It's the right approach. Go ahead... you can say it.
Actually my thesis was that it's not. If the government IS going to intervene the better approach is to use antitrust (ala the breakup of AT&T and the Microsoft browser suit) and antifraud (by defining Internet service to include all ports, being able to do servers as well as clients), rather than attempt common-carrier style communication regulation.
DOJ and the courts have a big enough hammer and historically have had the will to swing it in successful ways. But it doesn't have to micro-manage when it isn't clobbering a company gone wrong. FTC is no slouch either. ISPs are NOT common-carriers and making them so would mean turning them into a command economy and killing the Internet goose.
I explicitly ignored non- or de-regulatory approaches.
Do the candidates know what Net Neutrality means? I have seen no evidence that any of them do.
I just turned in a term paper on Network Neutrality issues and regulatory approaches to them.
One thing I discovered was that Obama (or at least his relevant policy wonk and/or speechwriter) was quite aware of the issues and was coming down strongly on the side of regulating to prevent entertainment/ISP conglomerate oligopolists from using their control of the pipes to strangle their content and services competition and shaft their customers.
Which may not be the right approach. But they did seem to be QUITE up on things.
Relevant Obama quote, from a June 8 2006 podcast:
The topic today is net neutrality. The Internet today is an open platform where the demand for websites and services dictates success. You've got barriers to entry that are low and equal for all comers... I can say what I want without censorship. I don't have to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with Internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can't pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes. So here's my view. We can't have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the Internet and that's why I'm supporting what is called net neutrality.
The microwave oven was a commercial product 19 years before Star Trek first aired.
The Star Trek communicator was not a cellphone. It was a handheld walkie-talkie, communicating with a single base station (the ship). Such had been in existence since at least WW II. Radio telephones also predate Star Trek by 20 years - initially as an automotive accessory with a handset in the front connected to a big box in the trunk, though getting the whole thing into a handheld didn't happen until 1973.
Cellular telephony is a separate invention. It's about reusing the same spectrum by progressively subdividing a coordinated grid of progressively lower-powered base stations as more phones are deployed, while adjusting the transmit power of the phones according to the size of the cell they're in to avoid interference with other users in nearby cells. This handles both the issues of finding enough spectrum to serve an ever-increasing subscriber base (rather than providing a handfull of party lines per city) and matching the financing of the buildout to the revenue from subscriber fees.
What Star Trek communicators DID invent (in addition to popularizing the idea of a handy pocket communicator) was the clamshell form factor. Motorola acknowledged this by naming the first clamshell cellphone model the "Star TAK" ("TAK" having been part of the naming scheme of their phones for some time) .
- There was pressure from the Android community. -- Motorola promised an unlocking tool "by the second half of 2011". - When it didn't appear, complaints were mad to the FCC about violation of a Part C rule that appears to REQUIRE a way for ordinary users to unlock the bootloader and load anything they want.
So this may be Motorola's response, 14 1/2 months late.
I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola held off, or limited the models unlocked, to avoid violating contract provisions with carriers that resell their phones with their service plans at greatly discounted prices.
Turn Left! Or so the Nav system of my unlocked phone said, even though I was in the middle of the bridge...
My LOCKED nav system did just about that to me last year.
I was driving east into Hawthorne NV on an old desert road. Coming through the last pass it told me to turn left midway through the last pass.. Taking the turn would have sent me down about a hundred feet of cliff.
It looks like there was once a wagon road there, which had washed out long ago. Of course the USGS still had the track on their maps, the map vendor had included it, and the nav system picked it because it was slightly shorter than going down the hill to the highway into town.
Some of our friends in a Prius were directed onto the 4x4 trail into Bodie. (Fortunately it was midsummer, and they were JUST able to make it - much to the astonishment of a couple of offroaders they encountered along the way.)
Trusting nav systems, especially in rural areas, is a great way to get killed (typically by getting stuck far from cellphone service), unlocked phone or not.
It is possible they do not believe everything they read or are told by someone else and are making choices based on profits.
-or-
Ever buy electronics / just about everything else at walmart? They support China and China has substantial environmental issues due to products sold at walmart.
Or maybe Nintendo wasn't even aware of this latest politically-correct hype until the hypemeisters called the company's PR number to see how the company was doing on their personal hotbutton issue and got a "Who the heck are you and why should we care?" brushoff.
I know I never encountered the term "conflict minerals" until reading this thread. To paraphrase Arlo: If they want to change the world and stuff they need to sing at least loud enough to be noticed.
