There's a ton of things they could spend $400M on rather than a give-away to already-highly-profitable telecoms when 4G already is more than fast enough, at least when you can get it and you haven't hit a data cap:
Space exploration, disease research, Medicaid funding, SkyTran R&D, taking care of homeless/PTSD vets, just to name a few.
Really, how is she actually a presidential candidate?
Because the DNC are a corrupt cabal who have selected her as their next President, and a majority of the Democratic voters (especially ones in the South) are stupid enough to buy her bullshit. Many of them even actually believe that it's a good idea to elect someone who's visibly corrupt because they think this will translate into "getting things done" in Washington for them somehow, or that this is necessary for that candidate to win (even though Bernie managed to do quite well without any Wall Street money at all). Honestly, there's no end to the rationalizations Democratic voters will come up with to defend their choice to vote for the candidate who they were told to vote for.
Mine's exactly the same. I don't live in a city (more of a small town really), and data service here sucks, and voice isn't that great either. But I have cable internet service through Metrocast and it works great. It's not expensive (compared to similar service in this country at least), it's reliable, and there's no caps or usage rates.
If your home internet service is slow or has caps, there's something seriously, seriously wrong.
I don't have any cellular data caps BTW, the service just sucks because the reception isn't that great. Ting's service plan and rates are excellent, but they have no control over Sprint's lack of towers, and that's kinda what I get for living out here. But for the price ($20/month) it's an acceptable trade-off.
Automated space probes are certainly the best choice for doing early science reconnaissance for outer planets and really just about anything: Pluto, Jupiter, etc. Sending people to Pluto to take photos and collect some data would be silly when we can send a probe to do it, especially considering how long it takes to get there with current technology (New Horizons took 10 years to get there).
Manned exploration is for close-up stuff where 1) you've already done robotic exploration so you have a good idea what the humans will encounter there (radiation, etc.), and 2) you're ready to do stuff that robots just aren't that good at. A team of geologists can do a lot more geological work on-site, and far faster, than waiting for communications with a probe that has limited abilities. And if you want to do stuff like try out growing things in Martian soil and setting up artificial habitats, you really need humans on-site to do that stuff.
Even when we sent humans to the Moon, we followed this pattern: our first landings on the Moon weren't human, but were (very primitive) remote-control probes. Here's a list of them. NASA sent a bunch of Ranger and Surveyor probes before attempting a manned landing. The Surveyor missions in particular were in support of the upcoming manned missions.
Well again, the Republicans didn't choose Trump, the voters did, despite what the GOP really wanted (which was Bush or Rubio). So the DNC got lucky really, since they were bound and determined to make Hillary their candidate no matter what. But for the Dem debates, I'm not seeing what you're seeing: the other candidates are actually rather lousy. Webb just seemed like a Republican actually, basically a Republican who decided the GOP was too full of crazies for him. O'Malley seemed to be nothing more than a cheerleader for Hillary, and Chafee didn't have anything memorable to say.
Yeah, and how many of your classmates in school as a teenager also had a TRS-80, or any home computer at all?
I was exactly like you back then (though I had something other than a TRS-80). I was absolutely not a normal teenager. My little nerd clique was not normal at the time; we were seen as weirdos because we liked computers.
Every teenager these days has a smartphone and uses computers. There's plenty of people my age who don't. There's lots more in the Boomer generation (I'm an Xer; Boomers are too old to have had personal computers as teenagers).
You're making the classic logical fallacy of assuming that everyone in your group (in this case, people your age) is exactly like you. They're not.
The older people who developed the internet are not representative of the older population in general. They're exceptions. A huge number of people who are the age of Tim Berners-Lee don't even use computers or smartphones; the same cannot be said of teenagers and Millenials.
Are you another moron who thinks elderly people are just as likely to be competent with modern technology as young people? Holy shit, this site is full of retards.
How on earth is Europe "a mess", aside from the current refugee crisis?
