You added the smiley but this is exactly their reasoning. Municipal broadband would hurt the other ISPs because the competition might force prices down and might force the big ISPs to improve their service. All this would mean lower profits which "hurts" those companies. Instead, we've got to let the big ISPs grow bigger and get fatter and fatter with profits.
Remember, all people are equal, but some people (corporations and the rich) are more equal than others (normal people).
The real joke* in this is that many of these municipalities aren't being served at all by the big monopolies. They asked for service repeatedly only to be denied. But if they start a municipal broadband effort, they are suddenly criticized for "squashing competition." In other words, the big ISPs won't serve them but they don't want anyone else to serve them either so they won't have competition just in case they decide to serve them in the future.
* Unfortunately, the joke is on the public who just wants Internet access and is being told it's illegal for them to get it unless the big ISP monopolies deign to grant them access.
He hasn't started killing anyone yet himself, but he did defend some people at one of his rallies who beat up a counter-protester by saying that the person deserved to be roughed up. Add in his inflammatory rhetoric that stops just shy of saying "hey everyone, go out and assault GROUP_THAT_IS_DIFFERENT_FROM_US" and he's heading into dangerous waters - especially for a presidential candidate.
Yes, but my analogy referred to users that tech support workers encountered. Tech support rarely seems to encounter "completely effective" users. Instead, they get a mix of people who don't know anything ("completely ineffective" - e.g, "What is a Start menu?") and who know just enough to be dangerous ("partially effective" - e.g. "I should be able to solve this by clicking here, right? No? What if I click there? What if I delete this? Why are you yelling at me to just stop and listen to you?")
But that's too HAAAARD! Why can't they just click a button and get instant access to anyone's computer? It's not like criminals would be able to get past the "For Law Enforcement Use Only" backdoor?
(Mandatory sarcasm warning to make sure people know I'm parodying law enforcement calls for less encryption and not actually advocating this myself.)
I'm beginning to think that governments are like users that tech support encounters.
The completely ineffective ones can do harm but usually wind up keeping themselves from doing too much harm.
The partly effective ones (the ones who think they know it all but don't) do a lot of damage as they overestimate their effectiveness and wind up trashing everything.
The completely effective ones don't do any harm but are also so rare as to be nonexistent.
Of course, the politics surrounding fear of extremists tends to blur the lines quite hard.
Exactly this. The Republicans will advocate for small government one second ("Get government out of our lives") and the next second call for a huge, over-reaching government to pry into all aspects of our lives in order to root out the terrorists that apparently hide behind every couch in America.
This isn't to say that the Democrats are any better, but at least they are honest about calling for big government.
Then a few of us will die, but the rest of us keep our freedom.
And just to quantify "few of us will die", how many people have been killed in terrorist attacks on American soil since 2001? Even including the 9-11 attacks, I'd wager less than 4,000. Let's say 5,000 to pad the numbers a bit. That's over 14 years so that's 360 people per year (again, rounding up). The population in the USA is 318.9 million so we're talking about 1.13 in every 1,000,000 Americans. Put another way, each American would have a 0.00013% chance of being the victim of a terror attack.
As a comparison, over 10,000 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2013 alone. That's almost 28 times the "terror fatality" rate. Yet you don't see politicians calling for all cars to automatically report back to the police when an impaired driver tries to start the car.
They wouldn't be able to get away with "You can't sue us for any reason", but demanding arbitration also means that they pick (and pay) the arbitrator. They select someone who is favorable to them and who will rule in their favor as often as possible. No, it doesn't make winning against them impossible, but if winning against them was impossible then forcing arbitration might be ruled illegal. So they take the occasional token loss and still wind up vastly ahead of where they'd be if actual lawsuits were allowed.
If I recall correctly, the signs of lead being dangerous were there, but like the cigarette industry decades later, the companies invested in leaded gasoline fought tooth and nail to keep everyone believing lead was harmless. They would actively try to discredit and defund anyone who said otherwise and put all their political weight towards squashing any legislation that might question their official platform.
Obviously, they weren't ultimately successful is keeping "lead is dangerous" suppressed forever, but they did delay any action to mitigate the effects (and profited off said delay).
I knew that there was at least one story about a generational ship being leapfrogged by FTL ships (and the generational ship's passengers needing to deal with their empty planet to colonize not being no empty anymore), but I didn't know of one dealing with an old weapon launched needing to be dealt with by the descendants of those who launched it. Of course, it doesn't surprise me that this would have been written by someone already.
