Depends on how many people are living there and what they're doing. The way to think of it is that the 1 GB connection is a great big ol' pipe that'll never be a choke point, no matter how many people are streaming Netflix or torrenting Fedora 20.

That said, my main workstation goes to a 1 GB switch attached to Cat 6 I had punched through the upstairs into the attic, threaded down the folding ladder frame, tacked across the garage ceiling to where the fiber modem is located in the far corner of the garage. So I have a direct full speed connection should I ever need it for anything. But for wifi, it's the cumulative throughput that's important.

> Depends. If you put the 4L of gas into your moped or prius or something lame like that, you can go about 70 yards before you are caught and beaten to death because you're an idiot.

This is officially my favorite Slashdot response of the year.

I thought it was two hubcaps full. Given the diameter of the hubcap and the deepest part of the curve (assume the curve is circular) compute the volume. How far can your supercharged Ford Falcon go on the fuel?

Socialize the bug. The bigger the audience, the better. I suspect that this is especially important with security issues. Argue that of the three legs of security, the bug violates "availability" if the users can't use the service. Also remind the vendor that even if you can't get out of the contract, you have to provide the service, so you will be forced to seek a different solution.

Back when Usenet was still a thang, I was the primary sysadmin for an SGI shop. Some version of SGI had upgraded NFS to some new version but had not updated lockd. File locking over NFS between Sun and SGI machines ceased to work. SGI engineering argued that there was no compelling new functionality in the new version of lockd, so they had not bothered to port it, and besides, "it works for us".

I complained bitterly about this in the appropriate Usenet groups, with analysis and examples. A few weeks later, I was contacted by our sales engineer with a patch, just for us, that fixed the problem. The very next OS release the patch became standard.

Point is, arguing the facts with the vendor did not get the problem fixed. Publicly rubbing the vendor's nose in it did.

> Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Well, that, and sustained fusion has not been achieved yet. That's kinda like saying "Pixie Dust will never replace coal because they cost too many Altairian Dollars per Ngogn", enthusiastically passing over the slight but persistent issue that pixies don't exist.

As a homeowner with several dogs and who relies on wood heat in the winter, having a truck is pretty much a necessity. But we also have a small car for commuting, because hey, why spend more on gas than you have to?

But I've long noticed that the disparity in gas mileage between the (unloaded) truck and the 4-banger to be much less than their ratings would indicate. Part are driving habits, of course. I tend to be very soft on the gas pedal of the truck, as it just gulps gas if you let it. And the tendency in the econodeathbox is what some people call "the digital pedal", which really has only two states -- idling/decelerating or trying-to-catch-up-with-traffic. All these things tend to have a leveling tendency, probably.

I spent my formative years in a DEC-dominated lab, so the office background sounds were the soft thok-thok-thok of VT100 keyboards rather than the clicky-clicky of the Model M. I did get a chance to use the M keyboard later, and agree it has the best tactile feel of any keyboard I've used before or sense.

As pointed out by others, the keyboard is a straight keyboard in days when most of us are using split keyboards, and the noise can be distracting. But when you spend most of your day as root, an audio indication that a key had been clicked, and the added force necessary to make it work, are actually positive things. Just my opinion.

Can't used Linkedin at all, then.

I see what happened. The thread had slipped into Comcast's business practices in general, not this particular case, but I think I could argue that in general, the practice of granting cable companies de facto monopolies in geographical markets naturally leads to abuses of which this particular case is an example. As someone else pointed out, Comcast no longer even tries to maintain an image, because really they don't have to.

I can't tell... Are you kidding? Cable TV/Internet has traditionally been a government sponsored monopoly.

I should add, this is why government protecting us from corporations doesn't work very well. Government is made up of people, just like corporations are. People in government pretty much rely on marketing their image in order to stay in business, just like corporations do. (Sometimes, they use the same marketing companies.) Heads of government are no less likely to be corrupt than heads of corporations.

I understand it's a thing that corporations are evil and government will protect us from them, but when all is said and done, that's a belief system, not a law of nature.

Well, regardless, I would not say that in the case of comcast, capitalism broke down. Rather, it was circumvented. And the government, who are ostensibly supposed to protect us from the kind of abuses you're talking about, was a party to it.

Watch any Xfinity commercial.

...of linkedin.

I would say this is the opposite of capitalism. Lack of consumer choice, paying off politicians to achieve an unquestioned monopoly, no need to provide a decent service because there's no competition. That's more like a government sponsored monopoly.