that Europe has utterly abused any non-homogenous population it contains within for hundreds of years *cough*jews and romany*cough*.
You left out Muslims, they're effectively the niggers of Europe, treated with contempt wherever they go, prohibited from building their places of worship (Switzerland), wearing the clothes proscribed by their faith (France, who also discriminates against Jews in the same way), and isolated into modern day ghettos (France again). The United States is far from perfect, but we don't tell people what they can wear or prohibit from them building places of worship. You'll note that the Muslims who have immigrated to the United States have yet to stage mass demonstrations and riots. Perhaps that has something to do with treating them like human beings? The EU might try that, it'd probably work better for them.
In nearly all of Europe after WWII there were guns, grenades, and explosives all over the place. They seem to have done a good job at makine most (but not all) of them go away and not be widely available
They aren't practical for most crime because they aren't easy to carry without attracting undue attention. That said, when you do get shot by one it's a truly nasty thing. The wound path for any pistol round is only a tad bit bigger than the bullet itself. Contrast that with the wound path for a rifle, which is many times the size of the projectile, and usually branches off into all sorts of directions because rifle rounds tend to fragment when they hit their target. Mythbusters demonstrated this when they were shooting various firearms into a swimming pool, there wasn't a single rifle round that didn't fragment upon hitting the water, even FMJ ones, whereas most of the pistol rounds (FMJ or JHP) managed to remain in one piece.
There's a reason why game animals will almost immediately drop with a well placed rifle round, whereas the same almost never happens with a pistol round, short of a CNS hit. There's a reason why any rifle round worth its salt will go through Kevlar like a hot knife through butter.
The 5.56x45mm NATO has three to four times the energy of a 9x19mm or.45ACP pistol, depending on the particular loading. The.30-06 has about eight times the energy of a.45 ACP, and nearly nine times the energy of a 9x19mm.
You're preaching to the choir my friend, I'm a card carrying NRA member who is licensed to carry in 30-some states, and I do so as a matter of routine wherever legal. Sitting in my office right now with a 1911 on my strong side with two reloads on my weak side.
I was just trying to dispel the notion that it's illegal to carry in movie theaters and malls. Hospitals and liquor serving establishments are the only pieces of private property I can think of where firearms are banned by statute in a significant number of American jurisdictions, and not even in all American jurisdictions. I can carry in bars here in the blue state of New York, and the nearly-as-blue state of Pennsylvania just to our South. Hospitals are also allowed in NYS, unless they're attached to a University.
Firearms also require a fair amount of training to use effectively, and musket balls were only as deadly as they were because of the state of medicine at the time they were in common use. Troops wounded by musket fire rarely had a quick death to look forward to.
There's only one sure-fire way to kill someone with a single shot -- a direct hit to the brain stem -- and if you're using a small handgun you're going to have to get to knife fighting range before you can be assured of hitting such a small target. You may as well use the knife, it's silent, you can use it more than one time, and it isn't going to blow up in your hand like your plastic firearm is apt to.
The bullet casing would not only set off a metal detector it would show up in x-ray or body scanning machines as well.
The millimeter wave scanning machines would pick up a completely plastic firearm (or knife) anyway. They picked up my boarding pass when I neglected to remove it from my pocket the last time I flew, which was home-printed on a regular piece of paper, using an inkjet printer. I think they've got plastic weapons covered....
80% of people shot with handguns survive. True statistic, learned it in a ballistics wounding seminar from a cardio-thoracic surgeon. I'd much rather face a handgun than a knife.
Layman just don't appreciate the energy differences between pistols and rifles. Pistols don't operate at the energy levels necessary for remote wounding effects, so they can only kill through two effects: Blood loss and the destruction/disablement of the central nervous system. The former takes time, sometimes a lot of it (stories abound of people surviving gun shot wounds for hours before finally receiving medical attention), whereas the latter is a comparatively small target that's only occasionally hit in a gunfight.
Rifles are a different animal entirely of course, but they're rarely used in crime and not something that those outside of the military generally need to concern themselves with.
