Energy providers install the meters outside of buildings allowing anyone to walk up to them and record energy consumption. It does not take smart meters to generate a privacy issue. Meters should go inside the house...and yes, even then they can still drive by in their van and read it out.
Yes, and no. The market took what was available for HTML5 and as before implemented it in various interpretations making the rendering engines and browsers behave differently in so many areas that it makes a mockery of a standard. There is currently not a single browser available that fully supports HTML5 and CSS3. I test web apps and it just sucks that after passing all tests in Chrome a bunch of them fail in Firefox and half of them fail in IE and then Safari on OS X is totally different again. The sole point of a standard is that anything coded to standard will yield IDENTICAL results on any standards compliant browser. Sadly, coding to standard will cause code to break in most current browsers. Also, HTML5 standard as it is right now leaves too much up to the implementers, like the fuzzy rules about what to do with password fields and autocomplete. As a developer I can set password fields not to be considered for autocomplete because there are significant security risks with storing passwords in shared environments, yet none of the browsers honor this directive in favor of pushing their own password manager. And that by default and with no means to turn it off. I understand the desire to give the user the power to decide, but in some cases the user does not understand or does understand, but doesn't care. Pushing security decisions always to the user is just too cheap. There are plenty other examples. Also, the tug of war over the video encoding to be used ending in what some for profits want. There is no reason to include a licensed or potentially licenseable technology in an open standard. For these reasons I agree that the W3C's clout is diminished, especially when the market now needs clear guidance on what HTML6 and CSS4 will be.
...but I mentioned it for the past two years: Microsoft biggest problem is that their foray into the ARM world with RT did not come with a server version. Yes, I know that RT was designed to be craptastic. Absolutely needlessly given that a much lower powered Pi can do more. ARM servers and their low power consumption allow for having many of them tightly packed into rack space and get turned on and used only when needed. Many enterprises have cyclical demands for processing power, especially for financials. One option would be using cloud resources on demand, but enterprise financials and cloud are a mix that causes a tummy ache for many.
Anyhow, Windows Server for ARM is a necessity to have for Microsoft and as usual they will be years too late to market with this. And maybe, just maybe it will not suck and comes without Metro garbage, ribbon crap, and eye candy that has no business on a server OS.
There is a simple solution to many voting issues: paper and pen. Print paper ballots and hand out pens. Each party / candidate is listed with a circle next to the name. Mark that circle in any which way to give that person your vote. Then fold the ballot and stuff it into an envelope that can be sealed (simplest would be lick and stick). Put that envelope into a sealed ballot box.
Voting stations can be placed in any building that is large enough to accommodate the expected turnout. The public, as long as not obstructing the voting process, can witness the sealing of the ballot box, submission of ballots, the transport to the counting place, and the ballot counting itself.
Pen and paper obviously provides a paper trail, it is easy to recount any votes, and the best is that pen and paper is low tech!! No power needed, no Internet access required, and thus very easy to administer as long as there is a means to get to the polling station. This is how elections are held in many European states and there are no significant problems. With public oversight stuffing the ballot box beforehand or during transport can be prevented. Witnesses can keep count on how many envelopes were dropped into the ballot box and how many are taken out at the counting place.
Once the election results are official and the ballots are no longer needed they can be recycled. Yes, e-voting is potentially cheaper and the tabulation of results is faster, but I rather have elections cost more and have results take longer to obtain in exchange for fair and secure voting. The rush to instant results is solely based on the need of the media, especially TV, who have nothing to talk about until results are coming in.
...making money is far fetched. Even if they truly have cash left (others doubt that), "making money" would have to include covering the huge write-offs of the past quarters. How long will that take?
Really???? As if the Control Panel was so in need to being reworked at the UI level! How about ditching the decade old NTFS for a better performing file system that is not hampered by DOS era limitations. Or improving networking performance so that we don't have to wait 20 seconds for Windows to figure out that it will take 3 seconds to copy a file.
Metroizing and ribbonizing the UI while making it entirely dysfunctional is clearly not a priority! This only shows that Microsoft still doesn't get anything.
Millions of people preserve history beyond just postal history by collecting and categorizing postal stamps from all over the world. These new digital stamps are as horrible as postage meters, they destroy not just a past time for many, but also eradicate an incredible means of documenting and preserving history.
I still use the first keyboard I ever bought. It is a Cherry G80-1000 (Made in Western Germany) that I got in the early 90s. See http://deskthority.net/wiki/Ch...
