Keep in mind that today we use those enhanced "powers" against accused terrorists, tomorrow it might be against those who speak out against the government. Actually, they don't even need to take that step. Once they are allowed to treat people accused of any single crime, be it terrorism, child porn, or high treason, outside the Constitution then they can treat anyone that way by simply trumping up the charge.
Well, I'd temper that a bit. Upholding the Constitution is first. Upholding justice is a fine secondary agenda. Upholding the laws is a good tertiary one. I'd be happy to allow people to believe the second and third could be in either order, actually. Upholding the Constitution is obviously first, though.
Free people, at least where freedom is cherished, are happier people than those denied freedom. People who are happy are more willing to defend the institutions which protect their happiness and less likely to undermine those institutions. Those who are resentful are more likely to tear down institutions they resent or to stand idly by while they are torn down. Therefore, in a land where freedom is cherished, there is no security if the people are not free. The government which takes too much freedom from the people will not be supported by the people.
Besides, security is important only for what you want secured. You don't secure your excrement; you flush it. If you cherish freedom, you have no real security if it's freedom that is lost. Losing what you cherish means you were not secure, by definition.
It's very difficult to say that a US base under US control on which the US holds a lease (under US real estate law and tradition, a leaseholder has most of the rights of an owner for the duration of the lease) is not under the jurisdiction of US courts. Ships, under international law, count as the land of their state of registry IIRC, so that's no better a solution to Bush's problem.
Bush's problem is that he has a constitution and a constituency to defend, and that he feels it's more useful to the constituency if he forgoes defending certain parts of the US Constitution. Thankfully, that's just the sort of thing the Constitution and its separation of powers was designed to prevent.
The Supreme Court has done what the nation's founder intended. It's too bad almost half the justices were against it.
The "citizens" are protected in some ways by the Constitution and "people" in other ways. The rights to speedy trial, indictment, to know your charge, to the counsel of an attorney, to face your accusers, and to subpoena witnesses in your defense are guaranteed to people, not just citizens.
They specifically agreed to be bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and to be tried in our military courts. These alleged criminal enemy combatants did not make those agreements, nor are they being considered POWs. It is therefore right that they receive the same treatment as anyone else accused of criminal acts under US jurisdiction.
Considering the Constitution of the United States was written largely by the same group who had written the Declaration of Independence, I think it is a difficult argument that the claims against the King would be allowed a pass for a new George.
The Declaration of Independence states that certain rights are endowed upon men by their Creator and unalienable. Among those are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.
The charges against King George which justified the revolution included, "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power" and "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences".
The preamble to the Constitution itself lists one of the reasons for its ordination as to "establish justice".
Article III section 2 states that the judicial power of the Supreme Court and the inferior courts extends to people including "a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects".
The 5th Amendment provides for indictment by grand jury and due process of law. It makes an exception for those serving in the military during war or public danger, but enemy combatants whether on the field of battle lawfully or unlawfully are not serving in our military.
The 6th Amendment requires that one be informed of the charges, to be confronted by witnesses against him, to have the power to subpoena witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel. No exception for military or maritime conditions are made in this Amendment.
Considering all of these facts, and considering that the founders who wrote and supported the one document were the writers and supporters of the other, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could seriously question the legal status of people being held as criminals indefinitely under the power of the United States.
The government specifically denied that these people were POWs. If they had been POWs, they could have been held until the end of hostilities with the countries in which they were captured. Being held as criminals, though, they have no fewer rights than American citizens under the US Constitution from what I can tell.
There's nothing I've read in the Constitution which says that non-citizens under the government's jurisdiction are to be treated differently from citizens in matters of criminal law. In fact, while the Constitution at one time allowed the historic fact of brutal slavery and racial subjugation, the Articles and the Amendments make clear distinctions in many cases between the words "citizen" and "person", and most of the protections are for the more generic "person". Now slavery is properly banned by the Constitution. Foreign parties accused of crimes should not be treated any differently than citizens, or what have we learned?
I think there's even a way to delineate along that line. There are skeptics, cynics, and pessimists. The lines between skeptics and cynics are a bit fuzzy, and between cynics and pessimists as well. Yet it's easy to tell the difference between a skeptic and a pessimist.
In brief, people can think "This may not work", "This probably won't work", or "This will never work" before they have any evidence.
