How much did they reduce your last tax bill based on people playing the lottery?
lol really? You think "taxes" is a zero-sum game?
And reading comprehension, please. I didn't say "taxes go down when a lottery is implemented", I said the money they rake in on a lottery doesn't need to be taken from everyone else as taxes, not that the amount taken from everyone will be reduced. Lottery "taxes" go to pay for things that otherwise would have caused a tax increase to pay for.
My college offered 4 semesters of COBOL. It was the worst experience of my time there,
I suggest that this is the fault of the college and not the language. If they decided to take four semesters to teach COBOL, then they were certainly not very good at it and were more interested in your money than teaching you stuff.
The university I went to had only one semester of COBOL, and even FORTRAN had only two. The first semester was teaching FORTRAN. The "advanced FORTRAN" semester dealt with learning everything in the "gray pages" of the CDC FORTRAN manual, which is where they put all the CDC-specific extensions.
but I mean, a screen door "ain't broke" but it's also not the best idea to fit your front door with.
And yet, most of the front doors I see on homes have screen doors, too. Very nice to keep the Jehovah's Witnesses from walking in when you open the front door to see who just rang your doorbell.
Indeed it's not just the language - it's exceptionally verbose and you're hardly likely to misunderstand the meaning of "MULTIPLY NumA BY NumB GIVING NumC."
Or the reason I think the language is magic: "MOVE CORRESPONDING A TO B." One statement pulls the relevant bits out of one struct and stuffs them into another, leaving the irrelevant bits alone. In fact, the only reason I know how to spell "corresponding" is because I used (and needed) that command so many times during one semester of COBOL.
Somebody does win the lottery (other than the lotto companies).
In the US, those evil lottery companies are called "the government". The money they take in from the lotteries means they don't need to take it from everyone in taxes. I like people who play the lottery.
And I have won at the casino, sometimes good amounts.
People who play games that are pure chance are long-term losers. Every game has a percentage in favor of the house.
Games that involves skill, however, depend on people who have no skill thinking they can beat the house for the house to make money. I have typically always won at Pai Gow. And poker, where there is no advantage for the house, they simply take in a rake off each pot.
I'm paying for bandwidth, and sharing it with whoever is in range is NOT in my best interest.
First, it is not "whoever is in range", it's other Comcast subscribers. They have to log in to use it. Second, you're not paying for their bandwidth. They are. You are paying for the trivial amount of electricity the wireless consumes when not providing service to you, too. In return, you get to use their connection when you are not at home, if you are in range of one of theirs.
As for the concerns over WiFi interference and congestion. The closest xfinitywifi NAP to me registers so far down in RSSI that it would be impossible for it to interfere with the signal in my own house.
Using your barbershop analogy, it's more like there are five barbershops in town. One will cut your hair for a reasonable price
The difference is that you do, indeed, have a choice between competing ISPs, not that there is only one ISP you can choose from. Not everyone has as such an exacting set of requirements as you do.
He is being intellectually dishonest by lumping wireless Internet providers such as Verizion in the same "Market" as high-speed internet providers such as comcast, charter, etc. These are two different products,
I think it is intellectually dishonest to claim that wireless services aren't Internet because you think they are two different products when they really aren't. I use wireless services and I see no difference between them and wired in any significant area. Maybe one significant thing: I got a static IP for free from VZW while Comcast still provides a dynamic. But Charter provides a static for my business account so maybe it's still "no significant difference".
my wireless internet on my smartphone is a fraction of the speed i expect from wired internet on my desktop.
"Not as fast as I want" isn't a reason to claim they aren't competition, it is a reason for you to choose one over the other. The fact that you can make that choice is what defines competition. And I dare say, you could probably find a company or three who would bring you fast internet, but you'd have to pay for it. "More than I want to pay" is also a reason to choose one competitor over another, not to deny that one of them exists.
Also what i expect to do on the smartphone is often different
Wireless internet is not limited to "what you can do on a smartphone." Most people may only ever access it that way, but inherently it is just another transport. I have remote servers that I talk to on a regular basis, and I need do nothing special to get there via their wireless internet. It's the same slogin that I use for all the wired servers I talk to.
I'd be willing to bet that they're including mobile operators in the "competition" space.
Since they compete with cable TV-carried internet services, yes, I bet they are. The FCC probably isn't using your limited definition based on price and medium to define what an ISP is, so they do come up with a number greater than '1' for 'available ISPs' in most markets. As do I, when I count five, oops, six (almost forgot one) that I am using right now.
I don't think I could honestly claim that there is only one ISP in this area just because there is only one cable company. There are simply too many other options to arbitrarily eliminate competitors from consideration. If I were to limit my definition to what you appear to be using, I'd not have any options at some of the remote locations I have internet service, but I seem to be able to find ISPs that serve them anyway. Perhaps I'm just not picky and don't try to pare the numbers down to the absolute minimum, I just use the services to get the job done. I mean, it would be really hard to claim that there is no available ISP service at a site where I'm located next to a VZW 4G tower. (Literally, the antenna is 30' away.)
But that "option" is "available" so into the Competition Bucket it goes!
Yep, that's how it's done when you talk about competition. If a company competes, it goes into the "bucket" to be counted. It may not be at the price you like, or the transport medium, or be as fast as you want, but it is still competition.
Then I must be in some special place that nobody ever heard of, because I currently use five different ISPs and have access to at least two more who would be happy to sell me service.
I have one wired, broadband ISP
What you are saying is that you only have one option that provides the service you want at the price you want to pay via a medium that you want to use. That is VERY different than there only being one ISP available to you.
For example, wireless covers a very large part of the US, especially when you realize that a fixed wireless customer can use external directional antennas to connect from much further away than a cell phone user can. Is there truly no 3g or 4g service where you live? Or DSL? Or any specialized wireless (5GHz or similar)? Will companies like Level 3 really not sell you service where you are?