No American jurisdiction that I'm aware of (even the anti-gun New York State, where I currently reside) bans firearms within movie theaters or malls. Those are private property, and private property owners are free to allow or prohibit firearms. A prohibition by the property owner may or may not have force of law, depending on the jurisdiction. Here in New York, "no guns allowed" signs have no force of law, outside of trespassing, i.e., if they ask you to leave and you refuse you've committed a crime. They're effectively in the same league as the sign that says "shirts and shoes required". Other jurisdictions (Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, to name a few) give such signs the force of law, and you can lose your concealed carry license and face criminal charges if you ignore them.
You can do both of those things, so long as you're filming them.
Paying for sex in front of the camera == production of pornography, perfectly legal in most American jurisdictions
Paying for sex without a camera == prostitution, and illegal in most American jurisdictions
It is reasonable to tax gambling to recoup these costs
It might be more reasonable not to allow gambling in the first place, particularly when it's the State (via the lottery) that's promoting it. That's what I was hinting at, not specifically condemning taxing the profits from gambling where it's legal for whatever reason. The flip-side to that is you drive it underground where it's harder to regulate, with obvious consequences, though at least the underground market isn't as ubiquitous and well advertised.
It would be interesting to see some actual studies done on the societal cost of legalized vs. illegal gambling, but I highly doubt that will happen anytime soon. There's just too much money at stake, and most of the States have figured out that legalized gambling is a nice way to raise taxes without the usual political cost of raising taxes. I do love the irony of funding education (New York lottery) and elderly care (Pennsylvania lottery) on the backs of those who can least afford the income hit associated with the lottery.
One doesn't need to be Christian to question the wisdom of allowing the Government and for-profit corporations to profit from gambling, which is essentially nothing more than a tax on people who are bad at math.
Nor do Christians generally oppose gambling. Two words for those who dispute this statement: Church bingo.
What happens when the App crashes?
on
Rigging Up Baby
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unlike a basic $35 baby-monitor, the $250 Owlet bootie and accompanying app can alert
parents if anything serious has gone wrong, like if a kid stops breathing, or if his heart stops
beating.
Babymonitor App, 4.0 stars, 4 reviews
Three five star reviews, then one one star review. "App did not warn me when baby died."
Want a slightly more serious take on it?
For the first 10 months of her life, her mother, Yasmin, kept detailed records of Elle's sleep patterns, feedings, and
diaper changes, noting the data points with a pencil and paper on a clipboard. A few months in, she digitized the logs, graphed the
data, and became a more knowledgeable parent.
Unfortunately for the Lucero family's sleeping habits, Yasmin never found a definitive answer. Per the data, Elle was just
fussy.
That last line accurately sums up every infant I've ever had in my charge. Not sure what pattern you could discern from graphing
all of this data, if my experiences are any guide it would make for one hell of a random number generator. I doubt one can find a
better entropy source than a newborns sleeping "schedule".;)
Hey, I'm not saying LNG is a bad energy source, just questioning the claim that's easy to handle and import. It requires very specialized (read: expensive) port equipment, huge investments in security, and (at least in the US, maybe the Japanese are more progressive) the overcoming of the vocal NIMBY/FUD types. None of these are problems with coal imports and exports.
You mean the POW camp that's hosting people captured on foreign battlefields? Is there a single person there of any nationality who was captured on American soil?
The Federal Government has all manner of ways to compel you to assist with a warrant and/or NSL. Gitmo isn't one of them. This guy didn't go to Gitmo, in spite of his refusal to cooperate with the Feds. He hasn't even gone to regular Federal prison, even though he arguably refused to enforce a valid court order, one issued after judicial review, not some NSL letter issued in the middle of the night by a faceless DOJ bureaucrat.
I'm not a fan of Gitmo and would like to see it shuttered sooner rather than later, but let's at least confine our discussions about it to reality. Reality: Nobody has been admitted in Gitmo in years, and none of those who were got sent there after being captured for crimes (real or alleged) on American soil.
The US is at the very brink of being a police state
I don't think you know what a real police state is. Stand outside the White House with a sign stating that BHO is an authoritarian asshat. Now try the same exercise in Pyongyang with a sign directed at the Supreme Leader. Repeat the exercise but replace the current leaders with George Washington and Kim Il-sung. What do you suppose the difference in outcomes will be for you?
Want a less extreme example? Hold a LGBT rally in Washington, wherein you call out the current political establishment for being spineless on the issue of LGBT rights. Now fly to Moscow and repeat the exercise. You won't end up in the Gulag like you would in North Korea, but you're going to be "encouraged" not to continue with your activities.
