Billy Johnson, age 8, was arrested Monday at his home, after an anonymous tip to authorities indicated that he was planning on causing a volcanic eruption using common household ingredients like vinegar and baking soda. His 6-year-old sister, Sally, was seen pointing and laughing at the young terrorist as he was led away in chains.
Maybe I have a mind filled with depravity after reading/. for this long, but I have to admit I expected quite a different story after you used the phrase "bad shrink-wrapping experience";)
No, that's not it at all. Net neutrality requires that the ISP maintain QoS based on nothing more than what the customer pays for - namely, a certain amount of bandwidth. If the customer exceeds that bandwidth, they get throttled. If they don't, the ISP routes their traffic normally, regardless of any other property of that traffic (including source, destination, port numbers, packet size, or the data contained therein). Filtering traffic based on source is a subset of what ISPs can do to create a non-neutral network.
If Internet TV suffers because it requires bandwidth in excess of what the customer is paying for, then screw the customer. If Internet TV suffers because Comcast can't support that many customers using said bandwidth, then Comcast can go upgrade its tubes.
I agree, although I have to qualify that by prefacing it with an "if you're going to disincentivize carbon emissions/pollution". The arbitrage situation created between states by these regulations is similar to one of the two failures of the Kyoto Protocol: it didn't hold some producers/polluters to the same standards as others.
Of course, the other failure of Kyoto - the sham of carbon credits - is also played out in the scenario we've been talking about, although it's not actually called carbon credits here. Carbon credits are just a veiled attempt to redistribute wealth without having a significant impact on carbon emissions.
Really, this whole situation is just a minicosm of everything that was wrong with Kyoto.
Businesses are large consumers of energy, and they definitely consider power costs when they decide where to locate. Excessive power costs can prevent power company growth. If anything, this simply means that businesses will locate outside of states that adopt these regulations. If there is an effect on the utilities, it will simply be that utilities will locate power plants in states more amenable to their presence in order to dilute their exposure to the regulations. Those plants will have a higher profit margin due to upward pricing pressures in the states with these regulations. In other words, environmental disincentives equal lost jobs.
Your other reasons are flawed as well. Ultimately, somebody is going to buy coal-generated electricity, if for no other reason than because that's all the power that's left to buy. Since coal plants make up the bulk of the base generation capacity in the US, most, if not all, of that capacity will always be used. That means that any pricing pressure on coal-generated power (and gas/oil generated power, for that matter), such as increased cost to produce, will ultimately be passed on to the consumer living in the area where the cost to produce has increased, regardless of whether that customer is buying their electricity individually or as part of a co-op.
By the way, it took rolling blackouts, intense price-gouging, fraudulent and other illegal business practices, and demolished retirement accounts to result in public outcry over electricity in California. Sharply increased gasoline prices still have yet to produce true public outcry. The community isn't fighting back in any meaningful fashion over energy prices, and the price increases that will result from Spitzer's plan aren't going to change that. The public will simply weather the storm, regardless of whether they're paying for improved technology or for keeping today's per-plant emissions levels.
Incentivization of alternative energy sources is the way to go, although it won't make Eliot Spitzer seem like the mighty slayer of the evil power companies.
Disincentivizing pollution from power plants won't work. Coal plants represent a great deal of base power production, meaning that they are always on even during non-peak hours. There's not a lot of slop to play around with, so pollution won't actually decrease as long as the power plants can just raise their rates instead of installing pollution-reduction equipment. With coal in such a dominant position in the US, there's not enough competition to prevent that from happening.
The right way to go about this is to offer positive incentives to companies that are developing alternative power sources into cost-effective solutions. One could argue that the revenues from pollution disincentives could be piped directly into alternative energy incentives. However, one should also realize that the left wing would have an easier time of soaking the rich by doing it themselves through taxes, instead of going through the energy industry (since poor people have to pay their electric bills, too). The only explanation for the left wing not doing it that way is that fining the power companies makes for better headlines.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer's administration is to issue regulations requiring power plants to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions We're being taxed and surcharged into oblivion, and we're passing the savings on to you!
System Shock 2 expertly held the possibility just barely out of reach of meeting another normal human being on board the Von Braun and Rickenbacker. Meeting Polito, your single human voice of guidance, halfway through, only to find out the truth of what SHODAN had done to her, was a stroke of storytelling so masterful that M. Night Shyamalan should cry himself to sleep at night for sucking by comparison.
the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD So does that mean that the Canadian government is going to require that online stores abandon DRM since CDs work fine without it?
Exactly. Regulating who can own how many media outlets within a market is questionable, yes, but regulating what they can say in those channels clearly trods on the First Amendment.
BTW, where did the FCC gain the authority to regulate newspapers?
Slashdot Mirror
Moderating the influence of urban areas over rural areas seems like a check to me.
Billy Johnson, age 8, was arrested Monday at his home, after an anonymous tip to authorities indicated that he was planning on causing a volcanic eruption using common household ingredients like vinegar and baking soda. His 6-year-old sister, Sally, was seen pointing and laughing at the young terrorist as he was led away in chains.
