Besides, I find it hilarious that ideological leftists would lobby so hard to replace a dead Democrat president with a Republican who happened to have a strong love for the Second Amendment... Me, I'm good with that.
You're arguing from a populist (and certainly emotional) standpoint that has no basis in fact. You even drag out old tropes which have little-to-no basis in fact just to eke out something that someday may resemble a point: You see, railroads, skyscrapers, and the Pyramids were built by hired labor, not slaves. Same with mining coal. Nobody made them do it at gunpoint (or spear-point, or sword-point, etc). Peasants were of course a bit more constrained, but (outside of the occasional accident that had bugger-all to do with nobles) they didn't die merely by producing goods and services (hell, most of them died of disease and warfare.)
Here's a poser for you - if it weren't for that capital and the concentration/organization of same, humankind would be doing... what? Most likely we'd all still be doing the hunter/gatherer thing. Meanwhile, you'd be bitching about how Jorm three caves over has four bearskin coats and three women to mate with, while no woman would give you the time of day in your one threadbare secondhand coat made of rabbit skins......but your misery would be all his fault, now wouldn't it?
But hey - please continue flailing about... this is actually mildly entertaining. Just promise that you don't froth at the mouth too much during the next Young Communists meeting, eh?;)
It did however drop a propellor blade and accidentally ram head-on into a British warship (HMS Hawke, I think?), though neither incident really tested the theory much.
Of what happens when you leave safety up to the private sector.
Funny thing - this ship was fully compliant with government regulations at the time, including the specific rule governing the number of lifeboats it was required to carry.
So in other words you have no rebuttal at all but felt affronted enough to howl in response. Got it.
Here, let me help you out a bit:
The motivation as to why it was built (to make $$$$$$ off the emigrant trade), and the very money-grubbing publicity surrounding that was impossible to miss. Now, in order to attract those dollars (and basically operate as a bulk people-mover), the steerage accommodations were actually far better than anything (steerage-wise) up to that time. The ship and its sisters were hyped rather excessively... and the first of the series (RMS Olympic) had already been in operation for awhile.
The hype for Titanic (and White Star Line) was ratcheted up further after a couple of spectacular (but non-fatal) accidents that occurred on Olympic, and the opulence was ratcheted up because reviews of the Olympic said that (paraphrased) the ship was rather nice, but rather blah... so they really went to town on Titanic to attract the wealthy in order to get even more hype. All that said, White Star knew full well that their majority source of income wouldn't come from the moneyed, but from the horde of emigrants down in steerage.
As a result? By the time it launched, it was billed as the biggest (it was), best (it was), and safest (well sort of) ship afloat.
So yeah, when it sank, naturally the public was thrilled, fascinated, and appalled all at once. Sure, a few big names bit the big one (Mr. Astor and Maj. Archibald Butt, among a few others), but the really big outcry came from the sheer numbers: lifeboat space for only half (at best), pushing full-speed in water full of icebergs that were known to eat ships alive at that time of year, and oh yeah - yellow journalism that (much like today's media) just loved a good, hard drama. Read the papers of the time - the editorials focused mostly on the safety issues for the emigrant trade, and excoriated White Star Lines (and specifically JP Morgan + J. Bruce Ismay) for their "criminal" negligence - doubly so for their little policy of forcing steerage passengers to wait for everyone else to get in a lifeboat first.
As further supporting evidence, the dead nobs were mostly portrayed as heroes, but not much outcry was caused by their specific deaths (at least outside of their families). The closest that their class caused in outcry was strictly moral in nature - specifically concerning Mr. Guggenheim's 18-year-old pregnant mistress (who was among the survivors).
Finally, note that both inquiries (US Congress and UK Board of Maritime Trade) never focused on the richies as their motivation or their source of outcry. Now whether that was for show or not is debatable, but facts are facts, and 100+ years on (and only one living survivor left - she was an infant at the time), that's all we have to work with.
TL; DR: The rich corpses were mere icing on what became a very big and very dramatic cake.
Now, if you have a rebuttal that proves your particular argument that dead money was the primary motivator, cool - let's see if you can grow up this time and articulate it.