Point being, there are varying degrees of "police state", and on a scale of 1 to 10 the United States might score a 2.5 on our worst day. We're not perfect, but the rhetoric that you're using is unproductive and clearly not grounded in reality.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have figured out that if sticking your head in a home microwave is dangerous
Home microwave: 0.8 to 1.5 kilowatts (59dBm to 62dBm)
Microwave repeater: No more than a few watts, typically less. (30dBm for 1 watt, 37dBm for 5 watts)
If you can't see the difference between 1.5 kilowatts and something typically measured in milliwatts then I don't know how to help you. Besides, I never advocated climbing the tower and sitting in front of the transmitter. I was responding to your absurd (and unsourced) claim that they can only use microwave repeaters "Where the tower is tall enough" because of "safety concerns". Your microwave leaks more RF than you'd be exposed to living under a transmission tower hosting repeaters.
Are you also afraid of wi-fi networks? Same frequency range as your microwave, with power outputs that aren't much lower than the microwave repeaters you're trying to claim raise safety issues.
It has to import all of its fossil fuels and NG is as easy to transport and handle as coal and burns a lot cleaner
Easy to transport? Sure, when it's produced domestically, or imported from countries you share a land border with. Neither applies for Japan though, she has to import all of her NG as LNG, which is a royal PITA to put it mildly. You don't need hyper-specialized port facilities (and huge investments in security) to import coal.
Not saying that coal is a better energy choice, just that it's a lot easier to handle when being exported/imported across oceans.
Honestly, I don't know what the f*ck Americans are doing to have almost twice as much emissions as here in Europe.
Population density. High dense parts of the United States viewed individually (New York City is the classic example) comparable very favorably to Europe. Europe also caught a few breaks of geography, the low-population density Nordic countries having ample access to geothermal and hydroelectric resources for instance. One can say the same for Canada, she is blessed with hydroelectric resources, and has a population small enough that she can meet a comparatively high portion of her energy needs using them. The United States probably has more hydroelectric resources, but not ten times what Canada has, and since we have ten times her population.....
Europeans also have a different attitude than Americans towards energy consumption. To toss in an anecdotal example, every single time I go to Italy I pay extra money to our hotel for the "privilege" (offered for free in even the scummiest American hotels) of having air conditioning. Every single time I leave the room for more than five minutes they let themselves in and turn the woefully undersized A/C unit off, thus ensuring it's 90+ degrees with nearly as much humidity upon my return. You'd never see an American hospitality establishment messing with the climate controls in a rented room, particularly in so obnoxious a fashion.
In other words you got called out on your BS and refuse to back it up. Gotcha. I think you're the kind of person who knows just enough to be dangerous. Case in point:
Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices.
"Safety hazard"?!? How much power do you think microwave links need? Hint: With good antennas and a clear LOS you can go miles with a power output measured in milliwatts. TV stations broadcast with power levels measured in kilowatts, and people live right next door to the transmitters while suffering no health effects whatsoever. You might want to familiarize yourself with the inverse square law and the basic fundamentals of RF engineering....
BTW, that link you gave the other poster doesn't even mention the word "T1" in any context, never mind validating your absurd claim that they're feeding 4G base stations with T1s.
Verizon pulls fiber to their base stations wherever possible.
T1s would be a nightmare. The current 2x10mhz LTE network tops out at about 75mbit/s down and 18mbit/s up. Multiply that by three (most base stations have three sectors), then add more bandwidth to account for each of the 3G Ev-DO channels (3mbit/s down and about 1.8mbit/s up) provided, multiply that number by three, then add a non zero amount for voice service (9.6kbit/s per call with current CDMA codecs, 13kbit/s for older codecs), SS7 signaling and other overhead.....
T1s barely scaled to meet demand for the Ev-DO network, where you had to contend with a demand for at least 9mbit/s (3mbit/s times three sectors) of data, in reality more than that since they typically allocate at least two channels for Ev-DO service, and you still need to have bandwidth for voice and signaling service. To meet that sort of demand you're talking about twelve or more bonded T-1s, and at that point you may as well just use a microwave repeater to reach those rural base stations where it's cost prohibitive to pull fiber.
