Well, no. If you look at the text of the law itself (USSC 47 533 (f)) (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_sec_47_00000533----000-.html), the FCC was given the power to "ensure that no cable operator or group of cable operators can unfairly impede, either because of the size of any individual operator or because of joint actions by a group of operators of sufficient size, the flow of video
programming from the video programmer to the consumer", among other provisions.
The court's position is that the 30% rule, which the FCC first adopted in 1993, no longer complies with the meaning of the Act because the marketplace has changed. The court cites, among other things, the growth of both dish services and the entrance of telephone companies into the television market. The court was also dubious of the methodology the FCC used to devise and defend the 30% rule. These are valid questions for a court to consider and completely within its remit.
Full text of the case, Comcast Corporation v. FCC, available here: http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200908/08-1114-1203454.pdf. The case was heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Douglas Ginsburg wrote the opinion, joined by Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Randolph.
Which means more parking, more infrastructure, etc. If you think about a typical service station, it works vaguely on a first-in first-out principle, except that some vehicles need more time to gas up, or sometimes you're staring at someone's nose because his tank is on the opposite side. Generally this isn't an issue because people get in and out within a few minutes of each other. If this is no longer the case the traffic flow in a service station will have to guarantee a route for each vehicle (or, as you say, morph into a fast food joint). On the other hand, assuming a cruising range of 200 miles at 60 miles per hour, you're pulling over every two and a half hours (when you're at a quarter charge). That's a lot of cheeseburgers;).
I live in the Midwest. 200 miles won't get me from Chicago to Detroit without re-charging. My 2002 Ford Focus has a cruising range of, conservatively, 320-350 miles, based on a 13 gallon tank and 27-30 mpg highway. That's not even close to parity. My other concern, and it involves all electric vehicles, is this: even at 10 minutes for a full charge, that's longer than it takes to refill my gas tank. This means a correspondingly low throughput at gas stations or the new equivalent. Has anyone addressed this looming logistical problem?
The standards at college newspapers are not always as stringent as those at major market newspapers. Thinking about the one at my alma mater, it did not employ an ombudsman, rarely fact-checked articles and didn't use tape recorders at interviews. I can think of three situations during my four years where it libeled a student or member of the administration. However, being a small paper with limited circulation and footprint, not much was done about it. Ditto, that matter, for an alternative weekly which accused a fairly prominent administrator of improper sexual conduct using anonymous sources (pretty weaselly actually--"rumours going around etc..."). A quick google-check shows that the Internet is perfectly unaware of any such accusations. What happens if that issue ever gets indexed online? He already got quietly forced out of his job.
Which is why my XP machine at work regularly breaks a month of uptime, rebooting only to install patches. Instability like that on Windows 2K or newer points to user error, not a fundamental flaw on the part of the operating system.
We tried this at my workplace and initial print quality seemed okay but the price was prohibitive compared to any perceived benefit. We didn't use them long enough to encounter any printout degradation like the anon above reported. A much better approach is to reduce printing overall to save paper.
On the other hand, ridership on the New Orleans-Florida segment of the pre-Katrina Sunset Limited was always poor. Methinks a better idea would be a revival of the Gulf Breeze or Gulf Coast Limited which would provide far more regular service.
Hat tip to the anon for the Google cache link (http://tinyurl.com/d2py5r).
The summary doesn't quote exactly from the paper, which actually said this:
"Our optimization framework is flexible and can be used to design a range of storage hierarchies. When applied to current workloads and prices we find the following in a nutshell: for many enterprise workloads capacity dominates provisioning costs and the current per-gigabyte price of SSDs is between a factor of 3 and 3000 times higher than needed to be cost-effective for full replacement. We find that SSDs can provide some benefit as an intermediate tier for caching and write-ahead logging in a hybrid disk-SSD configuration. Surprisingly, the power savings achieved by SSDs are comparable to power savings from using low-power SATA disks."
Excellent suggestion. We've been using this for about two years now and haven't had any problems. The Active Directory integration made contact lists and authentication a snap.
On the other hand, members of society have no right to steal (or receive) said work and distribute it--for free--without any possible authorization. Leave computers, which make everything magical and different, out of it for a second. He received a batch of brand new, stolen TVs off the back of a truck, and fenced them out of his garage. What a hero.
