Asy Ray to write it up in his blog. Ray will be the only one of us still alive in 100,000 years.

Yo quiero Earth.

The Federalist Society recently posted a podcast on this subject.
http://www.fed-soc.org/multime...

The issues, and unintended side effects of The Telephone Consumer Protection Act are more extensive than you probably imagine.I recommend that podcast as TFA for this thread.

The Summary says "Now kick that up to the electric company level, and give them a radio network that tells them which electric provider to get electricity from at what time to get the best (wholesale) price"

That's crazy. There are already organizations called Independent Systemm Operators (ISO) that run real time auctions to do thst function. They have been operating since the 1990s. No radios are needed. They have had high reliability communications methods for many decades.

Few people have working wind-up clocks in their houses any more. At least. It working day in day out. The sounds of ticking clocks at night was soothing.

Also soothing was the sound of the cuckoo clock cuckoopint on the hour.

Before refrigerators, we had an ice box. Under the ice box was a drip pan to catch the melt water.

All night long. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Instead of white icon lights and a chime, some pedestrian crossings used to have mechanical clappers. Clap slow to wait, clap fast to cross.

On a hot summer night when all windows were open (because we had no AC) you could hear those damn clappers clapping from all over the city.

Telling the factory men (and the whole town) that it was time to go home.

http://youtu.be/ABrKlQVNuPE.

I'm drinking coffee right now that I just brewed in my percolator.

That was fun. But he cheated, and dinged the end of line bell manually without reaching the end of line.

My Ford Falcon used to get low voltage. The cure was to whack the regulator with a tire iron.

No special smarts needed.

If you survive, you'll be a grand master fix it person.

There is another approach. To my knowledge, it has never been used anywhere in the world.

One monopoly could own, operate, and maintain the poles, wires and fibers. They would be a public utility and be answerable to the public service commission for tarrifs and meeting reliability and availabilty requirements. But they would not provide any consumer service at all. Their customers would be the electric power and communications companies that rent use of the facilities. Perhaps even natural gas and water distribution pipes could be included in the bundle.

It is already true that power and communications utilities outsource a lot of the line construction, operation, and maintenance of distribution to outside contractors, so the change might not be a dramatic as it sounds. It would be primarily a legal change to make these contractors public utilities, with the rights and obligations that go along with their role.

Please correct me if you know of some place where this approach has been applied.

Mod the parent up.

We are trying to make bulk surveillance harder, not targeted surveillance. By bulk I mean something like 500 million devices, all to be cracked.

In federal elections, state borders can be considered as districts causing the same kinds of distortions.

It would take a pretty thorough rewrite of The Constitution of the USA to eliminate disproportionate weight of citizen votes.