I'm merely responding to the fellow who seems uncomfortable with the notion of making a product intentionally unflyable in restricted airspace.
My backyard, despite being within 5 nm of an airport, is NOT restricted airspace and there is no danger to any White House or manned aircraft. You don't know what "restricted airspace" is, so stop flapping your gums about what is and isn't safe within it.
This "mandatory update" from DJI is patent bullshit, as is the argument that trained knowlegable pilots must be protected from killing people in major airliners by making the product non-functional in certain places.
For the record, I fly both manned and unmanned aircraft and know for a fact that there are safe places to fly quads that are within controlled airspace, which is much more common than restricted airspace -- where there are also safe flight areas.
It isn't up to politicians to think about what they're proposing. It's up to the people they serve to agree or disagree with it.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic here or not. You think it is better for politicians to pass all kinds of nonsensical laws without thinking about them, and then let the people go to court to get the laws overturned? (Just disagreeing with a law doesn't stop it from being a law, you actually have to do something based on that disagreement. Just voting your rep out also doesn't remove the laws he voted for.)
Are you seriously suggesting that it was better for the Patriot Act to be passed into law without serious thought (or the DOMA, or the DMCA) and then have a lot of people disagree with the law?
The assets of the company do not vanish instantly as the stock price drops.
The value of the company drops as the stock price drops, and the stock price drops as soon as it becomes obvious that customers are all cancelling their service.
Once we have 51% of the vote we can vote in a new consumer friendly board of directors to fire the current executives.
And as you're getting all the little people to buy this 51% over a three year period, large companies who would love to take over the areas served by Comcast are buying stock at the same bargain-basement rates you are. They can afford it. The people you want to buy stock are having to cancel service so they have enough money to buy stock. You'll never make 51%.
I can safely predict, if you cut the price of a share of Comcast today by 50% TW would be tendering a takeover offer before COB. They'd be fools not to, and you just don't have the money to compete with them.
It has the worst customer service and only maintains it function by being a monopoly.
So why hasn't another company come in and taken all the customers away from them? Because as much as you hate them and think their service is bad, too many other people just don't care. They get service, they pay their bill, they watch their programs. That points out that you are likely to get less than 0.1% of the customers to follow you in your cancel service/buy stock plan, which would turn a three year plan into a 3000 year plan.
1st question. You don't upgrade during the transition you upgrade after. Just the roughly 2 billion they paid in dividends could be put to use.
If they have no customers they have no dividends, and they have no cash flow to upgrade after the transition. Maybe you don't understand how the stock market works, but when you buy 51% of a company's stock the money doesn't go to the company, it goes to the people who owned the stock. Where do you get the money for all this upgraded hardware when nobody is paying for the service? You expect the stockholders to dump more money into the company when they've had to cancel their service to be able to afford what they've already bought?
2nd Tv is already dead is is all out IP bandwidth.
TV is hardly dead, and I have no idea what you mean by anything after that.
The last mile doesn't have to be fiber coax is just fine.
You don't have to buy out Comcast to get that. We've got that here. Fiber backbone, coax to the house. Nobody had to cancel service or buy stock.
Also I don't want them to magically maintain a company with no customers, I want the executives fired and the middle management fired and rebuild a customer centric customer own utility.
And your method of getting to the firing of the executives was for people to cancel their service and buy stock. Three years of no subs will definitely require some magic if the company doesn't go under in that time.
It not a pipe dream it a well worn business model.
Sure it is, but not by your means of getting there. You get there by getting the investors together and buying the working company. You don't try to drive the company into the ground, buy the remnants, and then claim success.
It would take a fortune to rebuild Comcast as a "customer owned utility" once you kill it off over a three year period. And now there's a question that needs another answer: how much stock must someone own before they can get service from their customer-owned utility? It sounds like getting service from this new company would be a very expensive proposition. Or you don't mean "customer owned", you mean "owned by people you think care enough to run things the way you want them to."
I suspect traffic circles ("roundabouts") would be a great solution
In my state, traffic circles and roundabouts are two different things that appear nearly identical but operate differently. For example, in a roundabout traffic in the circular roadway has the right of way over traffic trying to enter. In a traffic circle exactly the opposite is true: traffic in the circle has to yield to traffic waiting to enter. Sounds stupid, but that's the law. I treated a traffic circle like a roundabout one fine evening and wound up with a hefty ticket.
As opposed to only getting to hear the ones paid for by the elite ruling class?
You have it 100% backwards. Under the current system if you've got enough money to pay for an ad, you can do that. (With the exception of certain ads that applies to all.) If you can get people together to pay for your ads, you can do that. Citizen's United kept that possible. (CU wasn't a new thing, it reiterated an existing concept called "free speech" even for people who are members of a group.)
Under a public campaign financing system where ads are paid for by the public and money is limited to those who have met some popularity contest, all you'll get to hear are ads from those who the "elite ruling class" have decided pass the test. Independent voices will go away because they won't get the money authorized to buy ads. Unpopular opinions are not wanted and must be silenced.
I'm sorry if all you listen to today are the ads paid for by the "elite ruling class", but my radio and TV carry all kinds of ads from people who haven't passed the popularity contests during campaign season. Yes, I'd love it if there was a prohibition on this seemingly endless stream of nonsense from people I know are lying (feel free to apply that to whichever party you think it applies to), but I realize that it only lasts a couple of weeks and that any "solution" to the problem would be worse than the problem it's trying to solve. Perhaps that's because I understand that the First Amendment isn't there to protect speech that is popular, it's there for unpopular speech.
A 40lb payload would require a mammoth sized drone, which would be EASILY detected by radar. Thus, does not fit the problem cited.
A drone 'copter can fly just above treetops, or even below the treetops if actively navigated, and easily avoid detection by radar. The ground clutter would hide it very well until it was too late to do much about it.
A better solution than blanket "No peons, you cant own drones with that weight class!" would be like what we have with guns near schools.... That kind of regulation would be OK, and would work
Why yes, because nobody who wants to do something illegal with such a drone would ever violate an exclusion zone. Nobody would ever think of putting a drone in the back of a pickup truck, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, and launching it while passing by The White House.
Don't you have a vice president? And if he is also hit a new one is only an election away.
What is scariest is that Biden is a heartbeat away. Thanks for pointing that out.
Now to present a politically balanced scare -- the next in line if Biden is "also hit" is John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house. Following him is currently Orrin Hatch, the Republican President Pro-Tem of the Senate.
No, there will be no election until the next regular presidential election.
Don't imagine that it cannot happen. This is how Leslie Lynch King became the first and only person in US history to become vice president and then President of the US without being elected to those offices. You might know him better as Gerald R. Ford. He was appointed VP after Agnew resigned, and then became President when Nixon resigned.
That was a typo. I meant pay your bill and buy stock.
"Instead of" is a typo for what? And then you said more stock could be bought if everyone cancelled their service!
Also the existing infrastructure in many places has been totally deprecated.
I'm sure it has, and I'm sure it has been fully depreciated too. But if the company has no money because nobody is paying their bills or everyone has cancelled service (the second option you gave) then what money will they use to upgrade?