It's like complaining that there is only one barbershop in town, when the truth is that there is only one barbershop out of two dozen actually doing business in your town that charges a price you want to pay and has a cute woman to cut your hair.
When consumers can't vote with their wallets because the company has a monopoly,
There is not now and never has been a monopoly status for ISPs. You are conflating "ISP" with "Cable Television" improperly, especially since the latter lost monopoly status a long time ago (at least in the US).
If the government isn't willing to recognize the protections of the 4th amendment, why would the government recognize the protections of this new law?
Because the 4th amendment, intended to be a general overall statement, has subjective language that allows many things. I.e., "unreasonable" search and seizure depends on the definition of "reasonable", and your definition can and will differ from that of the government. This law would be explicit, and thus more focused.
The same crap that happened to cable tv, will eventually happen to online tv. Queue the added commercials soon.
Cable has always had commercials on non-premium content, and commercials on premium content are part of the premium network feed. The 'extra' commercials that cable has are called "local avails" and are ads that replace network-supplied ones.
Exactly. I'm not very thrilled by the prospect of a 140 foot 200,000 pound autonomous flying thing, staying below 400 foot
There are some places where uncontrolled airspace extends up to the bottom of Class A (18,000'), but darn few of them. Mostly, uncontrolled airspace extends from surface to either 700' or 1200' AGL.
But don't confuse the term "uncontrolled airspace" with "unmanaged" or "not within the FAA regulatory framework." As opposed to what another poster claims, aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace are not "fair game".
If you think part b means nondisclosure then you lack an understand of what nondiscretionary actually means legally.
Nondiscretionary relates to budgets not information.
Bullshit. Nondiscretionary means "not at the discretion of". Whether that is spending, as in "nondiscretionary spending", or action, as in the vast number of "must nots" that appear in the law. Such as in HIPAA.
Again, while the language in (1)(C) feels like it would provide privacy, that's wholly dependent on the guidance that's given as stated in (2).
And (3) which clearly exempts nondiscretionary information. The redacted information that cannot be legally disclosed will not be disclosed because of any NDA because it is ALREADY AGAINST THE LAW TO DISCLOSE IT.
It has nothing to do with the peer-review process that takes place before the EPA should ever consider relying on someone's research for regulatory guidance.
Yes it does, it requires that a "minimum" amount of clearance as outlined by whatever Congress dreams up.
Read the fucking law. It has nothing to do with peer review. The review that must take place is that the administrator must ensure that the data IS AVAILABLE in a way that anyone who wants to verify or try to duplicate the research can do so. It does NOT require the administrator to verify anything other than that. That is not "peer review".
What it DOES require is that research results be provided with enough detail to be verifiable
Science by default already does that.
Bullshit. Absolute nonsense. Published science does not publish the data -- it would take too much space to do that in any existing journal. And many, if not most, if not the vast majority, of scientists do NOT make their raw data available to anyone who they don't specifically decide they want to share it with.
But this law isn't talking about how to "do science", it is talking exclusively about how scientific research may be used to justify regulatory actions. That's moving out of the realm of science into politics and sociology.
we don't have an industry currently that is adjusted enough to support all the crazy stipulations that bind medical records with the unique requirements of environmental research.
More absolute nonsense. There is an entire industry revolving around HIPAA and other regulator compliance issues for scientific research. "Environmental research" has no "unique requirements" to start with, and any requirements that do exist can already be dealt with.
Additionally, that this ties it to budget
That this bill has a spending limit doesn't mean it is tied to budget.
I have to scratch my head and wonder why you trust the federal government so much when it comes to broad regulatory powers that you'd not care even a tiny bit about being able to see what scientific research is being used to justify EPA regulations. "We're from the EPA, trust us..." seems to make everything ok for you.
That's moronic.
it seems like the current proposal is a stepping stone to (a) Allow lay persons (or even entire industries with paid "scientists") to challenge the results
Gee, how awful that "science" be "challenged" by anyone. So you'd rather keep the science a secret so nobody can verify that it is reasonable?
and (b) delay the process of making new regulations by requiring the agency to jump through hoops (both in responsible releasing of confidential data,
The EPA is not responsible for releasing "confidential" data.
I can just see a politician saying that he read 100 facebook posts by citizen-scientists disproving the EPA experts' conclusions,
And this differs from today exactly how? The only difference is that the data MUST be available for review under this bill, and cannot be kept secret.
and that is why a ban on setting up oil refineries in national parks should be repealed.
"National parks" are a political creation, not a scientific one, so whether setting up an oil refinery in a "national park" is good or bad is a political question, not scientific. If you have some data showing that "national parks" have some special status scientifically compared to "just anyplace", then why shouldn't you share that data with the rest of us if you want the rest of us to be regulated in that matter?
So it maybe overall that some data will not be available for EPA research.
This has nothing to do with "EPA research". It has everything to do with EPA officials reviewing the existing research when creating regulations. It says, in very simple terms, that they may only consider research when that research is available to the public in a form that allows verification and replication if desired. In other words, they may NOT use "someone told us that this was bad, so we're going to ban it." Or "it is obvious that this is bad...". Or "if a lot of this is bad, then a little of it must be bad, too, so..."
But since it's such a large customer, it's more likely that the data will just have to be purchased with re-print rights (and at higher cost).
The EPA is not responsible for making the data public. The "administrator" is responsible for ensuring that the data is available to the public if it is to be used as a justification for regulation. That means by the source of the research, not EPA. Section 3A is explicit in saying that nothing requires the administrator to be the one making the data public.
Nor does this law require the EPA to verify the data or replicate the results.