I love the idea of exploration for its own sake as much as the next man. However, when you're talking about government financing, you're asking the man on the street to bankroll it. In times of prosperity it may be defensible to take a substantial chunk of the budget and spend it on prestige projects, but I think it's a hard sell in a recession. Manned space exploration, in particular, has always been more expensive than unmanned space exploration, with greater risks entailed. Prestige/awesome factor aside, the real winner is the aerospace industry (or whomever gets the contract). If we're going to prop them up, wouldn't the money be better spent on newer, more fuel-efficient airliners?
Historical context is important here. Apollo was a crash program sparked by (incorrect) fears of Soviet technological supremacy. Post-Sputnik, it was important to the United States that a civilian space agency be the public face of the American program, given the military dominance of the Soviet program. We also thought it important to emphasize the benefits of free enterprise (vis a vis socialism), which is why the vast majority of the actual hardware was bid out to corporations. It's true that NASA remained in the driver's seat, but the country discovered two things:
That it wasn't especially comfortable with the technocratic approach to administration.
That the Apollo program was incredibly expensive for no obvious return.
The second point is operative today. The domestic economy is in meltdown. Going ahead with this program is akin to giving the aerospace industry a bailout. If it needs one, then let's just give them the money outright.
FreeCol: Sid Meier's Colonization reimplemented in Java. Good graphics, good gameplay, multiplayer works well across platforms (just the other day there were three of us playing: I hosted on Ubuntu, my friends had XP and Vista). It isn't at the 1.0 release but it's playable as is and is actively developed.
28 of 33 (84%, a B), but I'm calling shenanigans on Question #9:
Under Our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?
A. Make treaties
B. Levy income taxes
C. Maintain prisons
D. Natural Disaster Aid
The "correct" answer is (A), make treaties. All well and good; it is established in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 that the President can do this with the "advice and consent of the Senate." Thing is, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution grants Congress the power to levy income taxes. Now, states also levy income tax, but Article I expressly forbids states from entering into treaties with foreign countries. I suppose, then, what the question was actually asking was this: "What is one power of the federal government denied to the states." Maybe that's obvious to everyone else, but I found it misleading.
There's an interesting write-up by Orin Kerr over at Volokh Conspiracy. An important point that's lost in the hand-wringing above is that the FBI agent in question posted the link in a message board which was already known to be a distribution point for child pornography, and the link in question was clearly described as a link to child pornography. As an aside to the prefetch argument, from reading Mozilla's FAQ I'm not such a link would have been prefetched, but I'm not sure about that.
Maybe so, but discussions here have no potential for impact on Wikipedia, and have little chance to expand beyond generalities. Which admins are abusive? It's not said. Which users were blocked unfairly? That's not clear either. Which deletion discussions were hijacked? That's also an unknown. Speaking as one of those abusive administrators (Mackensen), and an arbitrator, I'm happy to render assistance, but given the paucity of information presented there's very little I can do. This discussion leaves the impression of users who would rather rant about perceived injustices then fix the problem. This may be incorrect but that's still the impression I'm left with. Rants do not lend themselves to concrete discussion.
On the main issue, webcomics do suffer, more than most categories of articles, from an abundant lack of reliable sources. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, relying on the secondary accounts of others. If those accounts don't exist, drafting an article is rather difficult, and you're left with little more than a blurb describing the webcomic and its characters, which is tantamount to advertising. Not noted in the summary but germane to the discussion is that an otherwise little known webcomic would benefit significantly from mention in a high-visibility location like Wikipedia. Wikipedia regularly zaps articles concerning little-known businesses, bands, independent writers, unsuccessful actors looking for a break, new models on the scene, etc. What makes webcomics different? Someone farther up mentioned using WP to find information about a webcomic--shouldn't the webcomic itself supply that information?
If deletionism is so rampant, then why has the overall bar for inclusion dropped steadily over the last few years? Consider, for example, schools. High schools now regularly survive deletion debates, an outcome that would have been unthinkable four years ago, when the pro-school folks were in a decided minority.
I doubt very much whether folks are "being banned" for arguing in favor of keeping webcomics or other apparently threatened species of articles. If you think someone has been unjustly banned, drop a note on my talk page (I'm User:Mackensen on Wikipedia) and I'll look into it.