I have to take it apart and clean it again, but other than that it works the same great way as it did when I took it out of the box. It was rather expensive back then, but it is probably the best tech investment I ever made. And the best: No Windows Keys! They constantly get in the way and there is something inherently wrong with linking general use hardware to some specific piece of software.
The only downside of the G80-1000 is the current draw. It is right at the limit of what DIN->PS/2->USB converters can handle. When the cold, long winter days come I might look into hooking up a 5V power supply to the keyboard to give the USB converter a better chance.
At times I also use these ultra cheap 2$ Dell keyboards....just horrible! If it has to be a cheap USB keyboard I'd go with the Logitech K120, have a few of those even as wireless version and they work quite nicely.
....after consulting with a lawyer. Services were not rendered and for that reason you should not feel obligated to pay full price. And terminate the contract early. If an employee does not do the job you can fire her or him, same applies to a vendor. Given that you talked to the top brass it should not come as a surprise to them.
Leave it at that. While public shaming is a powerful tool it also comes with a long tail that will spell trouble for you and your company. Assuming that the vendor treats other customers the same way they will sooner than later find out that their business is going down the drain.
Then again, not fixing bugs and instead crank out more features in ever shorter cycles is what the Agile revolution has brought us. Mediocre is the new black!
Maybe it is simply that the project that would have been Windows 9 got canned within Microsoft. I am sure work on Win 9 was underway by the time Win 8.0 was released just to have its plug pulled after the dismal and entirely preventable (if Microsoft would have listened to beta testers) sales figures and adoption rate of Win 8. As much speculation as any other explanation. In the end it does not matter, it's just a name.
Mozilla stopped caring about ideas from others a long time ago. For years Mozilla only exists to feed the egos of the top developers. They are no longer listening to user input and keep alienating its user base with every version of any of their products. Abandoning their own incubator in this way really fits the picture. It would have only generated ideas that the top devs at Mozilla resoundingly rejected because it was 'not invented here'. They get really aggressive if you pitch an idea to them, almost as if you insulted their next of kin and burned their house down.
The Mozillas would be much better served if they'd shed their unlimited arrogance and return back to the roots making software aimed at satisfying user needs.
These MOOC don't come with any college credits so folks don't bother with them. Also, many see free as having no value. What will work better is MAOOC: Massive Almost Open Online Courses. Charge a small fee and folks will value the courses more...especially when they can collect credits after completion.
...you could just enjoy life for a day and do without a phone. I never owned a smartphone and the 20$ prepaid feature phone (although, it does have FM and games!) is sitting in the kitchen junk drawer most of the time. Honestly, you can go 24 hours without your damn phone. Further, you can also go rafting without your phone. Which call are you going to take while paddling like a mad man? Yes, I know, there is the way to and from and the mandatory visit to a local bar after returning...but even there you can do things like, well, talk to people 1:1 without playing around with your phone or checking messages every five minutes. Believe me, you are not that important to anyone that you have to be reachable 24x7, nobody is.
This is what you get from "going all in" with the cloud. While services like Steam are widely popular and provide access to games at a reasonably low price it comes with a new set of rules. And those rules include that the service and software provided can change at any time or go away entirely. If you don't like that then go an buy the original version of the game and play that. Alternatively, get organized and stop playing the new version of the game reminding EA every single day why you do that. Maybe they change their mind or maybe they offer both versions, but more likely they will just send your well meant messages to device null.
Agreed...the reason for open source as well as proprietary is the same: documentation is an afterthought and especially those in the know (developers! developers! developers!) outright hate documenting anything and if they do nobody understands it. The problem starts with many technical writers being neither technical nor writers, but often just a bunch of certified goons who know how to operate FrameMaker to prettiffy stuff that hopefully someone else wrote and nobody reads. In the tech writers...errr, formatters defense, they only get hired for a month to document an application that takes two months to master and two years to build. The sole purpose of this exercise is to check off the box next to "help" on the requirements sheet.
You want awesome documentation, then engage one or more tech writers full time and have them be plugged in right from the design phase. As it turns out, tech writers who are techie tend to know a lot about user experience and user interface design. Also, plugging them in right from the start will make it much easier to explain what the gizmo does because they came along on the journey of why the gizmo does what it does and why it doesn't do what it doesn't do. While the tech writer is busy getting the prep work done development takes place and the tech writer - as time allows - can join in the QA effort. Once a feature reached initial maturity the tech writer can describe the feature and write step by step instructions. After that - if time allows - the tech writer can help out in support because the tech writer should know the application as well as anyone in support or potentially even better. Over time the tech writer should be also turning into a subject matter expert to help in the analysis and design.