The skeptic will go with the evidence more readily. The cynic will be biased towards the negative, but can be convinced by the evidence. The pessimist will be surprised at success even when success should have been expected.
Of course, there are optimists to the other side of skeptics on that list. They'll favor success until the evidence proves them wrong, but will favor success the next time.
Then there are "true believers" on either end who either will be convinced of failure or convinced of success even after the outcome is clear to everyone else. They'll twist the evidence and the logic to their conclusion before they allow their conclusion to change with the evidence and logic.
Unfortunately, while electing politicians so we don't have to think, we often elect them in our own image.
It's terribly difficult to be a leader when you're following the opinion polls for all your decisions, for one thing. That's a big circle of people wanting the politician to do the thinking, and the politician wanting the people to do the thinking. Eventually we need to figure out that no thinking gets done that way, and only mimicry.
Clinton was renowned for following polls while in office. G.W. Bush likely also follows polls, but from his narrowly selected portion of the total US constituency. I'm not sure we've had someone in the office of President who actually did any leading since Eisenhower. Perhaps Kennedy or Reagan lead, but most modern holders of the office have been followers elected to lead.
Speaking of figuring out what's inedible... apparently someone in the produce business can't even tell the difference between shit and a tomato. Otherwise, how the hell are we getting an outbreak of intestinal bacteria all over something which has no intestines?
Manure to be used as a fertilizer is supposed to be composted thoroughly. Hands that handle food are supposed to be cleaned thoroughly, especially after using the toilet. Animal enclosures aren't supposed to allow effluent to run downhill onto food crops. How is this all so difficult to understand?
Yet we have people sick in 17 states and I can't have a slice of zesty red beefsteak on my burger at any restaurant in town. There's something very wrong with this.
Well, if you're an American you won't as long as the yuan is artificially pegged to the dollar. Perhaps they'll artificially tie it to the euro in the future.
I think your engineer with 5-10 years of experience may well replace 3 or 4 of those grads. Maybe even all five of them. The truth is, though, that they will work cheap now and gain experience. The single engineer is going to eventually find a new job or retire. He might be hit by the proverbial bus.
A good balance is having the experienced engineer mentor 3 to 7 new grads, I think. In five years, then, you have a number of people with more than five years of experience.
It was more of an "underclock" button. "Turbo" was whatever your system should normally run at. Turning it off made it clock down to AT speed so games with timing loops written to CPU NOOPs instead of using the system clock wouldn't be over before you got a chance to play.
Not to sound too much like Obi Wan, but many of the truths we cling to depend a great deal on our own point of view and all that.
If I was working for O'Reilly, Manning, APress, Wiley, et al I'd say a successful programming language was one which sold lots of books.
If I was a hiring manager for a large software company, I'd look closely at what language allowed the most cheap new grads to work together an produce something resembling quality code.
If I was teaching intro to computer science, I'd worry about what was preparing my students for the rest of their education.
If I was teaching a certificate-level course to people looking to get into the job market quickly, I'd look for the language with the highest placement rate.
If I was a person of little clue, I'd go largely by the hype. Some would go with the mainstream hype, and some go with the counter cultural "that's the big hype, but our language is better" underdog hype.
As a programmer, I prefer the language that helps me turn customer requirements into working programs that fastest with the least fuss on my part, and allows decent maintenance and customization later.
As the owner of a small boutique programming shop, I want my expressive, powerful language to give me an advantage over others using less expressive languages. I'd like to find others who can use it, but a few is alright as I don't need a huge team to work on programs.
Actually, according to the official DSL availability map he could't when he tried to order it. He happens to live along the route where the phone company connects the town to the long distance network.
He had to work his way through several different people on the telco's end to convince them to send him the equipment and mark his line active for DSL. He also had to sign a waiver of quality guarantees, since the official support from the CO didn't reach his house.
We're not sure, but from the speeds and the reliability he's getting we think the telco installed a smallish DSLAM in the substation near his house in order to start offering it to his neighbors, too. It's an unincorporated area in the county, but the houses are just as close to one another as in many subdivisions in town. It makes sense if they can get enough penetration in the market to run DSL out of the remote substations as well as the CO.
Actually, it was meant to make fun of the reporting that this was a major technical discovery. It seems like the folks at NASA are having routine engineering issues, yet the article makes them sound like idiots who don't understand basic electronics.
