and having ftp openly accesable to the net would just be stupid (and which windows users have sftp client installed?
Haven't you ever heard of iptables and port knocking for friends with dynamic IPs? --reject-with tcp-reset is your friend:) You could scan every single port on my PC and it'd get you nowhere. And all windows users have at least a basic command line ftp client by default.
Like it or not, Democrats are the same as Republicans. I commend your attempts to prove me wrong, but alas, I am resorting to the truth and to fact fact. And when one relies on the truth and fact, one always wins a debate. Thus I am victorious!
I would really like to hear you explain that to me. Because from where I stand they are not alike.
Do they both have examples of corporate kiss asses who only care about how much money you donate to their PACs? Sure. Do they take the same stance on all issues? Not by a longshot! Explain to me how they have the same stance on important issues. Note issues. Don't pull one issue out of your hat and tell me they are same.
Abortion: Remember, Republicans were the main force behind the War in Iraq (let alone the war in Afghanistan)
Funny, I thought the main force behind the War in Afghanistan was the 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9/11 and the fact that the Taliban refused to hand over the man responsible. You'll get no argument from me about Iraq but don't even try to throw Afghanistan in my face. If Bush had glassed that country I would have applauded him. Half the reason I opposed Iraq was that I (correctly as it turned out) thought it would detract from Afghanistan.
As an exercise for you, go though the other issues you listed and observe the very similar, if not exactly the same, policies displayed by both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Really? Same on abortion you say? Most Democrats are pro-choice. Most Republicans aren't. You won't find a more important issue with a bigger gap between the two parties.
Don't blame me for anything America has done lately; it was all done by Democrats and Republicans! And why don't I vote in America? Because I'm British. The best I can do is wake up fools like yourself who have fallen victim to a very manipulative system.
Very manipulative system? Last time I checked you could distract the British public by running a headline about which member of the Royal family was boning which member of the General Public. Yeah, maybe that's no better then Americans being distracted by Tom Cruise getting engaged but don't put yourself up on some sort of pedestal like you are better then us.
Democrats and Republicans are basically the same today.
Only if unimportant issues like abortion, foreign policy, ANWR/energy policy, taxes, religion and civil liberties don't matter to you.
Pro choice or pro life? Then it matters!
Pro fossil fuels or pro new technology? Then it matters!
Pro balanced budget or deficits don't mean anything? Then it matters!
Prayer and ID in schools or science and separation of Church and State? Then it matters!
I'm so sick of hearing this. Congrats to all the people who thought this and didn't come out to vote for Gore or Kerry. Or swallowed Nader's BS hook, line and sinker. You've handed the Federal judiciary to the far-right for the next few decades. You've alienated the rest of the World. You've committed American troops to be an occupying power in a hostile country with no foreseeable way out that doesn't create another theocracy.
No difference between the parties? Give me a fscking break.
Oh and if you think the Democrats are corporate sell outs or the Republicans don't represent true conservatism -- then why don't you register for whichever party and get off your lazy ass and vote in primaries? Or run for office? I guess it's much more productive to whine on/.
You see this problem a lot in crimes such as rape where the punishment is out of proportion to the actual crime. If the penality for rape is 20 years and the penality for murder is 20 years, I might as well rape and murder you rather than leave a witness alive to talk.
That's a logical thought but it's completely false in most American states.
If just blow you away in New York, for almost any reason, it's second degree murder. 25 to life. If I blow you away after raping or robbing you then it's first degree murder. Life in prison without parole or lethal injection.
In fact, the only way that you get murder one in New York, besides the aforementioned example (murder committed in the process of committing another felony) is if you kill a peace officer, a judge or a witness against you.
Besides the fact that it makes it murder one instead of murder two, in your example (I might as well kill her because murder is no worse then rape), you could still wind up with a consecutive sentence of 40 years.
