I've actually done this with some of his old videotapes as well as converting the VHS&DVD songs to CD, I just haven't gotten around to it with the DVDs themselves.
Some of the Thomas the Tank Engine videos my three-year old is in love with have 3 seperate, unskippable "We made this!" snippets, along with the FBI warning and two trailers. (At least the latter are skippable.)
Now add in menus that have to go through the entire minute plus animation before responding, it can easily take three minutes from disc insert to viewing the video. Ever waited with a three year old desperate for his fix for that long?
By the way, check the 1992 revolution in LA that was turned down quite brutally, where's their right to revolution?
Umm dude, speaking as one of the people who "brutally" put down the revolution (D Co, 1/149 Armor, CA ARNG), it was nothing of the sort. It was a bunch of people out to destroy and steal what they could while the police were overwhelmed. They had no political agenda beyond "I want that TV" or "I want to burn down that shop". Look at some of the TV interviews with looters during the riots- they're quite honest about what they were doing.
As far as being brutally put down, my unit despite being in one of the absolute worst areas of LA (Rampart) did not fire a shot, and indeed never used physical force beyond rounding up some illegal immigrants. (INS had a field day) The rioters in our area were in far more danger from the Korean storeowners who were armed to the teeth and not afraid to shoot back. There were a few bad instances (one about two blocks from my HQ) but the Guard had all the free food we could eat- people were stopping us on the streets to thank us for being there.
Actually, that's a great example. Car makers *don't* advertise top speeds. Motor Trend and the like might, but the car makers themselves do not. You'll see horsepower, gearings, etc, but not top speeds.
There was an intersting point in some news magazine lately about this. Dodge has an "advertgame" where you can drive Dodge cars in a race. The cars are closely modeled after real Dodges, of course, and thus have realistic top speeds. The article commented that this was a great way to get around the ban on advertising top speeds- it's not illegal to race cars on designated tracks, and all they are doing is showing reality...
The court seems to be acting pretty rational lately
You're on crack. I point you to
Kelo vs. New London, where the court just ruled that government can take your house away if the for-profit corporation who wants it will pay higher taxes, and
Gonzales v. Raich, where the SCOTUS ruled that growing, processing and consuming a plant entirely within a given state is forbidden because the federal laws trump the states, and the feds have authority because they can regulate interstate commerce.
This actually brings up a more interesting point. Since your credits are based on users who download AFTER you, it will become important not only to grab that hit song right away, but to grab only potentially popular music. The economic model discourages purchase of obscure (read: good) stuff. So, I hope they still have lots of bandwidth themselves.
I'm not sure this is a problem. Yes, Everyone is going to run out and get the latest hits, but so many people will do so that the value will rapidly go to zero since you'll be one of a million others.
On the other hand, if you're one of five sources for ObscureBand00, you'll get a (much) lower initial payout but you'll continue to get a small, steady stream.
It would be nice if the program had some sort of rank algorithm- start at the oldest file available if it has bandwidth, then move to others if you're getting more than 3 downloads on that file. The first person to get ObscureBand00 up will get a nice constant income-it would give a *huge* incentive to find new, interesting bands and be the first to host them.
While I'll be really interested in seeing how this works in reality, the basic idea is quite clever.
Since you get "credits" for letting people download from you, the P2P leech problem simply goes away- *everyone* not on dialup is going to want to be a server. The RIAA/record labels will spend close to 0 on bandwidth- a few seed copies and purchase info is all they need.
Presumeably they'll have some way to make sure only good copies stay on the network, thus removing the whole "I can't get the entire album at a decent bitrate, and Track 3 is all messed up" problem so common in current P2P.
If they get their entire catalog out fast, they could also return to the good old days of having a massive variety of stuff to sample from. This is still the problem with iTunes- obscure stuff just doesn't exist yet for whatever reason. Here you dump off one copy of some wierd goth/emo/trance/metal hybrid from Eastfarkistan and you'll get a few people to host it.
