vice after 9/11, figuratively speaking within the US and probably literally outside the US, and I'm sure not a few took a dirt nap when they gave intelligence ops half an opportunity to do so.
I'm sure that a CIA-sponsored trip to some Romanian dungeon where you spend time in the hands of some guy whose family still has a gripe against the Ottoman Empire and who learned his trade from Ceauescu and the Einsatzkommandos is enough to dissuade you from further terrorist activity and when you show your scars, probably dissuade your friends and loved ones should you make it back to whatever Arab slum you came from.
The bottom line is that refineries, nuke plants, chemical sites, etc are huge, soft targets and that NONE of them has been hit says something.
If you're referring to bytes/hr and my math is right, that's still 3.5Mbit/sec for h264 which is pretty aggressive for most home broadband with the exception of some of the better served cable modem customer base.
That makes a ton of sense, especially the Google tie-in (for bandwidth, expertise, infrastructure, etc).
The downside, though, is how much bandwidth does it take to stream two channels in HD simultaneously?
It would make sense if it was the kind of thing where you got everything offline and the Tivo just downloaded programming as it became available in the background.
But real-time TV watching might be a problem in HD unless each home has 5+MB/sec throughput.
Disclaimer: I own 3 Tivos; a Series 2 standalone bought in 2002 that's going strong (albeit soon to be nearly obsoleted by Comcast's digital conversion), and two HD Tivos. It will be a sad day when I have to replace them with POS cable products or some Frankenstein
IMHO, what's hurt Tivo has been a couple of things. One is painfully slow technology refresh.
When I bought my Series 2 in 2002, most digital cable channels (HBO, Encore, etc) offered DD 5.1 audio on most or all programs. The Series 2 had no digital audio interface but even by 2002 standards should have been able to handle digital audio. It wasn't until the release of the Series 3 some 3? 4? years later, which required a CableCard (and thus the delay for CableCard) before digital audio was available.
What should have happened is a new unit (Series 2.5?) issued with digital audio capabilities to bridge that gap. HD would have still been an issue, but HD boxes would downcovert and we could have had digital audio. Other hardware items they should have been more aggressive about include external storage and DVD burning. They had a burner model but it was too little, too late.
Tivo also blew it on "open access" advocacy.
They should have made a lot more noise about CableCard and breaking the cable company digital encoding stranglehold. A much more public advocacy that made it plain that cable companies are really only interested in monopolies and bullshit upcharges for throwaway hardware paid for 10x over by rental fees.
PC integration has also been lame and crippled. Tivo 2 Go should have used TivoDesktop to generate burn-ready DVD ISOs and not required third party software or bullshit copy protection.
I still love my Tivos for what they do with elegance, simplicity and reliability, but wholly agree they just can't really get it together.
Tip of the iceberg or just another wing nut?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The question I have is whether this guy is the tip of the iceberg or whether he's just another wing nut who can't admit when he's lost whatever argument he got in.
He does make some complaints in his screed about the kinds of issues that even rational people are worried about -- big government, big corporations and a "system" that feels stacked against individuals; some of these issues have been kicking around among conspiracy theorists and paranoids forever, yet a Treasury run by ex-bankers that loans out a trillion dollars to bankers and others who make sure the banks get paid is only too real.
Is unemployment and the rest of it going to create more of these guys?
I know a half-dozen guys that work as independent programmers and have generally only heard good things about their experience, excluding times of no work and shitty projects. I've never heard of this law or anyone impacted by it.
The IOC is in some ways worse than others. The large professional leagues are at least openly capitalist business enterprises, where the IOC puts forth an image of governing body for a global amateur athletic competition when in fact it really is about making money.
What's worse is that much of the IOC's leadership comes from the third world, where kleptocratic behavior is the norm, so a lot of the IOC officials walk around with their hands out.
It's not that his analysis of corporate motivations is wrong -- we *know* they're all greedy, avaricious bastards, but the portrayal was raised to comic-book levels of hyperbole. The days of a corporation being allowed to kill the natives -- literally -- to pursue profit seem to be over, and the idea that they would be able to do this in the future seems highly unlikely, especially on another planet!
I just finished a sadly canceled series on DVD -- "Threshold". Why it gets canceled but crap like Real Housewives gets 87 spinoffs, I'll never know.
