The real issue is first past the post voting, it inevitably leads to two party politics.
There are at least two states in the Union (Louisiana, Georgia) that mandate runoff elections if any candidate fails to get 50%+1; they still seem to predominately elect Democrats and Republicans. There are a lot of reasons for our de-facto two party system, I don't think first past the post is even in the Top 10. The biggest impediment is the logistical hurdles of running for Federal office; you need an effective party apparatus behind you in order to get your message out and nobody seems to want to expend the energy to build such an apparatus from the ground up. All the third parties can do is whine about unfair the system is. American history is filled with examples of "third" parties that knocked off one of the major parties, none of them did so by whining about first past the post....
How? How on earth is it anyone's business what you do in your spare time? Unless you come to your job intoxicated (and frankly, I'd be more wary of the drunks than the potheads) it's exactly none of any employer's business
There are employers now that are testing for nicotine and refusing to hire people who test positive. What say you to that? Because it's been my experience that there are very few people left these days who are willing to stand up for tobacco users.
He should been relived; Stark had ample warning that she was being stalked, from other assets (AWACS) in the area, detected the fire control radar of the inbound aircraft with her own systems, yet still took no defensive measures. The CIWS system was never activated, nor did Stark attempt to engage the hostile aircraft with her surface to air missiles.
Of course, the one incident really doesn't have anything to do with the the other. There are two key facts here:
1) Captain Rogers was needlessly aggressive, both from a legal standpoint (he violated the Rules of Engagement he was supposed to be operating under) and from a common sense perspective (using a two billion dollar air defense cruiser to engage gunboats, when he had smaller and less valuable ships under his command that could have accomplished the same mission; the chess analogy would be risking your queen to capture a pawn....)
2) His crew was insufficiently trained; their instruments reported an aircraft that was ascending in altitude the entire time it was tracked, yet they reported to their CO that it was descending on an attack vector. One might excuse Captain Roger's error in judgment on the basis of the incorrect information that was reaching him, except for the fact that it's HIS JOB to ensure his crew is properly trained. They worked together for months prior to deployment and spent weeks sailing across the Pacific and Indian Oceans before entering the combat zone; what the hell were they doing with themselves that whole time?
That element matters less than you would think it does; remember that the Iranians were engaged in hostilities against the USN at the time and there's no prohibition under international law against pursuing an enemy into his own territory when you're engaged in hostilities against him. The incident also happened in the Strait of Hormuz, where transit rights apply under the Law of the Sea. There's no such thing as "international waters" in the Strait, you're either in Iranian waters or Omanian waters. Both Iran and Oman are signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, part of which obligates them to allow transit through their territorial waters.
The location of the USS Vincennes is largely irrelevant in determining whether or not the attack was justified. The key facts here are the reckless behaviors of her Commanding Officer and his failures to ensure that his crew was properly trained prior to entering a combat zone. As a student of naval history I shake my head every time I read the story; the whole sad affair was completely avoidable. Politics may have protected Captain Rogers from criminal charges but one wonders how he can sleep at night with all those deaths on his conscience. The honorable thing to do would have been to eat his service pistol; that's what McVay ultimately did, and he was arguably not responsible for the loss of his ship and crew.
It wasillegal for them to strike. Some of them returned to work after POTUS ordered them to; the rest thought they would call his bluff. Alas, that only works if he's actually bluffing....
That's a very interesting concept; I suspect it's years away and by that time the bandwidth argument will be moot, although perhaps not since the trend seems to be for ever increasing video resolution. You've clearly given this more thought than I have; I'm not much of a video person and have largely contented myself with OTA + TiVo. I don't even really supplement with IPTV all that much, except for those times when I have company over that insists on watching some movie or another, which I usually end up sourcing from Amazon VOD. TiVo sees more use out of Pandora than any of the supported video streaming services, since I'm more partial to music than movies.:)
Interestingly enough, as a techie geek my bandwidth usage is pretty low. 50.4GB down/21.8GB up for the month of October. 95th percentile of 0.4mbit/s. It does annoy me a bit that I pay the same as my video addict neighbors, with usage in the 400-500GB range; not sure what their 95th percentile is, but they regularly run three simultaneous HD streams, so I'd hazard a guess that it's in the 12-15mbit/s range. Which one of us requires more back end infrastructure from the local ISP?:)
IPTV on demand is really the worst delivery system possible for video; virtually every delivery system that preceded it relied on the efficiency of point-to-multipoint, be it over the air television, CATV, or satellite. Now we're faced with a system that's going to send a discrete copy of House of Cards down the pipe for every one of the tens of millions of people that request it, even for those people that request it at virtually the same time.
I suppose it was inevitable, even a 1 GHz CATV plant can't compete against the limitless video choices of the internet, but if we're going to use residential internet connections as a primary means of video delivery it's inevitable that costs will go up. They would go up even if you didn't have the economy of scale (or, more cynically, conflict of interest) provided for by Triple Play packages that are going to be slowly killed by the advent of internet video. Residential networks were never engineered as a video delivery system; they'll adapt, as the internet always has, but the increased cost of doing business is going to come from somewhere.
