Almost every radio station broadcasts on a delay of a few seconds. There's someone in the booth with their finger on a button to bleep your horrible, dirty, nasty word.
Your best bet is to learn a bunch of sci fi swear words and use them in common speech.
Ted Stevens lost the ability to intelligently comment on the Internet when he called it a series of tubes. And I'm sure that, compared to Alaska, the rest of the US looks like the year 3000.
Honestly, what qualifications does this guy have other than "I've taken lots of money from AT&T and Verizon?"
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
Where do you live where you have more than two choices of providers? I'm sure in NYC or San Francisco it's a 'relatively free market,' but not where I live. I can choose between Verizon (BOO!) or Comcast (boo). Where's my free market? Where are my smaller providers? Hell, Verizon's not even planning on rolling FiOS out to me for another two years, even though I live in a densely populated area with housing values near those of my parent's suburban neighborhood.
Anyone who thinks broadband is a competitive market is kidding themselves. And anyone who thinks a bill that changes the "200kbps is broadband" is a Good Thing
Except this tax won't work. If they want to reduce congestion they need to make public transportation cheaper. Let's take the example of me taking my girlfriend into midtown Manhattan.
If they start a congestion charge they can use it to subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper.
And, like someone else said, you have to add the cost of insurance, maintenance, and purchasing the car. If you have a typical car loan, your payment could be $300/month, or $10/day. Add insurance and it starts getting comparable, but only if you got rid of your car altogether.
Finally, the goal isn't so much to keep people from coming into town occasionally, but to keep people from commuting solo. If 25% of the people carpooled, you'd see a 75% reduction in the number of cars, assuming four people per car. (Four people in one car versus four people four cars, therefore 3/4 the number of cars on the road.)
The "tax" is a congestion charge. It will be used to get people out of cars and into public transportation to ease congestion downtown and reduce energy use. I don't see how this is a bad thing. They're turning the externality of everyone driving individual cars and turning it into an internalized cost, just like Adam Smith recommends.
Broad taxes based on objective things like income are suspect, but specific taxes that deal with economic externalities, like congestion charges and superfund taxes, are fine by me.
That's kind of why I like the idea of PGP or other trust networks. It would be trivial for a company to give its members PGP keys and append them to every email to identify them. No PGP key? Auto delete.
And for folks like sales who need to talk to the outside world: Give them a separate email that's "outside the border."
What voltage is coming out of the transformer? All of the networking equipment I have in my house runs 12V DC out of a transformer. All solar panels run 12V DC, as do the storage batteries. Why not simply remove the transformer and power the UPS with a solar panel. You could get this set up for under $200 and never have to worry about losing internet or telephone service.
Not everything in computing is hard. I banged together a couple PHP scripts to track my gas mileage. I didn't need to know about non-terminating algorithms, I just had to figure out what the steps were to calculate and record the information.
However, I agree: Comp Sci shouldn't be dumbed down. There are definitely problems out there that require that level of theoretical knowledge to solve. However, the vast majority of folks coming out of Comp Sci won't use a lot of the stuff they were required to learn, and will have to learn a lot of things on their first job. I've seen folks who take comp sci write overly complex code and not know how to manage databases or how to diagnose problems with their systems or network.
So there's definitely a space out there for folks who don't know about the math behind Turing machines, but do have a generalized knowledge of computers and networking. And there are degrees out there for these people. I graduated from Penn State with a degree in Information Sciences and Technology. It gave me a lot of knowledge about project management, networking, databases, programming languages, system configuration and other stuff that I actually use day to day. Had I stayed in Comp Sci, I don't think I'd be as well rounded or as prepared for the "real world."
To use an analogy: Comp Sci is like pure physics. It's what develops stuff on the leading edge of technology. Programs like the one I was in are like engineering: We use the stuff developed by the physicists to solve real world problems. They're complimentary roles that both need to exist for computers and networks to move forward.
It's not stealing. If they're making a copy and keeping it for themselves, how does that prevent me from using my copy.
This is akin to me taking a book with a broken spine into be repaired and having the repairman make a photocopy of my book but then return it to me in good condition. Why would I care if he's got a copy? Unless, of course, it's my personal diary, but then it's kind of my fault for not encrypting it in the first place. How would he know he wasn't supposed to look at it if I didn't put something there to tell him?