That's a pretty impressive T1, since my LTE speed record with Verizon Wireless is 49mbit/s, with typical day-to-day speeds of 8mbit/s to 12mbit/s. Have you actually talked to a network engineer for any modern cellular provider or are you just making assumptions? The few times I've worked directly with the wireless carriers (on behalf of two clients with buildings the carriers wished to install base stations in) they've pulled fiber in to feed their equipment. T1s might still be used as a last resort for 2G/3G-only rural base stations, but they are not being utilized to feed modern base stations. Verizon's 2x10mhz LTE deployment provides a theoretical maximum of 75mbit/s downstream and ~18mbit/s upstream. They aren't feeding that with T1s....
Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy.
My latency (tested via pings to 8.8.8.8) on Verizon's LTE network is around 80ms, on the EVDO network it's about 200ms. The only way I can spike a wireless ping test to the numbers you're talking about is to saturate the link beforehand with a huge download.
Who aren't native to the Northeast United States, where we don't generally appreciate our wildlife being killed by well-fed domestic animals purely for sport. There are a TON of ways to satisfy your cat's hunting instinct without assisting in the destruction of the local wildlife population.
It's also not your responsibility to keep your cat away from dogs or people, the cat is perfectly capable of doing that itself.
Tell that to the cats my old dog killed on a regular basis when they were foolish enough to wander into her yard. Bonus points if you try to sue us after your cat dies inside our fenced in yard, like our neighbor did back in the day after the dog bagged three of her cats inside of two weeks. That dog was a cat terminating machine, she killed more than twenty of them over the course of her life, all of them inside of the fence-line. Interestingly enough she never bothered our cats, just the strange ones that were foolish enough to come into her yard.
One of them got ran over by a car
Good job failing as a pet owner. Guess how many of my pets have died because of my negligence? Zero.
Slashdot Mirror
that Europe has utterly abused any non-homogenous population it contains within for hundreds of years *cough*jews and romany*cough*.
You left out Muslims, they're effectively the niggers of Europe, treated with contempt wherever they go, prohibited from building their places of worship (Switzerland), wearing the clothes proscribed by their faith (France, who also discriminates against Jews in the same way), and isolated into modern day ghettos (France again). The United States is far from perfect, but we don't tell people what they can wear or prohibit from them building places of worship. You'll note that the Muslims who have immigrated to the United States have yet to stage mass demonstrations and riots. Perhaps that has something to do with treating them like human beings? The EU might try that, it'd probably work better for them.
In nearly all of Europe after WWII there were guns, grenades, and explosives all over the place. They seem to have done a good job at makine most (but not all) of them go away and not be widely available
You've never been to Finland, have you?
They aren't practical for most crime because they aren't easy to carry without attracting undue attention. That said, when you do get shot by one it's a truly nasty thing. The wound path for any pistol round is only a tad bit bigger than the bullet itself. Contrast that with the wound path for a rifle, which is many times the size of the projectile, and usually branches off into all sorts of directions because rifle rounds tend to fragment when they hit their target. Mythbusters demonstrated this when they were shooting various firearms into a swimming pool, there wasn't a single rifle round that didn't fragment upon hitting the water, even FMJ ones, whereas most of the pistol rounds (FMJ or JHP) managed to remain in one piece.
There's a reason why game animals will almost immediately drop with a well placed rifle round, whereas the same almost never happens with a pistol round, short of a CNS hit. There's a reason why any rifle round worth its salt will go through Kevlar like a hot knife through butter.
The 5.56x45mm NATO has three to four times the energy of a 9x19mm or .45ACP pistol, depending on the particular loading. The .30-06 has about eight times the energy of a .45 ACP, and nearly nine times the energy of a 9x19mm.
Not according to Handgunlaw.us, and I'll take their well-researched word over an AC, unless you care to cite the actual statute?
You're preaching to the choir my friend, I'm a card carrying NRA member who is licensed to carry in 30-some states, and I do so as a matter of routine wherever legal. Sitting in my office right now with a 1911 on my strong side with two reloads on my weak side.
I was just trying to dispel the notion that it's illegal to carry in movie theaters and malls. Hospitals and liquor serving establishments are the only pieces of private property I can think of where firearms are banned by statute in a significant number of American jurisdictions, and not even in all American jurisdictions. I can carry in bars here in the blue state of New York, and the nearly-as-blue state of Pennsylvania just to our South. Hospitals are also allowed in NYS, unless they're attached to a University.