They have universal healthcare in many countries (and an excellent public/private system in others like Germany), they have strong consumer protection laws (2-year warranties standard), free college tuition in some nations (Germany, Finland I think), excellent food, much better public health than we have (they don't have over 50% of the population obese like we do), their governments aren't nearly as corporate-controlled as ours is, they don't have problems with police brutality, and they have the highest standards of living in the world (esp. Switzerland and Sweden). They even have far better banking than we do (chip&pin cards for ages, easy and free bank transfers).
Even the Eastern European nations are advancing at a very fast rate, considering they were behind the Iron Curtain just 25 years ago.
Where did you get the utterly insane idea that "Europe is a mess"? Some right-wing propaganda site?
I can already tell you that it's going to be really bad. Really, really bad. There's only two candidates highly likely to win, and they're both absolutely horrible, so there's almost no way for it to *not* turn out really, really bad.
I am skeptical of your claim about the highest turnout in history, however. I guess we'll see. We haven't had candidates this horrible in a long time (probably since 1968, which is before I was alive), and we didn't have the internet back then with all the polarization and extremism that's created, so I'm not so sure you can look for historical parallels like that. I am hoping, however, that other parties will get a much higher portion of the vote than they did in the past.
Your comment is stupid. The simple fact is that Boomers did not grow up with digital technology, so of course they're less likely to think about things like backups: they never had to do backups when they were in their 20s because they didn't have personal computers back then. It's only the Millenials that grew up with this stuff, so if any generation is more likely to be computer-savvy, it's them.
Honestly, you think it's ageist to say that older people are less likely to be computer-savvy? You're a fucking idiot if you think people of all generations are equally likely to be.
The comment quality of this site gets worse every single day. I guess all the smart people really have left for greener pastures, leaving idiots like you behind, trying to claim that Grandma is just as statistically likely to be talented programmer as a 25-year-old.
To complete your analogy, it's like lighting your house on fire because the living room furniture is already on fire and emitting toxic fumes.
The problem here is that our alternative is Hillary, who is 99% certain to start another land war in the middle east, just like Bush did in Iraq. She pushed for an invasion of Syria which Obama luckily didn't listen to; with Obama out of the way we'll certainly being doing in Syria exactly what Bush did in Iraq.
No, you need to show this to the kids and encourage them to play it so they'll appreciate some of the best video games ever made, since all the modern ones suck.
Trump wasn't elected by "fascists", for the most part. He was elected by white, working class people who finally woke up and realized that the mainstream Republican policies weren't working for them, and the mainstream GOP politicians were just lying to them and pandering to them.
Unfortunately, instead of just abandoning the GOP altogether, they picked the one guy in the GOP (who conveniently joined the GOP just before the election cycle) who told them what they wanted to hear, and really isn't a very good candidate.
But they were right to be angry at the mainstream GOP.
Unfortunately, despite all the (rightful) populist anger, we're going to wind up with two absolutely terrible candidates running in November, one who's part of the party that always pushes Big Business but voices support for populist policies (that probably won't help, like building a wall), and another who's part of the party that claims to be for the common main but is clearly sold out to Wall Street and private prisons.
I'd rather let the country burn. We're never going to get a better voting system if we keep playing along like this. Maybe if we elect Trump things will get so bad they'll finally have a constitutional convention and write a big amendment which fixes this stuff.
Well it sure seems to be working better for them. And over there, they have a bunch of different political parties, not just two, so it's more feasible for that system to work.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a ton of things they could spend $400M on rather than a give-away to already-highly-profitable telecoms when 4G already is more than fast enough, at least when you can get it and you haven't hit a data cap:
Space exploration, disease research, Medicaid funding, SkyTran R&D, taking care of homeless/PTSD vets, just to name a few.
Really, how is she actually a presidential candidate?
Because the DNC are a corrupt cabal who have selected her as their next President, and a majority of the Democratic voters (especially ones in the South) are stupid enough to buy her bullshit. Many of them even actually believe that it's a good idea to elect someone who's visibly corrupt because they think this will translate into "getting things done" in Washington for them somehow, or that this is necessary for that candidate to win (even though Bernie managed to do quite well without any Wall Street money at all). Honestly, there's no end to the rationalizations Democratic voters will come up with to defend their choice to vote for the candidate who they were told to vote for.
