I think you'll find that open insubordination, while not grounds for a court martial, is grounds for immediate employment termination at nearly any employer in the US. Why should the civilian Executive branch employees not be subject to the same? Short of the Senate confirming or denying judges or certain high-level posts within Cabinet departments, the Executive branch employees theoretically serve at the will of the President.
Let people raise their kids. Unless they are some of the mentally ill who are an actual danger to their kids, they will do a better job of it than the government or a corporation. They know their kids better than you or I do and most parents intend at least to do the best for their kids. If they want to censor their kids' communications and monitor it to some extent, I'm fine with that. There is some point you have to teach your kids to have some integrity and to be trustworthy when you can't verify all their actions right away, but when that point comes varies by child. Any technology that helps a parent keep up with the technology their kids are using is great, as long as that's who is using it.
What's bad is when people get censored by the government or other powerful groups outside the rightful sphere of influence. Parents should be able to tell their kids what they can and can't read, watch, or say. Companies should be able to tell employees what they can and can't say on behalf of the company. Courts should be able to tell people they can't libel and slander. Police should be able to tell people they can't make death threats or harass people. Schools, employers, store or restaurant managers, social organizations, party hosts, and the hosts of any other gathering of people should be able to ask people to leave who as disruptive (although they shouldn't be able to have the people removed from public places nearby).
Voluntary censorship within your own organization is fine. Say it with me: "Voluntary censorship within your own organization is fine." Just like BDSM, it's when it's forced upon you that censorship is a problem.
Since you don't like black and white, let's discuss shades of explicitness. How explicit of permission do I need?
Is the broadcasting of "open network here" explicit enough? Each WiFi client card has its own uniquely assigned (unless I'm taking steps to clone someone's in order to trick the AP, of course, which would be stealing) MAC address which identifies it. Isn't it pretty explicit that I'm allowed to communicate with your AP if it associates with my device with its unique MAC? How about the DHCP server responding to that uniquely identified device? It then offers me an address and tells me what DNS servers to use. Then, it routes data for me. That doesn't exactly seem to be hostile to my using it, as the system has been configured to explicitly offer me:
notice of availability
connection to the device
connection to the network address assignment service (DHCP)
assignment of an address
assignment of DNS servers
routing
When the technology is built into pretty much every AP and AP/router combo on the market to either accept or deny a device at any one of those steps and it keeps specifically offering those services, how in the world can someone be more explicit? You want a sign on the building that says, "Here's my SSID. Free WiFi here!"?
If you don't want to share your resources with the public, quit using the public airwaves to broadcast the availability of your resources for free, which is what an open access point does. It specifically tells other systems that it is there. It tells those systems that it is available. It assigns them the necessary address information required to make use of it. It happily routes for them. It does all of this across what the government considers a public resource: a segment of the EM spectrum used for communications.
If you broadcast your SSID, you leave your access point open, you don't filter MAC addresses at the AP, you don't filter MAC addresses at the DHCP assignments, and you route traffic for passersby, then your network is both offering directly supporting their use. They are not maliciously taking something. You have your network configured to offer it. Whether you have to pay for what you're offering is of no concern. People offer to share what they've paid for all the time. It's called generosity.
In your specific case, you have your WiFi secured. That means your network is specifically telling people they are not free to use it.
There's a very old process people have of getting rid of stuff: they put it at the curb with a sign saying, "Free for the hauling" or something similar. If people broadcast to the curbside that their network access is free for me to use, I should be able to assume they mean it.
That's how it's supposed to work overall. That's not how it's supposed to work within the Executive Branch, of which the President is the head officer. When your boss gives you a legal order, you're supposed to obey it.
The issue you seem to be having is the hangup on the "GPU" terminology and its integration as a single chip. Just as people used mechanical relays then vacuum tubes then TTL chips then LSI chips for CPUs, vector units have taken the same course over the years.
Long before a PC consumer-level matrix machine was using a programmable GPU as a single chip on a single add-in card, companies were using vector or matrix processing units in large computers (like Crays) to process lots of data in various ways, including rendering video for later consumption on lesser machines.
Also, MMX, SSE, 3dNOW!, Altivec, and VMX were around before 2004. These were used by many software houses to do vector and matrix math right in the extended functionality of the CPU that included decoding and encoding video and audio. The Commodore Amiga had an add-on called the "Video Toaster" from NewTek that would allow real-time linear (as of the Amiga 2000) and non-linear (as of the 3000 and 4000) video editing including built-in compression.
