Ahh, no. Exactly the opposite. But if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and think you won because you didn't quite understand what I said, that's fine. It would be my loss to participate further, just as I said earlier.
I don't use my gas stove, yet I have to pay a connection fee (multi-apartment building).
If you have a connection for a gas stove, you are paying for the connection and the ability to use it. If I traveled for a month I'd not be using my water connection, but it is still connected and it is still available for use with the turn of a tap.
If you aren't connected to the municipal internet service, you have no ability to use it and should not be forced to pay for it.
Sorry, but "pay for what you get" doesn't work with lots of essential stuff.
You get something when you have the connection. Just like my wireline phone which I almost never get calls on and never make any.
No. You don't get it. The cost of fiber optics is basically a $lotsofmoney to dig trenches and lay the backbone fiber.
I get it fine. It's you who doesn't understand. Those costs are built into the monthly fee for service. You pay them when you get service. Until you have service, you shouldn't have to pay them. For Comcast, until you get service you pay them zero. Zip. Nada. For a municipal system, your taxes pay for it even if you never connect.
Once it's repaid the subscriber fee can go down a lot.
You are naive. Remarkably so. I've gone through two system rebuilds in this city. Not once has the price of service dropped after the system was paid for. Not once.
Oh, but a government service would. Sure. Ten years ago our city put a fee on our water bill to pay for fixing a specific major street that the contractor screwed up. I thought "the contractor should pay", but no, we got a fee on the water bill. It took four years before the street was fixed, and then the fee went away, right? Nope. It's gone up.
Should the newcomers pay the low fee?
If you think the fees will go down, you're naive.
Since your argument depends on an impossibility, your argument fails.
But just for the sake of argument, let's assume a miracle happens, a green unicorn runs the city and the fees go down. Should newcomers pay the lower fee? OF COURSE. Two reasons. First, their tax dollars paid for the initial build, too. Their tax dollars will go to cover any operating losses or upgrades. And second, if the costs are actually covered by the lower fee, then that's what they should pay. The city should not be in the for-profit internet business.
That's the problem with municipal competition with private enterprise. The taxpayer covers the losses and pays to create the competition that will ultimately lower competition, and may wind up paying twice for the same service (once to Comcast for the service he actually uses, once to the city to cover the losses for the service he doesn't want and can't use.)
If you have a gas stove and no gas connection then you should pay nothing. I know I wouldn't pay a dime for gas service if I bought a gas stove (or the house had one when I bought it) and I never call the gas company for a hookup. If you have a connection and can get flame when you turn the stove on, then you need to pay for that service, even if you never pay a penny for a ccf of gas. If you think a municipal internet service you aren't connected to is just like having a gas stove connected to the gas lines but never turned on, you're woefully wrong.
Spending money to build infrastructure isn't deficit spending.
If you have to borrow the money to build the infrastructure, yes, it is deficit spending. You're spending more money than you take in.
If it brings a few businesses to town or even better, creates them, it is essentially free
Borrowing money is never free, and the biggest lie is that taxpayer funded ANYTHING is "free".
What about the companies that leave town -- like the ones that the competition from the local government kill or keep from coming in to compete with the existing services? It's already bad enough that a second company won't come compete because the return on investment would be low; imagine how many would come if the competition from the taxpayer-funded system made that ROI negative? (Answer: none).
But there would be competition! Until the ROI for the existing services goes negative and they pull out, which leaves you with ONE true government monopoly and no competition at all.
You aren't active in your local government, are you? Your loss.
I've been active in my local government, and the OPs comment is spot on. For each issue I've taken an active stand in, about twenty vocal fuzzy-warm feel-good liberal nitwits captivated the imagination of the small minded city council members who thought their actions would be world-changing events. In each issue, the council has wound up having NO effect on anything but micromanaging the lives of the citizens or in one case having a negative impact on the world events they were coopting the voices of the local citizens over.
In other words, the only loss I saw for me was a complete waste of my time and energy, and the next time such an issue came up I lost nothing by not being an active participant in the dog and pony show the council was being put through. Were I one of the warm-fuzzy feel-good nitwits, I'd have gotten a great deal of warm-fuzzy feel-good goose bumps all over and feel so happy -- while actually accomplishing nothing.
So if I decline to pay now and then wait 5 years until the infrastructure is built and paid for by the first subscribers then should I pay the whole share or just the connection fee?
If you aren't getting the service, you shouldn't have to pay to build the system. Period. That means you shouldn't be forced to pay taxes for a municipal service that you aren't using. And the government shouldn't be allowed to use your taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of a system that isn't self-funding, especially when you may be paying the competition for service, too. I.e., the government is taking your money to become a competitor to the company you chose to do business with and perhaps forcing them out of business or into higher rates to cover the fixed costs and fewer subs.
When you eventually get service, you will pay THE SAME RATES EVERYONE ELSE DOES. (Yeah, barring special promotions to lure you to subscribe, which last a year or less.) So, you will pay a rate based on the costs AND a connection fee. Just like everyone else. IN FACT, you very well may wind up paying a lot MORE for your service because the first subscribers may be on a grandfathered plan that you can't get as a new sub.
If you think that cable companies drop rates after a few years because they've paid off the initial buildout costs, you're naive and uninformed.
Oh I see, government itself is the enemy of freedom!
Since the government hires the people to... monitor cellphone calls, use radars to search people's homes, put people in prison, etc,... I'd say you already know the answer.
If there were no government and no taxes we would all be perfectly free!