It's not clear to me whose "rights" are being violated here. There is no right to have an article on Wikipedia; more broadly, there is no right to enjoy publicity for your private or commercial enterprise, much as there is no right to make a profit or to earn money. The better articles on YRO concern situations where someone's rights are actually violated, in a fashion that involves technology. You've got the technology, but I see no rights violations occurring here. What did you have in mine?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no. If you look at the text of the law itself (USSC 47 533 (f)) (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_sec_47_00000533----000-.html), the FCC was given the power to "ensure that no cable operator or group of cable operators can unfairly impede, either because of the size of any individual operator or because of joint actions by a group of operators of sufficient size, the flow of video programming from the video programmer to the consumer", among other provisions. The court's position is that the 30% rule, which the FCC first adopted in 1993, no longer complies with the meaning of the Act because the marketplace has changed. The court cites, among other things, the growth of both dish services and the entrance of telephone companies into the television market. The court was also dubious of the methodology the FCC used to devise and defend the 30% rule. These are valid questions for a court to consider and completely within its remit.
Full text of the case, Comcast Corporation v. FCC, available here: http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200908/08-1114-1203454.pdf. The case was heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Douglas Ginsburg wrote the opinion, joined by Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Randolph.
Which means more parking, more infrastructure, etc. If you think about a typical service station, it works vaguely on a first-in first-out principle, except that some vehicles need more time to gas up, or sometimes you're staring at someone's nose because his tank is on the opposite side. Generally this isn't an issue because people get in and out within a few minutes of each other. If this is no longer the case the traffic flow in a service station will have to guarantee a route for each vehicle (or, as you say, morph into a fast food joint). On the other hand, assuming a cruising range of 200 miles at 60 miles per hour, you're pulling over every two and a half hours (when you're at a quarter charge). That's a lot of cheeseburgers ;).
I live in the Midwest. 200 miles won't get me from Chicago to Detroit without re-charging. My 2002 Ford Focus has a cruising range of, conservatively, 320-350 miles, based on a 13 gallon tank and 27-30 mpg highway. That's not even close to parity. My other concern, and it involves all electric vehicles, is this: even at 10 minutes for a full charge, that's longer than it takes to refill my gas tank. This means a correspondingly low throughput at gas stations or the new equivalent. Has anyone addressed this looming logistical problem?
I'd say you're describing intercity rail, except for #6 and possibly #7.
The standards at college newspapers are not always as stringent as those at major market newspapers. Thinking about the one at my alma mater, it did not employ an ombudsman, rarely fact-checked articles and didn't use tape recorders at interviews. I can think of three situations during my four years where it libeled a student or member of the administration. However, being a small paper with limited circulation and footprint, not much was done about it. Ditto, that matter, for an alternative weekly which accused a fairly prominent administrator of improper sexual conduct using anonymous sources (pretty weaselly actually--"rumours going around etc..."). A quick google-check shows that the Internet is perfectly unaware of any such accusations. What happens if that issue ever gets indexed online? He already got quietly forced out of his job.
Which is why my XP machine at work regularly breaks a month of uptime, rebooting only to install patches. Instability like that on Windows 2K or newer points to user error, not a fundamental flaw on the part of the operating system.
We tried this at my workplace and initial print quality seemed okay but the price was prohibitive compared to any perceived benefit. We didn't use them long enough to encounter any printout degradation like the anon above reported. A much better approach is to reduce printing overall to save paper.
On the other hand, ridership on the New Orleans-Florida segment of the pre-Katrina Sunset Limited was always poor. Methinks a better idea would be a revival of the Gulf Breeze or Gulf Coast Limited which would provide far more regular service.
Excellent suggestion. We've been using this for about two years now and haven't had any problems. The Active Directory integration made contact lists and authentication a snap.
Because the government always lies, but the individuals who compose the government are saintly truth-tellers.
On the other hand, members of society have no right to steal (or receive) said work and distribute it--for free--without any possible authorization. Leave computers, which make everything magical and different, out of it for a second. He received a batch of brand new, stolen TVs off the back of a truck, and fenced them out of his garage. What a hero.
Yeah, even MS doesn't have the chutzpah to charge full price for a service pack...
