I'm a theology-reading, bona-fide, for-real Christian...
Are you, really? To me, the for-real Christians are the ones on the street corner with a loudspeaker, extolling all to repent and find God before it is too late. The original Christians believed that the world was going to "end" and be judged within their own lifetime, not thousands of years later. I don't understand those modern "Christians" who go about their lives normally, even tolerantly permit their children to choose a different faith. If they seriously believed in God, judgement, and damnation and the real possibility of the hour of judgement being, oh, in ten minutes, they'd be doing every possible thing they could in their power to convert their children, and every last person they met about whom they cared the tiniest tiny bit.
Those people on the street corner with the loudspeakers, the ones going door to door, rudely interrupting people during dinner, those are the ones I can respect. They actually are for-real believers. Not the lame, tolerant, believe-what-you-want I-respect-other-religions Sunday Christians.
Wow. When I got out in '94, my starting salary at Motorola (Schaumburg) was 42500. That was TEN YEARS ago. And that was BEFORE the "Internet bubble." Wow.
The only problem with some rich people is that they sit on their cash and don't adequately invest it. The more money moves the better off we all are. I have no problem with rich people whose money is in motion.
That's actually pretty funny, in the context of something I just saw here in Chicago. Apparently activists in the poorer neighborhoods have found that a very large number of poor/lower-middle-class people have no bank accounts. None. They apparently stash their money in their homes/apartments. They do not understand/trust banks, or have been screwed over by fees. So instead they use check-cashing places, which take a non-trivial cut of the check, to cash paychecks and such. The activists have put together a campaign to encourage the use of fee-free (or at least fee-limited) bank accounts and teach people how to balance their accounts to avoid overdraft fees.
The wealthy generally get that way not through evilness. They get that way through drive, intelligence and thrift. And they then generally use that wealth to generate more wealth, by putting it back into the economy as a seed to grow. They don't sit on it in their bed mattress. That is a good thing for everybody, including the poor, who need the jobs generated by that investment.
Actually, the major distinction is the corporate charter as filed with their STATE government. Corporations are state entities. The only say the IRS has is whether or not they are taxed differently, federally. A corporation can be taxed as a charity at the state level, but not the federal level, and vice versa.
I love my 6310i too. It appears to be one of the last real phones. No idiotic keypad, no power-sapping stupid useless color screen or camera. Nice, simple, solid, big screen, *excellent* backlight, Bluetooth, tri-band GSM... perfect PHONE.
I am getting to hate cars. I learned to drive, literally, on a race track, when I was 15. I like driving. I was *this* close to going professional, but then wound up going to college to be a rocket scientist... switched out of AAE to CS though.
Anyway, sure, the Prius is nifty and all, good gas mileage and emissions. But I like my clutch. CVT sounds nasty. Where's the enjoyment in driving that on a twisty road? I don't want my car to be some damn utilitarian people-mover. I like shifting, damn it. I like being able to tear down my transmission to a bare case in 10 minutes. I like being able to drop the engine in my garage, and rebuild it myself relatively easily (which, BTW, requires some precise micrometers... an engine that revs to 8500 rpm has tight tolerances). I *hate* paying mechanics. I don't trust the bastards.
Nowadays, with OBD-II, and soon OBD-III, it is getting harder and harder to work on the car yourself. That damn Prius is moving toward the complete electro-mechanical black box. Speaking of which, I read today about a concept car from Volvo (Ford) that has a sealed hood. Sealed. You have to go to the dealer to get access to the drivetrain. Sick sick sick. One of the criteria by which I judge a car is how easy it is to change the oil filter. A car I can't maintain and work on myself? I rue the day.
Also, you need to learn to work the system... first, incorporate, and elect to be a subchapter S corporation at the federal and state level. Second, hire yourself. Get your employer/contract house to pay you corp-corp. Pay yourself a reasonable salary. Considering the downward pressure on salaries, and the worth of an Indian coder, consider yourself worth around $35k a year.
The rest that you earn... your business has legitimate expenses. Pay those, write them off. You can have an SEP retirement fund: save money, more than the $3000 an IRA lets you. Pay for your health care (though if you are more than a 2% shareholder, and you'll be 100% likely, you cannot deduct it from business income), deduct it from your taxes to the extent permitted.
Also, speaking of shares, if you are married, sell 51% of the company to your wife (if you trust her at least). Get certified as a woman-owned business by your city/county/state. It can help you get contracts if you decide to go independent.
With what is left of your business income, pay yourself dividends. Corporate dividends are not wages (so long as you paid yourself a reasonable salary, which YOU determine). You pay only income tax, no social security(i.e. ponzi)/medicare. If you pay yourself a low enough salary, and $35k is low enough, you can take your dividends at the Bush tax rate of 5% as well. I just hope Congress makes that permanent.
Also, unemployment insurance is a great deal. Lay yourself off between contracts, and then collect unemployment benefits. Where I am, I pay $270 a year, TOTAL, per employee for unemployment insurance premiums. For me, the WEEKLY "benefit" is $331.00. IOW, I get back my entire yearly premium in the first week. Even if my "contribution rate" went up due to lots of utilization of the account, it is still limited to taxing only the first $9000 of income. I don't advocate cheating the system, but DEFINITELY apply to collect the moment you lose a contract/job.
Just don't forget to pay quarterly estimated taxes for your personal income, and your business taxes monthly. Get an account with EFTPS, the online federal payment system, it's easy.
Right on. As I just wrote in a previous reply, the underlying technology involved in the interaction appears to be a mix of ELIZA and an Infocom-like adventure game text recognition engine using keywords, like what we wrote as kids in BASIC on our home computers back in the 80s. All the glitz on top, and the tie-in to other systems, appear to be the only real meat of the system. That is, of course, interesting. But the technology is certainly nothing terribly impressive, unless they've hidden the good stuff.
My thought EXACTLY. There are so many young people out there who don't know what has been done before. I just came from their web site, and the demonstration "interaction" between Alice and the supposed user reminded me STRONGLY of using ELIZA years and years and years ago. They have spruced it up, sure, and added good text recognition and speech, but it still seems to be based fundamentally on an Infocom-like adventure game text recognition system underneath. The bit where, and I paraphrase, she says she "appreciates his polite style, but it is ambiguous: please use what, where, when" instantly clued me in to that. Hell, I remember writing an adventure game engine in BASIC back in the 80s that did a decent job of parsing human text and figuring out what was wanted. I would have hoped that in the intervening DECADES, natural language recognition would have progressed a hell of a lot more than what appears to be the case. I'm sure in fact that it has, actually. Maybe just elsewhere.
I was at an ACM presentation not long ago, and some PhD was talking about this cool project he had done. Likewise, it looked functionally VERY similar to how one interacted with those old text Infocom games. Lots of the young kids ooh'ed and ahh'ed over it. I mentioned this similarity afterwards, and he actually got a bit irritated. I suppose people are supposed to have forgotten about that, so it can be re-invented in the 21st century.
The point was not that you must make money from everything you do. The point is that you *must* make some money to provide for yourself and your family. In the ideal world promoted by many, and apparently Aiden, no software would carry a monetary cost. In that world, how much are software developers worth? How will professional developers make ends meet? Yes, money is annoying, yes, excessive greed is bad. However, in the real world, one needs money to buy food, clothing, housing, computers, and the other stuff we need or want. Doing open source is fine. But, unless you are lucky in being able to make some money from it, treat it like your hobby, not your job.
As for making money from your education, while I am the first to point out that one should not base one's education solely on one's vocational interest (e.g. take lots and lots of elective courses outside of your focus, feed your mind while you can), if, like me, you spent tens of thousands of your own (not your fellow citizen's via the confiscation of the government) dollars/euros/whatever on that education, it is reasonable that you find some way to actually provide for yourself with the fruits of your education. 'Would you like fries with that?' isn't something a bright and educated person should be saying in the course of their job.
Is it not possible that the Second Amendment might be a relic of a bygone era? If so, then a justification for its continued existence is called for.
Your words. Obviously, I'm not sure what was in your mind when you wrote that. But it appears to be a belief that should the 2nd amendment go away, likewise goes a right. *poof* If not, I apologize for the presumption. But if so, I assert, again, that the 2nd amendment does not grant a right. It merely states that that right should not be infringed. It does not create the right. Again, learn to read our foundational legal documents. Our rights don't come from them. I futher assert that our common law jurisprudential system (which very much predates our federal government) would be quite well equipped to discern the fundamental right to possess arms regardless of whether or not the redundant 2nd amendment explicitly referenced said right. Hell, it might be hidden within some penumbra somewhere.:-)
Regarding forcing rights... I have no interest *whatsoever* in forcing a right on anyone. You seem to have our mutual positions entirely confused. My interest is in not having YOU force YOUR belief that I do NOT hold a right. I posit that neither you, nor 250 million of your best and dearest friends, have the legitimate power to do that. You may limit my exercise of my rights in society in order to protect your own rights. But you cannot exterminate them. Concealed carry, brandishment, transport on public property, possession of inherently dangerous weapons such as, oh, nuclear bombs... all well within the state police power to limit. But to assert that man has no right at all to be armed in one's defense, that said right does not exist, and is not inalienable? No.
