That's how cable worked in the 90's, but most cable companies are using a digital signal now. You need a set-top box to get the signal because it may be encrypted, but also because TVs don't come with a tuner that can actually tune into a QAM256 signal. Most digital channels are delivered at all times, not on-demand, unless you have a switched system like uVerse.
I've had the opposite happen: it takes me several hours to be seen in a visit to the ER, whereas I was able to renew my plates via an automatic machine in about 2 minutes while the office was closed. Whenever I do have to go in, it takes me between 5 and 15 minutes to do what I need to at the Secretary of State. (DMV of Michigan)
Besides, the failure of part of the government isn't an argument that the part should be taken away -- it's an argument that the part needs to operate with more oversight and transparency. The drive for profit doesn't make something better, it just makes it driven by profit. In a fully private system, if hospitals could profit off 10+ hour waits for patients more than it could off 20 minute waits, it would. Health care is an industry where ethics must play a higher role than profits.
You still overpayed, though. T1's are archaic. You can get 5mbit fiber these days for sub-$1000.;) (Depends on your location, I suppose, and how long ago you were talking about.)
You actually share the bandwidth with everyone on your node, in a standard hybrid fiber/coax network. That's roughly a square mile -- probably a couple thousand units, and more if it includes a lot of apartment buildings. I -think- the standard estimate in the industry is selling 12 times the available bandwidth, as most people barely use their available bandwidth, but I really can't remember. However, compared to wireless technology, coax can hold a LOT of users. I really wouldn't expect more than about.5 mbit connections once they start really selling this.
MAYBE it's going to be hard to enact a lot of programs, now that we have to bail out Wall Street to the tune of a trillion dollars. His new plan still says he supports Net Neutrality, this new version just seems trimmed down.
What I don't get is, if they want silent communication, we already have that technology. People with throat cancer and vocal cord damage talk through those weird robotic boxes they place on their throats. Just make the sound output get sent to everyone's headphones instead of broadcast through a speaker.
Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.
I'm with most of these people. You'll save a TON doing most of the work yourself. Certain things need to be contracted out, but for the most part you can do things yourself.
Also, it gives you a good reason to buy power tools. Some people swear by the commercial stuff, but I've used both and I don't think the price difference is justified. If you're doing MAJOR remodeling, though, it might be -- something along the lines of five our six rooms fully redone. I've gotten by with a bunch of "crappy" Ryobi stuff, that's worked just as well as the DeWalt tools I've used in the past. But if you have the cash, feel free to get professional grade Milwalke stuff. It's a personal choice. I've ripped out everything in my bathroom to the studs, and redid the whole thing, with just Ryobi. Framed a new room in the basement as well. YMMV.
Ask any firefighter how many times they've had to deal with bad issues that arose from poorly-done home improvement work. That's the main reason for permits -- to make sure the things you do don't result in a fire spreading out of control, or a ceiling caving in, or an electrical fire. If emergency workers didn't have to enter your home when something goes bad, then no one would probably care what you do to your house.
Unsupportable things are simply not taught in school. Why don't we start teaching the "possibility" that we live in the Matrix? You can't -prove- we don't.
Some life can thrive in hotter and colder environments than we can. If the earth were further or closer, we may have just evolved differently. Besides, life may have just evolved in one of the billions of other planetary systems in the universe.
Just because someone sees things differently, doesn't mean they have an "agenda". What agenda do I have for believing what I do?
For the record, I believe in the big bang. What I'd like to believe is that God created the big bang, knowing full well that we would evolve in billions of years. He is all-knowing, after all -- why would it be impossible for Him to have done this? I do understand that the Big Bang theory was created using the scientific method, whereas my God Made The Big Bang theory is my personal faith, and that the latter should thus not be forced on the public in our schools.
First, Obama and Hillary had 21 debates, including four one-on-one debates. I believe it set a record for debates during the primaries.
Second, McCain and Obama just recently finished making the schedule for debates, on August 21st. Three debates and a VP debate is pretty much standard.
Third, McCain invited Obama to town halls to debate questions from normal folks, and Obama never showed up. But wait... turns out that the "town hall" was actually invite-only, and filled with only Republican supporters. (link) I wouldn't exactly trust any town hall that was set up by McCain's camp.
