I doubt you're in the Bay Area. If anything, it's more the local monopolies (ATT and Comcast, sometimes without even competition from each other) who are able to extract astronomical prices without having to upgrade their infrastructure. But everyone else is either clamoring for Fiber, or for uncapped data pipes. That said, another problem could also be that for commercial use, the Bay Area is probably one of the best networked areas in the world. If you're a big company, you have access to nearly unlimited bandwidth. No need to invest in anything else.
The biggest hope for the Bay Area are projects like the San Leandro commercial fiber loop: the city puts in the fiber via public conduits, the companies pay for the creation and use, and the entire thing is maintained by... well, that's apparently a big secret, or no one knows to ask that question. Presumably businesses will pay the city to maintain the loop. But outside of projects like these, it's unlikely that the Bay Area is going to see much growth in terms of connectivity. The only ISP that is working on fiber is Sonic.net, and they're still going street by street in Sebastopol, a suburb far to the north.
Well... I'm actually more surprised that HP refuses to take the lead on ANY consumer-related goods. Or enterprise products/services, for that matter.
Man, I thought for a while that HP might be able to turn it around and get back to its roots of being a kick-ass engineering company, but it's pretty obvious that those days are now gone. I'm pretty sure that even the old engineering fogeys who might have been able to tell the yung'uns about what HP culture was like before have left the ship. At this point, it's just a large computer manufacturing company like Dell and Acer, with some enterprise big iron and consulting thrown in.
I wouldn't necessarily say it is a tie, it's more something that we can't really much about. Your thesis is completely valid as well - that the US military just has a shitty navigation system that thinks GPS is either unjammable or unspoofable. However, in the absence of solid evidence, I tend to favor the simpler explanation: that the drone malfunctioned, and Iran got some free PR out of it. Occam's razor, if you will.
The problem is that no one knows for sure whether that actually happened. Yes, the Iranians claim that's what they did, but it is unlikely for two reasons: the article specifically mentions that military GPS signals are encrypted (although it wouldn't be the first time that the military decides to use unencrypted channels to send/receive live drone information), and the Iranians are... well, prone to exaggerating their achievements. I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
Actually, a statist approach would be a conservative approach. After all, that's exactly what conservative means.... conserving the current state, sticking to historical habits, etc. And again, you illustrate my point beautifully: no one's calling you on your bullshit redefinition of what it means to be conservative.
The left's intellectual foundation is the universities where most social science profs and their students have for four decades or more been left-leaning if not Marxist.
1) What's wrong with working at universities? 2) What's wrong with being left? 3) You're employing a tautology to imply a negative connotation with being left-leaning. In other words, you're demonizing your opposition as not even being able to have a valid opinion. 4) You have no idea what a Marxist is. As a matter of fact, you don't even know what a political center is.
Obama represents that tradition; he comes from the ivory tower culture, he thinks of the rural whites as "clinging to their guns and religion", and he brooks no disagreement.
Argument from assertion. Not to mention that "he brooks no disagreement" is a hilarious position to take after George "I'm the decider" Bush was never once challenged on anything by the conservative "small government" people.
, but if you spend some time in the Southwest and the western states, except for the Pacific coastal region, you find a persistent culture of leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.
Is that what you call people who fire gays for being gay, who try to tell people what to do in the bedroom, and who will also consider you a lesser human if you believe in the wrong book? There's a big difference between an economical and a social laissez-faire position.
Rightly or wrongly, this is what they want whether they admit it or not.
Now you're implying you know someone's "true" mind, even if it contradicts what they're saying or doing. In other words, you are making shit up about a person, just so that you can lump them in a particular group.
Some of our greatest thinkers in decades past came off the farm, grew up going to a one room schoolhouse, spent more time out of doors than in a library, and so forth, yet this didn't seem to hold them back.
Argument from example. For every Abe Lincoln, there was a Ben Franklin.
They developed a uniquely American kind of independent thinking relatively free from the peer pressure of the eastern university environment.
Argument from myth. American exceptionalism is just like English, German, French, Chinese, or even Icelandic exceptionalism: a post-hoc justification for uniqueness based on a mythical interpretation of an abstract origin story and national character creation.
