> I wish I knew a way to assign and send browser audio streams explicitly to one audio device output, say a set of headphones while keeping any other audio output attached to the primary playback device (speakers).
Although the title of the page says Flash, three of the four methods are for the browser.
In Linux you can use patch bays to go crazy with arbitrarily complex connections between audio sources, effects, and outputs: https://qjackctl.sourceforge.i...
Car maintenance such as replacing warn tires helps prevent crashes. You don't have the Walmart deal with your car insurance company every time you get tires or an oil change.
Maintenance of your home's appliances and electrical helps prevent fires. You don't call out your home insurance company to replace a worn $5 outlet - you go to Home Depot, spend $5, and get a new outlet. If you did ask Home Depot to fill out forms and bill your home insurance company, then wait to hopefully get paid, that$5 receptacle would cost $15. All that extra processing and time waiting to get paid costs money.
Have you ever noticed that your doctor's office probably has one doctor, one nurse, and two or three people handling paperwork for the healthcare plan billing? Want to make a guess why a visit to the doctor costs twice as much here as it costs in cash countries?
Microsoft perfected that process back in the day. They'd make a great offer for a company's technology. Microsoft would agree to buy X units, at a price very profitable to the company, after they made a few improvements or integrations with Microsoft's other software. Of course, the target company wasn't allowed to sell to anyone else during that period. In the fine print Microsoft would get right of first refusal if the company was ever sold.
The company would work to make the improvements and integrations Microsoft asked for, unable to take any other customers during that time. When it came time for Microsoft to accept delivery, they'd sit on it for a month and not reply. Then they'd decline delivery, asking for more changes. When that run-around finally ended they'd eventually have to accept delivery, so then they sit in making the payment. Sometimes the contract might call for a late fee, which doesn't matter when they aren't paying anyway. A year after the contract was signed, without being allowed to sell to any other customers and having not been paid by Microsoft, the company would go under. The owners might well be behind on their mortgage at this point. That's when Microsoft would offer to buy the company for a pittance. They did the same dance over and over again.
Nissan has made twice as many fully electric cars as Tesla has. Renault and partners have made more than Tesla, I think. BYD has probably made a LOT more than Tesla has, but exact numbers are hard to come by.
The start up mentioned in the Verge story may or may not develop a usable product, but in my experience Verge is slightly less reliable than National Enquirer. For example, the last two network neutrality stories posted here in the last few days have been from Verge, and both have been utterly full of shit.
> A group of idiots and their money are soon parted.
Hmm, good point. Now announcing the newest and hottest pyramid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H blockchain currency, Flatcoin! The Flatcoin algorithm is designed to radically increase the value of the your Flatcoin as California falls off the edge of the flat earth due to glob^H^H^H^Hplatal warming. But wait, there's more! Today only, you can buy your very own solid-state Flatcoin mining rig which is powered by unlimited free energy from nuclear fallout from unsustainable banana farming.* Get yours today before availability is destroyed by returning to prehistoric 2015 and earlier network regulation without network neutrality rules which were ignored for the year and a half they were in effect anyway!
* 120V @ 15A electric service required to harvest free energy.
> Recognising the voice of someone under random conditions is a quite complex action. There are many things that are extremely simple for you, but extremely difficult for a computer.
It may or may not be *difficult*, but it's definitely *possible*. If anyone has any evidence that this task is particularly difficult for a computer, much more difficult than it is for a human, I'd love ot see that evidence. Or evidence to the contrary. If voice recognition actually is that hard for modern computers, there is an opportunity there to serve humanity and make a lot of money by leveraging that fact.
Whenever a friend or family member calls me, I can recognize their voice even WITHOUT them telling me who it is. So yes, of course it's possible to recognize voices, especially when the person says their name, so you're only confirming yes / no to a particular identity, not trying to figure out who it is.
A few things need to be done to make it more secure than it would be without them. The biggest one is a challenge - they should be prompted to say something they wouldn't predict ahead of time, in order to foil recordings. You could probably get a recording of me saying my nams, "Ray Morris" if you knew ahead of time what you needed me to say, but of the system asks random questions like "where do you work?" it would be tough to have a recording prepared for every possible question.