Now THAT is good advice! Best buddy stole my router forcing me to turn my under used linux machine into a router/firewall.... I am twice the tech I was (now i canplay minesweeper AND manipulate text based routing tables)
Well, if you can play minesweeper you are well on your way to a MCSE certification:)
soo, windows software doesn't have to be that way; just bad windows software does.
I don't think I dissed windows. Just bad interface design. It was pretty bad in the insurance field too -- you had to enter so much data but they designed it so that you had to use the mouse to move between dozens of screens in order to do this. The screens were laid out exactly like the paper applications we used (this is good) and you could tab on each page of the app (also good) -- but the idiot's left no way to switch between different pages without using the mouse. All it would have taken was a key binding (gee.... maybe page up and page down?) and it would have solved the biggest complaint that everybody had.
When I left they were considering another vendor. Dunno if they ever switched. I would have.
Generally speaking, sharing any connection is best achieved with an external router and not via a computer. That way if your Gentoo machine falls over or you need to reboot, it won't take out the connection for everyone else. YMMV.
Generally speaking, sharing a connection with Linux will give you useful hands on experience with iptables and it's a million times more flexable then any hardware router and about $60 cheaper.
We used to sell them to customers too far out in the sticks to get anything but dialup but whom wanted extra security or the ability to network multiple machines. We even had an entire office once that did all of their billing to an AS/400 via a dialup. It was all terminal based so the dialup worked just fine. At peak hours they had 11 people all doing billing at the same time. And you know what's really sad? They could do it faster on that terminal system then any GUI that has come since.
Ditto when I worked in the insurance field. We absoletely hated the new version of our agency management system when they moved to Windows. When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?
The California legislature brought that on itself when it jumped in the pockets of the industry. I'm not happy about the electric rates here, but I do what I can do keep them down (and am looking at more things, like LED replacements for the fluorescent bulbs).
I don't see how the legislature brought that on itself when you had outfits like Enron shutting down power plants to create a fake shortage so they could jack up the spot prices on electricity. You can say they brought it on themselves when they brought about deregulation in the first place (I'm less then happy with the results of deregulation in New York) -- but they weren't entirely to blame. When you have the businesses in one state holding another state hostage then the Federal Government should step in and put a stop to it -- interstate commence clause, what?
Ballot-box governing is one of the things that I like about California, though it does seem over the last few years that voters are tiring of it, since so many from both sides of the aisle have been voted down.
To each their own. I thought your recall election was the mother of all embarrassments. I'm also highly skeptical about ballot-box governing. One of the reasons that we have elected representatives is so that they can look at the bigger picture/long term rather then the passion of the moment. Of course there are things broken with that system too (gerrymandering being my biggest pet peeve) but I don't think Athenian Democracy is the answer:)
How can you be so fearful of a perfectly valid and safe technology?
Wanna go tit for tat and compare the deaths indirectly or directly caused by nuclear technology to those caused by coal or gas? Hell, it wasn't two weeks ago that a dozen coal miners died. How about the fact that burning coal dumps more radioactivity into the environment then nuclear power? Yet we are ok with coal power plants?
What are you basing your fear of nuclear power on? Because if it's the standard "I'm afraid of anything with the word 'nuclear' in it" attitude then I'm going to be very disappointed.
Your preaching to the choir with that post:) I was only comparing state Government insanity -- not saying I don't like Government or think it should be slashed. I'm a card carrying Democrat -- but I still don't see why Albany couldn't (until last year) pass a budget on time.
That's all I was saying. Nothing more, nothing less:)
Too much government or poorly run government is a real pain in the chops but it is nothing compared to not having enough government. Left alone the American public will tend to turn life into a warped, horror story in short order. And the issues that are caused by too little regulation can be far reaching. For example we are now beginning to deal with over crowded prisons that are a consequence of too little aid to the unfortunates in our nation. The expense of true prevention is far less a burden than the expense of trying to repair the inevitable consequences of neglect. Tax cuts can be really, really expensive in the long term. And the long term is now.
I live in NYC, a city with a population density to match anything Europe can offer, and my broadband stinks like offerings anywhere else in the US. It's definitely a political issue, not a technical one.