The good news is that we're kind of drowning in decent material. It's impossible to keep up with even the really good stuff.
The whole point here is that in Avatar the humans are portrayed with less sympathy and more selfish motivations than the Gestapo is usually portrayed in WW II movies.
Adding a more complex motivation with some kind of moral complexity to the humans makes the story more interesting and less of a simplistic bit of propagandizing.
Cameron does effects really well, but his storyline is juvenile.
"Out shopping for a new aquariums for my rattlesnake collection. The last burglar knocked them over running from the German Shepherds. Don't look forward to finding all 10 snakes, either."
That was my complaint as well. I would have liked two things changed:
1) Moral culpability of the Na'vi: Can't they do SOMETHING bad? Perhaps a second population ("Vi'Na", Green) comprising the other half of the population. All the same characteristics as the Na'Vi, except the two groups butcher each other like savages when they get half a chance. This also makes for a far more interesting dynamic with the Earthlings.
2) Moral justification for the Humans: Unobtainium is necessary to....(fill in the blank), do something to save Earth or its population from massive death and destruction that is within 100 years, and not a reason based solely on man's greed and indifference.
At this point we have Earthlings whose brutality is given some kind of ultimate moral motivation (back against the wall as a species) doing bad things to a group of natives who are perhaps environmentally good but also capable of their own internecine bloodbaths.
At this point its a drama, and not some junior high political metaphor that makes North Korean propaganda look sophisticated.
My Motorola Q on Verizon did something similar when placing calls.
The phone would indicate a call failure but the call would actually go through and I was able to talk to the remote party.
It would self-correct if the remote party answered and then hung up, but if you got a never-ending ring or some remote system that would stay active forever you had to power the phone off to disconnect. Placing another call would fail (even though the phone thought it was disconnected).
Verizon had no fix and Motorola didn't either and it was a once a week or more phenomenon. Not enough to cause me to toss the phone but enough to be super annoying. And it was a problem that followed to a replacement Q that I got mid-contract when my first bricked.
Of the racial victims, 16.8% were singled out because they were white.
The FBI has a terrible statistical history of including Hispanics and Whites in some categories, often as perpetrators. Table 3 of your data has no Hispanic perpetrator category. They don't commit hate crimes, or they're included under White?
Table 4 makes the pedantic distinction between Ethnicity and Race, placing anti-Hispanic crimes in a wholly seperate category, blurring the distinctions further.
Some of the table data makes no sense at all -- Whites committing anti-White bias crimes?
And it's kind of interesting that Blacks commit half of all violent crime (about 4 times their rate in the population, per the FBI and US Census) and whites are victims of violent crimes 5 times more than blacks are (DOJ). By those two statistics, black-on-white crime is huge, yet we're to believe that blacks only perpetrate "hate" 11 percent of hate crimes, lower than their rate in the population?
It doesn't make sense and it certainly illustrates the political nature of "hate" as a crime.
It's a nonsense term dreamed up by the left to politically marginalize and in some cases criminalize political speech they are opposed to. In the US, anyway, it is closely related to "hate crimes" which are structured in a way such that the only victims are non-whites and the only perpetrators are white males.
It is the byproduct of Western leftist political thinking on the concept of racism that generally holds only whites (usually males) culpable for racism and discrimination, despite ample evidence for non-white racism domestically in the U.S. (eg, Hispanics and Blacks) and globally (Arabs v. Black Africans, ethnic Indians versus non-Indian races, ethnic Asians versus others).
Taking the concept of "hate speech" and/or "hate crimes" at face value, most fundamentalist religious leaders (of all religions) should fit, yet religion seems to escape scrutiny, as do quite a few shocking black-on-white and black-on-other-race crimes despite overwhelming evidence that victims were targeted because of their race.
Yes, "tax stamps" was exactly what I was thinking. Ironically, Mississippi used the same system for alcohol when it was still a "dry" state.
When they began "issuing" and requiring them in Minnesota, they actually sold a couple of dozen of them. They made a big point of being able to buy them anonymously but glossed over the fact they were sold in a government building which was easily monitored by law enforcement. I don't remember any prosecutions making the news but I'm sure from time to time they beat somebody up with it or use it as leverage even if they don't ultimately convict them.