Demand billing seems as fair of a way as any to raise that revenue. Caps are stupid; transferring 100 gigabytes of data evenly spaced throughout an entire month (average transfer rate: 330kbit/s) does not have the same impact on a network as transferring 100 gigabytes in a day (average transfer rate: just shy of 10mbit/s). Networks need to be engineered to support peak hour throughput; the day streaming video went mainstream was the day that two decades of traffic engineering assumptions went out the window.
It's increasingly going to be about multiple users or automated users though
I've heard the multiple users argument before; I'm not unsympathetic to it, though I do have to wonder about the fairness of a price structure that charges the household with five simultaneous HD video streams the same as the household with zero or one HD video streams. Note that I'm not arguing in favor of caps; they're a blunt and ineffective solution (moved bytes don't cost the ISP money, but sustained bit-rate does) but I've often wondered why demand or 95th percentile billing wouldn't be fair.
There's a lot of griping about the state of broadband in our country, griping that I think would be minimized if people adopted some perspective. I remember paying $20/mo (in actuality $40/mo, if you consider the second POTS line....) for 14.4k dial up. In my area we now pay $45/mo for the entry level (15mbit/s) D3 package, working up to $80/mo for the highest (50mbit/s) package. None of those prices seem particularly outlandish to me and the comparison looks even better if you consider inflation; the $20 that I was paying for dial up in 1995 is now worth about $31, so paying $45/mo for more than one thousand times the bandwidth seems like a steal to me.
It's even cooler when one thinks about LTE; I remember when mobile data was a 9600 baud serial connection to my Motorola iDEN phone. Now I have a bloody DS3 in my pocket that will work almost anywhere in CONUS, for less than the cost of a nice meal out, and people still find things to complain about. Y'all don't know just how good you really have it.....
Yes, I'm aware of that part of the story. It doesn't exonerate Captain Rogers, nor can it explain why his crew was seemingly unable to read the information that was staring them in the face, specifically the fact that the aircraft was climbing the entire time they tracked it. That flight profile screams "NOT A THREAT" to anyone versed in anti air warfare, which you would expect the crew of an air defense cruiser to be, yet somehow they reported the contact as descending on an attack vector. There were doubtless many reasons for this failure, combat stress, the newness (at the time) of the AEGIS combat system, the double IFF response, the failure to establish communications with Iran Air 655, and so on. None of those facts excuse the failure though, at the end of the day the Captain of a ship is responsible for the happenings aboard ship, whether he could have influenced them or not, and Captain Rogers certainly had control over the training of his crew.
Training standards aboard the Vincennes were so bad that the anti-air warfare officer couldn't even complete the firing procedure; the "trigger" was ultimately "pulled" by an enlisted man in the CIC. On that basis alone Captain Rogers should have faced a court martial for dereliction of duty. US Navy Captains have faced the court martial for a lot less, see Charles B. McVay III for one of the most unjust examples.
Rogers was also aggressive to the point of recklessness, violating the standing Rules of Engagement several times. He was looking for a fight throughout the entire deployment, using his two billion dollar air defense cruiser to engage gunboats that were barely worthy of the name. The chip he carried on his shoulder could well have gotten his crew killed. Bottom line: At the end of the day none of those poor souls aboard Iran Air Flight 655 had to die. The Navy covered its ass, for various reasons, and none of the survivor's families will ever see justice worthy of the name. Want to add more insult to injury? The airliner was practically within visual range when the order to fire was given. A decent pair of binoculars would have sufficed to positively identify the target at 11 nautical miles, which was the range when the order to fire was given.
I say all of these things as a huge supporter of the US Navy and a jingoistic American; I have no lost love for the Islamic Republic and would not normally second guess someone responsible for the lives of 350 men in a war zone. In this case though the facts are pretty hard to dispute, it was a failure of training, personality, and leadership. In a just world Rogers would have faced the courts martial, as would several of the officers under his command, but we don't live in a just world....
"It's getting to the point where, if my neighboring community has a gig and we're still doing satellite, the property value in that town is going to go up," Deb Socia, director of Next Century Cities, a coalition of cities trying to provide gigabit internet speeds to their citizens, said. "You're going to lose people and you're going to lose revenue without it.
So she's equating high latency capped satellite service against gigabit fiber? Well duh. It would be more interesting to see if average people would really be willing to pay that $2,500 premium if the choice was between DOCSIS 3 service and fiber service. Or even between reasonably fast DSL vs. fiber. It's been my experience that there's not much difference for the typical user (hint:/.'ers are not typical) once speeds exceed 5mbit/s. What's the practical difference between the higher D3 tiers (say 50mbits) and gigabit fiber? How many websites can actually push a gig? Symmetrical upload would be the only selling point I can think of, but strictly speaking you don't need fiber to provide that service, nor do you need gigabit speeds to take advantage of it. I sit on a 30/30 connection right now that meets all of my needs and as an IT professional I'm well ahead of the target market for consumer ISPs.