One should also factor in other indicators such as caller ID and anamoly detection. If the person calls every month and does a $5,000 transaction, the next time they do the same thing is probably legitimate. If they are trying to do something out of the norm, stronger verification is called for. Many weak authenticators combined end up pretty strong, if the weak indicators are reasonably independent.
> Well put, I see the same stuff you do.... NN Was never good for the internet. Only for content providers that want profit but no expense.
Well I didn't say that, and I support the CONCEPT of net neutrality. Modern network optimization is just so technically complex that it's almost impossible to write effective NN laws that don't have a lot of unintended consequences. That said, NETFLIX specifically DID drum up a lot of BS about NN when at the end of the day they simply didn't want to pay their bills like every other web site does.
I don't put any bad intent on NN advocates generally. It is, however, true that roughly zero certified network admins have supported any of the rules as written, because they accidentally have the side effect of requiring the network to work less effectively for everyone.
I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.
What we teach mayors, city managers, and other decision makers is that *because* there is limited information available when an incident occurs, and limited time for discussion and deliberation, you'll likely be far better off if you have some template contingency plans in place ahead of, and in many cases it's good for those plans to have degrees or stages. If you're an official in Florida, or anywhere along the east coast, you should have hurricane plans ready BEFORE hurricane season, when you have time to discuss and plan carefully. Those plans should have triggers assigned ahead of time "when a category 3 storm is 300 miles away, activate chapter 4 of this plan". All cities, states, and countries should have generic "evacuate an area" plans, because all may have something happen that requires an evacuation. (We teach disaster preparedness to government officials at TEEX). In our courses, we have the responsible parties practice the plans, then watch themselves on the video and phone recordings and see what they could improve. Most think they passed along information that they never actually said, that's a very common error.
Ten years after Chernobyl, thousands of people who had been forcibly evacuated still didn't have new homes. That's a failure of planning. The government should have had in place plans to be able to house people affected by some sort of emergency.
That some sort of evacuation might be needed in some part of the country was entirely predictable. The failure wasn't caused by lack of information during the event. They had years before and after to figure out how to house people affected by some sort of disaster.
The author of the paper makes sure to mention that up front - it's not meant to be critical of officials at the time. It intended to provide another piece of information that officials can use when considering whether to order an evacuation when something happens in the future. During Hurricane Irma, for example, officials in Florida ordered mandatory evacuations only for the coast, which was the most dangerous place to be. Most of Florida was not evacuated because officials had learned that evacuation orders themselves cause problems and should not be made unnecessarily.
> Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.
Did they have to evacuate the entire continent immediately? Obviously no. Was it unavoidable that they evacuate everyone with 500 miles, within 24 hours? Nope, they didn't do that either. 50 miles? 5 miles? 1 mile? It was prudent to temporarily evacuate the people within 2 miles of the plant fairly quickly. Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium. > If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone. It seems that inhaling plutonium dust is more dangerous than ingesting it, because it's suspected that inhaling plutonium increases the risk of lung cancer. Without any known deaths from either it's hard to quantify that, though. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s. There has not been a single lung cancer among them. Albert Stevens had the highest dose of plutonium ever, having been injected with it in the 1940s. He lived to 79 years old, when he died of heart failure.
> This business of submitting comments to the FCC is not a vote. It was never represented as such. Nobody ever even implied that a huge volume of like-minded submissions would sway their agenda. They wanted legal arguments that they may not have thought of, and that's it.
Legal arguments, yes, and practical arguments and suggestions. I didn't think that the year and a half that the net neutrality rules were in place were all THAT much different than the previous years, so on this issue my participation was limited to commenting on the very early proposals (one of which would have made it illegal to block spam), but I was very involved in shaping the 2257 and DMCA rules.
I, and some business associates, commented extensively on 2257 and DMCA regulations based on the practical business effects of the proposed regulations, and the government made several changes to each draft based on our comments. As you said, these were things the regulatory agency may not have thought of, or areas where they didn't realize the impact until we pointed it out.