Artificial dichotomy. Too much water, you die. Too little water you die. Just the right amount of water -- you die from something else. Too much government, you lose freedoms. Too little government, you have the ultimate freedom to protect your own freedom. Just the right amount of government -- they don't take away freedoms arbitrarily and don't let others do so, either.
Government that competes using taxpayer dollars with existing corporations just because some people don't like the customer service they're getting is the wrong level of government. If there are so many people wanting another provider, another company would show up and eat the existing one's lunch. That doesn't happen. Hmmmm.
You mean like the way Christie is referred to as a "self-appointed public health expert", and then his opinion is shown to be wrong by quoting Obama -- another self-appointed public health expert?
I'm used to finding hidden biases in summaries (and articles they are quoted verbatim from), but this one is pretty obvious.
Yes, wait. The alleged goal is not total equivalence in all aspects of "marriage", it is equality in the legal aspect. If the goal were to have all the legal rights and protections of marriage and nothing else, then it would not matter if the religious connotations were also provided. Since the entire concept of "marriage" must be available, then there is clearly something besides the legal rights and protections involved.
I have never seen an ad from those seeking gay marriage that mentioned anything about wanting the extraneous parephenalia of marriage, only the legal aspects. In fact, every statement I've seen has tried to deny any extraneous aspects to marriage outside the legal. Such as, "marriage is a legal concept, religion doesn't play any part", despite clear evidence to the contrary for many, many people. "If this was a religious ceremony, then look at all the sin (divorces, adultery) that married people do."
I.e., the stated goal was never "separate but equal", just "same legal rights and protections." Were the goal of primary education to be simply "the same textbook education", then "separate but equal" when it comes to schools and race would be truly equal. Since primary education involves socialization and non-textbook concerns, "separate but equal" can't be equal by definition. But legally, there is no difference between a civil union that has all the legal rights and protections and a marriage that has the same. The only difference is in the unimportant bits, which seem to be very important after all.
Some teachers just don't know how to handle stuff.
I bet if you asked 100 teachers this question:
Assume you are a first grade teacher and you have no system-provided guidance for the following situation: one of your students tells another student he has a magic ring and is going to make him disappear. What do you do?
I bet that 100 out of the 100 will have the right answer. "Stop doing that Billy, and Tommy, there is no such thing. Both of you sit down and we're going to do math now..."
But then Tommy goes home and tells Momma that Billy threatened to make him disappear. Momma tells Daddy, who is a lawyer. Tommy has been traumatized and the school didn't do enough. (AKA "bullied".) Lawsuit follows. Zero-tolerance policy follows. The teachers get it right. The lawyers force the administration to create policies that don't allow interpretation, because as soon as one teacher does the right thing the lawyers point to the fact that the policy exists and THIS teacher ignored it, it becomes a case of negligence.
Now, remember that we as a society love fiction and magic and create complex fabrics that bedazzle our children. Harry Potter, to name one. Tolkien for another. And remember that when it comes to traumatizing someone, it is not what YOU believe that matters, it is what THEY believe. Psychological trauma is not an objective thing. "Hey, I knew the gun I used to rob a bank wasn't loaded and nobody would get hurt, why is this ARMED robbery?"
We're in a world where sending a text to someone that says "you're ugly" is called "bullying" and begs lawyers to step in. Zero-tolerance policies and zero-tolerance enforcements are a natural response to that legal ecosystem.
Homosexuals do not want to get married because of their respect for the institution of marriage. They want to get married because married people are an elite class that has special rights and privileges that non-married people do not enjoy.
And yet, civil union that would grant all the "rights and privileges" with respect to law and the state is not sufficient. It cannot be that they want just the legal protections and rights of marriage. There is something about the word "marriage" that is required.
I fear it is more of an attempt at taking things away from the institution of marriage (and thus the repeated arguments about how many people divorce or cheat -- ignoring all the ones who do neither) by changing the definition to be only the legal aspect.
No, a threat is a threat. If I threaten to make you disappear, and you don't feel that I'm joking, you won't care whether I added "by using magic" as how I would do it.
This. If I put my hand in my pocket, point my finger, and tell you I have got a gun, it's still a crime. The fact that this is a child only points out that we have billion dollar industries designed to create belief in the metaphysical in children. Harry Potter, Tolkein, Twilight, etc. And billion dollar industries taking fiction and turning it into reality. (I have a watch that has a more powerful computer in it than were imagined when I was born. RPi 2 is a quad-core A7 with 1 Gig RAM for $35! I can get a gun that I can use to rob you that has little chance of killing you but will completely disable you while I take your wallet.)
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you as to their having a "zero intelligence" policy.
I never once had to take a course on how to teach or even teach/TA a course (I was a research assistant the whole time I was in grad school).
You are a textbook example of why many professors in colleges are horrible teachers. They have no experience, and they are more interested in doing their research than teaching.
The person cited in the summary is just as qualified as most Ph.D.s.:)
Not true. He is not as educated or experienced in the topic as someone who has a Ph.D would be, and it would be trivial to stump him with a more advanced question. He is as qualified with respect to experience actually teaching, but he has not been in as many classes to see what hasn't worked by experiencing it. He may have had a good example which he can copy, but it is more likely the Ph.D has had one.
As for the big bucks,
I believe the realization was that he could make more money, which is certainly true for most app developers. The claim that academics make big bucks in any absolute sense is absurd.
Conservatives purposefully create laws like this, because of these differences in perception of what they mean from one class to another.
