Your right to claim blasphemy ends when you set foot outside the mosque.

.... I disagree, they can claim blasphemy all they want. The problem is that the prescription for that blasphemy is death.

Here's an example.

I'm Catholic, and therefore, I think all Protestants are blaspheming heretics when they deny the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist.*(see below)

My prescription is that all Protestants do the following:
+ Renounce their silly Calvinistic / Lutheran blasphemies and false teachings like the concept of a "Rapture"
+ Go to Confession
+ Join an RCIA program and (re)join the Catholic Church


And if they don't, well, I'll leave them alone.

See? That's far preferable to "KILL THEM NOW!!!" So the claim of blasphemy isn't the problem, it's the "fix" for the blasphemy.

* No, I don't really think all Protestants are heretics. Just misinformed.

Cox charges $10 extra for Internet-only service. It was still a big win to drop TV. With a DVR in the living room, we were paying about $160 per month (and that was without HBO, Showtime, etc.). I'm now paying just $63 per month for (IIRC) 50 Mbps down/5 Mbps up (or is it 50/10?). For what little TV I watch, there's a Netflix Blu-ray subscription, Usenet, and Bittorrent.

(Even at this level, local TV is still available in HD and maybe 40-50 cable channels are available in analog SD. Last time I used that was to tune in Fox News on election night. Most of the time, I can't be bothered to deal with live TV.)

I feel like things are getting off topic. What about me is the bestest?

Look at me!

That's almost precisely why this is being done in the first place. A Member of Parliament named Claire Perry saw a bandwagon she could jump on, using a tale she concocted about her daughter Googling for cookie recipes and getting porn instead, and used this as an excuse to hold a "hearing" on the subject. The hearing found that most parents were already aware of parental controls, had the option and chose not to use them; she took this as an excuse to push filters harder, demanding that ISPs make them opt-out rather than opt-in in hopes of boosting uptake. (Funnily enough, several of the people testifying at her "hearing" happened to be from companies involved in the filtering business...)

Since the biggest four ISPs agreed to force all their customers to reiterate specifically that they still don't want filtering, hopefully this will be enough to stop these idiots pushing any harder for a while - albeit having forced them to flush money away buying in a filtering system most customers never wanted. My current (much smaller, tech-savvy) ISP is very much opposed to this nonsense, which is one reason I'm happy to be their customer - though unfortunately this has already drawn government attention (after which, they had to take on an extra member of staff and upgrade transit pipes to handle the increased demand - probably not the result the politician expected!)

Telcos have been doing exactly that for decades now: all their exchanges and much of the optical kit runs on -48V: it's a low enough voltage to be safe to work on when live (negative rather than positive because that protects against corrosion on the wires), easy to combine sources (a diode will do it), no need to "switch" to backup power (just connect your load, battery and source together, job done).

Facebook went the other way for a large server farm, though: running 480V 3-phase AC to the racks (277V per phase). Cleverly, though, they don't need to convert DC from the batteries to AC in power cuts: the mixed DC/AC bus feeds switch-mode power supplies which convert incoming power to DC anyway, so switching between AC utility power and DC battery power doesn't matter. Pretty clever really, IMO.

Home-run fiber per home would get very expensive I think - normally the idea is something like PON (Passive Optical Networking), where a single fiber is split across a few dozen locations, rather like gas, electricity and water/drainage. Telephone service is, I think, unique in using home-run wiring back to the exchange; even there, the faster post-ADSL services such as VDSL share a single fiber link back to the exchange: my current 80/20 service is VDSL2 as far as the cabinet around the corner - all the hundred or so users on that cabinet share a single fiber from there.

Right now in the UK BT have this set up so everyone on FTTC or FTTP is connected to an Ethernet switch in the exchange, with their own VLAN; any ISP can connect their own equipment to that switch and get your VLAN trunked onto their Ethernet port, or they can pay BT to run PPPoE over that and transport it to them. That probably works better in practice than physically patching a few thousand fiber connections directly to different ISPs in each exchange building - my inner geek would love a straight through fiber link, but how much more would that cost?

kickass.so
 
We are heavy netflix users as well. There's a British series on there - Black Mirror. Sort of a technology related Twilight Zone-ish kind of thing. Whoever writes the stories has the ability to come up with some really disturbing stuff. My wife and daughters have been on a huge Gilmore Girls kick.
 
I watch more and more youtube as well. A lot of esports type stuff. My son watches Minecraft on youtube more than he actually plays it lately.
 
What was interesting to me today was that it hit me that while I listen to my mp3 collection at work, at home we never listen to locally stored music. It's all pandora. My girls do have music locally on their devices (phone and tablet) but that's not much. The latest Taylor Swift or whatever else they get into. We buy that via Amazon so I can download the drm free files and they can just copy them off the PC that is hooked up to our TV.
 
It's fun living in the future. I remember looking at the tv guide that came with the sunday paper every week to see what good shows would be on that week and hoping they would be at times I'd be able to watch.

They establishment Republicans have already rolled over with the passing of Cromnibus. I expect that if the push Jeb Bush to the front there will be record apathy among conservatives in the 2016 election.

To amplify on that point, never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. :-P

the composition and political thrust of the parties changed dramatically with the Republican southern strategy of the 60s

Let me put you some f'in knowledge.

And more.

And even more.

On top of that, how do you explain the Democrats' only really starting to lose their stranglehold on southern-state governorships and legislatures in the '90s and later?

It sounds like the plan is for this ship to be the first of several, so the question is how much of that $20 billion investment is for upfront costs (design, shipyard upgrades, construction equipment) that will not be duplicated in subsequent ships. As it is, the first ship looks to probably at least break even or even make a decent profit (provided it works as expected) with bigger profits hopefully to follow. I am sure these numbers have been gone over very carefully. You don't make an investment this large on a whim.