I thought Florida voted for Al Gore?
That awful "red state" you lived in definitely elected Obama TWICE, voting liberal even after his first term demonstrated how effective he is. Of their two senators, one is Democrat. Damn red states.

> you seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Government.

I simply have a clue as to how the US government was designed to work. The North Korea government is efficient - lil Kim makes a decision, issues the order, and it gets done. The US government is DESIGNED to be the exact opposite of that. It's supposed to be be fair, open, and accountable. So to make a major decision, a legislator in one house proposes a bill. The bill is referred to committee, where studies are ordered and hearing are held. A few months later, it goes to the full house. If we're lucky, it's approved by that house and sent over to the other house before the year ends. A similar process is repeated in the other house. If it's passed in the other house, then it's time for conference committee, then it needs to be passed by both houses again. Eventually it makes it's way to the agency responsible for implementing it, who puts out a Request for Proposals, etc.. A year or so later work can begin, with various reports being done constantly for that transparency we want. The reporting and compliance costs mean that it bids for a government job are about twice as much as the same job for a private client. Looking at jobs my company might have bid, for example, my city wanted a $35,000 IT job done. For the first round of being considered, there was 35 pages of paperwork. Round two would have been another 60 pages. To have a better chance of getting the contract, I'd probably have needed to hire my wife as an executive because she's female and black. For a private purchaser, the same job would have been set up with a few phone calls.

I'm glad there's so much extra overhead in government to seek fairness, openness, etc. The government has the power to simply take your house, kick you off so they can sell the land to a developer to build a mall. Because the government has so much power, we want to build in processes that encourage fairness, transparency, etc. It damn sure slows things down and makes it more expensive to get stuff done, though. I think it's a good trade-off - I'm willing to pay twice as much for a FAIR court system as opposed to an EFFICIENT court system. The extra overhead

You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Electricity, for example. Started by government? No, governments were fairly late entrants. The first electric utility was and Calder and Barnet, in Godalming. Several of the earliest electric networks were run by Edison.

Roads are most often built by governments these days, at a cost of about $1 million / mile. I get to see them allot, sitting in gridlock we paid millions for. Eventually I get home and turn on my lights, powered by cheap, reliable power provided by a corporation. I walk over to my computer and get on the internet. My internet is never gridlocked like the government roads are.

The New York City web site says that's incorrect. According to the city government, they grant franchises to specific companies to serve specific parts of the city. Here's the map of authorized service areas:

  http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/...

It's governments that enforce the current monopolies and dualopies, what they call a "franchise".

Do you really want government "competing", keeping ie Google fiber out while they offer up government service that works as well as Congress does, with DMV style customer service, and healthcare.gov quality? The way government would "compete" would be to simply deny permits to any company offering a better service that what government bureaucrats and theirlobbyist friends throw together.

The only large-scale success of modern broadband in the US lately has been Google Fiber. They go where local governments have decided to get the heck out of the way, often after wasting huge amounts of taxpayer money on failed attempts to have an ISP run by politicians.

A $10 / month Amerinoc hosting account for their web site will include MySQL. If that MySql allows finders to query just one item per second, that's tens of thousands of queries per day. Their PHP script then emails the registered owner. I don't see anything here that requires more than a few dollars per month, so leaving the service up until subscriptions run out shouldn't be a problem.

I'm assuming they don't get a large volume of phone calls every day for some reason.

The first several replies here aren't too useful. If that continues, ask band roadies on an appropriate forum. The band I used to do lights for did up to three shows per weekend, so there was plenty of opportunity for an expensive cable to end up in the wrong person's case and that sort of thing.

Something as simple as a stripe of blue paint on ALL of your gear will really help avoid accidents. For intentional theft, if you want the pawn shop to _maybe_ notice it, engraving is probably the only way to go.

I use several programming languages, and I can read about 3 human languages. While there are some similarities, I'd say the two things are quite different. However, that doesn't settle the question of what should be taught in school.

I've gone back to school. I'm getting a degree from WGU. For my degree, I could take either American history or sociology. By giving me the choice, the school isn't implying that history and sociology are the same thing. They are saying that either one will improve my education. I see foreign language and programming the same way. Learning either creates a more well-rounded and employable student. I see it as "take either foreign language or programming, not just basket weaving and bird watching".

> And the root problem here is that (thanks, FCC) email is *still* not considered a communication the way POTS or USmail is. ...
> they'd go to jail. Same goes for voice comms. But e-mail somehow magically belongs to the owners

When you use the company's telephone network, the same information is logged. Since virtually all systems do so, there's a standard data format they use, called CDR (call detail record). This has been the case for at least 40 years. You need logs to debug problems in the system, for capacity planning, etc. Does the company need to place an order now to have more lines to the outside world installed two months from now? The admin queries the logs to find out. Why is the company suddenly spending so much money on international calls? Again, they query the logs. If you send packages or letters using the company's FedEx account they have records of that too. They need to know how their money is being spent.

I'm shocked and amazed. A company running their own messaging server on their own network can see how it's being used?!
Next you'll tell me that my company's email administrator can see email I send at work, through the server they administer.

> it can't possibly cost them anything.

A server in New York wants to stream data to a user in California. Someone has to pay for a nationwide fiber network to move the traffic. Both Cogent and Verizon have presence in New York and California. Who carries the packets from New York to California? Very often, that's what peering disputes come down to.

  In general, neither party wants to carry the traffic across the country. Cogent wants to instantly hand the traffic to Verizon right there in the same building where they got the traffic from Netflix, so they don't have to carry the packets more than 100 meters. That's reasonable to them - they are delivering the packets to the company they are addressed to. Verizon would want to receive California packets in California. When Cogent is charging Netflix for transit, it's reasonable for Verizon to ask Cogent to provide that transit to California. Both have reasonable positions. They'll negotiate a mutually acceptable arrangement after first staking out their starting positions.

> You have no idea what you're talking about.

Then you're trying so hard to defend stupid that you've made yourself dense.
According to your link, US citizens send $2.9 trillion to Washington, who sends $500 billion to states, who send $100 billion back to the same localities it came from.

If that seems like a good idea to you, I've got something you'll love. I'm sure you'll get excited about this. You send me$1,000 and I'll send $250 of it to my wife, who will send $100 to you! Yay, you get $100! I'll pm my address to you.

They SELL connections to their customers. Cogent isn't paying Verizon. The peering they're talking about is an even trade with neither company paying the other. When it ceases to be an even trade, it's time for negotiations.

How did you reheat the fly to 220C while casting? And why?

You're not referring to just softening the plastic to shape it, are you? That's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about setting it up so that it moves back and forth based on temperature. You heat it up, it shortens. When you stop applying heat it lengthens.

School lunches are a big part, yes. Also her proposals include things like having the FCC limit advertising of foods that the government considers to be suboptimal choices. There's a lot of food related stuff, more food related than exercise related.

Personally , I think the local school should serve healthy food. I'm glad that decades ago the FDA started putting out guidance, suggestions, that assist local school districts with healthy menu planning. I don't see any need for local citizens to pay $10,000 in taxes to Washington, who takes their cut before sending $7,000 to the state, who takes their cut before sending $5,000 back to the local area. Federal bureaucracy to buy lunch is just silly.

It's also the local dieticians who are best able to work with local needs and tastes. Here in Texas, kids will eat burritos, they won't eat fish and chips. I bet in Massachusetts it's the other way around. Federal bureaucrats making more menu decisions for local schools isn't going to work too well, I don't think.