ALL laws inherently treat different classes differently, for the appropriate definition of "class". Many laws exist that deal solely with business owners, for example. I don't own a business so they have no effect on me. That doesn't make them discriminatory. There's a law in this city that you can't build anything downtown taller than a certain height. Again, no effect on me. It only matters to people rich enough to build buildings downtown.
The treatment of those who sleep on the sidewalk is equal. The cop who tells someone to move along doesn't have access to the tax records to see who makes more money. The result of enforcing the law may be different, but that doesn't make the law discriminatory. The fact that rich people are less likely to break that law is also irrelevant. Laws against burglary are also less likely to broken by rich people, too. Laws against murder are unlikely to be enforced against people who don't commit murders.
Your argument would make essentially all laws invalid because they all discriminate. Even something as simple as traffic laws discriminate against the middle class: people who can afford a car to drive, but aren't rich enough to hire a limo service for do it for them.
Is it really a zero-sum game where a girl studying CS means that a boy can't?
To progressives, everything is a zero sum game.
You have it backwards. To liberals, there are no zero-sum games. Giving things out for free will never cost more money. The "free" community college education will not draw money out of other programs. The examples are endless.
To answer the OP, yes, it very well can be a zero-sum game. I remember being shut out of classes because they were filled when I was in high school. My school had to prioritize enrollments to make sure upperclass students got the requirements to graduate, at the expense of lowerclass students who were on advanced tracks.
Schools have X dollars to hire Y teachers for Z classrooms. It's isn't as easy as "let's add another section" when the existing CS classes fill. That CS teacher is already teaching as many classes as she's paid to teach, and likely there are already the number of students her union contract limits specify. The room is already in use the rest of the day. (Colleges, at least, get increased tuition payments when they add a section to a filled class. High schools do not.)
This has already been demonstrated by Title IX requirements. Schools have to provide "equal opportunity" for girls and boys in sports. In some cases that meant boys teams were cut. In others, money is being spent on girls sports that nobody really wants to play. In Oregon, that "opportunity" is measured by actual participation numbers. Nobody cares if the girls in a certain school district have no interest in sports, if a school doesn't have the right percentages of participation it is assumed they are violating the girls' rights and corrective action is required.
the firmware can be altered... they're not hardcoding that.
There's no danger at all in that, is there. I mean, people who want to bypass the factory programming that keeps their device from working by hacking the firmware.
Seems kinda like someone who bypasses the fuse in his electronic widget with a piece of tinfoil because it keeps blowing and he wants to use what he paid for.
Exactly. In order to become a scientist one generally has to become an expert in a highly specialized field that might not be the right field necessary to judge the overall impact of a technology on society.
I had a biology teacher in high school who set us all straight on what it meant to be "a scientist". It wasn't what degree you got from college, or even if you got a degree at all. It was how you approached the world and dealt with obtaining and handling data.
A scientist first understands the process of science. That's why people who try to dismiss non-climate scientists with a wave of the hand and the statement "you aren't a climate scientist", when the issue is how data are handled, are wrong. Any scientist has standing to say "you can't just throw out all the data that doesn't support your hypothesis and then claim you've proven it."
As for judging the impact on society, you're right. Science doesn't juggle political or social or even economic details, those are left to politicians or economists or sociologists. And right there you can see my view on political science, economics, and social sciences.
So because you've never had a computer with AMT, AMT doesn't exist? That's some weird logic you have.
Didn't say that. I said I can't recall ever seeing it. Sorry the difference escapes you.
If your computer has WoL (most do) it has an "Active" network connection (as in a passive listening connection), even when you disable WoL, it's still listening, it just doesn't do anything.
It's hard to listen on an interface that has been shut off. Or on one that has been unplugged, which if you recall was what I suggested to deal with an always-on laptop network connection. Seems like I admitted they existed, which contradicts the words you tried putting in my mouth earlier.
I know what "wake on lan" is, and I also know that it is a BIOS setting to enable and disable it. Still, you can't "wake on lan" a system that isn't connected to a lan, now can you? That seems like a simpler solution if you are scared of the boogeyman turning your powered-down laptop back on. It's not like you have to crawl under the desk to get to the network connection when you unplug a laptop.
But using the simple solution doesn't allow for an "oh noes, the gov'mint can turn my laptop back on and monitor me, must buy a special laptop to be safe!" FUD campaign.
I believe Obama raised more money through smaller donations than Romney did, but even if not - he didn't appoint the Citizen's United faction to the SCOTUS.
He did not, and he would not.
And one-person-one-vote democracy doesn't work with one billionaire $100 million worth of speech vs 1 normal voter, 10 bucks.
You do realize that the Citizen's United case was specifically about a group of people trying to get around the "1 normal voter, 10 bucks" problem by aggregating many normal voters into many bucks, don't you? The only error CU made was in trying to buy airtime for an anti-Hilary movie. Otherwise, they were trying to deal with the very thing that you seem to be saying is a problem.
You're also implying that that billionaire is actually buying votes with his $100 million. In truth, his one vote counts just the same as my one vote and your one vote and everyone else's one vote. The true issue with "one-person-one-vote" is first to know that the one person has the right to vote before he is allowed and second that he only gets one vote. Requiring ID is the obvious solution. The same kind of ID that every citizen of many other countries is required to carry to get government services of any kind, and even many private services.
All parties are allocated the same budget for advertising, the only difference is that they each decide how, where and when to spend it as long as it's advertising (movies, TV, radio, print, Web) for themselves and no one else.
