Was there a serial number? Was there an inscription? Did she leave a palm print? If I had spent millions of dollars, and involved hundreds of people, I'd sure grab on to even the remotest of possibilities so I didn't have to walk away empty handed! FTFA: The piece, which measures about 24 by 18 inches (61 cm by 46 cm), did not appear to be a standard part of a Lockheed Electra, but TIGHAR researchers recently began to look into the possibility it might have been installed on the plane as a patch after a window was removed, he said.
On October 7, a TIGHAR team examined a plane at Wichita Air Services in Newton, Kansas, that was similar to Earhart's aircraft. Because the plane was being restored, it was possible to look at its interior and see where the sheet of metal recovered in 1991 would have fit, Gillespie said.
No. When you register your card with Apple Pay, you AUTHENTICATE with BofA (or whoever your bank is). BofA requires you to call them in so they can ID you and accept your registering the card with Apple Pay. Capital One allows Apple Pay to launch the Capital One app and authenticate it through logging in there. Re-read my comment and try again.
My bad on the parenthesis thing.
But I say "Anonymous Coward", I have seen your lack of parenthesis on multiple comments! HAHA!!!!/sarcasm
Sounds like they really just don't know.
It likely was a combination of factors, they say, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns and terrestrial processes.
But at least they are studying and learning.
"This abrupt, centennial-scale variability of CO2 appears to be a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle. "Previous research has hinted at the possibility that spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide may have accelerated the last deglaciation, but that hypothesis had not been resolved, the researchers say.
The earth has been from +14 to -6 degrees on average from where it is today. Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories. Its not like we had a thermocouple hooked up to a server recording that data for millions of years. These deductions are best effort conclusions on data that only tells a very broad stroke of the story. What upsets me is how demonizing the argument about Global Warming / Climate Change is. The earth will change its temperature. That will happen with or without us, just look at the historical record. Earths temperature isn't stable. And for all those who argue we are burning too much fossil fuels, those carbon atoms weren't created into existence in the ground as they were today, unless you believe the earth is 6000 years old! They were a part of the global carbon cycle, and buried during mass extinction events and processes that sequestered them to where they are today. It isn't science to say "for sure this and for sure that". Its science to say: "To the level of our current understanding...". Thats it. You can't know for certain, just like they didn't know for certain that the earth was the center of the universe, even though it was proselytized. Its not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions. All of science works better when there are those who are skeptical. It refines your proof if you are right, or betters your understanding if you are wrong.
As for the problems associated with climate change, it will happen. For those of us living where it will flood, there will be a new continent to live on, once it unfreezes (again!).
Apple Pay registers the card pretty fast, but not with BofA, you can't use their App to authenticate the card, you have to call in (at least you did when I registered my Credit and Debit cards. Capital One allows you to sign into the app and it instructs Apple Pay to go ahead.
On the subject of "who will win", I think that the easiest payment options with the most security and largest spending consumer base will win. Historically, thats users who use Apple. QR codes and Bank ACH transfers lack two of the three things - security and ease. They also miss the boat on a big number of other ancillary benefits Apple Pay has going for it: 1. Apple Pay can be used online. 2. There is no massive treasure trove of data for hackers to steal. 3. You can not ACH from a credit card. Guess where most of the retailers get their money from? Hint: Its not people's bank accounts, those are used to pay off credit cards. 4. If CurrentC participating retailers block Apple Pay (which is really to block NFC transactions), it stands to reason that Apple may block any CurrentC applications from their App Store. They could always point and say "In response to...".
Apple Pay will end up being just another NFC service, but NFC will ring the winner. What is Walmart / Best Buy / CVS going to do? Displace Visa/MC in the hundreds of countries that are already in? How many Visa terminals are there? Right. I suppose they have all the legal work figured out as well, and don't mind bankrupting themselves in the process./sarcasm
What I meant was many stores will have their own payment systems, and others will support the broad systems from Apple/Google, and some will be late to the "payment revolution", and so on and so fourth. Once it makes economic sense to adopt system X, they will adopt it. We still have to see how Apple Pay stands up to real world threats, heavy load, availability concerns, network issues (if the store is not in great cell range), etc.... We still don't know what happens when you take the big system you just made and apply it to the big load waiting for its availability and adoption. Time will tell us what the stores end up using because it will be the best system from a realistic point of view.
