Starbucks did a lot if business (as in packed wall to wall, sitting on the floor or standing) by having free wifi and power outlets they didn't mind people using.
Did they actually do a lot of business, or were there just a lot of people sitting in the shops using the free wifi? Will someone actually pay ten or fifteen times the actual value of a cup of coffee just to get access to wifi, and if so, is it really "free"?
I know when I needed "free" wifi while travelling in Europe, I didn't go to the most expensive coffee shop in town, I went to the cheapest.
So you have a choice: high speed Internet service above DSL speeds from the telco, who wants more money than it's worth and would result in reduced redundancy or wired voice.
If the disaster is big enough then there will likely be a police officers or paramedics on every block anyway, which is what you'd want the phones to be used for anyway.
1. It is unlikely there are enough emergency service workers of any kind to stock "every block" with their own, no matter how large or small the disaster is.
2. If there IS a cop or EMT on the block already, he's most likely there on a call already and cannot just drop what he's doing to come deal with you.
3. You MAY be lucky enough to have enough neighbors who are CERT trained and, more importantly, actually useful for something (CERT training doesn't make people useful during emergencies, it just makes them CERT trained and maybe they won't kill anyone by accident). Two or more (they're supposed to always be in teams) may be on your block and MAY be able to help, or may be able to call out for help. Don't count on it. (YOU are joining CERT today so you'll be useful to your community tomorrow, aren't you?)
On the other hand, for real emergencies 911 works even on a "dead" twisted-pair line.
If there is no battery on your "twisted pair line", then there is no way for the phone to signal to the CO that it needs dial tone, and the reason for no battery is most likely because your pair has been disconnected from the CO altogether. Most likely, the pair out of the CO that goes to your local distribution box has been put in use for someone else.
I'd like to know how you think you can make any calls on such a line, much less 911 in an emergency.
I believe the justification they gave was they replaced the line to the house with fiber, and would no longer be maintaining the old copper line required for standard POTS.
Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable. At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.
Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other providers who aren't pseudo-monopolies and don't need to pull your old copper lines?
Power comes not from hoarding money but from spending it. A few billion in a bank account means nothing in terms of status. A rich person cannot put his name in any visible location on a bank account (i.e., it appears only on the statements).
On the other hand, a few hundred million given to a University will get his name on a building or three. A civic center built through his donations will get his name on it.
And a billion in the bank doesn't buy politicians. It's the flow of money that gets power, and that fact is represented in the Move To Amend furor. They know that money spent is speech with some power to it.
The money he invests in the stock market goes to build and grow companies, which hire people, and pay off other investors in the stock market, many of whom are middle class working people who have money market and retirement accounts in mutual funds.
putting more money in the hands of the rich is futile.
Cutting tax rates doesn't put money in anyone's hands. It lets the people who earned the money KEEP it in their hands. And it isn't a gift, despite the repeated attempts at class warfare that would try to brand it as such. Returns on investments come at the risk of loss of that money, and there needs to be a reason to invest. Taking half of everything a "rich person" owns doesn't give him much reason to invest. Poker players call it "pot odds". If a bet will require half the pot, but only have a 20% chance of winning, the bet is a bad one, no matter what the cards a player is holding are. If a rich person sees that his investment in growing a company has a 20% chance of success, but he'll lose 50% of the success in taxes, he's better off keeping his money in the bank.
Well, having just been haranged by a Google web specialist at work about my company's "web presence" (because they scraped the Network Solutions database for a domain long ago expired), I'd say that it's called "talking to a telemarketer".
Even under order of the President, it is still illegal to use military against the civilian populace.
The wikipedia article I referenced, under "Exclusions and limitations" lists two situations speicifically where it is legal for the President (or executive branch appointees who work for him) to use the military against the civilian populace. And, of course, the military branch known as "Coast Guard" has law enforcement duties already assigned to them.
Posse Comitatus Act was intended to limit military use, not enable it.
That's probably why I kept using the phrase 'to keep', as in "to limit or prohibit" in what I wrote.
The President has literally nothing to do with it,
Other than the exceptions where he literally has everything to do with it, yes.