This would require closing the loophole already in the election funding laws where non-candidate organizations can buy ads. If all it takes to "bribe", I mean "donate" money to a candidate is to pay for ads to support him instead of him paying for them, then you've accomplished nothing except dipping into the taxpayer's pockets to pay for ads.
And if you close THAT loophole, you've essentially eviscerated the first amendment.
Tell me what you have done and what you are planning to do instead of shitting on someone else with half-truths.
So outright lies told by a candidate about himself cannot be countered by facts from the opponent, and are thus more acceptable than half-truths someone says about the other guy. Hows that "Hope and Change" working out?
It's not controversial. it's just it's another computer in your computer that's running Non-Free Software(tm). So they get rid of it and thus they have a computer that is Completely Free Of Proprietary Software.
And also Completely Free Of Full Remote Management capabilities.
I have a bunch of servers that all have iDrac or other management connections, and it sure is a lot easier to talk to a malfunctioning system when there is a dedicated remote console server. I've had people go wild using memory resources on some compute servers to the point that memory management is killing parts of the operating system. Parts that are required to remotely log in. Dedicated remote management means I can get a console to at least identify the problem (scrolling "killed" reports, e.g.) and then reset the system, without having to go find the physical system I need to poke.
I can't recall a single laptop I've had that has an active network connection when it is off, so how would someone use this AMT on a Lenovo laptop to turn one back on to do anything to it? If you don't want remote access to a laptop that's turned off, unplug the network cable. Set a password on the remote access. End of problem. I call FUD on this fear.
Any government that requires leaders to spend huge amounts of money to be elected isn't actually a democracy.
The filing fees for local offices are rarely more than a few hundred dollars, if that much. That's a paltry sum that the government requires to run for office. If you can't get a group of your supporters to donate that much, then it is unlikely you'll get enough votes to win anyway.
Now, the "$400,000" your local city leader friend told you "it costs" to be elected is really what HE spent on it. It isn't what government required him to spend.We have almost an entire city council here in this city that spent nothing more than the filing fee for their offices.
Of course he spent his money because he wanted to get his message to people so they'd vote for him instead of his opponent, most likely. Well, effective free speech requires money. That's a fact of life. If you're an unknown candidate, then it will cost more to get enough name recognition to win. That's also a fact of life.
So if you sold cellular data service, you wouldn't be able to also sell a video streaming service. That's how electricity and natural gas is sold in most places.
I'm sorry, what? I've never lived anyplace where the electric or gas companies didn't maintain the delivery infrastructure and sell the electricity or gas it carried. Most places?
The closest I've seen is where the electric company will allow you to pay MORE for electricity that is provided by another company over their wires. In Oregon, we have three or four "greener" energy providers you can select, and every one of them costs more. Competition? Ha.
Now, there is a "public" utility south of here that does the electricity, but they, too, both maintain and sell. Being public would seem like they're more "customer" oriented, but there is currently a battle going on over smart electric meters. A lot of the public doesn't want them because they are skeered of the radiation but the company is still installing them.
That is, your phone calls used to require a dedicated line(s) between you and the call recipient - a line you had total and exclusive access to for the duration of the call.... Now we're switching more to a VoIP model where voice traffic is sent as data packets over shared pipes,
The last mile always has been dedicated, if perhaps a bit shorter than a mile today compared to copper pairs from the CO. Telephone service has for a very long time been multiplexed/shared over common pipes once it got off the dedicated wire. That's still true for VoIP.
The main difference is that the switching system is not mandated by where the distant end of the dedicated line ends under VoIP. You can buy VoIP from several companies and that data will traverse the dedicated line where your copper POTS wire rant to one CO owned by your telecom provider.
Simple solution then: spin the quad 180 degrees and fly backwards. Unlike RC fixed wing aircraft, just because you can see the ass end of the quad doesn't mean it is flying away from you.
Geofencing is something that has been around a while and it's actually quite a good feature if you want to hand the remote to someone's kid or something to play with. Then they can't fly it away.
There is a significant ethical and technical difference between an optional setting on a UAV that doesn't let it fly more than X distance from "home" and a mandatory prohibition on flying anywhere within 10,000 or so locations programmed into the device by the manufacturer.
Not only is the latter a huge amount of data to store (controlled airspace around airports is often not just a circle X nm from ground to class A (18,000 feet), it can be an inverted wedding cake with cutouts or extensions), but it will require constant updates. The glass cockpit systems I fly require an update every 45 days (I think it is, I am not the one doing them) for legal reasons. And this will be done for the $100 quad you buy from Walmart? Nonsense.
That still leaves the ethical question of whether people like sjbe get to tell everyone else what they do and don't need to be able to do and thus what they do and don't have any right to do.
The FAA and the ARRL (American Radio Relay League - amateur radio) work closely together and the ARRL is even responsible for first line enforcement.
That is complete nonsense. ARRL has no enforcement authority for anything, either with the FAA (why would it?) or the FCC (which is what I think you meant.)
The ARRL is a VEC (volunteer examiner coordinator) which gives them a pipeline into the ULS (uniform licensing system) database for licensing, but they have zero enforcement function. They aren't a frequency coordinator so they don't even get authority to resolve interference issues.
The ARRL can notify hams of alleged rule violations all they want (through the OO -- official observer -- program), but they cannot demand a response nor can they tell hams to stop doing anything. They cannot show up on a ham's doorstep demanding access to the "station" or its records. They have no more power in that area than anyone else -- including your next door neighbor. They're a lobbying group when it comes to regulation of amateur radio. That's all.
