What what? Woah. Like paying with counterfeit money? Not really.
"PAY X AMOUNT TO THE ORDER OF X PERSON."
That sounds like an order to someone, not a promise. IE, it doesnt say "I have sufficient funds in this negotiable draft account to pay this person X amount, and X person should be allowed to withdraw this amount on demand." If that's what they want me to agree to, then my check should have to say that. It says it for credit cards...
Yeah, they came up with the steam engine. Then everyone copied it.
Of course, they bet the farm on their steam engine selling. If it didn't, they'd be fucked. Of course, it was a revolutionary invention, and it did. Everyone had a need for it in some way or another. Not every invention is like that. If I come up with a better high pressure car wash nozzle, big whoop. The only way I'll make any money is if for a while, since I came up with the idea, I get to keep that idea.
By no way do I mean the patent laws are fair. They're lightyears away from perfect. But your argument of "someone else woulda thought it up, so it's not fair to have a monopoly" doesn't work. You cannot prove someone else would have invented anything. Shit, I'd see the fact that I can rip everyone off for 20 years on my invention as incentive!
No, not one single researcher. An entire company full of researchers. That company has to pay them (and pay them well! They're fucking scientists, they deserve it for the most part!). Even when they fuck up 40 times before finding something that works. Sure, maybe someone else could have thought it up too. Prove it!
All of IT: It's common sense. As you mow the lawn with your 35HP, zero-turn-radius tractor that you spent $5000 on and have to sharpen the blades every month or two, the old man next door gets out his push-mower, oils up the gears a bit, and does just as good a job as you. Fix if if it's broke, dont replace it, and dont fix what aint broken.
But why would our logic not fail when something comes up like this. It seems to me that one rule we've started to lay down is that time is the one thing that will always be trucking forward. We can slow it down but not stop it - hence why flying a clock in a fast-ass plane is slightly slower than one that's stationary - but we can't reverse it. Of course we hit a dead-end synaptic wall when we think like that.
I'll admit, we have our problems, but please don't even TRY to say "ours is so much better!" without completely putting things into perspective.
England: 94,525 sq mi. pop 60,441,457 Germany: 137,846 sq mi. pop 82,431,390
etc, etc.
Hell, BOTH of those COUNTRIES would fit into the land area of TEXAS. Of COURSE there's shoddy wiring, etc, here. And I wasn't talking about internal household wiring, just the grid. I'll also remind you of a time less than a century ago where twice within a score of eachother Europe was pretty much levelled. Of COURSE your infrastructure is more sound than ours when it comes to modernization. In any area where the lines have been updated here (and I'll admit, they're not, unless there's a good reason), they're just as well documented and marked as anything.
We still managed to wire up nearly 6 million square miles. The closest other country that tried (not including Canada, I count them with us) ended up irradiating quite a bit of itself. And of course your phone doesn't work worth a shit in Silicon Valley. Guess what? There's a limited number of call channels. There's got to be a limit at some point. I'd never bet the farm on cell companies - they're certainly not regulated as tightly as the wired ones are.
Also, in regards to the brownouts, I wasn't effected. If we use rough figures (pop of NY vs pop of US), only 6.67% of the country was effected, or Actually, the federal regulatory body (the DoE? I'm not sure) launched an investigation, and it basically came down to software error. I was not effected - PP&L has had their shit straight for years. As I said earlier, I'm rural as fuck, but when my power goes out, I can dial a 1-800 number, press a couple keys, and know that some Union fuck is going to be our there in the snow ensuring that my power is back on within 8 hours or so.
As for the telephone system and its costs, once again, I was talking about the network itself. Honestly now, when is the last time you picked up a phone, dialled, and got "all circuits are busy"? The last time you had no dialtone, and it wasn't because of a tree on the line? The last time you dialled a number, and had the system completely bomb out on you?
