It's about risk assessment and encouraging bad behavior. Conservatives are more likely to look for the downside, and we're quite often right. Steroids have some pretty nasty side effects so while pro athletes will likely benefit short-term and find the downside acceptable, having impressionable children who haven't developed their risk assessment skills yet try to emulate them would be Bad. Less high profile people are less of a concern.
Don't think kids are that impressionable? Guess why the Left fights tooth and nail to maintain and control the government education monopoly.
As for the cognitive enhancers, what's the downside? The upside is pretty obvious and certainly practical, people don't take them for mere amusement, and they're taken by people who are usually pretty good at risk assessment, so... we'll watch quietly until the downside is a bit more clear. If the grade school set gets a hold of them I expect we'll hear more of a fuss.
The grade school use of prescription Ritalin, etc. is a much greater concern. It looks like ADHD is being driven by petrochemicals in the food supply, namely most artificial coloring, flavorings and preservatives. See feingold.org. This is one time when it's appropriate for the government to pull rank and ban stuff. The cost/benefit analysis is a no-brainer.
And if the corporations don't screw us, the religious right will.
Yeah, because if you don't do what the RR wants they'll march you off to sensitivity training. Oh, wait...
Try positing the notion that intelligence has a genetic basis in public at nearly any Western university and the PC crowd will shout you down before you get the chance to point out that genetic engineering could make heredity moot. Alzheimer's correlates very strongly with intelligence so the political aversion to computational genetics is slowing down a cure there too, far more so than the RR's aversion to hacking up human embryos for parts that scientists have since found a superior replacement for anyhow.
Yes, any idiot can see that FTTH is the way to go, but Comcast and AT&T aren't run by just ANY idiots. Running fiber is a one-time expense, a big one to be certain but once it's in place you're good for the foreseeable future. Now, Comcast could get away with milking their hybrid fiber/coax plant for a while longer if they'd simply devote more bandwidth to Internet instead of TV, especially if DOCSIS 3 modems work, but AT&T has no such excuse. Spending lots of money on fancy electronics to get their antiquated copper plant to provide a measly 27Mbps aggregate bandwidth from the fiber node to the home (FTTN) rather than do things right the first time is going to go down in the B-school books as one of the most penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions in history. Hello, regular HDTV feeds are 20Mbps and recompressing those so you'll have enough bandwidth left for Internet, VoIP, and one measly SDTV channel makes HDTV look like an overgrown YouTube video (I exaggerate... slightly).
The sad thing is that the measly 6M/1M "Elite" tier Internet service AT&T U-verse offers is usually superior to Comcast and cheaper too. If they'd have been a little smarter they'd have skipped TV entirely (and those expensive settop boxes, TV channel fees, etc) and used all the bandwidth for Internet... assuming that they absolutely, positively won't run fiber like Verizon.
I have to disagree with the notion that we have to wait for the existing monopolies to correct their rectal-cranial inversion. It is possible for a new company to build FTTH. Having a separate company run fiber that various competing companies can plug into, as CANARIE describes, makes a lot of sense. Such a dark fiber net could be municipally run, or maybe the electric companies would like another revenue stream.
Giuliani is taking credit for the drop in crime in NY during his tenure as mayor (personally I think it was mostly Bratton - the police Commissioner)
Giuliani backed up Bratton so he could do his job. The NYT screamed bloody murder over how those poor, oppressed criminals were treated by the Mayor and the NYPD. Giuliani got the job done anyhow. If Bratton had been the police commissioner in Los Angeles he'd have been fired within a week.
While I have no doubt that environmental factors are important (lead, petroleum-based food coloring/flavoring/preservatives, mercury, etc), there's no way that NYC's murder rate plummeted as fast as it did due to reduced lead exposure alone.
The NYT's story reminds me of how the Left reacted after the Soviet Union fell: uh, yeah, we knew that was going to happen, that's the ticket, Reagan had nothing to do with it...
Having anonymous unelected judges meeting in secret, passing secret rulings that rewrite foreign-intelligence law is scary. Congress should have never removed responsibility from our elected representatives by creating FISA. Somehow I don't think that's what the OP had in mind though.
and while its FTTN architecture is severely inferior to Verizon FIOS's FTTH, it might expand the territory AT&T is able to provide high-speed Internet service to. AT&T is sending in techs from Michigan to help deal with the 200,000+ installations already on order. If you see any big new metal boxes sitting on concrete pads in your neighborhood, they might be U-verse nodes.