Nor does it prohibit research of any kind.
Nor does it force the release of PII that is already protected by law.
Right. If a government agency wants to publish, they must agree to release the data to anyone who signs the NDA.
I'm sorry, but that is a lie. If the EPA wants to use this research to create regulations it must ensure that the source of the research has made the data available to the public, with some exceptions, so that anyone who wants to can verify or try to replicate the research. It has nothing to do with just publishing something.
And if the original research was not done by that government agency, then they may not have the authority to release that data.
This law has nothing specific about "government agency research."
Why do you think an agency that is creating regulations based on scientific research should be able to create those regulations based on secret data? Why shouldn't the data used to justify regulations be available to the people being regulated?
So if they aren't allowed to release the data, they aren't allowed to publish the data.
I think that is called a tautology. And "irrelevant", since this law has nothing to do with publishing research in general, only with using that "published" research to justify regulations when it really hasn't been published after all.
Why are so many people here happy to have government agencies create regulations based on "science" that nobody can look at? Is it because you want regulations that aren't supported by scientific research? Please, be honest and say so. Making up all this crap about "peer-review" or "publish" or "prohibiting research" or "HIPAA" is not honest at all.
Of course, I didn't compare "the internet" to cars. I compared the ability of car manufacturers' ability to craft policy to the ability of ISPs to craft policy.
That is an implicit equating of cars to the Internet, otherwise you cannot claim that the ability to have state-level policies for one means you can have effective state-level policies for the other.
Those cars are referred to as "50 state compliant',
And every penny of what it costs to add that compliance is paid for by the customer. It's a negative selling point in 49 states. And it does not apply to used cars in those states.
If enough states pass laws similar to Minnesota's, the ISPs will most likely cope by complying with those laws everywhere,
What if the laws are not identical? How does an ISP know someone lives in MN vs CA vs OH vs...? Do you want the prices of service to go up for everyone, like the prices of cars are higher because of California emissions gear? Aren't internet prices too high already? Should we force everyone to pay for MN's legislation? I didn't elect anyone who voted for it, so where's my "no taxation without representation"?
- Trunking radio has a nasty fallback mode when the coordinator(name?) fails - basically the radios revert to normal analog operation.
No. The radios revert to "do nothing" when the trunking controller fails. There is no controller telling all the other radios in the talk group what channel to listen to, and no controller telling your radio what channel to transmit on.
That's why you need to have non-trunked communications systems as a backup whenever a trunked system is in use.
And that is why only a fool for a communications engineer has a fire service relying on a trunked system. Only a fool (or untrained) fireman walks into a burning building with a trunked radio. People will DIE when a trunking controller fails if someone is in the middle of a fire and needs to call out for help. Forcing a firefighter inside a burning building to recognize that his trunked radio no longer reaches the repeater and change channels is putting his life in danger.
Whether the backup systems are analog or digital is irrelevant, and if the trunked system is 700MHz it CANNOT "revert" to analog because it cannot BE analog to start with.
That's obviously not acceptable for any nationwide effort,
You are confused. FirstNet is not a system where someone in California is going to talk to someone in Florida. It is a "nationwide effort" only in the terms that it will be a national standard.
Public safety radios are hilariously expensive - think >$800 per (basic!) handheld, far more for a mobile or base station,
Where to begin. First, you have it backwards. Handhelds are ridiculously more expensive than mobiles or bases, because handhelds have higher reliability requirements and have to pack all the electronics into a small form factor. And $800? Try $5000 or more for a modern handheld radio. But this is completely irrelevant to FirstNet.
If we were to upgrade everyone's radio this year
FirstNet does not require anyone to upgrade any existing radio. It is an LTE operation using a different band than commercial civilian use. At some point, phone manufacturers will start provisioning their products with this band, after some money is pumped into the system to get them to produce a starter product. What will be "upgraded" are the responder's cell phones, which can be pretty cheap since it is based on existing technology. Eventually, the same cell phone a first responder uses to call home to tell his spouse he'll be late for dinner is the same device he'll access FirstNet through.
The problem is there's currently a law that restricts medical information being handed out in a manner that agrees with the language of this proposal.
You mean this language:
(3) Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as --
(A) requiring the Administrator to disseminate scientific and technical information;
(B) superseding any nondiscretionary statutory requirement;
That language? The language that explicitly excludes redacted personal information covered by other statutory requirements from the public disclosure requirements? The PII that is required to be removed by this section of the law:
(C) publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results, except that any personally identifiable information, trade secrets, or commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential, shall be redacted prior to public availability.
There's ways to get it all to mesh well but those methods can take several years of legal paperwork which basically means that scientist will need to get lawyers at the ready should they decided to publish anything that *might* be peer reviewed.
Peer review has nothing to do with this. All research should be peer reviewed. All of it. This law doesn't touch that.
What it DOES require is that research results be provided with enough detail to be verifiable, with the specific exclusion that I just quoted to deal with PII that is required to be redacted by the previous section.
This isn't a law hoping to add more scrutiny, this is a law to make scientific research take longer than a two term president before it even hits the peer review stage.
This law has nothing to do with peer review. How do you keep coming up with this claim? This does nothing to change the length of time it takes to do research. It has nothing to do with the peer-review process that takes place before the EPA should ever consider relying on someone's research for regulatory guidance. It requires that data be available so the research, which has already been done, can be verified. If it doubles the amount of time to do a bit of research so that the data can be cleaned up for public viewing, then the data wasn't ready for use anyway.
All research affected by HIPAA would be banned by this bill.
Not true. So much not true that I cannot imagine it is untrue by simple mistake. This same untruth popped up (and from the same person, IIRC) the last time and was refuted ad nauseum, so how it could arise again now leaves me scratching my head as to the agenda.
