[StBernard] TRUE 912: Bamboo Sticks =:-O | Rural Electrification, Meet the Internet | The Schussing Life

[Westley Annis]

You have to click thru and read the Johnny Carson joke at the bottom.

Westley

-----Original Message-----
SINCE 1994 and reaching at least 42,590 subscribers, this is the 912th
  weekly issue of Randy Cassingham's...

THIS is TRUE: 4 December         Copyright 2011 http://www.thisistrue.com
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JUSTICE SERVED: "He thanked me and said, 'You did a great job and I'm
  satisfied'," said Attorney Harrison Williams of his client, Eon
  Shepherd, after their federal lawsuit against the state concluded.
  Shepherd is a prisoner serving life, and with Williams' help he sued
  the State of New York because prison guards "touched" his "sacred"
  Rastafarian dreadlocks during a search, and "slightly tore" his hair.
  With Williams' help, Shepherd won the suit -- and was awarded $1.00 by
  the jury. Williams says his law firm put in $75,000 worth of billable
  hours to prosecute the case; an appeals court ruled that the federal
  Prison Litigation Reform Act, which was passed to try to stem
  ridiculous lawsuits by inmates, applied in this case. The Act in part
  limits attorney's fees to 150 percent of a jury award applied, and the
  court awarded Williams $1.50 for his time. (RC/AP) ...Hopefully he's
  one and a half times more satisfied than Shepherd.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "RIDICULOUS LAWSUITS BY INMATES"? When Jesse Dimmick
  was a fugitive from Colorado fleeing a murder charge, he led police in
  Kansas on a chase, and his car was disabled in front of a newlywed
  couple's house. He ran in and confronted the couple, Jared and Lindsay
  Rowley, at knifepoint. As police surrounded the house, Dimmick says he
  got a verbal agreement from the couple that they would help him escape
  in exchange for an unspecified cash payment, which he says constituted
  "a legally binding oral contract." But when he fell asleep, the Rowleys
  fled the house and police stormed in, shooting and wounding Dimmick. He
  was convicted of multiple felonies in the case, but after his
  sentencing (10 years, 11 months), Dimmick was extradited to Colorado to
  face the murder charge. In his free time while awaiting trial in that
  case, Dimmick has sued the Rowleys "without the aid of proffessional
  [sic] legal counsel," his claim notes, alleging "breech [sic] of
  contract" and demanding $235,000 in compensation. The Rowleys' attorney
  asked for a dismissal of the suit, but the judge has yet to rule on
  that motion. (RC/Topeka Capital-Journal) ...The law has this backwards.
  Inmates shouldn't be allowed to file such suits without the judge's
  permission.

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DID YOU FIND ANY CLUES, OFFICER? Police in Saskatoon, Sask., Canada, were
  watching the comings and goings at a residence, and saw enough to get a
  search warrant to look inside the house of Jason Pauchay and his
  girlfriend, Clarissa Prosper, for evidence of drug dealing. As they
  searched, they found Pauchay's cell phone, which noted on the display
  it belonged to "Jason Pauchay Drug Dealer". Officers also found
  marijuana and $5,000 in cash. Pauchay, 24, pleaded guilty to drug
  trafficking. The report concludes that Pauchay "had no prior criminal
  record." (RC/Ottawa Citizen) ...Everybody has to start somewhere.

MAN OF THE YEAR: Simon Eroro, a reporter for the Post-Courier newspaper
  in Papua New Guinea, really wanted to get a story to expose how Free
  West Papua militants from Indonesia were getting across the border into
  PNG. "The impact of Simon's scoop was enormous," said the judges of an
  in-house journalism prize for News Limited reporters; the company
  employs Eroro. "The police commissioner launched a major operation to
  tighten the borders and close down the [Free West Papua] refugee
  camps." But to get that scoop -- to interview a group of "jungle
  rebels" who rarely let journalists in -- Eroro had to agree to first
  allow himself to be circumcised with bamboo sticks. He did, they did,
  and he got the scoop and the company award. (RC/London Telegraph)
  ...Nice move, but I bet he can't pull it off again!