Pretty sure that such an argument would be outweighed by the sheer number of dead (wealthy or not), combined with the fact that the newest, greatest, and biggest ship that mankind had built up to that point in time had just sank.
Fun factoid: only a near-literal couple of first-class children drowned, and the only first-class women who died had stayed behind voluntarily (refused to leave husbands, one died because she lost track of a kid, etc). Most of the first-class men died out of chivalry (they knew the math, decided to make room for the women, etc.)
Oh, and this was after the hype that it was fitted with the latest in safety engineering (read: watertight bulkheads), and that maritime experts everywhere were pronouncing the ship as being anywhere from incredibly hard to impossible to sink.
Funny thing - I went primarily Mac for my home user boxes because it was 1) an actual *nix (well, literally a certified UNIX variant), and 2) it could run all the CG/gfx app suites that I wanted it to run.
I never really got into the flamewars except for the occasional poking of fun at whatever side needed poking. For years on end, I happily ran a Mac Cube, the later a monster PowerMac on one big KVM switch with all my 'doze and Linux machinery.
I will say this, though: While I was re-installing Linux every year because I wanted to (distro-hopping), and reinstalling 'doze every 6-12 months on the PCs because I had to (Winrot)? I upgraded the Cube once in its 6 year lifespan, and the PowerMac once in its 9-year lifespan... both times only because I wanted the features that came with the upgrades. Now I just plop in the OS upgrade on my MacBook Pro, but have only had to re-install once - when I replaced the factory platter drive with a way faster SSD drive. The OS simply holds up at least as well as Linux over the long term.
As a fun side benefit, the MacBook Pros put up with my abuses just fine (my current one is nearly 3 years old), whereas before 2013 I was buying new laptops damned near every 12-18 months, with most of them dying off at the hardware level by month 13-14.
Overall though, I can happily use Macs and Linux side-by-side. Windows I only use when I have no choice in the matter (I use a Mac at work, BTW).
Naturally, because the corporation, all by itself, without any help from the local government, keeps competitors out with patrols of militiamen who shoot-on-site any contractor coming out to lay cable.
They don't have to - the city effectively does it for them (by way of fining any company dumb enough to try, then forcibly removing the offending infrastructure).
I typed that phrase mostly in jest, but I sincerely doubt you would have a 100-year ROI...
It would definitely take a few more years to get a return on the investment, yes, but consider that broadband wireless has a much faster ROI, and covers more people more quickly. For example, a local wireless provider (and a quite decent one) is Coho, which does a rather decent job of it considering the mountainous terrain they cover.
Now - in my current case, I do not expect cable or DSL - no worries there. I moved to the area knowing full well what my options are. However, let me give you a more realistic example of corporate laziness blinding them to profits:
The last time I used wireless Internet (Sprint BB), I lived in a densely populated suburban area near Ogden, UT with approximately 30,000 of my neighbors. I went looking for broadband in 2000-2001. Qwest (at the time) wouldn't deliver DSL because they refused to upgrade the ancient Integrated Pair Gain telecom infrastructure they put in place two decades prior. Comcast didn't want to drop a DOCSIS into the area in spite of already having cable TV locked-up in the same area. In comes Sprint Broadband... for $45/mo, I got guaranteed T-1 speeds up and down (at the time that was considered very decent). They stuck an antenna atop my house, and pointed it at a relay tower ~35 miles away. The connection was rock-solid (in the 5 years I had it, only once --in a blizzard-- did it drop packets), the prices were good for the service, and I was satisfied with it. The rest of the neighborhood felt the same way, and by mid-2001, it got to the point where Sprint had to periodically refuse new customers because they couldn't build up the infrastructure fast enough to keep up.
Sometime around 2003 Comcast started sniffing around for customers, but they got a somewhat cool reception because most of my neighborhood already had Sprint BB, and didn't feel like paying the exorbitant prices Comcast wanted to charge, in spite of offering 5mbps. Around 2004, Qwest finally showed up and (sort of) updated their infrastructure for DSL, but they wanted to charge $99/mo for what was basically the same average T-1 speed.
I can tell you right now that back in 2000, if either Comcast or Qwest had taken the time and spent the money, they would have had the entire area locked-up and the ROI would have been incredibly quick.