For the rest of your life, your arrest for child pornography will come up whenever a cop rolls up behind you and checks your plate or a child goes missing near you. It MIGHT not follow you if you move to another state.
Most States have a provision to seal arrests that resulted in no conviction, either because the charges were dropped or the defendant was acquitted at trial. In New York State they are automatically sealed in all circumstances except for the processing of firearms licenses, you don't even have to ask for it to happen, it just does.
The bigger problem (particularly in the day and age of Google) is the public record, i.e., police blotter. That never goes away, but that's not really relevant to your scenario of a traffic stop. Traffic cops aren't looking you up on Google when they pull up behind you for a speeding ticket.
The jury returns a verdict of not-guilty, even after the judge instructed the defense counsel that they COULD NOT LEGALLY USE THAT DEFENSE, and the defense replied that the defense rests. The judge has the power to disregard the jury's incorrect, (even if morally right,) decision because it's legally wrong. I can't say how often that happens off the top of my head, as IINAL, but the guy who told me this IAL,... so for whatever it's worth...
You're misinformed; Judges can't override a not-guilty verdict in the United States. They can set aside guilty verdicts if they feel the jury erred in that manner but they can not override an acquittal regardless of the reasons (or lack thereof) for it.
They may or may not need collective bargaining; I am honestly undecided on that point and could go either way. I do however firmly agree with the points I emphasized from the second quoted paragraph, specifically, "Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."
The ATC strike threatened to shut down the entire country. In no particular order:
The financial sector would have been shut down, since paper checks still had to be exchanged between banks in those days. Checks were primarily moved via mail, which relies heavily on air travel. This situation persisted until Check 21 was passed, largely in response to the disruption caused by the 9/11 shut down.
Related, USPS would have been crippled, with consequences far and wide. Ditto for Fedex and UPS.
The disruption to air travel would have cost the economy billions of dollars. See 9/11 and the fallout from just three lousy days of shut down, then consider the fact that telecommuting and video conferencing did not really exist in those days, so the economy was that much more dependent on air travel.
Medical flights would have been disrupted, directly placing lives at risk.
Whatever legitimate gripes public sector workers may have they do not get to hold hundreds of millions of people hostage to their demands. You accept certain tradeoffs when you go to work for Uncle Sam; in exchange for job security that private sector workers can only dream about you accept lower pay (vis-a-via the private sector), lousy hours, and the intrusion of politics into the workplace. There's a reason why it's called public service and if you're unwilling to accept those tradeoffs perhaps you should stay in the private sector?
Couldn't the same be said of people who are stupid enough to try and use their compass and paper map instead of navigating by the stars? I mean, what if your map is blown away by a gust of wind, then you're screwed!
Didn't you read the part where he said he was in the UK? Have you ever seen stars or blue skies in the UK? I sure as hell haven't. Stellar navigation doesn't work when you're looking at the bottom of a cumulus cloud.;)
Obama's fumbled every damn thing he's touched - relations with Russia ("Fuck the EU...), Obamacare, ISIS, Ebola (just watch the CDC go back and forth about how Ebola can/can't be spread by sneeze droplets...), the whole damn Middle East, European relations (think the Poles are happy about Obama pulling missile defense from them? Guess who called Obama "the real chickenshit" just a few days ago...)
I don't really care for the guy myself but laying the Ebola response on his doorstep is rather petty. Everything about CDC's response to Ebola screams "Government bureaucrats covering their ass" to me, which would have happened regardless of who was President. They started out quite sensibly, pointing out that Ebola does not spread casually, then the hospital in Texas screwed up with the first case of Ebola on American soil and the kneejerk overreaction + media feeding frenzy was on.
Said kneejerk overreaction has now permeated all levels of healthcare, to the point that I presented at my Doctor's Office yesterday with foot pains, which turned out to be stress fractures, a logical consequence of running a marathon just two weeks prior. I informed them of this recent history, my belief that it was either a stress fracture or simple overuse injury, so naturally the first question they had for me was "Have you traveled to West Africa in the last 21 days or had contact with anyone who has?"
Foot pain + recent marathon = EBOLA SCARE!!!! GOTTA COVER OUR ASS!!! HE MIGHT HAVE EBOLA!!!!
Not that I normally defend US military action... but come on.
Why was the US warship there in the first place? Iran was at war with Iraq, and had started to attack US oil tankers off shore. The US Military sent US Naval ships as escorts. Then Iran started actively attacking US warships. That ship had been under attack by Iranian gun boats just and hour earlier and that plane had taken off from a based that F14 attack craft were routinely operated out of.
I do normally defend US military action but I will not defend the shoot down of the Iranian airliner. Captain Rogers was a trigger happy asshole, with a poorly trained crew that was oblivious to what their instruments were reporting. The instruments aboard the USS Vincennes reported a climbing aircraft that was squawking Mode III (Civilian) IFF; the crew somehow interpreted this as a descending aircraft squawking a military code, which would actually be a legitimate threat to the ship, but that was not what was reported by their instruments.
