Maybe they will solve the price problem with scaling, maybe they won't. Frankly in rural areas many of the "best coverage" areas on coverage maps have large swaths of complete lack of service. By the time I get a functional 5G tower, which I understand have to be denser than existing towers, I'll likely have fiber service within a mile of my house. I'm not nearly as remote as some folks, but with the density requirement; I have no doubt that cell phone companies are going to leave rural customers once again in the dark.

Just checked my cell phone. It says I used 18GB myself, primarily through a 3.0Mbps DSL connection. That doesn't count the usage of 4 other people in my household, or whatever the DirecTV boxes are using for on demand, or "rewind to the beginning", or whatever we did on computers or streaming devices or firmware for all the stuff hanging off my network... Nor does it count for the 3GB 4G data my wife and I use. Even a small fee per GB sounds like a several hundred dollar bill every month.

"The NRA owns the Republicans" The NRA's 5 million members support the political party that they see as least hostile to the 2nd amendment. "apparently the Russians own the NRA thanks to the efforts of people like the Red Sparrow Butina" It seems a rather strange assumption that the NRA would have done less against Clinton given her record on the 2nd amendment without any Russian connection. From where I sit, it seems like just another division sowing tactic. Democrats have more of a reason to hate one of the biggest arms of the Republican party.

Our lab banned them because of security. I've had stacks of CDRWs that don't read or write but need to be properly destroyed. We were then allowed ESATA devices but our latest generation of PCs no longer included ESATA ports. USB or networking is the industry standard so sooner or later you just have to live with the drawbacks. Only one of those works with an air gapped machine.

As a DirecTV subscriber, I already would have dumped them if I had better than AT&T's shitty DSL service. I'm hoping this means they are going to replace my last mile equipment with UVerse capable stuff rather than just discontinuing servicing my address completely.

Thing humans can't do reliably also can't be done by human designed technology news at 11.

I went through undergrad during the dot com bubble/bust. Companies were pulling people out of college to fill all the available seats. When the bubble burst, guess who those companies kept and guess who was working retail...

Walmart has a system for its pick-up service: Select fruits and meats are earmarked for the pick-up service so people will keep using the service. You can generally expect a service with a decent startup cost like this one will offer "better" selection than going in to pick it up. Of course, expect the benefits to slide as more people start using the service just like self-checkout was great for a while as people were hesitant to use it, but now you've got to bag your own groceries and wait longer than just going through a regular checkout.

"They can get laws passed, tax breaks, government restrictions lifted and politicians elected to suit their needs, and the resultant damage to everybody else is worth far more than $100." This isn't fixed in governmental systems where wealth is more evenly distributed out by design. In those cases, corruption is rampant because the only way to get better than average results is through corruption.

I had a long conversation Sunday with a former city inspector about just this subject. If for some reason Apple isn't getting away with it because of ins with every municipal politician that would allow this, then it means Apple has ins to all the important state political figures. So if Apple doesn't already own those politicians, then it would be career suicide for one of them to make that move.

And everyone in that age bracket started or finished college after the second biggest failure of capitalism in a century. Income inequality sucks, but the GDP, population, and median income say capitalism isn't doing all that poorly. Sure the standard deviation needs some work, but I'm not sure knocking Mr. Gates down to median income is either pro-social or pro-economic.

I've called 3 times to customer service trying to get them to increase my DSL bandwidth. They not only can't seem to do it, a manager spent an hour trying to figure out what was going on and eventually hung up on me. If I can't get answers out of them when I'm offering to hand them additional money every month, good luck and God speed trying to get something out of support that won't.

Curious how this error behaves if electricity is flowing the other direction. Might be positive progress for solar cells. Worst case you are escaping this crap, best case your solar cell profitability curve just massively improved.

I'm behind but still enjoying it. Along the same lines: For parody radio shows, I loved Thrilling Adventure Hour. For spooky/weird, Limetown was really good. I'm a season in to The Black Tapes Podcast. that one leans a little too much on Serial's tropes but I've gotten past that to actually enjoying it.

That is patently untrue. They won't spend a dime improving their infrastructure until they have completely exhausted all other means of preventing actual competition.