The above example is why I made the phrase 'mostly' in jest.;)
I'm kind of curious about the non-cell-carrier wireless ISP usage data.
For instance, I use Sat. Internet (because the ISPs are too cheap/lazy to run broadband to my rural-as-hell property).
I also have used, and know that folks still use wireless ISPs (wherein a unidirectional antenna is bolted to the roof of the house and pointed to a distant tower). I last used it from 2000-2005 by way of Sprint Broadband, and got T1 speeds up and down - from a tower 35 miles away. Wasn't perfect for FPS gaming, but was quite usable in spite of that. Pretty sure that speeds have gone up since then.
You can't legally lock up resources owned by the company. You have to divulge passwords when asked by someone in authority. Otherwise, you could end up in jail.
I agree... so when they ask, you simply post those user/password combos for them on Pastebin, as well as a complete list of servers/VPNs/etc. Problem solved...
(Why yes that would torpedo your career, but damn it would be a bright blaze of glory on your way out...)
...it's the other sharp edge of that two-edge sword called local monopolistic power. Sure, Comcast has exclusive markets, but that means they cannot go into other markets that are already taken up by some other cable ISP. Netflix has no such restrictions.
Doesn't matter though - Comcast is a, like most cable ISPs, a bag of dicks, so even at 1/4 the size, they'll do their level best to extort money from Netflix and anyone else that streams video for a living...
Depends on the scope... and all it takes is for one key group of people (*nix sysadmins, say) to refuse and stand firm on that refusal.
Personally, if I worked for EmblemHealth, I'd be doing a couple of things right now:
1) start looking for another job - like yesterday.
2) dutifully record every last transgression made by the organization against HIPAA, SOX, and any other authority the organization is subject to. Then start sending emails to the uppers stating those problems, and asking for $$$ to fix it. Word them as if it's no big deal, but it really is a big deal, so as to give yourself a big cushion. Carefully record the expected refusals and store them offsite if you can. After leaving, blow the whistle, because odds are perfect they haven't complied by then if they hadn't complied by the time you left.
(and now for some fun ones, made mostly in jest, you understand...)
3) "Wow - for some odd reason I can't seem to locate all the really critical documentation! Where did it all go?"
4) carefully scrutinize every last labor law for the state. Do your level best to find transgressions against it (especially when it comes to discrimination laws)
5) as an extension to #5, record every spoken conversation, on your phone if you can. save the bits that could be construed as discrimination or suchlike.
6) "Training is going to take a lot longer than I thought..."
7) "I just got hired on to XYZ corp, but I won't start for a month. I'll be happy to transfer my critical knowledge at consultancy fees of $400/hr..." (just be damned sure you have that critical knowledge, have a job waiting for you, and that said knowledge isn't already documented somewhere).
8) carefully study the BOFH archives... see what you can put to use.;)
So, I open the local paper, and I see a cartoon in the op-ed section that clearly shows a candidate's trademark...
...not protected, you say?
Yes, I know the diff between a purely commercial activity and a newspaper opinion, but think about it - why is commercial activity suddenly not 'speech' just because it is a commercial activity?
As for people using Quicktime to play videos... I don't think this was ever the case.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s this was often the case (see also files with the *.mov extension), but as time went on the requirement slowed.
You don't see it as much these days because apps like VLC already have Quicktime decoders built-in to their product, and they just play it as a matter of course.
Linux is just a kernel, nothing more - and certainly not this nebulous ecosystem thingy you describe. Yes, just a kernel - and not even a whole OS, let alone a group of them. It's up to the distro makers (e.g. RedHat, Novell/SuSE, Debian, etc) to take that kernel and make a whole operating system around it.
Honestly, the repubs just utterly hate the american people, and prove it by constantly trying to pass this crap.
Honestly, stop drinking the Kool-Aid - *both* parties have nothing but contempt for the American people, and prove it by promising you the moon during election season, but only providing a slice of processed cheese after getting elected.
What the GOP claim is that the FCC will regulate pricing by imposing net neutrality.
Where in the bill can we find this alleged claim? There is a difference between rhetoric and the text of an actual bill or law.