As for the straw man of slavery and the sins of our fathers, I have no interest whatsoever in talking about that, as it hasn't the slightest bearing. Why do you continue to insist on bringing that into the discussion, as though it somehow trumps the moral authority of anyone who ever was involved with it? Did you perchance have ancestors in bondage? I don't know about you, but my viewpoints on morality and legal philosophy do not require that my like-minded forebears be angels, pure as the driven snow in their lives. The wisdom within the fruits of human thought and philosophy can be separated from those often flawed creatures who espoused them. See St. Augustine for a prime example.
And hell, my own ancestors owned a slave-trading business in Virginia. I surely hope that that familial sin does not taint my independence of thought in your mind.
In the end, the entire discussion boils down to: do you, Mr. Crawling Chaos, believe that our rights as citizens derive from a magical text written in the late 1700s by a few dead white guys? If so, then I suppose that in your mind the deletion of the 2nd amendment will also, magically, erase a right we have had for a long time. I would heartily disagree.
The Supremes have begun exercising their power to restrain federal, and even state, action, after an effective hiatus of about fifty years, ever since the 1937 capitulation to FDR. They have begun no longer accepting the nexus of interstate commerce as a blanket authorization for Congress to do whatever the hell Congress wants. See the Lopez case, where the Supremes ruled that the commerce clause does not give Congress a criminal police power (in that case, the interstate commerce clause was invoked to justify the "gun-free school zones" law). Other recent cases, where they ruled that the federal government has no power to compel a state to enact legislation; where the takings clause, as incorporated via the 14th amendment, was actually enforced against a local government to strike down an act of regulatory taking (S. Carolina Coastal Commission); so on. They've begun to assert the power to limit governmental action in ways which have been unheard of in decades. Aside: I did research for a couple years into the evolution of the takings power from foundation onward... in the 1990s, there began to be a "dramatic" change toward more restriction on governmental takings in response to government's rapidly growing hunger for regulatory takings of private property. It has seemed to fizzle out some, but we'll see.
The Supremes are beginning, fitfully, to reassert their role to limit legislative action, and no longer accept the blanket presumption of valid legislative intent and governmental interest as being an over-riding justification for every exercise of power. We will never, ever return to a true constitutional form of government again, with limited enumerated powers, though. That is well dead and buried.
Regarding the president and restricting of rights, that is a political argument. In times of national stress/conflict, the political branches have always imposed restrictions on rights. The current restrictions are pretty mild compared to the past. At least we still have habeas corpus in the United States; unlike Lincoln, Bush has not suspended it.
On NPR a few weeks ago, one of the uber-liberal radio hosts had a couple constitutional scholars on the show to discuss just this issue, that of Bush and Congress locking people up, restricting rights. She was shocked (it's always funny when she gets guests, who I'm sure she presumes share her world-view, who shock her that way) when they both agreed that they felt Bush was doing an overall good job in terms of the domestic response to the "war on terrorism." They stated that in times of emergency, a president has always done this. Bush has been more mild than he could have been. Our system is working the way it should. The courts are now beginning to review the decisions made. The cases will work their way through the system, and the Supremes will make some decisions, define some boundaries. But, this takes time. Have some patience.
As for spending, the budget, and the Supremes and the Constitution, that is a rather moot point in the 21st century. Since the 1930s, we have been in what is considered a post-constitutional era in most respects. We no longer pay any attention whatsoever to the enumerated powers of the federal government. Rather than amend the constitution to change with the reality of a all-powerful central government, something our constitution explicitly attempts to prevent, we as a people have chosen to ignore large swaths of the federal constitution. That's just the way it is. To be sure, the Supremes, a little bit before, and increasingly post-1937, created all sorts of complex, often absurd, doctrines to squeeze 20th century governmental "requirements" into the strait-jacket of the enumerated grant of powers. Congress has become accustomed to exercising its spending authority without restriction, and that's a Pandora's box that will never be closed. The Supremes may begin to whittle away at some exercising of powers, but will be unable to touch spending.
You apparently do not understand... Where do rights and power come from? Your God? My God? State of nature? Government? Mutual consent of your next door neighbor? The United Nations Security Council?
Let me repeat: this IS NOT ABOUT GUNS. It isn't about flawed white men and paying attention to papers from 200+ years ago as though they are holy writ. Do people have rights by nature of being, or are they granted rights by the goodwill and sufferance of other men? If they have rights which are inherent in being free men, then who decides what those rights are? Can your neighbors take away your rights by majority vote? This is a timeless issue, one which predates the Romans, postdates us, and is relevant regardless of whether it is hypocritical rich white dudes who were EVIL and owned slaves and oppressed women and therefore all their notions on liberty and rights are automatically void and worthless, or me, or you, talking about it.
From where do rights come, and who decides? Is it mob rule? The majority can decide that you no longer have a right to express your mind when they disagree? The majority can do whatever it wants? Or are the right to life, to free expression, uh, a "right" to medical care, uh, free food for the poor, and so on, terribly precious and protected from majority rule, yet other rights which you find not so precious are suspect and invalid and cease to exist? Who decides? You? A huge mob of people who agree with you and vote? Please answer the big question, not the little pissy insignificant question about some pieces of metal.
You have a distinct and well-defined political viewpoint on the hotpoint issue of guns. I'm sure you are a legal pragmatist. I therefore expect no answer beyond what you have already written: guns are bad, guns are intended to kill living creatures, nobody should have the right to have the ability to kill, and in the oh-so-modern 21st century with our oh-so-modern forms of representative civilized government nobody should have the right to be armed whatsoever; well, except your political overlords, that is. My simple, fundamental question is, if the people don't have the right and power to possess arms, then FROM WHERE DOES THE GOVERNMENT DERIVE THE POWER? *Limits* on the exercise of a right are quite different from not having the right at all. If it is immoral (who decides?) for man to possess the means to kill one another, and therefore not a right, then no one, NO ONE, has the right. Not me, not you, not the police, not the U.S. Army.
And once again, from the top. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America DOES NOT GRANT A RIGHT. Please, learn to read. It is useful.
This is legal philosophy. You aren't going to be convinced by any argument I may make. You believe what you choose to believe. If you believe that the rights of man are granted by other men/governments, then that is what you believe.
My double major in college was history, with a focus on US constitutional legal development, as well as ancient Rome. I've been studying this for a long, long time, both avocationally and in curricula, and what I write is based on that background.
Our legal system is based on the concept that the people are the sovereigns. We each are sovereign unto ourselves, and no man has more rights or power than any other man. We hold all power, and all rights, by default. That's just the way it works. You can disagree as to whether that is a valid legal philosophical precept, but that is the precept under which our founders operated, and it is the philosophical underpinning of our foundational legal system. We, the people, are the sovereigns, and we grant limited portions of our natural powers as sovereigns to our governments, through legal instruments: constitutions. The federal constitution proper, you will note, is a positive document. It positively grants powers to govenment. Its basis is that government has no power, whatsoever, until it is granted explicitly. The "bill of rights" then attempts to re-enforce that, by singling out particular areas of concern, and ending with the two amendments which explicitly state that *all* rights belong to the people, regardless of whether or not they are mentioned, and that all powers not explcitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states, or the people.
If you do not accept that foundation, fine. But, it is what our legal system accepts, and has for the life of this republic. It gets chipped away at for political/social expediency, but it does remain. Legal realism has crept in... the Supremes have gone through different doctrines (Lochner anybody?) over time, and have actually begun to recover, fitfully, from the "revolution" of 1933 in the last decade or so. But the basis remains: the people are sovereign, they empower government, and they hold rights because they are people, not because they are granted by other people (governments).
This discussion could be about many other things just as easily. The right to free speech. The right to assembly. The right to property. The right to control one's own body. The right to freely practice religion. The right to remain silent. The right to not incriminate one's self. The right to sell Nazi trinkets on ebay. The right to possess pornography. The right to encrypt one's email. The right to not have the government embed RFID tags under our skin and track us. There is a very, very good reason that our federal constitution doesn't enumerate every last right a person should have, unlike some other forms of government: here, we are presumed to have all those rights which do not infringe on the rights of others. Our courts play referee. In something as polarized as the right to bear arms, something I presume you oppose, there is very, very little that could be said to change anybody's mind on either side. I wouldn't even bother the attempt. But I will defend the legal principles and philosophy which underpin our system of governance in the United States, and point out how the right to bear arms ties into it philosophically, in particular how it would have been considered in the foundational period. And back to the original topic, were the 2nd amendment to disappear entirely, how that philosophy and our legal heritage would quite easily still support a fundamental right of the people to bear arms. The 2nd amendment didn't make up the right. It just says it shouldn't be infringed.