That means there is absolutely no reason not to hire a tech writer who is technically versed and a good writer as a full time team member who has to be allowed and encouraged to take part in all technical and design discussions. Also, writing decent documentation is a tremendous amount of work, about as much work as writing the application code, just using a different language. It is also an ongoing maintenance task to update for changes and add new items or remove topics about no longer present features. No matter if it is open source or proprietary, as long as teams and especially management are not willing to value tech writers the same way as they value architects or senior developers nothing will change. Sadly, on software teams tech writers are often even more belittled than QA, which also often gets no seat at the table, but is purely used as a scapegoat. Excellent documentation (and quality) take time and effort and skilled experts and all that costs money or takes someone who is willing to make a long term commitment to an open source project. Being a tech writer I tried on occasion and fairly quickly lost interest due to the endless arrogance of developers who think they are hot shit and know everything better, which means I didn't have to know any of it. They are instantly annoyed by any questions and by the time I beat the info out of them it was obsolete anyway because some other rogue developer just came up with what he thought was a much better way to do stuff negating a lot of other (and often better) work done before. Interestingly, I found more willingness of cooperation from commercial software companies who dished out free licenses for documentation work done for them (because they did the math and knew it was a steal). Doing documentation in open source projects is the most thankless job in the universe and that is why people don't want to do it and that is why FOSS docs often suck.
Ah yes, and reading source code....as mentioned, developers hate writing documentation and that includes comments in source code. It's great if they can compile C in their head, but the vast majority of people cannot do that, but they can follow along the logic and workflow if source code is properly documented.
First, football is not a sport and the goons on the sidelines with their fat headsets are already looking ridiculous. Now they add tablets to the mix? From what I read the coaches found that the Surface tablets are not working and are useless. My suggestion is to ditch all that tech gear, take the helmet and padding off the players, and then play a real team sport...which would be rugby. Rugby is also much less prone to major injuries and that should allow playing more than the 16 games a season.
Do we really need a full arsenal of nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire earth fivefold? Rather than throwing more money at this stuff the entire sites and the nuclear rockets should be dismantled. That will save a lot of money, make the world a safer place, and lower the need of staff.
The 15 cm claim is a total misrepresentation of the facts. The prosthetic leg is about 4 cm longer when not under load. The sole reason for this is to make it as long as the other leg when Rehm is walking or running, otherwise he would be limping. In other words, for the prosthetic leg to work as a normal leg it has to be longer given the design used.
Yes, it is designed like a spring, but so is a 'normal' leg which makes running and jumping possible in the first place. Rehm offered to take part in studies that compare his prosthetic leg with any other regular leg to see if there is indeed an advantage, even a small one. So far nobody has come forward to put their claims to the test. Until they do all the accusations of cheating and being against fair play are utterly baseless and in itself an act of unfairness. These accusations simply imply that an amputee with a prosthetic leg has to be a worse athlete or otherwise be a cheater. Really?
I can follow the argument that decriminalization of drugs will free up funds that can be better spend elsewhere, but I think that the elsewhere will be taking care of the increasing number of drug addicts and their ailments. Yes, I know, I am making assumptions here that if using drugs is no longer penalized the consumption will go up as well as keeping penalties will keep the number of users low. We have an excellent opportunity to put some facts into this by monitoring marijuana use in those states where it became legal beyond medical uses. Do more people try it? Do more people use it? Do we see a spike in things like traffic accidents due to doped drivers? Do we see the decrease in intelligence given that continued marijuana use destroys brain cells similar to heavy drinking? Do we get the same amount of lung cancer cases as from tobacco?
My prediction is that the cost will stay the same, but shift to other areas such as public health care expenses, public dependent care expenses, downturn in economy, etc. At the same time, is there any benefit from sending military after the drug lords and fight them in gun battles with no real outcome? The solution is in finding out what makes people not even want to try drugs, especially those that get one hooked instantly. Eradicating demand will take care of the rest very quickly.
I have yet to see any telco digging up anything. They just run the wire from the pole and drill right through the pristine front of the house to run black cable over white siding in the most obnoxious way possible. Dig up the front yard...pah! We are not Europe!
Then the US government needs to be sued as well as inventors of the technology behind the Tor network. Dumb court decision, it is like shooting the messenger.
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Energy providers install the meters outside of buildings allowing anyone to walk up to them and record energy consumption. It does not take smart meters to generate a privacy issue. Meters should go inside the house...and yes, even then they can still drive by in their van and read it out.
