Part of the problem is that the boxes are 4 feet *high*. It makes it a lot harder to see past them, and makes them much more noticeable. Add to that the electrical meters by the boxes, and the cement patch around them, and it turns into something like 5x5x4. Pretty gaudy -- even more so than the power transformer boxes in the area. (Which are mostly concealed by bushes.)
AT&T has fiber going to these boxes, and twisted pair going out of them into your house. When you change a channel on your TV, it actually sends a message back to this box to pick up a different channel from the fiber, and then transmits that channel to you. (This is unlike coax cable, because in coax you have everything being sent to you at all times. Your set-top box or TV tunes into a different station.) This is done because there is a huge bandwidth limitation to the twisted pair going into your house.
So, these boxes have to house equipment to convert fiber to twisted pair (fairly small), and enough equipment to tune into each separate channel that anyone is watching at that moment (fairly big). Then it needs cooling for all that (also big).
It's something of a hack of a solution in my book. They should have spent the extra money and done fiber to the home, because they're going to be outdated in 5 years anyways when people get more HDTVs, and thus have more HD channels being watched in their house at one time. The twisted pair can't handle that bandwidth, especially as people want higher and higher speeds for their internet.
I think they just want AT&T to do a better job at hiding the equipment. Or placing them in less-annoying locations, instead of in the middle of someones front lawn.
People have been hiding electronics for years, and there really isn't any excuse for this other than cost. I bet if you dig far enough into the company, you'll find that someone did a cost analysis showing that it's cheaper to take the bad PR from those that complain than it is to put money into hiding these from the start.
Don't do it! Candidates always shift towards the center. The ones that don't, LOSE. Until we get instant-runoff elections, third party votes just throw away your vote.
Unless you live in a "safe" state, like New York. Then, yeah, send a message.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused mostly by the deregulation of the mortgage industry. It became normal for lenders to give mortgages to people they historically knew couldn't afford it. In the past, their application would be rejected. Since the deregulation, everyone was telling people "sure, that's completely affordable."
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was discussed from the very first few months of Bush's administration taking office. Bush was briefed about Osama attacking the US with planes at his ranch in Texas, and he dismissed the possibility. We had a surplus with Clinton, and it became a debt when Bush took office, and has remained that way every year. And with a Dem as president, more "liberal" bills would be much less likely to get vetoed, such as health care bills.
So, yes, i do agree that there is a such thing as inertia. But the inertia was moving in the other direction than today...
But had Al Gore appealed more to those leaning further left than him, he would have lost votes from those leaning further right. Since there was no far-right candidate, Bush got ALL those votes. The math just doesn't work out in that kind of situation.
Seriously, if you want to change this system, vote third-part in your LOCAL and STATE elections. Then try to start movements for instant-runoff voting. Trying to change the system from the top down is the dream of lazy whiners, while trying to change the system from the bottom up is the dream of hard-working people with a goal.
Being vegatarian is common in a lot of parts of the world, too. I was trying to point out that the post i was replying to was kinda silly, because it was talking about doing things out of the norm... except for vegetarianism, because that's out of the norm.
Ah, but riding a bike to work, if you don't live in an area where it is common, is unusual. You're becoming unusual by trying to be more green than the rest of the population around you. Why would becoming a vegan be different?
For the record, i'm a meat-eater. Just like to present other sides.;)
It would just be VETOED by the president. The House can't do shit without 60% majority, called a supermajority. Do your homework.
The Neocon Republicans had control of Congress AND the Presidency for SIX YEARS, and look what has come out of it. Now the Democrats have the slimmest of majorities, and get everything filibustered and vetoed, and yet the Neocons are happy to sit back and blame everything on them.
So you consider them idiots? Even though they're making money of the direction the cost of oil is headed?
You, too, can become a speculator: invest in oil as a commodity. Or gold, for that matter. You're "speculating" that the price of oil will go up in the future.
It's ironic that the Bush administration wanted to do away with Social Security, and have everyone instead make investments. But now these investors are evil!
Speculation has ALWAYS existed. Why weren't oil prices always so high?
