Sorry, education has been tried. People who have advocated that have had free reign for twenty years and all that's happened is that STDs, recklessness, kids being born without two committed parents, innocence lost, etc. have increased to epidemic levels.
Unsafe acts are not safe. For example birth control is only 99.9% effective. So how long does it take the average sex starved teenager to engage in 1000 sex acts? Three years? Five Years? That's mean time between failure, and means a sexually active female has almost 100% chance of an unwanted pregnancy. Condoms in the field are only 85% effective. That means 15 out of 100 people who use condoms are vulnerable to infection every year.
So we can talk about it, but sex crazed adults don't want to talk about facts, they want to indoctrinate children to have them follow the same unsafe practices that are causing the problems.
Spam exists because it is profitable for someone. Basically costs are externalized. The spammer pays almost nothing and the customer, if only a few hundred of the thousands or millions of spam emails garner a sucker from whom you can extort money, wins.
Never believe that people don't still fall for the Nigerian Prince scam. Idiot talk shows are full of people who have, many of whom still refuse to believe they've been taken.
You can never underestimate the intelligence of the intelligence of some people.
This AT&T and the AT&T that was broken up are not the same company. This AT&T started as a cellular company that bought the AT&T name when the last visage of the broken up AT&T finally went bankrupt.
That being said it is right in line with the abusive practices of cellular companies in general.
In the long run its pretty unimportant except to people living on the edge though. If the difference between your economic survival is a partial payment back from AT&T then you probably shouldn't have been using them anyway. Just cancel at the end of the month and remember what d***ks they were about it when they offer you a discount to come back and tell them to stuff it. You're inconvenienced for a few weeks and they've lost a customer for life. Eventually they'll get it, or not and follow the old AT&T into bankruptcy.
It comes down to trying to live like their parents did even when their parents shafted them by voting for Trickle down economics just to get some short term tax cuts and maybe "stiggit" to the libs a bit. TFA is just more fuel on that fire.
No it comes down to them trying to live like their parents did after a lifetime of success. They want the McMansion, New car and fancy $1000 cell phone at an age when their parents were in a crappy starter home, drove a beater and had a line phone in the kitchen.
So are you maintaining that a Millenial is making 20% less than a Boomer who has the same skills and experience or are you saying a Boomer with years experience against a Millenial with relatively minor experience I think that's justified.
If you can afford the down payment buying is almost always cheaper than renting, provided you are smart and have discipline.
To start with you've got to remember the Realtor always works for the seller and they work on commission. That means it is to their benefit to try to get you to spend too much. The same with the bank. The more they lend you the more they make, so they will over qualify you. Be disciplined. I live in a townhome instead of a McMansion, though I could probably afford one. It never went underwater and I would make a modest profit if I sold, but meanwhile I've paid less than what it would have cost me to live in a rental townhouse the same size.
There are definitely better and worse times to buy. 2008-2009 was a great time to buy and a crappy time to sell, especially if you overpaid. Many properties which were underwater in 2009 have recovered nine years later and those folks who walked away because they were underwater basically threw away a lot of money. (I understand some lost their income and had no choice, but a lot just decided they wouldn't pay for a house that, on paper, was worth less than they borrowed.)
I do certainly agree that putting money away is a good idea. Experts say you should have at least six month's salary in savings, above what you might have put away for retirement.
The SUV and Truck market prove that tariffs do work. Trucks and SUVs are the only area that American car makers are competitive in. Why are they competitive? Anyone who tells you its because Japanese and European companies don't make trucks and SUVs is wrong. They all make trucks and SUVs and to sell them in the U.S. they face a >20% tariff.
GM is using the excuse that a $200 increase on a $40,000 is why they can't continue to make sedans, when the reason they can't sell sedans is because they make crappy sedans.
Other countries that put high tariffs on U.S. goods seem to be doing just fine. These economic 'free trade" rules only seem to apply to the U.S.
You make money in insurance by selling to people who don't use it. So to get insurance companies to cover pre-exisiting conditions and other bad risks Obamacare forced healthy young people, who wouldn't typically buy insurance beyond catastrophic coverage, to buy full policies that cover stuff they would never use. Insurance companies make a huge amount over what they were making before and take a part of that to cover bad risks and pocket the rest.