In fact, this bill WOULD NOT BAN RESEARCH OF ANY KIND.
Any claims that this bill would ban research are simply ridiculous.
All research involving external sources of proprietary data - which no researchers like using, but sometimes you have no choice - would also be banned.
Ditto untrue.
What might be HINDERED is the use of such research to create new regulations. I don't think that's a problem. The government shouldn't be making scientific-based regulations based on science that the government itself cannot know, and cannot be told to other scientists. "I have super secret data that proves that we need to create more laws..." is not acceptable.
And furthermore, not all research is reproducible.
Then it isn't science.
"Hey, I just detected the highest energy cosmic ray collision ever in my detector, here's my paper showing proof of the detection!" "Sorry, unless some other team can reproduce the same cosmic ray event in their own detector.... "
That's not what "verifiable" or "reproducible" means. "Can someone build a similar detector" doesn't mean every detector will make identical measurements of transient phenomena.
What is required is the data that shows that a specific event of specific type and with specific properties occurred at a specific time and date and with a sensor of a specific type, such that other scientists who have similar equipment can look through their records to see if they see something that matches. Or so that others in the field can build a sensor that would catch it the next time. That's science.
Cold fusion shows the kind of crap and moneywasting that takes place when people don't provide sufficient data to verify results.
Of course, some things make it through peer review that are later shown not to be reproducible
This bill has nothing to do with "peer review".
On the other hand, if their goal is to require that all results actually be reproduced before publication...
This bill has nothing to do with what can and cannot be published. It does not require that any studies BE reproduced, even.
If you cannot maintain the solution locally, it's the wrong solution.
This is a marvelous opinion, but the validity of this has been disproven by existing systems so often. Even "simple" VHF voice systems can be complex enough to be outside the scope of local maintenance. Are you arguing that a simple VHF voice solution is the wrong solution to providing local voice communications?
Unless it's under local control it's going to be locally useless to first responders and they won't bother to spend their money on equipment that can use it.
That is utter nonsense, and disproven by existing systems. Just one example, in Oregon there is something called OWIN (or was called that) that many agencies have bought into. It is hardly useless. And the National Interoperability channels are under NATIONAL control and they are hardly useless.
IF it's nothing more than another cell phone network, what's the point of building it?
Good thing it isn't just "another cell phone network." If you don't know what it is, please don't waste our time telling us how it won't work.
I urge you to do some thinking about what a local emergency looks like and what kinds of infrastructure might not survive.
I urge you to do some thinking about what kinds of local events classify as emergencies before you assume what infrastructure will and won't "survive". I see no reason why a fire at a chemical plant would do anything to take out the local cell system or a network based there. You're stuck thinking of "major disaster" when major disasters are rare, and many local events can benefit from having adequate data communications.
THINK
I find such arguments to be particularly insulting, as if only YOU have the ability to THINK of what might happen. Sorry, but there has been a lot of thinking about such things, and not every likely scenario has all the cellphone towers falling down.
It you have to call back to a suburb of Washington DC to make a change to the infrastructure to solve a local problem,
You truly have no idea what FirstNet is. Nobody has to call back to "a suburb of Washington DC" to use it. Or to get a COW to fill in coverage.
If you don't have access to it, it is because you haven't bought a UHF radio.
We mostly use a UHF system on a spare frequency the police already had a repeater set up for.
Wait a minute. You HAVE a UHF radio and you don't have the National Interoperability channels programmed into it?
Basically we assume the next time "the big one" happens, we'll show up and ought to have the frequencies programmed in that they tell us to use, but we don't know what those are and we don't really expect any coordination to work very well.
You cannot expect coordination based on ZERO planning will work at all. If your radios "ought" to have things programmed in, and you don't know what they are, then it is YOUR planning and training that has failed. Communications is a CRITICAL service that demands planning and training, and you clearly don't have either.
Your agency is putting your life in danger by failing to properly train you or exercise your abilities. The fact you have a UHF radio and you don't know whether you have UCALL or UTAC channels in it is unforgivable.
It sounds like what they're proposing is sort of uber-trunking-system, which would be pretty cool if it actually worked
It's not "uber trunking", it's an LTE-based data network.
And when you get out of the truck, if you're bringing a laptop or tablet in with you, it's not for communication - it's for recording patient information, and mostly you leave it in the rig and use a notepad or clipboard instead.
It's for DATA. That's what FirstNet is for.
but that has worked for 10 years with Bluetooth and dumb flip-phones.
And when the cell system that your "dumb flip-phone" relies on gets jammed and you cannot get a call through to the hospital, what do you do? Hey, FirstNet, a data network dedicated to first responders!
You don't seem to value the ability to get data about the event you're responding to. I don't know why. As a fire responder, don't you think it would be nice to be able to get floor plans for the building you are entering before you enter it? Weather data? Send equipment requests to the state for things you could get from them if only they knew you needed them? Wow.
to build a 911 network that should only cost about $500M
It's not a 911 network. It's a data network for first responders, and it's covering the US. Your $500 million quote is supported by what engineering and coverage study?
and even then will be unreliable in a true, national emergency.
FirstNet is not intended to deal with national emergencies. It is for regional or local events. It's intended to provide the ability for a fire responder to get building plans for the factory or schoolhouse he's managing the response to. It's intended to provide data for incidents where the existing LTE infrastructure may be overloaded by civilians.
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How much did they reduce your last tax bill based on people playing the lottery?
lol really? You think "taxes" is a zero-sum game?
And reading comprehension, please. I didn't say "taxes go down when a lottery is implemented", I said the money they rake in on a lottery doesn't need to be taken from everyone else as taxes, not that the amount taken from everyone will be reduced. Lottery "taxes" go to pay for things that otherwise would have caused a tax increase to pay for.