Actually NYC has it's own sets of problems. Most of the infrastructure is heavily outdated (NYC was the first major city to get phone service back in the day) and fairly hard to access. Would you rather string new wire on a pole in Albany or rip up 5th Avenue if you were Verizon? It was only last year that ConEd finally cut off DC service to the remaining few hundred customers who had it. That should give you an idea of how old the infrastructure is. DSL was something that could be deployed on the existing wires in most cases (only requires central office upgrades). I've seen DSL working just fine on cloth wiring from the 20s:)
Verizon tells me that they'll be deploying FiOS in major cities upstate (Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Binghamton) before Manhattan because of this.
Should I consider myself lucky that at least I have access both both DSL and cable, so the companies stay at least a tiny bit competitive?
Not really because they aren't all that competitive. The cable company gets to go after the core business of the phone company (landlines) while the phone company can't go after the core business of the cable company (TV). Hopefully this will change when Verizon rolls out FiOS -- then they'll be selling a triple play that is far superior to anything the cable providers can offer on their network.
I guess you don't know anything about nuclear fission. Perhaps it would surprise you to learn that the United States Navy has operated hundreds of fission reactors across a fifty year timespan without a single accident?
With that in mind could you think of a better place to get the brains you'd need to design/build/and operate reactors?
They seem to have started a race to see who can be the most disfunctional state government. Look at the attempts to pass legislature in some form or another trying to regulate the distribution of games having content that "might harm children".
I see your nanny state video game restrictions and raise you 21 consecutive late state budgets and a triumvirate system of Government:)
I challenge you on your disfunctional government, placing California's up for comparison. At least New York can come together in time of crisis. All California can do is fracture into twenty different political camps, all allies and all backstabbers.
California has it's own problems. Unlimited ballot box governing would come to mind as the biggest of those.
We do have one thing in common though. We are both blue states that can't count on DC for an iota of help. The way California got screwed over in the energy crisis was absoletely disgusting -- and DC refused to step in. The only thing keeping New York from facing a similiar problem is the fact that our energy deregulation was handled a bit better -- and we have friends to the North with a huge excess of hydroelectric power:)
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
In any case, I happen to live in upstate New York (outside of Binghamton for those with a map) and wish I had been online last night to see this discussion. Locally there seems to be two interests that are attempting to derail these projects. A) Bird Lovers, B) NIMBY.
I don't know if there is a solution to A. Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill? Or for that matter how many birds cell towers kill? We used to find dozens of dead birds and bats (presumably flew into the guy wires?) when I worked for a WISP and went up to the tower we were leasing. The solution to B is equally challenging. Property owners rights must be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. This is nothing new -- you'd be facing the same opposition to a cell tower, new transmission line, new gas pipeline or a prison (literally -- there's a big argument locally now about siting a juvvie prison).
For my part, as a New Yorker, I would like to see the New York State Power Authority (the same people that run the St. Lawrence Seaway and Niagara Falls) get a mandate to build and operate nuclear power plants and sell the resulting electricity to our utility companies in the same manner that the sell the power they get from hydro projects. They sell it at cost to the utilities who are not allowed to mark it up. Anybody who lives in New York State should see a "Hydroelectric cost savings" line item on their electric bill -- this is because of the power authority. Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
New York also has limited natural gas resources. Our leaders in Albany are currently trying to get mineral rights from the property owners so they can bring in the out of state energy companies (the Enron's of the World) to exploit these resources. This is a mistake! If I had my way I'd see these natural gas resources exploited by the power authority (or a similar state agency with a mandate to serve the public) and used to supplement the HEAP program for low income families having problems meeting their heating bills.
Of course none of this will ever happen because we have the most dysfunctional State Government in the country:) It's nice to dream though! Maybe Spitzer will clean it up when he gets elected.
And this is where you and I part ways. I don't buy into your "gov't is evil" nonsense. The gov't is people like you and me. It's not a monolithic institution, a single entity. So we should not treat it as some grand empire of shadow - it's just as inept as any other institution.