The very idea that a vector processor designed to work with video might be used to work with video is non-obvious. If Microsoft found a particularly useful way and novel way of putting the GPU to its already intended task, they should be free to patent that particular approach. Just the simple idea of using it for encoding rather than decoding wouldn't cut it, though.
Which is what Cray and SGI were doing years ago: using big vectors of fixed point or floating point processing units to run simulations then encode and render video for later display. Obvious prior art. Someone integrates a vector processor, puts it on an expansion card, gives it a three-letter acronym, and Ms decides to patent it. Classic Microsoft.
The town is in the county. There are probably other towns in the county. Rural county residents often get caught out when the more populous town and city dwellers vote to keep county taxes low because those in towns and cities pay their town or city taxes for most local services anyway. However, municipality or county are not the only options. There are tens of thousands of special taxation districts around the country. My local school district is separate from the county or city, as is the public library. There are rural fire, water, and levee districts that raise taxes to pay for rural services outside the city. Some areas near here get their electricity, their telephone service, their livestock feed, or their LP gas from non-profit cooperatives, which are another option for rural areas.
Many of us in town and out have private companies providing utilities like electricity, natural gas, LP gas, trash pickup, telephone service, Internet service, road cleaning and maintenance (even in towns some subdivided areas have privately built and maintained roads), and private security. Often this is in addition to using government services, sometimes even ones which are partially redundant.
Let's have an anecdote. My parents' road is private. The highway it's connected to is cleaned of snow and ice by the county since that's a county highway, and sometimes the state helps if the state is ahead of the game and the county is behind. The neighbors on my parents' road get together and pay to have the road cleaned after big snows that make it difficult for a typical four-wheel-drive pickup to get in and out. Sometimes the county will come out and clean it once the county roads are cleaned if there's extra money in the budget for diesel and manpower. Sometimes the county charges a fee comparable to what the private plows do if there's really just no money in the budget to clean private roads. I think that's fair enough, and so do my parents. They live on a road that was built privately and that goes nowhere except to the properties in the development. They have maintained the road as a private road so that the county can't suddenly extend it and route a bunch of traffic past their driveways (not without eminent domain proceedings, anyway) and so that only residents and their guests are allowed on the road. You give up something to get something else. Either you turn the road over to the county and it becomes public, or you keep it private and you're responsible for certain things yourselves. They pay for their own snow removal and their own fresh gravel and road leveling because they find it worthwhile.
The same neighborhood is part of a public non-town, non-city fire district that was voted into existence to provide funding to the mostly volunteer fire department. So they are not responsible for professional-level firefighting themselves (although we should all be responsible for fire safety and trying to extinguish small fires before they spread when possible).
Now that I mentioned those back to back, I'm just hoping the fire department never needs to get to ones of the houses before the road gets cleared in the winter. There's no guarantees how quickly the county roads would be cleared, either, though. The larger engines (there are some small tank trucks that are just heavy-duty pickups) shouldn't have as much problem with most snow drifts or ice as typical private vehicles, though, and it's rare that the road is drifted completely closed anyway. A tree over the road is just as likely to slow the trucks as the road being under too much snow for the fire engines.
I don't have public electricity or natural gas now. I have Ameren. Most of the country has Ameren, Commonwealth Edison, Nicor, or some other privately provided gas, oil, or electric utility of some sort. I do have city water, and I've lived places where I had city electricity. I do have city water and sewer. I also have city trash and recycling pickup now, but I've lived places where that's a private business.
You do realize, of course, that billions of those dollars the taxpayers paid into the government that then paid to the phone companies never paid for the upgraded capacity and rural service the phone companies promised, right? If you live in or travel through many rural parts of the US, your best bet for Internet access with high bandwidth is the privately funded satellite companies that rented their spectrum from the government and rented capacity on government rockets to put up their satellites (although until about now a government was needed to put things into space). Your best bet in those same areas for low-latency access is tower-to-tower wireless from either cellular providers or specialized wireless Internet providers that pay for their own towers or rent space on the towers of others and pay the government for spectrum.
I do believe police and fire should be public services. I don't believe you have a true grasp on what is private and what is public now, so arguing about possibilities in contrast to your ideas is a little silly.