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Soo.....you proved my point.
Ahh, no. Exactly the opposite. But if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and think you won because you didn't quite understand what I said, that's fine. It would be my loss to participate further, just as I said earlier.
I don't use my gas stove, yet I have to pay a connection fee (multi-apartment building).
If you have a connection for a gas stove, you are paying for the connection and the ability to use it. If I traveled for a month I'd not be using my water connection, but it is still connected and it is still available for use with the turn of a tap.
If you aren't connected to the municipal internet service, you have no ability to use it and should not be forced to pay for it.
Sorry, but "pay for what you get" doesn't work with lots of essential stuff.
You get something when you have the connection. Just like my wireline phone which I almost never get calls on and never make any.
No. You don't get it. The cost of fiber optics is basically a $lotsofmoney to dig trenches and lay the backbone fiber.
I get it fine. It's you who doesn't understand. Those costs are built into the monthly fee for service. You pay them when you get service. Until you have service, you shouldn't have to pay them. For Comcast, until you get service you pay them zero. Zip. Nada. For a municipal system, your taxes pay for it even if you never connect.
Once it's repaid the subscriber fee can go down a lot.
You are naive. Remarkably so. I've gone through two system rebuilds in this city. Not once has the price of service dropped after the system was paid for. Not once.
Oh, but a government service would. Sure. Ten years ago our city put a fee on our water bill to pay for fixing a specific major street that the contractor screwed up. I thought "the contractor should pay", but no, we got a fee on the water bill. It took four years before the street was fixed, and then the fee went away, right? Nope. It's gone up.
Should the newcomers pay the low fee?
If you think the fees will go down, you're naive. Since your argument depends on an impossibility, your argument fails.
But just for the sake of argument, let's assume a miracle happens, a green unicorn runs the city and the fees go down. Should newcomers pay the lower fee? OF COURSE. Two reasons. First, their tax dollars paid for the initial build, too. Their tax dollars will go to cover any operating losses or upgrades. And second, if the costs are actually covered by the lower fee, then that's what they should pay. The city should not be in the for-profit internet business.
That's the problem with municipal competition with private enterprise. The taxpayer covers the losses and pays to create the competition that will ultimately lower competition, and may wind up paying twice for the same service (once to Comcast for the service he actually uses, once to the city to cover the losses for the service he doesn't want and can't use.)
If you have a gas stove and no gas connection then you should pay nothing. I know I wouldn't pay a dime for gas service if I bought a gas stove (or the house had one when I bought it) and I never call the gas company for a hookup. If you have a connection and can get flame when you turn the stove on, then you need to pay for that service, even if you never pay a penny for a ccf of gas. If you think a municipal internet service you aren't connected to is just like having a gas stove connected to the gas lines but never turned on, you're woefully wrong.
Spending money to build infrastructure isn't deficit spending.
If you have to borrow the money to build the infrastructure, yes, it is deficit spending. You're spending more money than you take in.
If it brings a few businesses to town or even better, creates them, it is essentially free
Borrowing money is never free, and the biggest lie is that taxpayer funded ANYTHING is "free".
What about the companies that leave town -- like the ones that the competition from the local government kill or keep from coming in to compete with the existing services? It's already bad enough that a second company won't come compete because the return on investment would be low; imagine how many would come if the competition from the taxpayer-funded system made that ROI negative? (Answer: none).
But there would be competition! Until the ROI for the existing services goes negative and they pull out, which leaves you with ONE true government monopoly and no competition at all.
You aren't active in your local government, are you? Your loss.
I've been active in my local government, and the OPs comment is spot on. For each issue I've taken an active stand in, about twenty vocal fuzzy-warm feel-good liberal nitwits captivated the imagination of the small minded city council members who thought their actions would be world-changing events. In each issue, the council has wound up having NO effect on anything but micromanaging the lives of the citizens or in one case having a negative impact on the world events they were coopting the voices of the local citizens over.
In other words, the only loss I saw for me was a complete waste of my time and energy, and the next time such an issue came up I lost nothing by not being an active participant in the dog and pony show the council was being put through. Were I one of the warm-fuzzy feel-good nitwits, I'd have gotten a great deal of warm-fuzzy feel-good goose bumps all over and feel so happy -- while actually accomplishing nothing.
So if I decline to pay now and then wait 5 years until the infrastructure is built and paid for by the first subscribers then should I pay the whole share or just the connection fee?
If you aren't getting the service, you shouldn't have to pay to build the system. Period. That means you shouldn't be forced to pay taxes for a municipal service that you aren't using. And the government shouldn't be allowed to use your taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of a system that isn't self-funding, especially when you may be paying the competition for service, too. I.e., the government is taking your money to become a competitor to the company you chose to do business with and perhaps forcing them out of business or into higher rates to cover the fixed costs and fewer subs.
When you eventually get service, you will pay THE SAME RATES EVERYONE ELSE DOES. (Yeah, barring special promotions to lure you to subscribe, which last a year or less.) So, you will pay a rate based on the costs AND a connection fee. Just like everyone else. IN FACT, you very well may wind up paying a lot MORE for your service because the first subscribers may be on a grandfathered plan that you can't get as a new sub.
If you think that cable companies drop rates after a few years because they've paid off the initial buildout costs, you're naive and uninformed.
Oh I see, government itself is the enemy of freedom!
Since the government hires the people to ... monitor cellphone calls, use radars to search people's homes, put people in prison, etc, ... I'd say you already know the answer.