Umm, I didn't say the "gov't is evil". If you have seen around before you'll see that I've adopted the same "We are the government" attitude. I was just pointing out the fact that information is a double edged sword and that Government (of all levels) has managed to secure the right to use that information against you.
The credit report example I can almost see. But I find it absolutely disgusting that my medical insurance provider can be forced to turn over records about me to law enforcement. They can't force my doctor to break his privilege but they can get it via the insurance company? That's just wrong.
So, yes, the Government is you and me. You, me and millions of uninformed people that don't know or care to know about stuff like this. That's the only place that my disillusionment creeps in -- and I'm the write my Congresscritter and vote type. Not that it really even matters, seeing as how the number of competitive Congressional districts is numbered in the low dozens. *Sigh*
Oh, and if you want to put all of your medical information into a biometric database then that's your right. I'll be happy with my medalert bracelet that lists my allergies and has contact information for my main doctor. I don't want my information floating around in a global database that I have no control over. But just give it time -- soon I won't even have the right to make that decision for myself either. Just like I don't have the right to decline a social security number.
In a cash economy your purchases can't be tracked without intrusion. In a credit card economy your purchases are tracked by definition.
I solved this one. I don't use my credit card for anything that couldn't be tracked anyway (phone bill, cable bill, etc). I'll be damned if my credit union and VISA are going to know what I'm eating this week, or what brand of toilet paper I use, how often I buy gas or where I drink and party.
You list bad examples - reasons you want your information private. And they are valid. But consider medical emergencies. I'm allergic to morphine, but I have no PCP right now. If I were injured and taken to a hospital and they were able to scan my fingerprints and access my medical records they would know not to give me morphine. As it is - they're going to have to find out the hard way I'm allergic. If it was a fatal allergy (it's not) that would suck for me.
There are other solutions to that problem that don't involve a big brother biometric database. Ever hear of a med alert bracelet? That said, on the surface a database of medical information like that seems like a good thing. But in reality it would be completely abused by the Government. Go look at your Health Insurance contract. I'll wager that it has a clause saying they can turn over information about you to the authorities. Since when did my medical information become something that could be used against me?
Take credit reports. Originally started so that banks would know something about who they were loaning money to. Now they've become a big database for Government officials to use to profile people and skip-tracers to use to track down people who don't want to be found. And before you say "That's what they are meant for" -- no, it's not. For every sap trying to hide from his creditors I'd wager that there's an abused woman trying to hide from her abusive ex who is going to track her down thanks to the wonders of the credit report. Well, perhaps it's not a 1:1 ratio, but it's still a concern.
Beyond that, go read the text of the fair credit reporting act sometime. Read the clauses that are in there for "National Security". As if national security depends on the Government knowing how many times I was late on my Capital One bill. Pfffft, I hate the information age and it's my livelihood!
There's no money in simple criminal prosecution! Civil suits are where the dough is!
Is that why they bought off^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonated to so many politicians to get harsher criminial penalties for bringing camcorders into movie theaters?
Do they have Dick Cheney's house? Because a friend told me he has really nice roof tiles...and I, uh, can't quite make 'em out in Google Earth.
(Waves at the NSA.)
Hehe, I spent all day Saturday running new phone cable for a co-worker whose DSL wouldn't work. I found cloth wiring that dated to at least the 20s.
So I'm telling this story to a friend (who is also a telco weenie) and marveling at how the POTS service kept working on those degraded lines. I said "Yeah, you just can't kill POTUS, it's bulletproof". Obviously I meant to say "POTS" and not "POTUS";)
I kinda wonder how much fuel that NSA satellite had to burn to get a better read on my conversation that day:)
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So is the case with the book. When it is over, you have a copy, albait mangled and compressed, in your brain.
Not if my test scores mean anything.... oh, wait, he said mangled too. Darn!
There is trademark law. That say you call you produckt xxx and nobody else can call themself xxx.
