It's not that they're loyal to him, it's that their afraid of their party's voters (and donors). The Republicans in Congress have been either running scared of, or riding the wave of, their extremist base. As such, they're more afraid of being defeated in a primary than they are of moderate voters. Look at what happened after the Access Hollywood tape came out - a few of them reflexively disavowed him, only to come crawling back after they realized that their voters were with him, not them.
Now, that may change if they start to sense a rising tidal wave coming to wipe them out in Congress. But we're not there yet, by far - just look at how most of the Republican Senators acted at the Yates hearing yesterday for instance.
The other possibility that occurs to me is that Trump, in his fixation with Hillary Clinton, intends to double down and try to replace Comey with someone who will charge her, regardless of the fact that it won't last a day in court.
Of course, it could well be both, or some combination thereof. Perhaps Trump thinks the spectacle of that would distract sufficiently from the Russia investigation to let him quash it more easily, too.
Actually, I've seen at least two people do it in the time I was in the government, holding a clearance. I'm not talking about hearing a rumor second or third hand, I'm talking about a guy who sat two desks over, that I knew on a first name basis, and worked with daily. Neither were anyone of remote importance, just average joes, and these were in two separate offices/commands, separated both by hundreds of miles and several years.
Both of them did exactly that - they sent classified information via an unclassified email system. In one case, I was one of the recipients. Want to know what happened? There was an investigation to determine just what happened, and when. The investigators then wiped all the unclassified systems that touched those emails, including the servers they passed through. The guys who sent the email? They received a reprimand (I'm not sure if it was verbal or something more formal), and had to retake the security training on handling classified material.
That was it.
Neither was fired. If they did it again, they might have been, or if they violated security procedures some other way (bringing a cellphone into the secure area, or leaving a vault door unlocked or something). They sure as sh*t weren't sent to court, let alone jail over it.
Now, if the unclassified email was their own system? They might have gotten fired/lost their clearances, sure, but unless the investigators determined that there was intent to leak classified information, a la Manning/Snowden/etc, or worse, sell it to someone a la Ames/Hansen/etc, that's almost certainly all that would happen to them.
The reason being cited from what I'm reading so far is that he's being fired over mishandling the Clinton email probe. That his AG and Deputy signed off on it does not reassure me in the least. This is at best a minor, minor thing, one far less problematic than errors made by past FBI directors - ones that left people dead for instance... which leaves me with absolutely zero confidence that this is anything but an excuse to get rid of him and put a compliant stooge in that will quash the ongoing investigations.
Would it work? Probably not, no more than Nixon replacing the Attorney General in order to get special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired quashed the Watergate investigation/scandal. At worst, I think you'd see the damning evidence start to leak out into the open, spurring more action.
FBI Directors are traditionally non-partisan, and serve a 10 year term that is not at the pleasure of the president, unlike political appointees. This isn't to say that the President doesn't have the power to fire the Director, but it hasn't been done before, and would be a very unusual step. The question then is what is the cited reason for it, because given the current situation and ongoing investigations, it's really really suspicious, on par with the Watergate "midnight massacre" where Nixon fired both the Attorney General and the Deputy AG before getting to someone that would agree to fire the Special Prosecutor that was investigating Watergate.
In other words, it had better be a really damn good reason.
Regardless, it goes to show just how badly their (as in the Trump administration/etc) refusal to tell the truth on so many things reflects on them, that the first thing we think of when we hear them say that is "Oh, bullsh*t".
This is why we don't need any sort of oversight or Network Neutrality - we can clearly trust these companies to have our best interests at heart, because they're going to compete with each other in a robust marketplace! /s
And yet, you could do a lot worse than informing yourself on an issue by watching someone like John Oliver. You're going to get tons more relevant and factual information from watching one of his segments on a given issue than you ever will watching any one of a number of "opinion" personalities on most cable news networks.
It's certainly fair to disagree with any of Clinton's policies, but to say she had none is either disingenuous or misinformed. Clinton had a huge policy shop - it just never caught much if any press attention. Maybe that was her fault for not pushing them more - perhaps the advice of campaign consultants to avoid her tendency to "wonk out" and glaze people over with details maybe.
while Trump was clearly against central federal involvement to the level that we had achieved over the previous 16 years.