...the FCC will regulate pricing by ensuring that the cable companies don't use their pseudo-monopolies to gouge customers for internet access.
The FCC has already pledged to not do any price regulation whatsoever, so where is the support for this claim?
In most markets, consumers have at best two choices...
Actually, at least five methods in most markets for general access, and at least four if you don't count dial-up: Cable, DSL, 3/4G tether/dedicated, and Satellite. Fiber/FiOS is also available in many markets still.
Suddenly the cable companies lower their prices AND start to offer higher speeds.
Seeing the same thing here in and among the Sat. providers, in spite of the massive up-front infrastructure cost that they have to foot (that is, getting at least one satellite up into geosynchronous orbit). Not even 5 years ago, Hughes would charge you a massive monthly bill (something way over $200/mo IIRC) for a tiny 3GB monthly cap and maybe 1mbps speeds. Now, with Exede, I'm getting solid 25mbps with a nice, healthy 30GB (daytime, nights unlimited) monthly cap for just a touch over $100/mo. Yeah latency still sucks, but I don't play twitch games anymore, so no worries on my part.
Funny thing, the big claim is that ISP's are the ones claiming that Net Neutrality is equivalent to regulating what they charge customers, which is a crap argument that Obama picked up and turned into Yet Another Talking Point. The FCC has already pledged to not regulate what ISPs charge, so this bill will essentially make no difference whatsoever, save to codify the FCC's pledge into law.
So unless there's a provision in this bill that I missed which specifically kills net neutrality in any form or comes close enough to actually do so (I'll admit that I only glanced over the thing) , I think we can chalk this whole thing up to a combination of ongoing Obama-love from Vice, and partisan swordplay in Washington.
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I agree, and I'm a pale blue-eyed dude.
Besides, I find it hilarious that ideological leftists would lobby so hard to replace a dead Democrat president with a Republican who happened to have a strong love for the Second Amendment... Me, I'm good with that.
You're arguing from a populist (and certainly emotional) standpoint that has no basis in fact. You even drag out old tropes which have little-to-no basis in fact just to eke out something that someday may resemble a point: You see, railroads, skyscrapers, and the Pyramids were built by hired labor, not slaves. Same with mining coal. Nobody made them do it at gunpoint (or spear-point, or sword-point, etc). Peasants were of course a bit more constrained, but (outside of the occasional accident that had bugger-all to do with nobles) they didn't die merely by producing goods and services (hell, most of them died of disease and warfare.)
Here's a poser for you - if it weren't for that capital and the concentration/organization of same, humankind would be doing... what? Most likely we'd all still be doing the hunter/gatherer thing. Meanwhile, you'd be bitching about how Jorm three caves over has four bearskin coats and three women to mate with, while no woman would give you the time of day in your one threadbare secondhand coat made of rabbit skins... ...but your misery would be all his fault, now wouldn't it?
But hey - please continue flailing about... this is actually mildly entertaining. Just promise that you don't froth at the mouth too much during the next Young Communists meeting, eh? ;)
To be fair, the Olympic never scraped an iceberg.
It did however drop a propellor blade and accidentally ram head-on into a British warship (HMS Hawke, I think?), though neither incident really tested the theory much.
Of what happens when you leave safety up to the private sector.
Funny thing - this ship was fully compliant with government regulations at the time, including the specific rule governing the number of lifeboats it was required to carry.
So in other words you have no rebuttal at all but felt affronted enough to howl in response. Got it.
Here, let me help you out a bit:
The motivation as to why it was built (to make $$$$$$ off the emigrant trade), and the very money-grubbing publicity surrounding that was impossible to miss. Now, in order to attract those dollars (and basically operate as a bulk people-mover), the steerage accommodations were actually far better than anything (steerage-wise) up to that time. The ship and its sisters were hyped rather excessively... and the first of the series (RMS Olympic) had already been in operation for awhile.
The hype for Titanic (and White Star Line) was ratcheted up further after a couple of spectacular (but non-fatal) accidents that occurred on Olympic, and the opulence was ratcheted up because reviews of the Olympic said that (paraphrased) the ship was rather nice, but rather blah... so they really went to town on Titanic to attract the wealthy in order to get even more hype. All that said, White Star knew full well that their majority source of income wouldn't come from the moneyed, but from the horde of emigrants down in steerage.