If you want to be generous to Captain Rogers you can call it an example of scenario fulfillment but I'm not willing to give him that much benefit of the doubt. The Commanding Officer of at least one neighboring ship thought he was reckless and trigger happy (*) and his crew's failure to properly operate their ship represents a gross failure of training and accountability that the Captain of said ship is ultimately responsible for.
(*) See the various media interviews of Commander Carlson, Captain of the USS Sides, which was assigned to the same mission and tracked Iran Air Flight 655 on her own radar prior to the shootdown.
If public service workers received all the same perks as a congressman or president, they wouldn't need a union.
You got modded up for this nonsense? My mailman really needs Secret Service protection, free and super luxurious air travel courtesy of the United States Air Force, franking privileges to send his mail for free, and so on?
Actually, bad analogy, I like my mailman and I'd wager so do many of the people who will read this comment. Replace mailman with "TSA screener" and tell me he deserves any of the perks accorded to Members of Congress or POTUS. Six digit salary, military health care on the taxpayers dime, and so on. Seriously?
If you're referring to the Air Traffic Controllers you may wish to consider this quote from that Tea Party wacko known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt: (emphasis mine)
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
The Judge isn't the trier of fact in our legal system, that's the role of the Petit Jury, but why bother to actually learn how it works when you can just spread FUD?
Sure. GPS data. You sped on the way to the office. Misdemeanor.
Where do you live that speeding is a misdemeanor? And which phone keeps a second by second record of your movements, even if you're actively using the GPS for navigation?
Oops, one of the guys you have in your contacts deals weed.
It's not illegal to know people who deal weed, nor is the simple possession thereof a particularly serious matter in most of the United States. Where I live it will cost you less than the aforementioned speeding ticket, no more than a $100 fine, speeding tickets start at $150 + $85 court surcharge.
Got pictures of your toddler daughter playing in the sprinkler or bath tub on there somewhere? You might not want them looking through there and charging you with distributing child pornography.
This is FUD; have you actually read any legal statues regarding child pornography? Here's the Federal statute, 18 U.S. Code 2252 - Certain activities relating to material involving the sexual exploitation of minors, emphasis mine:
(a) Any person who —
(1) knowingly transports or ships using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce or in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce by any means including by computer or mails, any visual depiction, if—
(A)the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)such visual depiction is of such conduct;
(There are also other sections that cover simple possession, rather than distribution, but they use the same two pronged definition from (A) and (B) above, so I've omitted them here for the sake of brevity.)
Here's New York State's statute, Penal Law Article 263:
S 263.11 Possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child.
A person is guilty of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child when, knowing the character and content thereof, he knowingly has in his possession or control, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any obscene performance which includes sexual conduct by a child less than sixteen years of age.
Definition from that same chapter:
"Sexual conduct" means actual or simulated sexual intercourse, oral sexual conduct, anal sexual conduct, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sado-masochistic abuse, or lewd exhibition of the genitals.
The main purpose of smoking pot is to chill out, to be mellow. If you smoke a bunch of pot and you feel wound up, driven, ambitious and motivated you might want a refund.
Different strains of pot have different effects. Sativa blends are usually more of an intellectual high, indica blends tend to give the mellow "do nothing" couchlock high. In my experience smoking a sativa blend will make mundane tasks more tolerable (one can actually be more productive whilst stoned) and occasionally provides problem solving inspiration for more complicated tasks.
Regardless, slavery wasn't handled just through the 10th amendment. Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 specifies that slaves (i.e. people who are neither free nor indianans) count as 0.6 people for determining the number of congressional representatives from a state. Because of that, I'd say that the constitution condoned slavery.
You should actually research the matter rather than parroting poorly informed talking points. The 3/5th's clause was a compromise between the Northern States that wanted slaves to count for nothing (thereby eroding the political power of the slave holding states and presumably leading to a quicker demise for the institution of slavery) and the Southern States that wanted them counted at 100%. Had the North gotten its way it's quite probable that the Civil War and ultimate emancipation of the slaves would have occurred a generation sooner than happened in our timeline.
But at the same time it makes crime significantly harder, puts up barriers against suicide
Huh??? I own an M1 Garand, total length 43.5 inches. It would take little more than dexterity to use it to end my own life. Presumably most people that intend to commit suicide have toes, right?
20 years ago, my dad and I came home from a camping trip a day early, but late at night. If my mom had been armed, she would have shot at both of us.
Gosh, if only there was a way to have let your Mom know that it was the two of you instead of a would-be rapist. Perhaps you could have yelled out "HI MOM, WE'RE HOME EARLY!" as you entered the house. Nah, that couldn't possibly work. It's a damn good thing for you she wasn't armed or you'd be dead now. I have the same fear every time I come home early, but thankfully my girlfriend has evolved some pretty neat biological features like eardrums that reduce the likelihood of this happening....
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The real issue is first past the post voting, it inevitably leads to two party politics.