The wealthy and middle class are dipping into the used car market to find cars that get over 40 mpg, there's a demand. I can bet that people in the middle and upper middle class would rather be driving newer cars than older cars. This is raising the price of these older, more fuel efficient cars.
So by increasing the number of fuel efficient vehicles available, the upper classes will be satiated and demand for these cars will go down. Additionally, the introduction of more fuel efficient vehicles will mean that, in the future, more of them will be available in the used car market, and the premium paid for them will go down. Supply will catch up with demand.
As far as letters go, they're not a good way to show a company what people are demanding. The best way to get any company's attention is to dangle money in front of them. Letters don't produce profits. Money does. By showing that people will pay $3,000 over Blue Book for a mediocre car like the Metro, you're showing the car companies that people will buy these vehicles. Letters don't do that.
If people are buying Geo Metros for $3,000 over Blue Book value, it's showing the car companies that people want cars that get over 50 mpg and are willing to pay a premium for them. So the car companies are going to start building cars that get better mileage. This will put more higher mileage cars on the road and lower their price for everyone else.
But until this works we can cut payroll taxes to offset the price of gas for working people.
Own a home and loading garden supplies into your civic isn't going to cut it.
Homeowner here. I regularly load garden supplies into my Mazda Protege or my wife's Pontiac Vibe. I also haul 12' pieces of lumber and furniture in these vehicles. They're a lot more capable than most people think. There have been two occasions in the past two years where I needed to haul something that wouldn't fit in either of them, so I rented a truck. Seems to make a lot more sense than owning a truck just for those couple times where it's actually useful and paying hundreds of dollars more for gas.
Want to pull a boat or trailer (we are allowed to go on vacations aren't we???) and your little car won't cut it.
My dad owns a 14' sailboat that he tows with a VW Passat Wagon with a 1.8L turbocharged engine.
So the wife/husband drives the SUV to work by themselves, when they get home its hauling kids, the dog, going on camping trips, taking the neighbors kids to the ball game, etc.
A long time ago there were these things called station wagons and minivans. They were capable of doing all these things and still managed to get over 25mpg. Really, the only reason you don't see more of them is the stigma of parenthood. They're not seen as "hip." Most people who own SUVs could get by with one of these vehicles because the only real difference is that in most cases they lack four wheel drive. In fact, I remember my wife watching an old Lucille Ball movie where she and Desi were towing a huge Airstream trailer behind their convertible!
They know their needs you do not.
They might think they know their needs, but if they sat down and looked at what they used their vehicles for they would probably find they could downsize without losing any functional capability.
You're assuming that every album is a Scorsese-quality album. Without a doubt there are some albums like this, but most albums are Gore Verbinksi or worse just like many movies have all of their good parts in the trailer.
Seems to me the problem isn't the artist, but is instead the record company people who make artists produce appeal-to-everybody music that sells tons of records and makes them tons of money.
I'm an American in the US and I'm rooting for higher gas prices. The only way we're going to get folks to change their behavior is to make it too painful for them to maintain the status quo.
I've ceased my illegal activity and started buying music. It's a lot easier to find it on iTMS than it is to look for it on a P2P site, and I've also had music recommended to me that I like.
To put it another way: I've grown up and my time is worth more than the $1 it costs to buy a song.
I've traveled in Europe a bit, and the best place I ever visited was Denmark. Copenhagen is a fantastic city, but expensive. However there are great places on the peninsula. The people are nice, the weather is great, and it's got all the things I'm looking for in a society.
My wife's friend is moving to the Netherlands with her husband who's a bomb loader in the USAF. They're fundamentalist Christians, so I don't think they'll enjoy it that much, but I think we'd love it there. Her aunt and uncle lived there for almost ten years and raised a family there.
If you ask any dominatrix she'll tell you that most of her clientele are "upstanding citizenry." Business always spikes during a political party's convention, and doubly so for conservative parties.
Tiger Direct has a $400 special on a 32 inch wide screen LCD. ATSC tuner. 720p. HDMI, component video, etc. Weight 57 pounds.Niko SV3206 32" LCD HDTV Television
And I'm sure that's just as high quality as my Sharp CRT.
Your hernia-in-a-box CRT will need a converter for broadcast reception in two years. You paid $400 for 4:3 video and analog audio and you call this a bargain?
Thankfully we have options other than broadcast television. And, thankfully, I don't have super hearing that causes me to shriek at anything that's not pure digital audio and eyesight that can't tell the difference at normal viewing angles between HD and SD.