Not every plane is equipped to receive those signals and not every plane is required to transmit those signals.
The testing was done with drones so equipped, and I think the results point to the idea that drones WILL be required to have this. Commercial, passenger carrying aircraft will, and those are the aircraft over which a public uproar would commence when one is taken out by a drone. Most people won't care if those daredevil private pilots who are doing something patently unsafe to start with (ITHO) are endangered. Further, it is a desired goal of the FAA that all aircraft capable of having it will have it.
So long as the drones stay above say 30,000 feet and takeoff / land only at certain airports I suppose they might not interfere.
There are few airports that are above 30,000 feet (assuming you mean AGL and not just MSL or even ACE (above center of earth)). There are few aircraft that have no electrical systems above 18,000 feet MSL, which is the floor of Class A airspace. In Class A airspace, every aircraft is on an IFR flight plan, and it's far above the operational ceiling of the standard non-electrical systemed aircraft. It would be a good assumption that anyone above 18,000 ft will have ads-b or have chosen not to have it deliberately (if possible.)
but they do have "skin" in it, unlike the drone pilots.
Having "skin" in it is more likely to create a situation for panic. The kinds of planes flown by those with "skin" in it are unlikely to have autopilots capable of handling things for any significant amount of time, if at all, and the person who may or may not be sitting next to the one with the "skin" in it will likely not be another pilot who can help him out.
And, as I already said, the one with "skin" in it is flying a less maneuverable aircraft, in large part because it has been built to not kill the one who has "skin" in it when he does something stupid. G-limits in most aircraft are there to protect the airframe, but they are also much lower than what would harm the pilot and passengers. (High-G military and racing aircraft are the notable exception.)
In short, the pilot of a drone can move faster and get out of the way of something else faster because the lighter smaller drone will have higher G limits, allowing steeper, faster dives. Even if the G limits of the airframe are exceeded nobody will die. Cutting power and diving for the ground will be an available avoidance mode for drones; it will be a fatal, unlikely choice for the LSA pilot with few hours.
But overall, the point I think was lost is that saying "low time" as an excuse against drones also applies to human pilots who are in the planes they fly. Pilots who make such an argument are arguing for upping the hours required to get a pilot's license, too, and if they complain loudly enough I'm sure the non-pilot public will he happy to join them in demanding more training for new pilots of all types.
Yes, the police may be logistically indistinguishable from your average upper-developing-world mechanized infantry; but the org chart says they aren't military, so it's all good.
You do realize that the reason for posse commitatus is not to keep the local police from having effective and modern weapons, it is to keep the people who are using the effective, modern weapons under the control of the local civilian government, not the federal military command, and not imposing "outsider" rules on a local population? As in, troops can't go in to quash a whiskey rebellion, for example, or used to maintain control in southern states after they rebel again. Except, of course, under order of the President or Congress -- but not just because a local sheriff has lost control of his county.
They have been used for what most people consider good, however. As in 1958 when Eisenhower sent them into Arkansas to protect people not being protected by the local officials.
I fly and it scares me that someone, who has little actual flight time, could pilot a drone where he shouldn't and cause a fatality.
I fly, and I'm more concerned with the newly minted sport and recreational pilots who also have little actual flight time and are piloting other people AND heavier, less maneuverable machines.
It's called a streak camera and it has been done for decades. It's used not only for photo finishes of almost every race that has a photo-finish capability, but it was done decades ago in atomic spectroscopy as a detector for spark and arc spectrometers. And it's done on a daily basis for many other sciences, like studying waves running up the beach. (I'd give a link but I don't want to/. the site.)
Hell, there's even an app for that on the new iphone. All it takes is a simple video camera and a few lines (not even hundreds) of code (pull the middle five columns out of a video stream and put them next to each other in a bigger image. Rotate the camera at some rate. Or move the object past the camera. Streak cameras move the film to do the same thing with a fixed camera position.)
How well they do depends on how good the teachers are, not the class size. You'd expect a class with more than one teacher per student to do very well, wouldn't you? Personalized instruction.