Once competition decides what service we decide to favor. A bunch of services will fail, 3 or 4 will remain and be universally accepted. Just look at the credit card networks for reference as to how this will play out.
It stands to reason then that apple saw this comming. They can point to the "free" nature of its downloads and say "but the OS costs nothing!". So you can take your wonderful new machine, and install whatever you want on it.
That seems like a lot of dick-measuring on the part of developers. Why wouldn't Canonical simply update the repository with patches that address known security vulnerabilities? Where is the years of support? When you update your package list, the developers of those packages should be able to post updates...
This is why Linux is not desktop ready... to many stubborn minds pushing their way.
My guess is that the fact that no organisms exist with a Neanderthal genome defines them as extinct. Where one draws the line is more art than science I guess. There is a species of Galapagos tortoise that was biologically extinct since there was until recently just one male member (lonesome George). I know that there are some genetics in us (like the HMG group of proteins) that are ancient, but work so well that we still retain them. That doesn't mean the first species to have evolved them isn't extict, it just means we evolved from them.
I'm responsible for my childrens welfare. I'm not responsible for what they do because I cannot know everything they do without being the sort of insanely controlling parent who shouldn't have children anyway.
Sure, I am control their bank account. That's easy. I'm actually controlling the bank, not the child. Anyone who had ever let a child walk to the corner store to buy milk knows you can't know what they do once out of sight. Making parents liable for that is just nuts. It's an impossible situation.
It's like making you responsible for what I'm going to do next. Just as arbitrary and dumb as that.
So are you suggesting the children should be liable themselves? The state? Any adult within a few hundred feet? When a child hurts someone, who should then be liable is the question? When an adult hurts someone, they are either sued in civil court for compensation / damage relief; or tried by the state in criminal court.
Are you suggesting that the child be tried as an adult? Shared liability with the parents (both serve 1/2 time or something like that) or should the state be sending out checks every time a child causes injury to a third party?
The reason I say that parents should be liable is because you have to ask yourself: Who made the decision? The parents made a decision to have a child in the first place. Surely as we can tell, the child didn't decide to be conceived. The parents made the decision, so they should be responsible for the consequences of that decision. And in the state's case, they don't reap the rewards if the child does something productive or successful, potential benefit is under the control of the parents, of course; and so it should be. As well as the risks associated. You can not take all the rewards, and assume none of the risks in anything. Otherwise, why not have 100 children, blame the state for the 99 that don't make it successful, and claim the one who goes on Disney and becomes economically profitable? The child itself can't be responsible for making the decision because it can not understand all the consequences that go into making that decision, it is a child. Just like a computer can not understand that you are using it to write a nefarious program, and so the computer itself is not liable. That would be a silly notion. The entity making the decision has to be liable. Since the last decision made by an entity with responsibility is the parents, the judge was correct, they are the one's responsible. Neither the school, nor the state, nor the victims are in control of the child, can not discipline or punish the child, and so have no control themselves. How can this be anyone else's responsibility but the parent?
Why is custom hardware needed? Im just curious. There seem to be plenty of cheap ($100) SOC boards out there with ethernet ports. You only need one to route. Not sure what sort of hardware performance requirements the encryption and tunneling software would require, but surely one can be built for much less than $7500. Even a desktop with a bunch of 4x1GB port PCIe cards wouldn't cost a grand... its a desktop I know, but still....
He should consider using virtualization to increase his uptime since he is worried about multiple important systems on a single server. Virtualization gives you such good yields in consolidation, you can come out ahead while still using redundancy features like VMware FaultTolerance. Your vm runs "in-step" on two hosts, and will survive even if either host fails. Just requires 2X the used memory. That's still only the most extreme case though like for databases, as most servers should be able to survive a reboot (which is what happens when your host dies and there is capacity left in your cluster. The VM powers back up on another host.