If there were no government and no taxes we would all be perfectly free!
Artificial dichotomy. Too much water, you die. Too little water you die. Just the right amount of water -- you die from something else. Too much government, you lose freedoms. Too little government, you have the ultimate freedom to protect your own freedom. Just the right amount of government -- they don't take away freedoms arbitrarily and don't let others do so, either.
Government that competes using taxpayer dollars with existing corporations just because some people don't like the customer service they're getting is the wrong level of government. If there are so many people wanting another provider, another company would show up and eat the existing one's lunch. That doesn't happen. Hmmmm.
I'm used to finding hidden biases in summaries (and articles they are quoted verbatim from), but this one is pretty obvious.
Oh, wait.
Yes, wait. The alleged goal is not total equivalence in all aspects of "marriage", it is equality in the legal aspect. If the goal were to have all the legal rights and protections of marriage and nothing else, then it would not matter if the religious connotations were also provided. Since the entire concept of "marriage" must be available, then there is clearly something besides the legal rights and protections involved.
I have never seen an ad from those seeking gay marriage that mentioned anything about wanting the extraneous parephenalia of marriage, only the legal aspects. In fact, every statement I've seen has tried to deny any extraneous aspects to marriage outside the legal. Such as, "marriage is a legal concept, religion doesn't play any part", despite clear evidence to the contrary for many, many people. "If this was a religious ceremony, then look at all the sin (divorces, adultery) that married people do."
I.e., the stated goal was never "separate but equal", just "same legal rights and protections." Were the goal of primary education to be simply "the same textbook education", then "separate but equal" when it comes to schools and race would be truly equal. Since primary education involves socialization and non-textbook concerns, "separate but equal" can't be equal by definition. But legally, there is no difference between a civil union that has all the legal rights and protections and a marriage that has the same. The only difference is in the unimportant bits, which seem to be very important after all.
My kingdom for mod points.
Some teachers just don't know how to handle stuff.
I bet if you asked 100 teachers this question:
I bet that 100 out of the 100 will have the right answer. "Stop doing that Billy, and Tommy, there is no such thing. Both of you sit down and we're going to do math now..."
But then Tommy goes home and tells Momma that Billy threatened to make him disappear. Momma tells Daddy, who is a lawyer. Tommy has been traumatized and the school didn't do enough. (AKA "bullied".) Lawsuit follows. Zero-tolerance policy follows. The teachers get it right. The lawyers force the administration to create policies that don't allow interpretation, because as soon as one teacher does the right thing the lawyers point to the fact that the policy exists and THIS teacher ignored it, it becomes a case of negligence.
Now, remember that we as a society love fiction and magic and create complex fabrics that bedazzle our children. Harry Potter, to name one. Tolkien for another. And remember that when it comes to traumatizing someone, it is not what YOU believe that matters, it is what THEY believe. Psychological trauma is not an objective thing. "Hey, I knew the gun I used to rob a bank wasn't loaded and nobody would get hurt, why is this ARMED robbery?"
We're in a world where sending a text to someone that says "you're ugly" is called "bullying" and begs lawyers to step in. Zero-tolerance policies and zero-tolerance enforcements are a natural response to that legal ecosystem.
Homosexuals do not want to get married because of their respect for the institution of marriage. They want to get married because married people are an elite class that has special rights and privileges that non-married people do not enjoy.
And yet, civil union that would grant all the "rights and privileges" with respect to law and the state is not sufficient. It cannot be that they want just the legal protections and rights of marriage. There is something about the word "marriage" that is required.
I fear it is more of an attempt at taking things away from the institution of marriage (and thus the repeated arguments about how many people divorce or cheat -- ignoring all the ones who do neither) by changing the definition to be only the legal aspect.
No, a threat is a threat. If I threaten to make you disappear, and you don't feel that I'm joking, you won't care whether I added "by using magic" as how I would do it.
This. If I put my hand in my pocket, point my finger, and tell you I have got a gun, it's still a crime. The fact that this is a child only points out that we have billion dollar industries designed to create belief in the metaphysical in children. Harry Potter, Tolkein, Twilight, etc. And billion dollar industries taking fiction and turning it into reality. (I have a watch that has a more powerful computer in it than were imagined when I was born. RPi 2 is a quad-core A7 with 1 Gig RAM for $35! I can get a gun that I can use to rob you that has little chance of killing you but will completely disable you while I take your wallet.)
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you as to their having a "zero intelligence" policy.
This, too.
I never once had to take a course on how to teach or even teach/TA a course (I was a research assistant the whole time I was in grad school).
You are a textbook example of why many professors in colleges are horrible teachers. They have no experience, and they are more interested in doing their research than teaching.
The person cited in the summary is just as qualified as most Ph.D.s. :)
Not true. He is not as educated or experienced in the topic as someone who has a Ph.D would be, and it would be trivial to stump him with a more advanced question. He is as qualified with respect to experience actually teaching, but he has not been in as many classes to see what hasn't worked by experiencing it. He may have had a good example which he can copy, but it is more likely the Ph.D has had one.
As for the big bucks,
I believe the realization was that he could make more money, which is certainly true for most app developers. The claim that academics make big bucks in any absolute sense is absurd.
Conservatives purposefully create laws like this, because of these differences in perception of what they mean from one class to another.