I'm pretty sure that "XXX" is in the public domain now. Otherwise I'm in trouble ;)
and having ftp openly accesable to the net would just be stupid (and which windows users have sftp client installed?
Haven't you ever heard of iptables and port knocking for friends with dynamic IPs? --reject-with tcp-reset is your friend :) You could scan every single port on my PC and it'd get you nowhere. And all windows users have at least a basic command line ftp client by default.
Like it or not, Democrats are the same as Republicans. I commend your attempts to prove me wrong, but alas, I am resorting to the truth and to fact fact. And when one relies on the truth and fact, one always wins a debate. Thus I am victorious!
I would really like to hear you explain that to me. Because from where I stand they are not alike.
Do they both have examples of corporate kiss asses who only care about how much money you donate to their PACs? Sure. Do they take the same stance on all issues? Not by a longshot! Explain to me how they have the same stance on important issues. Note issues. Don't pull one issue out of your hat and tell me they are same.
Abortion: Remember, Republicans were the main force behind the War in Iraq (let alone the war in Afghanistan)
Funny, I thought the main force behind the War in Afghanistan was the 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9/11 and the fact that the Taliban refused to hand over the man responsible. You'll get no argument from me about Iraq but don't even try to throw Afghanistan in my face. If Bush had glassed that country I would have applauded him. Half the reason I opposed Iraq was that I (correctly as it turned out) thought it would detract from Afghanistan.
As an exercise for you, go though the other issues you listed and observe the very similar, if not exactly the same, policies displayed by both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Really? Same on abortion you say? Most Democrats are pro-choice. Most Republicans aren't. You won't find a more important issue with a bigger gap between the two parties.
Don't blame me for anything America has done lately; it was all done by Democrats and Republicans! And why don't I vote in America? Because I'm British. The best I can do is wake up fools like yourself who have fallen victim to a very manipulative system.
Very manipulative system? Last time I checked you could distract the British public by running a headline about which member of the Royal family was boning which member of the General Public. Yeah, maybe that's no better then Americans being distracted by Tom Cruise getting engaged but don't put yourself up on some sort of pedestal like you are better then us.
So I see.
Yeah, I opened myself up for that but the difference between him and I is that I don't buy into that "both parties are the same" BS.
Democrats and Republicans are basically the same today.
Only if unimportant issues like abortion, foreign policy, ANWR/energy policy, taxes, religion and civil liberties don't matter to you.
I'm so sick of hearing this. Congrats to all the people who thought this and didn't come out to vote for Gore or Kerry. Or swallowed Nader's BS hook, line and sinker. You've handed the Federal judiciary to the far-right for the next few decades. You've alienated the rest of the World. You've committed American troops to be an occupying power in a hostile country with no foreseeable way out that doesn't create another theocracy.
No difference between the parties? Give me a fscking break.
Oh and if you think the Democrats are corporate sell outs or the Republicans don't represent true conservatism -- then why don't you register for whichever party and get off your lazy ass and vote in primaries? Or run for office? I guess it's much more productive to whine on /.
You see this problem a lot in crimes such as rape where the punishment is out of proportion to the actual crime. If the penality for rape is 20 years and the penality for murder is 20 years, I might as well rape and murder you rather than leave a witness alive to talk.
That's a logical thought but it's completely false in most American states.
If just blow you away in New York, for almost any reason, it's second degree murder. 25 to life. If I blow you away after raping or robbing you then it's first degree murder. Life in prison without parole or lethal injection.
In fact, the only way that you get murder one in New York, besides the aforementioned example (murder committed in the process of committing another felony) is if you kill a peace officer, a judge or a witness against you.
Besides the fact that it makes it murder one instead of murder two, in your example (I might as well kill her because murder is no worse then rape), you could still wind up with a consecutive sentence of 40 years.
Now THAT is good advice! Best buddy stole my router forcing me to turn my under used linux machine into a router/firewall.... I am twice the tech I was (now i canplay minesweeper AND manipulate text based routing tables)
Well, if you can play minesweeper you are well on your way to a MCSE certification :)
*duck*
soo, windows software doesn't have to be that way; just bad windows software does.