Yeah. The only thing you're missing is the common insults. Although at this point, for some people, calling someone Marxist is exactly that.
Finally....
The opening post is an expression of anger and frustration at elements of our society who want to reprogram children to be more "open" to their particular world views.
I'm amazed that teaching critical thinking, as opposed to memorization, is now "reprogramming". Not to mention that I find your implication hilarious: that they were already programmed. In other words, you're just complaining that your programming is being overwritten with someone else's program.
And this is why the left in the US is completely being clobbered by the right. Too often insults, redefinitions and logical fallacies by the conservatives are met by "well, if I can figure out what they're really saying, we can maybe come to an agreement" by what amounts to the left. In other words, they're being nice in response to what is basically bullying.
Here's the problem: anyone who argues like the initial poster is not looking for a rational discourse, for an enlightening discussion, or even for a solution to a problem. They are merely looking to get enough people onto their side.
Definitely read up on the issue. But don't mistake the original post for an opening in a an honest discussion. It isn't.
Considering your complete troll actually did receive an upmod, I'd say that not only are you trolling, but you are also factually wrong in your accusation. Good work.
That's the most frustrating part about this bill. A tax would have been the exactly right way of going about it, but it was going to be absolutely impossible in this political landscape. Instead, we get this abortion of a funding scheme, just so that some politicians can go home and claim "No new taxes!"
You abysmal, inveterately shortsighted and proudly ignorant narcissist: the entire point of an insurance system is to spread the risk and cost of procedures and pay outs to as large a pool as possible. The way you benefit from this is actually two-fold: * if you do have some rare disease or costly accident, the larger pool will make it cheaper for you to cover the cost * the higher availability of health care raises the overall standard of living, which in turn makes you live in a place with a high standard of living.
So even if we take at face value your claim that your costs will raise more because of this act than without it (and all indications are that you're actually wrong on this), you do benefit from it.
Wait - your total yearly budget for health care is $4800?? Yes, you ARE leeching off the system. You know how much a minor trip to the ER costs (i.e., a little wipe out on a bike where nothing was fundamentally wrong, but there were risks for things being seriously wrong)? That's 5 grand right there. The ambulance ride? Another 3 grand.
Congratulations on being part of the people who don't need much health care. However, if you ever actually need surgery, I hope you have ten years of investment stashed away, because the raw hospital bill for an overnight stay in is about 50k. ICU can run you north of 100k. I'll also be happy if they just leave you to rot outside the ER, because you can't produce a cashier's check for the 100k that the entire ordeal will actually cost.
The single-minded selfishness and self-centeredness of people in this area is astounding.
Oh, and since liposuction isn't covered, your example is a complete strawman and a distraction.
You have absolutely no idea what Minitel was offering. You know how now, everyone has a www., and ads are frequently just attempts to get you to a website? Right around 1990, that's what the 3615 in the ads were - merely a way to get you to use their Minitel service.
BBS my ass. I know what those looked like, and there was absolutely nothing in them that could compete with the Minitel services.
No, web usage was slower to pick up in France because a lot of the services that the Internet offered were already on Minitel, and, at least in the early betters, much better on Minitel. Want to find movie or theater times? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to have some hot times with some 18-year old who really was a 45 year old man out in the middle of nowhere? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to play games that were actually better than what Farmville offers now? Minitel had it.
The Internet had a hard time in France because the existing system was actually better. Starting mid- to late-nineties, all of that changed, of course. But to argue that government interference prevented the better technology from taking off is ass-backwards: government interference created the better technology. Minitel only was overtaken once the network effect, technological advances and yes, the free market, provided better alternatives.
RIP Minitel, it was awesome. And it's games were still beyond a lot of the cruft that passes as games on Facebook.
Nevermind glider design, they went with amounts to a rowboat or fishing boat hull. That thing is going to capsize during the first gnarly wave or wind gust, and will never right itself. I predict it will make it about 100 miles before it is never heard of again.
All in all, that concept is going to utterly fail for a number of reasons. I guess that's what happens when landlubbers try to go boating.