Firearms also require a fair amount of training to use effectively, and musket balls were only as deadly as they were because of the state of medicine at the time they were in common use. Troops wounded by musket fire rarely had a quick death to look forward to.
There's only one sure-fire way to kill someone with a single shot -- a direct hit to the brain stem -- and if you're using a small handgun you're going to have to get to knife fighting range before you can be assured of hitting such a small target. You may as well use the knife, it's silent, you can use it more than one time, and it isn't going to blow up in your hand like your plastic firearm is apt to.
Can you suggest a realistic scenario where a plastic gun would be essential
Settling my long standing grudge with Clint Eastwood and Rene Russo? ;)
(Link for those who don't get it)
The bullet casing would not only set off a metal detector it would show up in x-ray or body scanning machines as well.
The millimeter wave scanning machines would pick up a completely plastic firearm (or knife) anyway. They picked up my boarding pass when I neglected to remove it from my pocket the last time I flew, which was home-printed on a regular piece of paper, using an inkjet printer. I think they've got plastic weapons covered....
I'd take my chances with the bullet.
80% of people shot with handguns survive. True statistic, learned it in a ballistics wounding seminar from a cardio-thoracic surgeon. I'd much rather face a handgun than a knife.
Layman just don't appreciate the energy differences between pistols and rifles. Pistols don't operate at the energy levels necessary for remote wounding effects, so they can only kill through two effects: Blood loss and the destruction/disablement of the central nervous system. The former takes time, sometimes a lot of it (stories abound of people surviving gun shot wounds for hours before finally receiving medical attention), whereas the latter is a comparatively small target that's only occasionally hit in a gunfight.
Rifles are a different animal entirely of course, but they're rarely used in crime and not something that those outside of the military generally need to concern themselves with.
No American jurisdiction that I'm aware of (even the anti-gun New York State, where I currently reside) bans firearms within movie theaters or malls. Those are private property, and private property owners are free to allow or prohibit firearms. A prohibition by the property owner may or may not have force of law, depending on the jurisdiction. Here in New York, "no guns allowed" signs have no force of law, outside of trespassing, i.e., if they ask you to leave and you refuse you've committed a crime. They're effectively in the same league as the sign that says "shirts and shoes required". Other jurisdictions (Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, to name a few) give such signs the force of law, and you can lose your concealed carry license and face criminal charges if you ignore them.
pay for sex (or indeed, be paid for sex)
You can do both of those things, so long as you're filming them.
Paying for sex in front of the camera == production of pornography, perfectly legal in most American jurisdictions
Paying for sex without a camera == prostitution, and illegal in most American jurisdictions
The law is nothing if not "consistent". ;)
Amarie
(Off the top of my head as a Star Trek geek, I'm sure there are other examples....)
It is reasonable to tax gambling to recoup these costs
It might be more reasonable not to allow gambling in the first place, particularly when it's the State (via the lottery) that's promoting it. That's what I was hinting at, not specifically condemning taxing the profits from gambling where it's legal for whatever reason. The flip-side to that is you drive it underground where it's harder to regulate, with obvious consequences, though at least the underground market isn't as ubiquitous and well advertised.
It would be interesting to see some actual studies done on the societal cost of legalized vs. illegal gambling, but I highly doubt that will happen anytime soon. There's just too much money at stake, and most of the States have figured out that legalized gambling is a nice way to raise taxes without the usual political cost of raising taxes. I do love the irony of funding education (New York lottery) and elderly care (Pennsylvania lottery) on the backs of those who can least afford the income hit associated with the lottery.
One doesn't need to be Christian to question the wisdom of allowing the Government and for-profit corporations to profit from gambling, which is essentially nothing more than a tax on people who are bad at math.
Nor do Christians generally oppose gambling. Two words for those who dispute this statement: Church bingo.
Unlike a basic $35 baby-monitor, the $250 Owlet bootie and accompanying app can alert parents if anything serious has gone wrong, like if a kid stops breathing, or if his heart stops beating.
This XKCD comes to mind for some reason.
Babymonitor App, 4.0 stars, 4 reviews
Three five star reviews, then one one star review. "App did not warn me when baby died."