U-verse's "Elite" Internet tier is 6M/1M. Slower downloads than Comcrap but faster uploads and only $40/mo, or $30/mo if you also subscribe to TV.
U-verse TV is problematic though, and they try to force you to sign up for it (you can drop it later, I did). Standard def TV looks great but HDTV is the most craptastic transcode I've ever seen, and you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time. Comcast looks dramatically better, let alone over-the-air.
It's a crying shame AT&T won't let me use the entire 27Mbps pipe for Internet. My RG is syncing with my node at 70Mbps+ but AT&T wants a "consistent" marketing message so they won't let me use it.
Anyhow, Bittorrent is working great here while people still on Comcast are complaining.
Rumor has it that the real reason AT&T isn't building FTTH is because local governments are demanding bribes such as the one you describe. I thought that they were just making up excuses but now I'm not so sure.
Me too. I still have mine. It's a bit beat up but repairable. Good ol' Estes. Not the most practical design but it looks cool. I think I still have the Star Trek Enterprise rocket too. (Pack rat? Who, me?)
tuition is so frickin' expensive, unless you come from a wealthy family or have a government paying for your degree. If you've heard that IT jobs are being shipped overseas en masse because the million dollar executive idiots say that "IT isn't a core competency" then a sane person who isn't seriously into the subject (IT, CompSci, etc) is going to look elsewhere. The jobs are coming back but I expect prospective students to be skittish for quite a while longer. Accounting is hot right now, what with the Sarbanes-Oxley idiocy that literally doubled the workload for auditors, if you can stomach the tedium.
The wastefulness of the modern American university bureaucracy is a wonder to behold. There's not much pressure to streamline when students can just keep loading up on government-sponsored debt.
A: Leftists will send you to the gulag. Liberals will send you to sensitivity training.
Seriously, I've been on the receiving end of so much hypocritical leftist/progressive control-freakishness to immunize me from their propaganda for life. They're all for freedom of speech so long as you agree with them. They make a fetish about government-run schools but send their kids to private schools. They try to make tax slaves out of the small business owners who are the backbone of the American economy, and everyone else who works for that matter. Let us alone!
A libertarian will tell you what you're doing wrong but leave it up to you to do something about it, unless the subject directly involves him, and even then. Leftists know what's good for you and will enforce their will whether you like it or not. Stalin was inevitable.
Libertarians understand economics. Leftists think that if you tax earnings 100% "the rich" won't give up and go play golf.
I've wound up being a conservative with libertarian tendencies. I like libertarian theory but it strikes me as a bit impractical.
CANARIE (Canada) has many interesting articles and presentations on cracking the last mile problem. In short: municipalities contract someone to build dark fiber networks to the home, homeowners buy a strand of fiber, and competing service providers plug their electronics into the fiber. There are variations on the theme of course but with a neutral party owning the fiber it makes it very easy for new service providers to set up shop.
I'd insist that ISPs peer all local traffic at full speed, or at least 100Mbps symmetric, but let competition sort everything else out.
They were going to move me ahead a grade early in elementary school but decided against it because I was already behind socially (read: getting beat up on a regular basis). The school was dead last academically in the district by a huge margin. My parents couldn't afford to move and transfers were approved strictly on the basis of skin color. Maybe if the credentialed idiots running the district would enforce discipline and double down on writing and math instruction they'd make some headway on their precious "racial balance"... but that's too "simple". You'll never get a doctorate in education with THAT idea.
Anyhow, even here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the Berkeley of the Midwest, it's screwed up too. Of course, if your family has money there are a couple of very nice elite private schools. Most of the government schools are decent. Sucks to be you if you're in the wrong government school district and short on cash though.
I strongly support school vouchers. Funding should follow the student. If that would have meant the closure of the rotten excuse for an elementary school I was forced to attend, GOOD! If the teachers' unions recoil in horror at the idea, I DON'T CARE! Governments are supposed to serve the people, not the bureaucracies. The MEA (aka "Michigan Mafia") and their Democratic Party lackeys can go to hell.