Of course, being the major album labels, they'll probably only seed the latest copies of Jessica Simpson and (insert latest dead rapper) at 64 kbit/second while managing to use 1MB/sec of bandwidth for DRM checks, but we'll see.
You might be surprised at what a kid wants to do on a computer.
My three-year old is totally uninterested in computer games and the like. You know what he likes? Spelling words.
His favorite game is to fire up a copy of Wordpad and go to town. Usually he spells the names of Thomas the Tank Engine trains from a little sheet that lists all of them, but lately he's been spelling stuff without looking.
He's immensely proud of this, and looking over to see an entire page of
Henry is green
Thomas is blue
James is red
all of which he typed out without looking I can't say I blame him.
Don't let them obssess about it, but don't be afraid to let them play with tech as well. Then take them out bike riding- they need that too.
I am, and I spent an enjoyable 2004 debating politics with a group of quite liberal professors every lunch.
Of course, being a conservative I hate W[1], so that probably helped. If you're a dittohead it's going to be rough- you're talking to people who've spent years studying politics and the daily talking point memo isn't going to cut it.
[1] Conservatives used to believe in balanced budgets, smaller federal government, free trade and minimally interventionist foreign policy. Too bad they don't anymore- I might vote for one again.
I'm reminded of the old saying that there are only 7 book plots. I've got a freaking house full of books despite the fact there hasn't been any real innovation in content, story or characterization for a hundred years or more.
I don't care if something is "Innovative". I care if it's good. Two examples: Serious Sam and Morrowind. Was either remotely innovative? SS was a self-parody of shoot-em-ups. Morrowind was innovative only in the expanse of the game- there was nothing there that hadn't been done a dozen times before.
But both were fun. Thinking back, the last "innovative" games I really enjoyed were Thief and System Shock 2, and I'd be happy to play an SS3 or another Thief not crippled by XBox compatibility.
As far as online play transforming everything, I don't really want to play a game that requires a lot of interaction with other people around the globe- I've got two young kids, a wife, a job and a house to take care of. Every online game I've seen seems to assume that you have none of those and that you'll just spend 60+ hours a week in your guild.
But have really, really crappy efficiency in "real world" situations.
Case in point- the turbine powered M1 tank. Performs like a bat out of hell, at least as far as tanks go, but tanks spend a *lot* of time sitting around idling. I could idle my old M60 for an entire night and still have a nearly full tank in the morning. (In practice you usually run the engine for a short while to recharge batteries and shut down.)
Now try to do that with an M1- you'll be out of gas in a heartbeat. The problem is so severe that the M1A2 has a second mini-turbine engine just for idling so that it will only drain 3-5 gallons/hour.
Stop and go traffic with a turbine car will get you something that makes a Hummer limo look like a Prius.
Thus, all the screening they have added is NOT for protecting people, but for protecting PLANES. Planes are expensive.
Umm, while planes are expensive they pale compared to large buildings. 9/11 demonstrated that a large, fully fueled airplane is a hell of a weapon. That's why you need to stop hijackings.
Still wierded out- A combination of better cockpit security measures like armored dors and more air marshalls would be a better solution than this.
Cassini-Huygens? Launched 8 years ago and was the last of the big, well funded missions. Development work began in the 1980s. What's in the pipeline now? Mars Science lab is probably going to be delayed. JIMO is probably gone, the Pluto mission is probably gone. There will be a few little missions like Messenger, but nothing major.
Hubble? Horribly flawed development, launched in 1990 after being in development since the 1970s. Decaying as we speak. Rescue misson perhaps, perhaps not. James Webb is not a replacement, won't fly to 2011 at the earliest and has only a 4-year lifespan.
Chandra? Launched 5 years ago, development started in the 1980s.
Where are we now? There's almost nothing in the pipeline and NASA's sucking every dime out of science to feed the shuttle and ISS programs. We've got another decade of good stuff from existing probes, but after that we better hope ESA, Japan and China take up the slack.