But I'll just point out that the statement was a bit of hyperbole in a reductio ad absurdum manner. If reducing class sizes is good, then reducing them even more must be gooder, and the lower limit is somewhere below one student per teacher. That's "throwing money at the system" for a result that is absurd.
Did you ever consider that they might not have had a choice? Perhaps they were born in that area, got a job there and needed to live within commuting distance. Couldn't just up-sticks and move inland.
The people who build or buy $2 million homes on the beachfront were neither born there, got a job there, nor are they so poor that they cannot afford to move somewhere else. In fact, many of those million dollar homes built on stilts are VACATION properties that they are busy renting out for big bucks whenever they aren't using them. Their jobs are in DC or New York or someplace else, they aren't commuting from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
I think most people would prefer not to have to be building engineering and geological experts and instead just have the government figure out what is safe and set some rules for building houses.
Yes, most people would rather have a nanny state where some civil servant tells them what is safe and what isn't and prohibits them from doing anything that might be bad for them.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take a degree in rocket science to see a bunch of other houses on the beach all built on stilts, and to see some stilts often just sticking up out of the surf (that look just like the kinds of stilts that a house might be built on), and to hear the stories from the locals about "the big one of oh-2" to know that the place they want their million dollar vacation home might not be a good risk. But since the guvmint will help them rebuild, why hesitate?
Let's put it this way. I was in a rental house where the beach was eroded so far back that the high tide was actually UNDER the house. I mean, waves all the way up under the garage. And yet, these houses were for sale, and people were actually coming to look at the property as potential buyers. There's somethig wrong in a system that rewards that kind of audacity.
Florida gets far, far, far more federal dollars than it contributes especially in disaster response.
So? You seem to think that anyone who wants smaller government must accept no federal money under any circumstances. You can have a smaller government and still have federal aid in times of disaster. Maybe not aid to people who build in known-hazard areas, but when a hurricane rips all the way across a state, not everyone is in a known-hazard area. Or when the levies break. People who build right on the shore, and build on stilts because they know floods happen on a regular basis, however, are a different sort.
It seems this is not an unusual twist to how things should work. Biden seemed to make quite a point of it in his debate with Paul, pointing out that Paul had written letters supporting his consitutuents' access to federal handouts. Why shouldn't he? If the Democrats are going to freely hand out billions of taxpayer dollars, why shouldn't the taxpayers in Paul's district get their share -- no matter how Paul voted on the handouts?
No, the system we keep throwing money at as if simply throwing money at the system would fix it.
You can hire a thousand teachers so the class sizes are all less than one student per teacher, and as long as the teachers are hamstrung by federal requirements (and local requirements implemented to deal with federal and state requirements), you'll not get good results.
In answer to your first question: Data Protection Act 1998.
Nice try. Last time I checked, South Carolina wasn't in the UK, so the UK Data Protection Act of 1998 wouldn't apply. I think the odd spelling of "Offences" might have been a give-away. We'd have called it "Offenses".
So when the crime rate goes up because of your less government you will remain silent right?
Unfortunately for your rant, the things you want to claim I've been calling for less of aren't. You don't know, so please stop making a fool of yourself.
When the hurricane hits the east coast next week you won't have a single comment on how the government handles the response right?
Yes, I will. I will say "those idiots who build houses on a coast that both erodes on a regular basis and is innundated by storms should not get taxpayer support in rebuilding. They chose to live there despite the dangers, they should assume the risk.
The fault lies with the citizens screaming for "less government" yet expecting government to do everything for them.
Sorry, mate, but I'm one of the ones who says "less government", and I also say "stop doing things for me that I can do better myself." Trying to paint all people who call for less government with the same brush as those who feel the government should be a nanny state is a mistake, and leads to a sloppy and fatally flawed argument.
addendum: what I don't get is this: they broke the Law,
Which law? Is there a law that says government agencies must encrypt certain information when they store it? Is there one that makes the government the criminal when a real criminal breaks in and steals data?
Slashdot Mirror
Starbucks did a lot if business (as in packed wall to wall, sitting on the floor or standing) by having free wifi and power outlets they didn't mind people using.