ALL laws inherently treat different classes differently, for the appropriate definition of "class". Many laws exist that deal solely with business owners, for example. I don't own a business so they have no effect on me. That doesn't make them discriminatory. There's a law in this city that you can't build anything downtown taller than a certain height. Again, no effect on me. It only matters to people rich enough to build buildings downtown.
The treatment of those who sleep on the sidewalk is equal. The cop who tells someone to move along doesn't have access to the tax records to see who makes more money. The result of enforcing the law may be different, but that doesn't make the law discriminatory. The fact that rich people are less likely to break that law is also irrelevant. Laws against burglary are also less likely to broken by rich people, too. Laws against murder are unlikely to be enforced against people who don't commit murders.
Your argument would make essentially all laws invalid because they all discriminate. Even something as simple as traffic laws discriminate against the middle class: people who can afford a car to drive, but aren't rich enough to hire a limo service for do it for them.
Is it really a zero-sum game where a girl studying CS means that a boy can't?
To progressives, everything is a zero sum game.
You have it backwards. To liberals, there are no zero-sum games. Giving things out for free will never cost more money. The "free" community college education will not draw money out of other programs. The examples are endless.
To answer the OP, yes, it very well can be a zero-sum game. I remember being shut out of classes because they were filled when I was in high school. My school had to prioritize enrollments to make sure upperclass students got the requirements to graduate, at the expense of lowerclass students who were on advanced tracks.
Schools have X dollars to hire Y teachers for Z classrooms. It's isn't as easy as "let's add another section" when the existing CS classes fill. That CS teacher is already teaching as many classes as she's paid to teach, and likely there are already the number of students her union contract limits specify. The room is already in use the rest of the day. (Colleges, at least, get increased tuition payments when they add a section to a filled class. High schools do not.)
This has already been demonstrated by Title IX requirements. Schools have to provide "equal opportunity" for girls and boys in sports. In some cases that meant boys teams were cut. In others, money is being spent on girls sports that nobody really wants to play. In Oregon, that "opportunity" is measured by actual participation numbers. Nobody cares if the girls in a certain school district have no interest in sports, if a school doesn't have the right percentages of participation it is assumed they are violating the girls' rights and corrective action is required.
the firmware can be altered... they're not hardcoding that.
There's no danger at all in that, is there. I mean, people who want to bypass the factory programming that keeps their device from working by hacking the firmware.
Seems kinda like someone who bypasses the fuse in his electronic widget with a piece of tinfoil because it keeps blowing and he wants to use what he paid for.
Exactly. In order to become a scientist one generally has to become an expert in a highly specialized field that might not be the right field necessary to judge the overall impact of a technology on society.
I had a biology teacher in high school who set us all straight on what it meant to be "a scientist". It wasn't what degree you got from college, or even if you got a degree at all. It was how you approached the world and dealt with obtaining and handling data.
A scientist first understands the process of science. That's why people who try to dismiss non-climate scientists with a wave of the hand and the statement "you aren't a climate scientist", when the issue is how data are handled, are wrong. Any scientist has standing to say "you can't just throw out all the data that doesn't support your hypothesis and then claim you've proven it."
As for judging the impact on society, you're right. Science doesn't juggle political or social or even economic details, those are left to politicians or economists or sociologists. And right there you can see my view on political science, economics, and social sciences.
So because you've never had a computer with AMT, AMT doesn't exist? That's some weird logic you have.
Didn't say that. I said I can't recall ever seeing it. Sorry the difference escapes you.
If your computer has WoL (most do) it has an "Active" network connection (as in a passive listening connection), even when you disable WoL, it's still listening, it just doesn't do anything.
It's hard to listen on an interface that has been shut off. Or on one that has been unplugged, which if you recall was what I suggested to deal with an always-on laptop network connection. Seems like I admitted they existed, which contradicts the words you tried putting in my mouth earlier.
I know what "wake on lan" is, and I also know that it is a BIOS setting to enable and disable it. Still, you can't "wake on lan" a system that isn't connected to a lan, now can you? That seems like a simpler solution if you are scared of the boogeyman turning your powered-down laptop back on. It's not like you have to crawl under the desk to get to the network connection when you unplug a laptop.
But using the simple solution doesn't allow for an "oh noes, the gov'mint can turn my laptop back on and monitor me, must buy a special laptop to be safe!" FUD campaign.
I believe Obama raised more money through smaller donations than Romney did, but even if not - he didn't appoint the Citizen's United faction to the SCOTUS.
He did not, and he would not.
And one-person-one-vote democracy doesn't work with one billionaire $100 million worth of speech vs 1 normal voter, 10 bucks.
You do realize that the Citizen's United case was specifically about a group of people trying to get around the "1 normal voter, 10 bucks" problem by aggregating many normal voters into many bucks, don't you? The only error CU made was in trying to buy airtime for an anti-Hilary movie. Otherwise, they were trying to deal with the very thing that you seem to be saying is a problem.
You're also implying that that billionaire is actually buying votes with his $100 million. In truth, his one vote counts just the same as my one vote and your one vote and everyone else's one vote. The true issue with "one-person-one-vote" is first to know that the one person has the right to vote before he is allowed and second that he only gets one vote. Requiring ID is the obvious solution. The same kind of ID that every citizen of many other countries is required to carry to get government services of any kind, and even many private services.
All parties are allocated the same budget for advertising, the only difference is that they each decide how, where and when to spend it as long as it's advertising (movies, TV, radio, print, Web) for themselves and no one else.