You need an Energy Recovery Ventilator. It takes outdoor air, does heat/humidity exchange with stale indoor air, vents the stale air and replaces it with fresh air. Here's one:
Several companies make them. I consider them to be must-have items for energy-efficient homes and modern homes built with an abundance of synthetic, outgassing materials.
Basically, people own a strand or two of dark fiber in a fiber bundle running from their home to a central point in a "condominium" arrangement. You plug that fiber into whichever service provider you choose. Change the electronics at the ends of the fiber to upgrade service. A municipality contracting out the construction and maintenance of the fiber plant is the most likely scenario. Plain Internet service is cheap and if the usual suspects want to plug an ONT (Optical Networking Terminal) in for "triple play" that works too. Even local ISPs could be competitive under this arrangement.
There are several variations on the theme. Use your imagination.
The most qualified students in the fields that governments will reap the most tax revenue from and/or need for internal use should get the highest tuition subsidies. Less qualified students get less of a subsidy or prove themselves at a community college before attending a top-tier school.
The trick is to predict that tax revenue with a reasonable degree of accuracy and to identify the most qualified students. The SAT was intended to identify students who weren't "connected" and would have been overlooked by the elite schools, but it produced results in conflict with the tribalist religion known as multiculturalism and I've yet to see a superior objective replacement.
Then there's the problem of the bloated bureaucracies at most universities. There's no real free market pressure to attend to that. I'm not sure what to do here.
The fiction that all students need a university education needs to end too. College has become the new high school, at least here in America. College degrees have become an atrociously expensive substitute for the IQ tests that companies used to be allowed to give, effectively screwing the people the do-gooders claimed to help. Most people would be better off learning on the job. The apprenticeship model is vastly underrated. It would help if the government education monopoly did a better job with the K-12 set. I'd break that monopoly with a voucher system but good luck getting that reform passed.
Instead of keeping the squirrels, they should have replaced the surveillance gear with tiny little bomb vests and let them go. If necessary, they could also indoctrinate the squirrels with rumors of 72 virgin squirrels awaiting them in the afterlife.
They tried, but:
1) Squirrels are better at math than jihadis. They spot the 72 virgin con easily. 2) Squirrels aren't all that picky about the virgin thing anyhow.
Actually, we have had problems with suicidal squirrels around here. Every once in a while the power will go out and they'll find a very crispy squirrel near a chewed-on power cable. I don't think that tiny little bomb vests would add much to the effect.
Sending in secret ninja squirrels to rescue the American hostages in Iran is sadly more likely than any other forceful action to get them released.
Correction...they are running Cat6 to homes...not using existing copper. Cat6 surely supports more than 6Mpbs?
They're running Cat5e from the box on the house into the house, if they don't use the existing telephone wire or cable TV coax. See the DSL Reports U-Verse Forum or uverseusers.com. They're using existing copper from the node to the home. Now, people are reporting that many lines test to 70-100Mbps, if they're close to the node (within 1400 feet or so). Unfortunately AT&T is using lowest common denominator specs, which is driving the handful of people with FTTH nuts.
people wouldn't work so hard to find wireless alternatives. AT&T has a nice idea with their U-verse service (Internet and IPTV) but they choked it by going with FTTN (Fiber To The Node, existing copper to the home) so there's only enough bandwidth to watch 1 HDTV channel at a time and Internet access tops out at 6M/1M. They're going to have to come back and put in fiber in a few years anyhow so why not get it right the first time?
AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars
AT&T's just cranky that the feds extorted $billions from them and the rest of the cellphone companies in prior spectrum auctions and it wouldn't be fair if everyone else didn't get screwed just as hard. Actually, they have a point. I only take issue with the pretension that taxpayers aren't ultimately paying for that spectrum in higher service bills.
I'd like to see that 700MHz spectrum opened up using 2.4GHz spectrum rules and skip the auction bit entirely, but there are certainly good alternatives to that. We don't necessarily need to set up the entire block of spectrum with the same rules. Maybe reserve an open chunk for directional antenna use only for fixed long-range wireless use?
Umm, how does the embargo stop Cuba from growing its own food? Plants being self-replicating and all. Might Castro's repressive government have a wee bit to do with it? Plus pretty much everyone else ignores the embargo.