There are at least two states in the Union (Louisiana, Georgia) that mandate runoff elections if any candidate fails to get 50%+1; they still seem to predominately elect Democrats and Republicans. There are a lot of reasons for our de-facto two party system, I don't think first past the post is even in the Top 10. The biggest impediment is the logistical hurdles of running for Federal office; you need an effective party apparatus behind you in order to get your message out and nobody seems to want to expend the energy to build such an apparatus from the ground up. All the third parties can do is whine about unfair the system is. American history is filled with examples of "third" parties that knocked off one of the major parties, none of them did so by whining about first past the post....
How? How on earth is it anyone's business what you do in your spare time? Unless you come to your job intoxicated (and frankly, I'd be more wary of the drunks than the potheads) it's exactly none of any employer's business
There are employers now that are testing for nicotine and refusing to hire people who test positive. What say you to that? Because it's been my experience that there are very few people left these days who are willing to stand up for tobacco users.
He should been relived; Stark had ample warning that she was being stalked, from other assets (AWACS) in the area, detected the fire control radar of the inbound aircraft with her own systems, yet still took no defensive measures. The CIWS system was never activated, nor did Stark attempt to engage the hostile aircraft with her surface to air missiles.
Of course, the one incident really doesn't have anything to do with the the other. There are two key facts here:
1) Captain Rogers was needlessly aggressive, both from a legal standpoint (he violated the Rules of Engagement he was supposed to be operating under) and from a common sense perspective (using a two billion dollar air defense cruiser to engage gunboats, when he had smaller and less valuable ships under his command that could have accomplished the same mission; the chess analogy would be risking your queen to capture a pawn....)
2) His crew was insufficiently trained; their instruments reported an aircraft that was ascending in altitude the entire time it was tracked, yet they reported to their CO that it was descending on an attack vector. One might excuse Captain Roger's error in judgment on the basis of the incorrect information that was reaching him, except for the fact that it's HIS JOB to ensure his crew is properly trained. They worked together for months prior to deployment and spent weeks sailing across the Pacific and Indian Oceans before entering the combat zone; what the hell were they doing with themselves that whole time?
That element matters less than you would think it does; remember that the Iranians were engaged in hostilities against the USN at the time and there's no prohibition under international law against pursuing an enemy into his own territory when you're engaged in hostilities against him. The incident also happened in the Strait of Hormuz, where transit rights apply under the Law of the Sea. There's no such thing as "international waters" in the Strait, you're either in Iranian waters or Omanian waters. Both Iran and Oman are signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, part of which obligates them to allow transit through their territorial waters.
The location of the USS Vincennes is largely irrelevant in determining whether or not the attack was justified. The key facts here are the reckless behaviors of her Commanding Officer and his failures to ensure that his crew was properly trained prior to entering a combat zone. As a student of naval history I shake my head every time I read the story; the whole sad affair was completely avoidable. Politics may have protected Captain Rogers from criminal charges but one wonders how he can sleep at night with all those deaths on his conscience. The honorable thing to do would have been to eat his service pistol; that's what McVay ultimately did, and he was arguably not responsible for the loss of his ship and crew.
It was illegal for them to strike. Some of them returned to work after POTUS ordered them to; the rest thought they would call his bluff. Alas, that only works if he's actually bluffing....
That's a very interesting concept; I suspect it's years away and by that time the bandwidth argument will be moot, although perhaps not since the trend seems to be for ever increasing video resolution. You've clearly given this more thought than I have; I'm not much of a video person and have largely contented myself with OTA + TiVo. I don't even really supplement with IPTV all that much, except for those times when I have company over that insists on watching some movie or another, which I usually end up sourcing from Amazon VOD. TiVo sees more use out of Pandora than any of the supported video streaming services, since I'm more partial to music than movies. :)
Interestingly enough, as a techie geek my bandwidth usage is pretty low. 50.4GB down/21.8GB up for the month of October. 95th percentile of 0.4mbit/s. It does annoy me a bit that I pay the same as my video addict neighbors, with usage in the 400-500GB range; not sure what their 95th percentile is, but they regularly run three simultaneous HD streams, so I'd hazard a guess that it's in the 12-15mbit/s range. Which one of us requires more back end infrastructure from the local ISP? :)
IPTV on demand is really the worst delivery system possible for video; virtually every delivery system that preceded it relied on the efficiency of point-to-multipoint, be it over the air television, CATV, or satellite. Now we're faced with a system that's going to send a discrete copy of House of Cards down the pipe for every one of the tens of millions of people that request it, even for those people that request it at virtually the same time.
I suppose it was inevitable, even a 1 GHz CATV plant can't compete against the limitless video choices of the internet, but if we're going to use residential internet connections as a primary means of video delivery it's inevitable that costs will go up. They would go up even if you didn't have the economy of scale (or, more cynically, conflict of interest) provided for by Triple Play packages that are going to be slowly killed by the advent of internet video. Residential networks were never engineered as a video delivery system; they'll adapt, as the internet always has, but the increased cost of doing business is going to come from somewhere.