I don't think I dissed windows. Just bad interface design. It was pretty bad in the insurance field too -- you had to enter so much data but they designed it so that you had to use the mouse to move between dozens of screens in order to do this. The screens were laid out exactly like the paper applications we used (this is good) and you could tab on each page of the app (also good) -- but the idiot's left no way to switch between different pages without using the mouse. All it would have taken was a key binding (gee.... maybe page up and page down?) and it would have solved the biggest complaint that everybody had.
When I left they were considering another vendor. Dunno if they ever switched. I would have.
Generally speaking, sharing any connection is best achieved with an external router and not via a computer. That way if your Gentoo machine falls over or you need to reboot, it won't take out the connection for everyone else. YMMV.
Generally speaking, sharing a connection with Linux will give you useful hands on experience with iptables and it's a million times more flexable then any hardware router and about $60 cheaper.
Not to mention you can't exactly throw a Linksys router (hardware firewall) inbetween you and the wall when you are on dialup.
Perhaps you've never seen one of these.
We used to sell them to customers too far out in the sticks to get anything but dialup but whom wanted extra security or the ability to network multiple machines. We even had an entire office once that did all of their billing to an AS/400 via a dialup. It was all terminal based so the dialup worked just fine. At peak hours they had 11 people all doing billing at the same time. And you know what's really sad? They could do it faster on that terminal system then any GUI that has come since.
Ditto when I worked in the insurance field. We absoletely hated the new version of our agency management system when they moved to Windows. When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?
The California legislature brought that on itself when it jumped in the pockets of the industry. I'm not happy about the electric rates here, but I do what I can do keep them down (and am looking at more things, like LED replacements for the fluorescent bulbs).
I don't see how the legislature brought that on itself when you had outfits like Enron shutting down power plants to create a fake shortage so they could jack up the spot prices on electricity. You can say they brought it on themselves when they brought about deregulation in the first place (I'm less then happy with the results of deregulation in New York) -- but they weren't entirely to blame. When you have the businesses in one state holding another state hostage then the Federal Government should step in and put a stop to it -- interstate commence clause, what?
Ballot-box governing is one of the things that I like about California, though it does seem over the last few years that voters are tiring of it, since so many from both sides of the aisle have been voted down.
To each their own. I thought your recall election was the mother of all embarrassments. I'm also highly skeptical about ballot-box governing. One of the reasons that we have elected representatives is so that they can look at the bigger picture/long term rather then the passion of the moment. Of course there are things broken with that system too (gerrymandering being my biggest pet peeve) but I don't think Athenian Democracy is the answer :)
How can you be so naive?
How can you be so fearful of a perfectly valid and safe technology?
Wanna go tit for tat and compare the deaths indirectly or directly caused by nuclear technology to those caused by coal or gas? Hell, it wasn't two weeks ago that a dozen coal miners died. How about the fact that burning coal dumps more radioactivity into the environment then nuclear power? Yet we are ok with coal power plants?
What are you basing your fear of nuclear power on? Because if it's the standard "I'm afraid of anything with the word 'nuclear' in it" attitude then I'm going to be very disappointed.
Your preaching to the choir with that post :) I was only comparing state Government insanity -- not saying I don't like Government or think it should be slashed. I'm a card carrying Democrat -- but I still don't see why Albany couldn't (until last year) pass a budget on time.
That's all I was saying. Nothing more, nothing less :)
Too much government or poorly run government is a real pain in the chops but it is nothing compared to not having enough government. Left alone the American public will tend to turn life into a warped, horror story in short order. And the issues that are caused by too little regulation can be far reaching. For example we are now beginning to deal with over crowded prisons that are a consequence of too little aid to the unfortunates in our nation. The expense of true prevention is far less a burden than the expense of trying to repair the inevitable consequences of neglect. Tax cuts can be really, really expensive in the long term. And the long term is now.
