You'll brook no argument from me on the so-called 'War on Drugs'. All I said was that the comparison to Nightwatch was absurd. If the comparison was valid then I'd be sitting behind bars for railing against the war on drugs. I'm not.
so what exactly happened? the article is long on confusion and short on explanations.
Someone got really greedy. Someone else caught them and is now going to use that fact to advance their political career. Some stockholders will suffer and a handful of executives will spend a few years in white collar resort prison.
the fact that most regular users don't browse at -1
Actually I would recommend that everyone browse at -1. There isn't really that much spam/trolling to contend with -- in exchange for having to scroll past one or two racist trolls you'll get to see raw unfiltered discussion that may not have survived the group think that permeates the moderation system.
I stopped caring or paying attention to moderation a long time ago. Give it to me raw baby!
The only reason for our politicians to be deceptive about this is because they are more interested in power than a smoothly-working system. I think this, above all, is what turns off many Americans to the prospect of socialism.
Bingo. Every "freebie" you get from the Government comes with a corresponding reduction in personal freedom. Want free health care? We will tell you what kind of policy you can purchase and take away your freedom to opt out of having said coverage.
Want assistance going to college? No problem. We'll just check to make sure you registered for selective service and make sure that you've never smoked weed.
Want money to help maintain your highways? No problem. Just implement 21 as the drinking age and we'll send you the money just as fast as you can cash the check. No matter that the Constitution grants the states the exclusive right to regulate alcohol.
and all the money in the world won't get them that if they're fundamentally opposed to their voters' preferences.
Ah, but the fix is in long before the voters go to the polls. The sad truth is that the overwhelming majority of House members do not need to worry about the general election. They only need to run far enough to the left or right to please the rabid members of their base that vote on primary day. Barring a sex scandal with an underage page or death from old age they need not worry about the general election.
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.
Why is that relevant? Statistically speaking our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are "rarely" killed in the line of duty. So I guess they don't have any reason to fear death when they go out on patrol? A police officer has to worry about taking a bullet every single time he has an interaction with someone. Have you ever known that kind of fear? Ever had to contemplate absorbing a small piece of lead at supersonic speeds when you show up at the office?
I cut them a lot of slack even though I've had my share of run-ins with asshole cops. Even if you are dealing with one that's a complete asshole it does you no good to escalate the situation. It's only going to make it worse. Suck it up and do what they tell you. If the abuse was particularly egregious then do the American thing and sue the hell out of them at a later date.
That's a pretty dumb comparison. Get back to me when Americans are being hauled away for expressing anti-Government views. Get back to me when Joe Biden assassinates Barack Obama so he can seize power.
The new UI doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people but for the life of me I can't figure out the new meta-moderation system. It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past -- whether or not this is related to the new meta-moderation system is open to debate.
I just read through all TSA security manuals and don't find anything about this road being dangerous.
I read the TSA manual. I didn't see anything that was particularly dangerous. Most of it SOP for anybody involved in the security (public or private) business.
I would wager that they are more worried about embarrassment than security. The part of the document that stuck out in my mind was the list of exemptions from enhanced security screenings. Your friendly local Congress-critter need not worry about dealing with security in the same manner as us mere plebs. All he or she has to do if selected for the enhanced screening is show a Congressional ID and the TSA folks are supposed to fold like a cheap suit. So much for all citizens being equal under the law.
Another thing I could find to bitch about is the practice at certain airports of giving first class passengers their own special queue to the security checkpoint. How is it that the Government tolerates this practice when it's our tax dollars funding the security system? TSA's answer on this is cute too, "We aren't in charge of the line, the airport is". Nice little cop out, isn't it?
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
1) There's a limit to how many towers you can deploy before they start to interfere with each other.
2) Building a tower is not the easiest thing in the world. Your local wireline internet company doesn't need to get permission from the town planning board and worry about NIMBY'ism every time it wants to expand it's coax plant. Your wireless internet/phone company does. Have you ever attended a zoning meeting where an entity (and it doesn't have to be a cell phone company either) is seeking to put up a tower? I have -- it's not usually a pretty sight.
you've ot to admit that at some point we're going to grow beyond what fossil fuels in of themselves are capable of providing.
We've had the technology to displace fossil fuels since the 50s. We just moved away from it because of a handful of loud NIMBYists/greenpeace'ers and a whole lot of FUD.
A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart.
I'm going to rant here....