If google can provide gigabit fiber from scratch a a lower price than cable even with content and ad revenue then Comcast could too.
The reasons that Google can do it at a lower price are two-fold. First, they don't have existing plant to maintain while they're over-building the existing stuff. Existing cable companies cannot just ignore the existing customer problems while they string new fibers all over; Google has no existing customers to deal with. Cable has a staff that is sufficient to maintain what they have, they have to hire or subcontract for the install of fiber; Google has one staff busy doing installs. Labor costs are a major part of your fixed costs.
And second, Google is focusing on a very limited number of cherry-picked markets and can dump loads of money into the system until it begins to turn a profit. It's the same way that Walmart can come into a city and cut prices until the competition goes out of business because Walmart has thousands of other stores operating at a profit that can subsidize that. And it's the same reason why municipal cable systems are an unfair competition to the market: a city can dip into the general fund (taxpayer dollars) to cover shortfalls from operating costs, a private company cannot. We have laws about dumping and fair trade for just such activities.
Once we own the company as a customer owned utility it functions exactly like my electrical utility which provides excellent customer service at some of the lowest power prices in the nation.
The problem is that getting to the point where you own it will destroy it. A cable system without customers cannot afford to maintain what they have, much less suddenly build out a complete new fiber system, and it will have zero say in negotiating contracts for content. You want a full set of ala carte channels? ESPN won't care and won't make that deal, and the customer-less Comcast will have no money to make it happen. You said it would take 3 years. That's a long time in a technology-driven industry. Three years of stagnation because there is no cash flow. Long before you reach the goal of ownership, your plan will drive the company into bankruptcy.
The same bargain-basement stock prices that you count on to gain control of the company in the first place will not go unnoticed by everyone else (like TW, or Google, or Microsoft) and they'll be busy buying stock for their own takeover.
It's a pipe dream filled with unicorns and pixies who magically maintain a company that has zero customers. And the only way you can suggest that TW wouldn't step in and complete the merger by buying the stock before you do is if you do the same thing to TW at the same time.
And THEN you say you'd want to put Lessig and Nader in charge. Neither one of them have run a company before and are political fringe thinkers who alienate people who do run companies. That's pixie dust in a nutshell.
I can see how my typo made this unclear.
What made it unclear is saying "instead of" and then continuing with a call for cancelling service so even more stock could be purchased. No, I think the only unclear thing here is how bankrupting a company is going to force it to build a full fiber system and give you cheap high-speed broadband.
If the person has money they still can buy billboard, commercials, etc if they have an opinion, so they still have their freedom of speech right.
Not if campaign finance becomes limited to public funding based on polling percentages, as was the desire of the person I first replied to.
I don't remember the amendment where the right to spend money on your own election is...
There is no amendment specifically for campaign spending, and campaign finance laws quite often violate the letter, if not just the intent, of the existing First Amendment. Converting the current "system" into one that is funded by public money alone and the "up north" groups don't get any to spend is a clear violation of the existing constitution.
Having 3 or more candidate elections would ensure more voices are heard,
Yeah, three voices all spouting the same popular opinions. Who said that having multiple copies of the same opinion was a good thing?
(never will every opinion be heard)
There is a significant difference between an unpopular candidate not finding funding for his speech to be heard and the government legislatively taking his ability to speak away. In the former, an unpopular candidate may have sufficient money of his own to pay for his own speech; in the latter he is legally prohibited from spending his own money to speak.
A more textbook example of a violation of the first amendment, and the reason why the first amendment is necessary in the first place, would be hard to find.
The great thing is candidates wouldn't have to tow the party line because they would no longer need two parties to raise funds...
Those who didn't toe the party line wouldn't be party candidates, and it would be the parties who do the work to get the signatures to get the money.
Elections would be tighter and there would be more participation (because it's more interesting).
I don't know why a "tighter" (closer?) election is necessarily a good thing, and you really need a citation for the ridiculous claim that limiting the number of voices in an election to the popular opinions would make it any more interesting, or that "more participation" is defacto a good thing.
Publicly funded elections would be awesome (with complex rules ensuring multiple party elections, but that make sure participants to have x numbers of signatures or x percentage of polling). Don't need the Goat Herders of Little Russia North getting too much money for no reason:-)
In other words, only the popular opinions get to be heard and the unpopular ones have no chance at all.
When companies can "effectively" just "buy laws" (and/or Politicians) corruption knows no bounds for price gouging.
What laws were bought?
It's hard to get upset over three politicians who wanted to support the merger and asked Comcast for help writing a letter to the FCC. I'm more upset that the politicians are writing letters AT ALL, since that's an open attempt at speaking over the voices of their constituents who are capable of writing their own letters. I.e., a city councilor or mayor who writes a letter on behalf of his city is stealing the speech from all the people who don't agree with his opinion.
If every household in America bought $150 in Comcast stock each month instead of paying their cable bill it would take ~3 years to buy them out. If everyone canceled their account and bought stock it would take less time.
Only because the stock price would plummet and the company would be worth only the value of the plant. At that point Time-Warner buys it from bankruptcy for a pittance and the merger happens anyway.
What significant difference is there between nobody paying their cable bill and everyone cancelling service? A couple of months into the former and service would be cancelled automatically AND the company would have a large amount of write-off for the bad debts.
Then we vote out the current board and replace them with Lessig, Nader et al. and BAM gigabit bidirectional IPV6 with al a carte channels.
What color is the sky on your world, Cliff? Why not ask for unicorns while you're at it? Who PAYS for all this infrastructure upgrade if there are no subscribers?
If it was about public safety he'd pull you over just to stop you, even if he was powerless to ticket you.
If he is powerless to ticket you, that means you're out of his jurisdiction and doesn't have authority to stop you.
The reason the local cop on the interstate didn't stop you for "blowing by" him was probably because he was there doing something else that he was called to assist with. There's no other reason for him to be there if it isn't in his jurisdiction.
There should not be a debate about whether you fully stopped, or almost stopped... only that you followed the intent of the intersection control.
OMG, you do NOT want law enforcement to become a guessing game of "what is the intent of the traffic signal". There is never a debate about whether you "fully stopped" or "almost", that's pretty easy for an observer to tell, and you get to debate it with the judge where that debate belongs. As well as the "intent" debate. As far as law enforcement goes, the "intent" of any traffic signal (i.e. "stop sign" or "red light") is that you stop. Period. End of sentence. If the municipality that installed the signal didn't want you to stop, they would have installed a yield or yellow flasher.
The marked worked exactly how it is supposed to work, and the best competitor won.
Really? I found it valuable to be able to browse the local shop to see what new magazines (or old ones I didn't know about) were available, to look inside to see what they contained. When I got interested in something, I could see what was available, and I could see covers that hinted that maybe I'd like to read what was inside. If I didn't see what I wanted, I could ask the owner and she'd help me find what I needed. In most cases, I'd walk out of the shop with what I wanted -- immediate delivery.
Compare this to Barnes and Noble (one of the "winners" in this competition.) I have an electronic subscription to a magazine. It is supposed to renew automatically, and they sent me an email a month ago telling me it would renew three weeks ago. So far, it hasn't renewed. I got the paper copy of the magazine, and BN touts that "nook magazines" are delivered before the paper versions are. I contacted support. They apologized that the most recent issue hadn't been put in my library and they'd look into it. I told them it was obvious why -- they hadn't renewed the subscription. They're still "looking into it" and it's been a week.