A program is started to detect alien atmosphere composition via high yield nuclear weapons. Nukes are launched but it takes hundreds of years for them to reach their targets and the program is forgotten about. In the meantime, mankind develops FTL drives and colonizes the planets. The nukes arrive after the colonies have been established for awhile and mankind winds up nuking itself.
Not so long ago, the news was full of fear-based "reporting" on all the evils of the internet. "The predators are online and coming into your child's bedroom." Fear, fear, and more fear.
Nowadays, if you want to inject some instant hysteria into a discussion or a news report, the recipe has been tweaked since the internet has become just an ordinary part of daily life. Just add "with a drone." Instant crazy follows.
Or you can create crazy by insinuating that said action is being taken by terrorists.
Hu-hum statement: "People are operating store-bought drones equipped with cameras."
HOLY COW BAN THEM NOW statement: "Terrorists are operating store-bought drones equipped with cameras."
It's like adding "in bed" to fortune cookie statements only with less laughs and more easily-scared people calling for government-restrictions to be put in place to guard against imagined threats.
This is pretty much standard for any major project. You go over what you plan on doing and how it will impact the surrounding environment. For most projects, it would be easily accomplished and accepted. It's perhaps a bit of annoying bureaucracy, but it helps avoid the case where you use your land in a way that hurts the land other people own. e.g. If a river ran across your land and you decided to build a dam regardless of the fact that the river fed both the water supply to a town downstream and a protected wetlands area. This is the standard "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" case. Your right to use your property ends when said use negatively impacts others.
Bringing this back to the article's topic, though, the environmental impact study for setting up a bunch of solar cells would be simple and it would be easy to show that this would have no impact on surrounding lands. The "what if they cause cancer" or "they'll suck up all the surrounding sunlight" claims are easily dismissed and shouldn't be used as a reason why the solar plant couldn't be built.
And yet, what I do on my own land — build a solar plant or dig a lake or raise cows — should not be subject to other people's voting.
I would agree with you but would add "so long as your actions don't affect other people or their land." So if you wanted to dump toxic waste on your land, you shouldn't be allowed to because it will seep into the groundwater and pollute the water for the rest of the town. However, if you wanted to put solar panels on your land and you've completed a mandatory environmental impact study showing that it wouldn't hurt the environment in the process, then I see no reason to disallow it. Definitely not on the grounds of "it'd suck up all the sun" or "I think solar cells might cause cancer but have no proof showing this so until it's proved they don't we should ban them."
Yes, "enough shade and nothing will grow" is true, but unless they were going to build the solar panels above the town, I don't see the relevance. Solar panels don't vacuum up sunlight. They only process the sunlight that hits them. So unless you were planning on putting solar panels directly above your farmland, they wouldn't affect plants in any way.
Nuclear power is fission. Solar power is capturing the byproducts of a fusion reaction. You might be able to argue that it would be more efficient to run a fusion reaction to generate power, but we currently don't have the technology to do so. Besides, there's this huge fusion reaction (on a scale we could only dream of) going on relatively nearby whether we want it or not. Why not capture some of those byproducts and use them to generate power?
Not only the pay but the entire teaching system often seems designed to push good teachers out (drown them with meaningless bureaucracy and politician/corporation imposed "standards" to live up to) so that the only teachers left are the ones whose opinion of the classroom is not that it's a place to inspire and educate young minds, but that it's the place they need to endure every day so they can collect their paycheck.
Or vulnerabilities. If Gigster winds up paying their developers the least amount possible, how long until their developers realize they get paid the same whether or not they sanitize that user input. User submitted a name of "Robert'); Drop Table Students; --"? No problem. Just stick that in the query and run it.
I actually use Windows Live Writer. It's a nice interface to write in, attach photos to a blog post, set categories, and upload the whole thing while scheduling when it will go live. I began using it years ago when WordPress' built-in editor was horrible. WordPress has improved since then, but I still like WLW. Recently, I had begun to worry that WLW was going to be tossed aside and not developed anymore. Open sourcing it gives me hope that people can continue to improve the product and keep it as a viable, locally installed alternative editor to WordPress' built-in editor.
I've been trying to cultivate a love of programming in my kids. Turns out I'm making them into criminals. Guess I should turn myself in now before I do something else wrong like use a DSLR to take pictures of buildings.
So I looked over the list, replacing "your child" with myself, and:
Warning signs of cyber crime Are you spending all of their time online?