As a result? By the time it launched, it was billed as the biggest (it was), best (it was), and safest (well sort of) ship afloat.
So yeah, when it sank, naturally the public was thrilled, fascinated, and appalled all at once. Sure, a few big names bit the big one (Mr. Astor and Maj. Archibald Butt, among a few others), but the really big outcry came from the sheer numbers: lifeboat space for only half (at best), pushing full-speed in water full of icebergs that were known to eat ships alive at that time of year, and oh yeah - yellow journalism that (much like today's media) just loved a good, hard drama. Read the papers of the time - the editorials focused mostly on the safety issues for the emigrant trade, and excoriated White Star Lines (and specifically JP Morgan + J. Bruce Ismay) for their "criminal" negligence - doubly so for their little policy of forcing steerage passengers to wait for everyone else to get in a lifeboat first.
As further supporting evidence, the dead nobs were mostly portrayed as heroes, but not much outcry was caused by their specific deaths (at least outside of their families). The closest that their class caused in outcry was strictly moral in nature - specifically concerning Mr. Guggenheim's 18-year-old pregnant mistress (who was among the survivors).
Finally, note that both inquiries (US Congress and UK Board of Maritime Trade) never focused on the richies as their motivation or their source of outcry. Now whether that was for show or not is debatable, but facts are facts, and 100+ years on (and only one living survivor left - she was an infant at the time), that's all we have to work with.
TL; DR: The rich corpses were mere icing on what became a very big and very dramatic cake.
Now, if you have a rebuttal that proves your particular argument that dead money was the primary motivator, cool - let's see if you can grow up this time and articulate it.
Pretty sure that such an argument would be outweighed by the sheer number of dead (wealthy or not), combined with the fact that the newest, greatest, and biggest ship that mankind had built up to that point in time had just sank.
Fun factoid: only a near-literal couple of first-class children drowned, and the only first-class women who died had stayed behind voluntarily (refused to leave husbands, one died because she lost track of a kid, etc). Most of the first-class men died out of chivalry (they knew the math, decided to make room for the women, etc.)
Oh, and this was after the hype that it was fitted with the latest in safety engineering (read: watertight bulkheads), and that maritime experts everywhere were pronouncing the ship as being anywhere from incredibly hard to impossible to sink.
I'm just gonna leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Funny thing - I went primarily Mac for my home user boxes because it was 1) an actual *nix (well, literally a certified UNIX variant), and 2) it could run all the CG/gfx app suites that I wanted it to run.
I never really got into the flamewars except for the occasional poking of fun at whatever side needed poking. For years on end, I happily ran a Mac Cube, the later a monster PowerMac on one big KVM switch with all my 'doze and Linux machinery.
I will say this, though: While I was re-installing Linux every year because I wanted to (distro-hopping), and reinstalling 'doze every 6-12 months on the PCs because I had to (Winrot)? I upgraded the Cube once in its 6 year lifespan, and the PowerMac once in its 9-year lifespan... both times only because I wanted the features that came with the upgrades. Now I just plop in the OS upgrade on my MacBook Pro, but have only had to re-install once - when I replaced the factory platter drive with a way faster SSD drive. The OS simply holds up at least as well as Linux over the long term.
As a fun side benefit, the MacBook Pros put up with my abuses just fine (my current one is nearly 3 years old), whereas before 2013 I was buying new laptops damned near every 12-18 months, with most of them dying off at the hardware level by month 13-14.
Overall though, I can happily use Macs and Linux side-by-side. Windows I only use when I have no choice in the matter (I use a Mac at work, BTW).
Naturally, because the corporation, all by itself, without any help from the local government, keeps competitors out with patrols of militiamen who shoot-on-site any contractor coming out to lay cable.
They don't have to - the city effectively does it for them (by way of fining any company dumb enough to try, then forcibly removing the offending infrastructure).
Not me - I don't do AC posts.
See above - I made the phrase mostly in jest.
I typed that phrase mostly in jest, but I sincerely doubt you would have a 100-year ROI...
