What will be worse is if they implement it as described. The "system" keeps track of what you put in your cart. So, you pick up an item, go look for something else, and while shopping decide you didn't want that first item after all. Will it accurately detect you removing it from the cart? Will it detect at all if you do as many people do when they change their minds -- simply put it on the nearest shelf, even if it was a clothing item and they are now in automotive?
I don't owe anyone any money until I am ready to walk out the door. Anything that can charge me for picking something up to look at it is broken design.
Steam was (and continues to be) successful, because it turned the adversarial relationship between player and publisher into a much more cooperative one.
Yeah, real cooperative. Like when I bought Duke Nukem Forever. It wouldn't do ANYTHING on my hardware, and I could not get a refund or sell it to someone who could use it because... Steam.
Yes, Steam has made things SO much better.
You could never get your money back for a shitty game.
I couldn't get my money back for a game that refused to run at all, so tell me exactly how Steam is an improvement when it was the fact Steam was involved that kept me from recovering one cent.
There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense,
There is not now and never has been a government-granted monopoly for internet service. The cable television laws that allowed exclusive franchises and now prohibit them deal with cable television services, not ISPs.
The fact that there are 14 business-class ISPs at least for Seattle kind of proves this.
Some free market advocates seems to think that this means outlawing any kind of publicly owned entities from participating in the market,
This has nothing to do with outlawing municipal broadband. The reasonable restriction on municipal broadband systems is that they are deliberate and explicit attempts at bypassing the franchise contracts that the municipality forces some broadband providers to agree to (specifically broadband over the cable television infrastructure) while allowing the municipality to cherry pick the profitable areas of the municipality while still forcing the franchised company to provide the high-cost services to the entire franchise area. A secondary (and still reasonable objection, IMNSHO) is that the municipality it trying to directly compete with a company that it regulates and can do so without many of the costs that the company is required to deal with.
It would be like having a city law that requires all automotive repair shops to be licensed and provide service to any make and model of auto that a customer brings in, while the city runs a competing repair shop that has no licensing requirements and needs to service only the makes of cars owned by rich people. If a mechanic needs an expensive, specialized tool to work on Astin Martin TorqueMobile 3 engines and the city isn't including that model in their coverage, this is a cost that the city-regulated mechanics need to pay that the city itself avoids. There's the required auto analogy.
I don't live in Seattle, but I have several friends who still do and for a long while it was essentially Comcast only as far as cable
This is not proof of a government-granted monopoly. It may prove that there is a defacto monopoly based on economic issues -- which I, for one, have never denied. I will point out that "cable" is only one means of delivering services, and as such this is confusing the issue of "medium" with "message". If you want video services, you can use something other than cable TV; if you want broadband there are other media for that message than just cable TV wires.
The city isn't required to grant anyone a franchise,
Yes, sir, if you read the federal law on this, municipalities are required to issue franchises to any serious, reasonable competitor who agrees to the same requirements that the existing franchisee has to follow. It is explicit in the law that a competitor who feels they have been denied a franchise for inappropriate reasons may take the franchise authority to court.
You mention 14 ISPs serving Seattle, but I'm assuming you're speaking of the metro area and not the city proper.
I don't know of the difference, but all I had to do was ask Google the question "ISPs Seattle". City limits is city limits. Will every ISP run their lines to every house in the city? I don't know, and that's an issue between the ISP and the customer, not the resident and the city.
If public entities have to play by the same rules as private companies and aren't themselves given special treatment, I fail to see how they cause harm.
If you mean ALL the same rules, then I am close to agreement. There are inherent advantages to being a taxpayer backed not-for-profit that cannot be eliminated, so I still object on those terms.
then I expect that consumers are getting much better deals than most other cities.
Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
You cited the franchise ordnance for Seattly, but apparently failed to read it. Refer to 21.60.050 A. Read all the words.
Technically there's nothing there that necessitates a monopoly,
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
but there's also nothing stopping a company from acquiring a non-compete clause either
Do you understand that federal law overrides local law in this area? It is against FEDERAL LAW for the city of Seattle to grant an exclusive franchise to ANY cable operator. (Since there are no franchise requirements for ISPs, that's the only franchise issue here.)
Comcast was quite notorious for doing that.
Of course Comcast would try for exclusive franchises while they were still legal. It's common sense for them. BUT -- they've been illegal for more then twenty years. The last franchise agreement between Seattle and Comcast was reached in 2017 -- and the expiring one wasn't exclusive either. The franchise ordnance you cite is explicit on this.
There are also a large number of states which have laws that attempt to hinder or outright prevent local municipalities from creating their own ISP,
This has nothing to do with cable companies, and in any case does not create a government-granted monopoly. It's irrelevant.
Personally I'm of the opinion that cities should be in charge of their own infrastructure
That's a different issue. You've claimed that Comcast has a government-granted monopoly in Seattle, and the existence of three franchised cable companies, along with federal law, proves you wrong.
and allow various companies to offer competing services to the city's residents.
I've already made friends with Google, and it tells me that there are at least 6 residential and 14 business ISPs serving Seattle, and of those 14 at least 7 are gigabit. This is what you call "no competition"?
Still better than much of Seattle where the city council gave monopolies to one cable company(Comcast)
There are currently three "cable companies" franchised with the city of Seattle, and in 2015 the city did away with the 'franchise zones' that limited service areas.
There is no requirement for a franchise for an ISP. The "web" shows that there are at least 6 residential ISPs and 14 business class, with at least 7 of the latter offering gigabit network speeds.
If you want a choice of internet providers you should probably ask your local government to stop granting monopoly rights to a single company.
Which ISP has been granted a monopoly by the government? It would be nice to know which one I shouldn't be dealing with as a way of punishing one of them.