Sites are HTML5 compatible, not compliant! HTML5 compliance will cause many things to not work in current browsers.
Yes, and no. The market took what was available for HTML5 and as before implemented it in various interpretations making the rendering engines and browsers behave differently in so many areas that it makes a mockery of a standard. There is currently not a single browser available that fully supports HTML5 and CSS3. I test web apps and it just sucks that after passing all tests in Chrome a bunch of them fail in Firefox and half of them fail in IE and then Safari on OS X is totally different again. The sole point of a standard is that anything coded to standard will yield IDENTICAL results on any standards compliant browser. Sadly, coding to standard will cause code to break in most current browsers. Also, HTML5 standard as it is right now leaves too much up to the implementers, like the fuzzy rules about what to do with password fields and autocomplete. As a developer I can set password fields not to be considered for autocomplete because there are significant security risks with storing passwords in shared environments, yet none of the browsers honor this directive in favor of pushing their own password manager. And that by default and with no means to turn it off. I understand the desire to give the user the power to decide, but in some cases the user does not understand or does understand, but doesn't care. Pushing security decisions always to the user is just too cheap. There are plenty other examples. Also, the tug of war over the video encoding to be used ending in what some for profits want. There is no reason to include a licensed or potentially licenseable technology in an open standard. For these reasons I agree that the W3C's clout is diminished, especially when the market now needs clear guidance on what HTML6 and CSS4 will be.
...but I mentioned it for the past two years: Microsoft biggest problem is that their foray into the ARM world with RT did not come with a server version. Yes, I know that RT was designed to be craptastic. Absolutely needlessly given that a much lower powered Pi can do more. ARM servers and their low power consumption allow for having many of them tightly packed into rack space and get turned on and used only when needed. Many enterprises have cyclical demands for processing power, especially for financials. One option would be using cloud resources on demand, but enterprise financials and cloud are a mix that causes a tummy ache for many. Anyhow, Windows Server for ARM is a necessity to have for Microsoft and as usual they will be years too late to market with this. And maybe, just maybe it will not suck and comes without Metro garbage, ribbon crap, and eye candy that has no business on a server OS.
There is a simple solution to many voting issues: paper and pen. Print paper ballots and hand out pens. Each party / candidate is listed with a circle next to the name. Mark that circle in any which way to give that person your vote. Then fold the ballot and stuff it into an envelope that can be sealed (simplest would be lick and stick). Put that envelope into a sealed ballot box. Voting stations can be placed in any building that is large enough to accommodate the expected turnout. The public, as long as not obstructing the voting process, can witness the sealing of the ballot box, submission of ballots, the transport to the counting place, and the ballot counting itself. Pen and paper obviously provides a paper trail, it is easy to recount any votes, and the best is that pen and paper is low tech!! No power needed, no Internet access required, and thus very easy to administer as long as there is a means to get to the polling station. This is how elections are held in many European states and there are no significant problems. With public oversight stuffing the ballot box beforehand or during transport can be prevented. Witnesses can keep count on how many envelopes were dropped into the ballot box and how many are taken out at the counting place. Once the election results are official and the ballots are no longer needed they can be recycled. Yes, e-voting is potentially cheaper and the tabulation of results is faster, but I rather have elections cost more and have results take longer to obtain in exchange for fair and secure voting. The rush to instant results is solely based on the need of the media, especially TV, who have nothing to talk about until results are coming in.
...making money is far fetched. Even if they truly have cash left (others doubt that), "making money" would have to include covering the huge write-offs of the past quarters. How long will that take?
Really???? As if the Control Panel was so in need to being reworked at the UI level! How about ditching the decade old NTFS for a better performing file system that is not hampered by DOS era limitations. Or improving networking performance so that we don't have to wait 20 seconds for Windows to figure out that it will take 3 seconds to copy a file. Metroizing and ribbonizing the UI while making it entirely dysfunctional is clearly not a priority! This only shows that Microsoft still doesn't get anything.
Millions of people preserve history beyond just postal history by collecting and categorizing postal stamps from all over the world. These new digital stamps are as horrible as postage meters, they destroy not just a past time for many, but also eradicate an incredible means of documenting and preserving history.