Obamacare was written by the insurance industry for the insurance industry. Since many of those required under Obamacare to buy insurance couldn't afford it that meant the government, primarily the states, most of whom are required by law to maintain a balance budget, would be required to pony up the money. So win for insurance companies, loss for taxpayers.
And when it all shook out just as many people or more than before were uninsured, so it did not even fix that problem.
Because its all about productivity. If I buy wood for $1 and turn it into a box I sell for $2 I have created wealth. I have been productive.
If you take my $2 and give $1 of it to 3 other people because UBI what you have done is unsustainable. Pies have nothing to do with it. Further If you're going to take my $2 why should I continue to make boxes at all. Rather I will take my $2 and go to Notaxia where people don't take the fruit of my productivity.
Too true. One of my favorite restaurants, which was fairly quiet and always busy recently closed because the landlord jacked up the rent and they had to close.
I hoped the space would remain empty long enough to give the landlord pause, but they fooled me. They lent it out almost immediately by offering a great rate to a new tenant, which I understand was about the same or lower than the last tenant. WFT!
I absolutely believe that our (U.S.) immigration policy is broken. We have limits set by progressives in the early and middle 20th century to keep out Jews and Eastern Europeans, and just about anyone who isn't a Western European. A legal immigrant from Mexico would have to wait >50 years to legally enter the country if they wait their turn.
That being said any country that is unwilling to defend its border and effectively screen who can enter and remain there has effectively surrendered it's sovereignty.
There's no way I believe that every person who wants to or has entered the U.S. illegally is a threat to the peace and well being of its citizens, however that fact is that without effective border controls anyone who is a threat cannot be stopped before they do harm.
I only want effective border control so that we can deal with the real problem of bad immigration law. As long as Republicans can use bad border control as an excuse to address the law problem they will. Securing the border takes away their reasons not to address the real problems. Conversely as long as large numbers of illegals can get into the country the Democrats have no reason to address bad immigration laws either. So a porous border allows both sides to ignore the real problem. Fixing the border will allow those of us who care about really fixing the laws to hold both sides feet to the fire.
Nike for one isn't interested in tech progression. They're interested selling stuff.
The basic change between the 1960's and now is that in the 1960's no one wore athletic shoes outside the gym. In the gym they bought whatever brand shoes the local shoe store or five and dime stocked. By and large brand names weren't a thing except for the very rich, and they did not buy off the rack.
As for Boeing in the 1960s only upper middle class and above flew. Most people going to Europe still went by ocean liner. For most other people an airplane flight was a few times in a lifetime thing.
In Nike's case the change is almost 100% about marketing.
In Boeing's case its all about deregulation of the airlines, advancement of technology, post-9/11, and lack of competition.
The only part of the clothing industry that involves IP at all is Trademark, not copyright. That why designers slap their logo on their designs because no one can copy their design if it includes the logo. Take the logo off and it's not protected.
So people buy legal knockoffs all the time, where it's a MIC purse instead of an MK purse where the MIC kinda looks like a MK. Totally legal, though designers sometimes scream about it.
The free rider 'problem' is not a problem. The fashion industry does fine because some people want 'original' designs by specific designers, not knockoffs, and will pay for the privilege. Often the better, designer items are made of better materials or with better workmanship. So people pay extra for them.
The purpose of copyright to to promote innovation and creation. Anyone who has an internet connection can find millions if not hundred of millions of free novels, songs, art or all types posted on line. Given away by the creators. There is also stuff for sale, which people actually buy, without onerous DRM.
All existing copyright does is benefit parasites and mediocre artist who pass the parasite gatekeepers.
Best example I can think of. The Martian was first posted for free. Later the author posted it on Amazon for a dine, because that was as little as he was allowed to. It became a best seller and many people who had read it for free paid the dime for it and the higher price for the paper published version or ebook.
They did this because it was good and they wanted to support the author. No one had to hold a gun to their head to do it and the creator created it because he was interested in the subject, with no expectation, I'm sure that it would someday make him a millionaire.