I love the idea of exploration for its own sake as much as the next man. However, when you're talking about government financing, you're asking the man on the street to bankroll it. In times of prosperity it may be defensible to take a substantial chunk of the budget and spend it on prestige projects, but I think it's a hard sell in a recession. Manned space exploration, in particular, has always been more expensive than unmanned space exploration, with greater risks entailed. Prestige/awesome factor aside, the real winner is the aerospace industry (or whomever gets the contract). If we're going to prop them up, wouldn't the money be better spent on newer, more fuel-efficient airliners?
The second point is operative today. The domestic economy is in meltdown. Going ahead with this program is akin to giving the aerospace industry a bailout. If it needs one, then let's just give them the money outright.
I experienced this yesterday driving west across the state on I-94--I kept getting "network busy" around Ann Arbor.
FreeCol: Sid Meier's Colonization reimplemented in Java. Good graphics, good gameplay, multiplayer works well across platforms (just the other day there were three of us playing: I hosted on Ubuntu, my friends had XP and Vista). It isn't at the 1.0 release but it's playable as is and is actively developed.
Under Our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?
The "correct" answer is (A), make treaties. All well and good; it is established in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 that the President can do this with the "advice and consent of the Senate." Thing is, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution grants Congress the power to levy income taxes. Now, states also levy income tax, but Article I expressly forbids states from entering into treaties with foreign countries. I suppose, then, what the question was actually asking was this: "What is one power of the federal government denied to the states." Maybe that's obvious to everyone else, but I found it misleading.
90% of the time it is boring, repetitive and soul-sucking--like most jobs. Then I go home for the day and spend time with family and friends.
I would too, but only because (A) I'm already downwind from two other nuclear power plants and (B) my state's economy needs all the help it can get.
There's an interesting write-up by Orin Kerr over at Volokh Conspiracy. An important point that's lost in the hand-wringing above is that the FBI agent in question posted the link in a message board which was already known to be a distribution point for child pornography, and the link in question was clearly described as a link to child pornography. As an aside to the prefetch argument, from reading Mozilla's FAQ I'm not such a link would have been prefetched, but I'm not sure about that.
Neither - he's a buffoon.
Maybe so, but discussions here have no potential for impact on Wikipedia, and have little chance to expand beyond generalities. Which admins are abusive? It's not said. Which users were blocked unfairly? That's not clear either. Which deletion discussions were hijacked? That's also an unknown. Speaking as one of those abusive administrators (Mackensen), and an arbitrator, I'm happy to render assistance, but given the paucity of information presented there's very little I can do. This discussion leaves the impression of users who would rather rant about perceived injustices then fix the problem. This may be incorrect but that's still the impression I'm left with. Rants do not lend themselves to concrete discussion.
On the main issue, webcomics do suffer, more than most categories of articles, from an abundant lack of reliable sources. Encyclopedias are supposed to be tertiary sources, relying on the secondary accounts of others. If those accounts don't exist, drafting an article is rather difficult, and you're left with little more than a blurb describing the webcomic and its characters, which is tantamount to advertising. Not noted in the summary but germane to the discussion is that an otherwise little known webcomic would benefit significantly from mention in a high-visibility location like Wikipedia. Wikipedia regularly zaps articles concerning little-known businesses, bands, independent writers, unsuccessful actors looking for a break, new models on the scene, etc. What makes webcomics different? Someone farther up mentioned using WP to find information about a webcomic--shouldn't the webcomic itself supply that information?
If deletionism is so rampant, then why has the overall bar for inclusion dropped steadily over the last few years? Consider, for example, schools. High schools now regularly survive deletion debates, an outcome that would have been unthinkable four years ago, when the pro-school folks were in a decided minority.
I doubt very much whether folks are "being banned" for arguing in favor of keeping webcomics or other apparently threatened species of articles. If you think someone has been unjustly banned, drop a note on my talk page (I'm User:Mackensen on Wikipedia) and I'll look into it.
It's not clear to me whose "rights" are being violated here. There is no right to have an article on Wikipedia; more broadly, there is no right to enjoy publicity for your private or commercial enterprise, much as there is no right to make a profit or to earn money. The better articles on YRO concern situations where someone's rights are actually violated, in a fashion that involves technology. You've got the technology, but I see no rights violations occurring here. What did you have in mine?