Whether or not the data contains any personal information is the real question because if there is any then someone will figure out how to get at it.
Even when personal information "has been stripped" it can be rediscovered in various ways.
For instance: At the start of WWII, US authorities used census data to round up people of Japanese descent. They didn't have the individuals' names. But they had the number on each block. So they just raided until they had accumulated that number.
Great, now I'll need to find some matching sun glasses to go with my tin foil hat.
Only if you've had your brain injected with the artificial retroviral biotech material.
This is just an application of an existing technology to primates. No big news.
The technique involves injecting the brain in the desired region with an artificial retrovirus-like agent. This contains a gene for an artificial surface protein that triggers the nerve to fire when exposed to a particular color of light, along with a promoter that activates the gene only in the correct type of neuron. The combination of the selective promoter and selective injection site makes it possible to target a particular set of nerves.
A couple of similar gene hacks can be used to get output by making selected cells flash in one of two colors when they fire.
(I read TFA hoping they'd found a way to use light to fire general nerves without first modifying them. But that was apparently not the case.)
So if the mind controllers haven't been drilling holes in your skull and sticking needles into your brain you don't need the shades.
I donated and phone-banked for Obama in 2008. But his record on Constitutional issues is uniformly abysmal. I am now convinced that he has no moral principles at all.
He's a typical major politician from Chicago, the unabashed pinnacle of US big-city machine politics since the end of Tammany Hall. Chicago was "The City That Works" because ANYBODY could buy the government functions at well-known and affordable prices.
Those of us with ANY experience with Chicago politics knew this even before he won the Democratic nomination - and told everyone whose ear we could bend. We're not surprised at all with how things are going, even now. This is EXACTLY what we expected.
(What will be interesting is whether Tampa and the Republican machine will make the same mistakes with this year's Republican convention that Chicago and the Democrat machine made with the Democratic convention in '68.)
To me as a European it is baffling how much sh*t you Americans take from your government and never take action.
Sure we take action. (Look at the "Liberty Movement" and the campaign of Ron Paul for just one example.)
It's just that the media that's reporting what goes on here to you Europeans is one of the major players we're opposing. So they're blacking it out.
In the age of the Internet their success is no longer total. Further, their attempts are gradually destroying, in the marketplace, the news arms of these conglomerates, accelerating the switch to Internet-based news reporting. But the blackout has been successful enough to cripple the political resistance for at least two presidential cycles.
The main political success so far was turning over the House of Representatives thanks to the Tea Party - which by then had been largely infiltrated and taken over from the Liberty wing by their bedfellows the Neocons. As usual with a revolution one branch of the old power structure infiltrated and co-opted the more succsessful portions of the organized opposition.
The earliest drives (RAMAC and the like) also had integral disks (with the spin motor integral inside the hub - with spare windings so you didn't lose your data if one burned out). But soon after that they went to removable packs, which was the way it worked for a while, with "washing machine" drives and "single platter in slot" drives.
But they had a lot of problems with contamination. And as the bits got closer together and the heads flew lower they were running into a serious issue.
The breakthrough came when IBM noticed that it had built less than twice as many packs as it had built drives. Turns out that the usual usage pattern was not to swap packs, but to do backups by copying to tape and to do "swaps" by copying tape to disk. Tape was far cheaper per bit than disk packs.
So they realized they could solve the contamination problem by having a sealed unit. The first version had the platters, heads, and cooling air filters in a sealed uint but the motors and actuators were external. The "packs", with heads and such, were still swappable. It also moved the heads to a parking area and let them land on the disk, rather than having a complex mechanism to lift them off the surface when shutting down. This was the "Winchester" - which became a generic term for head-landing disk drives and then for disk drives in general.
But electronics was getting very cheap and the mechanical connection to the external machinery was still problematic. So two generations later they went for an integral sealed unit with motors, actuators, and an electronic board. Thus was the current paradigm born. And with economy of scale and even tighter tolerances it has stayed that way until now (when semiconductors are finally looking to push disk drive technology into end-of-life).
This thing is glacial, whereas the original card readers read these things as fast as you could push them through.
Actually the early electronic ones (the ones with relays hooked to the computers with tubes), ran the card about one per second. Still faster than this, of course. (The sorters ran a lot faster.)
Go all the way back to Hollerith and even a sorter was about the same speed:
- Worker puts the card in the "press" and closes it (pushing pins through the holes and into the (pool of mercury?) back contact.)
