Governments have lots of people in them. They're actually capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
The bottleneck is not and has never been the spare time of bureaucrats. The problem is a limited amount of money.
Go take a walk through the Tenderloin and tell me that those people's problem is crappy cable upload speeds.
I love San Francisco, but I'm pretty sure there are much better ways for the city to spend its money. Fixing the roads, solving the homeless/drug addict problem or creating affordable housing come to mind immediately. Every dollar spent on this fiber project is a dollar that did not go to one of the above.
Why would I want Netflix if thepiratebay.org has everything I want without the hassle of streaming and artificial limitations?
Maybe if you cared about quaint old ideas like the people who made those TV shows getting paid for doing so and providing a revenue stream for those people to create more things you like in the future. Or if you believe in even quainter ideas like that if you don't want to pay for something you don't just get to use it anyway.
Hey, I used to pirate plenty of stuff too, back when I didn't have any money and/or it was really hard to find stuff on iTunes, Amazon, Google, Netflix or Hulu. I get it, especially if you're downloading stuff that isn't commercially available at any price - no harm no foul there, as far as I'm concerned. But *if* you have the means and the ability to get these things legally and properly compensate the people who made them, isn't there a decent moral argument to be made to do so, even if you have to (horror of horrors) skip through commercials or something?
In 10 years, the Seattle City council will complain about the impact of commuters on its road infrastructure
More likely they will be complaining about why there isn't enough usage of the mandatory tandem bicycle ride-sharing service that they instituted when they turned all the city's North-South streets into seven-abroad bicycle lanes.
I proudly call Seattle my home. And its mayors and city councils really do believe they're doing the right thing, bless their hearts. But they are pretty much all blithering idiots. Because Seattle is a tech boom town filled with generally liberal people, they have the money and political backing to do well-meaning but impractical things.
It's well meaning but it's almost universally poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences. Like this income tax idea, which will perversely drive out the people who pay the most in property taxes and push them into driving into work from the suburbs. And Seattle already has miserable traffic. But, again, while the economic sun is shining the city has the leeway to try these grand but foolish experiments. Unfortunately, at some point the tech boom here will end and there will be a nasty bill to pay for it.
It's an issue if you believe that the primary beneficiaries of such a rule are heterosexual males that will use this as an excuse to enter female bathrooms and use the law as an excuse.
It's not an issue if you believe that the primary beneficiaries of such a rule are transgender men or women (pre or post surgery) who already identify themselves by dress and attitude and who want to go to the bathroom they think they belong in.
Neither viewpoint is 100% right or wrong. There will be people who abuse the right to trans bathrooms, and others who use it as intended.
Personally, I have two young daughters who I am of course immensely concerned about protecting from predators. Yet I believe that there are plenty of laws already in place protecting them from being filmed, approached sexually or otherwise that keep them safe. I'm in favor of trans bathroom protection because I'm willing to believe that the benefit to trans people is greater than the risk from hetero pervs. (Data may prove me wrong.)
But it's wrong to think that this is a one-sided issue and that everyone who disagrees with me is just wrong. It's a valid concern. I disagree with the Texas/North Carolina measures. But I'm not willing to say that those who oppose trans bathroom rights are just awful people. I understand the instinct to protect one's children at all costs, even if this specific measure isn't borne out by my experience.
Slashdotters in general pride themselves on being rational people, and I think they are (moreso than the general population). But empathy for opposing viewpoints is a rare skill, even among the highly intelligent. Maybe we can use this place as a model for trying to talk rationally about the pros and cons of both approaches? I have much higher expectations of seeing a well thought out argument on either side - couched in terms that could actually sway minds instead of just stoking flames - here than I would expect in the comments of the Washington Post or Fox News.
There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics
In case you're interested, at least for lyrics, the actual reason is licensing.
Look at a piece of sheet music and you'll notice that the writers of the music and the lyrics are credited separately. Both get a check when you buy a music recording, both of them get a royalty fee. But if you want to *read* the lyrics, then that's a separate check to the lyricist, just as if you were buying a piece of sheet music. It's a relic of the days when sheet music was much more popular (dating back to when more people enjoyed music by buying the sheet music and performing it at home than buying expensive radios or record players).
So... Amazon, iTunes, Spotify or wherever you're getting your music from is OK paying the royalties for the sound recording but doesn't want to pay the extra royalty fee to get the lyrics/chords written down. Probably because most people don't care, they just want the cheaper music. I'm surprised that nobody (that I know of) has offered to sell the lyrics as an upcharge, but my guess is that they have focus grouped that with their customers and just found there isn't enough interest from people willing to pay for the lyrics.
Coverage / signal reliability varies by specific location. Bandwidth during peak times also varies, load increases then they up backhaul bandwith and it gets better for a while.
Full disclosure: I work for one of the four big carriers. But this isn't a commercial for my unnamed employer, it's just a description of why they are different.
There is a fundamental strategy difference between AT&T/Verizon and Sprint/T-Mobile. The key, of course, is money. And as a customer, you do get what you pay for.
Did you know that in the US, almost 70% of the population lives in 3% of the landmass? (That sounds shocking until you think about Alaska, Montana, West Texas, Nevada and Wyoming.) It doesn't take (comparatively) that many towers to cover the 70%. But it takes a disproportionately higher number more to cover the next 10% of the population. And the next 10% after that take almost half again the number of towers. The expense gets higher and higher as you try to reach 99% of the population (which is contained in roughly 70% of the land area of the US).
If you have the money to buy the spectrum and build the towers, you can choose to cover as many people as possible (and the side benefit is that you provide better coverage for people who travel a lot, especially to rural areas). If you have the money, you can also spend the billions on spectrum needed for the capacity to support users in dense areas and the backhaul to go with it. AT&T and Verizon, because they have the big subscriber/revenue bases and the cost advantages of legacy ILEC backhaul facilities in collectively more than half the states, choose that path. But it all costs money to do that, and you as a consumer pay more for the coverage quality.
Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the big piles of money or the huge subscriber bases. The good news for them: like I said, it costs a lot less money in tower building to cover 70% of the US population, and if you have fewer subscribers then you don't have to shell out as much on spectrum and backhaul. They have chosen (probably wisely, given their bank accounts) to go for the low hanging fruit, which costs less money and they can price their service more aggressively because they aren't trying to spend the money to cover everybody. So their strategy works well for most people, although if it works TOO well, then they have to start shelling out money that they don't have for more spectrum. (Sprint already has more spectrum than they know what to do with, but most of it is high-band ex-Clearwire WiMax spectrum that is almost useless in dense urban areas with lots of buildings to penetrate.)
So the bottom line is:
Live in an urban area and spend most of your time there? T-Mobile or Sprint are likely to meet your needs.
Live in a suburban/rural area, travel much and/or want to make sure you've got connectivity wherever you go? Verizon or AT&T are probably a better choice.
Coming up with something would require planning, negotiation, and "horse trading" skills. Trump is not known for any of these skills.
Oh, come on. I think the President is a buffoon but even I still recognize that if he has one legitimate claim to competence in any field is it "negotiation and horse trading." I have no doubt that he is genuinely good at it.
The real problem, as Trump is painfully beginning to discover, is that running a government involves a kind of negotiations that are exponentially more difficult and unsatisfying than business negotiation. Here's why:
In a business negotiation, one of the most vital factors is the fact that (generally speaking) you can always walk away. You're trying to buy Company X or real estate Z and your negotiating partner wants an unreasonable price or unacceptable conditions that there's no breaking the impasse over? Walk away. No deal gets done, but the world keeps spinning on its axis just fine with no real consequences. (Mostly.)
But in government? You don't get a debt ceiling increase passed, you don't get to walk away while the government stops paying its bills and torpedoes the world economy. You don't get an acceptable deal with Iran over its nuclear program, you don't get to walk away and just let them build nukes. You don't get a Middle East peace agreement that you want, you don't get to walk away and remove the US from the region while wholesale slaughter starts. There are real stakes in much of what the government does and no option to just walk away.
So I think that while Trump is undoubtedly good at negotiations, he's having to do them in a completely new environment with a different set of variables and new stakes. And with a 35% or whatever it is approval rating, he doesn't have as much leverage as he's used to. All in all, it's pretty much a perfect recipe for anyone to fail at being a negotiator even if they're otherwise good at it.
I get throttled only near busy cells (based on observation such as: at the mall while lots of other people are there).
That's not throttling. That's T-Mobile's network getting slammed.
Throttling is the deliberate, policy-based use of the network to constrain a user's throughput lower than default "best effort" settings. Traditionally this was done by forcing the user from a higher data rate technology to a lower one, such as bumping a user off the LTE network and onto 3G (HSPA/CDMA), or from a 3G network onto 2G (EDGE/1xRTT). More advanced networks can now do this by using LTE Quality of Service features to 1.) set a maximum bit rate for the user's default data EPS bearer or 2.) lower the user's ARP and QCI values so that they have a lower-than-best-effort priority for resources and in the network scheduler.
If you're getting lower throughput at busy cells, that isn't throttling, that's... the network being busy. If it happens every once in a while, that's an abnormal network load and to be expected. If it's happening all the time, your carrier either has its spectrum exhausted in the area, or sucks at network planning (constraints in backhaul, coverage densification, etc.). Or neither and they are just cheap.
PRESS: "Donald Trump was wiretapped in an ongoing investigation into ties to Russia"... It is actually funny seeing the same NYT "reporter" reporting "Donald Trump was Wiretapped" and "Donald Trump wasn't wiretapped".
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the New York Times that claimed Trump was being wiretapped, let alone the same reporter. In fact, I'm pretty darned sure it wasn't the "liberal press" that made the claim at all. The whole point of the incredulity over this from the "mainstream press" is that the original claim was dubiously sourced from the beginning and based on nothing more than "I bet this probably happened." Lack of critical thinking skills is disappointing in individuals like you or me, but genuinely dangerous in the hands of powerful people.
Liberals can quote both, and believe both simultaneously
I believe the cognitive dissonance may be going on somewhere else here. Or maybe rather the same affinity or lack thereof for fact checking.
The Pixel represents Google's first proper foray into the smartphone market
Can someone who follows Android more closely than I do explain WTH this statement from the summary means? Why is this in any way different from the Nexus phones, and why wasn't that a "proper" foray into the smartphone market? What is so special about Pixel compared to the original Nexus vision?
I would imagine that if you are in an area where you are using a WISP today, it's probably lacks the population density for the carriers to bother deploying 5G there. The only exception would likely be if you are in an area served by copper phone lines that the carrier (if it's the home ILEC) wants to rip up and get rid of.
Whatever 5G ends up being, it won't look like a traditional cellular service. The spectrum that it uses (in the 30 GHz range) is subject to serious atmospheric signal attenuation (especially compared to the 700 MHz bands typically used for LTE) and it won't reliably penetrate walls of any thickness. So it will be largely useless for cellular phones.
Instead, imagine it as just another last mile technology for fixed wireless. You'll have a 5G receiver hung on the exterior of your house, and you will now have an alternative to [CABLE COMPANY] or [PHONE COMPANY] for your home broadband service. One of the upsides to using such high spectrum bands is that you can jam a lot more data into the frequency, so it's likely to be priced (and have caps) that look more like a cable/fiber connection rather than a cellular plan. So, not a bad thing... but not going to change the way you use your cellphone, either.
The Democrat party is the owner of slavery, eugenics, segregation, and the KKK.
Technically true! But also completely disingenuous.
For any continuously evolving entity such as a nation or political party, there must reasonably be a statute of limitations on claiming either debts or credits for past actions.
The GOP of 2017 can no more claim to be the party of Lincoln than the Democrats of 2017 can claim to be the party of Jefferson, although they both do. The Democrats of today are no more responsible for FDR's interning of Japanese American citizens during World War II than today's Republicans are responsible for the Teapot Dome Oil Scandal or Watergate. The Democratic Party of today would be as unrecognizable today to Strom Thurmond in 1935 as today's Republican Party would be to Horace Greeley in 1866.