This would require closing the loophole already in the election funding laws where non-candidate organizations can buy ads. If all it takes to "bribe", I mean "donate" money to a candidate is to pay for ads to support him instead of him paying for them, then you've accomplished nothing except dipping into the taxpayer's pockets to pay for ads.
And if you close THAT loophole, you've essentially eviscerated the first amendment.
Tell me what you have done and what you are planning to do instead of shitting on someone else with half-truths.
So outright lies told by a candidate about himself cannot be countered by facts from the opponent, and are thus more acceptable than half-truths someone says about the other guy. Hows that "Hope and Change" working out?
It's not controversial. it's just it's another computer in your computer that's running Non-Free Software(tm). So they get rid of it and thus they have a computer that is Completely Free Of Proprietary Software.
And also Completely Free Of Full Remote Management capabilities.
I have a bunch of servers that all have iDrac or other management connections, and it sure is a lot easier to talk to a malfunctioning system when there is a dedicated remote console server. I've had people go wild using memory resources on some compute servers to the point that memory management is killing parts of the operating system. Parts that are required to remotely log in. Dedicated remote management means I can get a console to at least identify the problem (scrolling "killed" reports, e.g.) and then reset the system, without having to go find the physical system I need to poke.
I can't recall a single laptop I've had that has an active network connection when it is off, so how would someone use this AMT on a Lenovo laptop to turn one back on to do anything to it? If you don't want remote access to a laptop that's turned off, unplug the network cable. Set a password on the remote access. End of problem. I call FUD on this fear.
Any government that requires leaders to spend huge amounts of money to be elected isn't actually a democracy.
The filing fees for local offices are rarely more than a few hundred dollars, if that much. That's a paltry sum that the government requires to run for office. If you can't get a group of your supporters to donate that much, then it is unlikely you'll get enough votes to win anyway.
Now, the "$400,000" your local city leader friend told you "it costs" to be elected is really what HE spent on it. It isn't what government required him to spend.We have almost an entire city council here in this city that spent nothing more than the filing fee for their offices.
Of course he spent his money because he wanted to get his message to people so they'd vote for him instead of his opponent, most likely. Well, effective free speech requires money. That's a fact of life. If you're an unknown candidate, then it will cost more to get enough name recognition to win. That's also a fact of life.
So if you sold cellular data service, you wouldn't be able to also sell a video streaming service. That's how electricity and natural gas is sold in most places.
I'm sorry, what? I've never lived anyplace where the electric or gas companies didn't maintain the delivery infrastructure and sell the electricity or gas it carried. Most places?
The closest I've seen is where the electric company will allow you to pay MORE for electricity that is provided by another company over their wires. In Oregon, we have three or four "greener" energy providers you can select, and every one of them costs more. Competition? Ha.
Now, there is a "public" utility south of here that does the electricity, but they, too, both maintain and sell. Being public would seem like they're more "customer" oriented, but there is currently a battle going on over smart electric meters. A lot of the public doesn't want them because they are skeered of the radiation but the company is still installing them.
That is, your phone calls used to require a dedicated line(s) between you and the call recipient - a line you had total and exclusive access to for the duration of the call. ... Now we're switching more to a VoIP model where voice traffic is sent as data packets over shared pipes,
The last mile always has been dedicated, if perhaps a bit shorter than a mile today compared to copper pairs from the CO. Telephone service has for a very long time been multiplexed/shared over common pipes once it got off the dedicated wire. That's still true for VoIP.
The main difference is that the switching system is not mandated by where the distant end of the dedicated line ends under VoIP. You can buy VoIP from several companies and that data will traverse the dedicated line where your copper POTS wire rant to one CO owned by your telecom provider.
It will simply refuse to keep flying forward.
Simple solution then: spin the quad 180 degrees and fly backwards. Unlike RC fixed wing aircraft, just because you can see the ass end of the quad doesn't mean it is flying away from you.
Geofencing is something that has been around a while and it's actually quite a good feature if you want to hand the remote to someone's kid or something to play with. Then they can't fly it away.
There is a significant ethical and technical difference between an optional setting on a UAV that doesn't let it fly more than X distance from "home" and a mandatory prohibition on flying anywhere within 10,000 or so locations programmed into the device by the manufacturer.
Not only is the latter a huge amount of data to store (controlled airspace around airports is often not just a circle X nm from ground to class A (18,000 feet), it can be an inverted wedding cake with cutouts or extensions), but it will require constant updates. The glass cockpit systems I fly require an update every 45 days (I think it is, I am not the one doing them) for legal reasons. And this will be done for the $100 quad you buy from Walmart? Nonsense.
That still leaves the ethical question of whether people like sjbe get to tell everyone else what they do and don't need to be able to do and thus what they do and don't have any right to do.
The FAA and the ARRL (American Radio Relay League - amateur radio) work closely together and the ARRL is even responsible for first line enforcement.
That is complete nonsense. ARRL has no enforcement authority for anything, either with the FAA (why would it?) or the FCC (which is what I think you meant.)
The ARRL is a VEC (volunteer examiner coordinator) which gives them a pipeline into the ULS (uniform licensing system) database for licensing, but they have zero enforcement function. They aren't a frequency coordinator so they don't even get authority to resolve interference issues.
The ARRL can notify hams of alleged rule violations all they want (through the OO -- official observer -- program), but they cannot demand a response nor can they tell hams to stop doing anything. They cannot show up on a ham's doorstep demanding access to the "station" or its records. They have no more power in that area than anyone else -- including your next door neighbor. They're a lobbying group when it comes to regulation of amateur radio. That's all.