Well, what exactly would you want from an audio/video technology other than better quality?
One of the first articles I read about digital broadcast said that they could have ten times as many channels broadcast over the air. It would be like getting standard cable (the kind without the box) without paying for it. Why, for example, can't I get Discovery or Sci Fi over the air if there's so much more room for them? When it can save me money by letting me get the content I want over the air rather than having to pay for cable, I'll buy an HDTV.
That's a different story altogether. More monitor space increases productivity. I use a computer professionally. I can't think of anyone who watches TV professionally.
Notice first that this is being developed in Germany, not the US. The idea of using computerization on farms is nothing new in Europe.
When I toured Europe I stayed with a family who ran a chicken farm. The father had developed a way to harvest the eggs and feed the chickens all on his own using computerization and robotics. He says his biggest labor expense is going in and cleaning out the dead chickens about once a week. Purdue gave him an award for developing this system, and it's being used all across Europe.
His attempts to market this to farmers in the United States, however, were thwarted by the low cost of labor. He told me "Why would someone spend $150,000 on a system like mine when they can just hire some Mexicans?" It was hard to argue with that logic.
So this will be huge for European farmers who, because of the lack of cheap labor and the strict laws regulating pay and hours, require labor saving devices such as this robot. A $70,000 robot that's capable of weeding a whole field on its own would be amazingly useful to European farmers, especially since it would put them one more step closer to certifying their crops as organic, thus allowing them to charge more for their produce.
Not only that, it would allow European and American farmers to compete against farmers in the third world without subsidies, meaning a better standard of living for all involved.
Count me as one of those people who won't own an HD set until he's forced to. I just spent $400 on a 32" CRT TV, and I'm not about to go out and spend $700+ on a similarly sized HDTV. I don't watch sports or movies all that often, so what will this get me? My wife will be able to see every pore on the face of some reality TV tramp? I'll be able to make out the birthmark on Katie Sackhoff's shoulder? It doesn't add to the plot or production quality, and can often get in the way of it.
Let me put it this way: Until HDTV gives me something other than sub-microscopic picture quality, there's nothing I can't get from it that I can get from my video iPod.
I'd like to add that I am actively looking to emigrate from the United States. Other countries have far more to offer me and my family. 35 hour work weeks, a college education for my kids, a relaxed atmosphere towards sex, drugs and alcohol, and other things that the US is just simply not ready for, but that I am.
My reasons for leaving have little to do with the government and a lot to do with the culture. If you want to stay and try to change a culture based on rugged individualism and rampant Puritanical attitudes, go for it. I have better things to do with my life.
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Almost every radio station broadcasts on a delay of a few seconds. There's someone in the booth with their finger on a button to bleep your horrible, dirty, nasty word.
Your best bet is to learn a bunch of sci fi swear words and use them in common speech.
Ted Stevens lost the ability to intelligently comment on the Internet when he called it a series of tubes. And I'm sure that, compared to Alaska, the rest of the US looks like the year 3000.
Honestly, what qualifications does this guy have other than "I've taken lots of money from AT&T and Verizon?"
Where do you live where you have more than two choices of providers? I'm sure in NYC or San Francisco it's a 'relatively free market,' but not where I live. I can choose between Verizon (BOO!) or Comcast (boo). Where's my free market? Where are my smaller providers? Hell, Verizon's not even planning on rolling FiOS out to me for another two years, even though I live in a densely populated area with housing values near those of my parent's suburban neighborhood.
Anyone who thinks broadband is a competitive market is kidding themselves. And anyone who thinks a bill that changes the "200kbps is broadband" is a Good Thing
No, because then you'd have them pointed in the windows of cute Manhattanites.
If they start a congestion charge they can use it to subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper.
And, like someone else said, you have to add the cost of insurance, maintenance, and purchasing the car. If you have a typical car loan, your payment could be $300/month, or $10/day. Add insurance and it starts getting comparable, but only if you got rid of your car altogether.
Finally, the goal isn't so much to keep people from coming into town occasionally, but to keep people from commuting solo. If 25% of the people carpooled, you'd see a 75% reduction in the number of cars, assuming four people per car. (Four people in one car versus four people four cars, therefore 3/4 the number of cars on the road.)