My college offered 4 semesters of COBOL. It was the worst experience of my time there,
I suggest that this is the fault of the college and not the language. If they decided to take four semesters to teach COBOL, then they were certainly not very good at it and were more interested in your money than teaching you stuff.
The university I went to had only one semester of COBOL, and even FORTRAN had only two. The first semester was teaching FORTRAN. The "advanced FORTRAN" semester dealt with learning everything in the "gray pages" of the CDC FORTRAN manual, which is where they put all the CDC-specific extensions.
but I mean, a screen door "ain't broke" but it's also not the best idea to fit your front door with.
And yet, most of the front doors I see on homes have screen doors, too. Very nice to keep the Jehovah's Witnesses from walking in when you open the front door to see who just rang your doorbell.
Indeed it's not just the language - it's exceptionally verbose and you're hardly likely to misunderstand the meaning of "MULTIPLY NumA BY NumB GIVING NumC."
Or the reason I think the language is magic: "MOVE CORRESPONDING A TO B." One statement pulls the relevant bits out of one struct and stuffs them into another, leaving the irrelevant bits alone. In fact, the only reason I know how to spell "corresponding" is because I used (and needed) that command so many times during one semester of COBOL.
Somebody does win the lottery (other than the lotto companies).
In the US, those evil lottery companies are called "the government". The money they take in from the lotteries means they don't need to take it from everyone in taxes. I like people who play the lottery.
And I have won at the casino, sometimes good amounts.
People who play games that are pure chance are long-term losers. Every game has a percentage in favor of the house.
Games that involves skill, however, depend on people who have no skill thinking they can beat the house for the house to make money. I have typically always won at Pai Gow. And poker, where there is no advantage for the house, they simply take in a rake off each pot.
Are you suggesting that the DOCSIS modem actually provides 'X + y', and serves 'y' to other users?
Yes.
Specifically, that's not true.
Uhhh.
When I buy a pie, you don't get a slice without permission.
Nobody is eating your pie but you. You don't pay for the bandwidth other people use under this system.
I'm paying for bandwidth, and sharing it with whoever is in range is NOT in my best interest.
First, it is not "whoever is in range", it's other Comcast subscribers. They have to log in to use it. Second, you're not paying for their bandwidth. They are. You are paying for the trivial amount of electricity the wireless consumes when not providing service to you, too. In return, you get to use their connection when you are not at home, if you are in range of one of theirs.
As for the concerns over WiFi interference and congestion. The closest xfinitywifi NAP to me registers so far down in RSSI that it would be impossible for it to interfere with the signal in my own house.
Using your barbershop analogy, it's more like there are five barbershops in town. One will cut your hair for a reasonable price
The difference is that you do, indeed, have a choice between competing ISPs, not that there is only one ISP you can choose from. Not everyone has as such an exacting set of requirements as you do.
He is being intellectually dishonest by lumping wireless Internet providers such as Verizion in the same "Market" as high-speed internet providers such as comcast, charter, etc. These are two different products,
I think it is intellectually dishonest to claim that wireless services aren't Internet because you think they are two different products when they really aren't. I use wireless services and I see no difference between them and wired in any significant area. Maybe one significant thing: I got a static IP for free from VZW while Comcast still provides a dynamic. But Charter provides a static for my business account so maybe it's still "no significant difference".
my wireless internet on my smartphone is a fraction of the speed i expect from wired internet on my desktop.
"Not as fast as I want" isn't a reason to claim they aren't competition, it is a reason for you to choose one over the other. The fact that you can make that choice is what defines competition. And I dare say, you could probably find a company or three who would bring you fast internet, but you'd have to pay for it. "More than I want to pay" is also a reason to choose one competitor over another, not to deny that one of them exists.
Also what i expect to do on the smartphone is often different
Wireless internet is not limited to "what you can do on a smartphone." Most people may only ever access it that way, but inherently it is just another transport. I have remote servers that I talk to on a regular basis, and I need do nothing special to get there via their wireless internet. It's the same slogin that I use for all the wired servers I talk to.
I'd be willing to bet that they're including mobile operators in the "competition" space.
Since they compete with cable TV-carried internet services, yes, I bet they are. The FCC probably isn't using your limited definition based on price and medium to define what an ISP is, so they do come up with a number greater than '1' for 'available ISPs' in most markets. As do I, when I count five, oops, six (almost forgot one) that I am using right now.
I don't think I could honestly claim that there is only one ISP in this area just because there is only one cable company. There are simply too many other options to arbitrarily eliminate competitors from consideration. If I were to limit my definition to what you appear to be using, I'd not have any options at some of the remote locations I have internet service, but I seem to be able to find ISPs that serve them anyway. Perhaps I'm just not picky and don't try to pare the numbers down to the absolute minimum, I just use the services to get the job done. I mean, it would be really hard to claim that there is no available ISP service at a site where I'm located next to a VZW 4G tower. (Literally, the antenna is 30' away.)
But that "option" is "available" so into the Competition Bucket it goes!
Yep, that's how it's done when you talk about competition. If a company competes, it goes into the "bucket" to be counted. It may not be at the price you like, or the transport medium, or be as fast as you want, but it is still competition.
You are lucky.
Then I must be in some special place that nobody ever heard of, because I currently use five different ISPs and have access to at least two more who would be happy to sell me service.
I have one wired, broadband ISP
What you are saying is that you only have one option that provides the service you want at the price you want to pay via a medium that you want to use. That is VERY different than there only being one ISP available to you.
For example, wireless covers a very large part of the US, especially when you realize that a fixed wireless customer can use external directional antennas to connect from much further away than a cell phone user can. Is there truly no 3g or 4g service where you live? Or DSL? Or any specialized wireless (5GHz or similar)? Will companies like Level 3 really not sell you service where you are?