The survey data does not distinguish between adopted and biological children (those questions weren't asked) so it is possible that the effect is entirely one of choice in adopted cases, or at least that it is a contributing factor.
Hmm- I meant that somewhat in jest, but there might be something to it.
For domestic adoptions (like mine) you don't really get much of a choice- we had orginally given a preference for a girl the second time around after getting a boy the first time, but when you get offered a child you tend to chuck that preference in favor of the reality.
But for international adoption you can most certainly select sex, merely by choosing the country. If you go to China, you're going to get a girl, if you go to Russia and around there, it's probably going to be a boy.
I doubt the number of adoptions is going to skew the numbers, but perhaps engineers unconsiously prefer old Soviet-bloc countries over China?
Too late for most readers since I just saw this topic, but take a look at Dokeos.
It's a GPL'ed LAMP-based CMS. We've been using it (or its parent Claroline) for the last two years here at the college. It's not feature complete when compared to BB- the biggest misses are a gradebook and an advanced conferencing system- but it does about 90% of what we need it to do. Our most recent survey got a good or excellent vote from 86% of the faculty.
It's very easy to modify and customize. I've got it set up to suck course and enrollment info from our (nonstandard) student information system, we have single sign-on through our campus uPortal, automatic access to files in our eReserve system, etc. The folks at Dokeos are pretty good about taking feedback and code (I've given a lot of the former and a bit of the latter), although once in a while a bug will slip for a bit.
I've got a BB salesdroid showing up on campus soon to try and sell us on an "upgrade". Between Dokeos, Sakai and Moodle I can't see why we'd ever need to consider a commercial product- the features BB has that are better than these groups aren't going to be used here anyway.
You're quite right that tenure is not a perfect shield, but faculty members tend to get very, very ornery when it's threatened.
I was just reading an old Chronicle article yesterday about a similar case. (Threw it away afterwards, so I can't give you details since I've forgotten.) The university decided to get rid of two tenured professors by doing pretty much what you said- remove all their classes, get rid of their office, etc, even if they weren't fired.
The end result after a settlement- the professors won't be there anymore, but they're going to get paid for the rest of the time to their retirement. The faculty senate had a unanimous no confidence vote for the president and administration over the issue, followed by an overwhelming no confidence vote from the full faculty. The president is very unlikely to be there next year.
Tenure's not a perfect shield, but administrators mess with it at their own risk.
And if they do something that is not leagally wrong, but pisses off any possible source of funding for the university, then what?
They get pulled into a quiet room and told all would be best if they left the university. Then they "resign", but it's tenamount to firing.
Umm, no. At least here in the US, if the professor has tenure they say "Fuck you" and go directly to the faculty senate to stir up some shit. If the university tries to actually get rid of them chances are the faculty will call a no confidence vote that will probably cost the president her job.
If they don't have tenure they may have some more problems, but they'll still be going to the faculty senate. You've never seen a bunch of academics get in a snit I bet- it's an ugly sight. We've had major arguments in faculty meetings here because faculty were told to lock their campus mailboxes- I don't even want to think what it would be like to fire someone over an issue of "allowed" research.
I would hope that we'll have moved on to the Next Big Thing by that time
While I'd love to believe this, I'm not sure what this Next Big Thing will be given our trends.
Biology? This is where the biggest growth will be in the future, but between demands to stop teaching evolution to students and funding bans on stem cell research, I can see most of the really interesting stuff going on elsewhere. (Viz today's announcement by a South Korean lab that they'd grown stem cells to match specific patients.)
Chemistry/Physics/Materials Science? The latter will be a huge growth area, backed by the two former. Checked the US grad school population in these subjects? Hint: they are not american- we're educating the world, especially the Chinese.
Whenever I hear about future US dominance, I remember the kid of a friend of mine from India. She came over to the US for a year with him, and he went to the local public school. When she returned to India, she had a horrible time getting him back into an Indian school, since they regarded the time spent in an American school as more or less wasted.