The price of oil has gone up so much because of a number of reasons. The value of the US dollar has dropped -- sharply. (source) There is also inflation to take into perspective -- and keep in mind that the inflation numbers that the US reports doesn't take into account things like food and gasoline, so those numbers are spun to be lower than they actually are.. There is ALSO the fact that China is using more oil than ever, making more of a demand for the stuff.
So it DOES make it go up a little more because of speculation, but not significantly. If speculation were to blame, it wouldn't explain the spike in the cost of gold -- which has almost matched the increase in the cost of oil.
Besides, even if speculation is a huge chunk of the cost of oil... we could just release oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve. We did this in the past, and it drove down speculation in the short term. Not by huge numbers, but by just as much as drilling offshore would.
The problem is that the world is at PEAK OIL. There is no easy fix to this, but everyone wants to try to sell you an easy fix anyways. We should be converting cars to plug-in hybrids, and making a Manhattan Project for better solar panels and better batteries. Instead, we're trying to put more land into the hands of the richest businesses in the world, and more money into the hands of the countries we later go to war with.
I think the AC meant that it's easy to make a line about how the data can be used, if we can "watch the watchers", so to speak. The police won't want to keep a record of such data if they themselves get monitored as well -- making it much more likely that the data will be destroyed right after they run a license plate scan.
You could also just convert the PowerPoint file into a movie file, then use an iPhone to play it, pausing on each frame. Looks liek that;s exactly what this guy did:
So if they can't meet demand, the Invisible Hand says they should increase the cost. This pads their profit margin, allowing them to reinvest into building facilities to build more Wiis, and then sell later at a cheaper price when manufacturing ramps up. This is also the best strategy for retailers (even if they were a monopoly), since it pads their margins just as much. So why hasn't this happened?
Also, another thing that would damage it's image is the fact that no video game console has ever seen an increase in price by the company making it. It would be absolutely unprecedented (at least since the age of the original NES, as i didn't check further back), and Nintendo fanboys would be howling in anger about it.
Let's put it this way: when your opponent has you outgunned, and you don't have a chance of winning, do you retreat and regroup? Or do you fight to the last man? Fighting to the last man may look more noble, but regrouping gives you a much bigger chance of winning the fight at a later time.
That's what happened here. There wasn't enough support in the Senate to pass the bill they wanted (remember that there are only about 30-40 true Democrats in the Senate, and the rest are mainly Democrat in name), the bill already passed the House, and Bush would just whip out his veto crayon if it didn't include telco immunity. The Dems are regrouping until after the election, at which point they should (hopefully) have a stronger majority in Congress and a Democratic president.
For those thinking to vote third-party: this is NOT the election to throw away your vote by "making a statement". That happened enough in 2000 that we've had to suffer 8 years of Bush. Vote third party in your LOCAL elections, and join the movement for Instant Runoff elections. Just saying "to hell with it all" and voting third party won't get the system changed.
But, what about all the other companies that have done some pretty bad stuff, and get off with a wrist-slapping?
It's a pretty big coincidence that the only ones who stood up to the warrentless wiretaps was Quest, and that they only company to be punished for illegal activities after that was Quest. Especially considering that the Department of Justice is so heavily Bush-controlled, and that it has specifically targeted its opponents in the past. (See Don Siegelman.)
So if you lose your legs in Iraq, get denied decent veteran benefits for it, and find it almost impossible to get a job, which you need tp pay for the education to get a better job... that's a lifestyle choice?
So if you lose your home in a flood caused by a hurricane, despite being told that the levees should hold, only to be denied an insurance claim because the floods were caused by winds, and hey, you don't have wind coverage... that's a lifestyle choice?
So if you get cancer, run out of sick days at work and get laid off, and get left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical bills... that's a lifestyle choice?
Not everyone who is poor in the US is there because of a lifestyle choice. I'd rather have a few people scam the system than let people who are in dire need fall through the cracks. I somewhat hope you lose everything one day in some unforeseen emergency, just so you can wish you'd had a "safety net" of your own.
Besides, even of the people who did willingly sign up for lots of credit cards, or get into really bad mortgages, or just don't have good money-managing strategies: should the large corporations be allowed to take advantage of these people, to cover them in a mountain of debt? Should they just "know better", when you get dozens of offers for credit cards every day, but almost never hear about how bad a personal economic strategy debt actually is?