It's like complaining that there is only one barbershop in town, when the truth is that there is only one barbershop out of two dozen actually doing business in your town that charges a price you want to pay and has a cute woman to cut your hair.
When consumers can't vote with their wallets because the company has a monopoly,
There is not now and never has been a monopoly status for ISPs. You are conflating "ISP" with "Cable Television" improperly, especially since the latter lost monopoly status a long time ago (at least in the US).
If the government isn't willing to recognize the protections of the 4th amendment, why would the government recognize the protections of this new law?
Because the 4th amendment, intended to be a general overall statement, has subjective language that allows many things. I.e., "unreasonable" search and seizure depends on the definition of "reasonable", and your definition can and will differ from that of the government. This law would be explicit, and thus more focused.
The same crap that happened to cable tv, will eventually happen to online tv. Queue the added commercials soon.
Cable has always had commercials on non-premium content, and commercials on premium content are part of the premium network feed. The 'extra' commercials that cable has are called "local avails" and are ads that replace network-supplied ones.
Exactly. I'm not very thrilled by the prospect of a 140 foot 200,000 pound autonomous flying thing, staying below 400 foot
There are some places where uncontrolled airspace extends up to the bottom of Class A (18,000'), but darn few of them. Mostly, uncontrolled airspace extends from surface to either 700' or 1200' AGL.
But don't confuse the term "uncontrolled airspace" with "unmanaged" or "not within the FAA regulatory framework." As opposed to what another poster claims, aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace are not "fair game".
If you think part b means nondisclosure then you lack an understand of what nondiscretionary actually means legally. Nondiscretionary relates to budgets not information.
Bullshit. Nondiscretionary means "not at the discretion of". Whether that is spending, as in "nondiscretionary spending", or action, as in the vast number of "must nots" that appear in the law. Such as in HIPAA.
Again, while the language in (1)(C) feels like it would provide privacy, that's wholly dependent on the guidance that's given as stated in (2).
And (3) which clearly exempts nondiscretionary information. The redacted information that cannot be legally disclosed will not be disclosed because of any NDA because it is ALREADY AGAINST THE LAW TO DISCLOSE IT.
It has nothing to do with the peer-review process that takes place before the EPA should ever consider relying on someone's research for regulatory guidance.
Yes it does, it requires that a "minimum" amount of clearance as outlined by whatever Congress dreams up.
Read the fucking law. It has nothing to do with peer review. The review that must take place is that the administrator must ensure that the data IS AVAILABLE in a way that anyone who wants to verify or try to duplicate the research can do so. It does NOT require the administrator to verify anything other than that. That is not "peer review".
What it DOES require is that research results be provided with enough detail to be verifiable
Science by default already does that.
Bullshit. Absolute nonsense. Published science does not publish the data -- it would take too much space to do that in any existing journal. And many, if not most, if not the vast majority, of scientists do NOT make their raw data available to anyone who they don't specifically decide they want to share it with.
But this law isn't talking about how to "do science", it is talking exclusively about how scientific research may be used to justify regulatory actions. That's moving out of the realm of science into politics and sociology.
we don't have an industry currently that is adjusted enough to support all the crazy stipulations that bind medical records with the unique requirements of environmental research.
More absolute nonsense. There is an entire industry revolving around HIPAA and other regulator compliance issues for scientific research. "Environmental research" has no "unique requirements" to start with, and any requirements that do exist can already be dealt with.
Additionally, that this ties it to budget
That this bill has a spending limit doesn't mean it is tied to budget.
I have to scratch my head and wonder why you trust the federal government so much when it comes to broad regulatory powers that you'd not care even a tiny bit about being able to see what scientific research is being used to justify EPA regulations. "We're from the EPA, trust us..." seems to make everything ok for you. That's moronic.
it seems like the current proposal is a stepping stone to (a) Allow lay persons (or even entire industries with paid "scientists") to challenge the results
Gee, how awful that "science" be "challenged" by anyone. So you'd rather keep the science a secret so nobody can verify that it is reasonable?
and (b) delay the process of making new regulations by requiring the agency to jump through hoops (both in responsible releasing of confidential data,
The EPA is not responsible for releasing "confidential" data.
I can just see a politician saying that he read 100 facebook posts by citizen-scientists disproving the EPA experts' conclusions,
And this differs from today exactly how? The only difference is that the data MUST be available for review under this bill, and cannot be kept secret.
and that is why a ban on setting up oil refineries in national parks should be repealed.
"National parks" are a political creation, not a scientific one, so whether setting up an oil refinery in a "national park" is good or bad is a political question, not scientific. If you have some data showing that "national parks" have some special status scientifically compared to "just anyplace", then why shouldn't you share that data with the rest of us if you want the rest of us to be regulated in that matter?
So it maybe overall that some data will not be available for EPA research.
This has nothing to do with "EPA research". It has everything to do with EPA officials reviewing the existing research when creating regulations. It says, in very simple terms, that they may only consider research when that research is available to the public in a form that allows verification and replication if desired. In other words, they may NOT use "someone told us that this was bad, so we're going to ban it." Or "it is obvious that this is bad ...". Or "if a lot of this is bad, then a little of it must be bad, too, so ..."
But since it's such a large customer, it's more likely that the data will just have to be purchased with re-print rights (and at higher cost).
The EPA is not responsible for making the data public. The "administrator" is responsible for ensuring that the data is available to the public if it is to be used as a justification for regulation. That means by the source of the research, not EPA. Section 3A is explicit in saying that nothing requires the administrator to be the one making the data public.
Nor does this law require the EPA to verify the data or replicate the results.
Nor does it prohibit research of any kind.
Nor does it force the release of PII that is already protected by law.