FYI, I used to be a contractor for the state of Illinois in an IT capacity. Several people I know are or have been contractors of direct employees for the state. In that particular government, I can assure you that a decent portion of the employees are incompetent, slackers, or both. The rest are hard workers who unfortunately don't have the power to change the status quo by themselves.
I'm sure there's a certain portion of the US government that suffers from the same issues (although probably not as badly). However, NASA doesn't seem like the agency in which to find incompetent slackers. The places reporting on NASA's work seem to fit the bill quite nicely, though.
I guess next time I make a joke, I'll have to include some cute little pseudo-HTML tags to let you and the mods know. Sometimes a post reads back to me as I intended it even though something gets lost in the text-only translation. Sorry.
that a strongly charged gas cloud can wreak havoc on your sensitive electronics if you don't shield them properly. Oh, and putting insulation around your stuff cuts down on the charge that will move across it. That's your government's bondholder money at work!
My parents live 7 miles from a town of 18,000. They don't have Internet access at home because my mom uses it at work when she needs it and my dad's more interested in mowing the 8 acres on which they live or going camping. They still have DVD players (one for the house, one for the camper), digital OTA tuners (two for the house, one for the camper), a computer (my dad plays single-player games on it, my mom uses it as a photo album, word processor, etc). My mom's in her late 50s and my dad's in his early 60s.
About four miles down the road, one of my best friends and his wife and kids have 8 computers hooked up to DSL. They're still three miles from the closest town, but they host LAN parties.
One of my friends has 3.5 Mbps DSL in his town of 4500, and the other side of town can get 7Mbps. He telecommutes for much of his work. His home office is a testament to everything geek.
My sister lives in a town of 900. She and her husband have four computers, video equipment, sound recording equipment, cable Internet access, and digital cable.
My cousin lives in the middle of a 42-acre plot at the end of a gravel road off of a two-lane blacktop. That blacktop itself is off a US highway and never goes closer at any point than 5 miles from a town. She and her husband have two big screens, digital satellite, wireless ISP, video game consoles, electronic surveillance systems, cell phones, a digital camcorder, a DVR, and more.
I'm not sure exactly what your experience with rural residents is, but I think you're making assumptions that don't hold everywhere.
DSL is inherently distance-limited. Wider ranges of frequencies means the same signal quality can give better data throughput.
It'd be digital in both directions on both ends instead of digital from the ISP to the CO then analog on your end for your downloads and analog from you to the CO then digital from the CO to the ISP for your uploads.
The packet delivery management of TCP/IP could be used instead of the error correction built into your grandmas's $4 Winmodem's driver.
That said, it still sounds like the idea has some holes in it.
Actually, running fiber to the pedestal alongside your road and making sure the copper to your house has no repeaters is probably cheaper than testing this for every home and rolling the same trucks to fix rural copper loops back to town for every two-lane blacktop and gravel road and maintaining the signal quality on that new copper plant. If you're going to trench, plan ahead.
Actually, Enhanced 911 means they know your address when you call and is still being rolled out for analog lines with the incumbent telcos in many more rural parts of the country.
It only gets interesting that VoiP providers can't provide your address for you in the event of a call if your regular phone company can. Lots of county dispatching offices are still getting the equipment financed for installation so that they can use E911. No phone company can hook up to the E911 system until the dispatch office has it.
Actually, the ground expanding and contracting, the copper or aluminum conductors getting wet, cards hitting poles in bad conditions, and winds blowing down lines off of above-ground poles (or the poles falling over, trees breaking in the wind or under the weight of ice and falling on lines) is a huge problem for electricity out in the country, let alone telephone service.
My parents go without power at least 18 hours a year, and they're only 7 miles from the closest town, with no two houses along their road being more than a couple hundred meters apart. They call AT&T from a neighbor's house or from work about once a year to let them know they've been without phone service overnight.
By contrast, a 30cm dish will break up a bit in a bad storm for a few minutes and not require a truck roll unless the dish actually comes off the mount or the positioning bolts come loose. A 120cm C-band dish will work through almost any weather. Those are for TV data rates, and those are much higher than voice lines.
The latency on interactive services over geosynchronous satellites is crap, though. Point- to-multipoint home wireless from a tower is a much better for those who can get it, and the startup cost for installation is much cheaper than running a new cable plant to every house.