The Salvation Army and Goodwill certainly show that it's possible to run such charities. However, these are limited in size to how much they receive in donations. If social programs were limited in size based on how much is donated, rather than the program's actual need... well, imagine firefighters never coming to put out your burning house because they didn't receive enough donations that month.;)
I also want to add that a lot of Democrats (myself included) just want to keep guns out of the hands of children (i.e. kids playing around with Daddy's gun). Far too many kids are killed because it is currently a right to be able to own a loaded gun and keep it on your dresser. And far too many teens get a hold of their parents gun and commit suicide, though this number would probably just transfer to pill-related deaths if guns weren't available.
I'm more of a supporter of more safety training before being allowed to own a gun. Also, "smart guns" would be great, that only allow the owner to fire it. I've haven't seen any new stories about this since about 2002, though.
Not every Democrat is the same as every other Democrat. There are about 10-15 Democrats in the Senate that come from states that are much more right-leaning. They run a huge risk of losing their seats in the next election if seen as being weak on The War on Terror(TM). Just look at the Blue Dog Goalition in the House. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Democrats
Also, there's Liberman. He tends to stop a lot of things.
Without enough of a majority to stop vetos from the president, or to stop filibusters from Republicans, there's not much they can get done. And the Republicans are more than happy to sit back, do nothing, and blame everything on the Democrats.
Not just Verizon. The article said that Road Runner had been caught doing this, but as a user of this service, I can say from experience that they still do. Though, the weird thing is that it only happens about 10% of the time, whereas it happened 100% of the time at one point.
As someone pointed out earlier, you can change your DNS servers to 4.1.1.1 - 4.1.1.6, as those servers belong to Level 3 Communications, a backbone provider. No guarantee they won't do it in the future, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is that the boxes are 4 feet *high*. It makes it a lot harder to see past them, and makes them much more noticeable. Add to that the electrical meters by the boxes, and the cement patch around them, and it turns into something like 5x5x4. Pretty gaudy -- even more so than the power transformer boxes in the area. (Which are mostly concealed by bushes.)
AT&T has fiber going to these boxes, and twisted pair going out of them into your house. When you change a channel on your TV, it actually sends a message back to this box to pick up a different channel from the fiber, and then transmits that channel to you. (This is unlike coax cable, because in coax you have everything being sent to you at all times. Your set-top box or TV tunes into a different station.) This is done because there is a huge bandwidth limitation to the twisted pair going into your house.
So, these boxes have to house equipment to convert fiber to twisted pair (fairly small), and enough equipment to tune into each separate channel that anyone is watching at that moment (fairly big). Then it needs cooling for all that (also big).
It's something of a hack of a solution in my book. They should have spent the extra money and done fiber to the home, because they're going to be outdated in 5 years anyways when people get more HDTVs, and thus have more HD channels being watched in their house at one time. The twisted pair can't handle that bandwidth, especially as people want higher and higher speeds for their internet.
I think they just want AT&T to do a better job at hiding the equipment. Or placing them in less-annoying locations, instead of in the middle of someones front lawn.
People have been hiding electronics for years, and there really isn't any excuse for this other than cost. I bet if you dig far enough into the company, you'll find that someone did a cost analysis showing that it's cheaper to take the bad PR from those that complain than it is to put money into hiding these from the start.
I have to call bullshit on your counter-argument, plain and simple. You're failing to see that... wait, you hear me and agree?
But, we're on the internet. That can't happen!
Good points. I like that approval voting method. I like the range voting as well, but I'd bet a lot of people wouldn't be able to understand it.
Then again, maybe it's for the best that the people who cant grasp a simple voting system don't vote... ^_^
Don't do it! Candidates always shift towards the center. The ones that don't, LOSE. Until we get instant-runoff elections, third party votes just throw away your vote.
Unless you live in a "safe" state, like New York. Then, yeah, send a message.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused mostly by the deregulation of the mortgage industry. It became normal for lenders to give mortgages to people they historically knew couldn't afford it. In the past, their application would be rejected. Since the deregulation, everyone was telling people "sure, that's completely affordable."