Pretty much. I make websites at work, go home, and freelance as a web developer at home.
Are you interested in coding? Do you have independent learning material on computing?
Given that I'm a web developer, I'm very interested in coding. I have independent learning material on computing and know sites where I can find more material.
Do you have irregular sleeping patterns?
Sometimes I go to sleep as late as 1am and then wake up at 6:30am to start my day again.
Do you get an income from their online activities, do you know why and how?
Given that I work as a web developer (both day job and freelance), I make pretty much all my income from online activities.
Are you resistant when asked what they do online?
Ok, I tend not to be resistant when asked what I do online. So this would be a no.
Do you use the full data allowance on the home broadband?
We don't have a data allowance on our home broadband. I do use most of our mobile account's data allowance, though. So maybe score this as half right.
Have you become more socially isolated?
I have no in-person friends that I see regularly. I just see my immediate family (kids and wife) and a few co-workers.
So I'd score about 5.5 out of 7 on their scale. It sounds like I'm well on my way towards becoming a cyber criminal!
Not every old, white, Christian male is a problem. However, there are many people who bemoan the good old days when minorities and women stayed in the background of society and Christianity ruled how the government acted. These "good old days" may never have actually happened as they remember it, but it doesn't matter because society is no longer behaving like they think it used to and they'll fight tooth and nail to revert it back. To them, any change is scary - especially if it means a more diverse group of people having power over how society operates.
The founders of the Constitution were very knowledgeable and wise. They definitely weren't perfect - nobody is - but they set up a system of government that protects people against those who would want to abuse government power. It's people like Trump and his supporters who claim everything from "We should track all Muslim Americans" to "We should force everyone to say Merry Christmas" who don't respect the Constitution.
Like any President, there were good things and bad things about Nixon. Nixon's big bad moments (e.g. Watergate) tend to overshadow the good that he did. In many respects, he earned his bad reputation, but it's important to remember that he wasn't an evil guy and actually did some good while in office.
I didn't say everyone who was old, white, Christian, and male were in the "OWCG" group. However, the people fawning over Trump (and other GOP hopefuls who spew hatred) tend to be older (not liking the change that the younger generation is embracing and wishing for things to return to the "good old days"), white (seeing minorities as a threat to their dominance in society), Christian (seeing other religions as a threat to Christianity running the government), and male (seeing women as needing to "stay in their place" as subservient to men).
As for myself, I'm middle-aged (though I feel old sometimes), white, Jewish and male. I'm open minded enough to recognize that a diverse society isn't a threat to me dominating society (not that I ever dominated society). I don't see upcoming groups as rivals to squash, but as equals to welcome to the table.
Slashdot Mirror
You added the smiley but this is exactly their reasoning. Municipal broadband would hurt the other ISPs because the competition might force prices down and might force the big ISPs to improve their service. All this would mean lower profits which "hurts" those companies. Instead, we've got to let the big ISPs grow bigger and get fatter and fatter with profits.
Remember, all people are equal, but some people (corporations and the rich) are more equal than others (normal people).
The real joke* in this is that many of these municipalities aren't being served at all by the big monopolies. They asked for service repeatedly only to be denied. But if they start a municipal broadband effort, they are suddenly criticized for "squashing competition." In other words, the big ISPs won't serve them but they don't want anyone else to serve them either so they won't have competition just in case they decide to serve them in the future.
* Unfortunately, the joke is on the public who just wants Internet access and is being told it's illegal for them to get it unless the big ISP monopolies deign to grant them access.
He hasn't started killing anyone yet himself, but he did defend some people at one of his rallies who beat up a counter-protester by saying that the person deserved to be roughed up. Add in his inflammatory rhetoric that stops just shy of saying "hey everyone, go out and assault GROUP_THAT_IS_DIFFERENT_FROM_US" and he's heading into dangerous waters - especially for a presidential candidate.
Yes, but my analogy referred to users that tech support workers encountered. Tech support rarely seems to encounter "completely effective" users. Instead, they get a mix of people who don't know anything ("completely ineffective" - e.g, "What is a Start menu?") and who know just enough to be dangerous ("partially effective" - e.g. "I should be able to solve this by clicking here, right? No? What if I click there? What if I delete this? Why are you yelling at me to just stop and listen to you?")
But that's too HAAAARD! Why can't they just click a button and get instant access to anyone's computer? It's not like criminals would be able to get past the "For Law Enforcement Use Only" backdoor?