I live in NYC, a city with a population density to match anything Europe can offer, and my broadband stinks like offerings anywhere else in the US. It's definitely a political issue, not a technical one.
Actually NYC has it's own sets of problems. Most of the infrastructure is heavily outdated (NYC was the first major city to get phone service back in the day) and fairly hard to access. Would you rather string new wire on a pole in Albany or rip up 5th Avenue if you were Verizon? It was only last year that ConEd finally cut off DC service to the remaining few hundred customers who had it. That should give you an idea of how old the infrastructure is. DSL was something that could be deployed on the existing wires in most cases (only requires central office upgrades). I've seen DSL working just fine on cloth wiring from the 20s :)
Verizon tells me that they'll be deploying FiOS in major cities upstate (Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Binghamton) before Manhattan because of this.
Should I consider myself lucky that at least I have access both both DSL and cable, so the companies stay at least a tiny bit competitive?
Not really because they aren't all that competitive. The cable company gets to go after the core business of the phone company (landlines) while the phone company can't go after the core business of the cable company (TV). Hopefully this will change when Verizon rolls out FiOS -- then they'll be selling a triple play that is far superior to anything the cable providers can offer on their network.
I like your humor.
I guess you don't know anything about nuclear fission. Perhaps it would surprise you to learn that the United States Navy has operated hundreds of fission reactors across a fifty year timespan without a single accident?
With that in mind could you think of a better place to get the brains you'd need to design/build/and operate reactors?
They seem to have started a race to see who can be the most disfunctional state government. Look at the attempts to pass legislature in some form or another trying to regulate the distribution of games having content that "might harm children".
I see your nanny state video game restrictions and raise you 21 consecutive late state budgets and a triumvirate system of Government :)
I challenge you on your disfunctional government, placing California's up for comparison. At least New York can come together in time of crisis. All California can do is fracture into twenty different political camps, all allies and all backstabbers.
California has it's own problems. Unlimited ballot box governing would come to mind as the biggest of those.
We do have one thing in common though. We are both blue states that can't count on DC for an iota of help. The way California got screwed over in the energy crisis was absoletely disgusting -- and DC refused to step in. The only thing keeping New York from facing a similiar problem is the fact that our energy deregulation was handled a bit better -- and we have friends to the North with a huge excess of hydroelectric power :)
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
In any case, I happen to live in upstate New York (outside of Binghamton for those with a map) and wish I had been online last night to see this discussion. Locally there seems to be two interests that are attempting to derail these projects. A) Bird Lovers, B) NIMBY.
I don't know if there is a solution to A. Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill? Or for that matter how many birds cell towers kill? We used to find dozens of dead birds and bats (presumably flew into the guy wires?) when I worked for a WISP and went up to the tower we were leasing. The solution to B is equally challenging. Property owners rights must be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. This is nothing new -- you'd be facing the same opposition to a cell tower, new transmission line, new gas pipeline or a prison (literally -- there's a big argument locally now about siting a juvvie prison).
For my part, as a New Yorker, I would like to see the New York State Power Authority (the same people that run the St. Lawrence Seaway and Niagara Falls) get a mandate to build and operate nuclear power plants and sell the resulting electricity to our utility companies in the same manner that the sell the power they get from hydro projects. They sell it at cost to the utilities who are not allowed to mark it up. Anybody who lives in New York State should see a "Hydroelectric cost savings" line item on their electric bill -- this is because of the power authority. Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
New York also has limited natural gas resources. Our leaders in Albany are currently trying to get mineral rights from the property owners so they can bring in the out of state energy companies (the Enron's of the World) to exploit these resources. This is a mistake! If I had my way I'd see these natural gas resources exploited by the power authority (or a similar state agency with a mandate to serve the public) and used to supplement the HEAP program for low income families having problems meeting their heating bills.
Of course none of this will ever happen because we have the most dysfunctional State Government in the country :) It's nice to dream though! Maybe Spitzer will clean it up when he gets elected.