The delay in reaching full brightness irks me to no end with CFLs. It's not a big deal when you are talking about a room where you turn the light on and leave it on for several hours (my living room) but it drives me up the fucking wall when you consider rooms that you breeze in and out of (the bathroom, closets, etc.). By the time the damn things reach a decent level of light output you've already moved on to the next household chore.
Then there's the Hg content. I wonder how much mercury is going to enter the environment as a result of improperly disposed-of and/or broken CFLs? It also bothers me that I can't find a single CFL made in America. They all come from China. I can still buy incandescent bulbs made in America. In a few years I won't even be able to do that -- Congress can't find the political will to balance the budget but they can tell me what kind of light bulbs I can buy? WTF?
Comcast was yelled at for throttling access to "heavy users," but slashdot linked an article where it proved that heavy users do not actually impact performance on the network for everyone else. (Hence, the throttling was a bogus move.) My question is does this extend to cell networks?
It doesn't. Cell networks are an entirely different animal. Comcast can add more bandwidth by allocating more channels on the cable plant to DOCSIS service and/or splitting your neighborhood into different coax nodes so fewer homes/businesses share the same bandwidth pool.
Wireless companies have a much harder time adding more channels. Spectrum licenses cost billions of dollars and oftentimes will come in an entirely different frequency plan that isn't compatible with existing devices (see T-Mobile's AWS purchase for a good example). Up to a certain point they can add more towers to make the footprint served by each tower smaller (analogous to Comcast splitting the node in your neighborhood) but this isn't always feasible. Community opposition and zoning requirements are often major stumbling blocks to building more cell sites. Interference from other cell sites is also a factor.
The wireless data network was never intended to be used for large sustained transfers. It was intended to be used for remote productivity, light web browsing and other intermittent uses. Some of the engineers I've talked to at Verizon are even honest enough to admit this. This whole problem could have been avoided if the carriers had been honest in their marketing when they were rolling out data services.
Even so, commercial power more-or-less works like that: you're billed for power (that is, needed bandwidth), rather than total energy consumed.
Actually you are billed for both, at least in my experience. You are billed a "demand charge" that represents your highest usage per month for a set time interval and then you are billed for each kilowatt hour that you consume.
The demand charge is billed to reflect the cost of building out the power network -- if you have an appliance that sucks up 10kW but only runs for 15 minutes a day they still have to build that capacity into the network even you aren't using it most of the time. The kWh charges are billed to reflect the cost of generating the power.
Residential customers aren't usually billed under such a scheme because the meters that measure demand are expensive and their usage tends to be more predictable.
Personally I'd rather sponsor some heavy users with a few percent of my bill than pay the thousands of times the actual cost that we somehow seem to end up with when having metered access.
I'd wholeheartedly agree with you if we were talking about wireline internet services but wireless is a different animal. Adding bandwidth to a wireless network is not just a matter of pulling more cable -- you need more radios, more towers and more spectrum. The last one isn't always available and when it is the cost of it tends to run into the billions of dollars and often winds up in an entirely different frequency plan that isn't compatible with existing devices (see T-Mobile's purchase of the AWS bands for a good example)
There are things they can do to mitigate the problem somewhat -- deploying more towers allows the phones to transmit at a lower power and nets you more efficient use of the spectrum that you already have -- but at some point you are going to run into the brick wall of shannon's limit and further upgrades won't be feasible.
At that point you have to ask yourself if it's really fair that someone with an iPhone gets to use a disproportionate amount of the available bandwidth while a business user who wants to VPN suffers degraded performance. Some of the Verizon engineers I've talked to are honest enough to admit that they never intended their data services to be used for anything more than remote productivity, light web browsing and small downloads. The service was never intended or designed to compete with wireline internet services. Pity that the marketing folks aren't that upfront about things....
Slashdot Mirror
You'll brook no argument from me on the so-called 'War on Drugs'. All I said was that the comparison to Nightwatch was absurd. If the comparison was valid then I'd be sitting behind bars for railing against the war on drugs. I'm not.
so what exactly happened? the article is long on confusion and short on explanations.
Someone got really greedy. Someone else caught them and is now going to use that fact to advance their political career. Some stockholders will suffer and a handful of executives will spend a few years in white collar resort prison.
Sounds like someone is a little bitter that opposing points of view to his own occasionally survive the moderation process.
the fact that most regular users don't browse at -1
Actually I would recommend that everyone browse at -1. There isn't really that much spam/trolling to contend with -- in exchange for having to scroll past one or two racist trolls you'll get to see raw unfiltered discussion that may not have survived the group think that permeates the moderation system.