If your union only allows for promotion based on seniority and not based on skill, then -that- part of the union is broken. Fix that, instead of saying the whole system doesn't work. The propaganda that the entire system is broken was started by those that have to pay their workers a respectable wage. I've seen unions work greatly, and I've been in places where the workers were getting completely screwed and definitely needed to unionize.
Jobs are going overseas because the work is cheaper there. This isn't because they're un-unionized -- you can't compete with 50 cents an hour, union or not. Jobs have been allowed to go overseas because of our dropping of import taxes. While I think eventually lowering import taxes is a good thing on items, you need to do it to match the pace of the workforce acquiring new skills, to move on to more advanced jobs. You cant just drop import taxes, watch as all manufacturing work goes overseas, and tell people to now go to college and learn a new trade while they struggle to make their mortgage.
This doesn't apply to IT, though. Developers are somewhat screwed, and I don't have an answer to that question. But for all the people who work hands-on, who need to be on-site to do the job, unions would be fantastic. You can't outsource low-voltage wiring. You can't outsource an IT manager who needs to be available if a server goes down. And history has constantly shown that when these people come together to protect themselves, they make more, and they get better benefits.
It always astounds me that the people who are anti-union are usually the same who want completely free capitalism. Unions are a completely logical extension of capitalism -- workers banding together to maximize their "profit" from their jobs, so to speak. The main failures of unions are usually from corruption within the unions, and these problems should be fixed, instead of trying to tear down the whole system. A few business owners have been shown to be corrupt -- does this mean that ALL businesses are corrupt? Unions may sometimes fail, but their pros FAR outweigh their cons.
More importantly, when you have steel beams going the length of the building, it can *expand.* This can push out exterior walls, which then become too wide to hold the other beams, which come tumbling down. Lots of firefighters have seen this happen, albeit at a smaller scale, like houses and small buildings.
Seriously, a tie-breaking vote only ever comes up about once a year. It's barely ever an issue, considering how many votes congress passes.
And congress is only lame duck because Neo-conservatives have set an all-time record for filibusters, and because Bush will veto everything the Dems do get through. They're trying to cause what seems like a shutdown of Congress, and then blame the Dems for it -- and the public is completely buying it. I tried to argue this same point to someone else, and was only met with the response "no, it's because the Democrats are a bunch of useless idiots." That's almost word for word, and it represents way too many people's thought processes.
Obama voted for an amendment taking out the retroactive immunity, and it failed. He had to play politics and vote for it, so people wouldn't nail him for being soft on terrorism.
Remember four years ago, right before the election: the terrorism alert kept being raised, even though it was later admitted there was no actual terrorism threat. Imagine if the neo-conservatives can get that kind of fear into the American public again. The TV ads would be full of "he voted against stopping terrorism", and people would believe it, since 99% of the population doesn't even bother to read what the bill was actually about. Obama, despite actually having a better plan against terrorism, would sink as the "soft on terror" candidate.
People need to drop the FISA issue. I hated that bill too, but be angry against the coward Democrats that voted against striking out immunity (link). There are some surprising names on that list...
Hillary is all but guaranteed a Secretary of ____ position anyways, which until Cheney was probably more powerful than VP. In fact, I think the only reason Cheney was such a powerful VP is because George Bush allowed him so much power, and is somewhat weak by himself. Granted, with Karl Rove on his side, he was able to hold a lot of political sway, AND he had a Republican congress to help him out, AND he definately is good at spinning the media to put even more political pressure on his enemies.
Don't get me wrong: I hate the mafIAA's just as much as anyone here. But I'm way more concerned about the economy, and the huge money-drain in Iraq, and net neutrality, than copyright law. Neo-conservatives will ALWAYS side with big business, so the copyright issue is not a deciding factor for me in this election.
As the Parent said, it isn't the government's job to manufacture income equality. And no, this isn't because of something he says, it is because the very essence of freedom means that you are free to put your resources to work and make money. Even if you end up making more the someone else. You are essentially taking freedom away when they artificial barriers are put into place.