Wake me up (not drunk), when you start driving. :)
I want to die in my sleep like Grandpa, not screaming like the passengers in his car.
And this is where you and I part ways. I don't buy into your "gov't is evil" nonsense. The gov't is people like you and me. It's not a monolithic institution, a single entity. So we should not treat it as some grand empire of shadow - it's just as inept as any other institution.
Umm, I didn't say the "gov't is evil". If you have seen around before you'll see that I've adopted the same "We are the government" attitude. I was just pointing out the fact that information is a double edged sword and that Government (of all levels) has managed to secure the right to use that information against you.
The credit report example I can almost see. But I find it absolutely disgusting that my medical insurance provider can be forced to turn over records about me to law enforcement. They can't force my doctor to break his privilege but they can get it via the insurance company? That's just wrong.
So, yes, the Government is you and me. You, me and millions of uninformed people that don't know or care to know about stuff like this. That's the only place that my disillusionment creeps in -- and I'm the write my Congresscritter and vote type. Not that it really even matters, seeing as how the number of competitive Congressional districts is numbered in the low dozens. *Sigh*
Oh, and if you want to put all of your medical information into a biometric database then that's your right. I'll be happy with my medalert bracelet that lists my allergies and has contact information for my main doctor. I don't want my information floating around in a global database that I have no control over. But just give it time -- soon I won't even have the right to make that decision for myself either. Just like I don't have the right to decline a social security number.
In a cash economy your purchases can't be tracked without intrusion. In a credit card economy your purchases are tracked by definition.
I solved this one. I don't use my credit card for anything that couldn't be tracked anyway (phone bill, cable bill, etc). I'll be damned if my credit union and VISA are going to know what I'm eating this week, or what brand of toilet paper I use, how often I buy gas or where I drink and party.
You list bad examples - reasons you want your information private. And they are valid. But consider medical emergencies. I'm allergic to morphine, but I have no PCP right now. If I were injured and taken to a hospital and they were able to scan my fingerprints and access my medical records they would know not to give me morphine. As it is - they're going to have to find out the hard way I'm allergic. If it was a fatal allergy (it's not) that would suck for me.
There are other solutions to that problem that don't involve a big brother biometric database. Ever hear of a med alert bracelet? That said, on the surface a database of medical information like that seems like a good thing. But in reality it would be completely abused by the Government. Go look at your Health Insurance contract. I'll wager that it has a clause saying they can turn over information about you to the authorities. Since when did my medical information become something that could be used against me?
Take credit reports. Originally started so that banks would know something about who they were loaning money to. Now they've become a big database for Government officials to use to profile people and skip-tracers to use to track down people who don't want to be found. And before you say "That's what they are meant for" -- no, it's not. For every sap trying to hide from his creditors I'd wager that there's an abused woman trying to hide from her abusive ex who is going to track her down thanks to the wonders of the credit report. Well, perhaps it's not a 1:1 ratio, but it's still a concern.
Beyond that, go read the text of the fair credit reporting act sometime. Read the clauses that are in there for "National Security". As if national security depends on the Government knowing how many times I was late on my Capital One bill. Pfffft, I hate the information age and it's my livelihood!
There's no money in simple criminal prosecution! Civil suits are where the dough is!
Is that why they bought off^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonated to so many politicians to get harsher criminial penalties for bringing camcorders into movie theaters?
Do they have Dick Cheney's house? Because a friend told me he has really nice roof tiles...and I, uh, can't quite make 'em out in Google Earth.
(Waves at the NSA.)
Hehe, I spent all day Saturday running new phone cable for a co-worker whose DSL wouldn't work. I found cloth wiring that dated to at least the 20s.
So I'm telling this story to a friend (who is also a telco weenie) and marveling at how the POTS service kept working on those degraded lines. I said "Yeah, you just can't kill POTUS, it's bulletproof". Obviously I meant to say "POTS" and not "POTUS" ;)
I kinda wonder how much fuel that NSA satellite had to burn to get a better read on my conversation that day :)