Copyright to spark creativity is obsolete. It is unnecessary. Its purpose is suppose to be to increase the public domain, instead it has been subverted to make individuals, many of whom are not creators, rich.
Not Canadian but I think that it's a problem not limited to Canada. The fact is that local talent has always made the majority of their money from live performances. For some big performers, with really crappy contracts with distributors, they still make the majority of their money through live performances, which is why big name bands still do tours, and because distributors think that tours help sell product.
The problem really is that the present paradigm is untenable. Streams are too easy and cheap to make much money off of, for both performers and media companies.
The media companies want it to go back to like it was before, but of course it won't. At some level if they make it too onerous to get recorded music people will make their own or turn to live local artists, who will make most of their money through live performance.
It's many times worse than peopel 'accidentally' downloading. I run torrent to do things like download LibraOffice and Linux distributions. From time to time I get a violation notice from my ISP. Once they even cut me off and I had to call them.
Someone claimed that they had proof I had downloaded specific files, porn files, at specific times. Luckily I log my traffic. When I called the ISP their first answer was I shouldn't be running Torrent software, which I use for legitimate purposes. Their next was for me to directly contact the shills who claimed I had infringed. They were a company whom I know have a history of instituting lawsuits against innocent people and then leveraging $5000 or so from them to go away, as opposed to spending tens of thousands in court opposing them. They send out thousands of infringement notices without proof hoping to get a couple of hundred fools stupid enough to contact them directly.
When I told the ISP I had logs of my traffic and that I would be dealing with them over this, not some random IP troll they decided to turn me back on.
No blocking of access should even be considered until the IP owner can prove a violation has occurred. That means tying it to a specific individual, not IP address or MAC access. If they can't do that tough.
Meanwhile these IP trolls should have to pay fines for every false claim they make.
The term "black channels" is itself vague. The point isn't that the content contains African-American actors or presenters, but that the production company is owned by African-Americans. So the contention is that Charter refused to do business with an African-American owned company, not whether the content contained black performers.
So the fact that Charter might carry a program produced by Disney or Warner Brothers that contains African-American performers is not a defense.
Contentions that executives at Charter exhibited racist behavior, combined with their refusal to do business with a company owned by a racial minority in damning legally and has little to do with program content.
Satellite broadcast are vulnerable to interruptions due to weather. Where I'm at satellite TV looses the signal every time it rains.
OTA has limited bandwidth. You get dozens of channels as opposed to hundreds.
This also ignores the piece of the cable business that is not relevant to this story, which is data broadband. In most places there is simply no competition in broadband. I have exactly one choice for real, actual broadband, and that's cable. That makes cable a monopoly for me.
The problem with flying cars is that in general people can't be trusted to maneuver an object that they can drop on people's heads, so a pilot's license requires thousands of dollars to procure and hundreds of hours.
Once flying cars no longer require a human pilot, i.e. they are autonomous vehicles, then we will have flying cars. A number of companies are already working on it. Will everyone have one? No, but rich people will and most other people who have income will use them like Uber (who may even be one of the companies who own them.)
Homeless wasn't an issue until the 1980's because until the 1980's cities and towns could pass vagrant laws and tell those without an abode within the jurisdiction to be at the city line by sundown. Then vagrancy laws were declared unconstitutional and suddenly we have a homeless problem. There is a reason that during the Great Depression camps were formed primarily in the countryside. That was because cities and towns could kick out the homeless.
So no homeless didn't increase. It just became more visible.
As for fallout shelters. In the 1950's it seemed possible to survive a nuclear attack. In the present day anyone who lives in an actual target area, such as Virginia knows that so many nukes will be blanketing the area that everything will be vaporized. Additionally fall out shelters were meant to protect from fallout (no Duh) and we know now that it will be hundreds if not thousands of years before radiation levels will decrease enough to survive outside a shelter. So shelters are useless. They always were. They were a political salve to the population rather than a serious survival tool.
No one I know is snickering about California, and I live on the East Coast.
