One of the reasons the US founding fathers used the 3-branch system was that they hoped the branches would spend most of their time fighting each-other for control and leave the common man alone.
That was a good theory until political parties came along. The whole point of a political party is to get people in those 3 branches to cooperate with each other. Witness the Republican outrage over TSA's antics now that a Democrat is calling the shots and contrast it against the silence when GWB was calling the shots. Witness the muted response from Democrats when the Obama Administration declares that you have no right to privacy in public and contrast it against the response when GWB tried to do the same.
It also seems pretty obvious that Comcast is trying to protect its TV/Movie business. They figure if customers are not watching HBO or USA or whatever, but instead watching netflix, then Comcast will try to charge extra for the privilege.
As much as I hate cable, you do realize that Comcast's video services help to pay for the costs of maintaining that huge HFC network, right? If everybody cuts the cord on video services then costs for internet service will go up by a non-zero amount. I don't pay for video services from Time Warner because I don't find them to be worth the money but let's not pretend that it has a non-zero cost on the local cable company if everybody ditches video in exchange for data only services.
Two Bell customers are NOT paying for the same phone call. They both pay for continuous access to the network. Only the person making the call is paying for the call itself.
Cell phones charge for incoming calls too in the United States on the vast majority of plans.
There is no technical reason to restrict the upstream to a small fraction of the downstream except that one costs more than the other.
Yes there is. ADSL operates on a limited range of frequencies (determined by cable quality and distance) on a single pair. Each channel that you allocate to upstream comes at the expense of downstream channels. When you are aiming your product at people that download a lot more than they upload (i.e: the vast majority of residential customers) it makes more sense to allocate more of your limited number of channels to downstream than upstream.
DOCSIS has a similar limitation, albeit for different reasons. The upstream channel needs to accommodate dozens to hundreds of modems that compete for time slots to transmit in. Owing to this limitation and others the upstream channel has considerably less bandwidth than the downstream channel. On DOCSIS 1.1 the bandwidth is roughly 42/10mbit/s. On 2.0 and 3.0 it's 42/30mbit/s.
Why will this increase Comcast's operating costs? It's not going to affect Comcast's customers Netflix usage, so their overall traffic won't go up, it'll just be coming from a different peer.
Akamai delivered Netflix (and other content) to Comcast's customers by buying colo rack space in Comcast's POPs and pulling in their own private lines. Level 3 is dumping the traffic onto Comcast at a much smaller number of peering points, thus Comcast has to use their long haul network to transport the traffic across the country instead of having it originate inside a POP nearer to it's final destination.
Data usage (by volume) is reported only after roughly 24 hours after the use occurred.
Why not use your own utilities to track it instead of relying on Verizon? There are a number of different bandwidth monitoring tools available for different operating systems. Many of them are free. They won't be exact (nothing is, protocol overhead would skew the results a bit) but they'd give you a real time estimate that was in the ballpark.
I get what you are saying about the cap sucking but there really is no excuse for going over it without knowing.
For that matter, even the unlimited smart phone plans are being phased out rather rapidly in favor of capped plans, but that's another issue.
Verizon just revamped their 3G plans and kept unlimited data plans for smart phones. I think they enjoy beating AT&T over the head with it and in all reality the number of smart phone users that exceed 5GB are so few in number as to be meaningless in the grand scheme.
The only way I can blow past 5GB with my Droid-X (and I use it a lot, including screaming Pandora for hours a day) is to tether and that of course is against the TOS.
They typically have cable/dsl available at home, and are also occasionally in branch offices.
That's how Verizon wants it. They don't want you using the wireless network as a wireline replacement. They say the wireless network can't handle that kind of load. Cynics say they don't want to lose the wireline revenue. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle -- they need caps, but it seems that with the technology available they'd be able to do better than 5GB.
Teleconferencing with audio will be no more than 64kbit/s. It'd take more than seven days of that to reach 5GB. Video is a different animal of course. The bandwidth usage of e-mail (even with the occasional attachment) is negligible. Remote desktop is a joke -- ever monitored the bandwidth usage of a terminal server? My users who use aircards for RDP don't even hit 2GB, let alone 5GB.
Who do you market it to? Who is the target audience for a $41,000 EV? I can't spend that much on a vehicle, plain and simple. Many (most?) Americans are in the same boat. The vast majority of those that can spend that much are going to spend it on luxury rather than green.
The Volt will sell itself to the small minority of people who want to buy it. You aren't going to reach them with TV commercials.