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was discussed from the very first few months of Bush's administration taking office. Bush was briefed about Osama attacking the US with planes at his ranch in Texas, and he dismissed the possibility. We had a surplus with Clinton, and it became a debt when Bush took office, and has remained that way every year. And with a Dem as president, more "liberal" bills would be much less likely to get vetoed, such as health care bills.
So, yes, i do agree that there is a such thing as inertia. But the inertia was moving in the other direction than today...
But had Al Gore appealed more to those leaning further left than him, he would have lost votes from those leaning further right. Since there was no far-right candidate, Bush got ALL those votes. The math just doesn't work out in that kind of situation.
Seriously, if you want to change this system, vote third-part in your LOCAL and STATE elections. Then try to start movements for instant-runoff voting. Trying to change the system from the top down is the dream of lazy whiners, while trying to change the system from the bottom up is the dream of hard-working people with a goal.
Not that Republicans are much better,but at least they defend our interests.
Only if your interests involve lots of lobbyists and shrinking the middle class. ;)
Being vegatarian is common in a lot of parts of the world, too. I was trying to point out that the post i was replying to was kinda silly, because it was talking about doing things out of the norm... except for vegetarianism, because that's out of the norm.
Ah, but riding a bike to work, if you don't live in an area where it is common, is unusual. You're becoming unusual by trying to be more green than the rest of the population around you. Why would becoming a vegan be different?
For the record, i'm a meat-eater. Just like to present other sides. ;)
It would just be VETOED by the president. The House can't do shit without 60% majority, called a supermajority. Do your homework.
The Neocon Republicans had control of Congress AND the Presidency for SIX YEARS, and look what has come out of it. Now the Democrats have the slimmest of majorities, and get everything filibustered and vetoed, and yet the Neocons are happy to sit back and blame everything on them.
So you consider them idiots? Even though they're making money of the direction the cost of oil is headed?
You, too, can become a speculator: invest in oil as a commodity. Or gold, for that matter. You're "speculating" that the price of oil will go up in the future.
It's ironic that the Bush administration wanted to do away with Social Security, and have everyone instead make investments. But now these investors are evil!
Speculation has ALWAYS existed. Why weren't oil prices always so high?
The price of oil has gone up so much because of a number of reasons. The value of the US dollar has dropped -- sharply. (source) There is also inflation to take into perspective -- and keep in mind that the inflation numbers that the US reports doesn't take into account things like food and gasoline, so those numbers are spun to be lower than they actually are.. There is ALSO the fact that China is using more oil than ever, making more of a demand for the stuff.
So it DOES make it go up a little more because of speculation, but not significantly. If speculation were to blame, it wouldn't explain the spike in the cost of gold -- which has almost matched the increase in the cost of oil.
Besides, even if speculation is a huge chunk of the cost of oil... we could just release oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve. We did this in the past, and it drove down speculation in the short term. Not by huge numbers, but by just as much as drilling offshore would.
The problem is that the world is at PEAK OIL. There is no easy fix to this, but everyone wants to try to sell you an easy fix anyways. We should be converting cars to plug-in hybrids, and making a Manhattan Project for better solar panels and better batteries. Instead, we're trying to put more land into the hands of the richest businesses in the world, and more money into the hands of the countries we later go to war with.
I think the AC meant that it's easy to make a line about how the data can be used, if we can "watch the watchers", so to speak. The police won't want to keep a record of such data if they themselves get monitored as well -- making it much more likely that the data will be destroyed right after they run a license plate scan.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;625432195;pp;2;fp;;fpid;
You could also just convert the PowerPoint file into a movie file, then use an iPhone to play it, pausing on each frame. Looks liek that;s exactly what this guy did:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=366966
So if they can't meet demand, the Invisible Hand says they should increase the cost. This pads their profit margin, allowing them to reinvest into building facilities to build more Wiis, and then sell later at a cheaper price when manufacturing ramps up. This is also the best strategy for retailers (even if they were a monopoly), since it pads their margins just as much. So why hasn't this happened?
Also, another thing that would damage it's image is the fact that no video game console has ever seen an increase in price by the company making it. It would be absolutely unprecedented (at least since the age of the original NES, as i didn't check further back), and Nintendo fanboys would be howling in anger about it.