BUT IT'S NOT EVEN FOR ME! "Hoboken Man Denies Having Stolen Cellphone
  Before it Rings in His Pocket: Cops" -- Jersey Journal headline

THIS WEEK'S CONTRIBUTORS: RC-Randy Cassingham

DID YOU FIND an error? See http://www.thisistrue.com/errata.html

IT'S AN ALL-RANDY ISSUE this week. Jennifer is still out on medical
  leave. Alexander had to work extra hours. And Mike (the Air Force guy)
  is in special training before deploying overseas (but he expects to be
  able to write from there!)

IT'S REALLY COOL to have ads from *book publishers* supporting TRUE!
  Great reading begets more great reading, from fiction to helping dads.
  The ads make your free subscription possible, so it's great when you
  can at least glance at them and, if the content is of interest, click
  through to get more details. Anne Mitchell (the helping single dads
  author) is an old friend, and has the ability to write without a bunch
  of confusing legalese. Please do check the (only!) two ads each week.
  When advertisers get a good response, they continue to support TRUE so
  YOU can continue to get these issues for free. Win-win!

OUR FREE SHIPPING SPECIAL continues: Shipping on our Get Out of Hell Free
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THE FULL EDITION had *seven* more stories: Man pays 16-year-old traffic
  ticket under protest. He flunked out of college the first time around
  (majored in partying); at 61, he's much more serious, but.... Official
  Court Doctor who testified in cases over eight years turns out to not
  be a doctor. Minister's new group home for sex offenders (who are, he
  says, too often "treated unfairly") hits a snag, but the minister just
  shrugs. Criminal whines that police "treated me like a criminal!" Man
  accidentally throws his wife's platinum-diamond engagement ring into
  the trash -- and then it gets weird. Teenager elected mayor of his town
  -- and he didn't even run for the job! Don't forget to get yourself a
  little gift for the holidays: a full year of expanded issues is STILL
  just $24: http://thisistrue.com/upgrade.html

                                  o o o

RURAL ELECTRIFICATION, meet the Rural Internet. Back in the early years
  of the 20th century, as cities were starting to get electrical power,
  that was the problem: only cities were getting electrical power. City
  clustering of homes and multi-family dwellings made for a lot of
  customers per mile of wire strung, and the payback to the electric
  companies came quickly.

  Cities rapidly became hubs of commerce as factories got power to run
  machines. That attracted workers from the countrysides to fill jobs
  created in those factories, which brought more customers into the
  cities for the electric companies; business boomed. (And cities became
  crowded and dirty, in part thanks to dirty power generating facilities,
  many of which competed with each other.

  Out in the rural parts of the country, "electrification" went slowly,
  if at all. Rural residents were forced into makeshift solutions, like
  windmills to charge a battery to provide a little light after sundown.
  And while cities got new jobs, the rural areas of the country were left
  behind -- much further behind Europe, which was working a lot harder to
  wire up the countrysides. (By 1934, almost 90 percent farms in Germany
  and France had electricity, vs 11 percent in the U.S.)

  That started to change in 1935, with FDR's creation of the Rural
  Electrification Administration (now the "Rural Utilities Service",
  managed by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture). From one side of their
  mouths, electric companies argued that it wasn't profitable enough to
  serve rural homesteads (even though power rates were about four times
  what they were in the cities), while out of the other side of their
  mouths they complained about the REA, saying the government had "no
  right to compete" with them (or regulate them) by helping co-ops bring
  power to rural areas.

  Within four years, the REA brought power to 288,000 households. And in
  1949, the REA was expanded to bring telephone service to rural America.

  Now, early in the 21st century, there's a similar problem in rural
  parts of the U.S. Cities have broadband Internet, but it's much more
  lacking in rural areas -- including where I live. When I moved to
  western Colorado, I started with a satellite Internet connection. It
  sucked, thanks to the lag time of bouncing my signal off a satellite
  22,300 miles above me. The "round-trip light-time" to go that far is
  about a half second ... for ... every ... command ... or ... handshake
  ... request. Considering getting just one e-mail takes several such
  handshake/pings/command trips back and forth, that's several seconds
  per e-mail, multiplied by the 200-300 e-mails I get, and it adds up.
  (And don't even ask about web surfing!)

  Many of you can relate, I'm sure.

  Now I use a ridiculously complex scheme to get online: Rube Goldberg
  would be proud! But it beats my interim solution: paying $535 per MONTH
  for a T-1 line (1.54 MBPS each way), which these days is a pretty
  narrow pipe for "broad"band! I could afford to pay that when ad space
  in TRUE cost $700, during the "dotcom craze". That was then, this is
  now.