That is just silly. If people here didn't work long and hard, then all the natural benefits of the land would have been of no use. This nation didn't grow like it has in such a short time because of people taking time off and enjoying life. It grew because of people working their asses off. If that isn't rather obvious to you from studying the history of the nation, then discussion is pointless. If you haven't studied the history of the nation, then your comment is a bit more understandable.
Also, slavery is a straw man, and presentism. It was used primarily in the south, for agricultural labor. It was a dying system, because it was highly inefficient. Mechanization would have ended slavery as an economic tool, sooner rather than later. Slavery's effect on the rapid growth of the US as a world power was quite minimal, as its use in northern industrialized states was quite minimal. Actually, I take that back... the civil war did lead to many military advances.
As for military muscle, it had to be ACQUIRED first. The United States was a relative military pipsqueak until the late 1800s. That muscle was acquired on the back of hard work, child labor, six day work weeks, immigrants working even more, and so on.
I will grant you though that our form of government and its promotion of capitalism worked hand in hand with hard toil. A lot of people were, and are, mistreated in the process. But that does not belie the underlying argument that without the so-called "American work ethic" the nation would surely not have turned out as it did in this little blink of time.
The 2nd amendment is not about guns. It is about sovereignty, and the protection thereof. In the United States, the people are the sovereigns, seriously. Every little scrap of power a government here has, the people gave to it, because they had it first. It may seem odd, or extreme, to harp on it, but it is very important to understand it. The 2nd amendment does not grant a right to keep and bear arms. It merely states that the government may not infringe that right. Whether the 2nd amendment existed or not, the right would exist. Without that right, the government would be unable to have an army. One follows from the other.
The core concept of rights and powers are also quite important when reading of our constitution: people have rights. Governments have powers. Repeat: only people have rights. And people have rights because they have them (our constitutional form of government is a product of natural law), not because a government grants them. The people and their 'self-evident' rights and powers exist before government. In the entire body of the unamended constitution, the word 'right' appears once: securing (not granting) the rights of authors and inventors. Those who argue that the 2nd amendment merely protects the power of the state to have a militia are apparently disingenuous, illiterate, or both. It mentions a right of the people, not a power of the state. The language is clear, as was the intent.
Whether a court in the 21st century would find that governmental interest (the police power in this case) in restricting the right to bear arms over-rides the people's interest in exercising that right is something entirely different from whether that right exists. I am perfectly comfortable with courts finding that the governmental interest in protecting a populace in an urban area justifies restriction on the rights of the citizens. I am not comfortable whatsoever with a blanket, nation-wide determination of that to the point of total extermination of a fundamental human right to defend one's self.
If a court, however, fails to identify a right to arms at all, then that court is failing to protect the sovereign powers of the people of this nation, and is making a big mistake in the overall scheme of things. It is very important for the people to understand and protect the concept that *all* rights and *all* power rests with them, and they merely grant *limited* portions of that power to governments to exercise on their behalf.
Sure, today, in the 21st century, with over two centuries of republican representative government and peaceful transfers of power (except of course the civil war) behind us, this seems arcane and impractical to apply to our immediate social needs. But underlying our entire legal system is the concept of the utter and absolute primacy of the rights and powers of the sovereign people. It is a precious thing, and we need to understand it in its full meaning.
It's due to what some consider the extreme American "work ethic." Here, you are expected to work hard, all the time, preferably six or seven days a week, until you "retire" (more and more people now work during "retirement"). While this makes having "a life" difficult, it is what led to America becoming a global economic, military, and political uberpower in, what, a couple mere centuries. Old habits die hard. It is why you are lucky to get two paid weeks of vacation here, vs. six or more in some European nations.
This expected work ethic is not compatible with taking extended breaks. Being out of work is one thing... being voluntarily out of work is often seen as laziness.
On the other hand, of course, such a work ethic is, generally, a common trait of all really successful people, regardless of nationality or where they live. I guess in America, most businesses want to hire people who have the drive to be successful in life. I just wish they would accept that sometimes, success oriented people also want to pause and smell the rose.
In the beginning, there were two carriers per market. The FCC allocated bandwidth for the A carrier, and the B carrier. The A carrier was *always* the local Bell company, what we call the ILEC now. The frequencies licensed were in the 824 - 894 MHz range. Those are the frequencies where the original cellular FDMA AMPS operates.
In the mid 90s, the FCC began licensing PCS. PCS frequencies were initially 1850 - 1990 MHz. They also added some odd frequencies, called narrowband: 901-902MHz, 930-931 MHz, and 940-941 MHz. The narrowband cannot effectively be used for voice.
So, we have two ranges used here in the U.S. PCS was auctioned off, in six blocks per market, to permit lots of competition. The original intent was not for it to be used solely to compete with cellular. Rather, for lots of new technologies as well, such as wireless "landlines" using microcells. That never took off... rather than herald a new golden age of wireless communications, PCS has just facilitated cheaper cell phones. Not necessarily a bad thing I guess.
AT&T and Cingular do not use "850" MHz purely out of choice. Per the FCC:
Cellular licensees are permitted to participate in PCS outside of their existing service areas or in any area where the cellular licensee serves less than 10 percent of the population of the PCS service area. Cellular licensees are defined as entities which have an ownership interest of 20 percent or more in a cellular system. Cellular licensees may also compete for one of the 10 MHz blocks in their existing service areas. Local exchange telephone companies are permitted to apply for PCS licenses on the same basis as other applicants, except for instances where holdings in cellular systems would disqualify them.
Cingular is a consortium of Baby Bells: they already had FCC licenses, by default, for A band AMPS frequencies. Legally, they could not get into PCS frequencies. So they merely transitioned their network from AMPS->NAMPS->DAMPS->TDMA->GSM. As they expanded into markets where they didn't have cellular licenses, they sub-licensed or purchased, either in cellular or PCS. Same for Verizon, though they chose CDMA over GSM.
AT&T WS (which started life as McCaw) originally had very few licenses. They built their network mainly by buying up as many of the AMPS B carriers as they could (recall Cellular One... similar model). So, they also got pre-existing AMPS licenses, and purchased/sub-licensed other cellular/PCS licenses later. They then did the same network transition to GSM TDMA. That makes Cingular and AT&T a very good technology match.
As for T-Mobile, Sprint, others... they use what they use because they bought PCS licenses for a pretty penny. T-Mobile started out as Voicestream out west, and Aerial (US Cellular subsidiary) in other markets. Voicestream purchased Aerial, and then Deutsche Telecom purchased Voicestream. Sprint paid a fortune for its PCS spectrum, and built the "first nationwide network" using it. So on.
Regarding 900MHz, no cellular/PCS system in the US uses it for voice. Frequencies around there have been long allocated elsewhere, hence the FCC having to hand out little bits and pieces. There isn't room there for voice.
As for piggy-backing towers, that's always been done. Competitors have long shared towers, and sometimes are forced to by local regulations. They typically do not share equipment. They lease rack space in the shack, and put up their own antennas.
AT&T has multiple national plans. I have the AT&T National *Network* plan. That means that you do not pay roaming when you are on the AT&T network. If my phone says AT&T or Extended Area, I am not roaming. There is the other one where you allegedly never pay roaming charges... haven't tried that.
I got my AT&T phone when AT&T first opened for business. I had the "national network roaming" plan from DAY ONE. That was what caused me to get AT&T service, since I knew AT&T had the money to build out a national network, and I would wind up being able to roam to nearly any major city for free, eventually.
Which plan are you on? In either case, if your phone says AT&T, you shouldn't be charged roaming unless you are on a "local" plan.
A couple years ago, I had to do battle with AT&T for months over that issue. They purchased another network, where I travel. Once they integrated the networks, my phone started saying "AT&T" on it, so I started using the network there. And, they charged me for roaming. I called them, and they credited my account. And it kept happening... I was told that once the network billing systems were integrated, it would work as it should. Then, I started having trouble getting credited. AT&T apparently revamped their billing system, and my calling plan got lost... I was still being billed as always, but the AT&T staff couldn't see any details on my billing plan, and thus didn't know squat about how to fix my bill.
Then, they started getting uppity about it. One rep said I was on a local plan, I had to pay roaming out of my local area. I asked her to explain the years and years of my having travelled to both coasts, and not pay roaming, yet travelling 150 miles away to another AT&T market, and being charged roaming (I live in Chicago). She actually had the audacity to say that New York must be part of my local calling area, while Indianapolis is not. I then got a next level person. She acknowledged that they made a mistake, acknowledged that I shouldn't have been billed roaming, but then said that I had to pay, since the charges were more than 30 days and their "policy" was that they cannot adjust charges after 30 days. I said that I don't care about your policy, my *contract* is the only thing that governs what I have to pay. Then I got a "supervisor" who tried to pull the same "local calling area" BS. I again did the logic route, explain to me exactly how New York is local to Chicago, yet Indianapolis is not (both cities, same bill). He got confused, put me on hold, and then said that they would credit it. But still refused to acknowledge that they had erred. Eventually, after a long letter and a threatened lawsuit, and an update to their billing system I am sure, it got sorted out...