The flaw in your logic here is that removing all of that doesn't improve the situation, it makes it worse. Getting rid of an inefficient or messy solution to a problem doesn't get rid of the original problem.
Clinton framed this issue as nothing more than "Trump is against immigrants." Why couldn't she just propose a comprehensive low-wage immigrant worker program? I mean, that is what the country ultimately needs. I would have voted for her if she had such a plan. She did not.
Her policy was a bit more than that. Again, I suggest using a search engine rather than accepting what others are telling you (whether on social media, or from various news shows/sites) without question. As for why she couldn't, I would suggest that given the history of both her and her husband, she would be entirely willing to entertain a reasonable (and widely supported) compromise. The Clintons have never been ideologues, and that's partly why they take lots of flak from the Left, because while they're on the left, they're also more than willing to throw whatever pet cause under the bus in order to champion a policy they think is going to attract majority support.
Trump, meanwhile, has shown zero inclination to any sort of compromises from an absolute hard line position, either on the campaign trail or now that he's in office. Furthermore, his past history has not been that of a compromise type, but rather someone who is adamant about getting his way, and using hardball tactics to get it. Now, if you want the policy he's pushing, then sure, that's a good thing - but I would argue that he's only going to cause us vastly greater problems for a variety of reasons, but that would be an entire thread of its own, so I'll skip it.
4) Open source - Well, I mean "open". Trump talked to the press and anyone who would listen. Clinton gave canned speeches to small groups of supporters. She basically never gave press conferences.
Clinton has always had an uneasy relationship with the press, sure. That said, she did give press conferences - far moreso than Trump, yet she was the one who was criticized in certain parts of the media (particularly those that leaned right). Worse, Trump outright banned reporters from certain major media outlets whose coverage he didn't like: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/1...
My feeling is that Clinton phoned-in her tenure at State.
Based on what? Criticism on Fox or such? It's fair to disagree with the outcomes, and to suggest she could have done things differently, but it seems strange to me to suggest she spent her time not working.
ACA - I can do math. I have an understanding of models. The ACA is doomed by math. Clinton would not say the obvious. Why not?
The ACA isn't doomed by math any more than Social Security will run out in 203X. Since this is Slashdot, here's the requisite car analogy. If your engine is making a whining or knocking sound, do you throw up your hands and say
At this point it's not about making excuses for Clinton or the Democrats. We're not talking about them anymore, instead we're talking about Germany, we're talking about France, we're talking about what happens next time. If you think that these guys are going to help you again next time, you're on crack, because they're not on your side. They're on their own side, and if the next time around it's a left-wing candidate that says "I think we should (do what Russia wants)" then guess what?
Remember, who else was at the table with Putin and Michael Flynn at that RT Gala? Jill Stein.
This isn't about right or left, it's about interference. Sometimes that'll be for the right wing candidate, but sometimes it won't be.
You can argue that it's inefficient, but it's a hell of a lot better than a winner take all system, where you're forced to vote for the lesser evil at the start. At least this way, French citizens got to express their preference, first. Nobody is going to be under the illusion that Macron was the first choice of the majority.
"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."
Translated: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
There's certainly something to be said about the truth coming out. What we're seeing lately is not that, however. It's deliberate, one-sided, theft and carefully timed release of one side's information for specific political advantage. The concept isn't new, either - it was tried before and wound up becoming a scandal called Watergate.
What's different now is that the internet makes it so much easier to do, both because everyone uses it for communication and coordination on pretty much everything, but you don't need to even be close by to steal it, either. And even when you get caught red handed because all the digital evidence points right back to Russia, you've still got tons of useful idiots who'll throw up their hands and claim "it could be anyone else, we can never know, false flag, etc etc", never-mind the bots and sock puppets you can make to do the same.