If you are going to make me liable for something then I has to be something under my control. Short of tying my kids up in chains and never letting them do anything there is no way for me do absolutely guarantee that they will never do anything which causes liability. Not only would I refuse to do that it would be illegal and society does not want parents to do that: kids have to learn to control their own behaviour and that means giving them the freedom to do things wrong.
Parents have to be responsible but not necessarily liable. If we are taking reasonable measures to supervise our kids online including giving them guidance on how to behave as well as punishing them when they do not then I believe we have fulfilled our responsibility as parents and should not be held liable if one of them disobeys us and libels someone while we are not watching.
On the other hand if parents completely ignores their kids, provide no guidance or consequences then by all means find them negligent and hence liable through their act of negligence...but making parents automatically liable for their kids actions under all circumstances is unfair and encourages poor parenting since if means that you can't risk letting them fail. Indeed the only way to be sure would be to ban them from access the net: does society really want that?
Responsibility must mean liability. You can't claim to be responsible for something and then when it goes all wrong, stick your hands up in the air and say "not my fault!". If you are not liable and responsible, then you shouldn't have kids. They are under your control, thats what society has determined over generations to be the appropriate path to raising human beings. Now, I do agree with you that they are not totally under your control. For example: you can not beat your kids, even if you believe that it is the best way to encourage the behavior out of them that would yield better results. You could say that the state prevented you from administering the discipline you believed would have corrected their behavior and sue the state. But if you need to be that strict with your kids, and feel you need to beat them, and don't have that option at your disposal (as we do not in the US, for obvious and good reasons), then you should be able to reach out to those limiting your choices, and limiting your liability, as they have limited your ability. Thats fair.
I acknowledge things are not that simple. But to say "I have responsibility, but limit my liability", I disagree. By having kids, you assumed that liability, and took the risk. If you are not able to judge, and assess those risks, then you shouldn't be having kids.
At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.
Nonsense.
If your kid is in a park, grabs a rock, throws it at someone and causes harm, then you are responsible. Not the parks office, not the city, not the state, and not in the case of this incident, the school.
As a parent you are responsible for the actions of your kids in place of themselves since they are children. If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school. It isn't accepting full liability because you chose to exercise their facilities to perform your actions. Just like an ISP isn't responsible if you use their network to organize a murder (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). The school is not liable, the person is. But, because the person is underage, the person's parents are responsible. Its as simple as that. You are responsible for your kids actions, you in place of them. Don't like it? Don't have kids. Having kids involves accepting responsibility for them. Its that simple.
So if I post a stock trade on the internet, am I not liable if it looses money? What if I repeat on the internet what someone has said IRL? What if it wasn't on the internet, but on some other network, or on a cell phone that traverses the internet using a VOIP backend or even better still, just a land line? If a terrorist posts a command to others to attack some entity, is he not liable because it was on the internet? Where does liability start?
To impose that whatever happens "on the internet" is not real and shouldn't count is just plain unrealistic. What you say should count, you said it! I think you should be free to say it anonymously as well, and be free of "backtracking" that comment to you. But if you connect yourself to the comment, then absolutely you should be liable. Why are you so against personal responsibility? People are responsible for their actions. Plain and simple, and thats a good thing. If you post a great work of art on the internet, you are entitled to its copyright, so you are reaping the rewards from that work, and you can't have benefit on one hand and reject liability on the other. By great work of art, imagine your photography, a game you made, or some other product.
Is it ridiculous to state that tangible harm was done because of said comment? Maybe. If so, prove it. We have a mechanism for managing the relationships between people and the harm they might inflict with their actions. That's why we have courts. Its a good thing, and a good system.
On Slashdot, clearly you can, or your last post would not have appeared. Being a peer-moderated system, approval only gets you modded up or down, but slashdot doesn't delete bad comments like yours, and neither does Facebook.