Even better, when the current issue is put in my library, since they've dropped their Windows Nook reader (without saying anything, it took a round of email with support to find out why it just wouldn't log in to their server) I now must rely on an Android app to download my copies, and then I can copy the file out of the app's content directory to put it where I want it to be. The only way to know which is the correct file is to look at the creation date, the name is unintelligible gibberish. Fortunately this magazine is DRM-free, so I don't have to go through the steps of uploading the file to my PC to remove the DRM and then redownload it to read it using my reader of choice.
Oh, this Nook App has the wonderful property that it shows only a few characters of the name of the content along with the cover. So, unless I know the cover image of the issue of the magazine I want to read, I get to see "Asimo... 2015" as the identification. Which month? That info is contained only on the cover icon which is unreadable because it is so small. The "competitor" free app does much better, and B&N don't give a damn how hard it is to identify content.
So, when you say "the best competitor won", that's your opinion. It may be the opinion of many people, but it isn't a fact. What is more likely is that "the most convenient" or "the cheapest" competitor won, but that's not always "the best". Were it "the best", then why do people go to brick and mortar's to browse for things to buy before they buy online?
It wasn't competition from a direct competitor that drove Borders out of town, it was a technological revolution.
It was a technological "revolution" that allowed a company in Seattle, Washington to become a competitor with the Borders store in my town (and in all the other cities). If you want to claim that "competition is good" and then limit your definition to "competition that is only the same sized business located in the same city doing things the same way", you've lost all basis for your claim.
The cable and phone companies benefitted from sweatheart deals to install their connections in cities,
And a competitor can get those same "sweat" deals by signing a franchise agreement. That agreement will cost them a few percent of their revenue. That's not enough to stop them.
yet they would scream in outrage at the prospect of a new competitor getting a similar sweatheart deal to bring in service.
Of course they would. What they scream about is irrelevant. The grocery store on the corner isn't happy when another grocery store opens across the street, either. None of the grocery stores in town were happy when Walmart opened their grocery store here, and none of the general merchandise stores were happy when Walmart announced plans for a superstore here.
Because people on/. love to guess about details when those guesses can be used to ridicule or embarrass someone.
Because it ran out of batteries without warning while over the White House lawn and the owner couldn't reclaim it because of the security fence. Larger drones have battery warnings and some even have GPS-guided return-to-base functions on low battery.
A group I know recently took three quads to a beach to do some scientific research. Bought with limited funds so they aren't just toys, they're tools that need to be used properly and maintained for multiple uses.
Only one came back. Two of them wound up in the ocean.
Low battery return functions only work if they trigger far enough in advance that they can make it back to safety. The one I have (a $500 DJI) has such a function. The last time I flew it to "low battery", it had about enough battery left to make a controlled descent from directly overhead. Even if it had sufficient battery, the return algorithm is to climb to 20' and then fly to home and then descend. There's no sensors in the quad to notice that there's a 30' tree or building betwixt it and home.
Using a micro-quad is no proof-of-concept at all, as it wouldn't be able to carry a sufficient payload,
Except as a proof-of-concept regarding GPS jamming around a sensitive target, or to determine the security response to such an event. Not every 'proof of concept' has to deal exclusively with the specific hardware being tested, it can be a "proof of concept" for the entire process.
(ie a proof of concept that alerts the target to the possibility is no use at all.
I'm sorry, but you're assuming the security around the whitehouse is run by morons who couldn't imagine the use of a simple quad. I'm going to guess that they probably already know about the possibility.
It's as stupid as shining a laser sight through someone's window the day before the assassination attempt, telling the target to hide.
You're assuming that the pre-planned response if someone shines a laser pointer through Potus' window is to have the President of the US hide for the next few days. Somehow I doubt that's the reaction you'd get when you try it. For a bad guy, it would be valuable to know what the response IS to such an event, so that during any potential confusion some other method of attack can be used to accomplish whatever goal is desired.
You know, if you're going to try to do something bad to someone who is well defended, it is important to probe the responses so you can determine weaknesses or what other things you'll have to deal with.
As far as the size of the drone, I recall an episode of one of the recently ubiquitous gun-shop television shows where they designed and built a quad with a gun. It wasn't a huge quad they needed to carry that weight. They were also carrying a lot of extra weight since they were using a stock handgun. Get rid of all the useless stuff, like the stock, the magazine, etc, until you have a simple tube with a firing pin and it would weigh a lot less. A single-use barrel, thermal firing, you could probably get it down to weigh less than a GoPro. You could probably 3-D print the thing as part of the quad's chassis.
... to allow some people to yell so loudly... I can pretty much guarantee that this was never what was intended. And yet it will persist as long as we equate money with speech.
In the 1700s, printing presses were owned by people who had money to own such things. It has always been the case that people who have money have more ability to express their speech than someone who doesn't. The founders weren't ignorant boobs, they were people who had printing presses or access to them.
This "equate money with speech" is a fiction. The truth is, money is a prerequisite for ANYONE to have effective speech, especially today, but still true in the 1700s. By cutting someone's access to money, you cut his access to effective speech, thereby limiting his right to free speech. I'll point to the use of "free speech zones" at political conventions as an example of the technical existence of free speech but the practical effect of limiting it severely, which is what saying "you can say whatever you want but you can't spend money to buy TV or radio advertising to say it..." is equivalent to.
The case you are probably alluding to was just one example of PEOPLE who banded together to pool their money to buy airtime to exercise their right to free speech. Yes, they incorporated, but that's a red herring. At the base, they were people, and people are the ones who have the rights.
And to some degree there's a valid concern that if the government can block or limit expenditures on speech, then at some point the government/powers-that-be could be the only ones able to drown out everyone else.
A lot earlier than that, if you block expenditures by people who pool their money, you will GUARANTEE that the only people who can speak effectively are those who are rich all by themselves. The government already has free (as in beer) speech -- it's called "franking", or "spending taxpayer dollars on advertising", or "town hall meetings".
I'm not sure what the best solution is, or if there is an easy solution other than the institution of and enforcement of norms of behavior.
Those are called "laws", and we have a Constitution that limits what laws the government is supposed to be able to enact. One of the bits of our Constitution talks about speech and the limits on laws regarding such. Telling ten people that they cannot put their money together so they can buy a radio ad that none of them can afford individually, while allowing one person who can afford such an ad to buy time, is a fundamentally flawed and ethically bankrupt attempt at silencing people you don't agree with. Nobody complains about Citizens United when it allows unions to buy airtime, they only complain about the "corporation" that wanted to buy airtime for an anti-Hilary movie.
I guess Adam Smith was wrong, competition is not good.
Competition is great. For the customer. For awhile. Not so good for the businesses that are competing. Perhaps you've heard of the term "dumping"? That's when a "competitor" can afford to sell below cost just to drive his competition out of business. Great for the customer, until the competition goes away and prices go back up.
We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?