All this study shows it that bees can be trained to understand negative correlations, e.g. fewer of these symbols is good.
Do you think it is remarkable that an animal can understand that 'fewer of these symbols is good'? I think such understanding is as valuable as understanding that "more of these symbols is good" in some cases. For bees "more flowers is good" -- learned lesson. Also for bees, "fewer yellowjackets is good", as yellowjackets are a natural predator for honey bees.
As for the nonsense about the difference between "zero" (a current value) and "none" (no preexisting value) -- also not remarkable. Bees will be just as judgemental about a field that has zero flowers (because someone came and took them all) as they will towards a field with "none" flowers (because it never had any). Same result for them. Go somewhere else.
Even so, this is the sort of detail that a system designer ought to get right,
Are you trying to argue there should be "a system designer" here, and an RFP based on a requirements document should have been sent out for bids so that "system designers" could charge a huge amount of money for a simple solution, instead of a manager who uses Excel regularly saying "we need some randomness, let's use the Excel random number generator, it's good enough?"
The latter is probably what happened. A government worker knew a reasonable, good-enough solution to a simple problem and saved the taxpayers a lot of money.
When in doubt, a quality algorithm is always better than a bad one. This is the thing about security;
This has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with people who didn't get chosen to get immigration permits trying to find any excuse they can to sue the government and overturn the luck of other people so they can coerce the luck to fall upon themselves instead. This is a much bigger failure of any "randomization" process.
The sales price of any item is determined by what the market will bear and not the cost to make it.
How remarkably naive. It is a combination of both. If it costs $100 to make something, but the market will only pay $50, then NO company is going to go into business selling that item for just $50. You claim that the price is based on what "the market will bear", and yet it seems not to be true. Just a simple example is all it took to shatter your myth.
You are misapplying the economic principles that would maximize profits by thinking they determine when ANY profit will be made. When we say that the "market will not bear" a $100+ price for a thing that costs $100 to make, we aren't saying nobody will buy them. We're saying that the maximum profit won't occur at that price. Fewer people will buy them. Fewer will be made, and economies of scale will not help drive the cost down. But don't ever forget -- that company is still going to make a profit. It CANNOT make a profit, and cannot stay in business, if it sells its product for "what the market will bear" if the costs are higher than that.
As for selling "seconds", many companies realize that the costs can easily overcome any lower sales price, in either loss of sales of new equipment, continuing support for the second, or loss of market share when uninformed consumers believe that the "second" is a first run product and decide to buy from someone else for better quality.
This is the problem Amazon is in, and even they do try to move the "seconds" out through surplus or other channels. It's only the things that will not sell that way that they are destroying. And MY point is that these items belong to Amazon until they are sold, and the EU has no business telling them that they have to provide them to anyone for any purpose.
My point was that Amazon encourages consumers to use the defective label to get free return shipping.
Amazon does what Amazon has to do when it ships a defective product to someone. Don't blame Amazon for this problem. They're not forcing people to lie.
Then "I didn't like the color" wouldn't be an "item not as described".
"An item not as described" is not "a defective item", either. I've gotten "item not as described" before. In just one example, the item was not as described (a 50 Ohm 50 Watt resistor), but it was a perfectly functioning hot melt glue stick.
You charge me a restocking fee for a defective product, either one that you said was new and was a factory-defective product, or one of your "returns" where you tried to weasel out of a warranty of assumed fitness, and you will wind up in court. And I'll win.
they could go back to samsung, be inspected, factory reset and tested before going out to consumers who are happy to take the savings.
What "savings"?
That phone has already been through the manufacturing/distribution/retail system. It was tested before it left the factory. It was shipped to a distributor who sold and shipped it to a retailer. The retailer sold the product. At each step, the costs were added into the price of the product.
So, the product is returned for some reason. The retailer returns the money to the customer. That means they've already lost all the costs involved in the first sale.
In addition to all the costs involved in making a second sale of the same thing, they are expected to send the device back to the factory for a factory reset/flashing just to be sure nothing malicious was done to the phone while in the hands of the customer. That costs money. Shipping it around costs money.
And YOU expect the retailer (or someone) to sell the product for less than the first time. After adding on a bunch of costs. What "savings" do you imagine exist that would justify a lower selling price?
However I think the EU's point is that this is unnecessarily wasteful and that we (as a global society) would be better off if that stuff did get reconditioned for sale.
The EU's point is that this stuff belongs to Amazon until it is sold to a consumer and Amazon should not have the right to with with something it owns as it sees fit. Amazon has something that it could be forced to give or sell below cost to an EU resident, and the EU thinks it has the authority to order Amazon to do that.
In a somewhat unrelated note, I do believe that Amazon make this worse by offering free returns for anything that's defective.
Now I know you are... well, if something is defective from the seller then it is OBVIOUS that the seller should not only refund the purchase price but pay for getting it back. Forcing a customer to pay for shipping a defective product back just to get the refund on the purchase is absurd. "Free returns" is so obvious as to need no justification, except to some people.
Then they have painted themselves into a corner where the consumers fabricated defect means they can't resell that product as new.
You've fabricated the corner, because the fact that the product was SOLD means it cannot be sold as new again, defective or not.
While that's true, if Excel's RNG results in a pattern (e.g. cell A2534 is always assigned a low number and thus selected),
If you had bothered to read the finr article, you'd have learned that the tempest in the teapot is that Excel uses a pseudorandom generator. That's just like what a lot of systems use. It costs time and money to do real random generation, and it requires some hardware. PGP, IIRC, requires someone to type at the keyboard and it times the characters to generate a random number. There are radiative decay RNGs. There's even a lava lamp based RNG.