I still use the first keyboard I ever bought. It is a Cherry G80-1000 (Made in Western Germany) that I got in the early 90s. See http://deskthority.net/wiki/Ch... I have to take it apart and clean it again, but other than that it works the same great way as it did when I took it out of the box. It was rather expensive back then, but it is probably the best tech investment I ever made. And the best: No Windows Keys! They constantly get in the way and there is something inherently wrong with linking general use hardware to some specific piece of software. The only downside of the G80-1000 is the current draw. It is right at the limit of what DIN->PS/2->USB converters can handle. When the cold, long winter days come I might look into hooking up a 5V power supply to the keyboard to give the USB converter a better chance. At times I also use these ultra cheap 2$ Dell keyboards....just horrible! If it has to be a cheap USB keyboard I'd go with the Logitech K120, have a few of those even as wireless version and they work quite nicely.
....after consulting with a lawyer. Services were not rendered and for that reason you should not feel obligated to pay full price. And terminate the contract early. If an employee does not do the job you can fire her or him, same applies to a vendor. Given that you talked to the top brass it should not come as a surprise to them. Leave it at that. While public shaming is a powerful tool it also comes with a long tail that will spell trouble for you and your company. Assuming that the vendor treats other customers the same way they will sooner than later find out that their business is going down the drain. Then again, not fixing bugs and instead crank out more features in ever shorter cycles is what the Agile revolution has brought us. Mediocre is the new black!
Maybe it is simply that the project that would have been Windows 9 got canned within Microsoft. I am sure work on Win 9 was underway by the time Win 8.0 was released just to have its plug pulled after the dismal and entirely preventable (if Microsoft would have listened to beta testers) sales figures and adoption rate of Win 8. As much speculation as any other explanation. In the end it does not matter, it's just a name.
We need less guns, not more. Less guns means less people getting shot...but I guess that logic is to, well, logic for US brains.
Mozilla stopped caring about ideas from others a long time ago. For years Mozilla only exists to feed the egos of the top developers. They are no longer listening to user input and keep alienating its user base with every version of any of their products. Abandoning their own incubator in this way really fits the picture. It would have only generated ideas that the top devs at Mozilla resoundingly rejected because it was 'not invented here'. They get really aggressive if you pitch an idea to them, almost as if you insulted their next of kin and burned their house down. The Mozillas would be much better served if they'd shed their unlimited arrogance and return back to the roots making software aimed at satisfying user needs.
These MOOC don't come with any college credits so folks don't bother with them. Also, many see free as having no value. What will work better is MAOOC: Massive Almost Open Online Courses. Charge a small fee and folks will value the courses more...especially when they can collect credits after completion.
...you could just enjoy life for a day and do without a phone. I never owned a smartphone and the 20$ prepaid feature phone (although, it does have FM and games!) is sitting in the kitchen junk drawer most of the time. Honestly, you can go 24 hours without your damn phone. Further, you can also go rafting without your phone. Which call are you going to take while paddling like a mad man? Yes, I know, there is the way to and from and the mandatory visit to a local bar after returning...but even there you can do things like, well, talk to people 1:1 without playing around with your phone or checking messages every five minutes. Believe me, you are not that important to anyone that you have to be reachable 24x7, nobody is.
This is what you get from "going all in" with the cloud. While services like Steam are widely popular and provide access to games at a reasonably low price it comes with a new set of rules. And those rules include that the service and software provided can change at any time or go away entirely. If you don't like that then go an buy the original version of the game and play that. Alternatively, get organized and stop playing the new version of the game reminding EA every single day why you do that. Maybe they change their mind or maybe they offer both versions, but more likely they will just send your well meant messages to device null.