- Solenoid releases the spring-loaded door on the appropriate bin.
- Worker opens the press, extracts the card, puts it into the bin, and closes the bin door.
In the absense of triggering some government program that gives more tax reduction than the money given away, it is still a loss. He might not pay taxes on the money he doesn't get (because he had it paid to the workers instead). But that normally will be taxed at less than 100%. So he's still out-of-pocket.
IMHO what this says is that the CEO thinks that the compensation packages the company had set up ended up giving him too much, and the workers too little, for the long-term health of the company. So he fixes it by reorganizing it - and gets a boost in morale and some good press as a bonus.
He probably also ends up ahead long-term because the company does far better in the future than it would have without this action. But he also might be doing it because he really is an idealist and/or does care for his workers.
Either way (if he's not a compensated psychopath who doesn't feel anything much) he gets to feel very good in his eventual retirement.
Intel AMT includes hardware-based remote management, security, power-management, and remote-configuration features. These features allow an IT technician to access an AMT featured PC remotely.
Intel AMT relies on a hardware-based out-of-band (OOB) communication channel that operates below the OS level, the channel is independent of the state of the OS (present, missing, corrupted, down). The communication channel is also independent of the PC's power state, the presence of a management agent, and the state of many hardware components (such as hard disk drives and memory).
Most AMT features are available OOB, regardless of PC power state. Other features require the PC to be powered up (such as console redirection via serial over LAN (SOL), agent presence checking, and network traffic filtering). Intel AMT has remote power-up capability.
Hardware-based features can be combined with scripting to automate maintenance and service.
Which means all sorts of bad guys can potentially get at it, too. And this is at a level below the OS, so even the OS can't defend against being turned into a zombie.
Toshiba isn't the only one that does this - with AMT or some other spy hardware/firmware combo. Plug your machine into an Ethernet, turn it off, and see if the green light on the Ethernet jack stays on.
Lincoln did try [buying out all the existing slaves] and was rejected well past the South beginning to lose the Civil War.
I would be interested in any references you have for that. Not that I doubt you, but for my own follow up and to inject the references into debate on a non-slashdot forum. This issue is still discussed in libertarian circles and I have not heard anyone assert that Lincoln actually tried this before the war started.
As for the siege of Richmond discussions (for which a reference to the offer would also be handy), you may be conflating two issues: Ending slavery and ending secession. The southern states had a lot of other gripes about impositions from/via the Federal government and the richer northern states. (Still do, in fact. It's just that pretty much ALL the states are getting the shaft in one form or another these days.)
You're making the charmingly naive assumption that all the slaveowners would be willing to sell, and that it would be easy to ban further importation.
What made you think I was talking about voluntary sales? That would drive the (already very high) price through the roof. We're talking "eminent domain" here. Payment is about satisfying the "takings" clause of the 5th amendment. (Ending their status as property would be a taking.)
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
And if it were the Federal Government could have ended slavery for a LOT less money and an ENORMOUSLY lower number of lost lives by just buying all the slaves and freeing them, as was suggested at the time by Peter Cooper.
This would meet the constitutional requirements - or of a minor constitutional tweak was deemed necessary it would likely have succeeded if tried.
As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border.
You're right. I misremebered. Big Mac is farther from Motor City than the west side of New York STATE (and a few cities, such as Erie.) But New York is wide and going all the way to the city doubles the distance (even with a shortcut through Canada and Buffalo,)
During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down...
Different blackouts. I was talking about 1965, not 2003. ("The Great Northeast Blackout" - which was "THE" because it was The Big One for 38 years, until it got a comparable sibling.)
Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side.
I do recall that Compuserve saying they set up out there to get primary feeds from two significantly different parts of the grid. (I used to work in the next building south of them and took the tour. It was outside the city limits but not by any 20 miles.) Perhaps I misunderstood and they were talking about two primary lines in Detroit Edison's grid, making me three strikes for three swings. Or perhaps they paid Consumers to run a few miles of wire.
(I think they were about even east-west and a few miles north of the joint grid control center - but that was located at the high point of the county for the microwave link tower, rather than necessarily right at the grid border.)
Slashdot Mirror
Which may not be the right approach.
It's the right approach. Go ahead... you can say it.
Actually my thesis was that it's not. If the government IS going to intervene the better approach is to use antitrust (ala the breakup of AT&T and the Microsoft browser suit) and antifraud (by defining Internet service to include all ports, being able to do servers as well as clients), rather than attempt common-carrier style communication regulation.