China and India have 3-4x our population. They have a serious focus on education, at least for the non-peasant subset of that population. Couple that with an endless supply of expendable labor and very lax environmental laws, they may well bury us.
Now, they've got some problems unique to them (China's repressive government and vestiges of the centrally planned economy, India's license raj that stifles innovation.) but honestly I don't think the US is going to stay the global economic superpower for much longer.
But shouldn't VOIP users if they are technically savvy to use VOIP also be responsible and be sure that they can dial (ie have phone number handy) an emergency service?
I'm of mixed feelings here- yes, they should be responsible, but Vonage is selling themselves as a phone company. The front page of their web site says "Save Lots of Money On Your Phone Service".
Under the FAQs it says "Does Vonage offer access to 911 Dialing?" and gives the answer "Yes, Vonage offers access to emergency services through our Emergency Services Dialing Feature. This service is different from traditional 911 Dialing, but once activated it provides quick dialing to local emergency services"
IMHO, this is seriously misleading. It's not 911 as an average Joe/Jane understands it. That first word should be a bit fat "NO".
I have lived for a number of years in America, though, and my experience is that ordinary citizens there aren't afraid of their government(s) in the same way that they are in Cuba.
Back a dozen or so years ago, I was in the California National Guard (D Co, 1/149 Armor) We got called up for the LA riots following the Rodney King beating trial, and got shipped to Rampart, one of the worst places in LA.
I got thanked multiple times by the locals for being there. Not for stopping the riots- we were too late for that since much of our patrol area was a smoldering ruin.
We were being thanked for protecting the locals from police reprisals. They didn't feel safe when there was a police officer nearby, and for very good reason.
There are certainly people in America who fear (parts of) their government.
I'll see your Padilla and raise you uncounted hundreds or thousands in Cuba.
And I'll trump with the US having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We jail a lot higher percentage of folks than Cuba does.
Thank you War on Drugs!
And of course I'm not counting the hundreds in Gitmo that the Bush folks claim are outside of any legal authority by anyone. But hey, they're all terrorists, right? They shouldn't have rights.
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I've actually done this with some of his old videotapes as well as converting the VHS&DVD songs to CD, I just haven't gotten around to it with the DVDs themselves.
Some of the Thomas the Tank Engine videos my three-year old is in love with have 3 seperate, unskippable "We made this!" snippets, along with the FBI warning and two trailers. (At least the latter are skippable.)
Now add in menus that have to go through the entire minute plus animation before responding, it can easily take three minutes from disc insert to viewing the video. Ever waited with a three year old desperate for his fix for that long?
HULK WANT TO SMASH!
Umm dude, speaking as one of the people who "brutally" put down the revolution (D Co, 1/149 Armor, CA ARNG), it was nothing of the sort. It was a bunch of people out to destroy and steal what they could while the police were overwhelmed. They had no political agenda beyond "I want that TV" or "I want to burn down that shop". Look at some of the TV interviews with looters during the riots- they're quite honest about what they were doing.
As far as being brutally put down, my unit despite being in one of the absolute worst areas of LA (Rampart) did not fire a shot, and indeed never used physical force beyond rounding up some illegal immigrants. (INS had a field day) The rioters in our area were in far more danger from the Korean storeowners who were armed to the teeth and not afraid to shoot back. There were a few bad instances (one about two blocks from my HQ) but the Guard had all the free food we could eat- people were stopping us on the streets to thank us for being there.
There was an intersting point in some news magazine lately about this. Dodge has an "advertgame" where you can drive Dodge cars in a race. The cars are closely modeled after real Dodges, of course, and thus have realistic top speeds. The article commented that this was a great way to get around the ban on advertising top speeds- it's not illegal to race cars on designated tracks, and all they are doing is showing reality...