You forgot: - the car would be useless for trips exceeding 30mph, thus it would be a toy for rich people who want to think they are helping instead of being a fully functional automobile
They don't have the right to "detain" you for questioning without arresting you. If they opt to arrest you then you tell them that you won't be saying anything until your attorney shows up.
And yes, I can stop and have stopped when a girl has said no during sex
So have I, but you failed to answer my question. How much higher brain functioning was occurring during the act? You are able to instantly turn it off and withdraw in under a second? Somehow I doubt that and suspect the reality was a little bit more gray than black and white.
And it becomes rape when she says stop (or the safeword if you practice BDSM) and you don't immediately stop what you're doing.
Not according to the legal definition in my state it doesn't. Rape is only rape if it involves "forcible compulsion", or a number of other factors (all of them related to an inability to consent due to mental illness, intoxication or age) otherwise it would be a lessor offense.
it's just that I can't believe I'm actually having to argue about this with intelligent and educated people in 2010.
The fact that intelligent and educated people disagree with you should tell you that the issue is not as cut and dry as you think it is. Perhaps your experiences working as a rape crisis counselor have biased your opinion to the point that you can't even engage in a respectful dialog about differing opinions? Don't worry too much, I see the politically correct mods are lumping me in with the "once they open their legs they lose all control" guy. Can't handle differing opinions, can we mods?
BTW, don't misinterpret anything I've said as some sort of support for rapists or Mr. Assange (if he has indeed committed the acts he's accused of). I have a family member who was nearly raped and only avoided it by killing her would be attacker. Doing that messed her up at least as much as any of the victims of a completed rape that I've known. I just think there's a bit of a difference between someone who doesn't immediately stop during the act of coitus and someone that drags a woman into a dark alley and uses violence to initiate the act of coitus.
Excuse me, but I didn't raise the "I was so horny I couldn't stop" defense and the comparison to killing someone in a fit of rage is absurd. All I did was point out that it's not a simple matter of flipping an 'off' switch to override one of our most primal instincts. I presume you've had sex? How much higher brain functioning was occurring during the act?
At what point does it become rape if one partner changes their mind after intromission? After one second of continued penetration? Five? Ten? After the first pelvic motion? This issue is not as black and white as you are making it out to be.
FYI, the Jordanian president is quoted as having said to the US government in the paragraph that starts with 'A report' [washingtontimes.com], "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours".
That would be the Yemeni President. Jordan has a King, not a President and is some distance away from Yemen.....
Elliot Spitzer ran on a platform of no corruption, anti-prostitution and so on and then got caught spending public money on $3000 hookers.
Uhh, no, Elliot Spitzer got caught spending his own money on hookers. He came to the attention of the Feds when his personal bank(s) reported suspicious transactions on his accounts. These reporting requirements were originally put in place to catch money laundering operations connected to organized crime. I doubt that the Congress had "catch rich men paying for sex" in mind when they passed those laws but the nature of Government is to use all the power you surrender to it (and then some) so Mr. Spitzer was exposed.
I have no sympathy for Client #9 as he embarrassed my state and pissed away a mountain of needed political capital with his antics but the take away from what happened to him is that the Federal Government has entirely too much power, IMHO anyway. I don't happen to think the Feds should be concerning themselves with prostitution, do you?
There is a middle ground between his position and yours that recognizes the biological imperative of the sex act and the fact that halting said act once it has commenced runs counter to millions of years of evolution. Human beings are supposed to have the ability to override our biological drives but one could argue that the sex act is one of the few times that we submit to them and surrender this control.
Militarily, economically, culturally, they're not even in the top five.
Really? They have the 3rd largest economy in the world, after the United States and Japan. The PLA is the largest standing army on the planet. Culture is a harder thing to measure but I don't think you can discount them in this area either.
My guess is the former and watch as he might mysterisouly be transferred to the US to be tried for American crimes on disclosing secrets.
Put the tinfoil hat away. Nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted in the United States for publishing secret material. The number of such prosecutions can be counted on two hands. All the case law on the matter comes down AGAINST being able to prosecute the publisher of such information.
The crime was committed when the information was leaked by someone with a duty to keep it secret, not when a third party published said information. This doesn't make Mr. Assange any less of an asshat but I would not be overly worried about an American criminal prosecution for his activities.
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One of the reasons the US founding fathers used the 3-branch system was that they hoped the branches would spend most of their time fighting each-other for control and leave the common man alone.
That was a good theory until political parties came along. The whole point of a political party is to get people in those 3 branches to cooperate with each other. Witness the Republican outrage over TSA's antics now that a Democrat is calling the shots and contrast it against the silence when GWB was calling the shots. Witness the muted response from Democrats when the Obama Administration declares that you have no right to privacy in public and contrast it against the response when GWB tried to do the same.