I also don't believe the town of South Fulton, Tennessee's publicly funded town fire department should be expected to respond to fires outside the town for nothing. The taxpayers in the town should be their priority. If the people outside the town want public fire service, they should pay for it. If they don't want a subscription service then they need to set up their own taxing body that collects their own taxes. Rural fire, water, levee, LP gas, electric, telephone, and other services and utilities are often provided by either a special taxation district that is not a city or county or by a cooperative.
I see no reason this part of Obion County, Tennessee, gets to blame South Fulton for not throwing their fire department into every noncontributing flaming hole that comes along. South Fulton is responsible enough to have a fire department. They are kind enough to offer its services to those outside their town who will chip in to help cover the costs.
If Obion County or some portion of the county wants its own fire department or wants to contract the South Fulton department for universal coverage, then it's their job to raise a tax and either start a fire corps or pay South Fulton some compensation for taking their fire department on trips out of the town to fight these fires.
People like you who blame the city when every fucking article about this fire on the entire fucking Internet that I can find says the city goes above and beyond by offering to help with rural fire coverage just make me want to fucking puke.
A county's rural population pays no city taxes, period. Quit blaming the city that does have a governmental fire department for the county not having one. You need to learn to fucking read a fucking article.
I think what people really mean is "don't blame the town that pays their taxes for their fire department and asks in return a small annual fee for people outside their town to get coverage from the town's fire service. Blame the county or the portion of the county that doesn't have any other fire service but the one graciously offered to people outside the town that pays taxes to support it if only the rural residents will chip in a little bit. Shame on those rural residents for not forming a taxing board to collect the $75 per household to either put together their own fire service or contract that of the town of South Fulton for all residents in the area."
You see, the town has a tax-paid fire service. This area outside the town is outside the town because they didn't want to be inside the town, and they are not paying the taxes that the town residents pay. The town's fire service asks that they get a little something for leaving their taxed area (thereby even exposing their tax payers to more risk because at least part of the fire department is now out of town) to fight fires in areas that pay no taxes to support the department.
The people outside the town are responsible for their own government, and their own government is responsible to them. It's true that almost every city and town in the US is within some county or parish (there are a few exceptions, like St. Louis Missouri which seceded from its county decades ago), and therefore the people in the towns can vote in county elections and help keep county taxes really low since they tend to outnumber the sparser rural populations. However, those rural residents of the counties can still vote locally for an extra governmental body like a fire district, water district, levee district, or other special taxing body to collect a tax for a particular purpose.
My parents, for example, live miles from the nearest town and pay into a rural fire district. Many of the firefighters are volunteers, but there is some staff and the taxes pay for the equipment. Instead of blaming South Fulton, Tennessee for not fighting fires for people outside the city limits without some incentive, blame the people outside the city for not organizing to pay for the service collectively. If South Fulton is willing to share their fire department for such a reasonable fee and the problem is just that people forget to pay or refuse to pay, then a fire district could be put together to collect that fee from everyone and contract with the town of South Fulton for the coverage if the county or fire district can't support its own department.
The fire wasn't in the town. It was in a rural part of the county, outside the town whose fire service responded. There are no taxes a town can collect on property outside the town. The people inside the town deserve to get something paid into their fire service when their homes and businesses are put at greater risk because their fire service that they pay taxes for leaves their jurisdiction to fight some fire elsewhere. The shame is not on the town or its mayor.
The shame is on the county for not offering rural fire protection for its residents. If it can't afford to run its own fire service, it could at least put a $75 per household per year fire district tax in place and contract the services of the town of South Fulton to respond to any fire in the county, or at least in this area of the county that relies on the town's kindness to offer protection to people outside the town.
I don't think they should have responded, as someone in their tax base within the city might have needed their service, and they were off taking care of someone outside the city who hadn't paid anything in to the system. That said, once they were on the scene, they should have fought the fire until called away to somewhere that a taxpayer or a rural paying subscriber needed them. To have the equipment and people there and just watch it burn is the really reprehensible part in my eyes. Shame on Obion County's rural residents for not voting in a fire district to collect $75 per household up front in taxes to pay the town of South Fulton for their services across the board.
to Obion county, Tennessee, get yourself on the county board, and institute a tax to cover a fire service. South Fulton has no legal mandate to even offer fire protection outside the boundaries of the city. Blame the county and its rural residents for not having a fire service of their own or taking proper precautions for living in such a remote area that some other legal jurisdiction feels compelled to contract out protection.