The court seems to be acting pretty rational lately
You're on crack. I point you to
Kelo vs. New London, where the court just ruled that government can take your house away if the for-profit corporation who wants it will pay higher taxes, and
Gonzales v. Raich, where the SCOTUS ruled that growing, processing and consuming a plant entirely within a given state is forbidden because the federal laws trump the states, and the feds have authority because they can regulate interstate commerce.
You still sure the SCOTUS is acting rationally?
This actually brings up a more interesting point. Since your credits are based on users who download AFTER you, it will become important not only to grab that hit song right away, but to grab only potentially popular music. The economic model discourages purchase of obscure (read: good) stuff. So, I hope they still have lots of bandwidth themselves.
I'm not sure this is a problem. Yes, Everyone is going to run out and get the latest hits, but so many people will do so that the value will rapidly go to zero since you'll be one of a million others.
On the other hand, if you're one of five sources for ObscureBand00, you'll get a (much) lower initial payout but you'll continue to get a small, steady stream.
It would be nice if the program had some sort of rank algorithm- start at the oldest file available if it has bandwidth, then move to others if you're getting more than 3 downloads on that file. The first person to get ObscureBand00 up will get a nice constant income-it would give a *huge* incentive to find new, interesting bands and be the first to host them.
Since you get "credits" for letting people download from you, the P2P leech problem simply goes away- *everyone* not on dialup is going to want to be a server. The RIAA/record labels will spend close to 0 on bandwidth- a few seed copies and purchase info is all they need.
Presumeably they'll have some way to make sure only good copies stay on the network, thus removing the whole "I can't get the entire album at a decent bitrate, and Track 3 is all messed up" problem so common in current P2P.
If they get their entire catalog out fast, they could also return to the good old days of having a massive variety of stuff to sample from. This is still the problem with iTunes- obscure stuff just doesn't exist yet for whatever reason. Here you dump off one copy of some wierd goth/emo/trance/metal hybrid from Eastfarkistan and you'll get a few people to host it.
Of course, being the major album labels, they'll probably only seed the latest copies of Jessica Simpson and (insert latest dead rapper) at 64 kbit/second while managing to use 1MB/sec of bandwidth for DRM checks, but we'll see.
My three-year old is totally uninterested in computer games and the like. You know what he likes? Spelling words.
His favorite game is to fire up a copy of Wordpad and go to town. Usually he spells the names of Thomas the Tank Engine trains from a little sheet that lists all of them, but lately he's been spelling stuff without looking.
He's immensely proud of this, and looking over to see an entire page of
Henry is green
Thomas is blue
James is red
all of which he typed out without looking I can't say I blame him.
Don't let them obssess about it, but don't be afraid to let them play with tech as well. Then take them out bike riding- they need that too.
The reddest red state of all. Why would Diebold's CEO care about altering Utah results?
Of course, being a conservative I hate W[1], so that probably helped. If you're a dittohead it's going to be rough- you're talking to people who've spent years studying politics and the daily talking point memo isn't going to cut it.
[1] Conservatives used to believe in balanced budgets, smaller federal government, free trade and minimally interventionist foreign policy. Too bad they don't anymore- I might vote for one again.
I don't care if something is "Innovative". I care if it's good. Two examples: Serious Sam and Morrowind. Was either remotely innovative? SS was a self-parody of shoot-em-ups. Morrowind was innovative only in the expanse of the game- there was nothing there that hadn't been done a dozen times before.
But both were fun. Thinking back, the last "innovative" games I really enjoyed were Thief and System Shock 2, and I'd be happy to play an SS3 or another Thief not crippled by XBox compatibility.
As far as online play transforming everything, I don't really want to play a game that requires a lot of interaction with other people around the globe- I've got two young kids, a wife, a job and a house to take care of. Every online game I've seen seems to assume that you have none of those and that you'll just spend 60+ hours a week in your guild.
Case in point- the turbine powered M1 tank. Performs like a bat out of hell, at least as far as tanks go, but tanks spend a *lot* of time sitting around idling. I could idle my old M60 for an entire night and still have a nearly full tank in the morning. (In practice you usually run the engine for a short while to recharge batteries and shut down.)