1 - cash only. Yes kiddies, saving for and buying your item.
Having the money in hand before you buy something? That's crazy talk.
It also seems pretty obvious that Comcast is trying to protect its TV/Movie business. They figure if customers are not watching HBO or USA or whatever, but instead watching netflix, then Comcast will try to charge extra for the privilege.
As much as I hate cable, you do realize that Comcast's video services help to pay for the costs of maintaining that huge HFC network, right? If everybody cuts the cord on video services then costs for internet service will go up by a non-zero amount. I don't pay for video services from Time Warner because I don't find them to be worth the money but let's not pretend that it has a non-zero cost on the local cable company if everybody ditches video in exchange for data only services.
Two Bell customers are NOT paying for the same phone call. They both pay for continuous access to the network. Only the person making the call is paying for the call itself.
Cell phones charge for incoming calls too in the United States on the vast majority of plans.
There is no technical reason to restrict the upstream to a small fraction of the downstream except that one costs more than the other.
Yes there is. ADSL operates on a limited range of frequencies (determined by cable quality and distance) on a single pair. Each channel that you allocate to upstream comes at the expense of downstream channels. When you are aiming your product at people that download a lot more than they upload (i.e: the vast majority of residential customers) it makes more sense to allocate more of your limited number of channels to downstream than upstream.
DOCSIS has a similar limitation, albeit for different reasons. The upstream channel needs to accommodate dozens to hundreds of modems that compete for time slots to transmit in. Owing to this limitation and others the upstream channel has considerably less bandwidth than the downstream channel. On DOCSIS 1.1 the bandwidth is roughly 42/10mbit/s. On 2.0 and 3.0 it's 42/30mbit/s.
Why will this increase Comcast's operating costs? It's not going to affect Comcast's customers Netflix usage, so their overall traffic won't go up, it'll just be coming from a different peer.
Akamai delivered Netflix (and other content) to Comcast's customers by buying colo rack space in Comcast's POPs and pulling in their own private lines. Level 3 is dumping the traffic onto Comcast at a much smaller number of peering points, thus Comcast has to use their long haul network to transport the traffic across the country instead of having it originate inside a POP nearer to it's final destination.
There's also a $7500 federal tax credit available
If it's such a great idea why do I need to subsidize it with my tax dollars?
Data usage (by volume) is reported only after roughly 24 hours after the use occurred.
Why not use your own utilities to track it instead of relying on Verizon? There are a number of different bandwidth monitoring tools available for different operating systems. Many of them are free. They won't be exact (nothing is, protocol overhead would skew the results a bit) but they'd give you a real time estimate that was in the ballpark.
I get what you are saying about the cap sucking but there really is no excuse for going over it without knowing.
For that matter, even the unlimited smart phone plans are being phased out rather rapidly in favor of capped plans, but that's another issue.
Verizon just revamped their 3G plans and kept unlimited data plans for smart phones. I think they enjoy beating AT&T over the head with it and in all reality the number of smart phone users that exceed 5GB are so few in number as to be meaningless in the grand scheme.
The only way I can blow past 5GB with my Droid-X (and I use it a lot, including screaming Pandora for hours a day) is to tether and that of course is against the TOS.
I love both hiking and photography and would love being able to upload my photos to my server while on a hike.
I don't think you understand the point of hiking or photography if you can't wait until you get home to download the pictures from the camera.
They typically have cable/dsl available at home, and are also occasionally in branch offices.
That's how Verizon wants it. They don't want you using the wireless network as a wireline replacement. They say the wireless network can't handle that kind of load. Cynics say they don't want to lose the wireline revenue. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle -- they need caps, but it seems that with the technology available they'd be able to do better than 5GB.
Teleconferencing with audio will be no more than 64kbit/s. It'd take more than seven days of that to reach 5GB. Video is a different animal of course. The bandwidth usage of e-mail (even with the occasional attachment) is negligible. Remote desktop is a joke -- ever monitored the bandwidth usage of a terminal server? My users who use aircards for RDP don't even hit 2GB, let alone 5GB.
but I don't see any real marketing on the Volt
Who do you market it to? Who is the target audience for a $41,000 EV? I can't spend that much on a vehicle, plain and simple. Many (most?) Americans are in the same boat. The vast majority of those that can spend that much are going to spend it on luxury rather than green.
The Volt will sell itself to the small minority of people who want to buy it. You aren't going to reach them with TV commercials.