Want a slightly more serious take on it?
For the first 10 months of her life, her mother, Yasmin, kept detailed records of Elle's sleep patterns, feedings, and diaper changes, noting the data points with a pencil and paper on a clipboard. A few months in, she digitized the logs, graphed the data, and became a more knowledgeable parent.
Unfortunately for the Lucero family's sleeping habits, Yasmin never found a definitive answer. Per the data, Elle was just fussy.
That last line accurately sums up every infant I've ever had in my charge. Not sure what pattern you could discern from graphing all of this data, if my experiences are any guide it would make for one hell of a random number generator. I doubt one can find a better entropy source than a newborns sleeping "schedule". ;)
Children tend to make their hunger known before they starve to death. They're a bit harder to kill than houseplants and rabbits. ;)
Hey, I'm not saying LNG is a bad energy source, just questioning the claim that's easy to handle and import. It requires very specialized (read: expensive) port equipment, huge investments in security, and (at least in the US, maybe the Japanese are more progressive) the overcoming of the vocal NIMBY/FUD types. None of these are problems with coal imports and exports.
Just look at Gitmo.
You mean the POW camp that's hosting people captured on foreign battlefields? Is there a single person there of any nationality who was captured on American soil?
The Federal Government has all manner of ways to compel you to assist with a warrant and/or NSL. Gitmo isn't one of them. This guy didn't go to Gitmo, in spite of his refusal to cooperate with the Feds. He hasn't even gone to regular Federal prison, even though he arguably refused to enforce a valid court order, one issued after judicial review, not some NSL letter issued in the middle of the night by a faceless DOJ bureaucrat.
I'm not a fan of Gitmo and would like to see it shuttered sooner rather than later, but let's at least confine our discussions about it to reality. Reality: Nobody has been admitted in Gitmo in years, and none of those who were got sent there after being captured for crimes (real or alleged) on American soil.
The US is at the very brink of being a police state
I don't think you know what a real police state is. Stand outside the White House with a sign stating that BHO is an authoritarian asshat. Now try the same exercise in Pyongyang with a sign directed at the Supreme Leader. Repeat the exercise but replace the current leaders with George Washington and Kim Il-sung. What do you suppose the difference in outcomes will be for you?
Want a less extreme example? Hold a LGBT rally in Washington, wherein you call out the current political establishment for being spineless on the issue of LGBT rights. Now fly to Moscow and repeat the exercise. You won't end up in the Gulag like you would in North Korea, but you're going to be "encouraged" not to continue with your activities.
Point being, there are varying degrees of "police state", and on a scale of 1 to 10 the United States might score a 2.5 on our worst day. We're not perfect, but the rhetoric that you're using is unproductive and clearly not grounded in reality.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have figured out that if sticking your head in a home microwave is dangerous
Home microwave: 0.8 to 1.5 kilowatts (59dBm to 62dBm)
Microwave repeater: No more than a few watts, typically less. (30dBm for 1 watt, 37dBm for 5 watts)
If you can't see the difference between 1.5 kilowatts and something typically measured in milliwatts then I don't know how to help you. Besides, I never advocated climbing the tower and sitting in front of the transmitter. I was responding to your absurd (and unsourced) claim that they can only use microwave repeaters "Where the tower is tall enough" because of "safety concerns". Your microwave leaks more RF than you'd be exposed to living under a transmission tower hosting repeaters.
Are you also afraid of wi-fi networks? Same frequency range as your microwave, with power outputs that aren't much lower than the microwave repeaters you're trying to claim raise safety issues.
It has to import all of its fossil fuels and NG is as easy to transport and handle as coal and burns a lot cleaner
Easy to transport? Sure, when it's produced domestically, or imported from countries you share a land border with. Neither applies for Japan though, she has to import all of her NG as LNG, which is a royal PITA to put it mildly. You don't need hyper-specialized port facilities (and huge investments in security) to import coal.
Not saying that coal is a better energy choice, just that it's a lot easier to handle when being exported/imported across oceans.
Honestly, I don't know what the f*ck Americans are doing to have almost twice as much emissions as here in Europe.