It's unfortunate that none of us foresaw ahead of time how badly DMCA would need significant penalties for recklessly filing false complaints. That's a major omission in DMCA which has caused a lot of problems. The implementation of safe-harbor provisions of DMCA we ended up with is quite good in that web hosting companies and other service providers aren't afraid of being sued for customers' copyright infringement like they were before DMCA was implemented, and they have a well-defined, reasonable process for handling infringement. It sucks that process has been abused by frivilous complaints where there is no actual infringement.
As you said, the comment process is NOT a vote, especially not a "yes or no" vote, and certainly not a Facebook meme contest. It's meant to bring up issues the agency wasn't aware of and to suggest minor changes which make the regulations more practical to implement.
As an example, under a set of regulations I successfully commented on, each small business was required to keep certain records which include personal information about people who had made products they sell, people they had no contact with. The businesses had purchased items from a distributor, who purchased them from the producers, who employed the workers. It wasn't practical for the retailers to keep records about the workers who made the stuff. Through the comment process, we got the proposed regulations changed so that the distributors could hold the records. The distributors already served as a central clearinghouse for the products, so it worked out well for the to be the centralized keeper of records too.
I was looking at Toyota's plug-in cars and got significantly larger numbers than you did, but anyway that's a good point that Toyota's plug-in cars also have a gas engine. Maybe that's part of the reason Toyota sells a hundred times as many cars as Tesla does.
> Telsa has delivered just over 200,000 vehicles world wide
I see Nissan sold nearly that many fully electric Leafs last year alone, and has sold over 350,000 total. Sales numbers for BYD are harder to find, but it looks like they may have sold more than Tesla and Nissan combined. If I were betting on BEVs being the future, Nissan, BYD, or even Renault seem more likely to become the world's largest car maker than Tesla does - both Nissan and Renault have the dealer and service infrastructure and everything that Tesla lacks. Make no mistake, the current pricing of Tesla's stock assumes they'll be the world's biggest car maker within a few years.
> This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course. The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter. The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.
We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.
Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:
To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
Toyota's sold over 10 million cars every year, for many years. Toyota's stock is valued at $184 billion.
Tesla sells less than 100,000 cars a year, less than 1% of Toyota's sales, and doesn't have a track record of decades of consistent success that Toyota has. Tesla's stock is at $53 billion.
1% of Toyota's sales. If Tesla also had Toyota's proven track record, the company might be worth 1% of Toyota's price. It's overpriced by at least 30X.
"But Tesla sells ELECTRIC cars!", someone says. Toyota sells more ELECTRIC cars than Tesla does.
> Providing services is not speech. If it were, prostitution would be legal
That's an interesting topic. So in your opinion mailing out a pamphlet critical of President Trump isn't covered by free speech? Or is it covered if you send the pamphlet by mail, but not covered if you send it over the air, wirelessly? Or maybe it's free speech *only* if you're criticizing Trump, not if you're sending educational writing such as Wikipedia?
I can't imagine any way to say sending educational text such as Wikipedia to people who ask for it isn't free speech, without saying free speech is completely meaningless.
> (unless you are buying an FHA home or are using the VA mortgage, or are buying a HUD home)
Which is kinda like saying "all programmers are males (unless they are females or maybe something else).:). FHA, VA, and HUD combined make up a significant portion of purchases. My first house was none of the above and I had bad credit. I put 5% down. My second house, on paper I put 10% down but I actually only paid 6%. Again that wasn't FHA, VA, or HUD, and I had medium credit.
Putting 20% down on each house after your first is really good idea, in most cases. It's in no way required.
Some readers may wonder about the difference between the 10% down that is listed on my mortgage and the 7% I actually paid. I didn't need a real estate agent to drive me around looking at houses, so I used an agent who refunds half the commission to the buyer, 1.5% of the sales price. I also priced in a seller concession of 1.5% - the seller gave me "back" 1.5% of the money at closing. That covered 3% for the down payment, so I needed to cover 7%.
> My neighborhood is one of the cheaper neighborhoods within 32 miles.
Sounds like an interesting discussion. Which city is this that we're using as our example?
> But you can still live in this area in a mobile home on a $36,000 income.
Yes, on a $36,000 income you can buy a double wide from one of these manufacturers for $100,000-$200,000. Or, for $45,000-$65,000 you can buy one that's five years old, and save a hundred thousand dollars. Buying a double wide from the manufacturer is stupid 95% of the time.