Mine's exactly the same. I don't live in a city (more of a small town really), and data service here sucks, and voice isn't that great either. But I have cable internet service through Metrocast and it works great. It's not expensive (compared to similar service in this country at least), it's reliable, and there's no caps or usage rates.
If your home internet service is slow or has caps, there's something seriously, seriously wrong.
I don't have any cellular data caps BTW, the service just sucks because the reception isn't that great. Ting's service plan and rates are excellent, but they have no control over Sprint's lack of towers, and that's kinda what I get for living out here. But for the price ($20/month) it's an acceptable trade-off.
What exactly do they think an ISP is going to be able to do if the data is already encrypted when it hits their network?
Simple: they legislate that the ISP has to decrypt it.
It's not much different than the US state government which legislated the Pi equals 3.
No, the answer is that we should be doing both.
Automated space probes are certainly the best choice for doing early science reconnaissance for outer planets and really just about anything: Pluto, Jupiter, etc. Sending people to Pluto to take photos and collect some data would be silly when we can send a probe to do it, especially considering how long it takes to get there with current technology (New Horizons took 10 years to get there).
Manned exploration is for close-up stuff where 1) you've already done robotic exploration so you have a good idea what the humans will encounter there (radiation, etc.), and 2) you're ready to do stuff that robots just aren't that good at. A team of geologists can do a lot more geological work on-site, and far faster, than waiting for communications with a probe that has limited abilities. And if you want to do stuff like try out growing things in Martian soil and setting up artificial habitats, you really need humans on-site to do that stuff.
Even when we sent humans to the Moon, we followed this pattern: our first landings on the Moon weren't human, but were (very primitive) remote-control probes. Here's a list of them. NASA sent a bunch of Ranger and Surveyor probes before attempting a manned landing. The Surveyor missions in particular were in support of the upcoming manned missions.
Well again, the Republicans didn't choose Trump, the voters did, despite what the GOP really wanted (which was Bush or Rubio). So the DNC got lucky really, since they were bound and determined to make Hillary their candidate no matter what. But for the Dem debates, I'm not seeing what you're seeing: the other candidates are actually rather lousy. Webb just seemed like a Republican actually, basically a Republican who decided the GOP was too full of crazies for him. O'Malley seemed to be nothing more than a cheerleader for Hillary, and Chafee didn't have anything memorable to say.
Yeah, and how many of your classmates in school as a teenager also had a TRS-80, or any home computer at all?
I was exactly like you back then (though I had something other than a TRS-80). I was absolutely not a normal teenager. My little nerd clique was not normal at the time; we were seen as weirdos because we liked computers.
Every teenager these days has a smartphone and uses computers. There's plenty of people my age who don't. There's lots more in the Boomer generation (I'm an Xer; Boomers are too old to have had personal computers as teenagers).
You're making the classic logical fallacy of assuming that everyone in your group (in this case, people your age) is exactly like you. They're not.
The older people who developed the internet are not representative of the older population in general. They're exceptions. A huge number of people who are the age of Tim Berners-Lee don't even use computers or smartphones; the same cannot be said of teenagers and Millenials.
Are you another moron who thinks elderly people are just as likely to be competent with modern technology as young people? Holy shit, this site is full of retards.
How on earth is Europe "a mess", aside from the current refugee crisis?
They have universal healthcare in many countries (and an excellent public/private system in others like Germany), they have strong consumer protection laws (2-year warranties standard), free college tuition in some nations (Germany, Finland I think), excellent food, much better public health than we have (they don't have over 50% of the population obese like we do), their governments aren't nearly as corporate-controlled as ours is, they don't have problems with police brutality, and they have the highest standards of living in the world (esp. Switzerland and Sweden). They even have far better banking than we do (chip&pin cards for ages, easy and free bank transfers).