I do agree about medicines though. Part of that is that Salk owned the patent for his discovery. Now patents are owned by companies and their decisions ARE made by souless bean counters who only care about making money. But they are not reflective of the vast majority of the population.
In many cases discoveries were made by people tinkering in their garages. One of the reasons that doesn't happen so much now isn't just because science is so expensive. It's because so much of technology is locked up by IP laws. Most technological advances were made by leveraging the discoveries of a bunch of other people to make something new. Now it's difficult to do that unless you're a big company that can pay for all of the entangled IP.
Part of the problems can be laid at the feat of the ridiculous length and span of copyright and other intellectual property law. I work at a national lab and you would be shock at the number of times we can't use some specific mathematical algorithm because some bozo had patented it and it's too expensive to license the number of copies of the relevant software to do the job.
Want to fix the rate of scientific progress? Look into changing IP law, as well as getting rid of perish or publish, change the way grants are administered etc.
Why would you ever send directions in an email? If you are logged in to Google when you search out a map on a computer and then open it on your phone that destination comes up as the first search.
I use Maps all the time to go just about everywhere, even places I know how to go, so that I can use the fastest route feature and see slowdowns, as well as arrival time. I have noticed no delays or bloat.
I can tell you that if you're traveling through somewhere like metropolitan New Jersey or New York, where the road suck and massive construction always seems to be going on it sucks. That has little to nothing to do with Google Maps and everything to do with the roads sucking. Nothing is going to fix that.
I can also say from experience if you're checking cross roads to look for parking most of the time you can just ask Google for "parking near" your destination. That works, no pinching or scanning necessary.
I recently used Google Maps for a cross country trip. Its features allowed me to add destinations along the way (primarily gas and food). I had no problem with it. It ran smoothly through dead spots. Routed me around slowdowns. Got me to my hotel, located on federal land in national lab. It also got me to destinations in the area of my hotel. It wasn't slow and it didn't seem bloated.
I was extremely concerned about Whittaker taking over the role, especially as Capaldi seemed to hold so much promise but failed to deliver on almost every level, including a stream of stories on the evil of capitalism.
I have been pleasantly surprised. Whittaker has the Doctor nailed. She's the best modern Doctor since Tennant in my opinion.
Rosa was great. Alabama in the 50's might as well be another planet. There was no preaching. They just showed how it was. Have a problem with that? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
The Punjab episode could have been from the First Doctor's era. A real historical episode in which the alien influence was actually no influence at all. I also liked that it showed the Doctor could be wrong.
I'm actually a little surprised the rates aren't holding up. I'll be interested to see what world wide ratings do.
In the U.S. speech protections generally include protection from per-publication censorship. That is, I can say what ever I want and media is free to report on it. Now if I have violated the law I can be prosecuted for that violation, but people who repeat what I've said (such as news organizations) cannot be prosecuted.
This is a pretty high bar. It's why the NY Times could not be prevent from printing the Pentagon Papers once they were released. And why they could not be charged with espionage in that case.
Typically the problem has been that the U.S. is an early adopter. We got cell phones first so there were competing standards. By the time other countries jumped on the bandwagon a clear technology winner was established and so they never faced the competing standards with installed infrastructure problem.
The U.S. invented the credit card. The same applies.
Second is scope. The U.S. is big, with fifty different legal standards for most things. Many people consider this a feature not a bug, but this means that in many cases federal regulators can't just impose requirements on banks and retailers.
Like everything else its a matter of winners and losers. Who loses if security is bad and who wins if its good? Like the casinos the banks never lose. It's unclear if normal customers win if security is good. Most people never get hit by fraud in a way that hurts. I've had banks replace my cards dozens of times due to fraudulent charges over the years, never been charged a cent for the charges, or even been inconvenienced, except for having to change the charge number in my on line accounts.
Have I paid more for products or service over that time due to the collective cost of fraud? Probably, but I can't quantify that amount. And I'm not totally convinced the banks, credit card companies and retailers wouldn't have charged the same and pocketed the difference anyway.
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Sorry, education has been tried. People who have advocated that have had free reign for twenty years and all that's happened is that STDs, recklessness, kids being born without two committed parents, innocence lost, etc. have increased to epidemic levels.