You still have to rent or buy the land separately, so the total monthly cash outlay isn't THAT much different from a site-built home, just the end of the story is way different. Most people would be better off, long-term, with a 1,500 square foot house than with a 2,000 square foot trailer, for the same monthly payment.
Buying or renting a 20 year old mobile home is a totally different story. For a short time I lived in a single wide that I could have bought for $1,500. That's totally different than the $55,000 someone paid for it new.
The low-end models are still there, as always. More expensive models are also available, which increases the AVERAGE price.
The manufacturers haven't abandoned their primary market, people who are broke because they have don't think long-term, so they do things like spend a ton of money on something that falls apart in a few years rather than putting 10% down on a house which will go up in value.
> Nobody in their right minds would accept a free wired internet service that provides access to only one website.
Actually people DO accept free stuff. Millions of people even PAID for services that provided only limited web sites, not the internet in general. Half the people on Slashdot bought these services. (The other half apparently think the internet started a year and half ago, when the net neutrality rules went into effect.) These services had names like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Services that provide full, open access won in the marketplace because they are better, and people paying for service choose the open internet. People who don't buy internet service did in fact sign up for the free educational connection.
> (The net neutrality laws do not apply to wireless ISPs). > this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot.
I'm sorry but you're missing a lot of information. The government did in fact shut the service down. It's not theoretical, it happened about a year ago. It was a wireless service.
> By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Certainly people supporting new rules had good intentions. Unfortunately good intentions are of little practical value. Damage done with good intentions is still damage done. Based on what I see these supporters saying this week, all over the media, what they seek to prevent is "your ISP is going to start charging you extra for Tumblr". THAT, my friend, is theoretical, not real. Shutting down the free wireless service that provided access to Wikipedia and other educational content is what actually happened. That's what's real.
Slashdot Mirror
> I wish I knew a way to assign and send browser audio streams explicitly to one audio device output, say a set of headphones while keeping any other audio output attached to the primary playback device (speakers).
On Linux there are many ways to do that. This page lists three (plus another one just for Flash):
http://jackaudio.org/faq/routi...
Although the title of the page says Flash, three of the four methods are for the browser.
In Linux you can use patch bays to go crazy with arbitrarily complex connections between audio sources, effects, and outputs:
https://qjackctl.sourceforge.i...
Car maintenance such as replacing warn tires helps prevent crashes. You don't have the Walmart deal with your car insurance company every time you get tires or an oil change.
Maintenance of your home's appliances and electrical helps prevent fires. You don't call out your home insurance company to replace a worn $5 outlet - you go to Home Depot, spend $5, and get a new outlet. If you did ask Home Depot to fill out forms and bill your home insurance company, then wait to hopefully get paid, that$5 receptacle would cost $15. All that extra processing and time waiting to get paid costs money.
Have you ever noticed that your doctor's office probably has one doctor, one nurse, and two or three people handling paperwork for the healthcare plan billing? Want to make a guess why a visit to the doctor costs twice as much here as it costs in cash countries?
Microsoft perfected that process back in the day. They'd make a great offer for a company's technology. Microsoft would agree to buy X units, at a price very profitable to the company, after they made a few improvements or integrations with Microsoft's other software. Of course, the target company wasn't allowed to sell to anyone else during that period. In the fine print Microsoft would get right of first refusal if the company was ever sold.
The company would work to make the improvements and integrations Microsoft asked for, unable to take any other customers during that time. When it came time for Microsoft to accept delivery, they'd sit on it for a month and not reply. Then they'd decline delivery, asking for more changes. When that run-around finally ended they'd eventually have to accept delivery, so then they sit in making the payment. Sometimes the contract might call for a late fee, which doesn't matter when they aren't paying anyway. A year after the contract was signed, without being allowed to sell to any other customers and having not been paid by Microsoft, the company would go under. The owners might well be behind on their mortgage at this point. That's when Microsoft would offer to buy the company for a pittance. They did the same dance over and over again.
Nissan has made twice as many fully electric cars as Tesla has.
Renault and partners have made more than Tesla, I think.
BYD has probably made a LOT more than Tesla has, but exact numbers are hard to come by.