I stopped caring or paying attention to moderation a long time ago. Give it to me raw baby!
p.s. I'm diggin' your +1 troll, man.
It's always been my dream to get a +5 troll. Hasn't happened in 9+ years of posting to /. Maybe some day.....
The only reason for our politicians to be deceptive about this is because they are more interested in power than a smoothly-working system. I think this, above all, is what turns off many Americans to the prospect of socialism.
Bingo. Every "freebie" you get from the Government comes with a corresponding reduction in personal freedom. Want free health care? We will tell you what kind of policy you can purchase and take away your freedom to opt out of having said coverage.
Want assistance going to college? No problem. We'll just check to make sure you registered for selective service and make sure that you've never smoked weed.
Want money to help maintain your highways? No problem. Just implement 21 as the drinking age and we'll send you the money just as fast as you can cash the check. No matter that the Constitution grants the states the exclusive right to regulate alcohol.
and all the money in the world won't get them that if they're fundamentally opposed to their voters' preferences.
Ah, but the fix is in long before the voters go to the polls. The sad truth is that the overwhelming majority of House members do not need to worry about the general election. They only need to run far enough to the left or right to please the rabid members of their base that vote on primary day. Barring a sex scandal with an underage page or death from old age they need not worry about the general election.
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.
Why is that relevant? Statistically speaking our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are "rarely" killed in the line of duty. So I guess they don't have any reason to fear death when they go out on patrol? A police officer has to worry about taking a bullet every single time he has an interaction with someone. Have you ever known that kind of fear? Ever had to contemplate absorbing a small piece of lead at supersonic speeds when you show up at the office?
I cut them a lot of slack even though I've had my share of run-ins with asshole cops. Even if you are dealing with one that's a complete asshole it does you no good to escalate the situation. It's only going to make it worse. Suck it up and do what they tell you. If the abuse was particularly egregious then do the American thing and sue the hell out of them at a later date.
(I suppose he could have tried not accepting it, but I doubt that would have gone over any better than accepting it).
It would have gone over pretty good with the domestic crowd, the overwhelming majority of which feels that the award was unearned.
That's a pretty dumb comparison. Get back to me when Americans are being hauled away for expressing anti-Government views. Get back to me when Joe Biden assassinates Barack Obama so he can seize power.
But I fail to see what Obama has done to earn a Nobel peace prize.
He made the Norwegian leftists on the Nobel committee wet with the anticipation of what he might do?
Post != story
Yeah, yeah, I know, *whoosh*
You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements
The new UI doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people but for the life of me I can't figure out the new meta-moderation system. It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past -- whether or not this is related to the new meta-moderation system is open to debate.
At least we know they used the right data type for the stories ;)
Yeah, and if Hitler were alive and on Facebook today
If Hitler was alive and on the internet we'd know how WW2 would have gone....
or in some states, to even end their life.
Minor point, but no, judges can't decide this. Not unless the 12 members of the jury also decide it.
I just read through all TSA security manuals and don't find anything about this road being dangerous.
I read the TSA manual. I didn't see anything that was particularly dangerous. Most of it SOP for anybody involved in the security (public or private) business.
I would wager that they are more worried about embarrassment than security. The part of the document that stuck out in my mind was the list of exemptions from enhanced security screenings. Your friendly local Congress-critter need not worry about dealing with security in the same manner as us mere plebs. All he or she has to do if selected for the enhanced screening is show a Congressional ID and the TSA folks are supposed to fold like a cheap suit. So much for all citizens being equal under the law.
Another thing I could find to bitch about is the practice at certain airports of giving first class passengers their own special queue to the security checkpoint. How is it that the Government tolerates this practice when it's our tax dollars funding the security system? TSA's answer on this is cute too, "We aren't in charge of the line, the airport is". Nice little cop out, isn't it?
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
for the notoriously bad prequels
Don't worry, Lucas fixed it up this time. All of the blasters and light-sabers have been replaced by walkie-talkies and Santa shoots first.
There's two problems with your idea:
1) There's a limit to how many towers you can deploy before they start to interfere with each other.