Think about the same time frame that you're talking about holding today's entity responsible for yesterday's actions (1865-1964?). Is the Trump US government of 2017 morally liable for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves? Is Angela Merkel's German government morally responsible for unpaid reparations for Kaiser Wilhelm's invasion of neutral Belgium? Are today's management or shareholders of IBM or Ford morally liable for their WWII involvement with the Nazis? Do you think that the Disney Corporation of today stands for everything portrayed in Song of the South? No, of course not. Institutions stay but the people behind the actions die or leave, and the credit or blame leaves with them.
Institutional memory has its place, but only within reasonable time limits. The only place you can draw a meaningful lineage is where the institutional principles remain the same. And if you consider that, I think you'd be hard pressed to make the same argument.
"Just let people do whatever" is pretty much the idea of Conservatism, as long as our Rights are protected.
I used to think that, too. Then I realized that the Right in the US only believed in "just let people do whatever" as long as the "whatever" in question was not to smoke pot. Or have consensual gay/lesbian sex. Or get an abortion. Or burn a flag. Or unplug a brain-dead spouse from life support. Or... the list went on.
I hope someday we will all have the intellectual honesty to admit that Left and Right both have different things culturally that they want to permit and other things they want to ban. Neither side actually things government should butt out of your life, they just think the intrusiveness should be about different things.
No, T-Mobile's HSPA+ was sort of "3.5G" . Their "4G" stuff was always LTE.
Nope. In fact, T-Mobile was partly responsible with the whole BS confusion about "4G" and LTE.
Flash back to about five or six years ago. "4G" was generally understood by people in the cellular industry to refer to the 3GPP standardized Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which represented a quantum leap in the GSM family of technologies. Unfortunately, LTE was new and nobody was deploying it yet in the US (Verizon was first eventually, followed by AT&T). At this point, neither Sprint or T-Mobile had announced LTE plans.
Sprint - even then struggling for a positive message to tell about its network and one up its competitors - came up with the brilliant marketing idea to take its WiMAX (remember WiMAX?) Clearwire network and claim that it was the first "4G" network in the US. Whether you could claim WiMAX as a fourth generation digital cellular technology is debatable but if you squint just right it might have been okay.
T-Mobile saw this move and wanted to be able to make similar marketing claims to Sprint about 4G. They basically said, "our HSPA+ is faster than WiMAX. So it must be 4G too!" So even though there was no justifiable way to claim that HSPA+ was a 4G technology, T-Mobile started saying "we have 4G too!" Of course, AT&T didn't want to appear behind Sprint and T-Mobile so they adopted the ruse later too. (Verizon was still using 3G CDMA so it wasn't an option for them to join in the fun.)
If you look carefully at carrier ads today, you will still usually see their LTE coverage maps listed as "4G LTE" in order to distinguish it from their "faux G" HSPA+ or other 3G technologies. All because of some dodgy marketing decisions on Sprint and T-Mobile's parts.
The journalism curriculum needs a lot more basic science in it.
The problem wasn't in TFA, it was in the submitter's headline and the consequent lack of editing or fact-checking that it received from a Slashdot "editor." I'm unsure whether that bespeaks more of a need for basic science/math education among Slashdot submitters or a need for a Turing test for Slashdot editors to see if they're just bots approving random submissions based on flamebait keywords. I'm pretty sure I could just completely fabricate a story titled "Trump iPhones Zuckerberg's Laid Off IT Workers and Stallman To Net Neutrality Android Is Awesome" and see it sail through unchecked.
If you're not willing to use official channels and you're not willing to confront the person directly then you need to leave. That's it.
Precisely. However, you really need to question whether the original poster's two above assertions are true, or if they are just conflict avoidant/unable to understand corporate culture. Because if those aren't the case and the two assertions above are true, then the company is a toxic shithole that should be avoided like the plague.
The implication that you can't use official channels - even "skipping levels" up - indicates that the whole place is thoroughly corrupt through to the very very top. Saying that you can't talk to the person directly implies that they are so menacing/terrible/powerful that asserting yourself against a bully could never work.
Unless this is a small family owned business and the offender in question is part of the family, do both of these situations both sound likely?
I'm certainly not trying to impugn the submission poster, but it sounds fishy to me that this company is so rotten that none of the two most obvious approaches are even possible. I've never met a corporate HR department (at least at a company big enough to actually have legal counsel retained) that wasn't ready to jump all over any accusation of misconduct because they're so eager to fend off potential lawsuits. And any company where everyone - including the HR department and the org chain all the way up to the CEO - is totally off limits to a complaint about a malevolent employee is either a nepotism factory or a 100% nest of vipers.
I can't assess better than anyone else the validity of what the submitter says, but it does sound to me like some of the options he/she thinks are off limits might actually be on the table but he/she is too young/shy/lacking in self confidence to pursue. But if those things really are out of the question, then run don't walk out the door.
I wouldn't recommend that unless your country has no laws against libel.
Check your local laws of course, but writing something bad about someone in a private setting (i.e. in a non-public letter to a corporate HR department) is almost never grounds for a libel lawsuit, as far as I have ever heard. If that were so, there would be no such thing as customer service surveys, whistleblower laws, "mystery shopper" feedback, etc.
Libel is generally reserved for covering "public" pronouncements, typically in the form of journalistic stories. And even in those rare cases where, for example, a business has sued a private citizen over a bad Yelp review or some other public lambasting, they have pretty much universally lost.
In addition, most corporations have as part of their employment conditions that you can't sue the company or other employees as a result of negative opinions expressed as part of "official" company communications, such as an employee review or exit interview. (Otherwise no one could ever give an employee a bad review!) There are limits of course - if you allege that someone has committed a crime on the job, that obligates your employer to take it to the police, and depending on how that goes you could be opening yourself up to other things if your accusations of criminal activity are found to be negligibly inaccurate. But I assume you're not going there.
Libel law has many twists and turns which shouldn't be underestimated, but don't take it as a blanket reason for why you should never say anything bad about anyone - especially if it is provably true - in a context that is not intended for public consumption.