The start up mentioned in the Verge story may or may not develop a usable product, but in my experience Verge is slightly less reliable than National Enquirer. For example, the last two network neutrality stories posted here in the last few days have been from Verge, and both have been utterly full of shit.
> A group of idiots and their money are soon parted.
Hmm, good point. Now announcing the newest and hottest pyramid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H blockchain currency, Flatcoin! The Flatcoin algorithm is designed to radically increase the value of the your Flatcoin as California falls off the edge of the flat earth due to glob^H^H^H^Hplatal warming. But wait, there's more! Today only, you can buy your very own solid-state Flatcoin mining rig which is powered by unlimited free energy from nuclear fallout from unsustainable banana farming.* Get yours today before availability is destroyed by returning to prehistoric 2015 and earlier network regulation without network neutrality rules which were ignored for the year and a half they were in effect anyway!
* 120V @ 15A electric service required to harvest free energy.
I've read that he did start hanging out with the flat-Earth people AFTER he'd been fundraising for his rocket project.
> Recognising the voice of someone under random conditions is a quite complex action. There are many things that are extremely simple for you, but extremely difficult for a computer.
It may or may not be *difficult*, but it's definitely *possible*. If anyone has any evidence that this task is particularly difficult for a computer, much more difficult than it is for a human, I'd love ot see that evidence. Or evidence to the contrary. If voice recognition actually is that hard for modern computers, there is an opportunity there to serve humanity and make a lot of money by leveraging that fact.
Whenever a friend or family member calls me, I can recognize their voice even WITHOUT them telling me who it is. So yes, of course it's possible to recognize voices, especially when the person says their name, so you're only confirming yes / no to a particular identity, not trying to figure out who it is.
A few things need to be done to make it more secure than it would be without them. The biggest one is a challenge - they should be prompted to say something they wouldn't predict ahead of time, in order to foil recordings. You could probably get a recording of me saying my nams, "Ray Morris" if you knew ahead of time what you needed me to say, but of the system asks random questions like "where do you work?" it would be tough to have a recording prepared for every possible question.
One should also factor in other indicators such as caller ID and anamoly detection. If the person calls every month and does a $5,000 transaction, the next time they do the same thing is probably legitimate. If they are trying to do something out of the norm, stronger verification is called for. Many weak authenticators combined end up pretty strong, if the weak indicators are reasonably independent.
> Well put, I see the same stuff you do .... NN Was never good for the internet. Only for content providers that want profit but no expense.
Well I didn't say that, and I support the CONCEPT of net neutrality. Modern network optimization is just so technically complex that it's almost impossible to write effective NN laws that don't have a lot of unintended consequences. That said, NETFLIX specifically DID drum up a lot of BS about NN when at the end of the day they simply didn't want to pay their bills like every other web site does.
I don't put any bad intent on NN advocates generally. It is, however, true that roughly zero certified network admins have supported any of the rules as written, because they accidentally have the side effect of requiring the network to work less effectively for everyone.
Apple's 2015 PE ratio was 19 - meaning basically investors made about 6%. Tesla's was negative 60 - the company lost a SHITLOAD of money.
For 2019, Apple predicts a PE ratio of 14 to 15. (About 6% profit). Tesla predicts 1,500 PE, a profit of 0.006%. They aren't comparable.
I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.
What we teach mayors, city managers, and other decision makers is that *because* there is limited information available when an incident occurs, and limited time for discussion and deliberation, you'll likely be far better off if you have some template contingency plans in place ahead of, and in many cases it's good for those plans to have degrees or stages. If you're an official in Florida, or anywhere along the east coast, you should have hurricane plans ready BEFORE hurricane season, when you have time to discuss and plan carefully. Those plans should have triggers assigned ahead of time "when a category 3 storm is 300 miles away, activate chapter 4 of this plan". All cities, states, and countries should have generic "evacuate an area" plans, because all may have something happen that requires an evacuation. (We teach disaster preparedness to government officials at TEEX). In our courses, we have the responsible parties practice the plans, then watch themselves on the video and phone recordings and see what they could improve. Most think they passed along information that they never actually said, that's a very common error.
Ten years after Chernobyl, thousands of people who had been forcibly evacuated still didn't have new homes. That's a failure of planning. The government should have had in place plans to be able to house people affected by some sort of emergency.