Why would posting defamatory remarks make the profile fake, or warrant its deletion? Also, just because you can delete something doesn't mean no harm was inflicted. Granted, it limits the extent, but if you post something derogatory, and cause pain and suffering (or for example in a worst case scenario: suicide), deleting it only limits the damage, it doesn't undo that damage.
If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well.
You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.
The Municipal provider has the advantage of not needing customers to subscribe to collect it's fee's. It does this through taxes, which is coercion. I'm sorry, but it is. Your forcing someone to pay for something irrespective of the fact that they think it may be a good choice or not. Comcast will cover the cost and sell its service to everyone under the sun if they could, since they are GAURANTEED not to have competition, because your city gives them that guarantee. If such a guarantee was illegal, I imagine it would be too risky for one company to go in on it alone, at which point, multiple companies would form a corporation to SHARE THE COST AND ACCESS, or research cheaper methods, or lease their network to others who think they can do a better jobs like the ILECs.
Competition is good, and as Milton Friedman explains so well, no decent law can prevent a monopoly, only create them.
No, No No No!!!! It doesn't matter if they are a wolf in wolf's clothing! They have a service to sell, and users should be free to to use it if they so choose. What we should be against is any subsidization, special treatment, or monopolistic practices, always rooted in government. It is a fact, that monopolies can only exist for any great length of time with the help of a government law or regulation insuring their monopolistic status (with only one notable exception: The London DeBeers Corporation) . A monopoly exists and extorts their customers by jacking up prices, or delivering goods and services of a less than desirable quality. Barring any regulation preventing new competition, a competitor will always enter the market; because someone will have a business plan to either lower the cost, holding the quality constant, or raise the quality, holding the cost constant. In the US, capital is not a barrier to entry, as some investment house, or other financial mechanism is always looking to exercise their capital on a solid business plan. That is how free markets work. When there is good competition, you have the highest available quality, and the lowest cost, the market will bear. Choice is good, so long as the costs are realized, and not passed on to tax payers, who are then forced to be come a customer (via a lack of options, or because their taxes have already paid or partially paid for a good or service).
These councils need to get out of the business of "selecting" the internet provider and let the free market run its course. The outcome will always be what the customers choose, which is usually a variety of competitors, and thats a good thing!
Thats true if you do not have solar arrays that rotate to take advantage of the sun's maximum incidence, but in a commercial installation, thats non-sense. On a roof top, there are limitations such as aesthetics of having the panels flat against the roof, and maximum height of the structures that come into play that don't need to be considered for commercial installations. The commercial installations move their collectors to attain a maximum incidence throughout the day, by remaining perpendicular to the sun, as the systems are far too cheap and panels far too costly to not take advantage of. In California, the conservative estimation given clouds and hours is 7 useful hours per day on average throughout the year (less than the 8 I was estimating).
I was just giving an example for easy maths (8 hours is one third of a day), etc.. but you are right in the sense that you would have to scale up the lower amount of sunlight you have. I would also argue that my assessment assumes you want to remain energy-neutral and not economically-neutral. Since sunlight produces peak power, your KW/h is more expensive when you sell it than at night when you buy it back.
Right, and any area has to be evaluated for its most economical method of night-time power. But as I said, most data centers will be able to be powered by the relatively low-cost off peak power at night. Cities get their street lights powered at little or no cost because the power companies need to "burn off" the power they generate at night because they can not power off the plants, and there needs to be some load (I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but its what we were taught in H.S. in the 90's physics class). Im sure its also dependent on the kind of power system and plant design in use. As I said, the grid will be happy to take excess power in the day and return it back at night. If you truly gave the daily amount of power, in and out, you would also make money. Peak power (which you are providing via solar in excess of your load is more expensive than off-peak power which you are consuming at night, KW/h for KW/h.
Slashdot Mirror
Was there a serial number? Was there an inscription? Did she leave a palm print?