You forgot: - the car would be useless for trips exceeding 30mph, thus it would be a toy for rich people who want to think they are helping instead of being a fully functional automobile
From what I've seen, the political will to bail out anyone has been tapped out for at least the next 5-10 years.
Who needs political will when the Fed can just issue you lines of credit behind closed doors?
They don't have the right to "detain" you for questioning without arresting you. If they opt to arrest you then you tell them that you won't be saying anything until your attorney shows up.
Enabled us to live our materialistic lifestyle at a fraction of the true labor and environmental cost?
And yes, I can stop and have stopped when a girl has said no during sex
So have I, but you failed to answer my question. How much higher brain functioning was occurring during the act? You are able to instantly turn it off and withdraw in under a second? Somehow I doubt that and suspect the reality was a little bit more gray than black and white.
And it becomes rape when she says stop (or the safeword if you practice BDSM) and you don't immediately stop what you're doing.
Not according to the legal definition in my state it doesn't. Rape is only rape if it involves "forcible compulsion", or a number of other factors (all of them related to an inability to consent due to mental illness, intoxication or age) otherwise it would be a lessor offense.
it's just that I can't believe I'm actually having to argue about this with intelligent and educated people in 2010.
The fact that intelligent and educated people disagree with you should tell you that the issue is not as cut and dry as you think it is. Perhaps your experiences working as a rape crisis counselor have biased your opinion to the point that you can't even engage in a respectful dialog about differing opinions? Don't worry too much, I see the politically correct mods are lumping me in with the "once they open their legs they lose all control" guy. Can't handle differing opinions, can we mods?
BTW, don't misinterpret anything I've said as some sort of support for rapists or Mr. Assange (if he has indeed committed the acts he's accused of). I have a family member who was nearly raped and only avoided it by killing her would be attacker. Doing that messed her up at least as much as any of the victims of a completed rape that I've known. I just think there's a bit of a difference between someone who doesn't immediately stop during the act of coitus and someone that drags a woman into a dark alley and uses violence to initiate the act of coitus.
Excuse me, but I didn't raise the "I was so horny I couldn't stop" defense and the comparison to killing someone in a fit of rage is absurd. All I did was point out that it's not a simple matter of flipping an 'off' switch to override one of our most primal instincts. I presume you've had sex? How much higher brain functioning was occurring during the act?
At what point does it become rape if one partner changes their mind after intromission? After one second of continued penetration? Five? Ten? After the first pelvic motion? This issue is not as black and white as you are making it out to be.
FYI, the Jordanian president is quoted as having said to the US government in the paragraph that starts with 'A report' [washingtontimes.com], "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours".
That would be the Yemeni President. Jordan has a King, not a President and is some distance away from Yemen.....
You don't have to incriminate yourself, but you can't lie to them, or outright evade being brought in for questioning.
In America the response would be "Charge me with a crime or I'm not coming in."
Elliot Spitzer ran on a platform of no corruption, anti-prostitution and so on and then got caught spending public money on $3000 hookers.
Uhh, no, Elliot Spitzer got caught spending his own money on hookers. He came to the attention of the Feds when his personal bank(s) reported suspicious transactions on his accounts. These reporting requirements were originally put in place to catch money laundering operations connected to organized crime. I doubt that the Congress had "catch rich men paying for sex" in mind when they passed those laws but the nature of Government is to use all the power you surrender to it (and then some) so Mr. Spitzer was exposed.
I have no sympathy for Client #9 as he embarrassed my state and pissed away a mountain of needed political capital with his antics but the take away from what happened to him is that the Federal Government has entirely too much power, IMHO anyway. I don't happen to think the Feds should be concerning themselves with prostitution, do you?
There is a middle ground between his position and yours that recognizes the biological imperative of the sex act and the fact that halting said act once it has commenced runs counter to millions of years of evolution. Human beings are supposed to have the ability to override our biological drives but one could argue that the sex act is one of the few times that we submit to them and surrender this control.
Militarily, economically, culturally, they're not even in the top five.
Really? They have the 3rd largest economy in the world, after the United States and Japan. The PLA is the largest standing army on the planet. Culture is a harder thing to measure but I don't think you can discount them in this area either.
My guess is the former and watch as he might mysterisouly be transferred to the US to be tried for American crimes on disclosing secrets.
Put the tinfoil hat away. Nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted in the United States for publishing secret material. The number of such prosecutions can be counted on two hands. All the case law on the matter comes down AGAINST being able to prosecute the publisher of such information.
The crime was committed when the information was leaked by someone with a duty to keep it secret, not when a third party published said information. This doesn't make Mr. Assange any less of an asshat but I would not be overly worried about an American criminal prosecution for his activities.