IANAL, but I think the answer here is to sue the party claiming a copyright on a work that isn't covered. If they sell their works widely and you don't want to finance the suit, find a lawyer who'll certify you and some others as a class. The only problem is you'll have to actually pay the fee once to have been caused damages, or at least be denied their services or goods because you didn't pony up for their form. Proving specific damages in the latter case is beyond the scope.
You state's attorney general or some sort of state consumer protection board or citizen's ombudsman might be able to help. Perhaps even the FTC, but I'm guessing you've tried them already as one of the various federal agencies. Your Congress critter's office might be able to put some pull in your corner, especially right now just before the election.
There were hospitals in the 19th century in larger cities. They weren't as advanced as what we have today, but they certainly existed. Many smaller towns still don't have them, and although doctors these days rarely make house calls (it takes much less fortitude to put someone in a car than in a buggy, and there's always the ambulance service if necessary) it is common for there to be only one clinic with one or two doctors in a small town. Many of the smallest are miles away from a doctor, and farms outside towns are as well.
Unless you've seen many first through eighth grade single-classroom schools lately, then schools have changed since Laura Ingalls went to school. In fact, my father went to a one-room school for much of his time in school, and he's under 70. In some places the one-room or two-room school still exists, but it is very rare in the US because buses transport kids farther to fewer more centralized buildings.
I'm sure anyone who has seen a general store would be astonished at the size of a Target or Walmart, but the idea that you can buy things in a building meant for that purpose would hardly be news. Perhaps the breadth of product selection or the financial tools available to make payments would be more of a wonder than the stores themselves. Cash or a bill of store credit because you know the owner would be the options in her day. Imagine seeing cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, EBT cards, travellers' checks, chain loyalty reward cards, gift cards, and gift certificates being tendered. Now that'd be a learning curve.
I think the freeway interchange would make perfect sense as paved roads aren't exactly a 21st century invention. I'm sure there'd be some astonishment at the construction technology behind it and the cars speeding through it.
I've never been to Australia, but in the US a flight number and a particular aircraft have only a very loose connection to one another. I've had flights delayed while "our" plane was used to carry some other flight with more passengers or which could still be made on time while "their" plane was fixed in the hangar and then used for my flight. I've seen flights outright cancelled, and they'll cancel the flight that causes the least hassle to cancel and announce for some other flight's passengers to board at the gate where the fuming passengers are sitting, waiting to see which hotel they'll be in until on of the next day's flights.
There's a good chance they had some other plane being worked on which would have suddenly become your flight's plane if it wasn't fixed in time. It's better for their on-time percentage to have one really late flight than to have one plane cause a backup of several flights.
Don't think "too hot" or "too cold" exclusively. Think "poorly controlled temperature and ventilation". A cargo hold can be too hot, too cold, have too little air circulation for pets, and apparently can be hot enough to cause cargo that would be safe in the cabin into a crash hazard.
Also remember that with delays planes are often on the tarmac or taxiway for hours at a time in the sun with the checked baggage on them but no people. I doubt they're going to air condition the holds in case your laptop is on there. It's better to have special handling procedures for what can be a hazardous cargo.
It seems to me you've struck the civil disobedience nail on the head for getting this abomination of a law gutted. If everyone did this to all the political ads, then maybe the politicians would figure out how much of a pain in the ass they are being passing this trash.
Okay, so I'm not actually going to do that because I don't want to fight that fight. I'm fairly sure you're with me. It'd serve them right, though, wouldn't it? At least the members of the US Congress who voted the DMCA in? If the CDA ever comes back (it will) they'll probably put in a complaint that forces a takedown without due process, too. So then people could charge all political ads as indecent. What a hoot that'd be.
Taking time from someone working a minimum-wage job means he can't work that day and could lose his minimum-wage job. Taking time from someone who would otherwise spend the time vacationing in five-star hotels is not the same thing, either.
I doubt everyone in the company came to unanimous agreement. Most of the people who understood what kind of terrible idea it was just wanted to keep eating and paying mortgages, I'm sure.
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10.10 Thunder, thunder, Thundercats! Hoooooo!