There are VoiP boxes with analog phone jacks. You could even make the network access box on the side of the house a cheap router with an analog jack and Ethernet jacks for the customer's PCs. The problem there is cost.
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Well, I'd temper that a bit. Upholding the Constitution is first. Upholding justice is a fine secondary agenda. Upholding the laws is a good tertiary one. I'd be happy to allow people to believe the second and third could be in either order, actually. Upholding the Constitution is obviously first, though.
Free people, at least where freedom is cherished, are happier people than those denied freedom. People who are happy are more willing to defend the institutions which protect their happiness and less likely to undermine those institutions. Those who are resentful are more likely to tear down institutions they resent or to stand idly by while they are torn down. Therefore, in a land where freedom is cherished, there is no security if the people are not free. The government which takes too much freedom from the people will not be supported by the people.
Besides, security is important only for what you want secured. You don't secure your excrement; you flush it. If you cherish freedom, you have no real security if it's freedom that is lost. Losing what you cherish means you were not secure, by definition.
It's very difficult to say that a US base under US control on which the US holds a lease (under US real estate law and tradition, a leaseholder has most of the rights of an owner for the duration of the lease) is not under the jurisdiction of US courts. Ships, under international law, count as the land of their state of registry IIRC, so that's no better a solution to Bush's problem.
Bush's problem is that he has a constitution and a constituency to defend, and that he feels it's more useful to the constituency if he forgoes defending certain parts of the US Constitution. Thankfully, that's just the sort of thing the Constitution and its separation of powers was designed to prevent.
The Supreme Court has done what the nation's founder intended. It's too bad almost half the justices were against it.
The "citizens" are protected in some ways by the Constitution and "people" in other ways. The rights to speedy trial, indictment, to know your charge, to the counsel of an attorney, to face your accusers, and to subpoena witnesses in your defense are guaranteed to people, not just citizens.
They specifically agreed to be bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and to be tried in our military courts. These alleged criminal enemy combatants did not make those agreements, nor are they being considered POWs. It is therefore right that they receive the same treatment as anyone else accused of criminal acts under US jurisdiction.
Considering the Constitution of the United States was written largely by the same group who had written the Declaration of Independence, I think it is a difficult argument that the claims against the King would be allowed a pass for a new George.
The Declaration of Independence states that certain rights are endowed upon men by their Creator and unalienable. Among those are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.
The charges against King George which justified the revolution included, "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power" and "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences".
The preamble to the Constitution itself lists one of the reasons for its ordination as to "establish justice".
Article III section 2 states that the judicial power of the Supreme Court and the inferior courts extends to people including "a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects".
The 5th Amendment provides for indictment by grand jury and due process of law. It makes an exception for those serving in the military during war or public danger, but enemy combatants whether on the field of battle lawfully or unlawfully are not serving in our military.
The 6th Amendment requires that one be informed of the charges, to be confronted by witnesses against him, to have the power to subpoena witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel. No exception for military or maritime conditions are made in this Amendment.
Considering all of these facts, and considering that the founders who wrote and supported the one document were the writers and supporters of the other, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could seriously question the legal status of people being held as criminals indefinitely under the power of the United States.
The government specifically denied that these people were POWs. If they had been POWs, they could have been held until the end of hostilities with the countries in which they were captured. Being held as criminals, though, they have no fewer rights than American citizens under the US Constitution from what I can tell.
There's nothing I've read in the Constitution which says that non-citizens under the government's jurisdiction are to be treated differently from citizens in matters of criminal law. In fact, while the Constitution at one time allowed the historic fact of brutal slavery and racial subjugation, the Articles and the Amendments make clear distinctions in many cases between the words "citizen" and "person", and most of the protections are for the more generic "person". Now slavery is properly banned by the Constitution. Foreign parties accused of crimes should not be treated any differently than citizens, or what have we learned?
I think there's even a way to delineate along that line. There are skeptics, cynics, and pessimists. The lines between skeptics and cynics are a bit fuzzy, and between cynics and pessimists as well. Yet it's easy to tell the difference between a skeptic and a pessimist.
In brief, people can think "This may not work", "This probably won't work", or "This will never work" before they have any evidence.
The skeptic will go with the evidence more readily. The cynic will be biased towards the negative, but can be convinced by the evidence. The pessimist will be surprised at success even when success should have been expected.
Of course, there are optimists to the other side of skeptics on that list. They'll favor success until the evidence proves them wrong, but will favor success the next time.