Oh, and the roaming thing... I remember the days of analog. I had a book in my glovebox, with a list of all the carriers nationwide. My phone would tell me which cell I was on (national cell ID number) and I'd tell the phone which carrier I wanted to use in that cell, depending on the roaming rate in my little book.
AT&T never had CDMA. I got a cell phone with them when they first opened the doors. They have two flavors of TDMA: US TDMA, and the Franco GSM on US frequencies. They have been trying to get customers to transition entirely to GSM. Cingular, likewise, uses GSM and US TDMA.
The US, being the original cellular market, has gone through a lot of protocols. Pre-cell analog (single tower), AMPS & NAMPS (FDMA), digital TDMA of different flavors, and Qualcomm's CDMA. The Europeans, having built up their network after we blazed the path and learned the lessons, had the benefit of starting with their flavor of TDMA, GSM. TDMA had a slower growth pattern here because we had existing widespread AMPS networks, and customers didn't want to give up their AMPS phones for TDMA, which had markedly worse voice quality.
Today, CDMA is arguably a better technology, in theory. AMPS had the best voice quality (when there was no interference/static), giving a full dedicated frequency swath for representing the human voice, based on the Bell experience. NAMPS compressed that to get more calls per cell, but was still pretty much excellent quality. TMDA (time division) digitizes and packetizes the human voice, introducing artifacts from the process, and other issues. CDMA, however, in theory restores the AMPS model of a full spectrum dedicated to representing the human voice. Rather than doing frequency division (FDMA), it does code division: it transmits all calls simultaneously over the exact same frequency range. They are coded, and then picked out of the static at the other end.
Now, that's in theory... the proof is in the pudding. Way back when I worked at Motorola (in cell infrastructure (CIG), not handset), we were doing initial work with Qualcomm's CDMA. I heard that the engineers in the labs were making good progress, got good call quality. But then they did some wider testing, and the quality got much worse. They figured out that the code they devised to encode the voice worked great for a white male midwestern engineer. But not so great for others.
While I think CDMA is a great technology in theory, I also think that given the call degradation failure mode when there is congestion, when networks get greedy and try to cram more and more calls onto a single network node, and so on, TDMA still has the upper hand. Having worked on the business side of the cellular industry, you have to understand that the holy grail of these technologies is not quality: it is density. More calls per physical network node (cell) is the goal. TDMA and CDMA were both designed from day one to be worse than AMPS in terms of call quality, a decision intended to increase call density. It is only through that increased density that everybody and their dog can afford to have a cell phone.
As for having one network and one protocol, then where will innovation come from? That is actually one (possible) benefit to consolidation. When we opened up the frequencies with PCS (which, incidentally, wasn't intended to merely facilitate more and more mobile phone companies), we opened the door to our current environment of cut throat competition, where spending money on innovation gets squeezed out. Now that the market is consolidating, and carriers will be more profitable, we may start seeing some fundamental innovation, other than just with handsets. Wouldn't count on it though.
Speaking of grandparents... my grandmother transferred her NG subscription to me. So I've been a "valued subscriber" since before I was even born. I hope to do the same with my kids... see how long we can keep the run going.
For example the US Constitution says "congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech". Congress then goes right ahead and violates that law by trying to pass various (popular) laws abridging the freedom of speech. Our "elected officials" should probably be thrown in jail for violating that law, but instead the court merely announces that law was never valid in the first place.
What wishful thinking. As I wrote in another comment, we cannot have our cake and eat it too. We have convinced ourselves that the federal constitution is an incredibly flexible document, able to morph itself without any need to amend it or make textual changes.
The federal constitution proper is a positive document (I speak not of the "bill of rights"). It positively grants limited, specific powers to the government (and the 9th & 10th amendments even purposely emphasize that fact). However, that concept has proven inconvenient over the last two centuries. Therefore, our courts regularly fail to review and/or limit the exercise of federal power, using the doctrine that the legislature is simply PRESUMED to be exercising legitimate power, or they trot out tortured doctrines to justify the exercise of federal power: as in, the United States Congress can control how many tomatoes you grow in your personal garden. How? Because by growing your own tomatoes, you are not purchasing tomatoes, and the tomatoes you didn't purchase may have come from another state. Therefore, by growing your own, you are participating in interstate commerce, and therefore your actions are within the power of Congress to regulate. As Dave Barry says, I'm not making that up.
To believe on the one hand that Congress should not be limited by inconvenient restrictions on its power, which would render it incapable of doing so much that we take for granted today (labor laws, interstates, education funding, disaster relief, health care for the poor, welfare, and so on), yet to then believe that it SHOULD be restricted by the text of the constitution elsewhere, is untenable. Put it this way: it says in BLACK AND WHITE exactly what the Congress is permitted to do. When the Supremes enforce that to strike down an exercise of federal power, they are often accused of being activist, preferring "states' rights," and so on. Yet, we trust them to rely on penumbras and other artifices to devine hidden meaning in the first few amendments, such as an unwritten "right to privacy" and so on, and defend our rights. That is nothing but a crap shoot, and nobody in their right mind can point to anything in our constitution and state that "gay marriage" is a protected right, until a court "discovers" (makes up) that right. And then another court can un-discover it.
Most serious constitutional scholars recognize that we live in a post-constitutional era, one where our constitution is now mainly a quaint historical document in some ways. It is still enforced when it comes to structural terms (there is a president, he serves for four years, there are senators, so on). But in most substantive issues involving the exercise of power, we have transitioned to a largely "common law," pseudo-unwritten constitution. Our federal government is constrained primarily through judicial precedent, not a written constitution interpreted as textual law with meaning. I mean, ick, that would be constructionism.
Jefferson suggested that constitutions be discarded and re-written for each generation. There may be dangers in that (do you know that the French Constitution of 1958 declares the official language, and national song), but the danger of doing it the way we have done it is that the constitution becomes largely meaningless as a legal instrument.
Larry
p.s. Also, regarding your the court merely announces that law was never valid in the first place comment. Something many Americans do not realize is that laws, when found unconstitutional, do not become so from that date forward. Rather, the law was never constitu
First, this isn't about the US Constitution. The only plausible intersection of the US Constitution in this issue would be the 'full faith and credit' clause and, perhaps, the 14th amendment.
Second, the US Constitution is a positive document: it positively grants limited power to the government. It does not, despite popular conception, state that "the government can do whatever pops into its pretty little head, EXCEPT this and this and this." HOWEVER, that is precisely how courts and the congress, and consequently the people, have treated it from the mid 20th century onward. Hence, lots of constitutional scholars consider this a post-constitutional era, as we no longer take seriously the vast majority of the text of the federal constitution as a strict legal document. C'est la vie.
Therefore, it doesn't really matter what the federal constitution says the government can or cannot do. Congress will pass whatever garbage they want, whether national healthcare, defense of The One True Marriage bullshit, or funding AIDS medicines for the suffering people of Africa, and the courts will determine whether government has a "compelling interest" (a very, very broad doctrine that prima facia presumes it does) in passing such law, and neither will pay more than the most glancing of attention to the actual text of the federal constitution. It simply doesn't matter in the year 2004 any more.
I'm quite positive that you would chafe horribly were the federal government unable to fund or enforce all your pet causes, because they actually paid attention to the limits on their power. I mean, college tuition grants? Cancer research? (though I could see this one, if it was research into using cancer as a biological weapon!) Interstate highways? (well, Ike did justify them as a means for the military to move around) Missions to Mars? Health care for poor people? Welfare? Unemployment insurance? Money for people whose house is destroyed by a hurricane? Federal minimum wages or hours or other labor laws? Et cetera ad infinitum.
Do you REALLY believe that you can have your cake and eat it too? That you can on the one hand say "the federal constitution is an INCREDIBLY flexible document, after all, it enables us to tax the people and fund ALL SORTS of things that aren't even vaguely authorized by it, unless we make up some really twisted doctrines (stream of commerce anybody?)... however, it is INCREDIBLY RIGID and LIMITING when it comes to how our citizens can restrict the rights of other citizens and in particular Recognized Minorities!"
Finally, I am anxiously awaiting the moment that the gay-marriage bashers trot out the slippery slope argument. After all, if government no longer should be in the business of deciding who can marry whom, or what form marriage can take, then why not polygamy among consenting adults? Why should I not be permitted to have multiple wives? Or husbands? Why not permit the marriage of two men and six women into a single vague "marital unit" family. I mean, seriously? I think that gay marriage DOES open up the slippery slope, and I also think, why not? What the hell business is of the government when it comes to consenting adults?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a theology-reading, bona-fide, for-real Christian...