Now if they would just wise up and legalize AND sell the tax stamps they could make real money (although I think the tax stamp prices would have to be re-aligned with the real world cost of the product versus some artificially high number).
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Cisco wants it both ways.
They want to sell "bandwidth expansion solutions" to the parts of the business that actually want more bandwidth available.
They will then turn around and sell "bandwidth constraining" solutions to the parts of the business that don't.
It's just like John Chamber's & Cisco -- stand in front of Congress demanding their corporate constitutional right to influence American politicians in the name of freedom, while at the same time selling products to the Communist Chinese to enable censorship and repression.
You're right in the most pedantic sense, but I think where this kind of thing becomes a larger rights issue is the fact that we have a shrinking public space and more and more of our lives are spent tied to corporations and "private" spaces where the kind of "if you don't like it, don't do it" thinking stops being rational unless your name is Ted Kaczynski.
Participation in most of modern life requires going along with all manner of rights-sacrificing agreements -- credit cards, banks,
Now the Apple agreement may possibly be an extreme example of this (since you don't need to be an Apple developer), but the point remains valid.
I bought an Intermatic in-wall digital timer from Home Depot. Actually, several of them. After six months, I had three failures.
After the first failure I had no receipt anymore and went and replaced the entire timer. After the second failure I used the receipt from the new purchase to return the second failure. I repeated this after the third failure.
I guess its a not-nice thing to do, but these were expensive timers (which are great when they work) and I assume that Home Depot is just going to warranty the timers with the manufacturer anyway. It's not like I was returning something claimed to be in good shape, it was broken and that's why it was returned.
The postscript is that I found out that Intermatic stopped selling that model because of a faulty relay design that burned out prematurely and they were giving away replacements of an updated model. I got all 4 of my timers replaced with updated models and have had no failures since.
Take it to the politicians who oversee your hospital and provide funding and ultimately governance.
My guess is that Democrats would be the most likely to care about this, either from a public interest perspective, a conflict of interest or possibly even kickback basis, or even a freedom of speech basis (yes, you don't have freedom of speech at work but the rules are often more fluid when you work for the government).
I'd like for Republicans to care about this from a government-money-being-wasted basis, but AFAICT the general trend seems to be Republicans generally being in favor of corporate alignment, sweetheart deals, executive preference and suppressing workers.
The right politician on this case might actually put the fear of God in the executives responsible for this.
Why isn't population control talked about more?
It's one the easiest and most guaranteed ways to control all kinds of problems that result from the competition for and consumption of resources.
I wonder how many blacks would be willing to return to Ian Smith's Rhodesia versus living in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
Clever rhetoric, but unlike your dragons, we have concrete evidence of terrorism/terrorists exist. You'll need to prove the dragons exist before your amethyst argument starts to hold water.
FWIW, I agree with the parent poster; nuclear power plants, refineries, chemical plants, rail networks are all juicy targets. That they have not been hit before says something about either the magnitude & capabilities of the terrorist threat or the quality of counter-intelligence work.
Probably both. Islamic radicals seem great at symbolism but pretty lousy at strategy; hitting 4 major refineries on 9/11 would likely have done far more to damage the US than bringing down two office towers, a chunk of the Pentagon, and a swath of forest in Pennsylvania. But regardless of their strategy, they did show a startling ability to plan and execute.
But I'm sure intelligence work did a fair amount to thwart follow-on attacks; fairly or not, a lot of Muslims got their nuts in a vice after 9/11, figuratively speaking within the US and probably literally outside the US, and I'm sure not a few took a dirt nap when they gave intelligence ops half an opportunity to do so.
I'm sure that a CIA-sponsored trip to some Romanian dungeon where you spend time in the hands of some guy whose family still has a gripe against the Ottoman Empire and who learned his trade from Ceauescu and the Einsatzkommandos is enough to dissuade you from further terrorist activity and when you show your scars, probably dissuade your friends and loved ones should you make it back to whatever Arab slum you came from.
The bottom line is that refineries, nuke plants, chemical sites, etc are huge, soft targets and that NONE of them has been hit says something.
If you're referring to bytes/hr and my math is right, that's still 3.5Mbit/sec for h264 which is pretty aggressive for most home broadband with the exception of some of the better served cable modem customer base.