The "tax" is a congestion charge. It will be used to get people out of cars and into public transportation to ease congestion downtown and reduce energy use. I don't see how this is a bad thing. They're turning the externality of everyone driving individual cars and turning it into an internalized cost, just like Adam Smith recommends.
Broad taxes based on objective things like income are suspect, but specific taxes that deal with economic externalities, like congestion charges and superfund taxes, are fine by me.
And for folks like sales who need to talk to the outside world: Give them a separate email that's "outside the border."
What voltage is coming out of the transformer? All of the networking equipment I have in my house runs 12V DC out of a transformer. All solar panels run 12V DC, as do the storage batteries. Why not simply remove the transformer and power the UPS with a solar panel. You could get this set up for under $200 and never have to worry about losing internet or telephone service.
Not everything in computing is hard. I banged together a couple PHP scripts to track my gas mileage. I didn't need to know about non-terminating algorithms, I just had to figure out what the steps were to calculate and record the information.
However, I agree: Comp Sci shouldn't be dumbed down. There are definitely problems out there that require that level of theoretical knowledge to solve. However, the vast majority of folks coming out of Comp Sci won't use a lot of the stuff they were required to learn, and will have to learn a lot of things on their first job. I've seen folks who take comp sci write overly complex code and not know how to manage databases or how to diagnose problems with their systems or network.
So there's definitely a space out there for folks who don't know about the math behind Turing machines, but do have a generalized knowledge of computers and networking. And there are degrees out there for these people. I graduated from Penn State with a degree in Information Sciences and Technology. It gave me a lot of knowledge about project management, networking, databases, programming languages, system configuration and other stuff that I actually use day to day. Had I stayed in Comp Sci, I don't think I'd be as well rounded or as prepared for the "real world."
To use an analogy: Comp Sci is like pure physics. It's what develops stuff on the leading edge of technology. Programs like the one I was in are like engineering: We use the stuff developed by the physicists to solve real world problems. They're complimentary roles that both need to exist for computers and networks to move forward.
It's not stealing. If they're making a copy and keeping it for themselves, how does that prevent me from using my copy.
This is akin to me taking a book with a broken spine into be repaired and having the repairman make a photocopy of my book but then return it to me in good condition. Why would I care if he's got a copy? Unless, of course, it's my personal diary, but then it's kind of my fault for not encrypting it in the first place. How would he know he wasn't supposed to look at it if I didn't put something there to tell him?
The wealthy and middle class are dipping into the used car market to find cars that get over 40 mpg, there's a demand. I can bet that people in the middle and upper middle class would rather be driving newer cars than older cars. This is raising the price of these older, more fuel efficient cars.
So by increasing the number of fuel efficient vehicles available, the upper classes will be satiated and demand for these cars will go down. Additionally, the introduction of more fuel efficient vehicles will mean that, in the future, more of them will be available in the used car market, and the premium paid for them will go down. Supply will catch up with demand.
As far as letters go, they're not a good way to show a company what people are demanding. The best way to get any company's attention is to dangle money in front of them. Letters don't produce profits. Money does. By showing that people will pay $3,000 over Blue Book for a mediocre car like the Metro, you're showing the car companies that people will buy these vehicles. Letters don't do that.
Perhaps it is you who does not understand.
If people are buying Geo Metros for $3,000 over Blue Book value, it's showing the car companies that people want cars that get over 50 mpg and are willing to pay a premium for them. So the car companies are going to start building cars that get better mileage. This will put more higher mileage cars on the road and lower their price for everyone else.
But until this works we can cut payroll taxes to offset the price of gas for working people.
So cut payroll taxes so people can get food, but we need people to snap up high-mpg cars.
Homeowner here. I regularly load garden supplies into my Mazda Protege or my wife's Pontiac Vibe. I also haul 12' pieces of lumber and furniture in these vehicles. They're a lot more capable than most people think. There have been two occasions in the past two years where I needed to haul something that wouldn't fit in either of them, so I rented a truck. Seems to make a lot more sense than owning a truck just for those couple times where it's actually useful and paying hundreds of dollars more for gas.
My dad owns a 14' sailboat that he tows with a VW Passat Wagon with a 1.8L turbocharged engine.
A long time ago there were these things called station wagons and minivans. They were capable of doing all these things and still managed to get over 25mpg. Really, the only reason you don't see more of them is the stigma of parenthood. They're not seen as "hip." Most people who own SUVs could get by with one of these vehicles because the only real difference is that in most cases they lack four wheel drive. In fact, I remember my wife watching an old Lucille Ball movie where she and Desi were towing a huge Airstream trailer behind their convertible!