I think you'll find that open insubordination, while not grounds for a court martial, is grounds for immediate employment termination at nearly any employer in the US. Why should the civilian Executive branch employees not be subject to the same? Short of the Senate confirming or denying judges or certain high-level posts within Cabinet departments, the Executive branch employees theoretically serve at the will of the President.
Yet it is still advertised as a half-gallon as often as not. What say we file a class action?
You need to also get the SheathHammer.
Let people raise their kids. Unless they are some of the mentally ill who are an actual danger to their kids, they will do a better job of it than the government or a corporation. They know their kids better than you or I do and most parents intend at least to do the best for their kids. If they want to censor their kids' communications and monitor it to some extent, I'm fine with that. There is some point you have to teach your kids to have some integrity and to be trustworthy when you can't verify all their actions right away, but when that point comes varies by child. Any technology that helps a parent keep up with the technology their kids are using is great, as long as that's who is using it.
What's bad is when people get censored by the government or other powerful groups outside the rightful sphere of influence. Parents should be able to tell their kids what they can and can't read, watch, or say. Companies should be able to tell employees what they can and can't say on behalf of the company. Courts should be able to tell people they can't libel and slander. Police should be able to tell people they can't make death threats or harass people. Schools, employers, store or restaurant managers, social organizations, party hosts, and the hosts of any other gathering of people should be able to ask people to leave who as disruptive (although they shouldn't be able to have the people removed from public places nearby).
Voluntary censorship within your own organization is fine. Say it with me: "Voluntary censorship within your own organization is fine." Just like BDSM, it's when it's forced upon you that censorship is a problem.
Since you don't like black and white, let's discuss shades of explicitness. How explicit of permission do I need?
Is the broadcasting of "open network here" explicit enough? Each WiFi client card has its own uniquely assigned (unless I'm taking steps to clone someone's in order to trick the AP, of course, which would be stealing) MAC address which identifies it. Isn't it pretty explicit that I'm allowed to communicate with your AP if it associates with my device with its unique MAC? How about the DHCP server responding to that uniquely identified device? It then offers me an address and tells me what DNS servers to use. Then, it routes data for me. That doesn't exactly seem to be hostile to my using it, as the system has been configured to explicitly offer me:
When the technology is built into pretty much every AP and AP/router combo on the market to either accept or deny a device at any one of those steps and it keeps specifically offering those services, how in the world can someone be more explicit? You want a sign on the building that says, "Here's my SSID. Free WiFi here!"?
If you don't want to share your resources with the public, quit using the public airwaves to broadcast the availability of your resources for free, which is what an open access point does. It specifically tells other systems that it is there. It tells those systems that it is available. It assigns them the necessary address information required to make use of it. It happily routes for them. It does all of this across what the government considers a public resource: a segment of the EM spectrum used for communications.
If you broadcast your SSID, you leave your access point open, you don't filter MAC addresses at the AP, you don't filter MAC addresses at the DHCP assignments, and you route traffic for passersby, then your network is both offering directly supporting their use. They are not maliciously taking something. You have your network configured to offer it. Whether you have to pay for what you're offering is of no concern. People offer to share what they've paid for all the time. It's called generosity.
In your specific case, you have your WiFi secured. That means your network is specifically telling people they are not free to use it.
There's a very old process people have of getting rid of stuff: they put it at the curb with a sign saying, "Free for the hauling" or something similar. If people broadcast to the curbside that their network access is free for me to use, I should be able to assume they mean it.
That explains so much.
That's how it's supposed to work overall. That's not how it's supposed to work within the Executive Branch, of which the President is the head officer. When your boss gives you a legal order, you're supposed to obey it.
I think you may find that Cray and others had huge packages of vector coprocessors long before AMD/ATI or NVidia put them onto a single chip.
The issue you seem to be having is the hangup on the "GPU" terminology and its integration as a single chip. Just as people used mechanical relays then vacuum tubes then TTL chips then LSI chips for CPUs, vector units have taken the same course over the years.
Long before a PC consumer-level matrix machine was using a programmable GPU as a single chip on a single add-in card, companies were using vector or matrix processing units in large computers (like Crays) to process lots of data in various ways, including rendering video for later consumption on lesser machines.