It would definitely take a few more years to get a return on the investment, yes, but consider that broadband wireless has a much faster ROI, and covers more people more quickly. For example, a local wireless provider (and a quite decent one) is Coho, which does a rather decent job of it considering the mountainous terrain they cover.
Now - in my current case, I do not expect cable or DSL - no worries there. I moved to the area knowing full well what my options are. However, let me give you a more realistic example of corporate laziness blinding them to profits:
The last time I used wireless Internet (Sprint BB), I lived in a densely populated suburban area near Ogden, UT with approximately 30,000 of my neighbors. I went looking for broadband in 2000-2001. Qwest (at the time) wouldn't deliver DSL because they refused to upgrade the ancient Integrated Pair Gain telecom infrastructure they put in place two decades prior. Comcast didn't want to drop a DOCSIS into the area in spite of already having cable TV locked-up in the same area. In comes Sprint Broadband... for $45/mo, I got guaranteed T-1 speeds up and down (at the time that was considered very decent). They stuck an antenna atop my house, and pointed it at a relay tower ~35 miles away. The connection was rock-solid (in the 5 years I had it, only once --in a blizzard-- did it drop packets), the prices were good for the service, and I was satisfied with it. The rest of the neighborhood felt the same way, and by mid-2001, it got to the point where Sprint had to periodically refuse new customers because they couldn't build up the infrastructure fast enough to keep up.
Sometime around 2003 Comcast started sniffing around for customers, but they got a somewhat cool reception because most of my neighborhood already had Sprint BB, and didn't feel like paying the exorbitant prices Comcast wanted to charge, in spite of offering 5mbps. Around 2004, Qwest finally showed up and (sort of) updated their infrastructure for DSL, but they wanted to charge $99/mo for what was basically the same average T-1 speed.
I can tell you right now that back in 2000, if either Comcast or Qwest had taken the time and spent the money, they would have had the entire area locked-up and the ROI would have been incredibly quick.
The above example is why I made the phrase 'mostly' in jest. ;)
Depends...
Like Sibling, cell coverage is nonexistent out at my house, but I can get home Internet.
I'm kind of curious about the non-cell-carrier wireless ISP usage data.
For instance, I use Sat. Internet (because the ISPs are too cheap/lazy to run broadband to my rural-as-hell property).
I also have used, and know that folks still use wireless ISPs (wherein a unidirectional antenna is bolted to the roof of the house and pointed to a distant tower). I last used it from 2000-2005 by way of Sprint Broadband, and got T1 speeds up and down - from a tower 35 miles away. Wasn't perfect for FPS gaming, but was quite usable in spite of that. Pretty sure that speeds have gone up since then.
You can't legally lock up resources owned by the company. You have to divulge passwords when asked by someone in authority. Otherwise, you could end up in jail.
I agree... so when they ask, you simply post those user/password combos for them on Pastebin, as well as a complete list of servers/VPNs/etc. Problem solved...
(Why yes that would torpedo your career, but damn it would be a bright blaze of glory on your way out...)
...it's the other sharp edge of that two-edge sword called local monopolistic power. Sure, Comcast has exclusive markets, but that means they cannot go into other markets that are already taken up by some other cable ISP. Netflix has no such restrictions.
Doesn't matter though - Comcast is a, like most cable ISPs, a bag of dicks, so even at 1/4 the size, they'll do their level best to extort money from Netflix and anyone else that streams video for a living...
This, right here... but only to a point.
Get too antagonistic and/or too loud in public, and you will suddenly find yourself rather blackballed when it comes to IT jobs in town...
Two slight differences, though -
1) Reagan had a large pool of former military ATC folks who were able to practically jump into the job. PATCO didn't really expect that to happen.
2) Air traffic was a whole lot lighter back then.
Depends on the scope... and all it takes is for one key group of people (*nix sysadmins, say) to refuse and stand firm on that refusal.
Personally, if I worked for EmblemHealth, I'd be doing a couple of things right now:
1) start looking for another job - like yesterday.