Did they actually do a lot of business, or were there just a lot of people sitting in the shops using the free wifi? Will someone actually pay ten or fifteen times the actual value of a cup of coffee just to get access to wifi, and if so, is it really "free"?
I know when I needed "free" wifi while travelling in Europe, I didn't go to the most expensive coffee shop in town, I went to the cheapest.
So you have a choice: high speed Internet service above DSL speeds from the telco, who wants more money than it's worth and would result in reduced redundancy or wired voice.
FTFY.
If the disaster is big enough then there will likely be a police officers or paramedics on every block anyway, which is what you'd want the phones to be used for anyway.
1. It is unlikely there are enough emergency service workers of any kind to stock "every block" with their own, no matter how large or small the disaster is.
2. If there IS a cop or EMT on the block already, he's most likely there on a call already and cannot just drop what he's doing to come deal with you.
3. You MAY be lucky enough to have enough neighbors who are CERT trained and, more importantly, actually useful for something (CERT training doesn't make people useful during emergencies, it just makes them CERT trained and maybe they won't kill anyone by accident). Two or more (they're supposed to always be in teams) may be on your block and MAY be able to help, or may be able to call out for help. Don't count on it. (YOU are joining CERT today so you'll be useful to your community tomorrow, aren't you?)
On the other hand, for real emergencies 911 works even on a "dead" twisted-pair line.
If there is no battery on your "twisted pair line", then there is no way for the phone to signal to the CO that it needs dial tone, and the reason for no battery is most likely because your pair has been disconnected from the CO altogether. Most likely, the pair out of the CO that goes to your local distribution box has been put in use for someone else.
I'd like to know how you think you can make any calls on such a line, much less 911 in an emergency.
I believe the justification they gave was they replaced the line to the house with fiber, and would no longer be maintaining the old copper line required for standard POTS.
Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable. At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.
Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other providers who aren't pseudo-monopolies and don't need to pull your old copper lines?
but most don't! they hoard it for personal power.
Power comes not from hoarding money but from spending it. A few billion in a bank account means nothing in terms of status. A rich person cannot put his name in any visible location on a bank account (i.e., it appears only on the statements).
On the other hand, a few hundred million given to a University will get his name on a building or three. A civic center built through his donations will get his name on it.
And a billion in the bank doesn't buy politicians. It's the flow of money that gets power, and that fact is represented in the Move To Amend furor. They know that money spent is speech with some power to it.
The money he invests in the stock market goes to build and grow companies, which hire people, and pay off other investors in the stock market, many of whom are middle class working people who have money market and retirement accounts in mutual funds.
putting more money in the hands of the rich is futile.
Cutting tax rates doesn't put money in anyone's hands. It lets the people who earned the money KEEP it in their hands. And it isn't a gift, despite the repeated attempts at class warfare that would try to brand it as such. Returns on investments come at the risk of loss of that money, and there needs to be a reason to invest. Taking half of everything a "rich person" owns doesn't give him much reason to invest. Poker players call it "pot odds". If a bet will require half the pot, but only have a 20% chance of winning, the bet is a bad one, no matter what the cards a player is holding are. If a rich person sees that his investment in growing a company has a 20% chance of success, but he'll lose 50% of the success in taxes, he's better off keeping his money in the bank.
Well, having just been haranged by a Google web specialist at work about my company's "web presence" (because they scraped the Network Solutions database for a domain long ago expired), I'd say that it's called "talking to a telemarketer".
My cellphone battery is nearly dead, so please may I squeeze it up between your lovely knockers, my dear? Oh, they're natural? Nevermind...
Even under order of the President, it is still illegal to use military against the civilian populace.
The wikipedia article I referenced, under "Exclusions and limitations" lists two situations speicifically where it is legal for the President (or executive branch appointees who work for him) to use the military against the civilian populace. And, of course, the military branch known as "Coast Guard" has law enforcement duties already assigned to them.
Posse Comitatus Act was intended to limit military use, not enable it.
That's probably why I kept using the phrase 'to keep', as in "to limit or prohibit" in what I wrote.