But without a good solid education, moving to new jobs becomes hard. So if the local job dries up how do you get a new one if you don't have a decent education?
Here's the problem. The issue with jobs in the US today is not about education per se, but about fungibility of jobs.
A "fungible" job, or item, is one that can be exchanged equally at no loss or differentiation. (A US dollar bill is fungible, for example, because any dollar bill is equal to any other regardless of its source, condition or owner.) If one mechanical piece or the person who produces those pieces can be swapped out without any loss of productivity or quality then it is fungible. And as such it can be produced anywhere at a lower cost.
Education is not necessarily a defense against fungibility. If you have a theoretically white collar job of IT tech support but that job can be done equally well by someone with equivalent education/training in Hyderabad, then your job is still fungible despite your education.
Some jobs cannot be fungible because the quality of the person doing the job. Think of jobs where one person's talent is appreciably different than another's, like athletes, corporate strategists, artists, rockstar programmers, artists, musicians, financial advisors/fund managers, writers, architects or academics. Other jobs can't be fungible because of their requirements to be local, such as healthcare workers, local retail/tourism, or service providers (automotive/building/plumbing/contracting/cleaning/professional services).
So the bottom line here isn't whether you got a C in high school or not, it's whether you left high school early to take an apprenticeship in plumbing - which will probably get you lifelong local employment - or whether you got As in high school and a scholarship that led to a MFA in Medieval French Literature, which will probably get you a lifelong series of Starbucks barista jobs.
Advanced education is absolutely definitely important to a person's likelihood of future earnings. But not everyone is suited to (or wants to) have a college education. If everyone did, then college graduates would have no employment advantage, right? So the obvious conclusion is that it's not so important how much education you have - rather, it's what education you have in a field that people actually have jobs to hire for.
There may be no original prints of A New Hope left, but all the source material almost certainly exists.
The explanation, from what I recall, is that while the original source materials may exist, they are so degraded as to be useless for any kind of theatrical or master-quality presentation again. (Fair warning: my recollection is from watching documentaries on the Star Wars DVDs from several years ago, so anyone can feel free to correct me if they have watched them more recently.)
The original master 35mm print of Star Wars, being celluloid, was subject to scratching and wear throughout the process of making all the copies for theaters to show. On top of that, even well-preserved celluloid is subject to natural degradation over time - colors wash out, etc. Think of old photos in a photo album that over time have grown dimmer and less distinct.
I recall someone (John Knoll?) on the DVDs saying of the digital remastering efforts in 1996/1997 that the original master was already in bad enough shape that, had they not digitized it then, there could never have been a copy good enough to convert to high definition digital or theater projection quality. When they did the digital conversion though, they didn't keep (this logic sounds a bit fuzzy but bear with me) the pure original scan. Like a photographer who shoots an original photo that isn't "good enough" but needs to retouch it before publishing, they made their digital upgrades/cleanups and didn't bother to keep the unretouched versions since they (George Lucas?) in essence said, "what we scanned was crap so who needs that?"
Ergo - at least according to the then-Lucas-owned-LucasFilm party line - you end up with a badly degraded original celluloid version in a vault somewhere still, but the only high-def/digital version left is the one that had all the cleanup and alterations done to it. That doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't keep a digital version where Han shot first, but it does mean that there is no digital version left of the fully untouched "original." Which may be a fine point of distinction worth considering as to whether it's still possible to see the "original" depending on what that means to you.
NSA = domestic surveillance
CIA = foreign surveillance
The NSA has no reason to exist other than to spy on US citizens, for all other things (actual investigations) there is the FBI, police etc. Off course now it's all under the umbrella of DHS so it doesn't actually matter who is in charge, the spying will continue.
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Sorry, but pretty much exactly wrong.
The NSA is authorized to collect signals intelligence only on foreign citizens. Hence the uproar over domestics being caught up in the surveillance nets and not being redacted immediately as they are supposed to be. This isn't an arbitrary distinction, but because under US law, American citizens are entitled to the protection of the 4th amendment against unwarranted search or seizure, whereas foreign citizens are not. So the setup was that the NSA could warrant-less-ly wiretap the rest of the world, but needed to scrub out the information of Americans that got caught in the haul.
I don't know how closely those rules were followed for most of the NSA's history (and neither do you). But that was/is the NSA's charter. Oh, and the NSA also has a secondary mission of Information Assurance, which is how the government is supposed to protect its own classified information.
Probably the foreign/domestic split you're thinking of is the way that the FBI and CIA are structured. The CIA cannot surveil/investigate/spy on/shoot American citizens, and the FBI can only surveil/investigate/spy on/shoot people inside the US.
Also, while we're at it, neither the NSA nor the CIA is part of the "umbrella of DHS." The CIA rolls up to the Director of National Intelligence as the head of the nation's "intelligence community," whereas the NSA is part of the Department of Defense. DHS itself has a law enforcement role but no "spying" mandate at all other than activities directly involved in fulfilling that law enforcement mandate.
Which brings me to my #1 pet peeve. Why don't they have longer ramps both before and after security?
I don't like the answer, but I'm giving it to you. So please don't mod me down for being factual.
The reason is that every major airport in the US was designed before the "TSA era." Imagine a movie theater that was designed to just take your ticket, and then having to retrofit it to put a body scanner and personal items X-Ray into your ability to get into the theater. You can't rebuild the building to accommodate the new requirements, you just have to jam it in somehow. And so, in the same space, you have to accommodate all this new "Security Theater" nonsense in the same physical space that never anticipated it.
Everybody hates the new security requirements, and for good reason. But it's understandable why cramped spaces are so miserable now from an airport's perspective.
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Don't be duped. Clearly this study was funded by Big Sulphur.
Governments have lots of people in them. They're actually capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
The bottleneck is not and has never been the spare time of bureaucrats. The problem is a limited amount of money.
Go take a walk through the Tenderloin and tell me that those people's problem is crappy cable upload speeds.