Are you, really? To me, the for-real Christians are the ones on the street corner with a loudspeaker, extolling all to repent and find God before it is too late. The original Christians believed that the world was going to "end" and be judged within their own lifetime, not thousands of years later. I don't understand those modern "Christians" who go about their lives normally, even tolerantly permit their children to choose a different faith. If they seriously believed in God, judgement, and damnation and the real possibility of the hour of judgement being, oh, in ten minutes, they'd be doing every possible thing they could in their power to convert their children, and every last person they met about whom they cared the tiniest tiny bit.
Those people on the street corner with the loudspeakers, the ones going door to door, rudely interrupting people during dinner, those are the ones I can respect. They actually are for-real believers. Not the lame, tolerant, believe-what-you-want I-respect-other-religions Sunday Christians.
Larry
Wow. When I got out in '94, my starting salary at Motorola (Schaumburg) was 42500. That was TEN YEARS ago. And that was BEFORE the "Internet bubble." Wow.
Larry
The only problem with some rich people is that they sit on their cash and don't adequately invest it. The more money moves the better off we all are. I have no problem with rich people whose money is in motion.
That's actually pretty funny, in the context of something I just saw here in Chicago. Apparently activists in the poorer neighborhoods have found that a very large number of poor/lower-middle-class people have no bank accounts. None. They apparently stash their money in their homes/apartments. They do not understand/trust banks, or have been screwed over by fees. So instead they use check-cashing places, which take a non-trivial cut of the check, to cash paychecks and such. The activists have put together a campaign to encourage the use of fee-free (or at least fee-limited) bank accounts and teach people how to balance their accounts to avoid overdraft fees.
The wealthy generally get that way not through evilness. They get that way through drive, intelligence and thrift. And they then generally use that wealth to generate more wealth, by putting it back into the economy as a seed to grow. They don't sit on it in their bed mattress. That is a good thing for everybody, including the poor, who need the jobs generated by that investment.
Larry
Actually, the major distinction is the corporate charter as filed with their STATE government. Corporations are state entities. The only say the IRS has is whether or not they are taxed differently, federally. A corporation can be taxed as a charity at the state level, but not the federal level, and vice versa.
Larry
I love my 6310i too. It appears to be one of the last real phones. No idiotic keypad, no power-sapping stupid useless color screen or camera. Nice, simple, solid, big screen, *excellent* backlight, Bluetooth, tri-band GSM... perfect PHONE.
Larry
I am getting to hate cars. I learned to drive, literally, on a race track, when I was 15. I like driving. I was *this* close to going professional, but then wound up going to college to be a rocket scientist... switched out of AAE to CS though.
Anyway, sure, the Prius is nifty and all, good gas mileage and emissions. But I like my clutch. CVT sounds nasty. Where's the enjoyment in driving that on a twisty road? I don't want my car to be some damn utilitarian people-mover. I like shifting, damn it. I like being able to tear down my transmission to a bare case in 10 minutes. I like being able to drop the engine in my garage, and rebuild it myself relatively easily (which, BTW, requires some precise micrometers... an engine that revs to 8500 rpm has tight tolerances). I *hate* paying mechanics. I don't trust the bastards.
Nowadays, with OBD-II, and soon OBD-III, it is getting harder and harder to work on the car yourself. That damn Prius is moving toward the complete electro-mechanical black box. Speaking of which, I read today about a concept car from Volvo (Ford) that has a sealed hood. Sealed. You have to go to the dealer to get access to the drivetrain. Sick sick sick. One of the criteria by which I judge a car is how easy it is to change the oil filter. A car I can't maintain and work on myself? I rue the day.
Larry
Also, you need to learn to work the system... first, incorporate, and elect to be a subchapter S corporation at the federal and state level. Second, hire yourself. Get your employer/contract house to pay you corp-corp. Pay yourself a reasonable salary. Considering the downward pressure on salaries, and the worth of an Indian coder, consider yourself worth around $35k a year.
The rest that you earn... your business has legitimate expenses. Pay those, write them off. You can have an SEP retirement fund: save money, more than the $3000 an IRA lets you. Pay for your health care (though if you are more than a 2% shareholder, and you'll be 100% likely, you cannot deduct it from business income), deduct it from your taxes to the extent permitted.
Also, speaking of shares, if you are married, sell 51% of the company to your wife (if you trust her at least). Get certified as a woman-owned business by your city/county/state. It can help you get contracts if you decide to go independent.
With what is left of your business income, pay yourself dividends. Corporate dividends are not wages (so long as you paid yourself a reasonable salary, which YOU determine). You pay only income tax, no social security(i.e. ponzi)/medicare. If you pay yourself a low enough salary, and $35k is low enough, you can take your dividends at the Bush tax rate of 5% as well. I just hope Congress makes that permanent.
Also, unemployment insurance is a great deal. Lay yourself off between contracts, and then collect unemployment benefits. Where I am, I pay $270 a year, TOTAL, per employee for unemployment insurance premiums. For me, the WEEKLY "benefit" is $331.00. IOW, I get back my entire yearly premium in the first week. Even if my "contribution rate" went up due to lots of utilization of the account, it is still limited to taxing only the first $9000 of income. I don't advocate cheating the system, but DEFINITELY apply to collect the moment you lose a contract/job.
Just don't forget to pay quarterly estimated taxes for your personal income, and your business taxes monthly. Get an account with EFTPS, the online federal payment system, it's easy.
Larry
Right on. As I just wrote in a previous reply, the underlying technology involved in the interaction appears to be a mix of ELIZA and an Infocom-like adventure game text recognition engine using keywords, like what we wrote as kids in BASIC on our home computers back in the 80s. All the glitz on top, and the tie-in to other systems, appear to be the only real meat of the system. That is, of course, interesting. But the technology is certainly nothing terribly impressive, unless they've hidden the good stuff.
Larry
My thought EXACTLY. There are so many young people out there who don't know what has been done before. I just came from their web site, and the demonstration "interaction" between Alice and the supposed user reminded me STRONGLY of using ELIZA years and years and years ago. They have spruced it up, sure, and added good text recognition and speech, but it still seems to be based fundamentally on an Infocom-like adventure game text recognition system underneath. The bit where, and I paraphrase, she says she "appreciates his polite style, but it is ambiguous: please use what, where, when" instantly clued me in to that. Hell, I remember writing an adventure game engine in BASIC back in the 80s that did a decent job of parsing human text and figuring out what was wanted. I would have hoped that in the intervening DECADES, natural language recognition would have progressed a hell of a lot more than what appears to be the case. I'm sure in fact that it has, actually. Maybe just elsewhere.
I was at an ACM presentation not long ago, and some PhD was talking about this cool project he had done. Likewise, it looked functionally VERY similar to how one interacted with those old text Infocom games. Lots of the young kids ooh'ed and ahh'ed over it. I mentioned this similarity afterwards, and he actually got a bit irritated. I suppose people are supposed to have forgotten about that, so it can be re-invented in the 21st century.
Larry
The point was not that you must make money from everything you do. The point is that you *must* make some money to provide for yourself and your family. In the ideal world promoted by many, and apparently Aiden, no software would carry a monetary cost. In that world, how much are software developers worth? How will professional developers make ends meet? Yes, money is annoying, yes, excessive greed is bad. However, in the real world, one needs money to buy food, clothing, housing, computers, and the other stuff we need or want. Doing open source is fine. But, unless you are lucky in being able to make some money from it, treat it like your hobby, not your job.
As for making money from your education, while I am the first to point out that one should not base one's education solely on one's vocational interest (e.g. take lots and lots of elective courses outside of your focus, feed your mind while you can), if, like me, you spent tens of thousands of your own (not your fellow citizen's via the confiscation of the government) dollars/euros/whatever on that education, it is reasonable that you find some way to actually provide for yourself with the fruits of your education. 'Would you like fries with that?' isn't something a bright and educated person should be saying in the course of their job.
Larry
Is it not possible that the Second Amendment might be a relic of a bygone era? If so, then a justification for its continued existence is called for.
:-)
Your words. Obviously, I'm not sure what was in your mind when you wrote that. But it appears to be a belief that should the 2nd amendment go away, likewise goes a right. *poof* If not, I apologize for the presumption. But if so, I assert, again, that the 2nd amendment does not grant a right. It merely states that that right should not be infringed. It does not create the right. Again, learn to read our foundational legal documents. Our rights don't come from them. I futher assert that our common law jurisprudential system (which very much predates our federal government) would be quite well equipped to discern the fundamental right to possess arms regardless of whether or not the redundant 2nd amendment explicitly referenced said right. Hell, it might be hidden within some penumbra somewhere.
Regarding forcing rights... I have no interest *whatsoever* in forcing a right on anyone. You seem to have our mutual positions entirely confused. My interest is in not having YOU force YOUR belief that I do NOT hold a right. I posit that neither you, nor 250 million of your best and dearest friends, have the legitimate power to do that. You may limit my exercise of my rights in society in order to protect your own rights. But you cannot exterminate them. Concealed carry, brandishment, transport on public property, possession of inherently dangerous weapons such as, oh, nuclear bombs... all well within the state police power to limit. But to assert that man has no right at all to be armed in one's defense, that said right does not exist, and is not inalienable? No.