Even the Eastern European nations are advancing at a very fast rate, considering they were behind the Iron Curtain just 25 years ago.
Where did you get the utterly insane idea that "Europe is a mess"? Some right-wing propaganda site?
I don't think it's safe to assume that Slashdot posters represent the general population, so I think that 98.3% figure is highly flawed.
Of course, it does seem like the posting quality on this site has fallen to new depths, so maybe that figure isn't so far off after all.
I can already tell you that it's going to be really bad. Really, really bad. There's only two candidates highly likely to win, and they're both absolutely horrible, so there's almost no way for it to *not* turn out really, really bad.
I am skeptical of your claim about the highest turnout in history, however. I guess we'll see. We haven't had candidates this horrible in a long time (probably since 1968, which is before I was alive), and we didn't have the internet back then with all the polarization and extremism that's created, so I'm not so sure you can look for historical parallels like that. I am hoping, however, that other parties will get a much higher portion of the vote than they did in the past.
Your comment is stupid. The simple fact is that Boomers did not grow up with digital technology, so of course they're less likely to think about things like backups: they never had to do backups when they were in their 20s because they didn't have personal computers back then. It's only the Millenials that grew up with this stuff, so if any generation is more likely to be computer-savvy, it's them.
Honestly, you think it's ageist to say that older people are less likely to be computer-savvy? You're a fucking idiot if you think people of all generations are equally likely to be.
The comment quality of this site gets worse every single day. I guess all the smart people really have left for greener pastures, leaving idiots like you behind, trying to claim that Grandma is just as statistically likely to be talented programmer as a 25-year-old.
When the alternative is pouring sludge into the gas tank, I fail to see how pouring beer in there isn't a better idea.
Yep, just as I suspected: he's an older Gen-Xer or even a young Boomer: too technically clueless to keep backups.
Say what you want about the work ethic of Millennials, but at least they're more likely to be technologically clueful enough to keep backups.
Last I heard, Sanders' net worth was roughly a half-million. Basically, he's just been collecting his paychecks as a congressman.
To complete your analogy, it's like lighting your house on fire because the living room furniture is already on fire and emitting toxic fumes.
The problem here is that our alternative is Hillary, who is 99% certain to start another land war in the middle east, just like Bush did in Iraq. She pushed for an invasion of Syria which Obama luckily didn't listen to; with Obama out of the way we'll certainly being doing in Syria exactly what Bush did in Iraq.
Bernie is out, and Ron Paul is disliked for a tiny portion of his opinions.
Ron Paul wasn't running in this election. He's retired.
He never said he was voting for Hillary. There are more than two choices, in case you didn't understand that.
Yep, it's little wonder more and more people aren't bothering with it.
No, you need to show this to the kids and encourage them to play it so they'll appreciate some of the best video games ever made, since all the modern ones suck.
Trump wasn't elected by "fascists", for the most part. He was elected by white, working class people who finally woke up and realized that the mainstream Republican policies weren't working for them, and the mainstream GOP politicians were just lying to them and pandering to them.
Unfortunately, instead of just abandoning the GOP altogether, they picked the one guy in the GOP (who conveniently joined the GOP just before the election cycle) who told them what they wanted to hear, and really isn't a very good candidate.
But they were right to be angry at the mainstream GOP.
Unfortunately, despite all the (rightful) populist anger, we're going to wind up with two absolutely terrible candidates running in November, one who's part of the party that always pushes Big Business but voices support for populist policies (that probably won't help, like building a wall), and another who's part of the party that claims to be for the common main but is clearly sold out to Wall Street and private prisons.
I'd rather let the country burn. We're never going to get a better voting system if we keep playing along like this. Maybe if we elect Trump things will get so bad they'll finally have a constitutional convention and write a big amendment which fixes this stuff.
Well it sure seems to be working better for them. And over there, they have a bunch of different political parties, not just two, so it's more feasible for that system to work.
What are those FB friends saying now? Not what you think they'll do, what are they saying now that your prophecy came true?