Before you lecture me on how I should have shopped at the local dealer to support them, I did, and it wasn't enough to keep them alive.
Cable companies aren't like Borders. People don't buy services from more than one cable company at a time and if they aren't cable customers by now they likely won't become one just because competition moves in. At best, a new cable company can split the existing customer base. That's not enough to cover the fixed costs for plant, and certainly not enough to provide return on investment for over-building the existing system. The incumbent has a significant advantage because he's likely paid off a lot of the investment in the plant and equipment and can cut his prices to keep the new guy from making any money at all. Yes, that's good for the customer, except the customers of the new guy, and only as long as it takes for the new guy to give up and go away.
I bet Adam Smith would have understood that. I bet he'd understand when a company does a business plan and sees that there is no money to be made from competing in a limited, existing marketplace with high startup costs. I bet he'd understand why it takes a company the size of Google to do that kind of thing, and even then they're not rushing into the market.
So, the fact remains, it isn't the few percent skimmed from the cable companies in franchise fees that prevents competition. It's the ability to predict a negative return on investment for any new competitor, especially for the first few years, that keeps them from wasting their time and money.
If you disagree, you are free to dump a few million into competing with Comcast in our fair city and prove me wrong. I doubt I'd switch service to a start-up with no track record, but show me your list of services and we'll see.
Right now, there is no competition, only franchise agreements that limit competition.
It's not the few percent franchise fee that limits competition, it's the knowledge that a second franchisee for the same function would be splitting the available market and nobody would make a profit without raising prices -- and reducing the overall market.
While there may be a few people in an area who would actually start buying services from the new competitor because they aren't the existing company, they aren't enough to cover the fixed costs of running a second cable company in that area. If one cable company has 50% saturation (half the available consumers), then a second company can plan on splitting that number with the existing company and you can't profit if you have only 25% saturation. Not without raising rates. The fixed costs for plant as services are just too high.
Light travelling in a straight line isn't affected. Only light on a curve is affected.
So you're saying that a photon coming off the foot of David Beckham, or a spit-photon thrown by Nolan Ryan, travels slower than a photon normally would?
If you can get everyone to bet on a particular photon, and then slow that photon down so that all the other photons beat it, then you can clean up at the photon track.
Shhh... this is how the SSC scientists make their beer money -- tricking the locals into betting like that.
Tires rolling on pavement make noise. There's no reason to add to it.
Not very much noise, and if the car is already slowing to stop at an intersection or to make a turn, that tire noise is very low. Below the other noises on the street. I've been on the streets, both as a pedestrian and a bicyclist, and had an electric car sneak up on me from behind before, and I know it isn't the safest way to run things.
There is no reason to make a vehicle that can kill someone who mistakenly steps in front of it as quiet as possible. You might notice that trucks (even those with diesel engines that make considerable noise) are usually equipped with backup alarms to create noise to alert people in the area that he's backing up.
The demand for silence on the streets is ridiculous, and the claim that the next guy makes about billions of people living on the streets needing absolute silence even more so.
it's not guilt by association. When you address a group of racists and claim to be David Duke
You're lying again. He didn't claim to be David Duke, he claimed to be "David Duke without all the baggage".
Without all the baggage. All the baggage. That baggage includes a lot of stuff, not just the one or two things you want to pretend it does.
He also said: "I didn't know who all of these groups were, and I detest any kind of hate group", and "For anyone to suggest that I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous." The latter covers your attempts pretty well.
Just addressing a convention does NOT create an association. This is the same kind of nonsense that McCarthy used to find communists, and if it applies to Scalise then it applies to Obama and Biden and a lot of other people for their associations, too.
And you don't have to be a KKK member to be a racist which is basically what he was implying when he said he was "David Duke without the baggage" I'm an independent.
No, he was SAYING exactly the OPPOSITE. "Without all the baggage". ALL. You keep trying to hang baggage on him that he never had in the first place.
And could you please make some attempt at punctuation so we know where one sentence ends and the next begins?
Not an ideologue like you.
I don't know what you think you know about me, but I'm simply pointing out 1) your lies (about Byrd) and 2) your hypocrisy (by accepting guilt by association as valid against Scalise but not when it comes to Obama.) That's not being an "ideologue", that's being honest.
so your assumption the I hate Republicans and don't hate Democrats is way out in left field.
Your repeated attempts at trying to hang labels on a Republican and ignoring the same kinds of actions when it comes to a Democrat implies otherwise. I'm trying to get you to treat both the same but you seem unwilling to do that. I'd prefer it if you treated both the same and understood that guilt by association is a bad way of judging people, but I'd at least appreciate it if you were consistent in your use of guilt by association.
I have more respect for the racists such as David Duke that are open with their racism than I do for the closet racists like this guy
And the only evidence you have of racism against Scalise is that he spoke at a convention organized by a KKK member. That's guilt by association. Let's try this to see if you get the point. You are asked by a local scoutmaster to speak to a group of scouts about some topic you are an expert on. You happily agree to do so, and your talk is a great success. A week later the scoutmaster is arrested for sexual abuse of some of his troop. Are you a pedophile because you spoke at a meeting arranged by a pedophile? If it were Steve Scalise who gave that talk, you'd be hanging that baggage on him, I expect, but if it were you you'd certainly proclaim your innocence. And only an idiot would think that your talk to his troop proved your affiliation with his crime.
Racism is a primitive ideology of people with a primitive way of thinking.
It's good that you seem to know what racism is, but you've still failed miserably at identifying them or acting consistently in trying to do so. I don't know why you keep doing that.
If you want me to take you seriously when it comes to your alleged identification of racists, then you'll have to be consistent. Either you'll claim that Obama is a racist/homophobe for his association with Byrd and his speech at his funeral lauding the man, which means "guilt by association" is your method of identifying racists and you're doing it with Scalise, or you'll be a hypocrite and let Obama off the hook while trying to skewer Scalise for things he didn't do OR say.
This is not about byrd this is about Steve Scalise and is admitted associations. He addressed a group of racists
He has no "admitted associations". He gave a talk at a convention. Period. Just like Obama spoke at Byrd's funeral. If you fictionalize an "association" based on making a speech, then you need to fictionalize consistently.
It's about Byrd because YOU claimed that Byrd was not a leader in the house or senate, which was a lie you've been called on twice. Here's your statement:
I know you types like to bring up the Byrd strawman Byrd is not even alive today let alone being a party leader/whip in the house or senate.
It doesn't matter that Byrd is dead, Obama and a lot of other politicians associated with him, he was a strong leader in the senate in many different positions, and he was not only a member of the KKK but organized the chapter in his hometown and was elected to lead it. If someone with such ties to the Klan doesn't create guilt by association with people who idolize him, then simply giving a speech to a convention does not create such guilt.
and he also bragged about being an electable racist
No, he didn't. He said nothing about being a racist. He's done nothing that makes him a KKK member. "Without all the baggage" means without all the baggage. Maybe you aren't a native English speaker and you just didn't understand what "all the baggage" meant, but I've explained it to you sufficiently that you should know now. Continuing this further would only prove your hypocrisy when "guilt by association" only applies to Republicans you hate and not to the Democrats you don't.