But MOST of the "random" for most software is pseudo. And the algorithms are published.
The fine article talks about how bad some RNG is because you could "reverse engineer" the algorithm. In 1980 I tested the RNG in DEC RSX-11, and I simply looked up the algorithm in the manual to see if the results from testing matched theory. In a manual. "This is how the RAND function works..." As I recall, it was based on doing a simple calculation on a double precision number and pulling the middle 32 bits out of the number as the random output. You could actually write the code to do this yourself.
it could result in immigration employees who know of this gaming the system, to do an immigrant friend a favor or even auctioning the spot to the highest bidder.
Oh for pete's sake. If an immigration employee has this much access to determining who wins and who loses, then even if the RNG is a true, completely unpredictable, physical random process based number, all he'd have to do is run the random generation process over again until his chosen winner "won".
The bigger question to me is why are they using Excel for this? Spreadsheets are for calculating things.
Yeah, calculating things. Like random numbers. They're using Excel because it works for this and didn't cost them $1 million to pay a consultant to write something in python to do the same thing.
An immigration employee could take the spreadsheet after the random numbers were assigned, and copy-paste names or random numbers around to move people to/from the selected and denied categories,
They could do this even if the RNG is truly random, so the RNG has nothing to do with the problem.
All I know is that no matter what arguments are presented, since you DON'T want gun control
Another textbook example of the dishonesty of the anti-gun activists. You see, ny not wanting MORE gun control, or not wanting useless gun control, is painted as not wanting gun control at all.
I will do everything I can to make sure it is enacted. You are that big of a piece of shit.
So you will work to strip everyone of their freedoms because of spite. This is your idea why laws should be written, to spite those you don't agree with.
You didn't realize it, but yes, you were, the same way I did when I said it was nice you could rely on laws not changing. Laws change. Relying on them never changing as an excuse to allow THIS privacy violation or THAT privacy violation to gain a foothold is naive, at best. As soon as there is a "think of the children" event and someone realizes they have all this nice juicy data that could help them find a criminal, laws will change.
You'd be surprised how nice things can be when you get rid of all the Republican jackoffs.
It is simply impossible to have a decent conversation with you when you keep resorting to name calling and politics.
Travelling to work several hours early and leaving several hours late is not practical,
I wasn't responding to a claim it was practical, I was responding to the claim that employers force people to drive at peak times.
There is already an economic interest in travel during off-peak times...
Your time is not free,
Time not being reimbursed by your employer is free to him. Also, it is hard to put a cash value on "your time" (yes, you can claim a price for it, but until someone pays you that rate it's just a claim). It is trivial to demonstrate an actual cash value to off-peak driving if on-peak driving is taxed.
peak tickets on trains etc cost more.
You've changed the goalposts. The comment I replied to was for driving, not training.
Many companies are simply not allowing more flexible conditions,
Reducing congestion does not require all companies allowing flexible hours, only some of them. I didn't claim they would allow it, I just said it would be an easier sell if someone was specific about his own working hours and why instead of simply asking for "flexible time" for all.
and are forcing people to travel at peak times which causes all the problems.
You have just demonstrated "sarcasm" in response to sarcasm. It would be good to be able to rely on that. It's a shame we cannot. Especially when "think of the children".
Because guns exist, its not possible to reduce the numbers en masse over the years if it was tried?
You miss the point. You might be able to reduce the numbers of guns en-masse if you enacted a draconian, unconstitutional ban on guns in the US. Maybe.
What you would not significantly reduce is the number of guns used by criminals. You don't realize that the people who would turn in their gun when they are banned are the non-criminals. The people who aren't going to shoot up a school anyway. The ones who will CONTINUE to ignore the law are the ones who already ignore the law -- criminals.
You will create a situation directly analogous to Prohibition in the 20's. Alcohol was made illegal. Criminals became a source of illegal stuff. People died because of the crime that Prohibition created. Criminals profited because of the higher prices they could charge for illicit stuff.
There are already people who complain that the "Drug War" is causing the problem, not solving it. They point to the fact that a vacuum in supply will be met by illegal sources. Should we create a "Gun War" to go along with it?
Many would argue that as guns got scarce and the price soared, the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to buy them or find them?
The VAST majority of people are not involved in gun crime to start with. That is, until you make owning a gun a crime, at which point only criminals will own guns. Whether or not the vast majority of people would be able to afford one, the criminals will still have them and they're the ones you have to worry about.
So a person who is 14 years old has rights, unless he is a student in a K12 school. Interesting concept. Will that pass constitutional muster?
It would also prohibit a "K12 student" who finds a gun left unattended at home from doing anything to resolve that problem. He can't pick it up to put it in the gun safe where it should be, because that would be "in control of" something he legally cannot be. He's got to leave it alone, where maybe his 8 year old brother can find it and do something stupid with it.
This should prevent most of the school shootings, at least the ones done by students.
It is "yet another law" that a disgruntled K12 student looking to shoot up his classmates will ignore. He's breaking so many laws already that it is hard to imagine one more making any difference.
As for this being a law on the parents, well, kids are pretty smart. They can figure out how to steal guns from their parents, or from people who have no "K12 students" and thus aren't subject to your new law.
If nothing else, they can get their parents off the hook by simply claiming that they dropped out the day before the shooting, and thus are not a K12 student anymore. Well, he dropped out but hadn't notified the school office yet. He was going to get around to that but was distracted by all the gunfire.
Most people would love to drive outside of peak hours if given the chance, but most of those people are forced by their employers to drive during peak hours.
Most people do not drive for a living or need to be on the roads at any specific time. Some people work for delivery companies (UPS, FedEx, etc) that require delivery drivers to be on the road during working hours. Most people work for employers who want them at work BY a specific time and to leave AFTER another specific time.