  The result is in the U.S., where the Internet was invented, is falling
  WAY behind other countries. We're not even in the Top 10 of per capita
  availability of broadband, so this is far from just a "rural problem".

  The Netherlands is on top in broadband penetration, with 38.5 percent
  of inhabitants having broadband. They're followed by Switzerland,
  Denmark, Korea, Norway, France, Iceland, the U.K., Germany and Sweden,
  to round out the Top 10. The U.S. is currently 15th (up from 19th in
  2008), at 27.3 percent, following Luxembourg, Belgium, Canada, and
  Finland. Oh, if only the U.S. were as high tech as Korea! (Source:
  OECD, June 2011; link on web copy of this.)

  So where do high-tech businesses choose to locate? Not in western
  Colorado -- unless you're a one-man shop, and even then it's pretty
  frustrating. When I moved here, I didn't even CONSIDER trying to use
  online services in Colorado, let alone the Western Slope, and I'm just
  a small business. I contract for e-mail servers in Pennsylvania and
  Virginia, and web servers in Michigan.

  Where does that leave rural communities? It's not just a problem to get
  online at all, but where are the jobs going? Again not to rural areas,
  but the cities, where businesses can get reliable fiber optic online
  services. I can't blame them for going to cities where they could get
  power in the 1920s, and I can't blame them for going to cities where
  they can get bandwidth that now. But think about it: with the U.S.
  being 15th, maybe it won't be U.S. cities that will be attracting great
  "information economy" jobs. (Readers outside the U.S. just started to
  smile.)

  But do you know what's really galling to me? When Qwest (now "Century
  Link") put a new telephone cable in my road some years back, they
  proudly announced it had fiber optics built in. Fantastic! Well, no: a
  decade later, it's still "dark fiber" -- it's not being used. They have
  the *capability* to bring broadband to me and all of my neighbors, but
  they have refused to do it. I'm sure they'd point at government
  regulations as a problem, and it could well be. Meanwhile, I feel lucky
  when my 3 MBPS connection stays up for a full 24 hours without
  interruption. Sheesh.

  What can be done when someone is motivated -- and in a high-density
  city? A year ago I heard about a new apartment building in Hong Kong,
  where they were offering 1 GBPS Internet connections. Not for the
  building, for EACH APARTMENT! I'm content with 3 MBPS (when it works),
  and they're getting 1,000 MBPS. Almost makes me want to move.

  There is, at least, hope on the horizon: the Federal Communications
  Commission announced this fall they are "reforming" its Universal
  Service Fund (which brought telephone service to rural parts of the
  country) into the "Connect America Fund" to bring broadband. It
  promises to expand broadband to 7 million Americans and create a half-
  million rural jobs ...over SIX YEARS! The fund shift starts in January,
  but how long until the money starts flowing to upgrade systems? I hear
  2014 at the earliest.

  I fear it's too little, too late. But, I guess, it's a start....

COMMENTS? See http://ThisIsTrue.com/d-at

                                  o o o

THE LATEST POSTING TO JUMBO JOKE: What Democracy Means to Me -- a
  brilliant riff by Johnny Carson. http://www.JumboJoke.com

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TEN YEARS AGO IN TRUE: Minister in trouble for praying at an interfaith
  "Prayer for America" service for 9/11 terrorist attack rescue workers
  and victims' families because...!? http://www.thisistrue.com/7957

  And don't forget http://i.thisistrue.com for a new story every day on
  your Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, or other web-enabled phone!

THIS WEEK'S HONORARY UNSUBSCRIBE goes to Skiing Spymaster (no, really!)
  Peter Lunn. A million guys wish they could be this cool. For the full
  Schussing Story see http://www.HonoraryUnsubscribe.com/peter_lunn.html
AND SO LONG to actor Harry Morgan -- "Col. Potter" on M*A*S*H (1975-1983)
  and "Detective Bill Gannon" on Dragnet (1967-1970), plus more than 100
  films -- dead December 7 at 96.

YOU CAN REALLY HELP TRUE: Send this issue (in its entirety, please) to a
  friend with your personal recommendation. A friend told YOU about this
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  and (in?)famous cards, created in response to a reader telling Randy he
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