Unsafe acts are not safe. For example birth control is only 99.9% effective. So how long does it take the average sex starved teenager to engage in 1000 sex acts? Three years? Five Years? That's mean time between failure, and means a sexually active female has almost 100% chance of an unwanted pregnancy. Condoms in the field are only 85% effective. That means 15 out of 100 people who use condoms are vulnerable to infection every year.
So we can talk about it, but sex crazed adults don't want to talk about facts, they want to indoctrinate children to have them follow the same unsafe practices that are causing the problems.
Spam exists because it is profitable for someone. Basically costs are externalized. The spammer pays almost nothing and the customer, if only a few hundred of the thousands or millions of spam emails garner a sucker from whom you can extort money, wins.
Never believe that people don't still fall for the Nigerian Prince scam. Idiot talk shows are full of people who have, many of whom still refuse to believe they've been taken.
You can never underestimate the intelligence of the intelligence of some people.
This AT&T and the AT&T that was broken up are not the same company. This AT&T started as a cellular company that bought the AT&T name when the last visage of the broken up AT&T finally went bankrupt.
That being said it is right in line with the abusive practices of cellular companies in general.
In the long run its pretty unimportant except to people living on the edge though. If the difference between your economic survival is a partial payment back from AT&T then you probably shouldn't have been using them anyway. Just cancel at the end of the month and remember what d***ks they were about it when they offer you a discount to come back and tell them to stuff it. You're inconvenienced for a few weeks and they've lost a customer for life. Eventually they'll get it, or not and follow the old AT&T into bankruptcy.
It comes down to trying to live like their parents did even when their parents shafted them by voting for Trickle down economics just to get some short term tax cuts and maybe "stiggit" to the libs a bit. TFA is just more fuel on that fire.
No it comes down to them trying to live like their parents did after a lifetime of success. They want the McMansion, New car and fancy $1000 cell phone at an age when their parents were in a crappy starter home, drove a beater and had a line phone in the kitchen.
So are you maintaining that a Millenial is making 20% less than a Boomer who has the same skills and experience or are you saying a Boomer with years experience against a Millenial with relatively minor experience I think that's justified.
If you can afford the down payment buying is almost always cheaper than renting, provided you are smart and have discipline.
To start with you've got to remember the Realtor always works for the seller and they work on commission. That means it is to their benefit to try to get you to spend too much. The same with the bank. The more they lend you the more they make, so they will over qualify you. Be disciplined. I live in a townhome instead of a McMansion, though I could probably afford one. It never went underwater and I would make a modest profit if I sold, but meanwhile I've paid less than what it would have cost me to live in a rental townhouse the same size.
There are definitely better and worse times to buy. 2008-2009 was a great time to buy and a crappy time to sell, especially if you overpaid. Many properties which were underwater in 2009 have recovered nine years later and those folks who walked away because they were underwater basically threw away a lot of money. (I understand some lost their income and had no choice, but a lot just decided they wouldn't pay for a house that, on paper, was worth less than they borrowed.)
I do certainly agree that putting money away is a good idea. Experts say you should have at least six month's salary in savings, above what you might have put away for retirement.
The SUV and Truck market prove that tariffs do work. Trucks and SUVs are the only area that American car makers are competitive in. Why are they competitive? Anyone who tells you its because Japanese and European companies don't make trucks and SUVs is wrong. They all make trucks and SUVs and to sell them in the U.S. they face a >20% tariff.
GM is using the excuse that a $200 increase on a $40,000 is why they can't continue to make sedans, when the reason they can't sell sedans is because they make crappy sedans.
Other countries that put high tariffs on U.S. goods seem to be doing just fine. These economic 'free trade" rules only seem to apply to the U.S.
You make money in insurance by selling to people who don't use it. So to get insurance companies to cover pre-exisiting conditions and other bad risks Obamacare forced healthy young people, who wouldn't typically buy insurance beyond catastrophic coverage, to buy full policies that cover stuff they would never use. Insurance companies make a huge amount over what they were making before and take a part of that to cover bad risks and pocket the rest.