There are a lot of situations where some level of freedom is given away to promote the overall good of the people. In fact, every single form of government takes away some level of freedom. Monopolies aren't allowed to exist so it can better our economy, but that sure is a restriction on my freedom to run a business. Remember that the only form of government where you are completely free to do as you please is anarchy.
Imagine a life where you have unemployed people because they don't want to work or they fuck off and get people hurt so they were fired. Then fire as many people making the most money just to open jobs up for these original slacker unemployed people. That is what you are wanting to do by raising the rent on the rich just so they don't have as much or more then the poorer people when do something to make money.
Imagine a life where you have corporations controlling every aspect of society -- corporations so big that it would take you several lifetimes to amass enough wealth to get near their level of power. The opposite end of the spectrum seems pretty scary too, doesn't it? The point is, you can't dismiss an economic system by painting a picture of it's worse-case scenario, where everyone exploits the system and no one tries to fix it.
Income equality is something that is earned not forced or given. At least not in a free country/world.
Historically, as income equality got better in the US, so did our economy. It is typically when the middle class disappears (think the Guilded Age leading into the Great Depression, and how it mirrors what's happening today), that our economy as a whole starts to tank. A certain level of income inequality is a good thing -- Communism would probably never work at a large scale. But free reign of income inequality has always been a bad thing, because as income inequality increases it becomes near-impossible to jump from one class to the next. I'm not against there being ultra-rich elite, but I *am* against there being such a high amount of those that are homeless, being foreclosed on, being forced into bankrupcy, being forced to live in 3-4 income households, and with no visible light at the end of the tunnel.
I'm Progressive as all hell, and I usually don't agree with Micheal Moore. He tends to go on the extreme about things, and doesn't show any counter-points to his documentaries. I do think he's more good than bad, though.
I dislike Fox News both for the fact that it is right-leaning to the point of being radical, but I dislike it MORE because it claims to be the most balanced network on the air. If it described itself as "your neo-conservative news network", I don't think i'd be upset.
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That's how cable worked in the 90's, but most cable companies are using a digital signal now. You need a set-top box to get the signal because it may be encrypted, but also because TVs don't come with a tuner that can actually tune into a QAM256 signal. Most digital channels are delivered at all times, not on-demand, unless you have a switched system like uVerse.
I've had the opposite happen: it takes me several hours to be seen in a visit to the ER, whereas I was able to renew my plates via an automatic machine in about 2 minutes while the office was closed. Whenever I do have to go in, it takes me between 5 and 15 minutes to do what I need to at the Secretary of State. (DMV of Michigan)
Besides, the failure of part of the government isn't an argument that the part should be taken away -- it's an argument that the part needs to operate with more oversight and transparency. The drive for profit doesn't make something better, it just makes it driven by profit. In a fully private system, if hospitals could profit off 10+ hour waits for patients more than it could off 20 minute waits, it would. Health care is an industry where ethics must play a higher role than profits.
You still overpayed, though. T1's are archaic. You can get 5mbit fiber these days for sub-$1000. ;) (Depends on your location, I suppose, and how long ago you were talking about.)
You actually share the bandwidth with everyone on your node, in a standard hybrid fiber/coax network. That's roughly a square mile -- probably a couple thousand units, and more if it includes a lot of apartment buildings. I -think- the standard estimate in the industry is selling 12 times the available bandwidth, as most people barely use their available bandwidth, but I really can't remember. However, compared to wireless technology, coax can hold a LOT of users. I really wouldn't expect more than about .5 mbit connections once they start really selling this.
Yep, even Tom Brokaw films news stories in advance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUNTwHU-Mw
MAYBE it's going to be hard to enact a lot of programs, now that we have to bail out Wall Street to the tune of a trillion dollars. His new plan still says he supports Net Neutrality, this new version just seems trimmed down.
What I don't get is, if they want silent communication, we already have that technology. People with throat cancer and vocal cord damage talk through those weird robotic boxes they place on their throats. Just make the sound output get sent to everyone's headphones instead of broadcast through a speaker.
Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.
Yeah, everyone knows actors should just stay away from politics. Now, who's this Reagan fellow I keep hearing about...
Good point about getting high quality blades for your cutting tools.
I'm with most of these people. You'll save a TON doing most of the work yourself. Certain things need to be contracted out, but for the most part you can do things yourself.
