For your grandfather, would he have been allowed to install it himself the final 500 feet and if so what would have the telco cost been to establish the connection?

For the rural community, what sort of housing density are we talking about?

One thing that I would like to see it community networks that are then leased out to ISPs, with non-exclusive agreements. I would hope that in this scenario the ISPs and telco could not argue unfair competition and therefore be unable to block this.

One company I know will attempt to repair three times. If it still fails they replace, but the replacement part starts with a new warranty. I think that is the way it should be. The warranty should be on the part, so any replacement would effectively reset the effective purchase date.

That may get expensive for some companies, but maybe they should be rethinking their business model?

Two things come out of this:
    - IATA needs to regulate this.
    - Leg spacing and seat size should be mandatory provided information in any booking.

On one hand you can argue that the passengers are getting what they pay for, but on the other hand you can also argue that customers don't have this information, at time of booking, to make an informed purchase choice.

At the same time if fights break out often enough, requiring forced landings, then I think people will start realising this cost saving is actually getting expensive (extra cost due to unplanned landings, time and reputation).

Given the number of security issues related to buffer over-runs, I wonder whether C/C++ should provide a safe buffer that would help alleviate these issues? Sure it might compromise performance slightly, though it might be acceptable when faced with the alternative of unexpected issues due to an unforeseen buffer overrun.

I haven't yet decided whether this is yet another programming language we needed, but I will be interested to see whether Apple release the Swift support in LLVM as open source. One thing that I dislike more than new programming language for the sake of doing so, are single-platform languages.

I didn't see much in the article, but seeing the following PDF there appears to be multiple technologies at play. One of them being 'channel bonding':

http://www.kics.or.kr/Home/Use...

Its not the content that matters, but the bragging rights on how you access that content.

It does, but you should never under-estimate the ability of people to bother reading or paying attention to such details.

Apple does have a way to deactivate iMessage, but when you leave the Apple eco-system people don't realise that something that they were taking for granted suddenly gets in the way.

BTW the knowledge page for deactivating iMessage (never tried it): http://support.apple.com/kb/TS...

Well, this isn't any different that a friend stopping using Google Talk.

Network infrastructure. Despite the writing being on the wall, it has been considered as comedy. The comedy is now laughing at them. As usual it is going be a question of people panicking over something that could have been planned for.

They are by default, but there is the IPv6 privacy extension RFC4941. Also if you use DHCPv6, then you can decide exactly what IP each host gets.

Civil expenditure vs military expenditure. It's sad that it takes a military budget to do stuff, when a civilian space agency could do just as well.

The reality is that when asked the question 'why are you doing this?', the answer in one case will be a fuzzy 'important defence stuff' and people will stop asking questions, while in the other "researching technology for future manned space flight" and then people will start questioning it even more and each want to be a stake holder in the budget.

Not quite the same thing. Nature works at its own pace, but when you have geological evidence you should take heed of it. Geology can only help so much, because the exact time element is where things are fuzzy. On the flip side there are geologists who are more cautious about announcements and then get put in jail (case in Italy) - it's hard to win when everyone wants a scape goat.

For me it's like buildings or bridges that were built badly. You know they will fail, but not when. You know when the failure happens it won't be a pretty sight.

I am not aware of the documentary indicated, but a quick search turned up this "60 minutes" video, also covering the subject: http://www.styleite.com/news/l...

I think the problem comes from living in a bubble. We all live in a bubble and think of the reality around us being the reality for everyone else. It's not until you step outside of the bubble do you realise the assumptions ions aren't necessarily true. What will often be the case is different people solving different problems with different languages. Sometimes it's down to the suitability of the language, sometimes it's down to the local skill set and sometimes down to what's considered to be the latest trending language.

Learning a new language takes a time investment and changing the way we approach coding problems.

As a Java developer I am still wrestling with whether Scala will end up supplanting Java or whether it will be a side language that will simply influence the direction Java takes in the future?

For me languages fall into three main categories, those that stay in the main steam, those that influence the main steam languages and those that simply fade away, because they have been replaced by something 'better'. For the influencers they sometimes stay in the background because while innovative don't necessarily add a reason for such a radical change and by the time the look like they may be gaining steam, they lose it to the fact the 'mainstream' languages have picked up the best features.