Also, MMX, SSE, 3dNOW!, Altivec, and VMX were around before 2004. These were used by many software houses to do vector and matrix math right in the extended functionality of the CPU that included decoding and encoding video and audio. The Commodore Amiga had an add-on called the "Video Toaster" from NewTek that would allow real-time linear (as of the Amiga 2000) and non-linear (as of the 3000 and 4000) video editing including built-in compression.
The very idea that a vector processor designed to work with video might be used to work with video is non-obvious. If Microsoft found a particularly useful way and novel way of putting the GPU to its already intended task, they should be free to patent that particular approach. Just the simple idea of using it for encoding rather than decoding wouldn't cut it, though.
Which is what Cray and SGI were doing years ago: using big vectors of fixed point or floating point processing units to run simulations then encode and render video for later display. Obvious prior art. Someone integrates a vector processor, puts it on an expansion card, gives it a three-letter acronym, and Ms decides to patent it. Classic Microsoft.
The town is in the county. There are probably other towns in the county. Rural county residents often get caught out when the more populous town and city dwellers vote to keep county taxes low because those in towns and cities pay their town or city taxes for most local services anyway. However, municipality or county are not the only options. There are tens of thousands of special taxation districts around the country. My local school district is separate from the county or city, as is the public library. There are rural fire, water, and levee districts that raise taxes to pay for rural services outside the city. Some areas near here get their electricity, their telephone service, their livestock feed, or their LP gas from non-profit cooperatives, which are another option for rural areas.
Many of us in town and out have private companies providing utilities like electricity, natural gas, LP gas, trash pickup, telephone service, Internet service, road cleaning and maintenance (even in towns some subdivided areas have privately built and maintained roads), and private security. Often this is in addition to using government services, sometimes even ones which are partially redundant.
Let's have an anecdote. My parents' road is private. The highway it's connected to is cleaned of snow and ice by the county since that's a county highway, and sometimes the state helps if the state is ahead of the game and the county is behind. The neighbors on my parents' road get together and pay to have the road cleaned after big snows that make it difficult for a typical four-wheel-drive pickup to get in and out. Sometimes the county will come out and clean it once the county roads are cleaned if there's extra money in the budget for diesel and manpower. Sometimes the county charges a fee comparable to what the private plows do if there's really just no money in the budget to clean private roads. I think that's fair enough, and so do my parents. They live on a road that was built privately and that goes nowhere except to the properties in the development. They have maintained the road as a private road so that the county can't suddenly extend it and route a bunch of traffic past their driveways (not without eminent domain proceedings, anyway) and so that only residents and their guests are allowed on the road. You give up something to get something else. Either you turn the road over to the county and it becomes public, or you keep it private and you're responsible for certain things yourselves. They pay for their own snow removal and their own fresh gravel and road leveling because they find it worthwhile.
The same neighborhood is part of a public non-town, non-city fire district that was voted into existence to provide funding to the mostly volunteer fire department. So they are not responsible for professional-level firefighting themselves (although we should all be responsible for fire safety and trying to extinguish small fires before they spread when possible).
Now that I mentioned those back to back, I'm just hoping the fire department never needs to get to ones of the houses before the road gets cleared in the winter. There's no guarantees how quickly the county roads would be cleared, either, though. The larger engines (there are some small tank trucks that are just heavy-duty pickups) shouldn't have as much problem with most snow drifts or ice as typical private vehicles, though, and it's rare that the road is drifted completely closed anyway. A tree over the road is just as likely to slow the trucks as the road being under too much snow for the fire engines.
I don't have public electricity or natural gas now. I have Ameren. Most of the country has Ameren, Commonwealth Edison, Nicor, or some other privately provided gas, oil, or electric utility of some sort. I do have city water, and I've lived places where I had city electricity. I do have city water and sewer. I also have city trash and recycling pickup now, but I've lived places where that's a private business.
You do realize, of course, that billions of those dollars the taxpayers paid into the government that then paid to the phone companies never paid for the upgraded capacity and rural service the phone companies promised, right? If you live in or travel through many rural parts of the US, your best bet for Internet access with high bandwidth is the privately funded satellite companies that rented their spectrum from the government and rented capacity on government rockets to put up their satellites (although until about now a government was needed to put things into space). Your best bet in those same areas for low-latency access is tower-to-tower wireless from either cellular providers or specialized wireless Internet providers that pay for their own towers or rent space on the towers of others and pay the government for spectrum.