Now try to do that with an M1- you'll be out of gas in a heartbeat. The problem is so severe that the M1A2 has a second mini-turbine engine just for idling so that it will only drain 3-5 gallons/hour.
Stop and go traffic with a turbine car will get you something that makes a Hummer limo look like a Prius.
Thus, all the screening they have added is NOT for protecting people, but for protecting PLANES. Planes are expensive.
Umm, while planes are expensive they pale compared to large buildings. 9/11 demonstrated that a large, fully fueled airplane is a hell of a weapon. That's why you need to stop hijackings.
Still wierded out- A combination of better cockpit security measures like armored dors and more air marshalls would be a better solution than this.
Major Probes from the past 3 years... Major probes slated for launch in next 3 years:
Umm, yeah, that was kind of my point. We've got stuff for another decade. Go beyond that and tell me what the status is.
Cassini-Huygens? Launched 8 years ago and was the last of the big, well funded missions. Development work began in the 1980s. What's in the pipeline now? Mars Science lab is probably going to be delayed. JIMO is probably gone, the Pluto mission is probably gone. There will be a few little missions like Messenger, but nothing major.
Hubble? Horribly flawed development, launched in 1990 after being in development since the 1970s. Decaying as we speak. Rescue misson perhaps, perhaps not. James Webb is not a replacement, won't fly to 2011 at the earliest and has only a 4-year lifespan.
Chandra? Launched 5 years ago, development started in the 1980s.
Where are we now? There's almost nothing in the pipeline and NASA's sucking every dime out of science to feed the shuttle and ISS programs. We've got another decade of good stuff from existing probes, but after that we better hope ESA, Japan and China take up the slack.
The survey data does not distinguish between adopted and biological children (those questions weren't asked) so it is possible that the effect is entirely one of choice in adopted cases, or at least that it is a contributing factor.
Hmm- I meant that somewhat in jest, but there might be something to it.
For domestic adoptions (like mine) you don't really get much of a choice- we had orginally given a preference for a girl the second time around after getting a boy the first time, but when you get offered a child you tend to chuck that preference in favor of the reality.
But for international adoption you can most certainly select sex, merely by choosing the country. If you go to China, you're going to get a girl, if you go to Russia and around there, it's probably going to be a boy.
I doubt the number of adoptions is going to skew the numbers, but perhaps engineers unconsiously prefer old Soviet-bloc countries over China?
I've got a PhD in physical chemistry and two boys. Not sure how I managed to affect that.
It's a GPL'ed LAMP-based CMS. We've been using it (or its parent Claroline) for the last two years here at the college. It's not feature complete when compared to BB- the biggest misses are a gradebook and an advanced conferencing system- but it does about 90% of what we need it to do. Our most recent survey got a good or excellent vote from 86% of the faculty.
It's very easy to modify and customize. I've got it set up to suck course and enrollment info from our (nonstandard) student information system, we have single sign-on through our campus uPortal, automatic access to files in our eReserve system, etc. The folks at Dokeos are pretty good about taking feedback and code (I've given a lot of the former and a bit of the latter), although once in a while a bug will slip for a bit.
I've got a BB salesdroid showing up on campus soon to try and sell us on an "upgrade". Between Dokeos, Sakai and Moodle I can't see why we'd ever need to consider a commercial product- the features BB has that are better than these groups aren't going to be used here anyway.
I was just reading an old Chronicle article yesterday about a similar case. (Threw it away afterwards, so I can't give you details since I've forgotten.) The university decided to get rid of two tenured professors by doing pretty much what you said- remove all their classes, get rid of their office, etc, even if they weren't fired.
The end result after a settlement- the professors won't be there anymore, but they're going to get paid for the rest of the time to their retirement. The faculty senate had a unanimous no confidence vote for the president and administration over the issue, followed by an overwhelming no confidence vote from the full faculty. The president is very unlikely to be there next year.
