Albert Einstein.

You might be able to blow up a train just like an airplane, but planes being blown up, killing a hundred or so in the process was a problem well before 9/11. The difference is that you can't crash a high speed train into a skyscraper, causing it to collapse resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage. A train moves but its path is restricted to railways. A bus is much more dangerous because, if you managed to carry a bomb on board, you could crash the bus into a target and blow it up, damaging the target and killing everyone aboard the bus. Considering that, a train is no more dangerous, in terms of being a target for terrorism, than any other densely packed but static location, like a sports stadium.

What a ridiculous argument. Although the U.S. government's invasion in person communications in the last few years has increased due to the fears of terrorism that 9/11 brought on, it is no where near the all-seeing eye that China is when it comes to what their citizens do and how they are prosecuted. Although most ISPs bent over for the NSA, there was at least one ISP that stood up to the NSA: Qwest. If they served my area, I would sign up with them for that reason alone. It shows that there are limits to what kind of secret deals the U.S. government can get away with. Had a company stood up to the Chinese government that way, they would have not just been denied government contracts, but would have been kicked out of the country completely or had their company nationalized then sold to a friendlier corporation.

As for corporations knowing your information, they've been doing this for decades, it's just that their ability to collect information has grown more efficient. If you are uncomfortable about this, then stop being a consumer, move to the middle of nowhere, raise horses for transportation and grow your own food. Taking part in American Capitalism is one of the greatest opportunities in the world, but like anyting else that is great, it does not come free.

And for a good reason. Ron Paul firmly believes that no right to privacy exists in the Constitution. That means, in his opinion, anything not explicitly allowed in the Constitution can be criminalized by the government, including what people do in their bedroom.

On one of the phones I had (CU515), you could change the APN settings of the WAP browser to a dummy address without killing MMS. Menu->Settings->Connection-> Network Profiles That's the first thing I'd try to do to stop those pesky charges.

One big difference between AT&T and Verizon is that with AT&T you can tether and still receive calls while you can't even do that with Verizon, due to a limitation of CDMA. If you want to do that with AT&T it only costs you an extra $30 a month, but with Verizon you'd have to pay an extra $60 + an EVDO card. Tethering on Verizon is a lot like dial-up in the sense that the line is unavailable while you are surfing the internet or you get booted off when someone does call. To me, that makes the extra $30 to tether on Verizon a complete rip-off compared to AT&T.

You want to see a brilliant way to adapt your business model to your consumer? Watch last night's episode of "30 Rock." During the commercial break, I remember some Cisco commercial about a flat screen TV or something, which my brain forgot most of the details because it tuned out the commercial. Then, during the actual show itself, there is a scene virtually co-starring the Cisco product in a not-so-subtle but hilarious way. I now know that it's a teleconferencing product using high definition television and cameras because there's no way I could avoid paying attention to the product while watching the show at the same time.

People can pirate that show all they want and they'll still have to watch what amounts to a Cisco commercial, because taking it out would remove a significant and rather enjoyable portion of the episode. The lack of subtlety worked because it was part of the joke, but I'm sure there are subtle ways to advertise a product within a show itself. I'm not fond of product placement in shows, but I'd be more willing to put up with it if the content was free to watch and distribute.

There's nothing stopping you from setting up your own QoS within your network so that the data for your VoIP calls get higher priority, or a company selling pre-configured QoS hardware with easy to understand options. The point is, YOU get to decide how to use the bandwidth you pay for.

That being said, you could always just tell your kids to get off the damn internet. If I recall, if your teenager is using your home phone 24/7 then you can't exactly use it at the same time, so you have to tell them to get off the damn phone if you want to use it.

I'm actually mostly satisfied with this, because:

1) They're being transparent about it. Using this information, the end user can figure out how to configure stuff on their end to get the maximum total download, if they need it. I wonder if you can download more by downloading at max speed and taking the throttling or by staying just below the trigger that throttles you?

2) It sounds like there is no deep packet inspection going on at all to decide traffic prioritization. This means services that run over the internet like VoIP can compete based on price and quality of service, things the consumer likes, not based on who has a better relationship with the ISP that the consumer is paying to transfer the traffic.