I love San Francisco, but I'm pretty sure there are much better ways for the city to spend its money. Fixing the roads, solving the homeless/drug addict problem or creating affordable housing come to mind immediately. Every dollar spent on this fiber project is a dollar that did not go to one of the above.
Why would I want Netflix if thepiratebay.org has everything I want without the hassle of streaming and artificial limitations?
Maybe if you cared about quaint old ideas like the people who made those TV shows getting paid for doing so and providing a revenue stream for those people to create more things you like in the future. Or if you believe in even quainter ideas like that if you don't want to pay for something you don't just get to use it anyway.
Hey, I used to pirate plenty of stuff too, back when I didn't have any money and/or it was really hard to find stuff on iTunes, Amazon, Google, Netflix or Hulu. I get it, especially if you're downloading stuff that isn't commercially available at any price - no harm no foul there, as far as I'm concerned. But *if* you have the means and the ability to get these things legally and properly compensate the people who made them, isn't there a decent moral argument to be made to do so, even if you have to (horror of horrors) skip through commercials or something?
In 10 years, the Seattle City council will complain about the impact of commuters on its road infrastructure
More likely they will be complaining about why there isn't enough usage of the mandatory tandem bicycle ride-sharing service that they instituted when they turned all the city's North-South streets into seven-abroad bicycle lanes.
I proudly call Seattle my home. And its mayors and city councils really do believe they're doing the right thing, bless their hearts. But they are pretty much all blithering idiots. Because Seattle is a tech boom town filled with generally liberal people, they have the money and political backing to do well-meaning but impractical things.
You know, things like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bike share program in a city that is full of huge f***ing hills and where it rains half the year. Or mandating a $15 minimum wage without studying it first and then seeing it decrease earnings of those it was designed to help, at least according to one recent study (more research over time is still needed to say for sure). There's a much longer list for someone crankier than me to make.
It's well meaning but it's almost universally poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences. Like this income tax idea, which will perversely drive out the people who pay the most in property taxes and push them into driving into work from the suburbs. And Seattle already has miserable traffic. But, again, while the economic sun is shining the city has the leeway to try these grand but foolish experiments. Unfortunately, at some point the tech boom here will end and there will be a nasty bill to pay for it.
It's an issue if you believe that the primary beneficiaries of such a rule are heterosexual males that will use this as an excuse to enter female bathrooms and use the law as an excuse.
It's not an issue if you believe that the primary beneficiaries of such a rule are transgender men or women (pre or post surgery) who already identify themselves by dress and attitude and who want to go to the bathroom they think they belong in.
Neither viewpoint is 100% right or wrong. There will be people who abuse the right to trans bathrooms, and others who use it as intended.
Personally, I have two young daughters who I am of course immensely concerned about protecting from predators. Yet I believe that there are plenty of laws already in place protecting them from being filmed, approached sexually or otherwise that keep them safe. I'm in favor of trans bathroom protection because I'm willing to believe that the benefit to trans people is greater than the risk from hetero pervs. (Data may prove me wrong.)
But it's wrong to think that this is a one-sided issue and that everyone who disagrees with me is just wrong. It's a valid concern. I disagree with the Texas/North Carolina measures. But I'm not willing to say that those who oppose trans bathroom rights are just awful people. I understand the instinct to protect one's children at all costs, even if this specific measure isn't borne out by my experience.
Slashdotters in general pride themselves on being rational people, and I think they are (moreso than the general population). But empathy for opposing viewpoints is a rare skill, even among the highly intelligent. Maybe we can use this place as a model for trying to talk rationally about the pros and cons of both approaches? I have much higher expectations of seeing a well thought out argument on either side - couched in terms that could actually sway minds instead of just stoking flames - here than I would expect in the comments of the Washington Post or Fox News.
There's no excuse for digital music not including lyrics
In case you're interested, at least for lyrics, the actual reason is licensing.
Look at a piece of sheet music and you'll notice that the writers of the music and the lyrics are credited separately. Both get a check when you buy a music recording, both of them get a royalty fee. But if you want to *read* the lyrics, then that's a separate check to the lyricist, just as if you were buying a piece of sheet music. It's a relic of the days when sheet music was much more popular (dating back to when more people enjoyed music by buying the sheet music and performing it at home than buying expensive radios or record players).
So... Amazon, iTunes, Spotify or wherever you're getting your music from is OK paying the royalties for the sound recording but doesn't want to pay the extra royalty fee to get the lyrics/chords written down. Probably because most people don't care, they just want the cheaper music. I'm surprised that nobody (that I know of) has offered to sell the lyrics as an upcharge, but my guess is that they have focus grouped that with their customers and just found there isn't enough interest from people willing to pay for the lyrics.
If you'd like to learn more, NPR's Planet Money did an awesome podcast a few years ago about exactly this topic, including an interview with musicians who spend their time trying to shut down Internet free lyrics sites for just this reason.
Poor people paid most of the taxes that put fiber in those rich neighborhoods.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the exact opposite of true. At least at a national level (Federal income tax), the top 16% of earners (those will incomes of $100K or above) account for 79.4% of all the individual tax revenue paid to the government. In fact, the top 1% of earners account for 51.6% of the IRS individual tax revenue all by themselves. Maybe taxes in California are radically different, but I doubt it.
Coverage / signal reliability varies by specific location. Bandwidth during peak times also varies, load increases then they up backhaul bandwith and it gets better for a while.
Full disclosure: I work for one of the four big carriers. But this isn't a commercial for my unnamed employer, it's just a description of why they are different.
There is a fundamental strategy difference between AT&T/Verizon and Sprint/T-Mobile. The key, of course, is money. And as a customer, you do get what you pay for.
Did you know that in the US, almost 70% of the population lives in 3% of the landmass? (That sounds shocking until you think about Alaska, Montana, West Texas, Nevada and Wyoming.) It doesn't take (comparatively) that many towers to cover the 70%. But it takes a disproportionately higher number more to cover the next 10% of the population. And the next 10% after that take almost half again the number of towers. The expense gets higher and higher as you try to reach 99% of the population (which is contained in roughly 70% of the land area of the US).