I do think that the embargo should be scrapped. Having thousands and thousands of Americans flood Cuba could be very entertaining. Some people have suggested that Castro deliberately does something to piss us off every time Congress starts to seriously think about lifting the embargo for just that reason.
As for the UN, that collection of third-world dictatorships and European has-beens will nearly always vote against America and Israel. I don't know why we bother with that cesspool.
When did the US government supply Castro? All Wikipedia mentions is support from the usual useful idiots like the NYT plus assorted Cuban exiles.
The large numbers of Cubans who leave Cuba in rickety boats over shark-infested water suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, Castro's Cuba isn't such a fun place if you're not a Eurotrash tourist or a useful idiot.
for a Class B motorhome (converted van) so when the next big hurricane hits you can evacuate in style. Maybe add room for a boat in case you hung around too long, something with a hull that isn't going to get sliced up by submerged debris.
Actually, a big garage is a good idea regardless of where you live. Every McMansion should have one. It's tough to have too big of a garage. Kinda stands out though. You'd need a 10' high door for a Class B vs. the usual 7', just to be safe.
And the Armenian Genocide. Of course, that was the Religion of Peace exterminating Christians so don't expect the government education monopoly to mention it.
And it predates the Holocaust. Actually, Hitler likely viewed it as a successful proof-of-concept.
Sanctuary is trying the Internet-only approach to TV distribution. It stars Amanda Tapping (Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1) and some other familiar faces. You can buy DRM-free 480p and 720p downloads or watch the Youtube video for free (Sanctuary Fans has a link to that).
It's a very cool show and could easily be picked up by broadcast TV if they wanted to deal with the nuisance involved. I'm hoping they're successful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about risk assessment and encouraging bad behavior. Conservatives are more likely to look for the downside, and we're quite often right. Steroids have some pretty nasty side effects so while pro athletes will likely benefit short-term and find the downside acceptable, having impressionable children who haven't developed their risk assessment skills yet try to emulate them would be Bad. Less high profile people are less of a concern.
Don't think kids are that impressionable? Guess why the Left fights tooth and nail to maintain and control the government education monopoly.
As for the cognitive enhancers, what's the downside? The upside is pretty obvious and certainly practical, people don't take them for mere amusement, and they're taken by people who are usually pretty good at risk assessment, so... we'll watch quietly until the downside is a bit more clear. If the grade school set gets a hold of them I expect we'll hear more of a fuss.
The grade school use of prescription Ritalin, etc. is a much greater concern. It looks like ADHD is being driven by petrochemicals in the food supply, namely most artificial coloring, flavorings and preservatives. See feingold.org. This is one time when it's appropriate for the government to pull rank and ban stuff. The cost/benefit analysis is a no-brainer.
And if the corporations don't screw us, the religious right will.
Yeah, because if you don't do what the RR wants they'll march you off to sensitivity training. Oh, wait...
Try positing the notion that intelligence has a genetic basis in public at nearly any Western university and the PC crowd will shout you down before you get the chance to point out that genetic engineering could make heredity moot. Alzheimer's correlates very strongly with intelligence so the political aversion to computational genetics is slowing down a cure there too, far more so than the RR's aversion to hacking up human embryos for parts that scientists have since found a superior replacement for anyhow.
What, you mean like Utopia? (utopianet.org) Municipal Fiber system with competeing ISPs all available over the same fiber.
Yes!
Yes, any idiot can see that FTTH is the way to go, but Comcast and AT&T aren't run by just ANY idiots. Running fiber is a one-time expense, a big one to be certain but once it's in place you're good for the foreseeable future. Now, Comcast could get away with milking their hybrid fiber/coax plant for a while longer if they'd simply devote more bandwidth to Internet instead of TV, especially if DOCSIS 3 modems work, but AT&T has no such excuse. Spending lots of money on fancy electronics to get their antiquated copper plant to provide a measly 27Mbps aggregate bandwidth from the fiber node to the home (FTTN) rather than do things right the first time is going to go down in the B-school books as one of the most penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions in history. Hello, regular HDTV feeds are 20Mbps and recompressing those so you'll have enough bandwidth left for Internet, VoIP, and one measly SDTV channel makes HDTV look like an overgrown YouTube video (I exaggerate... slightly).