The point of my post was that it all WORKS. Somehow, in this godawful huge, backstabbingly capitalistic, pork-barrel government country, we managed to wire ourselves up for power, telephone, and internet, and it works. It may have its small problems, but they're all stateside. In an earlier post, someone compared this to us splitting off of Britian. Not so. The colonists had very good reasons to split off from Britain. However, the EU doesn't seem to even have one good concrete reason for it. It seems right now, that they want to break something for the sake of politics. Leave well enough alone, I say.
OK, ok. If you look at my posting history, I'm a little proud of my country. Maybe not it's government, but my country itself.
I might not be an expert, but it seems to me, that if we can do one thing damn well, it's build a network.
The interstate system. Your country may have the same, but your country probably doesn't have 6 million square miles to access. Maybe not every area is the BEST road in the world, but even without a map, if you can find a US Interstate, you can go anywhere. The numbering system makes sense (with few exceptions, I-99 where I live, for example), and there are many other US Highways and state roads that blanket the land. Even before this, we had the railroad system, which was just as complex and thorough in its coverage.
Rural electrification. If you haven't noticed, the US is fucking HUGE. My state itself is pretty rural. The electrical grid covers every last inch of PA as far as I've seen.
Cable television. My borough of 300 is served. Not just by some rural provider, but by a company that provides 75 analog channels, cable modems (5MBit/128kbit last I checked), digital cable, digital DVR/on-demand service, and cable telephony.
THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. Ma Bell wired this goddamn country so tight that Joe Redneck can call his neighbor 20 miles as the crow flies away, or his uncle/father 1,100 miles away in the middle of BFE. Hell, he could even video conference with him - the CO that serves my borough of 300 is DSL Live, I just happen to live 7 miles from it. Ever heard of the Telephone Pioneers of America? They truly were the pioneers of the 20th century. Take a drive through the woods in the US, and I guarantee you'll see phone poles and do-not-dig markers dotting the forest. They literally explored areas where nobody but deer had seen for years to bring telephone service to everyone. Not only that, but the engineers of Ma Bell and now Lucent, AT&T (SBC) and others built a network where every single one of us can pick up a telephone, and KNOW that there will be a dialtone. The system was built for 5 nines uptime. Even cell phones here are a feat - We may not have the coverage that some countries do, but look how big we are! We're lucky we get service anywhere but big cities at all!
These same people have taken the Department of Defense's original network and expanded it to the commercial entity we know today.
But there is one thing that I didn't mention: Federal oversight. The Federal government designed this road system. The Public Utilities comission was in charge of rural electrification. To this day, they continue to regulate the natural monopolies these companies have. They built the original Internet. And you know what? Pork barrel projects or not, they DID A GOOD JOB. A DAMN good job at that.
So maybe, EU, you should sit down, and think about history here. We're doing the best at what we DO best - Connecting ourselves. We're going to keep it running the way its run since the beginning because it makes us money - that is, private businesses. Thats why these networks exist, and why the federal government takes such care to make sure they are good. We're not going to cut you off jsut because we don't like you, or we'd have already done it. And chances are, you probably won't do as good a job as us at running your own sector of it. Don't fix something that ain't broke.
- The broadcast flag, if present, would keep you from using the digital out on your set, or recording it. They're trying to make it law that TV makers and VCR/DVR producers MUST acknowledge the flag.
- Riders are usually thrown on in comittee, iirc. But remember the Sattelite Home Viewer Act? You know, about SATELLITE TV?! The law was passed through congress to make it legal for satellite TV companies to broadcast local terrestial channels. BUT, a proofreader decided that RIAA paid better than the federal government, and stuck a clause in it that made music "works for hire" and ineligible for copyright by artists if they were under contract with the recording industry. The music industry will stick that rider wherever they can.
DOes the US regulate Internet commerce? No, they do not. They have not since THEY created the network.
Would the UN be interested in doing it? Who knows?
This is not to say that the US may someday want to regulate Internet commerce, and it IS their constitutional right - at least when it comes to the US side of it. But if the rest of the world would like to bitch and moan about it, they are more than welcome to create their own, and get the fuck off of ours. Good luck getting it working as well as we did.