If you have the money to buy the spectrum and build the towers, you can choose to cover as many people as possible (and the side benefit is that you provide better coverage for people who travel a lot, especially to rural areas). If you have the money, you can also spend the billions on spectrum needed for the capacity to support users in dense areas and the backhaul to go with it. AT&T and Verizon, because they have the big subscriber/revenue bases and the cost advantages of legacy ILEC backhaul facilities in collectively more than half the states, choose that path. But it all costs money to do that, and you as a consumer pay more for the coverage quality.
Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the big piles of money or the huge subscriber bases. The good news for them: like I said, it costs a lot less money in tower building to cover 70% of the US population, and if you have fewer subscribers then you don't have to shell out as much on spectrum and backhaul. They have chosen (probably wisely, given their bank accounts) to go for the low hanging fruit, which costs less money and they can price their service more aggressively because they aren't trying to spend the money to cover everybody. So their strategy works well for most people, although if it works TOO well, then they have to start shelling out money that they don't have for more spectrum. (Sprint already has more spectrum than they know what to do with, but most of it is high-band ex-Clearwire WiMax spectrum that is almost useless in dense urban areas with lots of buildings to penetrate.)
So the bottom line is:
Coming up with something would require planning, negotiation, and "horse trading" skills. Trump is not known for any of these skills.
Oh, come on. I think the President is a buffoon but even I still recognize that if he has one legitimate claim to competence in any field is it "negotiation and horse trading." I have no doubt that he is genuinely good at it.
The real problem, as Trump is painfully beginning to discover, is that running a government involves a kind of negotiations that are exponentially more difficult and unsatisfying than business negotiation. Here's why:
In a business negotiation, one of the most vital factors is the fact that (generally speaking) you can always walk away. You're trying to buy Company X or real estate Z and your negotiating partner wants an unreasonable price or unacceptable conditions that there's no breaking the impasse over? Walk away. No deal gets done, but the world keeps spinning on its axis just fine with no real consequences. (Mostly.)
But in government? You don't get a debt ceiling increase passed, you don't get to walk away while the government stops paying its bills and torpedoes the world economy. You don't get an acceptable deal with Iran over its nuclear program, you don't get to walk away and just let them build nukes. You don't get a Middle East peace agreement that you want, you don't get to walk away and remove the US from the region while wholesale slaughter starts. There are real stakes in much of what the government does and no option to just walk away.
So I think that while Trump is undoubtedly good at negotiations, he's having to do them in a completely new environment with a different set of variables and new stakes. And with a 35% or whatever it is approval rating, he doesn't have as much leverage as he's used to. All in all, it's pretty much a perfect recipe for anyone to fail at being a negotiator even if they're otherwise good at it.
I get throttled only near busy cells (based on observation such as: at the mall while lots of other people are there).
That's not throttling. That's T-Mobile's network getting slammed.
Throttling is the deliberate, policy-based use of the network to constrain a user's throughput lower than default "best effort" settings. Traditionally this was done by forcing the user from a higher data rate technology to a lower one, such as bumping a user off the LTE network and onto 3G (HSPA/CDMA), or from a 3G network onto 2G (EDGE/1xRTT). More advanced networks can now do this by using LTE Quality of Service features to 1.) set a maximum bit rate for the user's default data EPS bearer or 2.) lower the user's ARP and QCI values so that they have a lower-than-best-effort priority for resources and in the network scheduler.
If you're getting lower throughput at busy cells, that isn't throttling, that's... the network being busy. If it happens every once in a while, that's an abnormal network load and to be expected. If it's happening all the time, your carrier either has its spectrum exhausted in the area, or sucks at network planning (constraints in backhaul, coverage densification, etc.). Or neither and they are just cheap.
PRESS: "Donald Trump was wiretapped in an ongoing investigation into ties to Russia" ... It is actually funny seeing the same NYT "reporter" reporting "Donald Trump was Wiretapped" and "Donald Trump wasn't wiretapped".
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the New York Times that claimed Trump was being wiretapped, let alone the same reporter. In fact, I'm pretty darned sure it wasn't the "liberal press" that made the claim at all. The whole point of the incredulity over this from the "mainstream press" is that the original claim was dubiously sourced from the beginning and based on nothing more than "I bet this probably happened." Lack of critical thinking skills is disappointing in individuals like you or me, but genuinely dangerous in the hands of powerful people.
Liberals can quote both, and believe both simultaneously
I believe the cognitive dissonance may be going on somewhere else here. Or maybe rather the same affinity or lack thereof for fact checking.
The Pixel represents Google's first proper foray into the smartphone market
Can someone who follows Android more closely than I do explain WTH this statement from the summary means? Why is this in any way different from the Nexus phones, and why wasn't that a "proper" foray into the smartphone market? What is so special about Pixel compared to the original Nexus vision?
I would imagine that if you are in an area where you are using a WISP today, it's probably lacks the population density for the carriers to bother deploying 5G there. The only exception would likely be if you are in an area served by copper phone lines that the carrier (if it's the home ILEC) wants to rip up and get rid of.
Whatever 5G ends up being, it won't look like a traditional cellular service. The spectrum that it uses (in the 30 GHz range) is subject to serious atmospheric signal attenuation (especially compared to the 700 MHz bands typically used for LTE) and it won't reliably penetrate walls of any thickness. So it will be largely useless for cellular phones.
Instead, imagine it as just another last mile technology for fixed wireless. You'll have a 5G receiver hung on the exterior of your house, and you will now have an alternative to [CABLE COMPANY] or [PHONE COMPANY] for your home broadband service. One of the upsides to using such high spectrum bands is that you can jam a lot more data into the frequency, so it's likely to be priced (and have caps) that look more like a cable/fiber connection rather than a cellular plan. So, not a bad thing... but not going to change the way you use your cellphone, either.
The Democrat party is the owner of slavery, eugenics, segregation, and the KKK.
Technically true! But also completely disingenuous.
For any continuously evolving entity such as a nation or political party, there must reasonably be a statute of limitations on claiming either debts or credits for past actions.