The sad thing is that the measly 6M/1M "Elite" tier Internet service AT&T U-verse offers is usually superior to Comcast and cheaper too. If they'd have been a little smarter they'd have skipped TV entirely (and those expensive settop boxes, TV channel fees, etc) and used all the bandwidth for Internet... assuming that they absolutely, positively won't run fiber like Verizon.
I have to disagree with the notion that we have to wait for the existing monopolies to correct their rectal-cranial inversion. It is possible for a new company to build FTTH. Having a separate company run fiber that various competing companies can plug into, as CANARIE describes, makes a lot of sense. Such a dark fiber net could be municipally run, or maybe the electric companies would like another revenue stream.
Giuliani is taking credit for the drop in crime in NY during his tenure as mayor (personally I think it was mostly Bratton - the police Commissioner)
Giuliani backed up Bratton so he could do his job. The NYT screamed bloody murder over how those poor, oppressed criminals were treated by the Mayor and the NYPD. Giuliani got the job done anyhow. If Bratton had been the police commissioner in Los Angeles he'd have been fired within a week.
While I have no doubt that environmental factors are important (lead, petroleum-based food coloring/flavoring/preservatives, mercury, etc), there's no way that NYC's murder rate plummeted as fast as it did due to reduced lead exposure alone.
The NYT's story reminds me of how the Left reacted after the Soviet Union fell: uh, yeah, we knew that was going to happen, that's the ticket, Reagan had nothing to do with it...
Yeah, I question the story's timing too.
FWIW, I'm voting for Giuliani.
Having anonymous unelected judges meeting in secret, passing secret rulings that rewrite foreign-intelligence law is scary. Congress should have never removed responsibility from our elected representatives by creating FISA. Somehow I don't think that's what the OP had in mind though.
End the Stealth Government
and while its FTTN architecture is severely inferior to Verizon FIOS's FTTH, it might expand the territory AT&T is able to provide high-speed Internet service to. AT&T is sending in techs from Michigan to help deal with the 200,000+ installations already on order. If you see any big new metal boxes sitting on concrete pads in your neighborhood, they might be U-verse nodes.
U-verse's "Elite" Internet tier is 6M/1M. Slower downloads than Comcrap but faster uploads and only $40/mo, or $30/mo if you also subscribe to TV.
U-verse TV is problematic though, and they try to force you to sign up for it (you can drop it later, I did). Standard def TV looks great but HDTV is the most craptastic transcode I've ever seen, and you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time. Comcast looks dramatically better, let alone over-the-air.
It's a crying shame AT&T won't let me use the entire 27Mbps pipe for Internet. My RG is syncing with my node at 70Mbps+ but AT&T wants a "consistent" marketing message so they won't let me use it.
Anyhow, Bittorrent is working great here while people still on Comcast are complaining.
Rumor has it that the real reason AT&T isn't building FTTH is because local governments are demanding bribes such as the one you describe. I thought that they were just making up excuses but now I'm not so sure.
Me too. I still have mine. It's a bit beat up but repairable. Good ol' Estes. Not the most practical design but it looks cool. I think I still have the Star Trek Enterprise rocket too. (Pack rat? Who, me?)
Unemployment Training: The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools
Insightful, if a little depressing. He gives some pointers on how to counter the trend though.
tuition is so frickin' expensive, unless you come from a wealthy family or have a government paying for your degree. If you've heard that IT jobs are being shipped overseas en masse because the million dollar executive idiots say that "IT isn't a core competency" then a sane person who isn't seriously into the subject (IT, CompSci, etc) is going to look elsewhere. The jobs are coming back but I expect prospective students to be skittish for quite a while longer. Accounting is hot right now, what with the Sarbanes-Oxley idiocy that literally doubled the workload for auditors, if you can stomach the tedium.
The wastefulness of the modern American university bureaucracy is a wonder to behold. There's not much pressure to streamline when students can just keep loading up on government-sponsored debt.
A: Leftists will send you to the gulag. Liberals will send you to sensitivity training.
Seriously, I've been on the receiving end of so much hypocritical leftist/progressive control-freakishness to immunize me from their propaganda for life. They're all for freedom of speech so long as you agree with them. They make a fetish about government-run schools but send their kids to private schools. They try to make tax slaves out of the small business owners who are the backbone of the American economy, and everyone else who works for that matter. Let us alone!