Did you read the article? "In fact, children hospitalized for severe respiratory syncytial virus or bronchiolitis may be more likely to develop asthma later on according to Anne Wright of the Arizona Respiratory Center". That's the point I was making: that while there are certain situations where exposure helps in the long, there are many more situations where exposure hurts in the long run. Not to mention that the article generally talks about inflammation responses, not resistance to diseases. And please, next time, go for primary sources.
As for vaccines, you do realize that we don't have vaccines for everything? The reason is that the body stores the signature for certain viruses, but isn't able to do the same thing for other viruses or bacteria.
The problem isn't pricing. I'd choose Sonic if they cost double the amount that the other ISPs. Unfortunately, Sonic is dicking around in Sebastopol, Santa Cruz, and other communities that I'm not a part of. I will sign up the instant they show up in my neighborhood, but right now the chances of that happening in the next five years are close to zero. As such, I'm stuck with (shudder) ATT or Comcast.
And that's why we have two (count em, two!) shipyards capable of building a nuclear submarine. I'm really curious about who would consider that wasteful and inefficient, and what they're opinion would be once a fire (or an attack) puts the single shipyard out of commission.
Sometimes, being inefficient is good, and there's such a thing as being too efficient. Specifically government comes to mind.
On the upside, people in Switzerland go to school or work if they have a cold [...].
On the upside? When you are sick, stay home. Don't spread your very communicable disease to others. That's as much a problem in the US, btw. Drives me nuts every time I see someone coughing their lungs out at work....
How come you aren't running for president based on your self-evident platform that will lead to guaranteed freedom, wealth and permanent happiness? Oh, right, your ideas are even worse. Churchill's quip about democracy comes to mind.
And that, to me, is one of the biggest problems in the US: the political conversation has been completely taken over by fringe groups. Until it stops, we're hurtling towards doom.
Two very significant differences - and I can't believe that I have to point them out - speech has no direct ability to kill and destroy, while guns do, and speech DOES get regulated. Try telling a guard at the White House that you are there to kill the president, and your little bit of speech will have some very direct repercussions.
Simply put, it's not about guns. It's about fire safety and a loophole that allows gun owners to skate past the same penalties campfire builders and cigarette tossers contend with. Nothing more.
Absolutely. Completely agree. The next question though is: why does this loophole exist? And it exists because enough people in the Utah legislature are using your exact 2nd amendment reasoning to justify the existence of this loophole.
"Not everyone is coming after your right to speak freely." Would you feel the same way if this was about free speech?
Well, next time someone starts a fire by speaking some magic words, we can definitely have this conversation. In the meantime, nice attempt to deflect the conversation towards a completely unrelated and impossible situation.
Lastly, if there ever is a 2nd amendment situation that the NRA hasn't already taken up, feel free to call up the ACLU.
The problem is that Lovelock has absolutely no precise critiques that would allow you to do much deconstructing. His one specific critique, that it hasn't warmed in the last decade, makes the classic mistake of cherry-picking the starting point of his timeline to coincide with the absolute record high. As a result, his argument holds little water from a purely scientific perspective.
The other two points that the paper makes, and which put the interview squarely in the propaganda/flamebait category, is that Lovelock is somehow the godfather of Global Warming (at best, that would be Hansen) and that he has ever been anything close to an authority on Global Warming. His Gaia hypothesis was controversial (to put it kindly), and the one time he did venture into climate science on earth, he got the impact of CFCs in the atmosphere wrong.
So he has not published anything that can be deconstructed, he is not an accepted authority so that we could take him at his word, and somehow we are supposed to just nod when he gives an interview? Where is this sort of blind acceptance when someone like Hansen or Mann gives an interview?
Yes, you can. But you didn't read his post. Here, let me put it in small words and short sentences: people who cause a wildfire by having a campfire get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by using fireworks get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by grilling get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by shooting do NOT get prosecuted. Can you spot the difference now?
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt you're in the Bay Area. If anything, it's more the local monopolies (ATT and Comcast, sometimes without even competition from each other) who are able to extract astronomical prices without having to upgrade their infrastructure. But everyone else is either clamoring for Fiber, or for uncapped data pipes. That said, another problem could also be that for commercial use, the Bay Area is probably one of the best networked areas in the world. If you're a big company, you have access to nearly unlimited bandwidth. No need to invest in anything else.