Demand billing seems as fair of a way as any to raise that revenue. Caps are stupid; transferring 100 gigabytes of data evenly spaced throughout an entire month (average transfer rate: 330kbit/s) does not have the same impact on a network as transferring 100 gigabytes in a day (average transfer rate: just shy of 10mbit/s). Networks need to be engineered to support peak hour throughput; the day streaming video went mainstream was the day that two decades of traffic engineering assumptions went out the window.
It's increasingly going to be about multiple users or automated users though
I've heard the multiple users argument before; I'm not unsympathetic to it, though I do have to wonder about the fairness of a price structure that charges the household with five simultaneous HD video streams the same as the household with zero or one HD video streams. Note that I'm not arguing in favor of caps; they're a blunt and ineffective solution (moved bytes don't cost the ISP money, but sustained bit-rate does) but I've often wondered why demand or 95th percentile billing wouldn't be fair.
There's a lot of griping about the state of broadband in our country, griping that I think would be minimized if people adopted some perspective. I remember paying $20/mo (in actuality $40/mo, if you consider the second POTS line....) for 14.4k dial up. In my area we now pay $45/mo for the entry level (15mbit/s) D3 package, working up to $80/mo for the highest (50mbit/s) package. None of those prices seem particularly outlandish to me and the comparison looks even better if you consider inflation; the $20 that I was paying for dial up in 1995 is now worth about $31, so paying $45/mo for more than one thousand times the bandwidth seems like a steal to me.
It's even cooler when one thinks about LTE; I remember when mobile data was a 9600 baud serial connection to my Motorola iDEN phone. Now I have a bloody DS3 in my pocket that will work almost anywhere in CONUS, for less than the cost of a nice meal out, and people still find things to complain about. Y'all don't know just how good you really have it.....
Yes, I'm aware of that part of the story. It doesn't exonerate Captain Rogers, nor can it explain why his crew was seemingly unable to read the information that was staring them in the face, specifically the fact that the aircraft was climbing the entire time they tracked it. That flight profile screams "NOT A THREAT" to anyone versed in anti air warfare, which you would expect the crew of an air defense cruiser to be, yet somehow they reported the contact as descending on an attack vector. There were doubtless many reasons for this failure, combat stress, the newness (at the time) of the AEGIS combat system, the double IFF response, the failure to establish communications with Iran Air 655, and so on. None of those facts excuse the failure though, at the end of the day the Captain of a ship is responsible for the happenings aboard ship, whether he could have influenced them or not, and Captain Rogers certainly had control over the training of his crew.
Training standards aboard the Vincennes were so bad that the anti-air warfare officer couldn't even complete the firing procedure; the "trigger" was ultimately "pulled" by an enlisted man in the CIC. On that basis alone Captain Rogers should have faced a court martial for dereliction of duty. US Navy Captains have faced the court martial for a lot less, see Charles B. McVay III for one of the most unjust examples.
Rogers was also aggressive to the point of recklessness, violating the standing Rules of Engagement several times. He was looking for a fight throughout the entire deployment, using his two billion dollar air defense cruiser to engage gunboats that were barely worthy of the name. The chip he carried on his shoulder could well have gotten his crew killed. Bottom line: At the end of the day none of those poor souls aboard Iran Air Flight 655 had to die. The Navy covered its ass, for various reasons, and none of the survivor's families will ever see justice worthy of the name. Want to add more insult to injury? The airliner was practically within visual range when the order to fire was given. A decent pair of binoculars would have sufficed to positively identify the target at 11 nautical miles, which was the range when the order to fire was given.
I say all of these things as a huge supporter of the US Navy and a jingoistic American; I have no lost love for the Islamic Republic and would not normally second guess someone responsible for the lives of 350 men in a war zone. In this case though the facts are pretty hard to dispute, it was a failure of training, personality, and leadership. In a just world Rogers would have faced the courts martial, as would several of the officers under his command, but we don't live in a just world....
"It's getting to the point where, if my neighboring community has a gig and we're still doing satellite, the property value in that town is going to go up," Deb Socia, director of Next Century Cities, a coalition of cities trying to provide gigabit internet speeds to their citizens, said. "You're going to lose people and you're going to lose revenue without it.
So she's equating high latency capped satellite service against gigabit fiber? Well duh. It would be more interesting to see if average people would really be willing to pay that $2,500 premium if the choice was between DOCSIS 3 service and fiber service. Or even between reasonably fast DSL vs. fiber. It's been my experience that there's not much difference for the typical user (hint: /.'ers are not typical) once speeds exceed 5mbit/s. What's the practical difference between the higher D3 tiers (say 50mbits) and gigabit fiber? How many websites can actually push a gig? Symmetrical upload would be the only selling point I can think of, but strictly speaking you don't need fiber to provide that service, nor do you need gigabit speeds to take advantage of it. I sit on a 30/30 connection right now that meets all of my needs and as an IT professional I'm well ahead of the target market for consumer ISPs.