A libertarian will tell you what you're doing wrong but leave it up to you to do something about it, unless the subject directly involves him, and even then. Leftists know what's good for you and will enforce their will whether you like it or not. Stalin was inevitable.
Libertarians understand economics. Leftists think that if you tax earnings 100% "the rich" won't give up and go play golf.
I've wound up being a conservative with libertarian tendencies. I like libertarian theory but it strikes me as a bit impractical.
CANARIE (Canada) has many interesting articles and presentations on cracking the last mile problem. In short: municipalities contract someone to build dark fiber networks to the home, homeowners buy a strand of fiber, and competing service providers plug their electronics into the fiber. There are variations on the theme of course but with a neutral party owning the fiber it makes it very easy for new service providers to set up shop.
I'd insist that ISPs peer all local traffic at full speed, or at least 100Mbps symmetric, but let competition sort everything else out.
They were going to move me ahead a grade early in elementary school but decided against it because I was already behind socially (read: getting beat up on a regular basis). The school was dead last academically in the district by a huge margin. My parents couldn't afford to move and transfers were approved strictly on the basis of skin color. Maybe if the credentialed idiots running the district would enforce discipline and double down on writing and math instruction they'd make some headway on their precious "racial balance"... but that's too "simple". You'll never get a doctorate in education with THAT idea.
Anyhow, even here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the Berkeley of the Midwest, it's screwed up too. Of course, if your family has money there are a couple of very nice elite private schools. Most of the government schools are decent. Sucks to be you if you're in the wrong government school district and short on cash though.
I strongly support school vouchers. Funding should follow the student. If that would have meant the closure of the rotten excuse for an elementary school I was forced to attend, GOOD! If the teachers' unions recoil in horror at the idea, I DON'T CARE! Governments are supposed to serve the people, not the bureaucracies. The MEA (aka "Michigan Mafia") and their Democratic Party lackeys can go to hell.
(Bitter? Who, me?)
You need an Energy Recovery Ventilator. It takes outdoor air, does heat/humidity exchange with stale indoor air, vents the stale air and replaces it with fresh air. Here's one:
http://www.ultimateair.com/
Several companies make them. I consider them to be must-have items for energy-efficient homes and modern homes built with an abundance of synthetic, outgassing materials.
Customer owned fiber networks info.
The FAQ about Community Dark Fiber Networks is particularly interesting.
Basically, people own a strand or two of dark fiber in a fiber bundle running from their home to a central point in a "condominium" arrangement. You plug that fiber into whichever service provider you choose. Change the electronics at the ends of the fiber to upgrade service. A municipality contracting out the construction and maintenance of the fiber plant is the most likely scenario. Plain Internet service is cheap and if the usual suspects want to plug an ONT (Optical Networking Terminal) in for "triple play" that works too. Even local ISPs could be competitive under this arrangement.
There are several variations on the theme. Use your imagination.
The most qualified students in the fields that governments will reap the most tax revenue from and/or need for internal use should get the highest tuition subsidies. Less qualified students get less of a subsidy or prove themselves at a community college before attending a top-tier school.
The trick is to predict that tax revenue with a reasonable degree of accuracy and to identify the most qualified students. The SAT was intended to identify students who weren't "connected" and would have been overlooked by the elite schools, but it produced results in conflict with the tribalist religion known as multiculturalism and I've yet to see a superior objective replacement.
Then there's the problem of the bloated bureaucracies at most universities. There's no real free market pressure to attend to that. I'm not sure what to do here.
The fiction that all students need a university education needs to end too. College has become the new high school, at least here in America. College degrees have become an atrociously expensive substitute for the IQ tests that companies used to be allowed to give, effectively screwing the people the do-gooders claimed to help. Most people would be better off learning on the job. The apprenticeship model is vastly underrated. It would help if the government education monopoly did a better job with the K-12 set. I'd break that monopoly with a voucher system but good luck getting that reform passed.
Instead of keeping the squirrels, they should have replaced the surveillance gear with tiny little bomb vests and let them go.
If necessary, they could also indoctrinate the squirrels with rumors of 72 virgin squirrels awaiting them in the afterlife.
They tried, but:
1) Squirrels are better at math than jihadis. They spot the 72 virgin con easily.
2) Squirrels aren't all that picky about the virgin thing anyhow.