None of that.
Right. If a government agency wants to publish, they must agree to release the data to anyone who signs the NDA.
I'm sorry, but that is a lie. If the EPA wants to use this research to create regulations it must ensure that the source of the research has made the data available to the public, with some exceptions, so that anyone who wants to can verify or try to replicate the research. It has nothing to do with just publishing something.
And if the original research was not done by that government agency, then they may not have the authority to release that data.
This law has nothing specific about "government agency research."
Why do you think an agency that is creating regulations based on scientific research should be able to create those regulations based on secret data? Why shouldn't the data used to justify regulations be available to the people being regulated?
So if they aren't allowed to release the data, they aren't allowed to publish the data.
I think that is called a tautology. And "irrelevant", since this law has nothing to do with publishing research in general, only with using that "published" research to justify regulations when it really hasn't been published after all.
Why are so many people here happy to have government agencies create regulations based on "science" that nobody can look at? Is it because you want regulations that aren't supported by scientific research? Please, be honest and say so. Making up all this crap about "peer-review" or "publish" or "prohibiting research" or "HIPAA" is not honest at all.
Of course, I didn't compare "the internet" to cars. I compared the ability of car manufacturers' ability to craft policy to the ability of ISPs to craft policy.
That is an implicit equating of cars to the Internet, otherwise you cannot claim that the ability to have state-level policies for one means you can have effective state-level policies for the other.
Those cars are referred to as "50 state compliant',
And every penny of what it costs to add that compliance is paid for by the customer. It's a negative selling point in 49 states. And it does not apply to used cars in those states.
If enough states pass laws similar to Minnesota's, the ISPs will most likely cope by complying with those laws everywhere,
What if the laws are not identical? How does an ISP know someone lives in MN vs CA vs OH vs ...? Do you want the prices of service to go up for everyone, like the prices of cars are higher because of California emissions gear? Aren't internet prices too high already? Should we force everyone to pay for MN's legislation? I didn't elect anyone who voted for it, so where's my "no taxation without representation"?
- Trunking radio has a nasty fallback mode when the coordinator(name?) fails - basically the radios revert to normal analog operation.
No. The radios revert to "do nothing" when the trunking controller fails. There is no controller telling all the other radios in the talk group what channel to listen to, and no controller telling your radio what channel to transmit on.
That's why you need to have non-trunked communications systems as a backup whenever a trunked system is in use.
And that is why only a fool for a communications engineer has a fire service relying on a trunked system. Only a fool (or untrained) fireman walks into a burning building with a trunked radio. People will DIE when a trunking controller fails if someone is in the middle of a fire and needs to call out for help. Forcing a firefighter inside a burning building to recognize that his trunked radio no longer reaches the repeater and change channels is putting his life in danger.
Whether the backup systems are analog or digital is irrelevant, and if the trunked system is 700MHz it CANNOT "revert" to analog because it cannot BE analog to start with.
That's obviously not acceptable for any nationwide effort,
You are confused. FirstNet is not a system where someone in California is going to talk to someone in Florida. It is a "nationwide effort" only in the terms that it will be a national standard.
Public safety radios are hilariously expensive - think >$800 per (basic!) handheld, far more for a mobile or base station,
Where to begin. First, you have it backwards. Handhelds are ridiculously more expensive than mobiles or bases, because handhelds have higher reliability requirements and have to pack all the electronics into a small form factor. And $800? Try $5000 or more for a modern handheld radio. But this is completely irrelevant to FirstNet.
If we were to upgrade everyone's radio this year
FirstNet does not require anyone to upgrade any existing radio. It is an LTE operation using a different band than commercial civilian use. At some point, phone manufacturers will start provisioning their products with this band, after some money is pumped into the system to get them to produce a starter product. What will be "upgraded" are the responder's cell phones, which can be pretty cheap since it is based on existing technology. Eventually, the same cell phone a first responder uses to call home to tell his spouse he'll be late for dinner is the same device he'll access FirstNet through.
The problem is there's currently a law that restricts medical information being handed out in a manner that agrees with the language of this proposal.
You mean this language:
(3) Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as --
(A) requiring the Administrator to disseminate scientific and technical information;
(B) superseding any nondiscretionary statutory requirement;
That language? The language that explicitly excludes redacted personal information covered by other statutory requirements from the public disclosure requirements? The PII that is required to be removed by this section of the law:
(C) publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results, except that any personally identifiable information, trade secrets, or commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential, shall be redacted prior to public availability.
There's ways to get it all to mesh well but those methods can take several years of legal paperwork which basically means that scientist will need to get lawyers at the ready should they decided to publish anything that *might* be peer reviewed.
Peer review has nothing to do with this. All research should be peer reviewed. All of it. This law doesn't touch that.
What it DOES require is that research results be provided with enough detail to be verifiable, with the specific exclusion that I just quoted to deal with PII that is required to be redacted by the previous section.
This isn't a law hoping to add more scrutiny, this is a law to make scientific research take longer than a two term president before it even hits the peer review stage.
This law has nothing to do with peer review. How do you keep coming up with this claim? This does nothing to change the length of time it takes to do research. It has nothing to do with the peer-review process that takes place before the EPA should ever consider relying on someone's research for regulatory guidance. It requires that data be available so the research, which has already been done, can be verified. If it doubles the amount of time to do a bit of research so that the data can be cleaned up for public viewing, then the data wasn't ready for use anyway.
You, obviously, did not read the article. Personal, redacted info can be viewed by ANYONE who signs an non-disclosure agreement.
You, obviously, did not read the actual bill, because your claim is a lie.
"(3) Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as --
"(B) superseding any nondiscretionary statutory requirement;
HIPAA is a nondiscretionary statutory requirement.