DOJ and the courts have a big enough hammer and historically have had the will to swing it in successful ways. But it doesn't have to micro-manage when it isn't clobbering a company gone wrong. FTC is no slouch either. ISPs are NOT common-carriers and making them so would mean turning them into a command economy and killing the Internet goose.
I explicitly ignored non- or de-regulatory approaches.
Do the candidates know what Net Neutrality means?
I have seen no evidence that any of them do.
I just turned in a term paper on Network Neutrality issues and regulatory approaches to them.
One thing I discovered was that Obama (or at least his relevant policy wonk and/or speechwriter) was quite aware of the issues and was coming down strongly on the side of regulating to prevent entertainment/ISP conglomerate oligopolists from using their control of the pipes to strangle their content and services competition and shaft their customers.
Which may not be the right approach. But they did seem to be QUITE up on things.
Relevant Obama quote, from a June 8 2006 podcast:
microwave ovens (TOS) ...
cellphones/PMRs (TOS)
The microwave oven was a commercial product 19 years before Star Trek first aired.
The Star Trek communicator was not a cellphone. It was a handheld walkie-talkie, communicating with a single base station (the ship). Such had been in existence since at least WW II. Radio telephones also predate Star Trek by 20 years - initially as an automotive accessory with a handset in the front connected to a big box in the trunk, though getting the whole thing into a handheld didn't happen until 1973.
Cellular telephony is a separate invention. It's about reusing the same spectrum by progressively subdividing a coordinated grid of progressively lower-powered base stations as more phones are deployed, while adjusting the transmit power of the phones according to the size of the cell they're in to avoid interference with other users in nearby cells. This handles both the issues of finding enough spectrum to serve an ever-increasing subscriber base (rather than providing a handfull of party lines per city) and matching the financing of the buildout to the revenue from subscriber fees.
What Star Trek communicators DID invent (in addition to popularizing the idea of a handy pocket communicator) was the clamshell form factor. Motorola acknowledged this by naming the first clamshell cellphone model the "Star TAK" ("TAK" having been part of the naming scheme of their phones for some time) .
It's a simple generalization of "conflict diamonds",
I've only heard that as "blood diamonds".
I think it might be that Google purchase thing.
Guess I should have read further. B-)
As I read their entry in wikipedia:
- There was pressure from the Android community.
-- Motorola promised an unlocking tool "by the second half of 2011".
- When it didn't appear, complaints were mad to the FCC about violation of a Part C rule that appears to REQUIRE a way for ordinary users to unlock the bootloader and load anything they want.
So this may be Motorola's response, 14 1/2 months late.
I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola held off, or limited the models unlocked, to avoid violating contract provisions with carriers that resell their phones with their service plans at greatly discounted prices.
Turn Left! Or so the Nav system of my unlocked phone said, even though I was in the middle of the bridge...
My LOCKED nav system did just about that to me last year.
I was driving east into Hawthorne NV on an old desert road. Coming through the last pass it told me to turn left midway through the last pass.. Taking the turn would have sent me down about a hundred feet of cliff.
It looks like there was once a wagon road there, which had washed out long ago. Of course the USGS still had the track on their maps, the map vendor had included it, and the nav system picked it because it was slightly shorter than going down the hill to the highway into town.
Some of our friends in a Prius were directed onto the 4x4 trail into Bodie. (Fortunately it was midsummer, and they were JUST able to make it - much to the astonishment of a couple of offroaders they encountered along the way.)
Trusting nav systems, especially in rural areas, is a great way to get killed (typically by getting stuck far from cellphone service), unlocked phone or not.
It is possible they do not believe everything they read or are told by someone else and are making choices based on profits.
-or-
Ever buy electronics / just about everything else at walmart? They support China and China has substantial environmental issues due to products sold at walmart.
Or maybe Nintendo wasn't even aware of this latest politically-correct hype until the hypemeisters called the company's PR number to see how the company was doing on their personal hotbutton issue and got a "Who the heck are you and why should we care?" brushoff.
I know I never encountered the term "conflict minerals" until reading this thread. To paraphrase Arlo: If they want to change the world and stuff they need to sing at least loud enough to be noticed.
Or maybe they were allergic to some component of the placebo - such as corn sugar (a typical ingredient). Then they'd have REAL side effects.
Whether or not the data contains any personal information is the real question because if there is any then someone will figure out how to get at it.
Even when personal information "has been stripped" it can be rediscovered in various ways.