The biggest hope for the Bay Area are projects like the San Leandro commercial fiber loop: the city puts in the fiber via public conduits, the companies pay for the creation and use, and the entire thing is maintained by... well, that's apparently a big secret, or no one knows to ask that question. Presumably businesses will pay the city to maintain the loop. But outside of projects like these, it's unlikely that the Bay Area is going to see much growth in terms of connectivity. The only ISP that is working on fiber is Sonic.net, and they're still going street by street in Sebastopol, a suburb far to the north.
Well... I'm actually more surprised that HP refuses to take the lead on ANY consumer-related goods. Or enterprise products/services, for that matter.
Man, I thought for a while that HP might be able to turn it around and get back to its roots of being a kick-ass engineering company, but it's pretty obvious that those days are now gone. I'm pretty sure that even the old engineering fogeys who might have been able to tell the yung'uns about what HP culture was like before have left the ship. At this point, it's just a large computer manufacturing company like Dell and Acer, with some enterprise big iron and consulting thrown in.
Sad to see them go.
I wouldn't necessarily say it is a tie, it's more something that we can't really much about. Your thesis is completely valid as well - that the US military just has a shitty navigation system that thinks GPS is either unjammable or unspoofable. However, in the absence of solid evidence, I tend to favor the simpler explanation: that the drone malfunctioned, and Iran got some free PR out of it. Occam's razor, if you will.
The problem is that no one knows for sure whether that actually happened. Yes, the Iranians claim that's what they did, but it is unlikely for two reasons: the article specifically mentions that military GPS signals are encrypted (although it wouldn't be the first time that the military decides to use unencrypted channels to send/receive live drone information), and the Iranians are... well, prone to exaggerating their achievements. I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
You also appear to have a very narrow and limited set of experiences upon which to draw.
It's possible they experience job discrimination and such, though; I don't know, not being one, and not being in touch with their community.
Hilarious. The irony is coming hard and fast.
I understand the OP's criticism. I also understand that it is not based on fact, logic or normally accepted definitions.
a neo-statist approach
Actually, a statist approach would be a conservative approach. After all, that's exactly what conservative means.... conserving the current state, sticking to historical habits, etc. And again, you illustrate my point beautifully: no one's calling you on your bullshit redefinition of what it means to be conservative.
The left's intellectual foundation is the universities where most social science profs and their students have for four decades or more been left-leaning if not Marxist.
1) What's wrong with working at universities?
2) What's wrong with being left?
3) You're employing a tautology to imply a negative connotation with being left-leaning. In other words, you're demonizing your opposition as not even being able to have a valid opinion.
4) You have no idea what a Marxist is. As a matter of fact, you don't even know what a political center is.
Obama represents that tradition; he comes from the ivory tower culture, he thinks of the rural whites as "clinging to their guns and religion", and he brooks no disagreement.
Argument from assertion. Not to mention that "he brooks no disagreement" is a hilarious position to take after George "I'm the decider" Bush was never once challenged on anything by the conservative "small government" people.
, but if you spend some time in the Southwest and the western states, except for the Pacific coastal region, you find a persistent culture of leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.
Is that what you call people who fire gays for being gay, who try to tell people what to do in the bedroom, and who will also consider you a lesser human if you believe in the wrong book? There's a big difference between an economical and a social laissez-faire position.
Rightly or wrongly, this is what they want whether they admit it or not.
Now you're implying you know someone's "true" mind, even if it contradicts what they're saying or doing. In other words, you are making shit up about a person, just so that you can lump them in a particular group.
Some of our greatest thinkers in decades past came off the farm, grew up going to a one room schoolhouse, spent more time out of doors than in a library, and so forth, yet this didn't seem to hold them back.
Argument from example. For every Abe Lincoln, there was a Ben Franklin.
They developed a uniquely American kind of independent thinking relatively free from the peer pressure of the eastern university environment.
Argument from myth. American exceptionalism is just like English, German, French, Chinese, or even Icelandic exceptionalism: a post-hoc justification for uniqueness based on a mythical interpretation of an abstract origin story and national character creation.