Tenure's not a perfect shield, but administrators mess with it at their own risk.
And if they do something that is not leagally wrong, but pisses off any possible source of funding for the university, then what? They get pulled into a quiet room and told all would be best if they left the university. Then they "resign", but it's tenamount to firing.
Umm, no. At least here in the US, if the professor has tenure they say "Fuck you" and go directly to the faculty senate to stir up some shit. If the university tries to actually get rid of them chances are the faculty will call a no confidence vote that will probably cost the president her job.
If they don't have tenure they may have some more problems, but they'll still be going to the faculty senate. You've never seen a bunch of academics get in a snit I bet- it's an ugly sight. We've had major arguments in faculty meetings here because faculty were told to lock their campus mailboxes- I don't even want to think what it would be like to fire someone over an issue of "allowed" research.
I would hope that we'll have moved on to the Next Big Thing by that time
While I'd love to believe this, I'm not sure what this Next Big Thing will be given our trends.
Biology? This is where the biggest growth will be in the future, but between demands to stop teaching evolution to students and funding bans on stem cell research, I can see most of the really interesting stuff going on elsewhere. (Viz today's announcement by a South Korean lab that they'd grown stem cells to match specific patients.)
Chemistry/Physics/Materials Science? The latter will be a huge growth area, backed by the two former. Checked the US grad school population in these subjects? Hint: they are not american- we're educating the world, especially the Chinese.
Whenever I hear about future US dominance, I remember the kid of a friend of mine from India. She came over to the US for a year with him, and he went to the local public school. When she returned to India, she had a horrible time getting him back into an Indian school, since they regarded the time spent in an American school as more or less wasted.
China and India have 3-4x our population. They have a serious focus on education, at least for the non-peasant subset of that population. Couple that with an endless supply of expendable labor and very lax environmental laws, they may well bury us.
Now, they've got some problems unique to them (China's repressive government and vestiges of the centrally planned economy, India's license raj that stifles innovation.) but honestly I don't think the US is going to stay the global economic superpower for much longer.
The fears you highlight are not uncommon, but they are unfounded. Companies from India are not developing very good software.
Setting the Wayback machine for 1960...
<GM executive>The fears you highlight are not uncommon, but they are unfounded. Companies from Japan are not making very good cars.</GM executive>
But shouldn't VOIP users if they are technically savvy to use VOIP also be responsible and be sure that they can dial (ie have phone number handy) an emergency service?
I'm of mixed feelings here- yes, they should be responsible, but Vonage is selling themselves as a phone company. The front page of their web site says "Save Lots of Money On Your Phone Service".
Under the FAQs it says "Does Vonage offer access to 911 Dialing?" and gives the answer "Yes, Vonage offers access to emergency services through our Emergency Services Dialing Feature. This service is different from traditional 911 Dialing, but once activated it provides quick dialing to local emergency services"
IMHO, this is seriously misleading. It's not 911 as an average Joe/Jane understands it. That first word should be a bit fat "NO".
I have lived for a number of years in America, though, and my experience is that ordinary citizens there aren't afraid of their government(s) in the same way that they are in Cuba.
Back a dozen or so years ago, I was in the California National Guard (D Co, 1/149 Armor) We got called up for the LA riots following the Rodney King beating trial, and got shipped to Rampart, one of the worst places in LA.
I got thanked multiple times by the locals for being there. Not for stopping the riots- we were too late for that since much of our patrol area was a smoldering ruin.
We were being thanked for protecting the locals from police reprisals. They didn't feel safe when there was a police officer nearby, and for very good reason.
There are certainly people in America who fear (parts of) their government.
I'll see your Padilla and raise you uncounted hundreds or thousands in Cuba.
And I'll trump with the US having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We jail a lot higher percentage of folks than Cuba does.
Thank you War on Drugs!
And of course I'm not counting the hundreds in Gitmo that the Bush folks claim are outside of any legal authority by anyone. But hey, they're all terrorists, right? They shouldn't have rights.