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I'm merely responding to the fellow who seems uncomfortable with the notion of making a product intentionally unflyable in restricted airspace.
My backyard, despite being within 5 nm of an airport, is NOT restricted airspace and there is no danger to any White House or manned aircraft. You don't know what "restricted airspace" is, so stop flapping your gums about what is and isn't safe within it.
This "mandatory update" from DJI is patent bullshit, as is the argument that trained knowlegable pilots must be protected from killing people in major airliners by making the product non-functional in certain places.
For the record, I fly both manned and unmanned aircraft and know for a fact that there are safe places to fly quads that are within controlled airspace, which is much more common than restricted airspace -- where there are also safe flight areas.
It isn't up to politicians to think about what they're proposing. It's up to the people they serve to agree or disagree with it.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic here or not. You think it is better for politicians to pass all kinds of nonsensical laws without thinking about them, and then let the people go to court to get the laws overturned? (Just disagreeing with a law doesn't stop it from being a law, you actually have to do something based on that disagreement. Just voting your rep out also doesn't remove the laws he voted for.)
Are you seriously suggesting that it was better for the Patriot Act to be passed into law without serious thought (or the DOMA, or the DMCA) and then have a lot of people disagree with the law?
The assets of the company do not vanish instantly as the stock price drops.
The value of the company drops as the stock price drops, and the stock price drops as soon as it becomes obvious that customers are all cancelling their service.
Once we have 51% of the vote we can vote in a new consumer friendly board of directors to fire the current executives.
And as you're getting all the little people to buy this 51% over a three year period, large companies who would love to take over the areas served by Comcast are buying stock at the same bargain-basement rates you are. They can afford it. The people you want to buy stock are having to cancel service so they have enough money to buy stock. You'll never make 51%.
I can safely predict, if you cut the price of a share of Comcast today by 50% TW would be tendering a takeover offer before COB. They'd be fools not to, and you just don't have the money to compete with them.
It has the worst customer service and only maintains it function by being a monopoly.
So why hasn't another company come in and taken all the customers away from them? Because as much as you hate them and think their service is bad, too many other people just don't care. They get service, they pay their bill, they watch their programs. That points out that you are likely to get less than 0.1% of the customers to follow you in your cancel service/buy stock plan, which would turn a three year plan into a 3000 year plan.
1st question. You don't upgrade during the transition you upgrade after. Just the roughly 2 billion they paid in dividends could be put to use.
If they have no customers they have no dividends, and they have no cash flow to upgrade after the transition. Maybe you don't understand how the stock market works, but when you buy 51% of a company's stock the money doesn't go to the company, it goes to the people who owned the stock. Where do you get the money for all this upgraded hardware when nobody is paying for the service? You expect the stockholders to dump more money into the company when they've had to cancel their service to be able to afford what they've already bought?
2nd Tv is already dead is is all out IP bandwidth.
TV is hardly dead, and I have no idea what you mean by anything after that.
The last mile doesn't have to be fiber coax is just fine.
You don't have to buy out Comcast to get that. We've got that here. Fiber backbone, coax to the house. Nobody had to cancel service or buy stock.
Also I don't want them to magically maintain a company with no customers, I want the executives fired and the middle management fired and rebuild a customer centric customer own utility.
And your method of getting to the firing of the executives was for people to cancel their service and buy stock. Three years of no subs will definitely require some magic if the company doesn't go under in that time.
It not a pipe dream it a well worn business model.
Sure it is, but not by your means of getting there. You get there by getting the investors together and buying the working company. You don't try to drive the company into the ground, buy the remnants, and then claim success.
It would take a fortune to rebuild Comcast as a "customer owned utility" once you kill it off over a three year period. And now there's a question that needs another answer: how much stock must someone own before they can get service from their customer-owned utility? It sounds like getting service from this new company would be a very expensive proposition. Or you don't mean "customer owned", you mean "owned by people you think care enough to run things the way you want them to."
3rd Lessig Nader is a joke.
Those are the names you promoted as being the ne
I suspect traffic circles ("roundabouts") would be a great solution
In my state, traffic circles and roundabouts are two different things that appear nearly identical but operate differently. For example, in a roundabout traffic in the circular roadway has the right of way over traffic trying to enter. In a traffic circle exactly the opposite is true: traffic in the circle has to yield to traffic waiting to enter. Sounds stupid, but that's the law. I treated a traffic circle like a roundabout one fine evening and wound up with a hefty ticket.
As opposed to only getting to hear the ones paid for by the elite ruling class?
You have it 100% backwards. Under the current system if you've got enough money to pay for an ad, you can do that. (With the exception of certain ads that applies to all.) If you can get people together to pay for your ads, you can do that. Citizen's United kept that possible. (CU wasn't a new thing, it reiterated an existing concept called "free speech" even for people who are members of a group.)
Under a public campaign financing system where ads are paid for by the public and money is limited to those who have met some popularity contest, all you'll get to hear are ads from those who the "elite ruling class" have decided pass the test. Independent voices will go away because they won't get the money authorized to buy ads. Unpopular opinions are not wanted and must be silenced.
I'm sorry if all you listen to today are the ads paid for by the "elite ruling class", but my radio and TV carry all kinds of ads from people who haven't passed the popularity contests during campaign season. Yes, I'd love it if there was a prohibition on this seemingly endless stream of nonsense from people I know are lying (feel free to apply that to whichever party you think it applies to), but I realize that it only lasts a couple of weeks and that any "solution" to the problem would be worse than the problem it's trying to solve. Perhaps that's because I understand that the First Amendment isn't there to protect speech that is popular, it's there for unpopular speech.
A 40lb payload would require a mammoth sized drone, which would be EASILY detected by radar. Thus, does not fit the problem cited.
A drone 'copter can fly just above treetops, or even below the treetops if actively navigated, and easily avoid detection by radar. The ground clutter would hide it very well until it was too late to do much about it.
A better solution than blanket "No peons, you cant own drones with that weight class!" would be like what we have with guns near schools. ... That kind of regulation would be OK, and would work
Why yes, because nobody who wants to do something illegal with such a drone would ever violate an exclusion zone. Nobody would ever think of putting a drone in the back of a pickup truck, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, and launching it while passing by The White House.
Don't you have a vice president? And if he is also hit a new one is only an election away.
What is scariest is that Biden is a heartbeat away. Thanks for pointing that out.
Now to present a politically balanced scare -- the next in line if Biden is "also hit" is John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house. Following him is currently Orrin Hatch, the Republican President Pro-Tem of the Senate.
No, there will be no election until the next regular presidential election.
Don't imagine that it cannot happen. This is how Leslie Lynch King became the first and only person in US history to become vice president and then President of the US without being elected to those offices. You might know him better as Gerald R. Ford. He was appointed VP after Agnew resigned, and then became President when Nixon resigned.
That was a typo. I meant pay your bill and buy stock.
"Instead of" is a typo for what? And then you said more stock could be bought if everyone cancelled their service!
Also the existing infrastructure in many places has been totally deprecated.
I'm sure it has, and I'm sure it has been fully depreciated too. But if the company has no money because nobody is paying their bills or everyone has cancelled service (the second option you gave) then what money will they use to upgrade?