As for the straw man of slavery and the sins of our fathers, I have no interest whatsoever in talking about that, as it hasn't the slightest bearing. Why do you continue to insist on bringing that into the discussion, as though it somehow trumps the moral authority of anyone who ever was involved with it? Did you perchance have ancestors in bondage? I don't know about you, but my viewpoints on morality and legal philosophy do not require that my like-minded forebears be angels, pure as the driven snow in their lives. The wisdom within the fruits of human thought and philosophy can be separated from those often flawed creatures who espoused them. See St. Augustine for a prime example.
And hell, my own ancestors owned a slave-trading business in Virginia. I surely hope that that familial sin does not taint my independence of thought in your mind.
In the end, the entire discussion boils down to: do you, Mr. Crawling Chaos, believe that our rights as citizens derive from a magical text written in the late 1700s by a few dead white guys? If so, then I suppose that in your mind the deletion of the 2nd amendment will also, magically, erase a right we have had for a long time. I would heartily disagree.
Larry
Sorry, BTW, that was 1937. Typo.
The Supremes have begun exercising their power to restrain federal, and even state, action, after an effective hiatus of about fifty years, ever since the 1937 capitulation to FDR. They have begun no longer accepting the nexus of interstate commerce as a blanket authorization for Congress to do whatever the hell Congress wants. See the Lopez case, where the Supremes ruled that the commerce clause does not give Congress a criminal police power (in that case, the interstate commerce clause was invoked to justify the "gun-free school zones" law). Other recent cases, where they ruled that the federal government has no power to compel a state to enact legislation; where the takings clause, as incorporated via the 14th amendment, was actually enforced against a local government to strike down an act of regulatory taking (S. Carolina Coastal Commission); so on. They've begun to assert the power to limit governmental action in ways which have been unheard of in decades. Aside: I did research for a couple years into the evolution of the takings power from foundation onward... in the 1990s, there began to be a "dramatic" change toward more restriction on governmental takings in response to government's rapidly growing hunger for regulatory takings of private property. It has seemed to fizzle out some, but we'll see.
The Supremes are beginning, fitfully, to reassert their role to limit legislative action, and no longer accept the blanket presumption of valid legislative intent and governmental interest as being an over-riding justification for every exercise of power. We will never, ever return to a true constitutional form of government again, with limited enumerated powers, though. That is well dead and buried.
Regarding the president and restricting of rights, that is a political argument. In times of national stress/conflict, the political branches have always imposed restrictions on rights. The current restrictions are pretty mild compared to the past. At least we still have habeas corpus in the United States; unlike Lincoln, Bush has not suspended it.
On NPR a few weeks ago, one of the uber-liberal radio hosts had a couple constitutional scholars on the show to discuss just this issue, that of Bush and Congress locking people up, restricting rights. She was shocked (it's always funny when she gets guests, who I'm sure she presumes share her world-view, who shock her that way) when they both agreed that they felt Bush was doing an overall good job in terms of the domestic response to the "war on terrorism." They stated that in times of emergency, a president has always done this. Bush has been more mild than he could have been. Our system is working the way it should. The courts are now beginning to review the decisions made. The cases will work their way through the system, and the Supremes will make some decisions, define some boundaries. But, this takes time. Have some patience.
As for spending, the budget, and the Supremes and the Constitution, that is a rather moot point in the 21st century. Since the 1930s, we have been in what is considered a post-constitutional era in most respects. We no longer pay any attention whatsoever to the enumerated powers of the federal government. Rather than amend the constitution to change with the reality of a all-powerful central government, something our constitution explicitly attempts to prevent, we as a people have chosen to ignore large swaths of the federal constitution. That's just the way it is. To be sure, the Supremes, a little bit before, and increasingly post-1937, created all sorts of complex, often absurd, doctrines to squeeze 20th century governmental "requirements" into the strait-jacket of the enumerated grant of powers. Congress has become accustomed to exercising its spending authority without restriction, and that's a Pandora's box that will never be closed. The Supremes may begin to whittle away at some exercising of powers, but will be unable to touch spending.
Ever since Monroe and his
You apparently do not understand... Where do rights and power come from? Your God? My God? State of nature? Government? Mutual consent of your next door neighbor? The United Nations Security Council?
Let me repeat: this IS NOT ABOUT GUNS. It isn't about flawed white men and paying attention to papers from 200+ years ago as though they are holy writ. Do people have rights by nature of being, or are they granted rights by the goodwill and sufferance of other men? If they have rights which are inherent in being free men, then who decides what those rights are? Can your neighbors take away your rights by majority vote? This is a timeless issue, one which predates the Romans, postdates us, and is relevant regardless of whether it is hypocritical rich white dudes who were EVIL and owned slaves and oppressed women and therefore all their notions on liberty and rights are automatically void and worthless, or me, or you, talking about it.
From where do rights come, and who decides? Is it mob rule? The majority can decide that you no longer have a right to express your mind when they disagree? The majority can do whatever it wants? Or are the right to life, to free expression, uh, a "right" to medical care, uh, free food for the poor, and so on, terribly precious and protected from majority rule, yet other rights which you find not so precious are suspect and invalid and cease to exist? Who decides? You? A huge mob of people who agree with you and vote? Please answer the big question, not the little pissy insignificant question about some pieces of metal.
You have a distinct and well-defined political viewpoint on the hotpoint issue of guns. I'm sure you are a legal pragmatist. I therefore expect no answer beyond what you have already written: guns are bad, guns are intended to kill living creatures, nobody should have the right to have the ability to kill, and in the oh-so-modern 21st century with our oh-so-modern forms of representative civilized government nobody should have the right to be armed whatsoever; well, except your political overlords, that is. My simple, fundamental question is, if the people don't have the right and power to possess arms, then FROM WHERE DOES THE GOVERNMENT DERIVE THE POWER? *Limits* on the exercise of a right are quite different from not having the right at all. If it is immoral (who decides?) for man to possess the means to kill one another, and therefore not a right, then no one, NO ONE, has the right. Not me, not you, not the police, not the U.S. Army.
And once again, from the top. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America DOES NOT GRANT A RIGHT. Please, learn to read. It is useful.
Larry (who has never owned a gun BTW)
This is legal philosophy. You aren't going to be convinced by any argument I may make. You believe what you choose to believe. If you believe that the rights of man are granted by other men/governments, then that is what you believe.
My double major in college was history, with a focus on US constitutional legal development, as well as ancient Rome. I've been studying this for a long, long time, both avocationally and in curricula, and what I write is based on that background.
Our legal system is based on the concept that the people are the sovereigns. We each are sovereign unto ourselves, and no man has more rights or power than any other man. We hold all power, and all rights, by default. That's just the way it works. You can disagree as to whether that is a valid legal philosophical precept, but that is the precept under which our founders operated, and it is the philosophical underpinning of our foundational legal system. We, the people, are the sovereigns, and we grant limited portions of our natural powers as sovereigns to our governments, through legal instruments: constitutions. The federal constitution proper, you will note, is a positive document. It positively grants powers to govenment. Its basis is that government has no power, whatsoever, until it is granted explicitly. The "bill of rights" then attempts to re-enforce that, by singling out particular areas of concern, and ending with the two amendments which explicitly state that *all* rights belong to the people, regardless of whether or not they are mentioned, and that all powers not explcitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states, or the people.
If you do not accept that foundation, fine. But, it is what our legal system accepts, and has for the life of this republic. It gets chipped away at for political/social expediency, but it does remain. Legal realism has crept in... the Supremes have gone through different doctrines (Lochner anybody?) over time, and have actually begun to recover, fitfully, from the "revolution" of 1933 in the last decade or so. But the basis remains: the people are sovereign, they empower government, and they hold rights because they are people, not because they are granted by other people (governments).
This discussion could be about many other things just as easily. The right to free speech. The right to assembly. The right to property. The right to control one's own body. The right to freely practice religion. The right to remain silent. The right to not incriminate one's self. The right to sell Nazi trinkets on ebay. The right to possess pornography. The right to encrypt one's email. The right to not have the government embed RFID tags under our skin and track us. There is a very, very good reason that our federal constitution doesn't enumerate every last right a person should have, unlike some other forms of government: here, we are presumed to have all those rights which do not infringe on the rights of others. Our courts play referee. In something as polarized as the right to bear arms, something I presume you oppose, there is very, very little that could be said to change anybody's mind on either side. I wouldn't even bother the attempt. But I will defend the legal principles and philosophy which underpin our system of governance in the United States, and point out how the right to bear arms ties into it philosophically, in particular how it would have been considered in the foundational period. And back to the original topic, were the 2nd amendment to disappear entirely, how that philosophy and our legal heritage would quite easily still support a fundamental right of the people to bear arms. The 2nd amendment didn't make up the right. It just says it shouldn't be infringed.