2) dutifully record every last transgression made by the organization against HIPAA, SOX, and any other authority the organization is subject to. Then start sending emails to the uppers stating those problems, and asking for $$$ to fix it. Word them as if it's no big deal, but it really is a big deal, so as to give yourself a big cushion. Carefully record the expected refusals and store them offsite if you can. After leaving, blow the whistle, because odds are perfect they haven't complied by then if they hadn't complied by the time you left.
(and now for some fun ones, made mostly in jest, you understand...)
3) "Wow - for some odd reason I can't seem to locate all the really critical documentation! Where did it all go?"
4) carefully scrutinize every last labor law for the state. Do your level best to find transgressions against it (especially when it comes to discrimination laws)
5) as an extension to #5, record every spoken conversation, on your phone if you can. save the bits that could be construed as discrimination or suchlike.
6) "Training is going to take a lot longer than I thought..."
7) "I just got hired on to XYZ corp, but I won't start for a month. I'll be happy to transfer my critical knowledge at consultancy fees of $400/hr..." (just be damned sure you have that critical knowledge, have a job waiting for you, and that said knowledge isn't already documented somewhere).
8) carefully study the BOFH archives... see what you can put to use. ;)
So, I open the local paper, and I see a cartoon in the op-ed section that clearly shows a candidate's trademark...
Yes, I know the diff between a purely commercial activity and a newspaper opinion, but think about it - why is commercial activity suddenly not 'speech' just because it is a commercial activity?
As for people using Quicktime to play videos... I don't think this was ever the case.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s this was often the case (see also files with the *.mov extension), but as time went on the requirement slowed.
You don't see it as much these days because apps like VLC already have Quicktime decoders built-in to their product, and they just play it as a matter of course.
Nitpick:
Linux is just a kernel, nothing more - and certainly not this nebulous ecosystem thingy you describe. Yes, just a kernel - and not even a whole OS, let alone a group of them. It's up to the distro makers (e.g. RedHat, Novell/SuSE, Debian, etc) to take that kernel and make a whole operating system around it.
LOL - I loves me that partisan knee-jerk moderation! Let's see how many "overrated" mods I can get today in a desperate attempt to drown the post... ;)
Honestly, the repubs just utterly hate the american people, and prove it by constantly trying to pass this crap.
Honestly, stop drinking the Kool-Aid - *both* parties have nothing but contempt for the American people, and prove it by promising you the moon during election season, but only providing a slice of processed cheese after getting elected.
What the GOP claim is that the FCC will regulate pricing by imposing net neutrality.
Where in the bill can we find this alleged claim? There is a difference between rhetoric and the text of an actual bill or law.
...the FCC will regulate pricing by ensuring that the cable companies don't use their pseudo-monopolies to gouge customers for internet access.
The FCC has already pledged to not do any price regulation whatsoever, so where is the support for this claim?
In most markets, consumers have at best two choices...
Actually, at least five methods in most markets for general access, and at least four if you don't count dial-up: Cable, DSL, 3/4G tether/dedicated, and Satellite. Fiber/FiOS is also available in many markets still.
Suddenly the cable companies lower their prices AND start to offer higher speeds.
Seeing the same thing here in and among the Sat. providers, in spite of the massive up-front infrastructure cost that they have to foot (that is, getting at least one satellite up into geosynchronous orbit). Not even 5 years ago, Hughes would charge you a massive monthly bill (something way over $200/mo IIRC) for a tiny 3GB monthly cap and maybe 1mbps speeds. Now, with Exede, I'm getting solid 25mbps with a nice, healthy 30GB (daytime, nights unlimited) monthly cap for just a touch over $100/mo. Yeah latency still sucks, but I don't play twitch games anymore, so no worries on my part.
Competition is awesome that way.
Funny thing, the big claim is that ISP's are the ones claiming that Net Neutrality is equivalent to regulating what they charge customers, which is a crap argument that Obama picked up and turned into Yet Another Talking Point. The FCC has already pledged to not regulate what ISPs charge, so this bill will essentially make no difference whatsoever, save to codify the FCC's pledge into law.
So unless there's a provision in this bill that I missed which specifically kills net neutrality in any form or comes close enough to actually do so (I'll admit that I only glanced over the thing) , I think we can chalk this whole thing up to a combination of ongoing Obama-love from Vice, and partisan swordplay in Washington.