Actually, government employees do have more rights when it comes to speech (due to the 1st amendment) than private employees do. They can't just say any old thing, but if their criticism of their employer or the town is found by the court to be "of public concern" it could be considered protected speech. This law actually probably is unconstitutional, particularly if it's very broad (it could be written in a way that only banned non-protected speech, but my guess is they didn't think it through that well).

Well said...this is definitely making me think my next smartphone will be Android-based, and if I ever purchase a tablet it will almost certainly be Android-based, rather than an iPad, if they keep this crap up.

That's possible, but I live in a suburban area with relatively light population density - mostly single family houses in developments, surrounded by commercial shopping areas. The tower I draw from is in a strip mall - mostly it's there for mobile phone access while out shopping (probably not going to overload the tower), not for people using their home service. If it does get lousy though, I'll switch - but at least I have that option (since they offer non-contract service at a reasonable price).

That's a possibility, but the modems I had were completely different models (although both were made by Westell). Still, if that was the problem Verizon should have been the one to figure it out, not me. They don't pay me to do tech support, I pay them.

It would mostly happen when it was windy or humid, and I isolated pretty much every other possibility (replaced the modem, bypassed the wiring in my house entirely, filed numerous complaints with Verizon that had them check all the circuits at the CO, etc.). As best as I could tell there must have been something loose or exposed, and a good gust of wind or dampness would cause a fault that killed the connection. The modem wouldn't automatically reconnect though, so I'd have to do it manually. It was exceptionally difficult to troubleshoot, because other than the disconnection problems everything was "fine" - good signal, speed was appropriate, etc, etc. All the automated tests they will do detected no problems, so they refused to send anyone to actually look at the line. Pennywise, pound foolish - it might have cost them some money to send out a tech, but probably not as much as the income they lost by completely losing me as a customer.

If you live in an oversold area, it's apparently awful - but I don't. I regularly get 10mbps downstream, 1mbps upstream. I do a ton of bittorrent downloading and also watch a lot of streaming video through Hulu and Netflix, and I've yet to be throttled. It's also working right now, obviously, although earlier today I was having some trouble getting certain web pages to load - not sure if that was due to this, or something else. Clear isn't perfect, but so far it's better than my old Verizon DSL (the copper line to my house had some issue that Verizon simply refused to fix, which required me to manually reboot my modem as much as four or five times a day to maintain service), and yes, it's $20 a month cheaper than cable.

Dick's stories are perfect for film adaptation because they tend to be short - either short stories or novellas. His longest novels are still very short compared to most of what gets published today in the sci-fi genre. Short stories are easier to adapt to film - you generally have to cut a lot out of a novel to make it fit into a two hour movie, but short stories translate to a script more easily. Dick's stories also tend to have the kind of plot twists and the potential for action sequences that Hollywood favors, and he's well known and has a fairly big cult following. There are tons and tons of good sci-fi short stories out there, but very few of their authors are as well known as PKD. Combine all that together and they're a natural choice for adaptation.

Some people will probably claim that's a trite response, but it's actually the approach I took with my parents and so far it's worked quite well. All they ever did with their computer was browse the internet and check e-mail - they didn't even really have the technical expertise to be installing their own programs. Ubuntu has been a wonderful solution, particularly as Firefox has matured and the number of websites that require IE or ActiveX has dramatically declined. Linux is great for people with very low technical competence, and it's great for people with very high technical competence*. It's only a bear for people in the middle, who think that they should be able to do a lot of things with their computer, but aren't sure how to go about it. For those people, I would recommend a Mac.

*Windows is also fine for technically inclined people, since they're unlikely to accidentally install malware or leave their system open to viruses