Larry
That is just silly. If people here didn't work long and hard, then all the natural benefits of the land would have been of no use. This nation didn't grow like it has in such a short time because of people taking time off and enjoying life. It grew because of people working their asses off. If that isn't rather obvious to you from studying the history of the nation, then discussion is pointless. If you haven't studied the history of the nation, then your comment is a bit more understandable.
Also, slavery is a straw man, and presentism. It was used primarily in the south, for agricultural labor. It was a dying system, because it was highly inefficient. Mechanization would have ended slavery as an economic tool, sooner rather than later. Slavery's effect on the rapid growth of the US as a world power was quite minimal, as its use in northern industrialized states was quite minimal. Actually, I take that back... the civil war did lead to many military advances.
As for military muscle, it had to be ACQUIRED first. The United States was a relative military pipsqueak until the late 1800s. That muscle was acquired on the back of hard work, child labor, six day work weeks, immigrants working even more, and so on.
I will grant you though that our form of government and its promotion of capitalism worked hand in hand with hard toil. A lot of people were, and are, mistreated in the process. But that does not belie the underlying argument that without the so-called "American work ethic" the nation would surely not have turned out as it did in this little blink of time.
Larry
The 2nd amendment is not about guns. It is about sovereignty, and the protection thereof. In the United States, the people are the sovereigns, seriously. Every little scrap of power a government here has, the people gave to it, because they had it first. It may seem odd, or extreme, to harp on it, but it is very important to understand it. The 2nd amendment does not grant a right to keep and bear arms. It merely states that the government may not infringe that right. Whether the 2nd amendment existed or not, the right would exist. Without that right, the government would be unable to have an army. One follows from the other.
The core concept of rights and powers are also quite important when reading of our constitution: people have rights. Governments have powers. Repeat: only people have rights. And people have rights because they have them (our constitutional form of government is a product of natural law), not because a government grants them. The people and their 'self-evident' rights and powers exist before government. In the entire body of the unamended constitution, the word 'right' appears once: securing (not granting) the rights of authors and inventors. Those who argue that the 2nd amendment merely protects the power of the state to have a militia are apparently disingenuous, illiterate, or both. It mentions a right of the people, not a power of the state. The language is clear, as was the intent.
Whether a court in the 21st century would find that governmental interest (the police power in this case) in restricting the right to bear arms over-rides the people's interest in exercising that right is something entirely different from whether that right exists. I am perfectly comfortable with courts finding that the governmental interest in protecting a populace in an urban area justifies restriction on the rights of the citizens. I am not comfortable whatsoever with a blanket, nation-wide determination of that to the point of total extermination of a fundamental human right to defend one's self.
If a court, however, fails to identify a right to arms at all, then that court is failing to protect the sovereign powers of the people of this nation, and is making a big mistake in the overall scheme of things. It is very important for the people to understand and protect the concept that *all* rights and *all* power rests with them, and they merely grant *limited* portions of that power to governments to exercise on their behalf.
Sure, today, in the 21st century, with over two centuries of republican representative government and peaceful transfers of power (except of course the civil war) behind us, this seems arcane and impractical to apply to our immediate social needs. But underlying our entire legal system is the concept of the utter and absolute primacy of the rights and powers of the sovereign people. It is a precious thing, and we need to understand it in its full meaning.
Larry
It's due to what some consider the extreme American "work ethic." Here, you are expected to work hard, all the time, preferably six or seven days a week, until you "retire" (more and more people now work during "retirement"). While this makes having "a life" difficult, it is what led to America becoming a global economic, military, and political uberpower in, what, a couple mere centuries. Old habits die hard. It is why you are lucky to get two paid weeks of vacation here, vs. six or more in some European nations.
This expected work ethic is not compatible with taking extended breaks. Being out of work is one thing... being voluntarily out of work is often seen as laziness.
On the other hand, of course, such a work ethic is, generally, a common trait of all really successful people, regardless of nationality or where they live. I guess in America, most businesses want to hire people who have the drive to be successful in life. I just wish they would accept that sometimes, success oriented people also want to pause and smell the rose.
Larry
Some history is in order here...
In the beginning, there were two carriers per market. The FCC allocated bandwidth for the A carrier, and the B carrier. The A carrier was *always* the local Bell company, what we call the ILEC now. The frequencies licensed were in the 824 - 894 MHz range. Those are the frequencies where the original cellular FDMA AMPS operates.
In the mid 90s, the FCC began licensing PCS. PCS frequencies were initially 1850 - 1990 MHz. They also added some odd frequencies, called narrowband: 901-902MHz, 930-931 MHz, and 940-941 MHz. The narrowband cannot effectively be used for voice.
So, we have two ranges used here in the U.S. PCS was auctioned off, in six blocks per market, to permit lots of competition. The original intent was not for it to be used solely to compete with cellular. Rather, for lots of new technologies as well, such as wireless "landlines" using microcells. That never took off... rather than herald a new golden age of wireless communications, PCS has just facilitated cheaper cell phones. Not necessarily a bad thing I guess.
AT&T and Cingular do not use "850" MHz purely out of choice. Per the FCC:
Cellular licensees are permitted to participate in PCS outside of their existing service areas or in any area where the cellular licensee serves less than 10 percent of the population of the PCS service area. Cellular licensees are defined as entities which have an ownership interest of 20 percent or more in a cellular system. Cellular licensees may also compete for one of the 10 MHz blocks in their existing service areas. Local exchange telephone companies are permitted to apply for PCS licenses on the same basis as other applicants, except for instances where holdings in cellular systems would disqualify them.
Cingular is a consortium of Baby Bells: they already had FCC licenses, by default, for A band AMPS frequencies. Legally, they could not get into PCS frequencies. So they merely transitioned their network from AMPS->NAMPS->DAMPS->TDMA->GSM. As they expanded into markets where they didn't have cellular licenses, they sub-licensed or purchased, either in cellular or PCS. Same for Verizon, though they chose CDMA over GSM.
AT&T WS (which started life as McCaw) originally had very few licenses. They built their network mainly by buying up as many of the AMPS B carriers as they could (recall Cellular One... similar model). So, they also got pre-existing AMPS licenses, and purchased/sub-licensed other cellular/PCS licenses later. They then did the same network transition to GSM TDMA. That makes Cingular and AT&T a very good technology match.
As for T-Mobile, Sprint, others... they use what they use because they bought PCS licenses for a pretty penny. T-Mobile started out as Voicestream out west, and Aerial (US Cellular subsidiary) in other markets. Voicestream purchased Aerial, and then Deutsche Telecom purchased Voicestream. Sprint paid a fortune for its PCS spectrum, and built the "first nationwide network" using it. So on.
Regarding 900MHz, no cellular/PCS system in the US uses it for voice. Frequencies around there have been long allocated elsewhere, hence the FCC having to hand out little bits and pieces. There isn't room there for voice.
As for piggy-backing towers, that's always been done. Competitors have long shared towers, and sometimes are forced to by local regulations. They typically do not share equipment. They lease rack space in the shack, and put up their own antennas.
AT&T has multiple national plans. I have the AT&T National *Network* plan. That means that you do not pay roaming when you are on the AT&T network. If my phone says AT&T or Extended Area, I am not roaming. There is the other one where you allegedly never pay roaming charges... haven't tried that.
I got my AT&T phone when AT&T first opened for business. I had the "national network roaming" plan from DAY ONE. That was what caused me to get AT&T service, since I knew AT&T had the money to build out a national network, and I would wind up being able to roam to nearly any major city for free, eventually.
Which plan are you on? In either case, if your phone says AT&T, you shouldn't be charged roaming unless you are on a "local" plan.
A couple years ago, I had to do battle with AT&T for months over that issue. They purchased another network, where I travel. Once they integrated the networks, my phone started saying "AT&T" on it, so I started using the network there. And, they charged me for roaming. I called them, and they credited my account. And it kept happening... I was told that once the network billing systems were integrated, it would work as it should. Then, I started having trouble getting credited. AT&T apparently revamped their billing system, and my calling plan got lost... I was still being billed as always, but the AT&T staff couldn't see any details on my billing plan, and thus didn't know squat about how to fix my bill.
Then, they started getting uppity about it. One rep said I was on a local plan, I had to pay roaming out of my local area. I asked her to explain the years and years of my having travelled to both coasts, and not pay roaming, yet travelling 150 miles away to another AT&T market, and being charged roaming (I live in Chicago). She actually had the audacity to say that New York must be part of my local calling area, while Indianapolis is not. I then got a next level person. She acknowledged that they made a mistake, acknowledged that I shouldn't have been billed roaming, but then said that I had to pay, since the charges were more than 30 days and their "policy" was that they cannot adjust charges after 30 days. I said that I don't care about your policy, my *contract* is the only thing that governs what I have to pay. Then I got a "supervisor" who tried to pull the same "local calling area" BS. I again did the logic route, explain to me exactly how New York is local to Chicago, yet Indianapolis is not (both cities, same bill). He got confused, put me on hold, and then said that they would credit it. But still refused to acknowledge that they had erred. Eventually, after a long letter and a threatened lawsuit, and an update to their billing system I am sure, it got sorted out...