If I had spent millions of dollars, and involved hundreds of people, I'd sure grab on to even the remotest of possibilities so I didn't have to walk away empty handed!
FTFA:
The piece, which measures about 24 by 18 inches (61 cm by 46 cm), did not appear to be a standard part of a Lockheed Electra, but TIGHAR researchers recently began to look into the possibility it might have been installed on the plane as a patch after a window was removed, he said. On October 7, a TIGHAR team examined a plane at Wichita Air Services in Newton, Kansas, that was similar to Earhart's aircraft. Because the plane was being restored, it was possible to look at its interior and see where the sheet of metal recovered in 1991 would have fit, Gillespie said.
Not conclusive... sorry!
I had no idea Amelia Earhart was bionic and had metal patches!
No. When you register your card with Apple Pay, you AUTHENTICATE with BofA (or whoever your bank is). BofA requires you to call them in so they can ID you and accept your registering the card with Apple Pay. Capital One allows Apple Pay to launch the Capital One app and authenticate it through logging in there. Re-read my comment and try again.
/sarcasm
My bad on the parenthesis thing.
But I say "Anonymous Coward", I have seen your lack of parenthesis on multiple comments! HAHA!!!!
Sounds like they really just don't know.
It likely was a combination of factors, they say, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns and terrestrial processes.
But at least they are studying and learning.
"This abrupt, centennial-scale variability of CO2 appears to be a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle. "Previous research has hinted at the possibility that spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide may have accelerated the last deglaciation, but that hypothesis had not been resolved, the researchers say.
The earth has been from +14 to -6 degrees on average from where it is today. Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories. Its not like we had a thermocouple hooked up to a server recording that data for millions of years. These deductions are best effort conclusions on data that only tells a very broad stroke of the story.
What upsets me is how demonizing the argument about Global Warming / Climate Change is. The earth will change its temperature. That will happen with or without us, just look at the historical record. Earths temperature isn't stable. And for all those who argue we are burning too much fossil fuels, those carbon atoms weren't created into existence in the ground as they were today, unless you believe the earth is 6000 years old!
They were a part of the global carbon cycle, and buried during mass extinction events and processes that sequestered them to where they are today. It isn't science to say "for sure this and for sure that". Its science to say: "To the level of our current understanding...". Thats it. You can't know for certain, just like they didn't know for certain that the earth was the center of the universe, even though it was proselytized. Its not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions. All of science works better when there are those who are skeptical. It refines your proof if you are right, or betters your understanding if you are wrong.
As for the problems associated with climate change, it will happen. For those of us living where it will flood, there will be a new continent to live on, once it unfreezes (again!).
Apple Pay registers the card pretty fast, but not with BofA, you can't use their App to authenticate the card, you have to call in (at least you did when I registered my Credit and Debit cards. Capital One allows you to sign into the app and it instructs Apple Pay to go ahead.
/sarcasm
On the subject of "who will win", I think that the easiest payment options with the most security and largest spending consumer base will win. Historically, thats users who use Apple. QR codes and Bank ACH transfers lack two of the three things - security and ease. They also miss the boat on a big number of other ancillary benefits Apple Pay has going for it:
1. Apple Pay can be used online.
2. There is no massive treasure trove of data for hackers to steal.
3. You can not ACH from a credit card. Guess where most of the retailers get their money from? Hint: Its not people's bank accounts, those are used to pay off credit cards.
4. If CurrentC participating retailers block Apple Pay (which is really to block NFC transactions), it stands to reason that Apple may block any CurrentC applications from their App Store. They could always point and say "In response to...".
Apple Pay will end up being just another NFC service, but NFC will ring the winner. What is Walmart / Best Buy / CVS going to do? Displace Visa/MC in the hundreds of countries that are already in? How many Visa terminals are there? Right.
I suppose they have all the legal work figured out as well, and don't mind bankrupting themselves in the process.