Then there are "true believers" on either end who either will be convinced of failure or convinced of success even after the outcome is clear to everyone else. They'll twist the evidence and the logic to their conclusion before they allow their conclusion to change with the evidence and logic.
Unfortunately, while electing politicians so we don't have to think, we often elect them in our own image.
It's terribly difficult to be a leader when you're following the opinion polls for all your decisions, for one thing. That's a big circle of people wanting the politician to do the thinking, and the politician wanting the people to do the thinking. Eventually we need to figure out that no thinking gets done that way, and only mimicry.
Clinton was renowned for following polls while in office. G.W. Bush likely also follows polls, but from his narrowly selected portion of the total US constituency. I'm not sure we've had someone in the office of President who actually did any leading since Eisenhower. Perhaps Kennedy or Reagan lead, but most modern holders of the office have been followers elected to lead.
Speaking of figuring out what's inedible... apparently someone in the produce business can't even tell the difference between shit and a tomato. Otherwise, how the hell are we getting an outbreak of intestinal bacteria all over something which has no intestines?
Manure to be used as a fertilizer is supposed to be composted thoroughly. Hands that handle food are supposed to be cleaned thoroughly, especially after using the toilet. Animal enclosures aren't supposed to allow effluent to run downhill onto food crops. How is this all so difficult to understand?
Yet we have people sick in 17 states and I can't have a slice of zesty red beefsteak on my burger at any restaurant in town. There's something very wrong with this.
Three, then you bite through to the center with your beak.
Well, if you're an American you won't as long as the yuan is artificially pegged to the dollar. Perhaps they'll artificially tie it to the euro in the future.
I think your engineer with 5-10 years of experience may well replace 3 or 4 of those grads. Maybe even all five of them. The truth is, though, that they will work cheap now and gain experience. The single engineer is going to eventually find a new job or retire. He might be hit by the proverbial bus.
A good balance is having the experienced engineer mentor 3 to 7 new grads, I think. In five years, then, you have a number of people with more than five years of experience.
It was more of an "underclock" button. "Turbo" was whatever your system should normally run at. Turning it off made it clock down to AT speed so games with timing loops written to CPU NOOPs instead of using the system clock wouldn't be over before you got a chance to play.
If your car has a button for the turbo, you may have installed it incorrectly. ;-)
Not to sound too much like Obi Wan, but many of the truths we cling to depend a great deal on our own point of view and all that.
If I was working for O'Reilly, Manning, APress, Wiley, et al I'd say a successful programming language was one which sold lots of books.
If I was a hiring manager for a large software company, I'd look closely at what language allowed the most cheap new grads to work together an produce something resembling quality code.
If I was teaching intro to computer science, I'd worry about what was preparing my students for the rest of their education.
If I was teaching a certificate-level course to people looking to get into the job market quickly, I'd look for the language with the highest placement rate.
If I was a person of little clue, I'd go largely by the hype. Some would go with the mainstream hype, and some go with the counter cultural "that's the big hype, but our language is better" underdog hype.
As a programmer, I prefer the language that helps me turn customer requirements into working programs that fastest with the least fuss on my part, and allows decent maintenance and customization later.
As the owner of a small boutique programming shop, I want my expressive, powerful language to give me an advantage over others using less expressive languages. I'd like to find others who can use it, but a few is alright as I don't need a huge team to work on programs.
Actually, according to the official DSL availability map he could't when he tried to order it. He happens to live along the route where the phone company connects the town to the long distance network.
He had to work his way through several different people on the telco's end to convince them to send him the equipment and mark his line active for DSL. He also had to sign a waiver of quality guarantees, since the official support from the CO didn't reach his house.
We're not sure, but from the speeds and the reliability he's getting we think the telco installed a smallish DSLAM in the substation near his house in order to start offering it to his neighbors, too. It's an unincorporated area in the county, but the houses are just as close to one another as in many subdivisions in town. It makes sense if they can get enough penetration in the market to run DSL out of the remote substations as well as the CO.
Actually, it was meant to make fun of the reporting that this was a major technical discovery. It seems like the folks at NASA are having routine engineering issues, yet the article makes them sound like idiots who don't understand basic electronics.