Oh, and the roaming thing... I remember the days of analog. I had a book in my glovebox, with a list of all the carriers nationwide. My phone would tell me which cell I was on (national cell ID number) and I'd tell the phone which carrier I wanted to use in that cell, depending on the roaming rate in my little book.
Larry
AT&T never had CDMA. I got a cell phone with them when they first opened the doors. They have two flavors of TDMA: US TDMA, and the Franco GSM on US frequencies. They have been trying to get customers to transition entirely to GSM. Cingular, likewise, uses GSM and US TDMA.
The US, being the original cellular market, has gone through a lot of protocols. Pre-cell analog (single tower), AMPS & NAMPS (FDMA), digital TDMA of different flavors, and Qualcomm's CDMA. The Europeans, having built up their network after we blazed the path and learned the lessons, had the benefit of starting with their flavor of TDMA, GSM. TDMA had a slower growth pattern here because we had existing widespread AMPS networks, and customers didn't want to give up their AMPS phones for TDMA, which had markedly worse voice quality.
Today, CDMA is arguably a better technology, in theory. AMPS had the best voice quality (when there was no interference/static), giving a full dedicated frequency swath for representing the human voice, based on the Bell experience. NAMPS compressed that to get more calls per cell, but was still pretty much excellent quality. TMDA (time division) digitizes and packetizes the human voice, introducing artifacts from the process, and other issues. CDMA, however, in theory restores the AMPS model of a full spectrum dedicated to representing the human voice. Rather than doing frequency division (FDMA), it does code division: it transmits all calls simultaneously over the exact same frequency range. They are coded, and then picked out of the static at the other end.
Now, that's in theory... the proof is in the pudding. Way back when I worked at Motorola (in cell infrastructure (CIG), not handset), we were doing initial work with Qualcomm's CDMA. I heard that the engineers in the labs were making good progress, got good call quality. But then they did some wider testing, and the quality got much worse. They figured out that the code they devised to encode the voice worked great for a white male midwestern engineer. But not so great for others.
While I think CDMA is a great technology in theory, I also think that given the call degradation failure mode when there is congestion, when networks get greedy and try to cram more and more calls onto a single network node, and so on, TDMA still has the upper hand. Having worked on the business side of the cellular industry, you have to understand that the holy grail of these technologies is not quality: it is density. More calls per physical network node (cell) is the goal. TDMA and CDMA were both designed from day one to be worse than AMPS in terms of call quality, a decision intended to increase call density. It is only through that increased density that everybody and their dog can afford to have a cell phone.
As for having one network and one protocol, then where will innovation come from? That is actually one (possible) benefit to consolidation. When we opened up the frequencies with PCS (which, incidentally, wasn't intended to merely facilitate more and more mobile phone companies), we opened the door to our current environment of cut throat competition, where spending money on innovation gets squeezed out. Now that the market is consolidating, and carriers will be more profitable, we may start seeing some fundamental innovation, other than just with handsets. Wouldn't count on it though.
Larry
They were sponsors for the Italian America's Cup racing team, which did quite well... and I think they sell some clothes/accessories too.
Larry
Speaking of grandparents... my grandmother transferred her NG subscription to me. So I've been a "valued subscriber" since before I was even born. I hope to do the same with my kids... see how long we can keep the run going.
Larry
Uh, because it isn't accurate? Those French were probably drunk and singing La Marseillaise when they measured it; it's off a whole 0.2 mm!
Larry
For example the US Constitution says "congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech". Congress then goes right ahead and violates that law by trying to pass various (popular) laws abridging the freedom of speech. Our "elected officials" should probably be thrown in jail for violating that law, but instead the court merely announces that law was never valid in the first place.
What wishful thinking. As I wrote in another comment, we cannot have our cake and eat it too. We have convinced ourselves that the federal constitution is an incredibly flexible document, able to morph itself without any need to amend it or make textual changes.
The federal constitution proper is a positive document (I speak not of the "bill of rights"). It positively grants limited, specific powers to the government (and the 9th & 10th amendments even purposely emphasize that fact). However, that concept has proven inconvenient over the last two centuries. Therefore, our courts regularly fail to review and/or limit the exercise of federal power, using the doctrine that the legislature is simply PRESUMED to be exercising legitimate power, or they trot out tortured doctrines to justify the exercise of federal power: as in, the United States Congress can control how many tomatoes you grow in your personal garden. How? Because by growing your own tomatoes, you are not purchasing tomatoes, and the tomatoes you didn't purchase may have come from another state. Therefore, by growing your own, you are participating in interstate commerce, and therefore your actions are within the power of Congress to regulate. As Dave Barry says, I'm not making that up.
To believe on the one hand that Congress should not be limited by inconvenient restrictions on its power, which would render it incapable of doing so much that we take for granted today (labor laws, interstates, education funding, disaster relief, health care for the poor, welfare, and so on), yet to then believe that it SHOULD be restricted by the text of the constitution elsewhere, is untenable. Put it this way: it says in BLACK AND WHITE exactly what the Congress is permitted to do. When the Supremes enforce that to strike down an exercise of federal power, they are often accused of being activist, preferring "states' rights," and so on. Yet, we trust them to rely on penumbras and other artifices to devine hidden meaning in the first few amendments, such as an unwritten "right to privacy" and so on, and defend our rights. That is nothing but a crap shoot, and nobody in their right mind can point to anything in our constitution and state that "gay marriage" is a protected right, until a court "discovers" (makes up) that right. And then another court can un-discover it.
Most serious constitutional scholars recognize that we live in a post-constitutional era, one where our constitution is now mainly a quaint historical document in some ways. It is still enforced when it comes to structural terms (there is a president, he serves for four years, there are senators, so on). But in most substantive issues involving the exercise of power, we have transitioned to a largely "common law," pseudo-unwritten constitution. Our federal government is constrained primarily through judicial precedent, not a written constitution interpreted as textual law with meaning. I mean, ick, that would be constructionism.
Jefferson suggested that constitutions be discarded and re-written for each generation. There may be dangers in that (do you know that the French Constitution of 1958 declares the official language, and national song), but the danger of doing it the way we have done it is that the constitution becomes largely meaningless as a legal instrument.
Larry
p.s. Also, regarding your the court merely announces that law was never valid in the first place comment. Something many Americans do not realize is that laws, when found unconstitutional, do not become so from that date forward. Rather, the law was never constitu
First, this isn't about the US Constitution. The only plausible intersection of the US Constitution in this issue would be the 'full faith and credit' clause and, perhaps, the 14th amendment.
... however, it is INCREDIBLY RIGID and LIMITING when it comes to how our citizens can restrict the rights of other citizens and in particular Recognized Minorities!"
Second, the US Constitution is a positive document: it positively grants limited power to the government. It does not, despite popular conception, state that "the government can do whatever pops into its pretty little head, EXCEPT this and this and this." HOWEVER, that is precisely how courts and the congress, and consequently the people, have treated it from the mid 20th century onward. Hence, lots of constitutional scholars consider this a post-constitutional era, as we no longer take seriously the vast majority of the text of the federal constitution as a strict legal document. C'est la vie.
Therefore, it doesn't really matter what the federal constitution says the government can or cannot do. Congress will pass whatever garbage they want, whether national healthcare, defense of The One True Marriage bullshit, or funding AIDS medicines for the suffering people of Africa, and the courts will determine whether government has a "compelling interest" (a very, very broad doctrine that prima facia presumes it does) in passing such law, and neither will pay more than the most glancing of attention to the actual text of the federal constitution. It simply doesn't matter in the year 2004 any more.
I'm quite positive that you would chafe horribly were the federal government unable to fund or enforce all your pet causes, because they actually paid attention to the limits on their power. I mean, college tuition grants? Cancer research? (though I could see this one, if it was research into using cancer as a biological weapon!) Interstate highways? (well, Ike did justify them as a means for the military to move around) Missions to Mars? Health care for poor people? Welfare? Unemployment insurance? Money for people whose house is destroyed by a hurricane? Federal minimum wages or hours or other labor laws? Et cetera ad infinitum.
Do you REALLY believe that you can have your cake and eat it too? That you can on the one hand say "the federal constitution is an INCREDIBLY flexible document, after all, it enables us to tax the people and fund ALL SORTS of things that aren't even vaguely authorized by it, unless we make up some really twisted doctrines (stream of commerce anybody?)
Finally, I am anxiously awaiting the moment that the gay-marriage bashers trot out the slippery slope argument. After all, if government no longer should be in the business of deciding who can marry whom, or what form marriage can take, then why not polygamy among consenting adults? Why should I not be permitted to have multiple wives? Or husbands? Why not permit the marriage of two men and six women into a single vague "marital unit" family. I mean, seriously? I think that gay marriage DOES open up the slippery slope, and I also think, why not? What the hell business is of the government when it comes to consenting adults?
Larry