That makes a ton of sense, especially the Google tie-in (for bandwidth, expertise, infrastructure, etc).
The downside, though, is how much bandwidth does it take to stream two channels in HD simultaneously?
It would make sense if it was the kind of thing where you got everything offline and the Tivo just downloaded programming as it became available in the background.
But real-time TV watching might be a problem in HD unless each home has 5+MB/sec throughput.
Disclaimer: I own 3 Tivos; a Series 2 standalone bought in 2002 that's going strong (albeit soon to be nearly obsoleted by Comcast's digital conversion), and two HD Tivos. It will be a sad day when I have to replace them with POS cable products or some Frankenstein
IMHO, what's hurt Tivo has been a couple of things. One is painfully slow technology refresh.
When I bought my Series 2 in 2002, most digital cable channels (HBO, Encore, etc) offered DD 5.1 audio on most or all programs. The Series 2 had no digital audio interface but even by 2002 standards should have been able to handle digital audio. It wasn't until the release of the Series 3 some 3? 4? years later, which required a CableCard (and thus the delay for CableCard) before digital audio was available.
What should have happened is a new unit (Series 2.5?) issued with digital audio capabilities to bridge that gap. HD would have still been an issue, but HD boxes would downcovert and we could have had digital audio. Other hardware items they should have been more aggressive about include external storage and DVD burning. They had a burner model but it was too little, too late.
Tivo also blew it on "open access" advocacy.
They should have made a lot more noise about CableCard and breaking the cable company digital encoding stranglehold. A much more public advocacy that made it plain that cable companies are really only interested in monopolies and bullshit upcharges for throwaway hardware paid for 10x over by rental fees.
PC integration has also been lame and crippled. Tivo 2 Go should have used TivoDesktop to generate burn-ready DVD ISOs and not required third party software or bullshit copy protection.
I still love my Tivos for what they do with elegance, simplicity and reliability, but wholly agree they just can't really get it together.
The question I have is whether this guy is the tip of the iceberg or whether he's just another wing nut who can't admit when he's lost whatever argument he got in.
He does make some complaints in his screed about the kinds of issues that even rational people are worried about -- big government, big corporations and a "system" that feels stacked against individuals; some of these issues have been kicking around among conspiracy theorists and paranoids forever, yet a Treasury run by ex-bankers that loans out a trillion dollars to bankers and others who make sure the banks get paid is only too real.
Is unemployment and the rest of it going to create more of these guys?
I know a half-dozen guys that work as independent programmers and have generally only heard good things about their experience, excluding times of no work and shitty projects. I've never heard of this law or anyone impacted by it.
What's the deal?
The IOC is in some ways worse than others. The large professional leagues are at least openly capitalist business enterprises, where the IOC puts forth an image of governing body for a global amateur athletic competition when in fact it really is about making money.
What's worse is that much of the IOC's leadership comes from the third world, where kleptocratic behavior is the norm, so a lot of the IOC officials walk around with their hands out.
...should have been implemented as a difference engine constructed out of Legos. THEN I'm impressed.
It's not that his analysis of corporate motivations is wrong -- we *know* they're all greedy, avaricious bastards, but the portrayal was raised to comic-book levels of hyperbole. The days of a corporation being allowed to kill the natives -- literally -- to pursue profit seem to be over, and the idea that they would be able to do this in the future seems highly unlikely, especially on another planet!
I just finished a sadly canceled series on DVD -- "Threshold". Why it gets canceled but crap like Real Housewives gets 87 spinoffs, I'll never know.
The good news is that we're kind of drowning in decent material. It's impossible to keep up with even the really good stuff.
Most people I know would drop it if it wasn't free. I've only used it for a year and I'm already kind of over it.
I'd guess that they would start charging the for-profit users first, then some of the groups, and so on.
But they really rely on the network effect, and anything that causes them to lose users will have a cascading effect as people quit using it.
Thus my complaint.
The whole point here is that in Avatar the humans are portrayed with less sympathy and more selfish motivations than the Gestapo is usually portrayed in WW II movies.
Adding a more complex motivation with some kind of moral complexity to the humans makes the story more interesting and less of a simplistic bit of propagandizing.
Cameron does effects really well, but his storyline is juvenile.