For instance: At the start of WWII, US authorities used census data to round up people of Japanese descent. They didn't have the individuals' names. But they had the number on each block. So they just raided until they had accumulated that number.
Great, now I'll need to find some matching sun glasses to go with my tin foil hat.
Only if you've had your brain injected with the artificial retroviral biotech material.
This is just an application of an existing technology to primates. No big news.
The technique involves injecting the brain in the desired region with an artificial retrovirus-like agent. This contains a gene for an artificial surface protein that triggers the nerve to fire when exposed to a particular color of light, along with a promoter that activates the gene only in the correct type of neuron. The combination of the selective promoter and selective injection site makes it possible to target a particular set of nerves.
A couple of similar gene hacks can be used to get output by making selected cells flash in one of two colors when they fire.
(I read TFA hoping they'd found a way to use light to fire general nerves without first modifying them. But that was apparently not the case.)
So if the mind controllers haven't been drilling holes in your skull and sticking needles into your brain you don't need the shades.
Yet. B-)
I donated and phone-banked for Obama in 2008. But his record on Constitutional issues is uniformly abysmal. I am now convinced that he has no moral principles at all.
He's a typical major politician from Chicago, the unabashed pinnacle of US big-city machine politics since the end of Tammany Hall. Chicago was "The City That Works" because ANYBODY could buy the government functions at well-known and affordable prices.
Those of us with ANY experience with Chicago politics knew this even before he won the Democratic nomination - and told everyone whose ear we could bend. We're not surprised at all with how things are going, even now. This is EXACTLY what we expected.
(What will be interesting is whether Tampa and the Republican machine will make the same mistakes with this year's Republican convention that Chicago and the Democrat machine made with the Democratic convention in '68.)
To me as a European it is baffling how much sh*t you Americans take from your government and never take action.
Sure we take action. (Look at the "Liberty Movement" and the campaign of Ron Paul for just one example.)
It's just that the media that's reporting what goes on here to you Europeans is one of the major players we're opposing. So they're blacking it out.
In the age of the Internet their success is no longer total. Further, their attempts are gradually destroying, in the marketplace, the news arms of these conglomerates, accelerating the switch to Internet-based news reporting. But the blackout has been successful enough to cripple the political resistance for at least two presidential cycles.
The main political success so far was turning over the House of Representatives thanks to the Tea Party - which by then had been largely infiltrated and taken over from the Liberty wing by their bedfellows the Neocons. As usual with a revolution one branch of the old power structure infiltrated and co-opted the more succsessful portions of the organized opposition.
The earliest drives (RAMAC and the like) also had integral disks (with the spin motor integral inside the hub - with spare windings so you didn't lose your data if one burned out). But soon after that they went to removable packs, which was the way it worked for a while, with "washing machine" drives and "single platter in slot" drives.
But they had a lot of problems with contamination. And as the bits got closer together and the heads flew lower they were running into a serious issue.
The breakthrough came when IBM noticed that it had built less than twice as many packs as it had built drives. Turns out that the usual usage pattern was not to swap packs, but to do backups by copying to tape and to do "swaps" by copying tape to disk. Tape was far cheaper per bit than disk packs.
So they realized they could solve the contamination problem by having a sealed unit. The first version had the platters, heads, and cooling air filters in a sealed uint but the motors and actuators were external. The "packs", with heads and such, were still swappable. It also moved the heads to a parking area and let them land on the disk, rather than having a complex mechanism to lift them off the surface when shutting down. This was the "Winchester" - which became a generic term for head-landing disk drives and then for disk drives in general.
But electronics was getting very cheap and the mechanical connection to the external machinery was still problematic. So two generations later they went for an integral sealed unit with motors, actuators, and an electronic board. Thus was the current paradigm born. And with economy of scale and even tighter tolerances it has stayed that way until now (when semiconductors are finally looking to push disk drive technology into end-of-life).
This thing is glacial, whereas the original card readers read these things as fast as you could push them through.
Actually the early electronic ones (the ones with relays hooked to the computers with tubes), ran the card about one per second. Still faster than this, of course. (The sorters ran a lot faster.)
Go all the way back to Hollerith and even a sorter was about the same speed:
- Worker puts the card in the "press" and closes it (pushing pins through the holes and into the (pool of mercury?) back contact.)
- Solenoid releases the spring-loaded door on the appropriate bin.
- Worker opens the press, extracts the card, puts it into the bin, and closes the bin door.