If google can provide gigabit fiber from scratch a a lower price than cable even with content and ad revenue then Comcast could too.
The reasons that Google can do it at a lower price are two-fold. First, they don't have existing plant to maintain while they're over-building the existing stuff. Existing cable companies cannot just ignore the existing customer problems while they string new fibers all over; Google has no existing customers to deal with. Cable has a staff that is sufficient to maintain what they have, they have to hire or subcontract for the install of fiber; Google has one staff busy doing installs. Labor costs are a major part of your fixed costs.
And second, Google is focusing on a very limited number of cherry-picked markets and can dump loads of money into the system until it begins to turn a profit. It's the same way that Walmart can come into a city and cut prices until the competition goes out of business because Walmart has thousands of other stores operating at a profit that can subsidize that. And it's the same reason why municipal cable systems are an unfair competition to the market: a city can dip into the general fund (taxpayer dollars) to cover shortfalls from operating costs, a private company cannot. We have laws about dumping and fair trade for just such activities.
Once we own the company as a customer owned utility it functions exactly like my electrical utility which provides excellent customer service at some of the lowest power prices in the nation.
The problem is that getting to the point where you own it will destroy it. A cable system without customers cannot afford to maintain what they have, much less suddenly build out a complete new fiber system, and it will have zero say in negotiating contracts for content. You want a full set of ala carte channels? ESPN won't care and won't make that deal, and the customer-less Comcast will have no money to make it happen. You said it would take 3 years. That's a long time in a technology-driven industry. Three years of stagnation because there is no cash flow. Long before you reach the goal of ownership, your plan will drive the company into bankruptcy.
The same bargain-basement stock prices that you count on to gain control of the company in the first place will not go unnoticed by everyone else (like TW, or Google, or Microsoft) and they'll be busy buying stock for their own takeover.
It's a pipe dream filled with unicorns and pixies who magically maintain a company that has zero customers. And the only way you can suggest that TW wouldn't step in and complete the merger by buying the stock before you do is if you do the same thing to TW at the same time.
And THEN you say you'd want to put Lessig and Nader in charge. Neither one of them have run a company before and are political fringe thinkers who alienate people who do run companies. That's pixie dust in a nutshell.
I can see how my typo made this unclear.
What made it unclear is saying "instead of" and then continuing with a call for cancelling service so even more stock could be purchased. No, I think the only unclear thing here is how bankrupting a company is going to force it to build a full fiber system and give you cheap high-speed broadband.
If the person has money they still can buy billboard, commercials, etc if they have an opinion, so they still have their freedom of speech right.
Not if campaign finance becomes limited to public funding based on polling percentages, as was the desire of the person I first replied to.
I don't remember the amendment where the right to spend money on your own election is...
There is no amendment specifically for campaign spending, and campaign finance laws quite often violate the letter, if not just the intent, of the existing First Amendment. Converting the current "system" into one that is funded by public money alone and the "up north" groups don't get any to spend is a clear violation of the existing constitution.
Having 3 or more candidate elections would ensure more voices are heard,
Yeah, three voices all spouting the same popular opinions. Who said that having multiple copies of the same opinion was a good thing?
(never will every opinion be heard)
There is a significant difference between an unpopular candidate not finding funding for his speech to be heard and the government legislatively taking his ability to speak away. In the former, an unpopular candidate may have sufficient money of his own to pay for his own speech; in the latter he is legally prohibited from spending his own money to speak.
A more textbook example of a violation of the first amendment, and the reason why the first amendment is necessary in the first place, would be hard to find.
The great thing is candidates wouldn't have to tow the party line because they would no longer need two parties to raise funds...
Those who didn't toe the party line wouldn't be party candidates, and it would be the parties who do the work to get the signatures to get the money.
Elections would be tighter and there would be more participation (because it's more interesting).
I don't know why a "tighter" (closer?) election is necessarily a good thing, and you really need a citation for the ridiculous claim that limiting the number of voices in an election to the popular opinions would make it any more interesting, or that "more participation" is defacto a good thing.
Publicly funded elections would be awesome (with complex rules ensuring multiple party elections, but that make sure participants to have x numbers of signatures or x percentage of polling). Don't need the Goat Herders of Little Russia North getting too much money for no reason :-)
In other words, only the popular opinions get to be heard and the unpopular ones have no chance at all.
When companies can "effectively" just "buy laws" (and/or Politicians) corruption knows no bounds for price gouging.
What laws were bought?
It's hard to get upset over three politicians who wanted to support the merger and asked Comcast for help writing a letter to the FCC. I'm more upset that the politicians are writing letters AT ALL, since that's an open attempt at speaking over the voices of their constituents who are capable of writing their own letters. I.e., a city councilor or mayor who writes a letter on behalf of his city is stealing the speech from all the people who don't agree with his opinion.
If every household in America bought $150 in Comcast stock each month instead of paying their cable bill it would take ~3 years to buy them out. If everyone canceled their account and bought stock it would take less time.
Only because the stock price would plummet and the company would be worth only the value of the plant. At that point Time-Warner buys it from bankruptcy for a pittance and the merger happens anyway.
What significant difference is there between nobody paying their cable bill and everyone cancelling service? A couple of months into the former and service would be cancelled automatically AND the company would have a large amount of write-off for the bad debts.
Then we vote out the current board and replace them with Lessig, Nader et al. and BAM gigabit bidirectional IPV6 with al a carte channels.
What color is the sky on your world, Cliff? Why not ask for unicorns while you're at it? Who PAYS for all this infrastructure upgrade if there are no subscribers?
If it was about public safety he'd pull you over just to stop you, even if he was powerless to ticket you.
If he is powerless to ticket you, that means you're out of his jurisdiction and doesn't have authority to stop you.
The reason the local cop on the interstate didn't stop you for "blowing by" him was probably because he was there doing something else that he was called to assist with. There's no other reason for him to be there if it isn't in his jurisdiction.
There should not be a debate about whether you fully stopped, or almost stopped... only that you followed the intent of the intersection control.
OMG, you do NOT want law enforcement to become a guessing game of "what is the intent of the traffic signal". There is never a debate about whether you "fully stopped" or "almost", that's pretty easy for an observer to tell, and you get to debate it with the judge where that debate belongs. As well as the "intent" debate. As far as law enforcement goes, the "intent" of any traffic signal (i.e. "stop sign" or "red light") is that you stop. Period. End of sentence. If the municipality that installed the signal didn't want you to stop, they would have installed a yield or yellow flasher.
The marked worked exactly how it is supposed to work, and the best competitor won.
Really? I found it valuable to be able to browse the local shop to see what new magazines (or old ones I didn't know about) were available, to look inside to see what they contained. When I got interested in something, I could see what was available, and I could see covers that hinted that maybe I'd like to read what was inside. If I didn't see what I wanted, I could ask the owner and she'd help me find what I needed. In most cases, I'd walk out of the shop with what I wanted -- immediate delivery.