The fact that you drive to work so that the difference between your arrival and "be here by" is minimized, or you leave as soon as you can, is YOUR fault, not the employer's. The employer is not forcing you to drive during peak hours.
Taxing them more during peak hours will just be further punishment and won't do anything to ease congestion.
It will impact a lot of the casual traffic (shopping trips, etc.) and may increase car-pooling, or time-shifting for those who can work flexible hours. It may even get more employers to offer flexible hours if their employees have an economic interest in driving in off-peak times. It will help with congestion since it can reduce the traffic levels to below that threshold.
It is a lot more productive discussion for an employee to say to the boss "I am willing to work from 6AM to 3PM to avoid peak travel taxation, if that's ok with you", than for some generic "we'd like flexible hours just because" request.
why? the car that hit the ped already reported the accident and self-drove itself to the nearest police station with driver locked inside.
The car identified that there was something in the road six seconds before running it down. It didn't know it was a person, and it didn't care that it was a large obstacle in the road, either. Why would it drive to a police station? It was just defending itself against a road-intruder.
The only vehicles with these new plates are state-owned vehicles.
You missed the Subject of this story: "... trial rollout...". That means what they're doing today is intended to expand tomorrow. The fact that it's only state-owned vehicles today is irrelevant. The time to object to this idea is now, not after it becomes mandatory for all vehicles.
Also, the fact that there are current limits on what law enforcement can do with such data today does not protect us tomorrow. The law can change, and will change the first time something major happens that tracking these plates could help solve. It may not be the kidnapping of your child that creates an Amber-like amendment to data protection on this, but there will be a high-profile one that does.
Also, the concern is not just that the "GPS enabled" plate can be tracked, but that it must have a connection to the outside world to do that. How long before the first script is released to hack the plates and have them all show "RTZO SUX" on every car in the vicinity, or even the state?
Oregon keeps floating the idea of "GPS-based gas taxes". I.e., when you go to the pump, your data is downloaded and the tax for the kind of roads you drove on and at what time is added to your gas pump total. Nobody who is a proponent of this idea understands that this means that the government (taxation authority) will be recording every place you drive and when, and will be gathering that data, or they understand and don't care. The ones who do handwave away the privacy issues by claiming that the data will not be kept. And we all know that as soon as an Amber-like event occurs the government will be keeping the data so they can use it as evidence in court.
Arguing that this is ok because of laws today is ignorant of history and the ability to create new laws.
It's a pretty sad day when people put owning guns over the lives of human beings.
That's not what I've said in any way, shape, or form.
Chill out, it's a fucking toy 80% of the time.
If you can take that attitude about other people's rights, they can take that attitude with yours. Don't tell people to "chill out" when they are talking about rights, because they'll tell you the same thing when you complain about violations of yours.
A little regulation won't hurt anybody.
You are the textbook example of something I just referred to a minute or so ago in another post. WE ALREADY HAVE REGULATION. It is already illegal to kill someone else, in the context of school shootings. (Self defense is a different matter.) It is already a crime to steal a gun from someone else. It is, in most places, already a crime to carry a gun on a school campus. It is already a crime in most places to carry a concealed gun without a permit, and none of the school shooters has had one. There are already background checks.
We already have regulation. Putting this in terms of "a little regulation won't hurt anybody" is dishonest, but is the typical anti-gun talking point.
They went to the Supreme court to stop a national law to prevent the mentally ill from being reported to a national registry to prevent them from buying guns.
You're ok with people being put on a federal government list that they cannot get off of, have little control over being put on, with criteria that are subjective and change on a regular, if not daily, basis? That would be a list that is open to the public (anyone selling a gun to anyone else needs access) and brands that person as sick. This is ok with you? It's not a violation of due process or the right to privacy? Remember, you don't have to actively seek to buy a gun to be on that list, or for someone to check the list for your name.
"No Fly List" ok, too? Sex offender list for people who urinate in public, that ok?
I'd say if you approve of such a list you are mentally ill and deserve to be on the list. We're keeping an eye on you, my friend. And you'll probably respond that if I don't support such a list I must be mentally ill, so now we're both on the list.
They prevented laws that would stop bump stocks from being sold.
Bump stocks are not the problem. Banning bump stocks wouldn't solve anything, it would only create another precedent of "let's try banning X and hope it works". Let's stop now and not keep expanding X until it really does damage.
They spent 8 years convincing people that Obama wanted to take away guns and ammo, despite the only gun law changes proposed or passed by Obama were to allow carry in national parks and on Amtrak.
You don't understand the difference between what a President wants to enact and what he's able to get enacted, I see. Another sign of mental illness. You're closer to being on the national nutcase list with every sentence you speak.
They primarily are now a political organization, they raise money for republicans, they promote only republicans to their members.
I can't think of one social organization that doesn't promote political candidates that are supportive of the group ideas against those who are not. NRA is not alone.
If you want to find more egregious examples, look to the unions who use union dues to support political candidates who back the unions.
It doesn't matter that 90%+ of democratic lawmakers have the same goals for gun law changes as the majority of gun owners,
And whose statistics are those? That's rhetorical, I already know. They're made up to support stricter gun control, based on nebulous polls interpreted the way the gun control people want them to be. The question "do you support gun control" counts as support for the idea of MORE gun control, while the person who says "yes" means "I support what we already have." You can tell this because people who want to limit other people's freedom in this area never use the term "more" when they talk about "gun control", it's always "we need gun control" -- as if there were none now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't owe anyone any money until I am ready to walk out the door. Anything that can charge me for picking something up to look at it is broken design.
Steam was (and continues to be) successful, because it turned the adversarial relationship between player and publisher into a much more cooperative one.