Obamacare was written by the insurance industry for the insurance industry. Since many of those required under Obamacare to buy insurance couldn't afford it that meant the government, primarily the states, most of whom are required by law to maintain a balance budget, would be required to pony up the money. So win for insurance companies, loss for taxpayers.
And when it all shook out just as many people or more than before were uninsured, so it did not even fix that problem.
Because its all about productivity. If I buy wood for $1 and turn it into a box I sell for $2 I have created wealth. I have been productive.
If you take my $2 and give $1 of it to 3 other people because UBI what you have done is unsustainable. Pies have nothing to do with it. Further If you're going to take my $2 why should I continue to make boxes at all. Rather I will take my $2 and go to Notaxia where people don't take the fruit of my productivity.
Too true. One of my favorite restaurants, which was fairly quiet and always busy recently closed because the landlord jacked up the rent and they had to close.
I hoped the space would remain empty long enough to give the landlord pause, but they fooled me. They lent it out almost immediately by offering a great rate to a new tenant, which I understand was about the same or lower than the last tenant. WFT!
Some people are just stupid.
I absolutely believe that our (U.S.) immigration policy is broken. We have limits set by progressives in the early and middle 20th century to keep out Jews and Eastern Europeans, and just about anyone who isn't a Western European. A legal immigrant from Mexico would have to wait >50 years to legally enter the country if they wait their turn.
That being said any country that is unwilling to defend its border and effectively screen who can enter and remain there has effectively surrendered it's sovereignty.
There's no way I believe that every person who wants to or has entered the U.S. illegally is a threat to the peace and well being of its citizens, however that fact is that without effective border controls anyone who is a threat cannot be stopped before they do harm.
I only want effective border control so that we can deal with the real problem of bad immigration law. As long as Republicans can use bad border control as an excuse to address the law problem they will. Securing the border takes away their reasons not to address the real problems. Conversely as long as large numbers of illegals can get into the country the Democrats have no reason to address bad immigration laws either. So a porous border allows both sides to ignore the real problem. Fixing the border will allow those of us who care about really fixing the laws to hold both sides feet to the fire.
Nike for one isn't interested in tech progression. They're interested selling stuff.
The basic change between the 1960's and now is that in the 1960's no one wore athletic shoes outside the gym. In the gym they bought whatever brand shoes the local shoe store or five and dime stocked. By and large brand names weren't a thing except for the very rich, and they did not buy off the rack.
As for Boeing in the 1960s only upper middle class and above flew. Most people going to Europe still went by ocean liner. For most other people an airplane flight was a few times in a lifetime thing.
In Nike's case the change is almost 100% about marketing.
In Boeing's case its all about deregulation of the airlines, advancement of technology, post-9/11, and lack of competition.
The only part of the clothing industry that involves IP at all is Trademark, not copyright. That why designers slap their logo on their designs because no one can copy their design if it includes the logo. Take the logo off and it's not protected.
So people buy legal knockoffs all the time, where it's a MIC purse instead of an MK purse where the MIC kinda looks like a MK. Totally legal, though designers sometimes scream about it.
The free rider 'problem' is not a problem. The fashion industry does fine because some people want 'original' designs by specific designers, not knockoffs, and will pay for the privilege. Often the better, designer items are made of better materials or with better workmanship. So people pay extra for them.
The purpose of copyright to to promote innovation and creation. Anyone who has an internet connection can find millions if not hundred of millions of free novels, songs, art or all types posted on line. Given away by the creators. There is also stuff for sale, which people actually buy, without onerous DRM.
All existing copyright does is benefit parasites and mediocre artist who pass the parasite gatekeepers.
Best example I can think of. The Martian was first posted for free. Later the author posted it on Amazon for a dine, because that was as little as he was allowed to. It became a best seller and many people who had read it for free paid the dime for it and the higher price for the paper published version or ebook.
They did this because it was good and they wanted to support the author. No one had to hold a gun to their head to do it and the creator created it because he was interested in the subject, with no expectation, I'm sure that it would someday make him a millionaire.