Yeah. The only thing you're missing is the common insults. Although at this point, for some people, calling someone Marxist is exactly that.
Finally....
The opening post is an expression of anger and frustration at elements of our society who want to reprogram children to be more "open" to their particular world views.
I'm amazed that teaching critical thinking, as opposed to memorization, is now "reprogramming". Not to mention that I find your implication hilarious: that they were already programmed. In other words, you're just complaining that your programming is being overwritten with someone else's program.
And this is why the left in the US is completely being clobbered by the right. Too often insults, redefinitions and logical fallacies by the conservatives are met by "well, if I can figure out what they're really saying, we can maybe come to an agreement" by what amounts to the left. In other words, they're being nice in response to what is basically bullying.
Here's the problem: anyone who argues like the initial poster is not looking for a rational discourse, for an enlightening discussion, or even for a solution to a problem. They are merely looking to get enough people onto their side.
Definitely read up on the issue. But don't mistake the original post for an opening in a an honest discussion. It isn't.
Considering your complete troll actually did receive an upmod, I'd say that not only are you trolling, but you are also factually wrong in your accusation. Good work.
That's the most frustrating part about this bill. A tax would have been the exactly right way of going about it, but it was going to be absolutely impossible in this political landscape. Instead, we get this abortion of a funding scheme, just so that some politicians can go home and claim "No new taxes!"
You abysmal, inveterately shortsighted and proudly ignorant narcissist: the entire point of an insurance system is to spread the risk and cost of procedures and pay outs to as large a pool as possible. The way you benefit from this is actually two-fold:
* if you do have some rare disease or costly accident, the larger pool will make it cheaper for you to cover the cost
* the higher availability of health care raises the overall standard of living, which in turn makes you live in a place with a high standard of living.
So even if we take at face value your claim that your costs will raise more because of this act than without it (and all indications are that you're actually wrong on this), you do benefit from it.
Wait - your total yearly budget for health care is $4800?? Yes, you ARE leeching off the system. You know how much a minor trip to the ER costs (i.e., a little wipe out on a bike where nothing was fundamentally wrong, but there were risks for things being seriously wrong)? That's 5 grand right there. The ambulance ride? Another 3 grand.
Congratulations on being part of the people who don't need much health care. However, if you ever actually need surgery, I hope you have ten years of investment stashed away, because the raw hospital bill for an overnight stay in is about 50k. ICU can run you north of 100k. I'll also be happy if they just leave you to rot outside the ER, because you can't produce a cashier's check for the 100k that the entire ordeal will actually cost.
The single-minded selfishness and self-centeredness of people in this area is astounding.
Oh, and since liposuction isn't covered, your example is a complete strawman and a distraction.
You have absolutely no idea what Minitel was offering. You know how now, everyone has a www., and ads are frequently just attempts to get you to a website? Right around 1990, that's what the 3615 in the ads were - merely a way to get you to use their Minitel service.
BBS my ass. I know what those looked like, and there was absolutely nothing in them that could compete with the Minitel services.
No, web usage was slower to pick up in France because a lot of the services that the Internet offered were already on Minitel, and, at least in the early betters, much better on Minitel. Want to find movie or theater times? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to have some hot times with some 18-year old who really was a 45 year old man out in the middle of nowhere? Minitel had it, Internet didn't. Wanted to play games that were actually better than what Farmville offers now? Minitel had it.
The Internet had a hard time in France because the existing system was actually better. Starting mid- to late-nineties, all of that changed, of course. But to argue that government interference prevented the better technology from taking off is ass-backwards: government interference created the better technology. Minitel only was overtaken once the network effect, technological advances and yes, the free market, provided better alternatives.
RIP Minitel, it was awesome. And it's games were still beyond a lot of the cruft that passes as games on Facebook.
Nevermind glider design, they went with amounts to a rowboat or fishing boat hull. That thing is going to capsize during the first gnarly wave or wind gust, and will never right itself. I predict it will make it about 100 miles before it is never heard of again.
All in all, that concept is going to utterly fail for a number of reasons. I guess that's what happens when landlubbers try to go boating.
Thanks, I was only thinking in terms of genetic pass-down. But it's a good point.