(Mandatory sarcasm warning to make sure people know I'm parodying law enforcement calls for less encryption and not actually advocating this myself.)
I'm beginning to think that governments are like users that tech support encounters.
The completely ineffective ones can do harm but usually wind up keeping themselves from doing too much harm.
The partly effective ones (the ones who think they know it all but don't) do a lot of damage as they overestimate their effectiveness and wind up trashing everything.
The completely effective ones don't do any harm but are also so rare as to be nonexistent.
Exactly this. The Republicans will advocate for small government one second ("Get government out of our lives") and the next second call for a huge, over-reaching government to pry into all aspects of our lives in order to root out the terrorists that apparently hide behind every couch in America.
This isn't to say that the Democrats are any better, but at least they are honest about calling for big government.
And just to quantify "few of us will die", how many people have been killed in terrorist attacks on American soil since 2001? Even including the 9-11 attacks, I'd wager less than 4,000. Let's say 5,000 to pad the numbers a bit. That's over 14 years so that's 360 people per year (again, rounding up). The population in the USA is 318.9 million so we're talking about 1.13 in every 1,000,000 Americans. Put another way, each American would have a 0.00013% chance of being the victim of a terror attack.
As a comparison, over 10,000 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2013 alone. That's almost 28 times the "terror fatality" rate. Yet you don't see politicians calling for all cars to automatically report back to the police when an impaired driver tries to start the car.
They wouldn't be able to get away with "You can't sue us for any reason", but demanding arbitration also means that they pick (and pay) the arbitrator. They select someone who is favorable to them and who will rule in their favor as often as possible. No, it doesn't make winning against them impossible, but if winning against them was impossible then forcing arbitration might be ruled illegal. So they take the occasional token loss and still wind up vastly ahead of where they'd be if actual lawsuits were allowed.
If I recall correctly, the signs of lead being dangerous were there, but like the cigarette industry decades later, the companies invested in leaded gasoline fought tooth and nail to keep everyone believing lead was harmless. They would actively try to discredit and defund anyone who said otherwise and put all their political weight towards squashing any legislation that might question their official platform.
Obviously, they weren't ultimately successful is keeping "lead is dangerous" suppressed forever, but they did delay any action to mitigate the effects (and profited off said delay).
I knew that there was at least one story about a generational ship being leapfrogged by FTL ships (and the generational ship's passengers needing to deal with their empty planet to colonize not being no empty anymore), but I didn't know of one dealing with an old weapon launched needing to be dealt with by the descendants of those who launched it. Of course, it doesn't surprise me that this would have been written by someone already.
I feel like there's a sci-fi story there.
A program is started to detect alien atmosphere composition via high yield nuclear weapons. Nukes are launched but it takes hundreds of years for them to reach their targets and the program is forgotten about. In the meantime, mankind develops FTL drives and colonizes the planets. The nukes arrive after the colonies have been established for awhile and mankind winds up nuking itself.
Or you can create crazy by insinuating that said action is being taken by terrorists.
Hu-hum statement: "People are operating store-bought drones equipped with cameras."
HOLY COW BAN THEM NOW statement: "Terrorists are operating store-bought drones equipped with cameras."
It's like adding "in bed" to fortune cookie statements only with less laughs and more easily-scared people calling for government-restrictions to be put in place to guard against imagined threats.
This is pretty much standard for any major project. You go over what you plan on doing and how it will impact the surrounding environment. For most projects, it would be easily accomplished and accepted. It's perhaps a bit of annoying bureaucracy, but it helps avoid the case where you use your land in a way that hurts the land other people own. e.g. If a river ran across your land and you decided to build a dam regardless of the fact that the river fed both the water supply to a town downstream and a protected wetlands area. This is the standard "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" case. Your right to use your property ends when said use negatively impacts others.
Bringing this back to the article's topic, though, the environmental impact study for setting up a bunch of solar cells would be simple and it would be easy to show that this would have no impact on surrounding lands. The "what if they cause cancer" or "they'll suck up all the surrounding sunlight" claims are easily dismissed and shouldn't be used as a reason why the solar plant couldn't be built.
I would agree with you but would add "so long as your actions don't affect other people or their land." So if you wanted to dump toxic waste on your land, you shouldn't be allowed to because it will seep into the groundwater and pollute the water for the rest of the town. However, if you wanted to put solar panels on your land and you've completed a mandatory environmental impact study showing that it wouldn't hurt the environment in the process, then I see no reason to disallow it. Definitely not on the grounds of "it'd suck up all the sun" or "I think solar cells might cause cancer but have no proof showing this so until it's proved they don't we should ban them."