Now get off my lawn!
In the absense of triggering some government program that gives more tax reduction than the money given away, it is still a loss. He might not pay taxes on the money he doesn't get (because he had it paid to the workers instead). But that normally will be taxed at less than 100%. So he's still out-of-pocket.
IMHO what this says is that the CEO thinks that the compensation packages the company had set up ended up giving him too much, and the workers too little, for the long-term health of the company. So he fixes it by reorganizing it - and gets a boost in morale and some good press as a bonus.
He probably also ends up ahead long-term because the company does far better in the future than it would have without this action. But he also might be doing it because he really is an idealist and/or does care for his workers.
Either way (if he's not a compensated psychopath who doesn't feel anything much) he gets to feel very good in his eventual retirement.
I avoid later-model Toshibas because they include firmware to enable Intel AMT - and consider it a feature!
Quoting Wikipedia:
Which means all sorts of bad guys can potentially get at it, too. And this is at a level below the OS, so even the OS can't defend against being turned into a zombie.
Toshiba isn't the only one that does this - with AMT or some other spy hardware/firmware combo. Plug your machine into an Ethernet, turn it off, and see if the green light on the Ethernet jack stays on.
(And you thought "secure boot" was bad...)
Write speed of an average HDD: ~50MBPS
Upload speed of an average Internet connection: ~0.1MBPS
You must admit it's aptly named.
Every time you open or operate on a file you get to take a little Nappa.
Lincoln did try [buying out all the existing slaves] and was rejected well past the South beginning to lose the Civil War.
I would be interested in any references you have for that. Not that I doubt you, but for my own follow up and to inject the references into debate on a non-slashdot forum. This issue is still discussed in libertarian circles and I have not heard anyone assert that Lincoln actually tried this before the war started.
As for the siege of Richmond discussions (for which a reference to the offer would also be handy), you may be conflating two issues: Ending slavery and ending secession. The southern states had a lot of other gripes about impositions from/via the Federal government and the richer northern states. (Still do, in fact. It's just that pretty much ALL the states are getting the shaft in one form or another these days.)
You're making the charmingly naive assumption that all the slaveowners would be willing to sell, and that it would be easy to ban further importation.
What made you think I was talking about voluntary sales? That would drive the (already very high) price through the roof. We're talking "eminent domain" here. Payment is about satisfying the "takings" clause of the 5th amendment. (Ending their status as property would be a taking.)
Importation had already been banned.
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
And if it were the Federal Government could have ended slavery for a LOT less money and an ENORMOUSLY lower number of lost lives by just buying all the slaves and freeing them, as was suggested at the time by Peter Cooper.
This would meet the constitutional requirements - or of a minor constitutional tweak was deemed necessary it would likely have succeeded if tried.
Born n' raised in Michigan, living in Texas.
MI is a lot of things, but enormous it ain't.
Not compared to Texas. (But then few sovereigns are. Texas outsizes many European countries.)
Speaking of which: Is there any talk of Texas ever exercising its treaty option to break up into five states and get eight more senators?
As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border.
You're right. I misremebered. Big Mac is farther from Motor City than the west side of New York STATE (and a few cities, such as Erie.) But New York is wide and going all the way to the city doubles the distance (even with a shortcut through Canada and Buffalo,)
During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down...
Different blackouts. I was talking about 1965, not 2003. ("The Great Northeast Blackout" - which was "THE" because it was The Big One for 38 years, until it got a comparable sibling.)
Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side.
I do recall that Compuserve saying they set up out there to get primary feeds from two significantly different parts of the grid. (I used to work in the next building south of them and took the tour. It was outside the city limits but not by any 20 miles.) Perhaps I misunderstood and they were talking about two primary lines in Detroit Edison's grid, making me three strikes for three swings. Or perhaps they paid Consumers to run a few miles of wire.
(I think they were about even east-west and a few miles north of the joint grid control center - but that was located at the high point of the county for the microwave link tower, rather than necessarily right at the grid border.)
Is this correct? Detroit lost power, and I'd believed that the parts of the state covered by Consumers, not DTE, lost power
I think we're on different blackouts. I'm talking about the one in 1965. The one in 2003 DID get Michigan, too.
Oops. I misremembered it.
It's farther from Detroit to the Macinac Bridge than to the western boundary of New York STATE (or a few of its western cities, such as Erie.)
But New York State is wide. Going to New York CITY beats the trip to the Big Mac by more than a factor of two - even shortcutting through Canada.