What I meant was many stores will have their own payment systems, and others will support the broad systems from Apple/Google, and some will be late to the "payment revolution", and so on and so fourth. Once it makes economic sense to adopt system X, they will adopt it. We still have to see how Apple Pay stands up to real world threats, heavy load, availability concerns, network issues (if the store is not in great cell range), etc.... We still don't know what happens when you take the big system you just made and apply it to the big load waiting for its availability and adoption. Time will tell us what the stores end up using because it will be the best system from a realistic point of view.
Once competition decides what service we decide to favor. A bunch of services will fail, 3 or 4 will remain and be universally accepted. Just look at the credit card networks for reference as to how this will play out.
It stands to reason then that apple saw this comming. They can point to the "free" nature of its downloads and say "but the OS costs nothing!". So you can take your wonderful new machine, and install whatever you want on it.
That seems like a lot of dick-measuring on the part of developers. Why wouldn't Canonical simply update the repository with patches that address known security vulnerabilities? Where is the years of support? When you update your package list, the developers of those packages should be able to post updates...
This is why Linux is not desktop ready... to many stubborn minds pushing their way.
Group of genes, not protiens! My bad.
My guess is that the fact that no organisms exist with a Neanderthal genome defines them as extinct. Where one draws the line is more art than science I guess. There is a species of Galapagos tortoise that was biologically extinct since there was until recently just one male member (lonesome George). I know that there are some genetics in us (like the HMG group of proteins) that are ancient, but work so well that we still retain them. That doesn't mean the first species to have evolved them isn't extict, it just means we evolved from them.
Because regardless of weather or not you have a point, a lot of people will write off your opinion as "the rantings of an idiot".
I'm responsible for my childrens welfare. I'm not responsible for what they do because I cannot know everything they do without being the sort of insanely controlling parent who shouldn't have children anyway. Sure, I am control their bank account. That's easy. I'm actually controlling the bank, not the child. Anyone who had ever let a child walk to the corner store to buy milk knows you can't know what they do once out of sight. Making parents liable for that is just nuts. It's an impossible situation. It's like making you responsible for what I'm going to do next. Just as arbitrary and dumb as that.
So are you suggesting the children should be liable themselves? The state? Any adult within a few hundred feet? When a child hurts someone, who should then be liable is the question? When an adult hurts someone, they are either sued in civil court for compensation / damage relief; or tried by the state in criminal court.
Are you suggesting that the child be tried as an adult? Shared liability with the parents (both serve 1/2 time or something like that) or should the state be sending out checks every time a child causes injury to a third party?
The reason I say that parents should be liable is because you have to ask yourself: Who made the decision? The parents made a decision to have a child in the first place. Surely as we can tell, the child didn't decide to be conceived. The parents made the decision, so they should be responsible for the consequences of that decision. And in the state's case, they don't reap the rewards if the child does something productive or successful, potential benefit is under the control of the parents, of course; and so it should be. As well as the risks associated. You can not take all the rewards, and assume none of the risks in anything. Otherwise, why not have 100 children, blame the state for the 99 that don't make it successful, and claim the one who goes on Disney and becomes economically profitable? The child itself can't be responsible for making the decision because it can not understand all the consequences that go into making that decision, it is a child. Just like a computer can not understand that you are using it to write a nefarious program, and so the computer itself is not liable. That would be a silly notion. The entity making the decision has to be liable. Since the last decision made by an entity with responsibility is the parents, the judge was correct, they are the one's responsible. Neither the school, nor the state, nor the victims are in control of the child, can not discipline or punish the child, and so have no control themselves. How can this be anyone else's responsibility but the parent?
Why is custom hardware needed? Im just curious. There seem to be plenty of cheap ($100) SOC boards out there with ethernet ports. You only need one to route. Not sure what sort of hardware performance requirements the encryption and tunneling software would require, but surely one can be built for much less than $7500. Even a desktop with a bunch of 4x1GB port PCIe cards wouldn't cost a grand... its a desktop I know, but still....