Population density. High dense parts of the United States viewed individually (New York City is the classic example) comparable very favorably to Europe. Europe also caught a few breaks of geography, the low-population density Nordic countries having ample access to geothermal and hydroelectric resources for instance. One can say the same for Canada, she is blessed with hydroelectric resources, and has a population small enough that she can meet a comparatively high portion of her energy needs using them. The United States probably has more hydroelectric resources, but not ten times what Canada has, and since we have ten times her population.....
Europeans also have a different attitude than Americans towards energy consumption. To toss in an anecdotal example, every single time I go to Italy I pay extra money to our hotel for the "privilege" (offered for free in even the scummiest American hotels) of having air conditioning. Every single time I leave the room for more than five minutes they let themselves in and turn the woefully undersized A/C unit off, thus ensuring it's 90+ degrees with nearly as much humidity upon my return. You'd never see an American hospitality establishment messing with the climate controls in a rented room, particularly in so obnoxious a fashion.
I won't even bother replying to the rest.
In other words you got called out on your BS and refuse to back it up. Gotcha. I think you're the kind of person who knows just enough to be dangerous. Case in point:
Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices.
"Safety hazard"?!? How much power do you think microwave links need? Hint: With good antennas and a clear LOS you can go miles with a power output measured in milliwatts. TV stations broadcast with power levels measured in kilowatts, and people live right next door to the transmitters while suffering no health effects whatsoever. You might want to familiarize yourself with the inverse square law and the basic fundamentals of RF engineering....
BTW, that link you gave the other poster doesn't even mention the word "T1" in any context, never mind validating your absurd claim that they're feeding 4G base stations with T1s.
Verizon pulls fiber to their base stations wherever possible.
T1s would be a nightmare. The current 2x10mhz LTE network tops out at about 75mbit/s down and 18mbit/s up. Multiply that by three (most base stations have three sectors), then add more bandwidth to account for each of the 3G Ev-DO channels (3mbit/s down and about 1.8mbit/s up) provided, multiply that number by three, then add a non zero amount for voice service (9.6kbit/s per call with current CDMA codecs, 13kbit/s for older codecs), SS7 signaling and other overhead.....
T1s barely scaled to meet demand for the Ev-DO network, where you had to contend with a demand for at least 9mbit/s (3mbit/s times three sectors) of data, in reality more than that since they typically allocate at least two channels for Ev-DO service, and you still need to have bandwidth for voice and signaling service. To meet that sort of demand you're talking about twelve or more bonded T-1s, and at that point you may as well just use a microwave repeater to reach those rural base stations where it's cost prohibitive to pull fiber.
These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul
That's a pretty impressive T1, since my LTE speed record with Verizon Wireless is 49mbit/s, with typical day-to-day speeds of 8mbit/s to 12mbit/s. Have you actually talked to a network engineer for any modern cellular provider or are you just making assumptions? The few times I've worked directly with the wireless carriers (on behalf of two clients with buildings the carriers wished to install base stations in) they've pulled fiber in to feed their equipment. T1s might still be used as a last resort for 2G/3G-only rural base stations, but they are not being utilized to feed modern base stations. Verizon's 2x10mhz LTE deployment provides a theoretical maximum of 75mbit/s downstream and ~18mbit/s upstream. They aren't feeding that with T1s....
Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy.
My latency (tested via pings to 8.8.8.8) on Verizon's LTE network is around 80ms, on the EVDO network it's about 200ms. The only way I can spike a wireless ping test to the numbers you're talking about is to saturate the link beforehand with a huge download.
Cats are predators.
Who aren't native to the Northeast United States, where we don't generally appreciate our wildlife being killed by well-fed domestic animals purely for sport. There are a TON of ways to satisfy your cat's hunting instinct without assisting in the destruction of the local wildlife population.
It's also not your responsibility to keep your cat away from dogs or people, the cat is perfectly capable of doing that itself.
Tell that to the cats my old dog killed on a regular basis when they were foolish enough to wander into her yard. Bonus points if you try to sue us after your cat dies inside our fenced in yard, like our neighbor did back in the day after the dog bagged three of her cats inside of two weeks. That dog was a cat terminating machine, she killed more than twenty of them over the course of her life, all of them inside of the fence-line. Interestingly enough she never bothered our cats, just the strange ones that were foolish enough to come into her yard.
One of them got ran over by a car
Good job failing as a pet owner. Guess how many of my pets have died because of my negligence? Zero.