The things I am worried about are:

1) If they advertise using maximum available bandwidth only, that is misleading advertising. They should advertise the speed that you can download at without threat of throttling and mention that you can achieve higher speeds than that for limited periods of time.

2) If the cap applies to third party services but not to the ISP's services, like high definition television, this is anti-competitive and shows a desire to limit consumer choice. Third-party internet television providers won't be able to compete because their customers will constantly be hitting that cap, so the cable companies will fulfill their own prophecy that consumers want their television service and not a third-party's.

3) What does this mean: "your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible [for congestion]"? This does not sound transparent. I didn't read the full FCC filing, but if someone has an answer as to how they figure out which user's traffic is causing the congestion, it'd be appreciated. If they're looking at the kind of data you are transferring to decide whether to throttle you or not, that's not acceptable. ISPs should not be digging around in our packages to decide what to do with the data we pay them to transfer. Throttle the heaviest user of the CMTS, the one that's been using it the longest, whatever, as long as you're not looking to see what kind of data we are transferring.

California's airports are approaching capacity. The HSR is supposed to relieve the airports of intrastate flights to free up room for more interstate and international flights. A secondary benefit is the connection between main airports like LAX and overflow airports like Ontario International (in San Bernardino County, not Canada). Also, HSR is not as much of a target for terrorism as planes are because HSR is on the ground and follows a strict path. Last, building it will make it easier for other connecting HSR lines to be built, potentially by the private sector. There is a company called Desert Xpress that has been trying to build a HSR line from Las Vegas to Victorville just to cut down on the weekend traffic. If HSR passed through Palmdale/Lancaster, it's a clear path from there to Victorville and ultimately Las Vegas.

San Diego's airport is tiny and voters rejected building a bigger airport elsewhere. Orange County passed on turning El Toro into an international airport and instead are turning it into the largest park in the country. All flights that have to be turned away because of overcapacity are lost business. California may be ok for now, with the recession reducing all forms of traffic, but when the rubber hits the road again we're going to have the same problem.

You can take the San Diego Trolley from the San Ysidro border crossing all the way up to the Santa Fe Depot or Middletown (near the airport) via the blue line. The HSR line would end at either an intermodal transit station near the airport or at Santa Fe Depot, so technically a lot of people across the border could take the blue line to the HSR and use that to get wherever they need to be.

In fact, San Diego's blue line is one of the most successful transit lines in the U.S. In '96 roughly 90% of its cost was paid for by fares collected. At one time it even turned a profit.

A link to the marketplace audio or article would be nice.

I'm going to assume, based on the topic "unwinding the bailout" that these "loans" they speak of were the funds they gave to the banks to prevent them from collapsing. A quick google renders multiple headlines stating that some banks are in fact repaying the bail-out monies:

http://www.google.com/search?q=banks+return+bail+out+money&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

And what is this... "As Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/economy/31taxpayer.html

Now I'm not saying that the government and thus the taxpayers are not going to lose money. I'm just pointing out that some of the bail out money is being returned. Will we get back every dollar we put into it? Probably not, but that's not what you are saying. What you said is that none of these loans, implying the bail out funds given to individual companies, will be repaid, and from what I can see that is not true.

Two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they wish in the privacy of their own home. If you start legislating based on the probability of genetic defects, it should be based on that probability, not just on incest. If two people aren't related, but have a 65% chance of having a child with a genetic defect, then it should be illegal for them to have sex as well. If not, then it becomes obvious that to motivation for legislation has little to do with preventing the birth of children born with genetic defects.

So you wouldn't mind the government putting cameras to be monitored 24/7 up and down your street, right?

For some people it's a chance to be a kid for 4 more years. Actually, the people that had that attitude usually didn't last past the first year. You would find them walking around the dorms with a beer bong while the rest of us were studying. For the ones that actually made it through all four years, it actually was about living with the most responsibility we'd ever had in order to get a degree so that we get the job instead of the guy with the beer bong or the ones that even didn't bother to go. For some of us, it was about all that hard work in high school paying off in the form of a scholarship so that we could go to school without needed to work full time. For others, it was working and going to school at the same time.