Yeah, real cooperative. Like when I bought Duke Nukem Forever. It wouldn't do ANYTHING on my hardware, and I could not get a refund or sell it to someone who could use it because ... Steam.
Yes, Steam has made things SO much better.
You could never get your money back for a shitty game.
I couldn't get my money back for a game that refused to run at all, so tell me exactly how Steam is an improvement when it was the fact Steam was involved that kept me from recovering one cent.
with most addresses covered by only one or two options. Is this not true?
I don't know, and it is irrelevant to the issue of whether there is a government-granted monopoly status to any of them. The answer to that is "no".
There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense,
There is not now and never has been a government-granted monopoly for internet service. The cable television laws that allowed exclusive franchises and now prohibit them deal with cable television services, not ISPs.
The fact that there are 14 business-class ISPs at least for Seattle kind of proves this.
Some free market advocates seems to think that this means outlawing any kind of publicly owned entities from participating in the market,
This has nothing to do with outlawing municipal broadband. The reasonable restriction on municipal broadband systems is that they are deliberate and explicit attempts at bypassing the franchise contracts that the municipality forces some broadband providers to agree to (specifically broadband over the cable television infrastructure) while allowing the municipality to cherry pick the profitable areas of the municipality while still forcing the franchised company to provide the high-cost services to the entire franchise area. A secondary (and still reasonable objection, IMNSHO) is that the municipality it trying to directly compete with a company that it regulates and can do so without many of the costs that the company is required to deal with.
It would be like having a city law that requires all automotive repair shops to be licensed and provide service to any make and model of auto that a customer brings in, while the city runs a competing repair shop that has no licensing requirements and needs to service only the makes of cars owned by rich people. If a mechanic needs an expensive, specialized tool to work on Astin Martin TorqueMobile 3 engines and the city isn't including that model in their coverage, this is a cost that the city-regulated mechanics need to pay that the city itself avoids. There's the required auto analogy.
I don't live in Seattle, but I have several friends who still do and for a long while it was essentially Comcast only as far as cable
This is not proof of a government-granted monopoly. It may prove that there is a defacto monopoly based on economic issues -- which I, for one, have never denied. I will point out that "cable" is only one means of delivering services, and as such this is confusing the issue of "medium" with "message". If you want video services, you can use something other than cable TV; if you want broadband there are other media for that message than just cable TV wires.
The city isn't required to grant anyone a franchise,
Yes, sir, if you read the federal law on this, municipalities are required to issue franchises to any serious, reasonable competitor who agrees to the same requirements that the existing franchisee has to follow. It is explicit in the law that a competitor who feels they have been denied a franchise for inappropriate reasons may take the franchise authority to court.
You mention 14 ISPs serving Seattle, but I'm assuming you're speaking of the metro area and not the city proper.
I don't know of the difference, but all I had to do was ask Google the question "ISPs Seattle". City limits is city limits. Will every ISP run their lines to every house in the city? I don't know, and that's an issue between the ISP and the customer, not the resident and the city.
If public entities have to play by the same rules as private companies and aren't themselves given special treatment, I fail to see how they cause harm.
If you mean ALL the same rules, then I am close to agreement. There are inherent advantages to being a taxpayer backed not-for-profit that cannot be eliminated, so I still object on those terms.
then I expect that consumers are getting much better deals than most other cities.
Most other cities don't need 14 ISPs to serve al
It's the typical business model in most cities as far as cable companies go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
You cited the franchise ordnance for Seattly, but apparently failed to read it. Refer to 21.60.050 A. Read all the words.
Technically there's nothing there that necessitates a monopoly,
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
but there's also nothing stopping a company from acquiring a non-compete clause either
Do you understand that federal law overrides local law in this area? It is against FEDERAL LAW for the city of Seattle to grant an exclusive franchise to ANY cable operator. (Since there are no franchise requirements for ISPs, that's the only franchise issue here.)
Comcast was quite notorious for doing that.
Of course Comcast would try for exclusive franchises while they were still legal. It's common sense for them. BUT -- they've been illegal for more then twenty years. The last franchise agreement between Seattle and Comcast was reached in 2017 -- and the expiring one wasn't exclusive either. The franchise ordnance you cite is explicit on this.
There are also a large number of states which have laws that attempt to hinder or outright prevent local municipalities from creating their own ISP,
This has nothing to do with cable companies, and in any case does not create a government-granted monopoly. It's irrelevant.
Personally I'm of the opinion that cities should be in charge of their own infrastructure
That's a different issue. You've claimed that Comcast has a government-granted monopoly in Seattle, and the existence of three franchised cable companies, along with federal law, proves you wrong.
and allow various companies to offer competing services to the city's residents.
I've already made friends with Google, and it tells me that there are at least 6 residential and 14 business ISPs serving Seattle, and of those 14 at least 7 are gigabit. This is what you call "no competition"?
Still better than much of Seattle where the city council gave monopolies to one cable company(Comcast)
There are currently three "cable companies" franchised with the city of Seattle, and in 2015 the city did away with the 'franchise zones' that limited service areas.
There is no requirement for a franchise for an ISP. The "web" shows that there are at least 6 residential ISPs and 14 business class, with at least 7 of the latter offering gigabit network speeds.
What monopoly are you referring to?
If you want a choice of internet providers you should probably ask your local government to stop granting monopoly rights to a single company.
Which ISP has been granted a monopoly by the government? It would be nice to know which one I shouldn't be dealing with as a way of punishing one of them.
All this study shows it that bees can be trained to understand negative correlations, e.g. fewer of these symbols is good.