Also, it gives you a good reason to buy power tools. Some people swear by the commercial stuff, but I've used both and I don't think the price difference is justified. If you're doing MAJOR remodeling, though, it might be -- something along the lines of five our six rooms fully redone. I've gotten by with a bunch of "crappy" Ryobi stuff, that's worked just as well as the DeWalt tools I've used in the past. But if you have the cash, feel free to get professional grade Milwalke stuff. It's a personal choice. I've ripped out everything in my bathroom to the studs, and redid the whole thing, with just Ryobi. Framed a new room in the basement as well. YMMV.
Ask any firefighter how many times they've had to deal with bad issues that arose from poorly-done home improvement work. That's the main reason for permits -- to make sure the things you do don't result in a fire spreading out of control, or a ceiling caving in, or an electrical fire. If emergency workers didn't have to enter your home when something goes bad, then no one would probably care what you do to your house.
I'm guilty of it too, though... :(
Unsupportable things are simply not taught in school. Why don't we start teaching the "possibility" that we live in the Matrix? You can't -prove- we don't.
Some life can thrive in hotter and colder environments than we can. If the earth were further or closer, we may have just evolved differently. Besides, life may have just evolved in one of the billions of other planetary systems in the universe.
Just because someone sees things differently, doesn't mean they have an "agenda". What agenda do I have for believing what I do?
For the record, I believe in the big bang. What I'd like to believe is that God created the big bang, knowing full well that we would evolve in billions of years. He is all-knowing, after all -- why would it be impossible for Him to have done this? I do understand that the Big Bang theory was created using the scientific method, whereas my God Made The Big Bang theory is my personal faith, and that the latter should thus not be forced on the public in our schools.
Why would the press be Liberal-biased when it is mostly Republican-owned?
First, Obama and Hillary had 21 debates, including four one-on-one debates. I believe it set a record for debates during the primaries.
Second, McCain and Obama just recently finished making the schedule for debates, on August 21st. Three debates and a VP debate is pretty much standard.
Third, McCain invited Obama to town halls to debate questions from normal folks, and Obama never showed up. But wait... turns out that the "town hall" was actually invite-only, and filled with only Republican supporters. (link) I wouldn't exactly trust any town hall that was set up by McCain's camp.
Simply put, you make more and have better benefits in a union.
If your union only allows for promotion based on seniority and not based on skill, then -that- part of the union is broken. Fix that, instead of saying the whole system doesn't work. The propaganda that the entire system is broken was started by those that have to pay their workers a respectable wage. I've seen unions work greatly, and I've been in places where the workers were getting completely screwed and definitely needed to unionize.
Jobs are going overseas because the work is cheaper there. This isn't because they're un-unionized -- you can't compete with 50 cents an hour, union or not. Jobs have been allowed to go overseas because of our dropping of import taxes. While I think eventually lowering import taxes is a good thing on items, you need to do it to match the pace of the workforce acquiring new skills, to move on to more advanced jobs. You cant just drop import taxes, watch as all manufacturing work goes overseas, and tell people to now go to college and learn a new trade while they struggle to make their mortgage.
This doesn't apply to IT, though. Developers are somewhat screwed, and I don't have an answer to that question. But for all the people who work hands-on, who need to be on-site to do the job, unions would be fantastic. You can't outsource low-voltage wiring. You can't outsource an IT manager who needs to be available if a server goes down. And history has constantly shown that when these people come together to protect themselves, they make more, and they get better benefits.
It always astounds me that the people who are anti-union are usually the same who want completely free capitalism. Unions are a completely logical extension of capitalism -- workers banding together to maximize their "profit" from their jobs, so to speak. The main failures of unions are usually from corruption within the unions, and these problems should be fixed, instead of trying to tear down the whole system. A few business owners have been shown to be corrupt -- does this mean that ALL businesses are corrupt? Unions may sometimes fail, but their pros FAR outweigh their cons.
Why don't we just try it out once, and see if it's something that would be good to do again.
You know, kinda like they did with the first PAX?
More importantly, when you have steel beams going the length of the building, it can *expand.* This can push out exterior walls, which then become too wide to hold the other beams, which come tumbling down. Lots of firefighters have seen this happen, albeit at a smaller scale, like houses and small buildings.