Let's put it this way: when your opponent has you outgunned, and you don't have a chance of winning, do you retreat and regroup? Or do you fight to the last man? Fighting to the last man may look more noble, but regrouping gives you a much bigger chance of winning the fight at a later time.
That's what happened here. There wasn't enough support in the Senate to pass the bill they wanted (remember that there are only about 30-40 true Democrats in the Senate, and the rest are mainly Democrat in name), the bill already passed the House, and Bush would just whip out his veto crayon if it didn't include telco immunity. The Dems are regrouping until after the election, at which point they should (hopefully) have a stronger majority in Congress and a Democratic president.
For those thinking to vote third-party: this is NOT the election to throw away your vote by "making a statement". That happened enough in 2000 that we've had to suffer 8 years of Bush. Vote third party in your LOCAL elections, and join the movement for Instant Runoff elections. Just saying "to hell with it all" and voting third party won't get the system changed.
Yeah, they did some really crappy stuff.
But, what about all the other companies that have done some pretty bad stuff, and get off with a wrist-slapping?
It's a pretty big coincidence that the only ones who stood up to the warrentless wiretaps was Quest, and that they only company to be punished for illegal activities after that was Quest. Especially considering that the Department of Justice is so heavily Bush-controlled, and that it has specifically targeted its opponents in the past. (See Don Siegelman.)
So if you lose your legs in Iraq, get denied decent veteran benefits for it, and find it almost impossible to get a job, which you need tp pay for the education to get a better job... that's a lifestyle choice?
So if you lose your home in a flood caused by a hurricane, despite being told that the levees should hold, only to be denied an insurance claim because the floods were caused by winds, and hey, you don't have wind coverage... that's a lifestyle choice?
So if you get cancer, run out of sick days at work and get laid off, and get left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical bills... that's a lifestyle choice?
Not everyone who is poor in the US is there because of a lifestyle choice. I'd rather have a few people scam the system than let people who are in dire need fall through the cracks. I somewhat hope you lose everything one day in some unforeseen emergency, just so you can wish you'd had a "safety net" of your own.
Besides, even of the people who did willingly sign up for lots of credit cards, or get into really bad mortgages, or just don't have good money-managing strategies: should the large corporations be allowed to take advantage of these people, to cover them in a mountain of debt? Should they just "know better", when you get dozens of offers for credit cards every day, but almost never hear about how bad a personal economic strategy debt actually is?
The Salvation Army and Goodwill certainly show that it's possible to run such charities. However, these are limited in size to how much they receive in donations. If social programs were limited in size based on how much is donated, rather than the program's actual need... well, imagine firefighters never coming to put out your burning house because they didn't receive enough donations that month. ;)
I also want to add that a lot of Democrats (myself included) just want to keep guns out of the hands of children (i.e. kids playing around with Daddy's gun). Far too many kids are killed because it is currently a right to be able to own a loaded gun and keep it on your dresser. And far too many teens get a hold of their parents gun and commit suicide, though this number would probably just transfer to pill-related deaths if guns weren't available.
I'm more of a supporter of more safety training before being allowed to own a gun. Also, "smart guns" would be great, that only allow the owner to fire it. I've haven't seen any new stories about this since about 2002, though.
Not every Democrat is the same as every other Democrat. There are about 10-15 Democrats in the Senate that come from states that are much more right-leaning. They run a huge risk of losing their seats in the next election if seen as being weak on The War on Terror(TM). Just look at the Blue Dog Goalition in the House. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Democrats
Also, there's Liberman. He tends to stop a lot of things.
Without enough of a majority to stop vetos from the president, or to stop filibusters from Republicans, there's not much they can get done. And the Republicans are more than happy to sit back, do nothing, and blame everything on the Democrats.
If you'd like your money to be given to these things... why don't you just make a donation to these causes?
Not just Verizon. The article said that Road Runner had been caught doing this, but as a user of this service, I can say from experience that they still do. Though, the weird thing is that it only happens about 10% of the time, whereas it happened 100% of the time at one point.
As someone pointed out earlier, you can change your DNS servers to 4.1.1.1 - 4.1.1.6, as those servers belong to Level 3 Communications, a backbone provider. No guarantee they won't do it in the future, though.