Dirk Flanksteak!
Slap Meatrock!
Big McLargehuge!
The "crotchety old man who lives across the street and yells at us to stay off his lawn" of all bombs.
you can always opt for the more refined "I figger."
Ahhhhh, feels like home!
A quick Google search turned up the rough conservative estimate of one square millimeter of copper bus bar per 10 amperes of current.
Maybe I have a mind filled with depravity after reading /. for this long, but I have to admit I expected quite a different story after you used the phrase "bad shrink-wrapping experience" ;)
Well, it's also filed under "Your Rights Online", however that works.
I was replying to this post, as indicated by clicking the "Parent" link on my post.
Fantastic! Now nobody even has to be pirating anything in order for customers to get treated like criminals. Go go gadget DRM.
No, that's not it at all. Net neutrality requires that the ISP maintain QoS based on nothing more than what the customer pays for - namely, a certain amount of bandwidth. If the customer exceeds that bandwidth, they get throttled. If they don't, the ISP routes their traffic normally, regardless of any other property of that traffic (including source, destination, port numbers, packet size, or the data contained therein). Filtering traffic based on source is a subset of what ISPs can do to create a non-neutral network.
If Internet TV suffers because it requires bandwidth in excess of what the customer is paying for, then screw the customer. If Internet TV suffers because Comcast can't support that many customers using said bandwidth, then Comcast can go upgrade its tubes.
Well, at least we still have nearly a thousand years of ice left in Halley's Comet, thus solving our global warming problems once and for all.
I agree, although I have to qualify that by prefacing it with an "if you're going to disincentivize carbon emissions/pollution". The arbitrage situation created between states by these regulations is similar to one of the two failures of the Kyoto Protocol: it didn't hold some producers/polluters to the same standards as others.
Of course, the other failure of Kyoto - the sham of carbon credits - is also played out in the scenario we've been talking about, although it's not actually called carbon credits here. Carbon credits are just a veiled attempt to redistribute wealth without having a significant impact on carbon emissions.
Really, this whole situation is just a minicosm of everything that was wrong with Kyoto.
Your other reasons are flawed as well. Ultimately, somebody is going to buy coal-generated electricity, if for no other reason than because that's all the power that's left to buy. Since coal plants make up the bulk of the base generation capacity in the US, most, if not all, of that capacity will always be used. That means that any pricing pressure on coal-generated power (and gas/oil generated power, for that matter), such as increased cost to produce, will ultimately be passed on to the consumer living in the area where the cost to produce has increased, regardless of whether that customer is buying their electricity individually or as part of a co-op.
By the way, it took rolling blackouts, intense price-gouging, fraudulent and other illegal business practices, and demolished retirement accounts to result in public outcry over electricity in California. Sharply increased gasoline prices still have yet to produce true public outcry. The community isn't fighting back in any meaningful fashion over energy prices, and the price increases that will result from Spitzer's plan aren't going to change that. The public will simply weather the storm, regardless of whether they're paying for improved technology or for keeping today's per-plant emissions levels.
Incentivization of alternative energy sources is the way to go, although it won't make Eliot Spitzer seem like the mighty slayer of the evil power companies.
Disincentivizing pollution from power plants won't work. Coal plants represent a great deal of base power production, meaning that they are always on even during non-peak hours. There's not a lot of slop to play around with, so pollution won't actually decrease as long as the power plants can just raise their rates instead of installing pollution-reduction equipment. With coal in such a dominant position in the US, there's not enough competition to prevent that from happening.
The right way to go about this is to offer positive incentives to companies that are developing alternative power sources into cost-effective solutions. One could argue that the revenues from pollution disincentives could be piped directly into alternative energy incentives. However, one should also realize that the left wing would have an easier time of soaking the rich by doing it themselves through taxes, instead of going through the energy industry (since poor people have to pay their electric bills, too). The only explanation for the left wing not doing it that way is that fining the power companies makes for better headlines.
...the wooden vampire-impaling kind of stake? Because if so, I think Microsoft's got it all backwards.
Bender: A grim day for robot-kind. Ah, well, we can always build more killbots!
My money is on hybridization with the Dawson's Creek Trapper Keeper Ultra Keeper Futura S 2000.
(spoiler warning)
System Shock 2 expertly held the possibility just barely out of reach of meeting another normal human being on board the Von Braun and Rickenbacker. Meeting Polito, your single human voice of guidance, halfway through, only to find out the truth of what SHODAN had done to her, was a stroke of storytelling so masterful that M. Night Shyamalan should cry himself to sleep at night for sucking by comparison.
Don't we have a Politics section for stuff like this?
Exactly. Regulating who can own how many media outlets within a market is questionable, yes, but regulating what they can say in those channels clearly trods on the First Amendment.
BTW, where did the FCC gain the authority to regulate newspapers?
Of course, once you've made all that money, don't you have better things to do than vote?