Agreed...the reason for open source as well as proprietary is the same: documentation is an afterthought and especially those in the know (developers! developers! developers!) outright hate documenting anything and if they do nobody understands it. The problem starts with many technical writers being neither technical nor writers, but often just a bunch of certified goons who know how to operate FrameMaker to prettiffy stuff that hopefully someone else wrote and nobody reads. In the tech writers...errr, formatters defense, they only get hired for a month to document an application that takes two months to master and two years to build. The sole purpose of this exercise is to check off the box next to "help" on the requirements sheet. You want awesome documentation, then engage one or more tech writers full time and have them be plugged in right from the design phase. As it turns out, tech writers who are techie tend to know a lot about user experience and user interface design. Also, plugging them in right from the start will make it much easier to explain what the gizmo does because they came along on the journey of why the gizmo does what it does and why it doesn't do what it doesn't do. While the tech writer is busy getting the prep work done development takes place and the tech writer - as time allows - can join in the QA effort. Once a feature reached initial maturity the tech writer can describe the feature and write step by step instructions. After that - if time allows - the tech writer can help out in support because the tech writer should know the application as well as anyone in support or potentially even better. Over time the tech writer should be also turning into a subject matter expert to help in the analysis and design. That means there is absolutely no reason not to hire a tech writer who is technically versed and a good writer as a full time team member who has to be allowed and encouraged to take part in all technical and design discussions. Also, writing decent documentation is a tremendous amount of work, about as much work as writing the application code, just using a different language. It is also an ongoing maintenance task to update for changes and add new items or remove topics about no longer present features. No matter if it is open source or proprietary, as long as teams and especially management are not willing to value tech writers the same way as they value architects or senior developers nothing will change. Sadly, on software teams tech writers are often even more belittled than QA, which also often gets no seat at the table, but is purely used as a scapegoat. Excellent documentation (and quality) take time and effort and skilled experts and all that costs money or takes someone who is willing to make a long term commitment to an open source project. Being a tech writer I tried on occasion and fairly quickly lost interest due to the endless arrogance of developers who think they are hot shit and know everything better, which means I didn't have to know any of it. They are instantly annoyed by any questions and by the time I beat the info out of them it was obsolete anyway because some other rogue developer just came up with what he thought was a much better way to do stuff negating a lot of other (and often better) work done before. Interestingly, I found more willingness of cooperation from commercial software companies who dished out free licenses for documentation work done for them (because they did the math and knew it was a steal). Doing documentation in open source projects is the most thankless job in the universe and that is why people don't want to do it and that is why FOSS docs often suck. Ah yes, and reading source code....as mentioned, developers hate writing documentation and that includes comments in source code. It's great if they can compile C in their head, but the vast majority of people cannot do that, but they can follow along the logic and workflow if source code is properly documented.
First, football is not a sport and the goons on the sidelines with their fat headsets are already looking ridiculous. Now they add tablets to the mix? From what I read the coaches found that the Surface tablets are not working and are useless. My suggestion is to ditch all that tech gear, take the helmet and padding off the players, and then play a real team sport...which would be rugby. Rugby is also much less prone to major injuries and that should allow playing more than the 16 games a season.
That is the name of a chain of junk stores in Germany...not flattering for that neck of the woods.
Do we really need a full arsenal of nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire earth fivefold? Rather than throwing more money at this stuff the entire sites and the nuclear rockets should be dismantled. That will save a lot of money, make the world a safer place, and lower the need of staff.
The 15 cm claim is a total misrepresentation of the facts. The prosthetic leg is about 4 cm longer when not under load. The sole reason for this is to make it as long as the other leg when Rehm is walking or running, otherwise he would be limping. In other words, for the prosthetic leg to work as a normal leg it has to be longer given the design used. Yes, it is designed like a spring, but so is a 'normal' leg which makes running and jumping possible in the first place. Rehm offered to take part in studies that compare his prosthetic leg with any other regular leg to see if there is indeed an advantage, even a small one. So far nobody has come forward to put their claims to the test. Until they do all the accusations of cheating and being against fair play are utterly baseless and in itself an act of unfairness. These accusations simply imply that an amputee with a prosthetic leg has to be a worse athlete or otherwise be a cheater. Really?
I can follow the argument that decriminalization of drugs will free up funds that can be better spend elsewhere, but I think that the elsewhere will be taking care of the increasing number of drug addicts and their ailments. Yes, I know, I am making assumptions here that if using drugs is no longer penalized the consumption will go up as well as keeping penalties will keep the number of users low. We have an excellent opportunity to put some facts into this by monitoring marijuana use in those states where it became legal beyond medical uses. Do more people try it? Do more people use it? Do we see a spike in things like traffic accidents due to doped drivers? Do we see the decrease in intelligence given that continued marijuana use destroys brain cells similar to heavy drinking? Do we get the same amount of lung cancer cases as from tobacco? My prediction is that the cost will stay the same, but shift to other areas such as public health care expenses, public dependent care expenses, downturn in economy, etc. At the same time, is there any benefit from sending military after the drug lords and fight them in gun battles with no real outcome? The solution is in finding out what makes people not even want to try drugs, especially those that get one hooked instantly. Eradicating demand will take care of the rest very quickly.
...flip-flop on how it defines itself." - Why? Because the existing cable companies have that cheat move patented for themselves or what?
I have yet to see any telco digging up anything. They just run the wire from the pole and drill right through the pristine front of the house to run black cable over white siding in the most obnoxious way possible. Dig up the front yard...pah! We are not Europe!
Then the US government needs to be sued as well as inventors of the technology behind the Tor network. Dumb court decision, it is like shooting the messenger.