Wheeler can not to more or less then congress wants.
Congress long ago shifted its regulatory authority to executive branch agencies like the FCC. They're too busy accepting cash from lobbyists to waste time making policy!
Someone else will come along and compete with them.
How do folks like you manage to so completely ignore observational evidence? It is a natural talent or a learned skill?
He never advocates to eliminate the government enforced monopoly status
High speed telecommunications needs wires, cables, or waveguides. That means access to land. Access to land means permission of governments: it is governments that turn land into "property".
The telecom infrastructure is a public good like roads, rails, the water and sewer system, and the electric grid. Ideas of competition simply do not apply. If you don't find the sort of pants you want in the market, you can go start making your own and compete; if you don't like the railways, you can't start laying down tracks next to Amtrak's and Conrail's. We can recognize that and do things sensibly, with public ownership or a heavily regulated monopoly; or we can have the sort of corrupt and counterproductive bullshit that marked the start of the railroad age and which currently infects telecomm in the U.S.
First implies an order.
First can also imply pre-emption. A nuclear first strike, for example, is intended to knock out the other guy's arsenal so that there is no counter, no second attack.
First can mean "before some other thing, event, etc.: If you're going, phone first." Or "[b]efore or above all others in time, order, rank, or importance: arrived first; forgot to light the oven first.". Or "[b]efore anything else; firstly. Clean the sink first, before you even think of starting to cook..
"Han shot first" is quite grammatically correct.
Like it or not, George Lucas never wanted Han to shoot first.
1977 Lucas did, and wrote the script and made the film that way. The guy who changed the film, 1997 Lucas, had the edge and artistic integrity that 1977 Lucas had.
It's unfortunate that 1997 Lucas can screw with the work of 1977 Lucas.
Maybe we should all get over it.
Or maybe we should try to preserve a work of art against the deprivations of corporate scum, and of screenwriters and directors who lose their talent.
Where you outlaws get those guns? Oh from good guys in states where it is legal to sell them in bulk.
In the U.S., they get them from friends who buy them in proxy "straw purchases", or from corrupt gun dealers.
But if you think that getting rid of these sources is possible and would stop bad guys from getting guns, nope; in the Philippines and Australia and India bad guys get guns from back alley gunsmiths. And these are not just zip guns, some of them are high quality firearms.
Guns just are not hard to make. The Nazis couldn't keep resistance movements from churning out submachine guns in clandestine factories.
If we magically made all guns in the U.S. disappear and sealed the borders so none could get in, your local meth lab would open up a metalworking annex and become a one-shop shop for crime. Only ordinary citizens -- the folks who are unlikely to shoot people anyway -- would be disarmed.
They're not much more useful against a modern, mechanized army than your bare hands.
Which explains the easy victories our modern, mechanized army had in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Oh, wait...
Bombs and tanks and all the mechanization are pretty useless for controlling a population. You need human beings on the ground to do the controlling. Those human beings can be shot at. So if you don't want to be controlled, there are two options: 1) be prepared to shoot at the controllers, or 2) be prepared to die at the hands of the controllers, and hope that they or those who give them orders get sick and tired of killing you.
To which U.S. prepaid carrier should I try switching? Ting?
I have an Android phone on a T-Mobile prepaid plan. Ok, it's 1.6, but it's Android. (It's my landline replacement, just needed something as cheap as possible to which I could assign the home phone number I got back in 1995, so as long as it makes and receives calls at my home location I'm satisfied -- my other phone is the smart phone I carry, I'm pickier about that.)
I think the idea is you'd let the user know. "This password would take approximately 4.5 days to crack....
..."if we are incompetent enough to divulge your encrypted password." So, how about you don't divulge my encrypted password, then?
I have several libertarian friends who feel very much like Jobs apparently did about that issue; that you shouldn't be required by law to purchase a license plate and keep paying for "renewals" to keep it current.
And you don't have to...provided that you don't plan to drive on the public roads. If you want to drive on the state's roads, it's appropriate for the state to set safety standards and charge you a fee.
And the irony of a guy who made billions using a government-created corporation and government-created copyrights and patents getting his underwear in a bunch over government-issued license plates...yeah.
Privately owned, there is an incentive to fix damage and maintain infrastructure.
What color is the sky on your planet, where the inhabitants evidently behave differently? Here on Earth, history shows that privatization leads again and again to cost-cutting in the interest of short-term profits, the neglect of upkeep, and the failure to maintain sufficient overcapacity in order to deal with surges and failures.
Are places like Ft. Hood secure? No. Is a nuclear missile silo secure? I dam well hope so...
I'm sure the parts of Ft. Hood that contain things that the military thinks are valuable are secure. The parts inhabited by cannon fodder, not so much.
but ultimately if you're not mapping up from the behaviour of the individual atoms you're dealing with phenomenology...'Phenomenology' is not a criticism, unless it's taken as so by people who mistakenly think they're dealing with the underlying science directly.)
Working with the theoretical (i.e., mental) constructs we call "particles" and "atoms" is no less and no more "phenomenology" than is any other branch of science. Our observations about electrons and atoms are phenomena, not noumena.
But the way the human race is behaving currently, getting off this dirtball in any meaningful way seems exceedingly unlikely.
We've already gotten off this planet, and will likely do so again, though I don't expect any humans will get beyond cis-lunar space this century. We may even send robot probes to other systems someday in the far future. Colonizing other stars? Not happening.
If a technological species is going to survive long enough to reach the truly high levels of technology and economics required for that, it can't wipe itself out by destroying its planet's ecosystem. It will have to develop a society that does not value endless expansion for its own own sake (the ideology of the cancer cell, as one wit put it), but that voluntarily stabilizes its population at a sustainable level and learns to value its home planet.
IOW, if a species is going to survive long enough to have the ability to colonize other stars, it has to become mature enough to not want to, because it's made its homeworld (and home system) so very very nice and gotten interested in other things. (What other things? I can no more predict that then a Neanderthal could predict rick-rolling.)
Is Scalia seriously suggesting police can act on a tip only after proving that tipster is telling the truth?
As much as I hate to find myself anywhere near Scalia (through he's joined here by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan), police can legitimately act on a tip only after proving that a tipster is *likely* to be telling the truth. In this case, after following the car for five minutes and not seeing anything that gave them suspicion that the driver was drunk, there's no way that they could have reasonable suspicion this guy was a drunk driver. Given the documented existence of SWATing, anonymous tips cannot be considered credible grounds for intrusion into a person's liberty.
Interestingly, in this case the tip was not anonymous, but that fact wasn't brought up in the original prosecution and so the tip is dealt with as anonymous.
Lucky for Scalia most progressives still believe in elections, democracy, rule of law and that SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution is the only legal interpretation.
Really? You believe that most progressives believe that in 1857, no person of African descent could be a citizen of a state, despite zero evidence for this decision in the text of the Constitution? And that in 1896, states could comply with the equal protection clause via "separate but equal" bullshit? Well, it does seem that "progressive" has been defined downwards since Obama came into office.
Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and SCOTUS decisions, are areas that overlap sometimes but not always. Genuine progressives put human rights before the others.
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