That some sort of evacuation might be needed in some part of the country was entirely predictable. The failure wasn't caused by lack of information during the event. They had years before and after to figure out how to house people affected by some sort of disaster.
The author of the paper makes sure to mention that up front - it's not meant to be critical of officials at the time. It intended to provide another piece of information that officials can use when considering whether to order an evacuation when something happens in the future. During Hurricane Irma, for example, officials in Florida ordered mandatory evacuations only for the coast, which was the most dangerous place to be. Most of Florida was not evacuated because officials had learned that evacuation orders themselves cause problems and should not be made unnecessarily.
Yep, we went through several drafts of 2257 rules
> Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.
Did they have to evacuate the entire continent immediately? Obviously no. Was it unavoidable that they evacuate everyone with 500 miles, within 24 hours? Nope, they didn't do that either. 50 miles? 5 miles? 1 mile? It was prudent to temporarily evacuate the people within 2 miles of the plant fairly quickly. Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium.
> If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone. It seems that inhaling plutonium dust is more dangerous than ingesting it, because it's suspected that inhaling plutonium increases the risk of lung cancer. Without any known deaths from either it's hard to quantify that, though. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s. There has not been a single lung cancer among them. Albert Stevens had the highest dose of plutonium ever, having been injected with it in the 1940s. He lived to 79 years old, when he died of heart failure.
> This business of submitting comments to the FCC is not a vote. It was never represented as such. Nobody ever even implied that a huge volume of like-minded submissions would sway their agenda. They wanted legal arguments that they may not have thought of, and that's it.
Legal arguments, yes, and practical arguments and suggestions. I didn't think that the year and a half that the net neutrality rules were in place were all THAT much different than the previous years, so on this issue my participation was limited to commenting on the very early proposals (one of which would have made it illegal to block spam), but I was very involved in shaping the 2257 and DMCA rules.
I, and some business associates, commented extensively on 2257 and DMCA regulations based on the practical business effects of the proposed regulations, and the government made several changes to each draft based on our comments. As you said, these were things the regulatory agency may not have thought of, or areas where they didn't realize the impact until we pointed it out.
It's unfortunate that none of us foresaw ahead of time how badly DMCA would need significant penalties for recklessly filing false complaints. That's a major omission in DMCA which has caused a lot of problems. The implementation of safe-harbor provisions of DMCA we ended up with is quite good in that web hosting companies and other service providers aren't afraid of being sued for customers' copyright infringement like they were before DMCA was implemented, and they have a well-defined, reasonable process for handling infringement. It sucks that process has been abused by frivilous complaints where there is no actual infringement.
As you said, the comment process is NOT a vote, especially not a "yes or no" vote, and certainly not a Facebook meme contest. It's meant to bring up issues the agency wasn't aware of and to suggest minor changes which make the regulations more practical to implement.
As an example, under a set of regulations I successfully commented on, each small business was required to keep certain records which include personal information about people who had made products they sell, people they had no contact with. The businesses had purchased items from a distributor, who purchased them from the producers, who employed the workers. It wasn't practical for the retailers to keep records about the workers who made the stuff. Through the comment process, we got the proposed regulations changed so that the distributors could hold the records. The distributors already served as a central clearinghouse for the products, so it worked out well for the to be the centralized keeper of records too.
I was looking at Toyota's plug-in cars and got significantly larger numbers than you did, but anyway that's a good point that Toyota's plug-in cars also have a gas engine. Maybe that's part of the reason Toyota sells a hundred times as many cars as Tesla does.
> Telsa has delivered just over 200,000 vehicles world wide
I see Nissan sold nearly that many fully electric Leafs last year alone, and has sold over 350,000 total. Sales numbers for BYD are harder to find, but it looks like they may have sold more than Tesla and Nissan combined. If I were betting on BEVs being the future, Nissan, BYD, or even Renault seem more likely to become the world's largest car maker than Tesla does - both Nissan and Renault have the dealer and service infrastructure and everything that Tesla lacks. Make no mistake, the current pricing of Tesla's stock assumes they'll be the world's biggest car maker within a few years.
> This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.
We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.
Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m...