He should consider using virtualization to increase his uptime since he is worried about multiple important systems on a single server. Virtualization gives you such good yields in consolidation, you can come out ahead while still using redundancy features like VMware FaultTolerance. Your vm runs "in-step" on two hosts, and will survive even if either host fails. Just requires 2X the used memory. That's still only the most extreme case though like for databases, as most servers should be able to survive a reboot (which is what happens when your host dies and there is capacity left in your cluster. The VM powers back up on another host.
If you are going to make me liable for something then I has to be something under my control. Short of tying my kids up in chains and never letting them do anything there is no way for me do absolutely guarantee that they will never do anything which causes liability. Not only would I refuse to do that it would be illegal and society does not want parents to do that: kids have to learn to control their own behaviour and that means giving them the freedom to do things wrong. Parents have to be responsible but not necessarily liable. If we are taking reasonable measures to supervise our kids online including giving them guidance on how to behave as well as punishing them when they do not then I believe we have fulfilled our responsibility as parents and should not be held liable if one of them disobeys us and libels someone while we are not watching. On the other hand if parents completely ignores their kids, provide no guidance or consequences then by all means find them negligent and hence liable through their act of negligence...but making parents automatically liable for their kids actions under all circumstances is unfair and encourages poor parenting since if means that you can't risk letting them fail. Indeed the only way to be sure would be to ban them from access the net: does society really want that?
Responsibility must mean liability. You can't claim to be responsible for something and then when it goes all wrong, stick your hands up in the air and say "not my fault!". If you are not liable and responsible, then you shouldn't have kids. They are under your control, thats what society has determined over generations to be the appropriate path to raising human beings.
Now, I do agree with you that they are not totally under your control. For example: you can not beat your kids, even if you believe that it is the best way to encourage the behavior out of them that would yield better results. You could say that the state prevented you from administering the discipline you believed would have corrected their behavior and sue the state. But if you need to be that strict with your kids, and feel you need to beat them, and don't have that option at your disposal (as we do not in the US, for obvious and good reasons), then you should be able to reach out to those limiting your choices, and limiting your liability, as they have limited your ability. Thats fair.
I acknowledge things are not that simple. But to say "I have responsibility, but limit my liability", I disagree. By having kids, you assumed that liability, and took the risk. If you are not able to judge, and assess those risks, then you shouldn't be having kids.
At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.
Nonsense.
If your kid is in a park, grabs a rock, throws it at someone and causes harm, then you are responsible. Not the parks office, not the city, not the state, and not in the case of this incident, the school.
As a parent you are responsible for the actions of your kids in place of themselves since they are children. If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school. It isn't accepting full liability because you chose to exercise their facilities to perform your actions. Just like an ISP isn't responsible if you use their network to organize a murder (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). The school is not liable, the person is. But, because the person is underage, the person's parents are responsible. Its as simple as that. You are responsible for your kids actions, you in place of them. Don't like it? Don't have kids. Having kids involves accepting responsibility for them. Its that simple.
So, no sir, you have it wrong.
So if I post a stock trade on the internet, am I not liable if it looses money? What if I repeat on the internet what someone has said IRL? What if it wasn't on the internet, but on some other network, or on a cell phone that traverses the internet using a VOIP backend or even better still, just a land line? If a terrorist posts a command to others to attack some entity, is he not liable because it was on the internet? Where does liability start?
To impose that whatever happens "on the internet" is not real and shouldn't count is just plain unrealistic. What you say should count, you said it! I think you should be free to say it anonymously as well, and be free of "backtracking" that comment to you. But if you connect yourself to the comment, then absolutely you should be liable. Why are you so against personal responsibility? People are responsible for their actions. Plain and simple, and thats a good thing. If you post a great work of art on the internet, you are entitled to its copyright, so you are reaping the rewards from that work, and you can't have benefit on one hand and reject liability on the other. By great work of art, imagine your photography, a game you made, or some other product.
Is it ridiculous to state that tangible harm was done because of said comment? Maybe. If so, prove it. We have a mechanism for managing the relationships between people and the harm they might inflict with their actions. That's why we have courts. Its a good thing, and a good system.