Compare this to Barnes and Noble (one of the "winners" in this competition.) I have an electronic subscription to a magazine. It is supposed to renew automatically, and they sent me an email a month ago telling me it would renew three weeks ago. So far, it hasn't renewed. I got the paper copy of the magazine, and BN touts that "nook magazines" are delivered before the paper versions are. I contacted support. They apologized that the most recent issue hadn't been put in my library and they'd look into it. I told them it was obvious why -- they hadn't renewed the subscription. They're still "looking into it" and it's been a week.
Even better, when the current issue is put in my library, since they've dropped their Windows Nook reader (without saying anything, it took a round of email with support to find out why it just wouldn't log in to their server) I now must rely on an Android app to download my copies, and then I can copy the file out of the app's content directory to put it where I want it to be. The only way to know which is the correct file is to look at the creation date, the name is unintelligible gibberish. Fortunately this magazine is DRM-free, so I don't have to go through the steps of uploading the file to my PC to remove the DRM and then redownload it to read it using my reader of choice.
Oh, this Nook App has the wonderful property that it shows only a few characters of the name of the content along with the cover. So, unless I know the cover image of the issue of the magazine I want to read, I get to see "Asimo ... 2015" as the identification. Which month? That info is contained only on the cover icon which is unreadable because it is so small. The "competitor" free app does much better, and B&N don't give a damn how hard it is to identify content.
So, when you say "the best competitor won", that's your opinion. It may be the opinion of many people, but it isn't a fact. What is more likely is that "the most convenient" or "the cheapest" competitor won, but that's not always "the best". Were it "the best", then why do people go to brick and mortar's to browse for things to buy before they buy online?
It wasn't competition from a direct competitor that drove Borders out of town, it was a technological revolution.
It was a technological "revolution" that allowed a company in Seattle, Washington to become a competitor with the Borders store in my town (and in all the other cities). If you want to claim that "competition is good" and then limit your definition to "competition that is only the same sized business located in the same city doing things the same way", you've lost all basis for your claim.
The cable and phone companies benefitted from sweatheart deals to install their connections in cities,
And a competitor can get those same "sweat" deals by signing a franchise agreement. That agreement will cost them a few percent of their revenue. That's not enough to stop them.
yet they would scream in outrage at the prospect of a new competitor getting a similar sweatheart deal to bring in service.
Of course they would. What they scream about is irrelevant. The grocery store on the corner isn't happy when another grocery store opens across the street, either. None of the grocery stores in town were happy when Walmart opened their grocery store here, and none of the general merchandise stores were happy when Walmart announced plans for a superstore here.
I'm guessing it was a $50 Walmart toy. Why?
Because people on /. love to guess about details when those guesses can be used to ridicule or embarrass someone.
Because it ran out of batteries without warning while over the White House lawn and the owner couldn't reclaim it because of the security fence. Larger drones have battery warnings and some even have GPS-guided return-to-base functions on low battery.
A group I know recently took three quads to a beach to do some scientific research. Bought with limited funds so they aren't just toys, they're tools that need to be used properly and maintained for multiple uses.
Only one came back. Two of them wound up in the ocean.
Low battery return functions only work if they trigger far enough in advance that they can make it back to safety. The one I have (a $500 DJI) has such a function. The last time I flew it to "low battery", it had about enough battery left to make a controlled descent from directly overhead. Even if it had sufficient battery, the return algorithm is to climb to 20' and then fly to home and then descend. There's no sensors in the quad to notice that there's a 30' tree or building betwixt it and home.
Using a micro-quad is no proof-of-concept at all, as it wouldn't be able to carry a sufficient payload,
Except as a proof-of-concept regarding GPS jamming around a sensitive target, or to determine the security response to such an event. Not every 'proof of concept' has to deal exclusively with the specific hardware being tested, it can be a "proof of concept" for the entire process.
(ie a proof of concept that alerts the target to the possibility is no use at all.
I'm sorry, but you're assuming the security around the whitehouse is run by morons who couldn't imagine the use of a simple quad. I'm going to guess that they probably already know about the possibility.
It's as stupid as shining a laser sight through someone's window the day before the assassination attempt, telling the target to hide.
You're assuming that the pre-planned response if someone shines a laser pointer through Potus' window is to have the President of the US hide for the next few days. Somehow I doubt that's the reaction you'd get when you try it. For a bad guy, it would be valuable to know what the response IS to such an event, so that during any potential confusion some other method of attack can be used to accomplish whatever goal is desired.
You know, if you're going to try to do something bad to someone who is well defended, it is important to probe the responses so you can determine weaknesses or what other things you'll have to deal with.
As far as the size of the drone, I recall an episode of one of the recently ubiquitous gun-shop television shows where they designed and built a quad with a gun. It wasn't a huge quad they needed to carry that weight. They were also carrying a lot of extra weight since they were using a stock handgun. Get rid of all the useless stuff, like the stock, the magazine, etc, until you have a simple tube with a firing pin and it would weigh a lot less. A single-use barrel, thermal firing, you could probably get it down to weigh less than a GoPro. You could probably 3-D print the thing as part of the quad's chassis.
... to allow some people to yell so loudly ... I can pretty much guarantee that this was never what was intended. And yet it will persist as long as we equate money with speech.
In the 1700s, printing presses were owned by people who had money to own such things. It has always been the case that people who have money have more ability to express their speech than someone who doesn't. The founders weren't ignorant boobs, they were people who had printing presses or access to them.
This "equate money with speech" is a fiction. The truth is, money is a prerequisite for ANYONE to have effective speech, especially today, but still true in the 1700s. By cutting someone's access to money, you cut his access to effective speech, thereby limiting his right to free speech. I'll point to the use of "free speech zones" at political conventions as an example of the technical existence of free speech but the practical effect of limiting it severely, which is what saying "you can say whatever you want but you can't spend money to buy TV or radio advertising to say it..." is equivalent to.
The case you are probably alluding to was just one example of PEOPLE who banded together to pool their money to buy airtime to exercise their right to free speech. Yes, they incorporated, but that's a red herring. At the base, they were people, and people are the ones who have the rights.
And to some degree there's a valid concern that if the government can block or limit expenditures on speech, then at some point the government/powers-that-be could be the only ones able to drown out everyone else.
A lot earlier than that, if you block expenditures by people who pool their money, you will GUARANTEE that the only people who can speak effectively are those who are rich all by themselves. The government already has free (as in beer) speech -- it's called "franking", or "spending taxpayer dollars on advertising", or "town hall meetings".
I'm not sure what the best solution is, or if there is an easy solution other than the institution of and enforcement of norms of behavior.
Those are called "laws", and we have a Constitution that limits what laws the government is supposed to be able to enact. One of the bits of our Constitution talks about speech and the limits on laws regarding such. Telling ten people that they cannot put their money together so they can buy a radio ad that none of them can afford individually, while allowing one person who can afford such an ad to buy time, is a fundamentally flawed and ethically bankrupt attempt at silencing people you don't agree with. Nobody complains about Citizens United when it allows unions to buy airtime, they only complain about the "corporation" that wanted to buy airtime for an anti-Hilary movie.
I guess Adam Smith was wrong, competition is not good.
Competition is great. For the customer. For awhile. Not so good for the businesses that are competing. Perhaps you've heard of the term "dumping"? That's when a "competitor" can afford to sell below cost just to drive his competition out of business. Great for the customer, until the competition goes away and prices go back up.