Well, now let's turn the tables. I'll give you an example of the tides turning -
Last year, on my 18th birthday, I partied a little bit too hard. After hours of drinking, we went for a drive (YES, we DID have a sober driver.). Unfortunately, we ended up in a situation that the cops were called, and my 4 buddies and I had to spend the rest of my 18th birthday shackled to the walls in a PA State Police barracks. Now, at this point, I was too drunk to write, so they just made me sit there and did their rounds. After a few hours I see one... two... and then three... go up for their mugshot and then leavc... and then they finally let me go.
So, I go outside to meet my friends and try to find them a way home, and I promptly get punched square in the face. "What the FUCK was that for?", I thought. Well, it turns out the state police, despite my inability to drive, write, or even talk without sounding like a raging alcoholic, had told my friends I had written a confession that said A - we had broken the windows (what got us there in the first place) and that B - everyone had been drinking. It would be in <i>their</i> best interest to do the same. So they did.
I could go into another example of the same thing happening to someone else, but I'm sure everyone's heard enough of them.
When my long-forgotten ancestors accepted this nation's founders' idea for government, they placed their trust in it for not only themselves, but everyone down the line, too. I've even heard cops say that "pig" stands for "Pride, Integrity, Guts". What's that middle word there?
If you would like your citizens to behave and be honest people of high moral standards, then you MUST do the same. With deceit comes dissention, and with dissention, revolution is born. Those that lead must do so by example, and soon enough, those that should be removed from society will become very evident.
To put it short, How can you trust a liar? You can't, no matter how truthful they are.
So what's worse? the Ma Bell behemoth that pretty much invented half of last century and wired the whole damn nation, or millions of little guys, getting into arguments about who can talk to who on the world's largest public-but-not-really network?
Ah, grasshopper. You better watch out or that RIAA gestapo truck might arrest you for unclean thinking next! The police, as corrupt and useless as they can be, were given that power by the people. RIAA WAS NOT GIVEN AND NEVER SHOULD GET SUCH POWER. Distributing a copyrighted good is perfectly legal if you're distributing it to someone who has a license to have it... such as the RIAA.
Selling crack is illegal ALWAYS. So yeah, selling it to a cop would be bad. Selling a copy of a CD to a cop would be bad, too, unless you told him "You must be buying this for backup purposes"
Illogical argument. This is INTELLECTUAL property, not REAL property. If I went to the store and bought a VCR your company made, and I put it into a xerox machine and made copies of it for the world, and you took one for a backup, I DID NOTHING WRONG. That is, you're already allowed to have a copy, and since you can't prove I gave any copied VCR to anyone who DIDN'T have a VCR license, you can't prove I did anything wrong.
One word: Drag. There's a lot more friction to a 3800lb car that must overcome not only mechanical friction in its engine and transmission, but from its tires and the air itself, also. In space, one push lasts years longer than the same push would here where we're bound by more rules of physics.
They do here - Shell and others sell the ethanol. Unfortunately, you're quite right. The US is bigger, it hasn't reached even most of us yet. Would be nice, we sure have enough corn.
Ever seen the Ford Tauri and Rangers with the leaf on the front fender? They're Flex Fuel vehicles. They can run on E85, 85% Ethanol and 15% gasoline, and anything in between. In fact, according to the manual at least, they run BETTER on E85. I'm a Ford freak, but I'm sure GM and others are putting out the same. Most of the busses in my home town dump out nothing but warm H2O.
The problem, however, is finding an E85 station. If I could find them locally, I'd have my car converted over in a second.
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What what? Woah. Like paying with counterfeit money? Not really.
"PAY X AMOUNT TO THE ORDER OF X PERSON."
That sounds like an order to someone, not a promise. IE, it doesnt say "I have sufficient funds in this negotiable draft account to pay this person X amount, and X person should be allowed to withdraw this amount on demand." If that's what they want me to agree to, then my check should have to say that. It says it for credit cards...
Yeah, they came up with the steam engine. Then everyone copied it.