FYI, I used to be a contractor for the state of Illinois in an IT capacity. Several people I know are or have been contractors of direct employees for the state. In that particular government, I can assure you that a decent portion of the employees are incompetent, slackers, or both. The rest are hard workers who unfortunately don't have the power to change the status quo by themselves.
I'm sure there's a certain portion of the US government that suffers from the same issues (although probably not as badly). However, NASA doesn't seem like the agency in which to find incompetent slackers. The places reporting on NASA's work seem to fit the bill quite nicely, though.
I guess next time I make a joke, I'll have to include some cute little pseudo-HTML tags to let you and the mods know. Sometimes a post reads back to me as I intended it even though something gets lost in the text-only translation. Sorry.
that a strongly charged gas cloud can wreak havoc on your sensitive electronics if you don't shield them properly. Oh, and putting insulation around your stuff cuts down on the charge that will move across it. That's your government's bondholder money at work!
My parents live 7 miles from a town of 18,000. They don't have Internet access at home because my mom uses it at work when she needs it and my dad's more interested in mowing the 8 acres on which they live or going camping. They still have DVD players (one for the house, one for the camper), digital OTA tuners (two for the house, one for the camper), a computer (my dad plays single-player games on it, my mom uses it as a photo album, word processor, etc). My mom's in her late 50s and my dad's in his early 60s.
About four miles down the road, one of my best friends and his wife and kids have 8 computers hooked up to DSL. They're still three miles from the closest town, but they host LAN parties.
One of my friends has 3.5 Mbps DSL in his town of 4500, and the other side of town can get 7Mbps. He telecommutes for much of his work. His home office is a testament to everything geek.
My sister lives in a town of 900. She and her husband have four computers, video equipment, sound recording equipment, cable Internet access, and digital cable.
My cousin lives in the middle of a 42-acre plot at the end of a gravel road off of a two-lane blacktop. That blacktop itself is off a US highway and never goes closer at any point than 5 miles from a town. She and her husband have two big screens, digital satellite, wireless ISP, video game consoles, electronic surveillance systems, cell phones, a digital camcorder, a DVR, and more.
I'm not sure exactly what your experience with rural residents is, but I think you're making assumptions that don't hold everywhere.
DSL is inherently distance-limited. Wider ranges of frequencies means the same signal quality can give better data throughput.
It'd be digital in both directions on both ends instead of digital from the ISP to the CO then analog on your end for your downloads and analog from you to the CO then digital from the CO to the ISP for your uploads.
The packet delivery management of TCP/IP could be used instead of the error correction built into your grandmas's $4 Winmodem's driver.
That said, it still sounds like the idea has some holes in it.
Actually, running fiber to the pedestal alongside your road and making sure the copper to your house has no repeaters is probably cheaper than testing this for every home and rolling the same trucks to fix rural copper loops back to town for every two-lane blacktop and gravel road and maintaining the signal quality on that new copper plant. If you're going to trench, plan ahead.
Actually, Enhanced 911 means they know your address when you call and is still being rolled out for analog lines with the incumbent telcos in many more rural parts of the country.
It only gets interesting that VoiP providers can't provide your address for you in the event of a call if your regular phone company can. Lots of county dispatching offices are still getting the equipment financed for installation so that they can use E911. No phone company can hook up to the E911 system until the dispatch office has it.
Actually, the ground expanding and contracting, the copper or aluminum conductors getting wet, cards hitting poles in bad conditions, and winds blowing down lines off of above-ground poles (or the poles falling over, trees breaking in the wind or under the weight of ice and falling on lines) is a huge problem for electricity out in the country, let alone telephone service.
My parents go without power at least 18 hours a year, and they're only 7 miles from the closest town, with no two houses along their road being more than a couple hundred meters apart. They call AT&T from a neighbor's house or from work about once a year to let them know they've been without phone service overnight.
By contrast, a 30cm dish will break up a bit in a bad storm for a few minutes and not require a truck roll unless the dish actually comes off the mount or the positioning bolts come loose. A 120cm C-band dish will work through almost any weather. Those are for TV data rates, and those are much higher than voice lines.
The latency on interactive services over geosynchronous satellites is crap, though. Point- to-multipoint home wireless from a tower is a much better for those who can get it, and the startup cost for installation is much cheaper than running a new cable plant to every house.
There are VoiP boxes with analog phone jacks. You could even make the network access box on the side of the house a cheap router with an analog jack and Ethernet jacks for the customer's PCs. The problem there is cost.