On Slashdot, clearly you can, or your last post would not have appeared. Being a peer-moderated system, approval only gets you modded up or down, but slashdot doesn't delete bad comments like yours, and neither does Facebook.
Why would posting defamatory remarks make the profile fake, or warrant its deletion? Also, just because you can delete something doesn't mean no harm was inflicted. Granted, it limits the extent, but if you post something derogatory, and cause pain and suffering (or for example in a worst case scenario: suicide), deleting it only limits the damage, it doesn't undo that damage.
If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well. You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.
The Municipal provider has the advantage of not needing customers to subscribe to collect it's fee's. It does this through taxes, which is coercion. I'm sorry, but it is. Your forcing someone to pay for something irrespective of the fact that they think it may be a good choice or not. Comcast will cover the cost and sell its service to everyone under the sun if they could, since they are GAURANTEED not to have competition, because your city gives them that guarantee. If such a guarantee was illegal, I imagine it would be too risky for one company to go in on it alone, at which point, multiple companies would form a corporation to SHARE THE COST AND ACCESS, or research cheaper methods, or lease their network to others who think they can do a better jobs like the ILECs. Competition is good, and as Milton Friedman explains so well, no decent law can prevent a monopoly, only create them.
No, No No No!!!! It doesn't matter if they are a wolf in wolf's clothing! They have a service to sell, and users should be free to to use it if they so choose.
What we should be against is any subsidization, special treatment, or monopolistic practices, always rooted in government. It is a fact, that monopolies can only exist for any great length of time with the help of a government law or regulation insuring their monopolistic status (with only one notable exception: The London DeBeers Corporation) . A monopoly exists and extorts their customers by jacking up prices, or delivering goods and services of a less than desirable quality. Barring any regulation preventing new competition, a competitor will always enter the market; because someone will have a business plan to either lower the cost, holding the quality constant, or raise the quality, holding the cost constant. In the US, capital is not a barrier to entry, as some investment house, or other financial mechanism is always looking to exercise their capital on a solid business plan.
That is how free markets work. When there is good competition, you have the highest available quality, and the lowest cost, the market will bear.
Choice is good, so long as the costs are realized, and not passed on to tax payers, who are then forced to be come a customer (via a lack of options, or because their taxes have already paid or partially paid for a good or service).
These councils need to get out of the business of "selecting" the internet provider and let the free market run its course. The outcome will always be what the customers choose, which is usually a variety of competitors, and thats a good thing!
Thats true if you do not have solar arrays that rotate to take advantage of the sun's maximum incidence, but in a commercial installation, thats non-sense. On a roof top, there are limitations such as aesthetics of having the panels flat against the roof, and maximum height of the structures that come into play that don't need to be considered for commercial installations. The commercial installations move their collectors to attain a maximum incidence throughout the day, by remaining perpendicular to the sun, as the systems are far too cheap and panels far too costly to not take advantage of. In California, the conservative estimation given clouds and hours is 7 useful hours per day on average throughout the year (less than the 8 I was estimating).
I was just giving an example for easy maths (8 hours is one third of a day), etc.. but you are right in the sense that you would have to scale up the lower amount of sunlight you have. I would also argue that my assessment assumes you want to remain energy-neutral and not economically-neutral. Since sunlight produces peak power, your KW/h is more expensive when you sell it than at night when you buy it back.
Right, and any area has to be evaluated for its most economical method of night-time power. But as I said, most data centers will be able to be powered by the relatively low-cost off peak power at night. Cities get their street lights powered at little or no cost because the power companies need to "burn off" the power they generate at night because they can not power off the plants, and there needs to be some load (I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but its what we were taught in H.S. in the 90's physics class). Im sure its also dependent on the kind of power system and plant design in use. As I said, the grid will be happy to take excess power in the day and return it back at night. If you truly gave the daily amount of power, in and out, you would also make money. Peak power (which you are providing via solar in excess of your load is more expensive than off-peak power which you are consuming at night, KW/h for KW/h.