Of course, they bet the farm on their steam engine selling. If it didn't, they'd be fucked. Of course, it was a revolutionary invention, and it did. Everyone had a need for it in some way or another. Not every invention is like that. If I come up with a better high pressure car wash nozzle, big whoop. The only way I'll make any money is if for a while, since I came up with the idea, I get to keep that idea.
By no way do I mean the patent laws are fair. They're lightyears away from perfect. But your argument of "someone else woulda thought it up, so it's not fair to have a monopoly" doesn't work. You cannot prove someone else would have invented anything. Shit, I'd see the fact that I can rip everyone off for 20 years on my invention as incentive!
No, not one single researcher. An entire company full of researchers. That company has to pay them (and pay them well! They're fucking scientists, they deserve it for the most part!). Even when they fuck up 40 times before finding something that works. Sure, maybe someone else could have thought it up too. Prove it!
Well, that scientist that came up with the formula to cure avian flu has got to make money to pay his family somehow...
Economics has nothing to do with society's ability to do something. It has to do with society's ability to trade such somethings.
For a month last summer, I made cash by printing ", INC." at the end of my name on my checks and writing them out in large amounts to myself.
My bank never noticed until I told them and turned myself in.
YES! Thank you.
All of IT: It's common sense. As you mow the lawn with your 35HP, zero-turn-radius tractor that you spent $5000 on and have to sharpen the blades every month or two, the old man next door gets out his push-mower, oils up the gears a bit, and does just as good a job as you. Fix if if it's broke, dont replace it, and dont fix what aint broken.
Don't try it, your fingers might have a mistrial.
But why would our logic not fail when something comes up like this. It seems to me that one rule we've started to lay down is that time is the one thing that will always be trucking forward. We can slow it down but not stop it - hence why flying a clock in a fast-ass plane is slightly slower than one that's stationary - but we can't reverse it. Of course we hit a dead-end synaptic wall when we think like that.
12.5 ppm underneath the taste threshold? My pool is at 3 ppm, and it has one hell of a taste.
Is that 2005-10-14... or 10-14-2005? or 14-10-2005? or 14OCT2005?
I'll admit, we have our problems, but please don't even TRY to say "ours is so much better!" without completely putting things into perspective.
England: 94,525 sq mi. pop 60,441,457
Germany: 137,846 sq mi. pop 82,431,390
etc, etc.
Hell, BOTH of those COUNTRIES would fit into the land area of TEXAS. Of COURSE there's shoddy wiring, etc, here. And I wasn't talking about internal household wiring, just the grid. I'll also remind you of a time less than a century ago where twice within a score of eachother Europe was pretty much levelled. Of COURSE your infrastructure is more sound than ours when it comes to modernization. In any area where the lines have been updated here (and I'll admit, they're not, unless there's a good reason), they're just as well documented and marked as anything.
We still managed to wire up nearly 6 million square miles. The closest other country that tried (not including Canada, I count them with us) ended up irradiating quite a bit of itself. And of course your phone doesn't work worth a shit in Silicon Valley. Guess what? There's a limited number of call channels. There's got to be a limit at some point. I'd never bet the farm on cell companies - they're certainly not regulated as tightly as the wired ones are.
Also, in regards to the brownouts, I wasn't effected. If we use rough figures (pop of NY vs pop of US), only 6.67% of the country was effected, or Actually, the federal regulatory body (the DoE? I'm not sure) launched an investigation, and it basically came down to software error. I was not effected - PP&L has had their shit straight for years. As I said earlier, I'm rural as fuck, but when my power goes out, I can dial a 1-800 number, press a couple keys, and know that some Union fuck is going to be our there in the snow ensuring that my power is back on within 8 hours or so.
As for the telephone system and its costs, once again, I was talking about the network itself. Honestly now, when is the last time you picked up a phone, dialled, and got "all circuits are busy"? The last time you had no dialtone, and it wasn't because of a tree on the line? The last time you dialled a number, and had the system completely bomb out on you?