They might think they know their needs, but if they sat down and looked at what they used their vehicles for they would probably find they could downsize without losing any functional capability.
You're assuming that every album is a Scorsese-quality album. Without a doubt there are some albums like this, but most albums are Gore Verbinksi or worse just like many movies have all of their good parts in the trailer.
Seems to me the problem isn't the artist, but is instead the record company people who make artists produce appeal-to-everybody music that sells tons of records and makes them tons of money.
I'm an American in the US and I'm rooting for higher gas prices. The only way we're going to get folks to change their behavior is to make it too painful for them to maintain the status quo.
I've ceased my illegal activity and started buying music. It's a lot easier to find it on iTMS than it is to look for it on a P2P site, and I've also had music recommended to me that I like.
To put it another way: I've grown up and my time is worth more than the $1 it costs to buy a song.
I've traveled in Europe a bit, and the best place I ever visited was Denmark. Copenhagen is a fantastic city, but expensive. However there are great places on the peninsula. The people are nice, the weather is great, and it's got all the things I'm looking for in a society.
My wife's friend is moving to the Netherlands with her husband who's a bomb loader in the USAF. They're fundamentalist Christians, so I don't think they'll enjoy it that much, but I think we'd love it there. Her aunt and uncle lived there for almost ten years and raised a family there.
If you ask any dominatrix she'll tell you that most of her clientele are "upstanding citizenry." Business always spikes during a political party's convention, and doubly so for conservative parties.
And I'm sure that's just as high quality as my Sharp CRT.
Thankfully we have options other than broadcast television. And, thankfully, I don't have super hearing that causes me to shriek at anything that's not pure digital audio and eyesight that can't tell the difference at normal viewing angles between HD and SD.
Haven't seen it.
One of the first articles I read about digital broadcast said that they could have ten times as many channels broadcast over the air. It would be like getting standard cable (the kind without the box) without paying for it. Why, for example, can't I get Discovery or Sci Fi over the air if there's so much more room for them? When it can save me money by letting me get the content I want over the air rather than having to pay for cable, I'll buy an HDTV.
That's a different story altogether. More monitor space increases productivity. I use a computer professionally. I can't think of anyone who watches TV professionally.
Notice first that this is being developed in Germany, not the US. The idea of using computerization on farms is nothing new in Europe.
When I toured Europe I stayed with a family who ran a chicken farm. The father had developed a way to harvest the eggs and feed the chickens all on his own using computerization and robotics. He says his biggest labor expense is going in and cleaning out the dead chickens about once a week. Purdue gave him an award for developing this system, and it's being used all across Europe.
His attempts to market this to farmers in the United States, however, were thwarted by the low cost of labor. He told me "Why would someone spend $150,000 on a system like mine when they can just hire some Mexicans?" It was hard to argue with that logic.
So this will be huge for European farmers who, because of the lack of cheap labor and the strict laws regulating pay and hours, require labor saving devices such as this robot. A $70,000 robot that's capable of weeding a whole field on its own would be amazingly useful to European farmers, especially since it would put them one more step closer to certifying their crops as organic, thus allowing them to charge more for their produce.
Not only that, it would allow European and American farmers to compete against farmers in the third world without subsidies, meaning a better standard of living for all involved.
Count me as one of those people who won't own an HD set until he's forced to. I just spent $400 on a 32" CRT TV, and I'm not about to go out and spend $700+ on a similarly sized HDTV. I don't watch sports or movies all that often, so what will this get me? My wife will be able to see every pore on the face of some reality TV tramp? I'll be able to make out the birthmark on Katie Sackhoff's shoulder? It doesn't add to the plot or production quality, and can often get in the way of it.
Let me put it this way: Until HDTV gives me something other than sub-microscopic picture quality, there's nothing I can't get from it that I can get from my video iPod.
I'd like to add that I am actively looking to emigrate from the United States. Other countries have far more to offer me and my family. 35 hour work weeks, a college education for my kids, a relaxed atmosphere towards sex, drugs and alcohol, and other things that the US is just simply not ready for, but that I am.
My reasons for leaving have little to do with the government and a lot to do with the culture. If you want to stay and try to change a culture based on rugged individualism and rampant Puritanical attitudes, go for it. I have better things to do with my life.