The President has literally nothing to do with it,
Other than the exceptions where he literally has everything to do with it, yes.
Who makes decisions like this, and the re: the laptop resolutions? How can we make them ~rue~ those choices?
1. The people who think they have the right totell you that you are using too much energy and pass laws to stop you.
2. We can't. They're too happy forcing you to be green to notice that you are unhappy being artificially technologically limited.
Not every plane is equipped to receive those signals and not every plane is required to transmit those signals.
The testing was done with drones so equipped, and I think the results point to the idea that drones WILL be required to have this. Commercial, passenger carrying aircraft will, and those are the aircraft over which a public uproar would commence when one is taken out by a drone. Most people won't care if those daredevil private pilots who are doing something patently unsafe to start with (ITHO) are endangered. Further, it is a desired goal of the FAA that all aircraft capable of having it will have it.
So long as the drones stay above say 30,000 feet and takeoff / land only at certain airports I suppose they might not interfere.
There are few airports that are above 30,000 feet (assuming you mean AGL and not just MSL or even ACE (above center of earth)). There are few aircraft that have no electrical systems above 18,000 feet MSL, which is the floor of Class A airspace. In Class A airspace, every aircraft is on an IFR flight plan, and it's far above the operational ceiling of the standard non-electrical systemed aircraft. It would be a good assumption that anyone above 18,000 ft will have ads-b or have chosen not to have it deliberately (if possible.)
but they do have "skin" in it, unlike the drone pilots.
Having "skin" in it is more likely to create a situation for panic. The kinds of planes flown by those with "skin" in it are unlikely to have autopilots capable of handling things for any significant amount of time, if at all, and the person who may or may not be sitting next to the one with the "skin" in it will likely not be another pilot who can help him out.
And, as I already said, the one with "skin" in it is flying a less maneuverable aircraft, in large part because it has been built to not kill the one who has "skin" in it when he does something stupid. G-limits in most aircraft are there to protect the airframe, but they are also much lower than what would harm the pilot and passengers. (High-G military and racing aircraft are the notable exception.)
In short, the pilot of a drone can move faster and get out of the way of something else faster because the lighter smaller drone will have higher G limits, allowing steeper, faster dives. Even if the G limits of the airframe are exceeded nobody will die. Cutting power and diving for the ground will be an available avoidance mode for drones; it will be a fatal, unlikely choice for the LSA pilot with few hours.
But overall, the point I think was lost is that saying "low time" as an excuse against drones also applies to human pilots who are in the planes they fly. Pilots who make such an argument are arguing for upping the hours required to get a pilot's license, too, and if they complain loudly enough I'm sure the non-pilot public will he happy to join them in demanding more training for new pilots of all types.
same as GPS tracking in my book.
If you have GPS tracking in your book you need to stop buying them from Amazon. At least stop reading them on your cellphone with a Kindle app.
Yes, the police may be logistically indistinguishable from your average upper-developing-world mechanized infantry; but the org chart says they aren't military, so it's all good.
You do realize that the reason for posse commitatus is not to keep the local police from having effective and modern weapons, it is to keep the people who are using the effective, modern weapons under the control of the local civilian government, not the federal military command, and not imposing "outsider" rules on a local population? As in, troops can't go in to quash a whiskey rebellion, for example, or used to maintain control in southern states after they rebel again. Except, of course, under order of the President or Congress -- but not just because a local sheriff has lost control of his county.
They have been used for what most people consider good, however. As in 1958 when Eisenhower sent them into Arkansas to protect people not being protected by the local officials.
I fly and it scares me that someone, who has little actual flight time, could pilot a drone where he shouldn't and cause a fatality.
I fly, and I'm more concerned with the newly minted sport and recreational pilots who also have little actual flight time and are piloting other people AND heavier, less maneuverable machines.
Hell, there's even an app for that on the new iphone. All it takes is a simple video camera and a few lines (not even hundreds) of code (pull the middle five columns out of a video stream and put them next to each other in a bigger image. Rotate the camera at some rate. Or move the object past the camera. Streak cameras move the film to do the same thing with a fixed camera position.)