The point of my post was that it all WORKS. Somehow, in this godawful huge, backstabbingly capitalistic, pork-barrel government country, we managed to wire ourselves up for power, telephone, and internet, and it works. It may have its small problems, but they're all stateside. In an earlier post, someone compared this to us splitting off of Britian. Not so. The colonists had very good reasons to split off from Britain. However, the EU doesn't seem to even have one good concrete reason for it. It seems right now, that they want to break something for the sake of politics. Leave well enough alone, I say.
OK, ok. If you look at my posting history, I'm a little proud of my country. Maybe not it's government, but my country itself.
I might not be an expert, but it seems to me, that if we can do one thing damn well, it's build a network.
The interstate system. Your country may have the same, but your country probably doesn't have 6 million square miles to access. Maybe not every area is the BEST road in the world, but even without a map, if you can find a US Interstate, you can go anywhere. The numbering system makes sense (with few exceptions, I-99 where I live, for example), and there are many other US Highways and state roads that blanket the land. Even before this, we had the railroad system, which was just as complex and thorough in its coverage.
Rural electrification. If you haven't noticed, the US is fucking HUGE. My state itself is pretty rural. The electrical grid covers every last inch of PA as far as I've seen.
Cable television. My borough of 300 is served. Not just by some rural provider, but by a company that provides 75 analog channels, cable modems (5MBit/128kbit last I checked), digital cable, digital DVR/on-demand service, and cable telephony.
THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. Ma Bell wired this goddamn country so tight that Joe Redneck can call his neighbor 20 miles as the crow flies away, or his uncle/father 1,100 miles away in the middle of BFE. Hell, he could even video conference with him - the CO that serves my borough of 300 is DSL Live, I just happen to live 7 miles from it. Ever heard of the Telephone Pioneers of America? They truly were the pioneers of the 20th century. Take a drive through the woods in the US, and I guarantee you'll see phone poles and do-not-dig markers dotting the forest. They literally explored areas where nobody but deer had seen for years to bring telephone service to everyone. Not only that, but the engineers of Ma Bell and now Lucent, AT&T (SBC) and others built a network where every single one of us can pick up a telephone, and KNOW that there will be a dialtone. The system was built for 5 nines uptime. Even cell phones here are a feat - We may not have the coverage that some countries do, but look how big we are! We're lucky we get service anywhere but big cities at all!
These same people have taken the Department of Defense's original network and expanded it to the commercial entity we know today.
But there is one thing that I didn't mention: Federal oversight. The Federal government designed this road system. The Public Utilities comission was in charge of rural electrification. To this day, they continue to regulate the natural monopolies these companies have. They built the original Internet. And you know what? Pork barrel projects or not, they DID A GOOD JOB. A DAMN good job at that.
So maybe, EU, you should sit down, and think about history here. We're doing the best at what we DO best - Connecting ourselves. We're going to keep it running the way its run since the beginning because it makes us money - that is, private businesses. Thats why these networks exist, and why the federal government takes such care to make sure they are good. We're not going to cut you off jsut because we don't like you, or we'd have already done it. And chances are, you probably won't do as good a job as us at running your own sector of it. Don't fix something that ain't broke.
because the Brits didn't. The colonists did, and the Brits just decided they wanted to be in charge.
- The broadcast flag, if present, would keep you from using the digital out on your set, or recording it. They're trying to make it law that TV makers and VCR/DVR producers MUST acknowledge the flag.
- Riders are usually thrown on in comittee, iirc. But remember the Sattelite Home Viewer Act? You know, about SATELLITE TV?! The law was passed through congress to make it legal for satellite TV companies to broadcast local terrestial channels. BUT, a proofreader decided that RIAA paid better than the federal government, and stuck a clause in it that made music "works for hire" and ineligible for copyright by artists if they were under contract with the recording industry. The music industry will stick that rider wherever they can.
DOes the US regulate Internet commerce? No, they do not. They have not since THEY created the network.
Would the UN be interested in doing it? Who knows?
This is not to say that the US may someday want to regulate Internet commerce, and it IS their constitutional right - at least when it comes to the US side of it. But if the rest of the world would like to bitch and moan about it, they are more than welcome to create their own, and get the fuck off of ours. Good luck getting it working as well as we did.