I do believe police and fire should be public services. I don't believe you have a true grasp on what is private and what is public now, so arguing about possibilities in contrast to your ideas is a little silly.
I also don't believe the town of South Fulton, Tennessee's publicly funded town fire department should be expected to respond to fires outside the town for nothing. The taxpayers in the town should be their priority. If the people outside the town want public fire service, they should pay for it. If they don't want a subscription service then they need to set up their own taxing body that collects their own taxes. Rural fire, water, levee, LP gas, electric, telephone, and other services and utilities are often provided by either a special taxation district that is not a city or county or by a cooperative.
I see no reason this part of Obion County, Tennessee, gets to blame South Fulton for not throwing their fire department into every noncontributing flaming hole that comes along. South Fulton is responsible enough to have a fire department. They are kind enough to offer its services to those outside their town who will chip in to help cover the costs.
If Obion County or some portion of the county wants its own fire department or wants to contract the South Fulton department for universal coverage, then it's their job to raise a tax and either start a fire corps or pay South Fulton some compensation for taking their fire department on trips out of the town to fight these fires.
People like you who blame the city when every fucking article about this fire on the entire fucking Internet that I can find says the city goes above and beyond by offering to help with rural fire coverage just make me want to fucking puke.
A county's rural population pays no city taxes, period. Quit blaming the city that does have a governmental fire department for the county not having one. You need to learn to fucking read a fucking article.
I think what people really mean is "don't blame the town that pays their taxes for their fire department and asks in return a small annual fee for people outside their town to get coverage from the town's fire service. Blame the county or the portion of the county that doesn't have any other fire service but the one graciously offered to people outside the town that pays taxes to support it if only the rural residents will chip in a little bit. Shame on those rural residents for not forming a taxing board to collect the $75 per household to either put together their own fire service or contract that of the town of South Fulton for all residents in the area."
You see, the town has a tax-paid fire service. This area outside the town is outside the town because they didn't want to be inside the town, and they are not paying the taxes that the town residents pay. The town's fire service asks that they get a little something for leaving their taxed area (thereby even exposing their tax payers to more risk because at least part of the fire department is now out of town) to fight fires in areas that pay no taxes to support the department.
The people outside the town are responsible for their own government, and their own government is responsible to them. It's true that almost every city and town in the US is within some county or parish (there are a few exceptions, like St. Louis Missouri which seceded from its county decades ago), and therefore the people in the towns can vote in county elections and help keep county taxes really low since they tend to outnumber the sparser rural populations. However, those rural residents of the counties can still vote locally for an extra governmental body like a fire district, water district, levee district, or other special taxing body to collect a tax for a particular purpose.
My parents, for example, live miles from the nearest town and pay into a rural fire district. Many of the firefighters are volunteers, but there is some staff and the taxes pay for the equipment. Instead of blaming South Fulton, Tennessee for not fighting fires for people outside the city limits without some incentive, blame the people outside the city for not organizing to pay for the service collectively. If South Fulton is willing to share their fire department for such a reasonable fee and the problem is just that people forget to pay or refuse to pay, then a fire district could be put together to collect that fee from everyone and contract with the town of South Fulton for the coverage if the county or fire district can't support its own department.
The fire wasn't in the town. It was in a rural part of the county, outside the town whose fire service responded. There are no taxes a town can collect on property outside the town. The people inside the town deserve to get something paid into their fire service when their homes and businesses are put at greater risk because their fire service that they pay taxes for leaves their jurisdiction to fight some fire elsewhere. The shame is not on the town or its mayor.
The shame is on the county for not offering rural fire protection for its residents. If it can't afford to run its own fire service, it could at least put a $75 per household per year fire district tax in place and contract the services of the town of South Fulton to respond to any fire in the county, or at least in this area of the county that relies on the town's kindness to offer protection to people outside the town.
I don't think they should have responded, as someone in their tax base within the city might have needed their service, and they were off taking care of someone outside the city who hadn't paid anything in to the system. That said, once they were on the scene, they should have fought the fire until called away to somewhere that a taxpayer or a rural paying subscriber needed them. To have the equipment and people there and just watch it burn is the really reprehensible part in my eyes. Shame on Obion County's rural residents for not voting in a fire district to collect $75 per household up front in taxes to pay the town of South Fulton for their services across the board.
to Obion county, Tennessee, get yourself on the county board, and institute a tax to cover a fire service. South Fulton has no legal mandate to even offer fire protection outside the boundaries of the city. Blame the county and its rural residents for not having a fire service of their own or taking proper precautions for living in such a remote area that some other legal jurisdiction feels compelled to contract out protection.
