Because their football game was tits up and it wasn't even the second half.

One counter argument would be the small municipalities who don't get get broadband at all, despite already having the wire/fiber running through their town.

Another counter argument would be the lack of infrastructure upgrades, combined with overselling bandwidth, combined with Verizon not playing fair with Netflix.

As for offering service to out of towners - if a neighboring town wanted to buy service from my municipal broadband, and they were willing to create their own infrastructure to connect with mine, it doesn't sound too unreasonable.

Re-read your post. I'll help you out, even.

What happened to your brain in the 60 minutes between your posts? At first you extoll the virtues of the Democrats, and now you claim your original post is about Democrats and Rebulicans being the same. Do you see the discontinuity?

GP has it right. The US was built disregarding the damage we were doing to the environment. Now that we're on top, its easy for us to tell people not to do things. But if anyone else wants to get ahead, they're going to do it the cheap and easy way. Without some sort of alternative financial incentive, greed will drive countries to disregard the environment to ensure their industry evolves. While you can point at Democrats and Republicans and call them angels or devils, the rest of the world is going to do what they want with regards to the environment (and there are a lot more of them than there are of us).

I'm not sure how you can have min/maxing without it unbalancing the PC's. It becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust, and the GM has to find some way to tone up encounters without destroying everyone else.

You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.

I'll give you this one. The upside, you can use min/maxing to offset your mechanical flaws. So my martial adept, Gravedigger, used a shovel as a weapon. He had a penalty to fight with it, but I was still able to game the system to still be overpowered.

On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.

That was my first thought before reading the article. Pay the employee, no hassle and red rape to worry about getting caught up in. However, FTFA:

So it may simply be that there was a lot of money to be made by screwing Amtrak out of it.

I wonder if this is related to the Metro version of Skype being difficult to perform surveillance on.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

Not officially, no.

Who said anything about putting it out as bait?
The article specifically talks about using it on an internal network.

Okay, just close your eyes and it will all go away.

I mean, maybe you could say that it's African in that it is most prevalent in countries in Africa. But it is significant in Iran and Iraq, as well. You can check out this link I painstakingly researched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

I would assume it means you need to have less stock on hand to do any particular job. Less money tied up in material, less money wasted because you aren't selling off the scrap for less than you paid for it.

That's what decriminalization means, and it only deals with half of the problem. 2 possible outcomes:

1) Drop in addicts is such that selling drugs is no longer profitable. Drug cartels go home, take up another profession.

or

2) The number of addicts drops by some percentage, leaving the other percentage of the addicts still buying from and still ultimately empowering some very undesirable people. In this case, you get to endlessly continue the war on drugs.



Or you could legalize, as in, make drugs actually legal, to buy, sell, use, make - and affordable to the point at which cartels can't make the kind of money they do now. If we're lucky, number 1 above takes care of this for us; if we're not lucky, the drugs remain a profit maker for cartels and the like.

Sure, it's only $8. But by that logic, everybody should just have Netflix whether they use it or not. GP likely has other things competing for his attention, probably including cable tv, at which point its a reasonable question of how much is too much.
There is a point at which media competing for your attention reaches saturation. After that, you can keep buying into services, but the time you spend on any one goes down and the overall value is diluted (unless you have some specific need from each service).

I would say the bigger problem right now is that people don't care enough, period. Your average person is going to want to use whatever is cheaper, or whatever they have now, and isn't aware enough to demand something better and isn't going to want to pay for it. Existing products and services don't have a lot of incentive to improve because the customers don't care enough. As long as competition keeps the playing field level, as long as noone tightens up their security, nobody has to spend money on something that doesn't directly generate revenue.

Consumers aren't going to drive companies to improve. It's going to take competitors trying to one up each other, to offer better service at the same price, to make people want to use their product. Until then, it doesn't matter that the consumers are infecting their computers and giving scammers their login information; the NSA is just going to be using their dirty backdoor tricks to get what they want (plus whatever exploits they copy from the scammers).

Once you have the scammers and the NSA back on a level playing field, then you can get back to status quo where the user is the biggest unseen threat.

I've been thinking along these lines for a few years now. Make the drugs legal, regulate them, and possibly even have the government sell them. Use taxes on drugs to fund rehab programs. Give sex workers a way to get out from drug induced slavery. Cut the head off the cocaine cartel by growing it here or importing it from someone else. Take a blow to the coffers of street gangs as well as more organized criminals.

The obvious number one downside is the potential for an increase in number of addicts. I never really had the answer for how to counter that. Social stigma? Government monitoring program on those who buy from the "drug store" that encourages rehabilitation? But maybe if you make the harder drugs extra affordable in an outpatient setting like you describe, it offers a way out for the addicts, while making it inconvenient for dabblers and college kids to get into the really nasty stuff. You could still sell (and tax, of course) the less addictive/destructive drugs, as you would alcohol and tobacco.

And bonus points if this reduces violent crime rates by people trying to get money to fuel their need.