Do you think it is remarkable that an animal can understand that 'fewer of these symbols is good'? I think such understanding is as valuable as understanding that "more of these symbols is good" in some cases. For bees "more flowers is good" -- learned lesson. Also for bees, "fewer yellowjackets is good", as yellowjackets are a natural predator for honey bees.
As for the nonsense about the difference between "zero" (a current value) and "none" (no preexisting value) -- also not remarkable. Bees will be just as judgemental about a field that has zero flowers (because someone came and took them all) as they will towards a field with "none" flowers (because it never had any). Same result for them. Go somewhere else.
Even so, this is the sort of detail that a system designer ought to get right,
Are you trying to argue there should be "a system designer" here, and an RFP based on a requirements document should have been sent out for bids so that "system designers" could charge a huge amount of money for a simple solution, instead of a manager who uses Excel regularly saying "we need some randomness, let's use the Excel random number generator, it's good enough?"
The latter is probably what happened. A government worker knew a reasonable, good-enough solution to a simple problem and saved the taxpayers a lot of money.
When in doubt, a quality algorithm is always better than a bad one. This is the thing about security;
This has nothing to do with security. It has everything to do with people who didn't get chosen to get immigration permits trying to find any excuse they can to sue the government and overturn the luck of other people so they can coerce the luck to fall upon themselves instead. This is a much bigger failure of any "randomization" process.
The sales price of any item is determined by what the market will bear and not the cost to make it.
How remarkably naive. It is a combination of both. If it costs $100 to make something, but the market will only pay $50, then NO company is going to go into business selling that item for just $50. You claim that the price is based on what "the market will bear", and yet it seems not to be true. Just a simple example is all it took to shatter your myth.
You are misapplying the economic principles that would maximize profits by thinking they determine when ANY profit will be made. When we say that the "market will not bear" a $100+ price for a thing that costs $100 to make, we aren't saying nobody will buy them. We're saying that the maximum profit won't occur at that price. Fewer people will buy them. Fewer will be made, and economies of scale will not help drive the cost down. But don't ever forget -- that company is still going to make a profit. It CANNOT make a profit, and cannot stay in business, if it sells its product for "what the market will bear" if the costs are higher than that.
As for selling "seconds", many companies realize that the costs can easily overcome any lower sales price, in either loss of sales of new equipment, continuing support for the second, or loss of market share when uninformed consumers believe that the "second" is a first run product and decide to buy from someone else for better quality.
This is the problem Amazon is in, and even they do try to move the "seconds" out through surplus or other channels. It's only the things that will not sell that way that they are destroying. And MY point is that these items belong to Amazon until they are sold, and the EU has no business telling them that they have to provide them to anyone for any purpose.
My point was that Amazon encourages consumers to use the defective label to get free return shipping.
Amazon does what Amazon has to do when it ships a defective product to someone. Don't blame Amazon for this problem. They're not forcing people to lie.
Then "I didn't like the color" wouldn't be an "item not as described".
"An item not as described" is not "a defective item", either. I've gotten "item not as described" before. In just one example, the item was not as described (a 50 Ohm 50 Watt resistor), but it was a perfectly functioning hot melt glue stick.
Alright, but keep the restocking fee.
You charge me a restocking fee for a defective product, either one that you said was new and was a factory-defective product, or one of your "returns" where you tried to weasel out of a warranty of assumed fitness, and you will wind up in court. And I'll win.
they could go back to samsung, be inspected, factory reset and tested before going out to consumers who are happy to take the savings.
What "savings"?
That phone has already been through the manufacturing/distribution/retail system. It was tested before it left the factory. It was shipped to a distributor who sold and shipped it to a retailer. The retailer sold the product. At each step, the costs were added into the price of the product.
So, the product is returned for some reason. The retailer returns the money to the customer. That means they've already lost all the costs involved in the first sale.
In addition to all the costs involved in making a second sale of the same thing, they are expected to send the device back to the factory for a factory reset/flashing just to be sure nothing malicious was done to the phone while in the hands of the customer. That costs money. Shipping it around costs money.
And YOU expect the retailer (or someone) to sell the product for less than the first time. After adding on a bunch of costs. What "savings" do you imagine exist that would justify a lower selling price?
However I think the EU's point is that this is unnecessarily wasteful and that we (as a global society) would be better off if that stuff did get reconditioned for sale.
The EU's point is that this stuff belongs to Amazon until it is sold to a consumer and Amazon should not have the right to with with something it owns as it sees fit. Amazon has something that it could be forced to give or sell below cost to an EU resident, and the EU thinks it has the authority to order Amazon to do that.
In a somewhat unrelated note, I do believe that Amazon make this worse by offering free returns for anything that's defective.
Now I know you are ... well, if something is defective from the seller then it is OBVIOUS that the seller should not only refund the purchase price but pay for getting it back. Forcing a customer to pay for shipping a defective product back just to get the refund on the purchase is absurd. "Free returns" is so obvious as to need no justification, except to some people.
Then they have painted themselves into a corner where the consumers fabricated defect means they can't resell that product as new.
You've fabricated the corner, because the fact that the product was SOLD means it cannot be sold as new again, defective or not.
While that's true, if Excel's RNG results in a pattern (e.g. cell A2534 is always assigned a low number and thus selected),
If you had bothered to read the finr article, you'd have learned that the tempest in the teapot is that Excel uses a pseudorandom generator. That's just like what a lot of systems use. It costs time and money to do real random generation, and it requires some hardware. PGP, IIRC, requires someone to type at the keyboard and it times the characters to generate a random number. There are radiative decay RNGs. There's even a lava lamp based RNG.
But MOST of the "random" for most software is pseudo. And the algorithms are published.