Yes, there's a lot that goes into it. Assuming a direct fiber route from point A to point B, fiber is likely to be faster than going up to a satellite, bouncing to another satellite, and back down. As with most things though, there's a difference between theory and practice, because my data isn't taking a straight route from London to Singapore (well unless I'm using IPoAC*, but that has its own issues). Terrestrial links can hit a lot of latency going over undersea cables, for instance.
Not as much as you would think. SpaceX is talking about having a large number of satellites much closer to the ground, which means vastly reduced latency. They're claiming it may be as low as 25ms. Specifically, they're talking about satellites that will "operat[e] in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km)." Compare that to HughesNet whose satellites operate at an altitude of about 35,400km.
So while direct fiber on the ground is still going to be the best possible case, this might be close enough to be reasonably competitive in a way that existing satellite providers aren't.
I'm not from Austin, so I can't speak to the particulars, since not all of those ISPs may service a particular address for various reasons. In theory, though, with robust enough competition, abuse of Net Neutrality would be solved through market forces, because if ISP A starts trying to slow particular traffic, then ISP B can make a point to advertise that it has better speeds for Netflix/etc, people switch to B, and A hemorrhages subscribers, and so forth. You need a large enough pool of options though - two just isn't enough, because if it's just A and B, B might decide "Hey, I can extort money from Netflix too, that's easier than trying to steal A's subscribers." Offhand I'd posit that the minimum number of options probably would need to be around 4 or 5 to ensure that no duopoly or cartel behavior occurs.
Austin is also the rare exception in the USA, in having more than 1 or 2 choices (partly because of Google Fiber). We'd likely need something like government-imposed Local Loop unbundling in order to generate real competition in the majority of the country.
That's not what we as a country have believed for a long time. I'm sure that you read about Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busters in school at some point or other. There is indeed a point where privately owned companies can amass enough power that it's bad for everyone, and they need to be kept in check somehow. When that isn't happening naturally on its own, what should we do? In the past, we turned to the government, not because we expect the government to micromanage every little aspect of those companies, but because the government is the one we empowered to create and enforce the rules of the playing field.
In the case of ISPs, the vast majority of Americans CANNOT simply 'change their service/provider' because they only have one choice available. Those who have any real array of choices are a tiny minority. In cases such as these, it is absolutely the role of government to step in and prevent abuses of that monopoly, or to take active measures to introduce/encourage real competition in that market. Both of these things have occurred in the past, with power utilities, telephone, oil, railroads, etc, to the general betterment of consumers and to the United States as a whole. There is no reason why that should be any different today with internet service providers.
Cornyn is also from Texas. I suspect it's more that they gain their support from the rest of Texas, rather than the Austin area (which is bright blue), and thus feel in no way compelled to care two whits about what anyone from Austin thinks.
Really though, net neutrality (and the entire ISP market issue, of which NN problems are a subset) isn't something that only a techie from someplace like Austin should care about - it affects rural areas as much, if not more. Austin has multiple high quality ISPs, including Google Fiber, whose presence caused the various incumbents to upgrade their offerings. Conversely, most rural areas only have one ISP who likely offers speeds that barely qualify for "broadband" status, if even that. Users in Austin are going to be a lot better if we lose NN than some rancher in West Texas will be.
That would be Ron Wyden, a Democratic Senator from Oregon. He's been consistently very good when it comes to issues regarding the internet, privacy, and putting the needs and rights of users ahead of corporate (or government) ones, or at minimum on an equal footing (which feels like 'ahead' these days).
This is completely shocking. Who would have thought that a subsidiary of News Corporation would stoop to something like hacking and electronic surveillance?/s
Your understanding of these things seems to be rooted in the 1970s. What you said used to be true, back then - but it's not today. The technology is improving rapidly, as is our ability to store and distribute that energy.
It's like the old notions about electric cars. All the prototype ones from 20 years ago were terrible on so many levels, in terms of power, range, recharge time, etc, not to mention cost. But as we're seeing now, that's changing radically. Go look at Tesla for instance. We may not yet be at the day where electric is 100% better in all areas, but it's now only a matter of when, not if.