We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and ... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?
Before you lecture me on how I should have shopped at the local dealer to support them, I did, and it wasn't enough to keep them alive.
Cable companies aren't like Borders. People don't buy services from more than one cable company at a time and if they aren't cable customers by now they likely won't become one just because competition moves in. At best, a new cable company can split the existing customer base. That's not enough to cover the fixed costs for plant, and certainly not enough to provide return on investment for over-building the existing system. The incumbent has a significant advantage because he's likely paid off a lot of the investment in the plant and equipment and can cut his prices to keep the new guy from making any money at all. Yes, that's good for the customer, except the customers of the new guy, and only as long as it takes for the new guy to give up and go away.
I bet Adam Smith would have understood that. I bet he'd understand when a company does a business plan and sees that there is no money to be made from competing in a limited, existing marketplace with high startup costs. I bet he'd understand why it takes a company the size of Google to do that kind of thing, and even then they're not rushing into the market.
So, the fact remains, it isn't the few percent skimmed from the cable companies in franchise fees that prevents competition. It's the ability to predict a negative return on investment for any new competitor, especially for the first few years, that keeps them from wasting their time and money.
If you disagree, you are free to dump a few million into competing with Comcast in our fair city and prove me wrong. I doubt I'd switch service to a start-up with no track record, but show me your list of services and we'll see.
Right now, there is no competition, only franchise agreements that limit competition.
It's not the few percent franchise fee that limits competition, it's the knowledge that a second franchisee for the same function would be splitting the available market and nobody would make a profit without raising prices -- and reducing the overall market.
While there may be a few people in an area who would actually start buying services from the new competitor because they aren't the existing company, they aren't enough to cover the fixed costs of running a second cable company in that area. If one cable company has 50% saturation (half the available consumers), then a second company can plan on splitting that number with the existing company and you can't profit if you have only 25% saturation. Not without raising rates. The fixed costs for plant as services are just too high.
Light travelling in a straight line isn't affected. Only light on a curve is affected.
So you're saying that a photon coming off the foot of David Beckham, or a spit-photon thrown by Nolan Ryan, travels slower than a photon normally would?
If you can get everyone to bet on a particular photon, and then slow that photon down so that all the other photons beat it, then you can clean up at the photon track.
Shhh ... this is how the SSC scientists make their beer money -- tricking the locals into betting like that.
Tires rolling on pavement make noise. There's no reason to add to it.
Not very much noise, and if the car is already slowing to stop at an intersection or to make a turn, that tire noise is very low. Below the other noises on the street. I've been on the streets, both as a pedestrian and a bicyclist, and had an electric car sneak up on me from behind before, and I know it isn't the safest way to run things.
There is no reason to make a vehicle that can kill someone who mistakenly steps in front of it as quiet as possible. You might notice that trucks (even those with diesel engines that make considerable noise) are usually equipped with backup alarms to create noise to alert people in the area that he's backing up.
The demand for silence on the streets is ridiculous, and the claim that the next guy makes about billions of people living on the streets needing absolute silence even more so.
it's not guilt by association. When you address a group of racists and claim to be David Duke
You're lying again. He didn't claim to be David Duke, he claimed to be "David Duke without all the baggage". Without all the baggage. All the baggage. That baggage includes a lot of stuff, not just the one or two things you want to pretend it does.
He also said: "I didn't know who all of these groups were, and I detest any kind of hate group", and "For anyone to suggest that I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous." The latter covers your attempts pretty well.
Just addressing a convention does NOT create an association. This is the same kind of nonsense that McCarthy used to find communists, and if it applies to Scalise then it applies to Obama and Biden and a lot of other people for their associations, too.
And you don't have to be a KKK member to be a racist which is basically what he was implying when he said he was "David Duke without the baggage" I'm an independent.
No, he was SAYING exactly the OPPOSITE. "Without all the baggage". ALL. You keep trying to hang baggage on him that he never had in the first place.
And could you please make some attempt at punctuation so we know where one sentence ends and the next begins?
Not an ideologue like you.
I don't know what you think you know about me, but I'm simply pointing out 1) your lies (about Byrd) and 2) your hypocrisy (by accepting guilt by association as valid against Scalise but not when it comes to Obama.) That's not being an "ideologue", that's being honest.
so your assumption the I hate Republicans and don't hate Democrats is way out in left field.
Your repeated attempts at trying to hang labels on a Republican and ignoring the same kinds of actions when it comes to a Democrat implies otherwise. I'm trying to get you to treat both the same but you seem unwilling to do that. I'd prefer it if you treated both the same and understood that guilt by association is a bad way of judging people, but I'd at least appreciate it if you were consistent in your use of guilt by association.
I have more respect for the racists such as David Duke that are open with their racism than I do for the closet racists like this guy
And the only evidence you have of racism against Scalise is that he spoke at a convention organized by a KKK member. That's guilt by association. Let's try this to see if you get the point. You are asked by a local scoutmaster to speak to a group of scouts about some topic you are an expert on. You happily agree to do so, and your talk is a great success. A week later the scoutmaster is arrested for sexual abuse of some of his troop. Are you a pedophile because you spoke at a meeting arranged by a pedophile? If it were Steve Scalise who gave that talk, you'd be hanging that baggage on him, I expect, but if it were you you'd certainly proclaim your innocence. And only an idiot would think that your talk to his troop proved your affiliation with his crime.
Racism is a primitive ideology of people with a primitive way of thinking.
It's good that you seem to know what racism is, but you've still failed miserably at identifying them or acting consistently in trying to do so. I don't know why you keep doing that.
If you want me to take you seriously when it comes to your alleged identification of racists, then you'll have to be consistent. Either you'll claim that Obama is a racist/homophobe for his association with Byrd and his speech at his funeral lauding the man, which means "guilt by association" is your method of identifying racists and you're doing it with Scalise, or you'll be a hypocrite and let Obama off the hook while trying to skewer Scalise for things he didn't do OR say.
This is not about byrd this is about Steve Scalise and is admitted associations. He addressed a group of racists
He has no "admitted associations". He gave a talk at a convention. Period. Just like Obama spoke at Byrd's funeral. If you fictionalize an "association" based on making a speech, then you need to fictionalize consistently.
It's about Byrd because YOU claimed that Byrd was not a leader in the house or senate, which was a lie you've been called on twice. Here's your statement:
It doesn't matter that Byrd is dead, Obama and a lot of other politicians associated with him, he was a strong leader in the senate in many different positions, and he was not only a member of the KKK but organized the chapter in his hometown and was elected to lead it. If someone with such ties to the Klan doesn't create guilt by association with people who idolize him, then simply giving a speech to a convention does not create such guilt.
and he also bragged about being an electable racist
No, he didn't. He said nothing about being a racist. He's done nothing that makes him a KKK member. "Without all the baggage" means without all the baggage. Maybe you aren't a native English speaker and you just didn't understand what "all the baggage" meant, but I've explained it to you sufficiently that you should know now. Continuing this further would only prove your hypocrisy when "guilt by association" only applies to Republicans you hate and not to the Democrats you don't.