2) Building a tower is not the easiest thing in the world. Your local wireline internet company doesn't need to get permission from the town planning board and worry about NIMBY'ism every time it wants to expand it's coax plant. Your wireless internet/phone company does. Have you ever attended a zoning meeting where an entity (and it doesn't have to be a cell phone company either) is seeking to put up a tower? I have -- it's not usually a pretty sight.
you've ot to admit that at some point we're going to grow beyond what fossil fuels in of themselves are capable of providing.
We've had the technology to displace fossil fuels since the 50s. We just moved away from it because of a handful of loud NIMBYists/greenpeace'ers and a whole lot of FUD.
A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart.
I'm going to rant here....
The delay in reaching full brightness irks me to no end with CFLs. It's not a big deal when you are talking about a room where you turn the light on and leave it on for several hours (my living room) but it drives me up the fucking wall when you consider rooms that you breeze in and out of (the bathroom, closets, etc.). By the time the damn things reach a decent level of light output you've already moved on to the next household chore.
Then there's the Hg content. I wonder how much mercury is going to enter the environment as a result of improperly disposed-of and/or broken CFLs? It also bothers me that I can't find a single CFL made in America. They all come from China. I can still buy incandescent bulbs made in America. In a few years I won't even be able to do that -- Congress can't find the political will to balance the budget but they can tell me what kind of light bulbs I can buy? WTF?
Comcast was yelled at for throttling access to "heavy users," but slashdot linked an article where it proved that heavy users do not actually impact performance on the network for everyone else. (Hence, the throttling was a bogus move.) My question is does this extend to cell networks?
It doesn't. Cell networks are an entirely different animal. Comcast can add more bandwidth by allocating more channels on the cable plant to DOCSIS service and/or splitting your neighborhood into different coax nodes so fewer homes/businesses share the same bandwidth pool.
Wireless companies have a much harder time adding more channels. Spectrum licenses cost billions of dollars and oftentimes will come in an entirely different frequency plan that isn't compatible with existing devices (see T-Mobile's AWS purchase for a good example). Up to a certain point they can add more towers to make the footprint served by each tower smaller (analogous to Comcast splitting the node in your neighborhood) but this isn't always feasible. Community opposition and zoning requirements are often major stumbling blocks to building more cell sites. Interference from other cell sites is also a factor.
The wireless data network was never intended to be used for large sustained transfers. It was intended to be used for remote productivity, light web browsing and other intermittent uses. Some of the engineers I've talked to at Verizon are even honest enough to admit this. This whole problem could have been avoided if the carriers had been honest in their marketing when they were rolling out data services.
Even so, commercial power more-or-less works like that: you're billed for power (that is, needed bandwidth), rather than total energy consumed.
Actually you are billed for both, at least in my experience. You are billed a "demand charge" that represents your highest usage per month for a set time interval and then you are billed for each kilowatt hour that you consume.
The demand charge is billed to reflect the cost of building out the power network -- if you have an appliance that sucks up 10kW but only runs for 15 minutes a day they still have to build that capacity into the network even you aren't using it most of the time. The kWh charges are billed to reflect the cost of generating the power.
Residential customers aren't usually billed under such a scheme because the meters that measure demand are expensive and their usage tends to be more predictable.
Personally I'd rather sponsor some heavy users with a few percent of my bill than pay the thousands of times the actual cost that we somehow seem to end up with when having metered access.
I'd wholeheartedly agree with you if we were talking about wireline internet services but wireless is a different animal. Adding bandwidth to a wireless network is not just a matter of pulling more cable -- you need more radios, more towers and more spectrum. The last one isn't always available and when it is the cost of it tends to run into the billions of dollars and often winds up in an entirely different frequency plan that isn't compatible with existing devices (see T-Mobile's purchase of the AWS bands for a good example)
There are things they can do to mitigate the problem somewhat -- deploying more towers allows the phones to transmit at a lower power and nets you more efficient use of the spectrum that you already have -- but at some point you are going to run into the brick wall of shannon's limit and further upgrades won't be feasible.
At that point you have to ask yourself if it's really fair that someone with an iPhone gets to use a disproportionate amount of the available bandwidth while a business user who wants to VPN suffers degraded performance. Some of the Verizon engineers I've talked to are honest enough to admit that they never intended their data services to be used for anything more than remote productivity, light web browsing and small downloads. The service was never intended or designed to compete with wireline internet services. Pity that the marketing folks aren't that upfront about things....
Next at the chopping block, in my book, are dishonest politicians, no matter what party they are affiliated with.
There are honest politicians? What office does he hold, I'd like to meet him......