IANAL, but I think the answer here is to sue the party claiming a copyright on a work that isn't covered. If they sell their works widely and you don't want to finance the suit, find a lawyer who'll certify you and some others as a class. The only problem is you'll have to actually pay the fee once to have been caused damages, or at least be denied their services or goods because you didn't pony up for their form. Proving specific damages in the latter case is beyond the scope.
You state's attorney general or some sort of state consumer protection board or citizen's ombudsman might be able to help. Perhaps even the FTC, but I'm guessing you've tried them already as one of the various federal agencies. Your Congress critter's office might be able to put some pull in your corner, especially right now just before the election.
There were hospitals in the 19th century in larger cities. They weren't as advanced as what we have today, but they certainly existed. Many smaller towns still don't have them, and although doctors these days rarely make house calls (it takes much less fortitude to put someone in a car than in a buggy, and there's always the ambulance service if necessary) it is common for there to be only one clinic with one or two doctors in a small town. Many of the smallest are miles away from a doctor, and farms outside towns are as well.
Unless you've seen many first through eighth grade single-classroom schools lately, then schools have changed since Laura Ingalls went to school. In fact, my father went to a one-room school for much of his time in school, and he's under 70. In some places the one-room or two-room school still exists, but it is very rare in the US because buses transport kids farther to fewer more centralized buildings.
I'm sure anyone who has seen a general store would be astonished at the size of a Target or Walmart, but the idea that you can buy things in a building meant for that purpose would hardly be news. Perhaps the breadth of product selection or the financial tools available to make payments would be more of a wonder than the stores themselves. Cash or a bill of store credit because you know the owner would be the options in her day. Imagine seeing cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, EBT cards, travellers' checks, chain loyalty reward cards, gift cards, and gift certificates being tendered. Now that'd be a learning curve.
I think the freeway interchange would make perfect sense as paved roads aren't exactly a 21st century invention. I'm sure there'd be some astonishment at the construction technology behind it and the cars speeding through it.
I've never been to Australia, but in the US a flight number and a particular aircraft have only a very loose connection to one another. I've had flights delayed while "our" plane was used to carry some other flight with more passengers or which could still be made on time while "their" plane was fixed in the hangar and then used for my flight. I've seen flights outright cancelled, and they'll cancel the flight that causes the least hassle to cancel and announce for some other flight's passengers to board at the gate where the fuming passengers are sitting, waiting to see which hotel they'll be in until on of the next day's flights.
There's a good chance they had some other plane being worked on which would have suddenly become your flight's plane if it wasn't fixed in time. It's better for their on-time percentage to have one really late flight than to have one plane cause a backup of several flights.
Don't think "too hot" or "too cold" exclusively. Think "poorly controlled temperature and ventilation". A cargo hold can be too hot, too cold, have too little air circulation for pets, and apparently can be hot enough to cause cargo that would be safe in the cabin into a crash hazard.
Also remember that with delays planes are often on the tarmac or taxiway for hours at a time in the sun with the checked baggage on them but no people. I doubt they're going to air condition the holds in case your laptop is on there. It's better to have special handling procedures for what can be a hazardous cargo.
It seems to me you've struck the civil disobedience nail on the head for getting this abomination of a law gutted. If everyone did this to all the political ads, then maybe the politicians would figure out how much of a pain in the ass they are being passing this trash.
Okay, so I'm not actually going to do that because I don't want to fight that fight. I'm fairly sure you're with me. It'd serve them right, though, wouldn't it? At least the members of the US Congress who voted the DMCA in? If the CDA ever comes back (it will) they'll probably put in a complaint that forces a takedown without due process, too. So then people could charge all political ads as indecent. What a hoot that'd be.
Taking time from someone working a minimum-wage job means he can't work that day and could lose his minimum-wage job. Taking time from someone who would otherwise spend the time vacationing in five-star hotels is not the same thing, either.
I doubt everyone in the company came to unanimous agreement. Most of the people who understood what kind of terrible idea it was just wanted to keep eating and paying mortgages, I'm sure.