But I'll just point out that the statement was a bit of hyperbole in a reductio ad absurdum manner. If reducing class sizes is good, then reducing them even more must be gooder, and the lower limit is somewhere below one student per teacher. That's "throwing money at the system" for a result that is absurd.
Did you ever consider that they might not have had a choice? Perhaps they were born in that area, got a job there and needed to live within commuting distance. Couldn't just up-sticks and move inland.
The people who build or buy $2 million homes on the beachfront were neither born there, got a job there, nor are they so poor that they cannot afford to move somewhere else. In fact, many of those million dollar homes built on stilts are VACATION properties that they are busy renting out for big bucks whenever they aren't using them. Their jobs are in DC or New York or someplace else, they aren't commuting from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
I think most people would prefer not to have to be building engineering and geological experts and instead just have the government figure out what is safe and set some rules for building houses.
Yes, most people would rather have a nanny state where some civil servant tells them what is safe and what isn't and prohibits them from doing anything that might be bad for them.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take a degree in rocket science to see a bunch of other houses on the beach all built on stilts, and to see some stilts often just sticking up out of the surf (that look just like the kinds of stilts that a house might be built on), and to hear the stories from the locals about "the big one of oh-2" to know that the place they want their million dollar vacation home might not be a good risk. But since the guvmint will help them rebuild, why hesitate?
Let's put it this way. I was in a rental house where the beach was eroded so far back that the high tide was actually UNDER the house. I mean, waves all the way up under the garage. And yet, these houses were for sale, and people were actually coming to look at the property as potential buyers. There's somethig wrong in a system that rewards that kind of audacity.
Florida gets far, far, far more federal dollars than it contributes especially in disaster response.
So? You seem to think that anyone who wants smaller government must accept no federal money under any circumstances. You can have a smaller government and still have federal aid in times of disaster. Maybe not aid to people who build in known-hazard areas, but when a hurricane rips all the way across a state, not everyone is in a known-hazard area. Or when the levies break. People who build right on the shore, and build on stilts because they know floods happen on a regular basis, however, are a different sort.
It seems this is not an unusual twist to how things should work. Biden seemed to make quite a point of it in his debate with Paul, pointing out that Paul had written letters supporting his consitutuents' access to federal handouts. Why shouldn't he? If the Democrats are going to freely hand out billions of taxpayer dollars, why shouldn't the taxpayers in Paul's district get their share -- no matter how Paul voted on the handouts?
Oh, the system we don't put money in?
No, the system we keep throwing money at as if simply throwing money at the system would fix it.
You can hire a thousand teachers so the class sizes are all less than one student per teacher, and as long as the teachers are hamstrung by federal requirements (and local requirements implemented to deal with federal and state requirements), you'll not get good results.
In answer to your first question: Data Protection Act 1998.
Nice try. Last time I checked, South Carolina wasn't in the UK, so the UK Data Protection Act of 1998 wouldn't apply. I think the odd spelling of "Offences" might have been a give-away. We'd have called it "Offenses".
So when the crime rate goes up because of your less government you will remain silent right?
Unfortunately for your rant, the things you want to claim I've been calling for less of aren't. You don't know, so please stop making a fool of yourself.
When the hurricane hits the east coast next week you won't have a single comment on how the government handles the response right?
Yes, I will. I will say "those idiots who build houses on a coast that both erodes on a regular basis and is innundated by storms should not get taxpayer support in rebuilding. They chose to live there despite the dangers, they should assume the risk.
Oops, none of the SSN were encrypted. All but 16,000 cc/debit were. My bad. Rest of points stand.
The fault lies with the citizens screaming for "less government" yet expecting government to do everything for them.
Sorry, mate, but I'm one of the ones who says "less government", and I also say "stop doing things for me that I can do better myself." Trying to paint all people who call for less government with the same brush as those who feel the government should be a nanny state is a mistake, and leads to a sloppy and fatally flawed argument.
addendum: what I don't get is this: they broke the Law,
Which law? Is there a law that says government agencies must encrypt certain information when they store it? Is there one that makes the government the criminal when a real criminal breaks in and steals data?