For the rest of your life, your arrest for child pornography will come up whenever a cop rolls up behind you and checks your plate or a child goes missing near you. It MIGHT not follow you if you move to another state.
Most States have a provision to seal arrests that resulted in no conviction, either because the charges were dropped or the defendant was acquitted at trial. In New York State they are automatically sealed in all circumstances except for the processing of firearms licenses, you don't even have to ask for it to happen, it just does.
The bigger problem (particularly in the day and age of Google) is the public record, i.e., police blotter. That never goes away, but that's not really relevant to your scenario of a traffic stop. Traffic cops aren't looking you up on Google when they pull up behind you for a speeding ticket.
The jury returns a verdict of not-guilty, even after the judge instructed the defense counsel that they COULD NOT LEGALLY USE THAT DEFENSE, and the defense replied that the defense rests. The judge has the power to disregard the jury's incorrect, (even if morally right,) decision because it's legally wrong. I can't say how often that happens off the top of my head, as IINAL, but the guy who told me this IAL,... so for whatever it's worth...
You're misinformed; Judges can't override a not-guilty verdict in the United States. They can set aside guilty verdicts if they feel the jury erred in that manner but they can not override an acquittal regardless of the reasons (or lack thereof) for it.
They may or may not need collective bargaining; I am honestly undecided on that point and could go either way. I do however firmly agree with the points I emphasized from the second quoted paragraph, specifically, "Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."
The ATC strike threatened to shut down the entire country. In no particular order:
The financial sector would have been shut down, since paper checks still had to be exchanged between banks in those days. Checks were primarily moved via mail, which relies heavily on air travel. This situation persisted until Check 21 was passed, largely in response to the disruption caused by the 9/11 shut down.
Related, USPS would have been crippled, with consequences far and wide. Ditto for Fedex and UPS.
The disruption to air travel would have cost the economy billions of dollars. See 9/11 and the fallout from just three lousy days of shut down, then consider the fact that telecommuting and video conferencing did not really exist in those days, so the economy was that much more dependent on air travel.
Medical flights would have been disrupted, directly placing lives at risk.
Whatever legitimate gripes public sector workers may have they do not get to hold hundreds of millions of people hostage to their demands. You accept certain tradeoffs when you go to work for Uncle Sam; in exchange for job security that private sector workers can only dream about you accept lower pay (vis-a-via the private sector), lousy hours, and the intrusion of politics into the workplace. There's a reason why it's called public service and if you're unwilling to accept those tradeoffs perhaps you should stay in the private sector?
Couldn't the same be said of people who are stupid enough to try and use their compass and paper map instead of navigating by the stars? I mean, what if your map is blown away by a gust of wind, then you're screwed!
Didn't you read the part where he said he was in the UK? Have you ever seen stars or blue skies in the UK? I sure as hell haven't. Stellar navigation doesn't work when you're looking at the bottom of a cumulus cloud. ;)
Obama's fumbled every damn thing he's touched - relations with Russia ("Fuck the EU...), Obamacare, ISIS, Ebola (just watch the CDC go back and forth about how Ebola can/can't be spread by sneeze droplets...), the whole damn Middle East, European relations (think the Poles are happy about Obama pulling missile defense from them? Guess who called Obama "the real chickenshit" just a few days ago...)
I don't really care for the guy myself but laying the Ebola response on his doorstep is rather petty. Everything about CDC's response to Ebola screams "Government bureaucrats covering their ass" to me, which would have happened regardless of who was President. They started out quite sensibly, pointing out that Ebola does not spread casually, then the hospital in Texas screwed up with the first case of Ebola on American soil and the kneejerk overreaction + media feeding frenzy was on.
Said kneejerk overreaction has now permeated all levels of healthcare, to the point that I presented at my Doctor's Office yesterday with foot pains, which turned out to be stress fractures, a logical consequence of running a marathon just two weeks prior. I informed them of this recent history, my belief that it was either a stress fracture or simple overuse injury, so naturally the first question they had for me was "Have you traveled to West Africa in the last 21 days or had contact with anyone who has?"
Foot pain + recent marathon = EBOLA SCARE!!!! GOTTA COVER OUR ASS!!! HE MIGHT HAVE EBOLA!!!!
Not that I normally defend US military action... but come on.
Why was the US warship there in the first place? Iran was at war with Iraq, and had started to attack US oil tankers off shore. The US Military sent US Naval ships as escorts. Then Iran started actively attacking US warships. That ship had been under attack by Iranian gun boats just and hour earlier and that plane had taken off from a based that F14 attack craft were routinely operated out of.
I do normally defend US military action but I will not defend the shoot down of the Iranian airliner. Captain Rogers was a trigger happy asshole, with a poorly trained crew that was oblivious to what their instruments were reporting. The instruments aboard the USS Vincennes reported a climbing aircraft that was squawking Mode III (Civilian) IFF; the crew somehow interpreted this as a descending aircraft squawking a military code, which would actually be a legitimate threat to the ship, but that was not what was reported by their instruments.