While most species tend to reproduce until they reach the exhaustion point of available natural resources, recent data indicate that this isn't the case for humans with sufficiently advanced living conditions. Specifically, in every country with even moderately advanced living standards, the birth rate has fallen to below replacement levels. It's proven pretty much universal in fact, and while culture may alter it somewhat, there is yet to be a country/culture that has proven to be different.
In many cases, some of these countries are going to face a crisis of not having enough people, rather than the opposite. So, yes, if you give them access to modern things like birth control and family planning, then the problem solves itself (and your problem is the reverse, potentially, of not having enough people).
He's making tons of money off of all this. I kind of wonder if that wasn't the entire idea (plus some ego-stroking) to begin with.
For instance, we, the taxpayers, are paying for things like the Secret Service to use space at the Trump properties he's spending time at (not to mention his wife and son). His kids are using the status and access to improve their business dealings (which also benefit him). He never divested any of his holdings - he just handed direct control of the operations to his son, while retaining full ownership. He put it in a trust, but it's entirely revocable, meaning that he can take the whole thing back at any time he feels like it.
And yet we've gotten to a point where politics is so ridiculously polarized that none of the Republicans care about him looting the public treasury and taking bribes from anyone and everyone, as long as he's not a Democrat.
I'm guessing you've never served in the Armed Forces.
Part of what it means to be in the military is that you're expected to look out for your buddies, whether male or female. You're supposed to be able to count on them to have your back, and you theirs. The military is expected to act as groups, not as a gaggle of individuals, and spends lots of time training to do exactly that..
Personally, I'd believe that this sort of conduct was already punishable under a number of UCMJ articles - certainly under Article 134, "Conduct Prejudicial to Good Order and Discipline." I'm not a military lawyer (or lawyer at all), but depending on circumstances there's a number of other Articles that such activity would likely be in violation of. Regardless of that, though, this kind of conduct is utterly toxic for any sort of unit, and I'm not in the least surprised that they're cracking down on it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that they're loyal to him, it's that their afraid of their party's voters (and donors). The Republicans in Congress have been either running scared of, or riding the wave of, their extremist base. As such, they're more afraid of being defeated in a primary than they are of moderate voters. Look at what happened after the Access Hollywood tape came out - a few of them reflexively disavowed him, only to come crawling back after they realized that their voters were with him, not them.
Now, that may change if they start to sense a rising tidal wave coming to wipe them out in Congress. But we're not there yet, by far - just look at how most of the Republican Senators acted at the Yates hearing yesterday for instance.
The other possibility that occurs to me is that Trump, in his fixation with Hillary Clinton, intends to double down and try to replace Comey with someone who will charge her, regardless of the fact that it won't last a day in court.
Of course, it could well be both, or some combination thereof. Perhaps Trump thinks the spectacle of that would distract sufficiently from the Russia investigation to let him quash it more easily, too.
Actually, I've seen at least two people do it in the time I was in the government, holding a clearance. I'm not talking about hearing a rumor second or third hand, I'm talking about a guy who sat two desks over, that I knew on a first name basis, and worked with daily. Neither were anyone of remote importance, just average joes, and these were in two separate offices/commands, separated both by hundreds of miles and several years.
Both of them did exactly that - they sent classified information via an unclassified email system. In one case, I was one of the recipients. Want to know what happened? There was an investigation to determine just what happened, and when. The investigators then wiped all the unclassified systems that touched those emails, including the servers they passed through. The guys who sent the email? They received a reprimand (I'm not sure if it was verbal or something more formal), and had to retake the security training on handling classified material.
That was it.
Neither was fired. If they did it again, they might have been, or if they violated security procedures some other way (bringing a cellphone into the secure area, or leaving a vault door unlocked or something). They sure as sh*t weren't sent to court, let alone jail over it.
Now, if the unclassified email was their own system? They might have gotten fired/lost their clearances, sure, but unless the investigators determined that there was intent to leak classified information, a la Manning/Snowden/etc, or worse, sell it to someone a la Ames/Hansen/etc, that's almost certainly all that would happen to them.