The fine article talks about how bad some RNG is because you could "reverse engineer" the algorithm. In 1980 I tested the RNG in DEC RSX-11, and I simply looked up the algorithm in the manual to see if the results from testing matched theory. In a manual. "This is how the RAND function works..." As I recall, it was based on doing a simple calculation on a double precision number and pulling the middle 32 bits out of the number as the random output. You could actually write the code to do this yourself.
it could result in immigration employees who know of this gaming the system, to do an immigrant friend a favor or even auctioning the spot to the highest bidder.
Oh for pete's sake. If an immigration employee has this much access to determining who wins and who loses, then even if the RNG is a true, completely unpredictable, physical random process based number, all he'd have to do is run the random generation process over again until his chosen winner "won".
The bigger question to me is why are they using Excel for this? Spreadsheets are for calculating things.
Yeah, calculating things. Like random numbers. They're using Excel because it works for this and didn't cost them $1 million to pay a consultant to write something in python to do the same thing.
An immigration employee could take the spreadsheet after the random numbers were assigned, and copy-paste names or random numbers around to move people to/from the selected and denied categories,
They could do this even if the RNG is truly random, so the RNG has nothing to do with the problem.
All I know is that no matter what arguments are presented, since you DON'T want gun control
Another textbook example of the dishonesty of the anti-gun activists. You see, ny not wanting MORE gun control, or not wanting useless gun control, is painted as not wanting gun control at all.
I will do everything I can to make sure it is enacted. You are that big of a piece of shit.
So you will work to strip everyone of their freedoms because of spite. This is your idea why laws should be written, to spite those you don't agree with.
I wasn't being sarcastic.
You didn't realize it, but yes, you were, the same way I did when I said it was nice you could rely on laws not changing. Laws change. Relying on them never changing as an excuse to allow THIS privacy violation or THAT privacy violation to gain a foothold is naive, at best. As soon as there is a "think of the children" event and someone realizes they have all this nice juicy data that could help them find a criminal, laws will change.
You'd be surprised how nice things can be when you get rid of all the Republican jackoffs.
It is simply impossible to have a decent conversation with you when you keep resorting to name calling and politics.
Travelling to work several hours early and leaving several hours late is not practical,
I wasn't responding to a claim it was practical, I was responding to the claim that employers force people to drive at peak times.
There is already an economic interest in travel during off-peak times... Your time is not free,
Time not being reimbursed by your employer is free to him. Also, it is hard to put a cash value on "your time" (yes, you can claim a price for it, but until someone pays you that rate it's just a claim). It is trivial to demonstrate an actual cash value to off-peak driving if on-peak driving is taxed.
peak tickets on trains etc cost more.
You've changed the goalposts. The comment I replied to was for driving, not training.
Many companies are simply not allowing more flexible conditions,
Reducing congestion does not require all companies allowing flexible hours, only some of them. I didn't claim they would allow it, I just said it would be an easier sell if someone was specific about his own working hours and why instead of simply asking for "flexible time" for all.
and are forcing people to travel at peak times which causes all the problems.
There's that word "forcing" again.
You have just demonstrated "sarcasm" in response to sarcasm. It would be good to be able to rely on that. It's a shame we cannot. Especially when "think of the children".
Because guns exist, its not possible to reduce the numbers en masse over the years if it was tried?
You miss the point. You might be able to reduce the numbers of guns en-masse if you enacted a draconian, unconstitutional ban on guns in the US. Maybe.
What you would not significantly reduce is the number of guns used by criminals. You don't realize that the people who would turn in their gun when they are banned are the non-criminals. The people who aren't going to shoot up a school anyway. The ones who will CONTINUE to ignore the law are the ones who already ignore the law -- criminals.
You will create a situation directly analogous to Prohibition in the 20's. Alcohol was made illegal. Criminals became a source of illegal stuff. People died because of the crime that Prohibition created. Criminals profited because of the higher prices they could charge for illicit stuff.
There are already people who complain that the "Drug War" is causing the problem, not solving it. They point to the fact that a vacuum in supply will be met by illegal sources. Should we create a "Gun War" to go along with it?
Many would argue that as guns got scarce and the price soared, the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to buy them or find them?
The VAST majority of people are not involved in gun crime to start with. That is, until you make owning a gun a crime, at which point only criminals will own guns. Whether or not the vast majority of people would be able to afford one, the criminals will still have them and they're the ones you have to worry about.
No violation of 2nd Amendment rights.
So a person who is 14 years old has rights, unless he is a student in a K12 school. Interesting concept. Will that pass constitutional muster?
It would also prohibit a "K12 student" who finds a gun left unattended at home from doing anything to resolve that problem. He can't pick it up to put it in the gun safe where it should be, because that would be "in control of" something he legally cannot be. He's got to leave it alone, where maybe his 8 year old brother can find it and do something stupid with it.
This should prevent most of the school shootings, at least the ones done by students.
It is "yet another law" that a disgruntled K12 student looking to shoot up his classmates will ignore. He's breaking so many laws already that it is hard to imagine one more making any difference.
As for this being a law on the parents, well, kids are pretty smart. They can figure out how to steal guns from their parents, or from people who have no "K12 students" and thus aren't subject to your new law.
If nothing else, they can get their parents off the hook by simply claiming that they dropped out the day before the shooting, and thus are not a K12 student anymore. Well, he dropped out but hadn't notified the school office yet. He was going to get around to that but was distracted by all the gunfire.
It depends. If the idea is to eventually have all state-owned vehicles with digital license plates
Read the summary, at least. It talks about owners avoiding lines at DMV, etc. That means everyone, not just state fleets.
Fortunately, California is a state that has led the nation in privacy protection laws.
It's good to rely on the fact that laws never change.
Most people would love to drive outside of peak hours if given the chance, but most of those people are forced by their employers to drive during peak hours.