Yes, "enough shade and nothing will grow" is true, but unless they were going to build the solar panels above the town, I don't see the relevance. Solar panels don't vacuum up sunlight. They only process the sunlight that hits them. So unless you were planning on putting solar panels directly above your farmland, they wouldn't affect plants in any way.
Nuclear power is fission. Solar power is capturing the byproducts of a fusion reaction. You might be able to argue that it would be more efficient to run a fusion reaction to generate power, but we currently don't have the technology to do so. Besides, there's this huge fusion reaction (on a scale we could only dream of) going on relatively nearby whether we want it or not. Why not capture some of those byproducts and use them to generate power?
Not only the pay but the entire teaching system often seems designed to push good teachers out (drown them with meaningless bureaucracy and politician/corporation imposed "standards" to live up to) so that the only teachers left are the ones whose opinion of the classroom is not that it's a place to inspire and educate young minds, but that it's the place they need to endure every day so they can collect their paycheck.
Or vulnerabilities. If Gigster winds up paying their developers the least amount possible, how long until their developers realize they get paid the same whether or not they sanitize that user input. User submitted a name of "Robert'); Drop Table Students; --"? No problem. Just stick that in the query and run it.
I actually use Windows Live Writer. It's a nice interface to write in, attach photos to a blog post, set categories, and upload the whole thing while scheduling when it will go live. I began using it years ago when WordPress' built-in editor was horrible. WordPress has improved since then, but I still like WLW. Recently, I had begun to worry that WLW was going to be tossed aside and not developed anymore. Open sourcing it gives me hope that people can continue to improve the product and keep it as a viable, locally installed alternative editor to WordPress' built-in editor.
I've been trying to cultivate a love of programming in my kids. Turns out I'm making them into criminals. Guess I should turn myself in now before I do something else wrong like use a DSLR to take pictures of buildings.
So I looked over the list, replacing "your child" with myself, and:
Pretty much. I make websites at work, go home, and freelance as a web developer at home.
Given that I'm a web developer, I'm very interested in coding. I have independent learning material on computing and know sites where I can find more material.
Sometimes I go to sleep as late as 1am and then wake up at 6:30am to start my day again.
Given that I work as a web developer (both day job and freelance), I make pretty much all my income from online activities.
Ok, I tend not to be resistant when asked what I do online. So this would be a no.
We don't have a data allowance on our home broadband. I do use most of our mobile account's data allowance, though. So maybe score this as half right.
I have no in-person friends that I see regularly. I just see my immediate family (kids and wife) and a few co-workers.
So I'd score about 5.5 out of 7 on their scale. It sounds like I'm well on my way towards becoming a cyber criminal!
Not every old, white, Christian male is a problem. However, there are many people who bemoan the good old days when minorities and women stayed in the background of society and Christianity ruled how the government acted. These "good old days" may never have actually happened as they remember it, but it doesn't matter because society is no longer behaving like they think it used to and they'll fight tooth and nail to revert it back. To them, any change is scary - especially if it means a more diverse group of people having power over how society operates.
The founders of the Constitution were very knowledgeable and wise. They definitely weren't perfect - nobody is - but they set up a system of government that protects people against those who would want to abuse government power. It's people like Trump and his supporters who claim everything from "We should track all Muslim Americans" to "We should force everyone to say Merry Christmas" who don't respect the Constitution.
Like any President, there were good things and bad things about Nixon. Nixon's big bad moments (e.g. Watergate) tend to overshadow the good that he did. In many respects, he earned his bad reputation, but it's important to remember that he wasn't an evil guy and actually did some good while in office.
I didn't say everyone who was old, white, Christian, and male were in the "OWCG" group. However, the people fawning over Trump (and other GOP hopefuls who spew hatred) tend to be older (not liking the change that the younger generation is embracing and wishing for things to return to the "good old days"), white (seeing minorities as a threat to their dominance in society), Christian (seeing other religions as a threat to Christianity running the government), and male (seeing women as needing to "stay in their place" as subservient to men).
As for myself, I'm middle-aged (though I feel old sometimes), white, Jewish and male. I'm open minded enough to recognize that a diverse society isn't a threat to me dominating society (not that I ever dominated society). I don't see upcoming groups as rivals to squash, but as equals to welcome to the table.