The reason being cited from what I'm reading so far is that he's being fired over mishandling the Clinton email probe. That his AG and Deputy signed off on it does not reassure me in the least. This is at best a minor, minor thing, one far less problematic than errors made by past FBI directors - ones that left people dead for instance. .. which leaves me with absolutely zero confidence that this is anything but an excuse to get rid of him and put a compliant stooge in that will quash the ongoing investigations.
Would it work? Probably not, no more than Nixon replacing the Attorney General in order to get special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired quashed the Watergate investigation/scandal. At worst, I think you'd see the damning evidence start to leak out into the open, spurring more action.
FBI Directors are traditionally non-partisan, and serve a 10 year term that is not at the pleasure of the president, unlike political appointees. This isn't to say that the President doesn't have the power to fire the Director, but it hasn't been done before, and would be a very unusual step. The question then is what is the cited reason for it, because given the current situation and ongoing investigations, it's really really suspicious, on par with the Watergate "midnight massacre" where Nixon fired both the Attorney General and the Deputy AG before getting to someone that would agree to fire the Special Prosecutor that was investigating Watergate.
In other words, it had better be a really damn good reason.
Regardless, it goes to show just how badly their (as in the Trump administration/etc) refusal to tell the truth on so many things reflects on them, that the first thing we think of when we hear them say that is "Oh, bullsh*t".
This is why we don't need any sort of oversight or Network Neutrality - we can clearly trust these companies to have our best interests at heart, because they're going to compete with each other in a robust marketplace!
/s
AI is going to get rid of lawyers? I suddenly feel far more welcoming and accepting of this AI takeover.
And yet, you could do a lot worse than informing yourself on an issue by watching someone like John Oliver. You're going to get tons more relevant and factual information from watching one of his segments on a given issue than you ever will watching any one of a number of "opinion" personalities on most cable news networks.
1) Taxes - As someone fairly educated on economics, Clinton had zero tax/economic policy. I wish she did, so I could compare.
Here, let me take two seconds to google that for you:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org...
It's certainly fair to disagree with any of Clinton's policies, but to say she had none is either disingenuous or misinformed. Clinton had a huge policy shop - it just never caught much if any press attention. Maybe that was her fault for not pushing them more - perhaps the advice of campaign consultants to avoid her tendency to "wonk out" and glaze people over with details maybe.
while Trump was clearly against central federal involvement to the level that we had achieved over the previous 16 years.
The flaw in your logic here is that removing all of that doesn't improve the situation, it makes it worse. Getting rid of an inefficient or messy solution to a problem doesn't get rid of the original problem.
Clinton framed this issue as nothing more than "Trump is against immigrants." Why couldn't she just propose a comprehensive low-wage immigrant worker program? I mean, that is what the country ultimately needs. I would have voted for her if she had such a plan. She did not.
Her policy was a bit more than that. Again, I suggest using a search engine rather than accepting what others are telling you (whether on social media, or from various news shows/sites) without question. As for why she couldn't, I would suggest that given the history of both her and her husband, she would be entirely willing to entertain a reasonable (and widely supported) compromise. The Clintons have never been ideologues, and that's partly why they take lots of flak from the Left, because while they're on the left, they're also more than willing to throw whatever pet cause under the bus in order to champion a policy they think is going to attract majority support.
Trump, meanwhile, has shown zero inclination to any sort of compromises from an absolute hard line position, either on the campaign trail or now that he's in office. Furthermore, his past history has not been that of a compromise type, but rather someone who is adamant about getting his way, and using hardball tactics to get it. Now, if you want the policy he's pushing, then sure, that's a good thing - but I would argue that he's only going to cause us vastly greater problems for a variety of reasons, but that would be an entire thread of its own, so I'll skip it.
4) Open source - Well, I mean "open". Trump talked to the press and anyone who would listen. Clinton gave canned speeches to small groups of supporters. She basically never gave press conferences.
Clinton has always had an uneasy relationship with the press, sure. That said, she did give press conferences - far moreso than Trump, yet she was the one who was criticized in certain parts of the media (particularly those that leaned right). Worse, Trump outright banned reporters from certain major media outlets whose coverage he didn't like:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/1...
My feeling is that Clinton phoned-in her tenure at State.