The GOP of 2017 can no more claim to be the party of Lincoln than the Democrats of 2017 can claim to be the party of Jefferson, although they both do. The Democrats of today are no more responsible for FDR's interning of Japanese American citizens during World War II than today's Republicans are responsible for the Teapot Dome Oil Scandal or Watergate. The Democratic Party of today would be as unrecognizable today to Strom Thurmond in 1935 as today's Republican Party would be to Horace Greeley in 1866.
Think about the same time frame that you're talking about holding today's entity responsible for yesterday's actions (1865-1964?). Is the Trump US government of 2017 morally liable for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves? Is Angela Merkel's German government morally responsible for unpaid reparations for Kaiser Wilhelm's invasion of neutral Belgium? Are today's management or shareholders of IBM or Ford morally liable for their WWII involvement with the Nazis? Do you think that the Disney Corporation of today stands for everything portrayed in Song of the South? No, of course not. Institutions stay but the people behind the actions die or leave, and the credit or blame leaves with them.
Institutional memory has its place, but only within reasonable time limits. The only place you can draw a meaningful lineage is where the institutional principles remain the same. And if you consider that, I think you'd be hard pressed to make the same argument.
"Just let people do whatever" is pretty much the idea of Conservatism, as long as our Rights are protected.
I used to think that, too. Then I realized that the Right in the US only believed in "just let people do whatever" as long as the "whatever" in question was not to smoke pot. Or have consensual gay/lesbian sex. Or get an abortion. Or burn a flag. Or unplug a brain-dead spouse from life support. Or... the list went on.
I hope someday we will all have the intellectual honesty to admit that Left and Right both have different things culturally that they want to permit and other things they want to ban. Neither side actually things government should butt out of your life, they just think the intrusiveness should be about different things.
No, T-Mobile's HSPA+ was sort of "3.5G" . Their "4G" stuff was always LTE.
Nope. In fact, T-Mobile was partly responsible with the whole BS confusion about "4G" and LTE.
Flash back to about five or six years ago. "4G" was generally understood by people in the cellular industry to refer to the 3GPP standardized Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which represented a quantum leap in the GSM family of technologies. Unfortunately, LTE was new and nobody was deploying it yet in the US (Verizon was first eventually, followed by AT&T). At this point, neither Sprint or T-Mobile had announced LTE plans.
Sprint - even then struggling for a positive message to tell about its network and one up its competitors - came up with the brilliant marketing idea to take its WiMAX (remember WiMAX?) Clearwire network and claim that it was the first "4G" network in the US. Whether you could claim WiMAX as a fourth generation digital cellular technology is debatable but if you squint just right it might have been okay.
T-Mobile saw this move and wanted to be able to make similar marketing claims to Sprint about 4G. They basically said, "our HSPA+ is faster than WiMAX. So it must be 4G too!" So even though there was no justifiable way to claim that HSPA+ was a 4G technology, T-Mobile started saying "we have 4G too!" Of course, AT&T didn't want to appear behind Sprint and T-Mobile so they adopted the ruse later too. (Verizon was still using 3G CDMA so it wasn't an option for them to join in the fun.)
If you look carefully at carrier ads today, you will still usually see their LTE coverage maps listed as "4G LTE" in order to distinguish it from their "faux G" HSPA+ or other 3G technologies. All because of some dodgy marketing decisions on Sprint and T-Mobile's parts.
The journalism curriculum needs a lot more basic science in it.
The problem wasn't in TFA, it was in the submitter's headline and the consequent lack of editing or fact-checking that it received from a Slashdot "editor." I'm unsure whether that bespeaks more of a need for basic science/math education among Slashdot submitters or a need for a Turing test for Slashdot editors to see if they're just bots approving random submissions based on flamebait keywords. I'm pretty sure I could just completely fabricate a story titled "Trump iPhones Zuckerberg's Laid Off IT Workers and Stallman To Net Neutrality Android Is Awesome" and see it sail through unchecked.
It has a solid business case. "There's always money in the banana stand."
If you're not willing to use official channels and you're not willing to confront the person directly then you need to leave. That's it.
Precisely. However, you really need to question whether the original poster's two above assertions are true, or if they are just conflict avoidant/unable to understand corporate culture. Because if those aren't the case and the two assertions above are true, then the company is a toxic shithole that should be avoided like the plague.
The implication that you can't use official channels - even "skipping levels" up - indicates that the whole place is thoroughly corrupt through to the very very top. Saying that you can't talk to the person directly implies that they are so menacing/terrible/powerful that asserting yourself against a bully could never work.
Unless this is a small family owned business and the offender in question is part of the family, do both of these situations both sound likely?
I'm certainly not trying to impugn the submission poster, but it sounds fishy to me that this company is so rotten that none of the two most obvious approaches are even possible. I've never met a corporate HR department (at least at a company big enough to actually have legal counsel retained) that wasn't ready to jump all over any accusation of misconduct because they're so eager to fend off potential lawsuits. And any company where everyone - including the HR department and the org chain all the way up to the CEO - is totally off limits to a complaint about a malevolent employee is either a nepotism factory or a 100% nest of vipers.
I can't assess better than anyone else the validity of what the submitter says, but it does sound to me like some of the options he/she thinks are off limits might actually be on the table but he/she is too young/shy/lacking in self confidence to pursue. But if those things really are out of the question, then run don't walk out the door.
I wouldn't recommend that unless your country has no laws against libel.
Check your local laws of course, but writing something bad about someone in a private setting (i.e. in a non-public letter to a corporate HR department) is almost never grounds for a libel lawsuit, as far as I have ever heard. If that were so, there would be no such thing as customer service surveys, whistleblower laws, "mystery shopper" feedback, etc.
Libel is generally reserved for covering "public" pronouncements, typically in the form of journalistic stories. And even in those rare cases where, for example, a business has sued a private citizen over a bad Yelp review or some other public lambasting, they have pretty much universally lost.