If you want to be generous to Captain Rogers you can call it an example of scenario fulfillment but I'm not willing to give him that much benefit of the doubt. The Commanding Officer of at least one neighboring ship thought he was reckless and trigger happy (*) and his crew's failure to properly operate their ship represents a gross failure of training and accountability that the Captain of said ship is ultimately responsible for.
(*) See the various media interviews of Commander Carlson, Captain of the USS Sides, which was assigned to the same mission and tracked Iran Air Flight 655 on her own radar prior to the shootdown.
If public service workers received all the same perks as a congressman or president, they wouldn't need a union.
You got modded up for this nonsense? My mailman really needs Secret Service protection, free and super luxurious air travel courtesy of the United States Air Force, franking privileges to send his mail for free, and so on?
Actually, bad analogy, I like my mailman and I'd wager so do many of the people who will read this comment. Replace mailman with "TSA screener" and tell me he deserves any of the perks accorded to Members of Congress or POTUS. Six digit salary, military health care on the taxpayers dime, and so on. Seriously?
If you're referring to the Air Traffic Controllers you may wish to consider this quote from that Tea Party wacko known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt: (emphasis mine)
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
The Judge isn't the trier of fact in our legal system, that's the role of the Petit Jury, but why bother to actually learn how it works when you can just spread FUD?
Sure. GPS data. You sped on the way to the office. Misdemeanor.
Where do you live that speeding is a misdemeanor? And which phone keeps a second by second record of your movements, even if you're actively using the GPS for navigation?
Oops, one of the guys you have in your contacts deals weed.
It's not illegal to know people who deal weed, nor is the simple possession thereof a particularly serious matter in most of the United States. Where I live it will cost you less than the aforementioned speeding ticket, no more than a $100 fine, speeding tickets start at $150 + $85 court surcharge.
Got pictures of your toddler daughter playing in the sprinkler or bath tub on there somewhere? You might not want them looking through there and charging you with distributing child pornography.
This is FUD; have you actually read any legal statues regarding child pornography? Here's the Federal statute, 18 U.S. Code 2252 - Certain activities relating to material involving the sexual exploitation of minors, emphasis mine:
(a) Any person who —
(1) knowingly transports or ships using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce or in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce by any means including by computer or mails, any visual depiction, if—
(A)the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)such visual depiction is of such conduct;
(There are also other sections that cover simple possession, rather than distribution, but they use the same two pronged definition from (A) and (B) above, so I've omitted them here for the sake of brevity.)
Here's New York State's statute, Penal Law Article 263:
S 263.11 Possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child.
A person is guilty of possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child when, knowing the character and content thereof, he knowingly has in his possession or control, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any obscene performance which includes sexual conduct by a child less than sixteen years of age.
Definition from that same chapter:
"Sexual conduct" means actual or simulated sexual intercourse, oral sexual conduct, anal sexual conduct, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sado-masochistic abuse, or lewd exhibition of the genitals.
The main purpose of smoking pot is to chill out, to be mellow. If you smoke a bunch of pot and you feel wound up, driven, ambitious and motivated you might want a refund.
Different strains of pot have different effects. Sativa blends are usually more of an intellectual high, indica blends tend to give the mellow "do nothing" couchlock high. In my experience smoking a sativa blend will make mundane tasks more tolerable (one can actually be more productive whilst stoned) and occasionally provides problem solving inspiration for more complicated tasks.
I'm not sure how 'not forbidding' is different than 'allowing'.
The AC said it better than I ever could.
Regardless, slavery wasn't handled just through the 10th amendment. Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 specifies that slaves (i.e. people who are neither free nor indianans) count as 0.6 people for determining the number of congressional representatives from a state. Because of that, I'd say that the constitution condoned slavery.
You should actually research the matter rather than parroting poorly informed talking points. The 3/5th's clause was a compromise between the Northern States that wanted slaves to count for nothing (thereby eroding the political power of the slave holding states and presumably leading to a quicker demise for the institution of slavery) and the Southern States that wanted them counted at 100%. Had the North gotten its way it's quite probable that the Civil War and ultimate emancipation of the slaves would have occurred a generation sooner than happened in our timeline.
But at the same time it makes crime significantly harder, puts up barriers against suicide
Huh??? I own an M1 Garand, total length 43.5 inches. It would take little more than dexterity to use it to end my own life. Presumably most people that intend to commit suicide have toes, right?
20 years ago, my dad and I came home from a camping trip a day early, but late at night. If my mom had been armed, she would have shot at both of us.
Gosh, if only there was a way to have let your Mom know that it was the two of you instead of a would-be rapist. Perhaps you could have yelled out "HI MOM, WE'RE HOME EARLY!" as you entered the house. Nah, that couldn't possibly work. It's a damn good thing for you she wasn't armed or you'd be dead now. I have the same fear every time I come home early, but thankfully my girlfriend has evolved some pretty neat biological features like eardrums that reduce the likelihood of this happening....