Most people do not drive for a living or need to be on the roads at any specific time. Some people work for delivery companies (UPS, FedEx, etc) that require delivery drivers to be on the road during working hours. Most people work for employers who want them at work BY a specific time and to leave AFTER another specific time.
The fact that you drive to work so that the difference between your arrival and "be here by" is minimized, or you leave as soon as you can, is YOUR fault, not the employer's. The employer is not forcing you to drive during peak hours.
Taxing them more during peak hours will just be further punishment and won't do anything to ease congestion.
It will impact a lot of the casual traffic (shopping trips, etc.) and may increase car-pooling, or time-shifting for those who can work flexible hours. It may even get more employers to offer flexible hours if their employees have an economic interest in driving in off-peak times. It will help with congestion since it can reduce the traffic levels to below that threshold.
It is a lot more productive discussion for an employee to say to the boss "I am willing to work from 6AM to 3PM to avoid peak travel taxation, if that's ok with you", than for some generic "we'd like flexible hours just because" request.
why? the car that hit the ped already reported the accident and self-drove itself to the nearest police station with driver locked inside.
The car identified that there was something in the road six seconds before running it down. It didn't know it was a person, and it didn't care that it was a large obstacle in the road, either. Why would it drive to a police station? It was just defending itself against a road-intruder.
The only vehicles with these new plates are state-owned vehicles.
You missed the Subject of this story: "... trial rollout ...". That means what they're doing today is intended to expand tomorrow. The fact that it's only state-owned vehicles today is irrelevant. The time to object to this idea is now, not after it becomes mandatory for all vehicles.
Also, the fact that there are current limits on what law enforcement can do with such data today does not protect us tomorrow. The law can change, and will change the first time something major happens that tracking these plates could help solve. It may not be the kidnapping of your child that creates an Amber-like amendment to data protection on this, but there will be a high-profile one that does.
Also, the concern is not just that the "GPS enabled" plate can be tracked, but that it must have a connection to the outside world to do that. How long before the first script is released to hack the plates and have them all show "RTZO SUX" on every car in the vicinity, or even the state?
Oregon keeps floating the idea of "GPS-based gas taxes". I.e., when you go to the pump, your data is downloaded and the tax for the kind of roads you drove on and at what time is added to your gas pump total. Nobody who is a proponent of this idea understands that this means that the government (taxation authority) will be recording every place you drive and when, and will be gathering that data, or they understand and don't care. The ones who do handwave away the privacy issues by claiming that the data will not be kept. And we all know that as soon as an Amber-like event occurs the government will be keeping the data so they can use it as evidence in court.
Arguing that this is ok because of laws today is ignorant of history and the ability to create new laws.
It's a pretty sad day when people put owning guns over the lives of human beings.
That's not what I've said in any way, shape, or form.
Chill out, it's a fucking toy 80% of the time.
If you can take that attitude about other people's rights, they can take that attitude with yours. Don't tell people to "chill out" when they are talking about rights, because they'll tell you the same thing when you complain about violations of yours.
A little regulation won't hurt anybody.
You are the textbook example of something I just referred to a minute or so ago in another post. WE ALREADY HAVE REGULATION. It is already illegal to kill someone else, in the context of school shootings. (Self defense is a different matter.) It is already a crime to steal a gun from someone else. It is, in most places, already a crime to carry a gun on a school campus. It is already a crime in most places to carry a concealed gun without a permit, and none of the school shooters has had one. There are already background checks.
We already have regulation. Putting this in terms of "a little regulation won't hurt anybody" is dishonest, but is the typical anti-gun talking point.
They went to the Supreme court to stop a national law to prevent the mentally ill from being reported to a national registry to prevent them from buying guns.
You're ok with people being put on a federal government list that they cannot get off of, have little control over being put on, with criteria that are subjective and change on a regular, if not daily, basis? That would be a list that is open to the public (anyone selling a gun to anyone else needs access) and brands that person as sick. This is ok with you? It's not a violation of due process or the right to privacy? Remember, you don't have to actively seek to buy a gun to be on that list, or for someone to check the list for your name.
"No Fly List" ok, too? Sex offender list for people who urinate in public, that ok?
I'd say if you approve of such a list you are mentally ill and deserve to be on the list. We're keeping an eye on you, my friend. And you'll probably respond that if I don't support such a list I must be mentally ill, so now we're both on the list.
They prevented laws that would stop bump stocks from being sold.
Bump stocks are not the problem. Banning bump stocks wouldn't solve anything, it would only create another precedent of "let's try banning X and hope it works". Let's stop now and not keep expanding X until it really does damage.
They spent 8 years convincing people that Obama wanted to take away guns and ammo, despite the only gun law changes proposed or passed by Obama were to allow carry in national parks and on Amtrak.
You don't understand the difference between what a President wants to enact and what he's able to get enacted, I see. Another sign of mental illness. You're closer to being on the national nutcase list with every sentence you speak.
They primarily are now a political organization, they raise money for republicans, they promote only republicans to their members.
I can't think of one social organization that doesn't promote political candidates that are supportive of the group ideas against those who are not. NRA is not alone. If you want to find more egregious examples, look to the unions who use union dues to support political candidates who back the unions.
It doesn't matter that 90%+ of democratic lawmakers have the same goals for gun law changes as the majority of gun owners,
And whose statistics are those? That's rhetorical, I already know. They're made up to support stricter gun control, based on nebulous polls interpreted the way the gun control people want them to be. The question "do you support gun control" counts as support for the idea of MORE gun control, while the person who says "yes" means "I support what we already have." You can tell this because people who want to limit other people's freedom in this area never use the term "more" when they talk about "gun control", it's always "we need gun control" -- as if there were none now.