Actually, we have had problems with suicidal squirrels around here. Every once in a while the power will go out and they'll find a very crispy squirrel near a chewed-on power cable. I don't think that tiny little bomb vests would add much to the effect.
Sending in secret ninja squirrels to rescue the American hostages in Iran is sadly more likely than any other forceful action to get them released.
Correction...they are running Cat6 to homes...not using existing copper. Cat6 surely supports more than 6Mpbs?
They're running Cat5e from the box on the house into the house, if they don't use the existing telephone wire or cable TV coax. See the DSL Reports U-Verse Forum or uverseusers.com. They're using existing copper from the node to the home. Now, people are reporting that many lines test to 70-100Mbps, if they're close to the node (within 1400 feet or so). Unfortunately AT&T is using lowest common denominator specs, which is driving the handful of people with FTTH nuts.
people wouldn't work so hard to find wireless alternatives. AT&T has a nice idea with their U-verse service (Internet and IPTV) but they choked it by going with FTTN (Fiber To The Node, existing copper to the home) so there's only enough bandwidth to watch 1 HDTV channel at a time and Internet access tops out at 6M/1M. They're going to have to come back and put in fiber in a few years anyhow so why not get it right the first time?
AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars
AT&T's just cranky that the feds extorted $billions from them and the rest of the cellphone companies in prior spectrum auctions and it wouldn't be fair if everyone else didn't get screwed just as hard. Actually, they have a point. I only take issue with the pretension that taxpayers aren't ultimately paying for that spectrum in higher service bills.
I'd like to see that 700MHz spectrum opened up using 2.4GHz spectrum rules and skip the auction bit entirely, but there are certainly good alternatives to that. We don't necessarily need to set up the entire block of spectrum with the same rules. Maybe reserve an open chunk for directional antenna use only for fixed long-range wireless use?
Umm, how does the embargo stop Cuba from growing its own food? Plants being self-replicating and all. Might Castro's repressive government have a wee bit to do with it? Plus pretty much everyone else ignores the embargo.
I do think that the embargo should be scrapped. Having thousands and thousands of Americans flood Cuba could be very entertaining. Some people have suggested that Castro deliberately does something to piss us off every time Congress starts to seriously think about lifting the embargo for just that reason.
As for the UN, that collection of third-world dictatorships and European has-beens will nearly always vote against America and Israel. I don't know why we bother with that cesspool.
When did the US government supply Castro? All Wikipedia mentions is support from the usual useful idiots like the NYT plus assorted Cuban exiles.
The internet has been known to route around damage, you know ...
Castro is the damage. Routing around his enforcers is nontrivial.
The large numbers of Cubans who leave Cuba in rickety boats over shark-infested water suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, Castro's Cuba isn't such a fun place if you're not a Eurotrash tourist or a useful idiot.
One of the many blogs about Cuban political prisoners:
coalitionofcubanamericanwomen.blogspot.com
for a Class B motorhome (converted van) so when the next big hurricane hits you can evacuate in style. Maybe add room for a boat in case you hung around too long, something with a hull that isn't going to get sliced up by submerged debris.
Actually, a big garage is a good idea regardless of where you live. Every McMansion should have one. It's tough to have too big of a garage. Kinda stands out though. You'd need a 10' high door for a Class B vs. the usual 7', just to be safe.
And the Armenian Genocide. Of course, that was the Religion of Peace exterminating Christians so don't expect the government education monopoly to mention it.
And it predates the Holocaust. Actually, Hitler likely viewed it as a successful proof-of-concept.
Sanctuary is trying the Internet-only approach to TV distribution. It stars Amanda Tapping (Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1) and some other familiar faces. You can buy DRM-free 480p and 720p downloads or watch the Youtube video for free (Sanctuary Fans has a link to that).
It's a very cool show and could easily be picked up by broadcast TV if they wanted to deal with the nuisance involved. I'm hoping they're successful.
we were downloading faster than we could burn and by the end of the year we had a collection of over 300 movies.
In the email the netAdmin sent us, we were using the full dorm bandwidth (1MB/sec) sustained, both ways for 14 days straight...
Bah! In my day the university only had 56K of bandwidth, so when we wanted to watch a movie we had to walk to the video store and rent it.
I know it sounds primitive today, but one should never underestimate the data transfer capacity of a VHS tape.