Copyright to spark creativity is obsolete. It is unnecessary. Its purpose is suppose to be to increase the public domain, instead it has been subverted to make individuals, many of whom are not creators, rich.
Not Canadian but I think that it's a problem not limited to Canada. The fact is that local talent has always made the majority of their money from live performances. For some big performers, with really crappy contracts with distributors, they still make the majority of their money through live performances, which is why big name bands still do tours, and because distributors think that tours help sell product.
The problem really is that the present paradigm is untenable. Streams are too easy and cheap to make much money off of, for both performers and media companies.
The media companies want it to go back to like it was before, but of course it won't. At some level if they make it too onerous to get recorded music people will make their own or turn to live local artists, who will make most of their money through live performance.
It's many times worse than peopel 'accidentally' downloading. I run torrent to do things like download LibraOffice and Linux distributions. From time to time I get a violation notice from my ISP. Once they even cut me off and I had to call them.
Someone claimed that they had proof I had downloaded specific files, porn files, at specific times. Luckily I log my traffic. When I called the ISP their first answer was I shouldn't be running Torrent software, which I use for legitimate purposes. Their next was for me to directly contact the shills who claimed I had infringed. They were a company whom I know have a history of instituting lawsuits against innocent people and then leveraging $5000 or so from them to go away, as opposed to spending tens of thousands in court opposing them. They send out thousands of infringement notices without proof hoping to get a couple of hundred fools stupid enough to contact them directly.
When I told the ISP I had logs of my traffic and that I would be dealing with them over this, not some random IP troll they decided to turn me back on.
No blocking of access should even be considered until the IP owner can prove a violation has occurred. That means tying it to a specific individual, not IP address or MAC access. If they can't do that tough.
Meanwhile these IP trolls should have to pay fines for every false claim they make.
The term "black channels" is itself vague. The point isn't that the content contains African-American actors or presenters, but that the production company is owned by African-Americans. So the contention is that Charter refused to do business with an African-American owned company, not whether the content contained black performers.
So the fact that Charter might carry a program produced by Disney or Warner Brothers that contains African-American performers is not a defense.
Contentions that executives at Charter exhibited racist behavior, combined with their refusal to do business with a company owned by a racial minority in damning legally and has little to do with program content.
DirectTV and OTA are not equivalent to cable.
Satellite broadcast are vulnerable to interruptions due to weather. Where I'm at satellite TV looses the signal every time it rains.
OTA has limited bandwidth. You get dozens of channels as opposed to hundreds.
This also ignores the piece of the cable business that is not relevant to this story, which is data broadband. In most places there is simply no competition in broadband. I have exactly one choice for real, actual broadband, and that's cable. That makes cable a monopoly for me.
The problem with flying cars is that in general people can't be trusted to maneuver an object that they can drop on people's heads, so a pilot's license requires thousands of dollars to procure and hundreds of hours.
Once flying cars no longer require a human pilot, i.e. they are autonomous vehicles, then we will have flying cars. A number of companies are already working on it. Will everyone have one? No, but rich people will and most other people who have income will use them like Uber (who may even be one of the companies who own them.)
Homeless wasn't an issue until the 1980's because until the 1980's cities and towns could pass vagrant laws and tell those without an abode within the jurisdiction to be at the city line by sundown. Then vagrancy laws were declared unconstitutional and suddenly we have a homeless problem. There is a reason that during the Great Depression camps were formed primarily in the countryside. That was because cities and towns could kick out the homeless.
So no homeless didn't increase. It just became more visible.
As for fallout shelters. In the 1950's it seemed possible to survive a nuclear attack. In the present day anyone who lives in an actual target area, such as Virginia knows that so many nukes will be blanketing the area that everything will be vaporized. Additionally fall out shelters were meant to protect from fallout (no Duh) and we know now that it will be hundreds if not thousands of years before radiation levels will decrease enough to survive outside a shelter. So shelters are useless. They always were. They were a political salve to the population rather than a serious survival tool.
No one I know is snickering about California, and I live on the East Coast.