Seriously, a tie-breaking vote only ever comes up about once a year. It's barely ever an issue, considering how many votes congress passes.
And congress is only lame duck because Neo-conservatives have set an all-time record for filibusters, and because Bush will veto everything the Dems do get through. They're trying to cause what seems like a shutdown of Congress, and then blame the Dems for it -- and the public is completely buying it. I tried to argue this same point to someone else, and was only met with the response "no, it's because the Democrats are a bunch of useless idiots." That's almost word for word, and it represents way too many people's thought processes.
Obama voted for an amendment taking out the retroactive immunity, and it failed. He had to play politics and vote for it, so people wouldn't nail him for being soft on terrorism.
Remember four years ago, right before the election: the terrorism alert kept being raised, even though it was later admitted there was no actual terrorism threat. Imagine if the neo-conservatives can get that kind of fear into the American public again. The TV ads would be full of "he voted against stopping terrorism", and people would believe it, since 99% of the population doesn't even bother to read what the bill was actually about. Obama, despite actually having a better plan against terrorism, would sink as the "soft on terror" candidate.
People need to drop the FISA issue. I hated that bill too, but be angry against the coward Democrats that voted against striking out immunity (link). There are some surprising names on that list...
Hillary is all but guaranteed a Secretary of ____ position anyways, which until Cheney was probably more powerful than VP. In fact, I think the only reason Cheney was such a powerful VP is because George Bush allowed him so much power, and is somewhat weak by himself. Granted, with Karl Rove on his side, he was able to hold a lot of political sway, AND he had a Republican congress to help him out, AND he definately is good at spinning the media to put even more political pressure on his enemies.
Don't get me wrong: I hate the mafIAA's just as much as anyone here. But I'm way more concerned about the economy, and the huge money-drain in Iraq, and net neutrality, than copyright law. Neo-conservatives will ALWAYS side with big business, so the copyright issue is not a deciding factor for me in this election.
As the Parent said, it isn't the government's job to manufacture income equality. And no, this isn't because of something he says, it is because the very essence of freedom means that you are free to put your resources to work and make money. Even if you end up making more the someone else. You are essentially taking freedom away when they artificial barriers are put into place.
There are a lot of situations where some level of freedom is given away to promote the overall good of the people. In fact, every single form of government takes away some level of freedom. Monopolies aren't allowed to exist so it can better our economy, but that sure is a restriction on my freedom to run a business. Remember that the only form of government where you are completely free to do as you please is anarchy.
Imagine a life where you have unemployed people because they don't want to work or they fuck off and get people hurt so they were fired. Then fire as many people making the most money just to open jobs up for these original slacker unemployed people. That is what you are wanting to do by raising the rent on the rich just so they don't have as much or more then the poorer people when do something to make money.
Imagine a life where you have corporations controlling every aspect of society -- corporations so big that it would take you several lifetimes to amass enough wealth to get near their level of power. The opposite end of the spectrum seems pretty scary too, doesn't it? The point is, you can't dismiss an economic system by painting a picture of it's worse-case scenario, where everyone exploits the system and no one tries to fix it.
Income equality is something that is earned not forced or given. At least not in a free country/world.
Historically, as income equality got better in the US, so did our economy. It is typically when the middle class disappears (think the Guilded Age leading into the Great Depression, and how it mirrors what's happening today), that our economy as a whole starts to tank. A certain level of income inequality is a good thing -- Communism would probably never work at a large scale. But free reign of income inequality has always been a bad thing, because as income inequality increases it becomes near-impossible to jump from one class to the next. I'm not against there being ultra-rich elite, but I *am* against there being such a high amount of those that are homeless, being foreclosed on, being forced into bankrupcy, being forced to live in 3-4 income households, and with no visible light at the end of the tunnel.
I'm Progressive as all hell, and I usually don't agree with Micheal Moore. He tends to go on the extreme about things, and doesn't show any counter-points to his documentaries. I do think he's more good than bad, though.
I dislike Fox News both for the fact that it is right-leaning to the point of being radical, but I dislike it MORE because it claims to be the most balanced network on the air. If it described itself as "your neo-conservative news network", I don't think i'd be upset.