Based on what? Criticism on Fox or such? It's fair to disagree with the outcomes, and to suggest she could have done things differently, but it seems strange to me to suggest she spent her time not working.
ACA - I can do math. I have an understanding of models. The ACA is doomed by math. Clinton would not say the obvious. Why not?
The ACA isn't doomed by math any more than Social Security will run out in 203X. Since this is Slashdot, here's the requisite car analogy. If your engine is making a whining or knocking sound, do you throw up your hands and say
Yeah, no.
At this point it's not about making excuses for Clinton or the Democrats. We're not talking about them anymore, instead we're talking about Germany, we're talking about France, we're talking about what happens next time. If you think that these guys are going to help you again next time, you're on crack, because they're not on your side. They're on their own side, and if the next time around it's a left-wing candidate that says "I think we should (do what Russia wants)" then guess what?
Remember, who else was at the table with Putin and Michael Flynn at that RT Gala? Jill Stein.
This isn't about right or left, it's about interference. Sometimes that'll be for the right wing candidate, but sometimes it won't be.
You can argue that it's inefficient, but it's a hell of a lot better than a winner take all system, where you're forced to vote for the lesser evil at the start. At least this way, French citizens got to express their preference, first. Nobody is going to be under the illusion that Macron was the first choice of the majority.
"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."
Translated: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
There's certainly something to be said about the truth coming out. What we're seeing lately is not that, however. It's deliberate, one-sided, theft and carefully timed release of one side's information for specific political advantage. The concept isn't new, either - it was tried before and wound up becoming a scandal called Watergate.
What's different now is that the internet makes it so much easier to do, both because everyone uses it for communication and coordination on pretty much everything, but you don't need to even be close by to steal it, either. And even when you get caught red handed because all the digital evidence points right back to Russia, you've still got tons of useful idiots who'll throw up their hands and claim "it could be anyone else, we can never know, false flag, etc etc", never-mind the bots and sock puppets you can make to do the same.
Yes, there's a lot that goes into it. Assuming a direct fiber route from point A to point B, fiber is likely to be faster than going up to a satellite, bouncing to another satellite, and back down. As with most things though, there's a difference between theory and practice, because my data isn't taking a straight route from London to Singapore (well unless I'm using IPoAC*, but that has its own issues). Terrestrial links can hit a lot of latency going over undersea cables, for instance.
*See RFC 1193 if you're not familiar.
Not as much as you would think. SpaceX is talking about having a large number of satellites much closer to the ground, which means vastly reduced latency. They're claiming it may be as low as 25ms. Specifically, they're talking about satellites that will "operat[e] in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km)." Compare that to HughesNet whose satellites operate at an altitude of about 35,400km.
So while direct fiber on the ground is still going to be the best possible case, this might be close enough to be reasonably competitive in a way that existing satellite providers aren't.
I'm not from Austin, so I can't speak to the particulars, since not all of those ISPs may service a particular address for various reasons. In theory, though, with robust enough competition, abuse of Net Neutrality would be solved through market forces, because if ISP A starts trying to slow particular traffic, then ISP B can make a point to advertise that it has better speeds for Netflix/etc, people switch to B, and A hemorrhages subscribers, and so forth. You need a large enough pool of options though - two just isn't enough, because if it's just A and B, B might decide "Hey, I can extort money from Netflix too, that's easier than trying to steal A's subscribers." Offhand I'd posit that the minimum number of options probably would need to be around 4 or 5 to ensure that no duopoly or cartel behavior occurs.
Austin is also the rare exception in the USA, in having more than 1 or 2 choices (partly because of Google Fiber). We'd likely need something like government-imposed Local Loop unbundling in order to generate real competition in the majority of the country.
That's not what we as a country have believed for a long time. I'm sure that you read about Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busters in school at some point or other. There is indeed a point where privately owned companies can amass enough power that it's bad for everyone, and they need to be kept in check somehow. When that isn't happening naturally on its own, what should we do? In the past, we turned to the government, not because we expect the government to micromanage every little aspect of those companies, but because the government is the one we empowered to create and enforce the rules of the playing field.