I do agree about medicines though. Part of that is that Salk owned the patent for his discovery. Now patents are owned by companies and their decisions ARE made by souless bean counters who only care about making money. But they are not reflective of the vast majority of the population.
In many cases discoveries were made by people tinkering in their garages. One of the reasons that doesn't happen so much now isn't just because science is so expensive. It's because so much of technology is locked up by IP laws. Most technological advances were made by leveraging the discoveries of a bunch of other people to make something new. Now it's difficult to do that unless you're a big company that can pay for all of the entangled IP.
Part of the problems can be laid at the feat of the ridiculous length and span of copyright and other intellectual property law. I work at a national lab and you would be shock at the number of times we can't use some specific mathematical algorithm because some bozo had patented it and it's too expensive to license the number of copies of the relevant software to do the job.
Want to fix the rate of scientific progress? Look into changing IP law, as well as getting rid of perish or publish, change the way grants are administered etc.
With phones it's all about the network. So maybe the S5 user is on Sprint instead of Verizon?
Why would you ever send directions in an email? If you are logged in to Google when you search out a map on a computer and then open it on your phone that destination comes up as the first search.
I use Maps all the time to go just about everywhere, even places I know how to go, so that I can use the fastest route feature and see slowdowns, as well as arrival time. I have noticed no delays or bloat.
I can tell you that if you're traveling through somewhere like metropolitan New Jersey or New York, where the road suck and massive construction always seems to be going on it sucks. That has little to nothing to do with Google Maps and everything to do with the roads sucking. Nothing is going to fix that.
I can also say from experience if you're checking cross roads to look for parking most of the time you can just ask Google for "parking near" your destination. That works, no pinching or scanning necessary.
I recently used Google Maps for a cross country trip. Its features allowed me to add destinations along the way (primarily gas and food). I had no problem with it. It ran smoothly through dead spots. Routed me around slowdowns. Got me to my hotel, located on federal land in national lab. It also got me to destinations in the area of my hotel. It wasn't slow and it didn't seem bloated.
I was extremely concerned about Whittaker taking over the role, especially as Capaldi seemed to hold so much promise but failed to deliver on almost every level, including a stream of stories on the evil of capitalism.
I have been pleasantly surprised. Whittaker has the Doctor nailed. She's the best modern Doctor since Tennant in my opinion.
Rosa was great. Alabama in the 50's might as well be another planet. There was no preaching. They just showed how it was. Have a problem with that? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
The Punjab episode could have been from the First Doctor's era. A real historical episode in which the alien influence was actually no influence at all. I also liked that it showed the Doctor could be wrong.
I'm actually a little surprised the rates aren't holding up. I'll be interested to see what world wide ratings do.
In the U.S. speech protections generally include protection from per-publication censorship. That is, I can say what ever I want and media is free to report on it. Now if I have violated the law I can be prosecuted for that violation, but people who repeat what I've said (such as news organizations) cannot be prosecuted.
This is a pretty high bar. It's why the NY Times could not be prevent from printing the Pentagon Papers once they were released. And why they could not be charged with espionage in that case.
So no the U.S. government cannot remove speech.
Typically the problem has been that the U.S. is an early adopter. We got cell phones first so there were competing standards. By the time other countries jumped on the bandwagon a clear technology winner was established and so they never faced the competing standards with installed infrastructure problem.
The U.S. invented the credit card. The same applies.
Second is scope. The U.S. is big, with fifty different legal standards for most things. Many people consider this a feature not a bug, but this means that in many cases federal regulators can't just impose requirements on banks and retailers.
Like everything else its a matter of winners and losers. Who loses if security is bad and who wins if its good? Like the casinos the banks never lose. It's unclear if normal customers win if security is good. Most people never get hit by fraud in a way that hurts. I've had banks replace my cards dozens of times due to fraudulent charges over the years, never been charged a cent for the charges, or even been inconvenienced, except for having to change the charge number in my on line accounts.
Have I paid more for products or service over that time due to the collective cost of fraud? Probably, but I can't quantify that amount. And I'm not totally convinced the banks, credit card companies and retailers wouldn't have charged the same and pocketed the difference anyway.