In addition, most corporations have as part of their employment conditions that you can't sue the company or other employees as a result of negative opinions expressed as part of "official" company communications, such as an employee review or exit interview. (Otherwise no one could ever give an employee a bad review!) There are limits of course - if you allege that someone has committed a crime on the job, that obligates your employer to take it to the police, and depending on how that goes you could be opening yourself up to other things if your accusations of criminal activity are found to be negligibly inaccurate. But I assume you're not going there.
Libel law has many twists and turns which shouldn't be underestimated, but don't take it as a blanket reason for why you should never say anything bad about anyone - especially if it is provably true - in a context that is not intended for public consumption.
But without a good solid education, moving to new jobs becomes hard. So if the local job dries up how do you get a new one if you don't have a decent education?
Here's the problem. The issue with jobs in the US today is not about education per se, but about fungibility of jobs.
A "fungible" job, or item, is one that can be exchanged equally at no loss or differentiation. (A US dollar bill is fungible, for example, because any dollar bill is equal to any other regardless of its source, condition or owner.) If one mechanical piece or the person who produces those pieces can be swapped out without any loss of productivity or quality then it is fungible. And as such it can be produced anywhere at a lower cost.
Education is not necessarily a defense against fungibility. If you have a theoretically white collar job of IT tech support but that job can be done equally well by someone with equivalent education/training in Hyderabad, then your job is still fungible despite your education.
Some jobs cannot be fungible because the quality of the person doing the job. Think of jobs where one person's talent is appreciably different than another's, like athletes, corporate strategists, artists, rockstar programmers, artists, musicians, financial advisors/fund managers, writers, architects or academics. Other jobs can't be fungible because of their requirements to be local, such as healthcare workers, local retail/tourism, or service providers (automotive/building/plumbing/contracting/cleaning/professional services).
So the bottom line here isn't whether you got a C in high school or not, it's whether you left high school early to take an apprenticeship in plumbing - which will probably get you lifelong local employment - or whether you got As in high school and a scholarship that led to a MFA in Medieval French Literature, which will probably get you a lifelong series of Starbucks barista jobs.
Advanced education is absolutely definitely important to a person's likelihood of future earnings. But not everyone is suited to (or wants to) have a college education. If everyone did, then college graduates would have no employment advantage, right? So the obvious conclusion is that it's not so important how much education you have - rather, it's what education you have in a field that people actually have jobs to hire for.
There may be no original prints of A New Hope left, but all the source material almost certainly exists.
The explanation, from what I recall, is that while the original source materials may exist, they are so degraded as to be useless for any kind of theatrical or master-quality presentation again. (Fair warning: my recollection is from watching documentaries on the Star Wars DVDs from several years ago, so anyone can feel free to correct me if they have watched them more recently.)
The original master 35mm print of Star Wars, being celluloid, was subject to scratching and wear throughout the process of making all the copies for theaters to show. On top of that, even well-preserved celluloid is subject to natural degradation over time - colors wash out, etc. Think of old photos in a photo album that over time have grown dimmer and less distinct.
I recall someone (John Knoll?) on the DVDs saying of the digital remastering efforts in 1996/1997 that the original master was already in bad enough shape that, had they not digitized it then, there could never have been a copy good enough to convert to high definition digital or theater projection quality. When they did the digital conversion though, they didn't keep (this logic sounds a bit fuzzy but bear with me) the pure original scan. Like a photographer who shoots an original photo that isn't "good enough" but needs to retouch it before publishing, they made their digital upgrades/cleanups and didn't bother to keep the unretouched versions since they (George Lucas?) in essence said, "what we scanned was crap so who needs that?"
Ergo - at least according to the then-Lucas-owned-LucasFilm party line - you end up with a badly degraded original celluloid version in a vault somewhere still, but the only high-def/digital version left is the one that had all the cleanup and alterations done to it. That doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't keep a digital version where Han shot first, but it does mean that there is no digital version left of the fully untouched "original." Which may be a fine point of distinction worth considering as to whether it's still possible to see the "original" depending on what that means to you.
NSA = domestic surveillance CIA = foreign surveillance The NSA has no reason to exist other than to spy on US citizens, for all other things (actual investigations) there is the FBI, police etc.
Off course now it's all under the umbrella of DHS so it doesn't actually matter who is in charge, the spying will continue. Reply to This
Sorry, but pretty much exactly wrong.
The NSA is authorized to collect signals intelligence only on foreign citizens. Hence the uproar over domestics being caught up in the surveillance nets and not being redacted immediately as they are supposed to be. This isn't an arbitrary distinction, but because under US law, American citizens are entitled to the protection of the 4th amendment against unwarranted search or seizure, whereas foreign citizens are not. So the setup was that the NSA could warrant-less-ly wiretap the rest of the world, but needed to scrub out the information of Americans that got caught in the haul.
I don't know how closely those rules were followed for most of the NSA's history (and neither do you). But that was/is the NSA's charter. Oh, and the NSA also has a secondary mission of Information Assurance, which is how the government is supposed to protect its own classified information.
Probably the foreign/domestic split you're thinking of is the way that the FBI and CIA are structured. The CIA cannot surveil/investigate/spy on/shoot American citizens, and the FBI can only surveil/investigate/spy on/shoot people inside the US.
Also, while we're at it, neither the NSA nor the CIA is part of the "umbrella of DHS." The CIA rolls up to the Director of National Intelligence as the head of the nation's "intelligence community," whereas the NSA is part of the Department of Defense. DHS itself has a law enforcement role but no "spying" mandate at all other than activities directly involved in fulfilling that law enforcement mandate.
Which brings me to my #1 pet peeve. Why don't they have longer ramps both before and after security?
I don't like the answer, but I'm giving it to you. So please don't mod me down for being factual.
The reason is that every major airport in the US was designed before the "TSA era." Imagine a movie theater that was designed to just take your ticket, and then having to retrofit it to put a body scanner and personal items X-Ray into your ability to get into the theater. You can't rebuild the building to accommodate the new requirements, you just have to jam it in somehow. And so, in the same space, you have to accommodate all this new "Security Theater" nonsense in the same physical space that never anticipated it.
Everybody hates the new security requirements, and for good reason. But it's understandable why cramped spaces are so miserable now from an airport's perspective.