All research affected by HIPAA would be banned by this bill.
Not true. So much not true that I cannot imagine it is untrue by simple mistake. This same untruth popped up (and from the same person, IIRC) the last time and was refuted ad nauseum, so how it could arise again now leaves me scratching my head as to the agenda.
In fact, this bill WOULD NOT BAN RESEARCH OF ANY KIND.
Any claims that this bill would ban research are simply ridiculous.
All research involving external sources of proprietary data - which no researchers like using, but sometimes you have no choice - would also be banned.
Ditto untrue.
What might be HINDERED is the use of such research to create new regulations. I don't think that's a problem. The government shouldn't be making scientific-based regulations based on science that the government itself cannot know, and cannot be told to other scientists. "I have super secret data that proves that we need to create more laws..." is not acceptable.
And furthermore, not all research is reproducible.
Then it isn't science.
"Hey, I just detected the highest energy cosmic ray collision ever in my detector, here's my paper showing proof of the detection!" "Sorry, unless some other team can reproduce the same cosmic ray event in their own detector.... "
That's not what "verifiable" or "reproducible" means. "Can someone build a similar detector" doesn't mean every detector will make identical measurements of transient phenomena.
What is required is the data that shows that a specific event of specific type and with specific properties occurred at a specific time and date and with a sensor of a specific type, such that other scientists who have similar equipment can look through their records to see if they see something that matches. Or so that others in the field can build a sensor that would catch it the next time. That's science.
Cold fusion shows the kind of crap and moneywasting that takes place when people don't provide sufficient data to verify results.
Of course, some things make it through peer review that are later shown not to be reproducible
This bill has nothing to do with "peer review".
On the other hand, if their goal is to require that all results actually be reproduced before publication...
This bill has nothing to do with what can and cannot be published. It does not require that any studies BE reproduced, even.
If you cannot maintain the solution locally, it's the wrong solution.
This is a marvelous opinion, but the validity of this has been disproven by existing systems so often. Even "simple" VHF voice systems can be complex enough to be outside the scope of local maintenance. Are you arguing that a simple VHF voice solution is the wrong solution to providing local voice communications?
Unless it's under local control it's going to be locally useless to first responders and they won't bother to spend their money on equipment that can use it.
That is utter nonsense, and disproven by existing systems. Just one example, in Oregon there is something called OWIN (or was called that) that many agencies have bought into. It is hardly useless. And the National Interoperability channels are under NATIONAL control and they are hardly useless.
IF it's nothing more than another cell phone network, what's the point of building it?
Good thing it isn't just "another cell phone network." If you don't know what it is, please don't waste our time telling us how it won't work.
I urge you to do some thinking about what a local emergency looks like and what kinds of infrastructure might not survive.
I urge you to do some thinking about what kinds of local events classify as emergencies before you assume what infrastructure will and won't "survive". I see no reason why a fire at a chemical plant would do anything to take out the local cell system or a network based there. You're stuck thinking of "major disaster" when major disasters are rare, and many local events can benefit from having adequate data communications.
THINK
I find such arguments to be particularly insulting, as if only YOU have the ability to THINK of what might happen. Sorry, but there has been a lot of thinking about such things, and not every likely scenario has all the cellphone towers falling down.
It you have to call back to a suburb of Washington DC to make a change to the infrastructure to solve a local problem,
You truly have no idea what FirstNet is. Nobody has to call back to "a suburb of Washington DC" to use it. Or to get a COW to fill in coverage.
(We don't have access to UTAC, I don't think.)
If you don't have access to it, it is because you haven't bought a UHF radio.
We mostly use a UHF system on a spare frequency the police already had a repeater set up for.
Wait a minute. You HAVE a UHF radio and you don't have the National Interoperability channels programmed into it?
Basically we assume the next time "the big one" happens, we'll show up and ought to have the frequencies programmed in that they tell us to use, but we don't know what those are and we don't really expect any coordination to work very well.
You cannot expect coordination based on ZERO planning will work at all. If your radios "ought" to have things programmed in, and you don't know what they are, then it is YOUR planning and training that has failed. Communications is a CRITICAL service that demands planning and training, and you clearly don't have either.
Your agency is putting your life in danger by failing to properly train you or exercise your abilities. The fact you have a UHF radio and you don't know whether you have UCALL or UTAC channels in it is unforgivable.
It sounds like what they're proposing is sort of uber-trunking-system, which would be pretty cool if it actually worked
It's not "uber trunking", it's an LTE-based data network.
And when you get out of the truck, if you're bringing a laptop or tablet in with you, it's not for communication - it's for recording patient information, and mostly you leave it in the rig and use a notepad or clipboard instead.
It's for DATA. That's what FirstNet is for.
but that has worked for 10 years with Bluetooth and dumb flip-phones.
And when the cell system that your "dumb flip-phone" relies on gets jammed and you cannot get a call through to the hospital, what do you do? Hey, FirstNet, a data network dedicated to first responders!
You don't seem to value the ability to get data about the event you're responding to. I don't know why. As a fire responder, don't you think it would be nice to be able to get floor plans for the building you are entering before you enter it? Weather data? Send equipment requests to the state for things you could get from them if only they knew you needed them? Wow.
since we can't afford to buy it.
The goal is to make it cheap. One of the goals.
to build a 911 network that should only cost about $500M
It's not a 911 network. It's a data network for first responders, and it's covering the US. Your $500 million quote is supported by what engineering and coverage study?
and even then will be unreliable in a true, national emergency.
FirstNet is not intended to deal with national emergencies. It is for regional or local events. It's intended to provide the ability for a fire responder to get building plans for the factory or schoolhouse he's managing the response to. It's intended to provide data for incidents where the existing LTE infrastructure may be overloaded by civilians.