Man, my reply was gonna be "VHS was around as LONG AS I CAN PHYSICALLY RECALL, and I'm 19."
:P
You, however, actually made my drunken statement a good argument. +1 Insightful.
So he lied. What's wrong with that?
"WHERE DO I START?!" you're probably thinking.
Well, now let's turn the tables. I'll give you an example of the tides turning -
Last year, on my 18th birthday, I partied a little bit too hard. After hours of drinking, we went for a drive (YES, we DID have a sober driver.). Unfortunately, we ended up in a situation that the cops were called, and my 4 buddies and I had to spend the rest of my 18th birthday shackled to the walls in a PA State Police barracks. Now, at this point, I was too drunk to write, so they just made me sit there and did their rounds. After a few hours I see one... two... and then three... go up for their mugshot and then leavc... and then they finally let me go.
So, I go outside to meet my friends and try to find them a way home, and I promptly get punched square in the face. "What the FUCK was that for?", I thought. Well, it turns out the state police, despite my inability to drive, write, or even talk without sounding like a raging alcoholic, had told my friends I had written a confession that said A - we had broken the windows (what got us there in the first place) and that B - everyone had been drinking. It would be in <i>their</i> best interest to do the same. So they did.
I could go into another example of the same thing happening to someone else, but I'm sure everyone's heard enough of them.
When my long-forgotten ancestors accepted this nation's founders' idea for government, they placed their trust in it for not only themselves, but everyone down the line, too. I've even heard cops say that "pig" stands for "Pride, Integrity, Guts". What's that middle word there?
If you would like your citizens to behave and be honest people of high moral standards, then you MUST do the same. With deceit comes dissention, and with dissention, revolution is born. Those that lead must do so by example, and soon enough, those that should be removed from society will become very evident.
To put it short, How can you trust a liar? You can't, no matter how truthful they are.
And guess what? The cattle don't want quality. buy it cheap, break it, buy it again. China seems to see that.
So what's worse? the Ma Bell behemoth that pretty much invented half of last century and wired the whole damn nation, or millions of little guys, getting into arguments about who can talk to who on the world's largest public-but-not-really network?
Ah, grasshopper. You better watch out or that RIAA gestapo truck might arrest you for unclean thinking next! The police, as corrupt and useless as they can be, were given that power by the people. RIAA WAS NOT GIVEN AND NEVER SHOULD GET SUCH POWER. Distributing a copyrighted good is perfectly legal if you're distributing it to someone who has a license to have it... such as the RIAA.
Selling crack is illegal ALWAYS. So yeah, selling it to a cop would be bad. Selling a copy of a CD to a cop would be bad, too, unless you told him "You must be buying this for backup purposes"
Illogical argument. This is INTELLECTUAL property, not REAL property. If I went to the store and bought a VCR your company made, and I put it into a xerox machine and made copies of it for the world, and you took one for a backup, I DID NOTHING WRONG. That is, you're already allowed to have a copy, and since you can't prove I gave any copied VCR to anyone who DIDN'T have a VCR license, you can't prove I did anything wrong.
One word: Drag. There's a lot more friction to a 3800lb car that must overcome not only mechanical friction in its engine and transmission, but from its tires and the air itself, also. In space, one push lasts years longer than the same push would here where we're bound by more rules of physics.
They do here - Shell and others sell the ethanol. Unfortunately, you're quite right. The US is bigger, it hasn't reached even most of us yet. Would be nice, we sure have enough corn.
Ever seen the Ford Tauri and Rangers with the leaf on the front fender? They're Flex Fuel vehicles. They can run on E85, 85% Ethanol and 15% gasoline, and anything in between. In fact, according to the manual at least, they run BETTER on E85. I'm a Ford freak, but I'm sure GM and others are putting out the same. Most of the busses in my home town dump out nothing but warm H2O.
The problem, however, is finding an E85 station. If I could find them locally, I'd have my car converted over in a second.