In the case of ISPs, the vast majority of Americans CANNOT simply 'change their service/provider' because they only have one choice available. Those who have any real array of choices are a tiny minority. In cases such as these, it is absolutely the role of government to step in and prevent abuses of that monopoly, or to take active measures to introduce/encourage real competition in that market. Both of these things have occurred in the past, with power utilities, telephone, oil, railroads, etc, to the general betterment of consumers and to the United States as a whole. There is no reason why that should be any different today with internet service providers.
Cornyn is also from Texas. I suspect it's more that they gain their support from the rest of Texas, rather than the Austin area (which is bright blue), and thus feel in no way compelled to care two whits about what anyone from Austin thinks.
Really though, net neutrality (and the entire ISP market issue, of which NN problems are a subset) isn't something that only a techie from someplace like Austin should care about - it affects rural areas as much, if not more. Austin has multiple high quality ISPs, including Google Fiber, whose presence caused the various incumbents to upgrade their offerings. Conversely, most rural areas only have one ISP who likely offers speeds that barely qualify for "broadband" status, if even that. Users in Austin are going to be a lot better if we lose NN than some rancher in West Texas will be.
That would be Ron Wyden, a Democratic Senator from Oregon. He's been consistently very good when it comes to issues regarding the internet, privacy, and putting the needs and rights of users ahead of corporate (or government) ones, or at minimum on an equal footing (which feels like 'ahead' these days).
This is completely shocking. Who would have thought that a subsidiary of News Corporation would stoop to something like hacking and electronic surveillance? /s
Your understanding of these things seems to be rooted in the 1970s. What you said used to be true, back then - but it's not today. The technology is improving rapidly, as is our ability to store and distribute that energy.
It's like the old notions about electric cars. All the prototype ones from 20 years ago were terrible on so many levels, in terms of power, range, recharge time, etc, not to mention cost. But as we're seeing now, that's changing radically. Go look at Tesla for instance. We may not yet be at the day where electric is 100% better in all areas, but it's now only a matter of when, not if.
While most species tend to reproduce until they reach the exhaustion point of available natural resources, recent data indicate that this isn't the case for humans with sufficiently advanced living conditions. Specifically, in every country with even moderately advanced living standards, the birth rate has fallen to below replacement levels. It's proven pretty much universal in fact, and while culture may alter it somewhat, there is yet to be a country/culture that has proven to be different.
In many cases, some of these countries are going to face a crisis of not having enough people, rather than the opposite. So, yes, if you give them access to modern things like birth control and family planning, then the problem solves itself (and your problem is the reverse, potentially, of not having enough people).
He's making tons of money off of all this. I kind of wonder if that wasn't the entire idea (plus some ego-stroking) to begin with.
For instance, we, the taxpayers, are paying for things like the Secret Service to use space at the Trump properties he's spending time at (not to mention his wife and son). His kids are using the status and access to improve their business dealings (which also benefit him). He never divested any of his holdings - he just handed direct control of the operations to his son, while retaining full ownership. He put it in a trust, but it's entirely revocable, meaning that he can take the whole thing back at any time he feels like it.
And yet we've gotten to a point where politics is so ridiculously polarized that none of the Republicans care about him looting the public treasury and taking bribes from anyone and everyone, as long as he's not a Democrat.
I guess "the Cyber" is actually hard, huh? Kind of like Health Care, or North Korea?
Who knew?
I'm guessing you've never served in the Armed Forces.
Part of what it means to be in the military is that you're expected to look out for your buddies, whether male or female. You're supposed to be able to count on them to have your back, and you theirs. The military is expected to act as groups, not as a gaggle of individuals, and spends lots of time training to do exactly that..
Personally, I'd believe that this sort of conduct was already punishable under a number of UCMJ articles - certainly under Article 134, "Conduct Prejudicial to Good Order and Discipline." I'm not a military lawyer (or lawyer at all), but depending on circumstances there's a number of other Articles that such activity would likely be in violation of. Regardless of that, though, this kind of conduct is utterly toxic for any sort of unit, and I'm not in the least surprised that they're cracking down on it.