Did you read the article? "In fact, children hospitalized for severe respiratory syncytial virus or bronchiolitis may be more likely to develop asthma later on according to Anne Wright of the Arizona Respiratory Center". That's the point I was making: that while there are certain situations where exposure helps in the long, there are many more situations where exposure hurts in the long run. Not to mention that the article generally talks about inflammation responses, not resistance to diseases. And please, next time, go for primary sources.
As for vaccines, you do realize that we don't have vaccines for everything? The reason is that the body stores the signature for certain viruses, but isn't able to do the same thing for other viruses or bacteria.
Over time, your body develops natural defenses to things you're constantly exposed to.
Citation needed. For every example you can give, I can give you 10 counter examples.
You pass along that defense to your children.
I thought Lamarckian evolution had been disproven?
The problem isn't pricing. I'd choose Sonic if they cost double the amount that the other ISPs. Unfortunately, Sonic is dicking around in Sebastopol, Santa Cruz, and other communities that I'm not a part of. I will sign up the instant they show up in my neighborhood, but right now the chances of that happening in the next five years are close to zero. As such, I'm stuck with (shudder) ATT or Comcast.
And that's why we have two (count em, two!) shipyards capable of building a nuclear submarine. I'm really curious about who would consider that wasteful and inefficient, and what they're opinion would be once a fire (or an attack) puts the single shipyard out of commission.
Sometimes, being inefficient is good, and there's such a thing as being too efficient. Specifically government comes to mind.
On the upside, people in Switzerland go to school or work if they have a cold [...].
On the upside? When you are sick, stay home. Don't spread your very communicable disease to others. That's as much a problem in the US, btw. Drives me nuts every time I see someone coughing their lungs out at work....
How come you aren't running for president based on your self-evident platform that will lead to guaranteed freedom, wealth and permanent happiness? Oh, right, your ideas are even worse. Churchill's quip about democracy comes to mind.
And that, to me, is one of the biggest problems in the US: the political conversation has been completely taken over by fringe groups. Until it stops, we're hurtling towards doom.
Two very significant differences - and I can't believe that I have to point them out - speech has no direct ability to kill and destroy, while guns do, and speech DOES get regulated. Try telling a guard at the White House that you are there to kill the president, and your little bit of speech will have some very direct repercussions.
Simply put, it's not about guns. It's about fire safety and a loophole that allows gun owners to skate past the same penalties campfire builders and cigarette tossers contend with. Nothing more.
Absolutely. Completely agree. The next question though is: why does this loophole exist? And it exists because enough people in the Utah legislature are using your exact 2nd amendment reasoning to justify the existence of this loophole.
"Not everyone is coming after your right to speak freely." Would you feel the same way if this was about free speech?
Well, next time someone starts a fire by speaking some magic words, we can definitely have this conversation. In the meantime, nice attempt to deflect the conversation towards a completely unrelated and impossible situation.
Lastly, if there ever is a 2nd amendment situation that the NRA hasn't already taken up, feel free to call up the ACLU.
The problem is that Lovelock has absolutely no precise critiques that would allow you to do much deconstructing. His one specific critique, that it hasn't warmed in the last decade, makes the classic mistake of cherry-picking the starting point of his timeline to coincide with the absolute record high. As a result, his argument holds little water from a purely scientific perspective.
The other two points that the paper makes, and which put the interview squarely in the propaganda/flamebait category, is that Lovelock is somehow the godfather of Global Warming (at best, that would be Hansen) and that he has ever been anything close to an authority on Global Warming. His Gaia hypothesis was controversial (to put it kindly), and the one time he did venture into climate science on earth, he got the impact of CFCs in the atmosphere wrong.
So he has not published anything that can be deconstructed, he is not an accepted authority so that we could take him at his word, and somehow we are supposed to just nod when he gives an interview? Where is this sort of blind acceptance when someone like Hansen or Mann gives an interview?
Yes, you can. But you didn't read his post. Here, let me put it in small words and short sentences: people who cause a wildfire by having a campfire get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by using fireworks get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by grilling get prosecuted. People who cause a wildfire by shooting do NOT get prosecuted. Can you spot the difference now?