To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
Toyota's sold over 10 million cars every year, for many years. Toyota's stock is valued at $184 billion.
Tesla sells less than 100,000 cars a year, less than 1% of Toyota's sales, and doesn't have a track record of decades of consistent success that Toyota has. Tesla's stock is at $53 billion.
1% of Toyota's sales. If Tesla also had Toyota's proven track record, the company might be worth 1% of Toyota's price. It's overpriced by at least 30X.
"But Tesla sells ELECTRIC cars!", someone says. Toyota sells more ELECTRIC cars than Tesla does.
> Providing services is not speech. If it were, prostitution would be legal
That's an interesting topic. So in your opinion mailing out a pamphlet critical of President Trump isn't covered by free speech? Or is it covered if you send the pamphlet by mail, but not covered if you send it over the air, wirelessly? Or maybe it's free speech *only* if you're criticizing Trump, not if you're sending educational writing such as Wikipedia?
I can't imagine any way to say sending educational text such as Wikipedia to people who ask for it isn't free speech, without saying free speech is completely meaningless.
> (unless you are buying an FHA home or are using the VA mortgage, or are buying a HUD home)
Which is kinda like saying "all programmers are males (unless they are females or maybe something else). :). FHA, VA, and HUD combined make up a significant portion of purchases. My first house was none of the above and I had bad credit. I put 5% down. My second house, on paper I put 10% down but I actually only paid 6%. Again that wasn't FHA, VA, or HUD, and I had medium credit.
Putting 20% down on each house after your first is really good idea, in most cases. It's in no way required.
Some readers may wonder about the difference between the 10% down that is listed on my mortgage and the 7% I actually paid. I didn't need a real estate agent to drive me around looking at houses, so I used an agent who refunds half the commission to the buyer, 1.5% of the sales price. I also priced in a seller concession of 1.5% - the seller gave me "back" 1.5% of the money at closing. That covered 3% for the down payment, so I needed to cover 7%.
> My neighborhood is one of the cheaper neighborhoods within 32 miles.
Sounds like an interesting discussion. Which city is this that we're using as our example?
> But you can still live in this area in a mobile home on a $36,000 income.
Yes, on a $36,000 income you can buy a double wide from one of these manufacturers for $100,000-$200,000. Or, for $45,000-$65,000 you can buy one that's five years old, and save a hundred thousand dollars. Buying a double wide from the manufacturer is stupid 95% of the time.
You still have to rent or buy the land separately, so the total monthly cash outlay isn't THAT much different from a site-built home, just the end of the story is way different. Most people would be better off, long-term, with a 1,500 square foot house than with a 2,000 square foot trailer, for the same monthly payment.
Buying or renting a 20 year old mobile home is a totally different story. For a short time I lived in a single wide that I could have bought for $1,500. That's totally different than the $55,000 someone paid for it new.
The low-end models are still there, as always. More expensive models are also available, which increases the AVERAGE price.
The manufacturers haven't abandoned their primary market, people who are broke because they have don't think long-term, so they do things like spend a ton of money on something that falls apart in a few years rather than putting 10% down on a house which will go up in value.
> Nobody in their right minds would accept a free wired internet service that provides access to only one website.
Actually people DO accept free stuff. Millions of people even PAID for services that provided only limited web sites, not the internet in general. Half the people on Slashdot bought these services. (The other half apparently think the internet started a year and half ago, when the net neutrality rules went into effect.) These services had names like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Services that provide full, open access won in the marketplace because they are better, and people paying for service choose the open internet. People who don't buy internet service did in fact sign up for the free educational connection.
> (The net neutrality laws do not apply to wireless ISPs).
> this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot.
I'm sorry but you're missing a lot of information. The government did in fact shut the service down. It's not theoretical, it happened about a year ago. It was a wireless service.
> By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Certainly people supporting new rules had good intentions. Unfortunately good intentions are of little practical value. Damage done with good intentions is still damage done. Based on what I see these supporters saying this week, all over the media, what they seek to prevent is "your ISP is going to start charging you extra for Tumblr". THAT, my friend, is theoretical, not real. Shutting down the free wireless service that provided access to Wikipedia and other educational content is what actually happened. That's what's real.