Party Vibe

President Obama is smarter than many realise but knows he has to tread carefullly or he will end up like JFK. I never thought he was opposed to medical use and don’t think he’s a particularly great fan of Prohibition either; but half the country still supports the “tough action”. He will therefore need to slowly bring in change whilst the rightwingers are distracted by something else such as the new Cold War that is brewing up; or the right create a domestic environmental and economic crisis which may also well happen soon as they are digging so many holes in the USA with fracking for oil that floods and earthquakes will soon follow.

The USA has always been set up so the President does not have absolute power anyway and states are able to do things on their own which might not align 100% with Federal Law; its an odd way of running a country (which to some extent leaves it in a state of permanent low level civil war, hence the peoples fascination with guns) and only feasible for a physically large nation with lots of resources but the USA just about survives in this manner.

@Requiem 597005 wrote:

You seem to get a warped view of exactly who makes what decisions in US politics cos you always hear the presidents gonna veto this bill from congress or that congress will pull some pathetic stunt to somehow stop the president passing something. The the president will you his executive order special move which congress will refuse to fund.

Country seems to follow the same laws as wonderland.

that warped view seems to be exactly how the USA “works”. the other bit is when busineses don’t like what the government has decided (supposedly be a democratic debate) and they sue the government. No other democratic nation in the world operates like that and even in some “undemocratic” nations you at least know what the goverment’s views are and they stick to them even if big business complaines (and it doesn’t even harm their economies).

The only reason its tolerated is presumably because the govt leaves businesses alone whilst its arguing amongst themselves.

It wasn’t that long ago the Republicans “shut down” the government other than Police and military; which in every other part of the world is called a military coup.

I think it will take an Asian nation to decrminalise (as well as Europe and the USA) to tip the scales but that might not be impossible; I never thought I’d see in my lifetime signs that Malaysia was looking towards Switzerland to improve drugs rehab (that document you unearthed a while back).

yes exactly that sort of thing. On US phone bills they even put this amount they pay the FCC just to whinge about this (and its often not even accurate) whereas no one bothers in Europe; TBH if i really wanted to know all the figures are on the websites of the Communications Ministry (ofcom/Agentschap Telecom/BnetZA etc).

There are only 2 or 3 major broadband providers in the USA, surprisingly the UK comes out as one of the better nations where competitive markets are concerned and across the North Sea only affluent town areas have decent broadband as they are still using the old PTT infrastructure and they cherry picked the towns after privatisation – you can’t even do online radio in some rural areas of NL or DE as the broadband is too slow (and this is in a middle class area where a chap who is a father and grandfather is paying for a family house’s connection) which is why they still set up their pirate stations.

@Requiem 597009 wrote:

They only got classified as common carriers cos AT&T sues when the FCC tried to impose lighter rules and the courts said you can’t do it unless you reclassify the carriers. They literally sued themselves into it lol.

and I’m not surprised; when I went on the FCC website a while back (I was curious as to whether Europe or the USA got allowed more powerful wi fi fixed links) there was concern that the normal phone lines did not work correctly because of all the cost saving measures of the telcos and ISPs (they shift all of them to VOIP and don’t even protect 911 service).

Incidentally the result was Europe is permitted better wifi kit with stronger output as end users/system integrators have a better relation with our regulators whereas Americans try and “disrupt” things; and would use wrong channels / excessive power in a band shared with civillian aircraft radars.

they were referring to the PSTN which is the analogue telephone network; it might seem outdated but still has its advantages for the end user. I build VOIP based telephone exchanges for work but they all still interface to analogue lines which are kept on as they should still work if the electricity in the village has failed!

Coincidentally I just had to talk a colleague through resetting a VOIP system as British Telecom had dropped the broadband circuit connecting it to the outside world; a flaw in the American designed software causes the extensions on the internal side of the network to slowly unregister (they are trying to resolve bogus addresses through DNS) and the whole lot stops working; not just the VOIP connections between sites.

The workaround is to plug two analogue phones into the sockets in the front reception (so staff can still call nines etc) until the faulty broadband circuits are identified and reset or bypassed; as I insist there are two in each site and they usually don’t both fail at once I can normally still access the exchange remotely and fix the problem.

This flaw (and some others) have existed 10 years and the Americans have claimed it is not a problem – I guess they are so used to poor quality software engineering (whilst constantly trying to promote new features no one wants) they don’t see it as such. At that point I start thinking they should smoke more cannabis; it might even slow them down enough to set their heads straight and concentrate on getting basic features of their tech working correctly before moving on to the next “cool” thing…

the BT people at the frontline and in the Openreach division do their best; they are held back by bad management and still being forced to be part of a profit driven company whilst having a monopoly (which means Ofcom have to enforce more regulations to stop abuses of power).

It would be more sensible to bring Openreach back into public ownership (it can be done whilst still allowing competition amongst companies reselling the telecoms services) with its managers working with the Education Department to concentrate on training apprentices and other young staff (or older people who need jobs). This was how the Post Office / PTT organisations worked for much of my lifetime but they had issues with govts diverting their resources and profits for the Cold War and other political stuff.

Americans would of course claim that they built the Internet – but until 1991 it was restricted to elite groups in Universities and never was nationwide (other than near big uni campuses), or before that automated telephone call routing systems; but from what I can see although they invented them; the private phone companies in USA did not adopt automatic working for some time and the US companies ended up signing contracts with the public phone companies of Europe and perfected the systems in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands and and Germany.

The issues with software development are more recent; and linked to a philosophy amongst software engineers that its OK if it works 98% of the time; which might be fine for computer games but can be dangerous if transferred across to real time safety or business critical computer systems.