"Out shopping for a new aquariums for my rattlesnake collection. The last burglar knocked them over running from the German Shepherds. Don't look forward to finding all 10 snakes, either."
I really liked Chronicles and Pitch Black.
That was my complaint as well. I would have liked two things changed:
1) Moral culpability of the Na'vi: Can't they do SOMETHING bad? Perhaps a second population ("Vi'Na", Green) comprising the other half of the population. All the same characteristics as the Na'Vi, except the two groups butcher each other like savages when they get half a chance. This also makes for a far more interesting dynamic with the Earthlings.
2) Moral justification for the Humans: Unobtainium is necessary to....(fill in the blank), do something to save Earth or its population from massive death and destruction that is within 100 years, and not a reason based solely on man's greed and indifference.
At this point we have Earthlings whose brutality is given some kind of ultimate moral motivation (back against the wall as a species) doing bad things to a group of natives who are perhaps environmentally good but also capable of their own internecine bloodbaths.
At this point its a drama, and not some junior high political metaphor that makes North Korean propaganda look sophisticated.
I don't know but I'd guess the "thought" that goes into them is something like:
(1) keeps foreign crap out of clean rooms ....
(2) costs as little as possible
(999999999999) Is comfortable for employees to wear.
My Motorola Q on Verizon did something similar when placing calls.
The phone would indicate a call failure but the call would actually go through and I was able to talk to the remote party.
It would self-correct if the remote party answered and then hung up, but if you got a never-ending ring or some remote system that would stay active forever you had to power the phone off to disconnect. Placing another call would fail (even though the phone thought it was disconnected).
Verizon had no fix and Motorola didn't either and it was a once a week or more phenomenon. Not enough to cause me to toss the phone but enough to be super annoying. And it was a problem that followed to a replacement Q that I got mid-contract when my first bricked.
Of the racial victims, 16.8% were singled out because they were white.
The FBI has a terrible statistical history of including Hispanics and Whites in some categories, often as perpetrators. Table 3 of your data has no Hispanic perpetrator category. They don't commit hate crimes, or they're included under White?
Table 4 makes the pedantic distinction between Ethnicity and Race, placing anti-Hispanic crimes in a wholly seperate category, blurring the distinctions further.
Some of the table data makes no sense at all -- Whites committing anti-White bias crimes?
And it's kind of interesting that Blacks commit half of all violent crime (about 4 times their rate in the population, per the FBI and US Census) and whites are victims of violent crimes 5 times more than blacks are (DOJ). By those two statistics, black-on-white crime is huge, yet we're to believe that blacks only perpetrate "hate" 11 percent of hate crimes, lower than their rate in the population?
It doesn't make sense and it certainly illustrates the political nature of "hate" as a crime.
It's a nonsense term dreamed up by the left to politically marginalize and in some cases criminalize political speech they are opposed to. In the US, anyway, it is closely related to "hate crimes" which are structured in a way such that the only victims are non-whites and the only perpetrators are white males.
It is the byproduct of Western leftist political thinking on the concept of racism that generally holds only whites (usually males) culpable for racism and discrimination, despite ample evidence for non-white racism domestically in the U.S. (eg, Hispanics and Blacks) and globally (Arabs v. Black Africans, ethnic Indians versus non-Indian races, ethnic Asians versus others).
Taking the concept of "hate speech" and/or "hate crimes" at face value, most fundamentalist religious leaders (of all religions) should fit, yet religion seems to escape scrutiny, as do quite a few shocking black-on-white and black-on-other-race crimes despite overwhelming evidence that victims were targeted because of their race.
Yes, "tax stamps" was exactly what I was thinking. Ironically, Mississippi used the same system for alcohol when it was still a "dry" state.
When they began "issuing" and requiring them in Minnesota, they actually sold a couple of dozen of them. They made a big point of being able to buy them anonymously but glossed over the fact they were sold in a government building which was easily monitored by law enforcement. I don't remember any prosecutions making the news but I'm sure from time to time they beat somebody up with it or use it as leverage even if they don't ultimately convict them.
Now if they would just wise up and legalize AND sell the tax stamps they could make real money (although I think the tax stamp prices would have to be re-aligned with the real world cost of the product versus some artificially high number).