> The US is one of the least dense countries in the world -- especially at its population.

Yes, and no. If you ignore the most rural 20% of the US, Britain, and France, there's really not that much of a difference. France & Britain have some pretty huge expanses of rural wilderness, too. Yeah, we have hundreds of thousands of square miles of desolate wilderness out west and in Alaska, but those areas are about as relevant & meaningful to the daily lives of people who live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, DC, and Miami as they are to the lives of people who could walk out their front door and throw a rock into the Seine or Thames. If you limited gigabit internet to the subset of Americans who live at the average population density of Watford, Cambridge, or LIverpool, the overwhelming majority of us would STILL be enjoying gigabit internet.

Exactly. Signal processing has definitely improved, but a huge chunk of the range-improvement has come from better provisioning and wire management. 10 years ago, if you called SBC for DSL, the salesperson would query the mainframe to look up your distance, and if it said you were even a single foot more than their arbitrary cut off for g.Lite, as far as SBC was concerned you weren't getting DSL. Period, end of story. AT&T is still pretty anal, and you practically have to know as much about VDSL2 and outside wiring as their own sales people AND be threatening to cancel within the first 30 days of signing up for new service to get them to roll a truck to even TRY getting anything faster than 18/1.5mbps with U-Verse... but it's still a huge improvement over 10 years ago, when they'd have just told you to have a nice day & transferred you to someone who'd try selling you dialup.

The fundamental problem we have in most of the US today is the fact that AT&T's capital investment horizon is roughly 5 years. If they won't see guaranteed ROI within that horizon, they won't do it. And since they've colluded with Comcast to get states to pass laws making it damn near impossible for uppity municipalities to take matters into their own hands and lay their own fiber, they can get away with it... for now.

The thing is, the A500 really *wasn't* that expensive relative to the 128. Circa 1989, an A500 with a meg, built-in floppy, and monitor was only $999. By the time you added up the cost of the 128, the floppy drive, and the same multisync monitor (without which you couldn't use 80-column mode), the 128 was *maybe* two hundred bucks less, and basically pointless.

I think you just accidentally misread it... I said that M-discs are basically non-LTH BD-R discs with DVD track geometry.

LTH discs are the ones made with organic dyes, just like DVD+/-R.

M-Disc is NOT made with organic dyes. It's a phase-change magneto-optical recordable DVD that's readable by normal drives/players, but requires a BD-R drive with the right firmware to burn.

EEPROM also happens to be the ancestor of SLC flash, not MLC, TLC or worse.

Flash is like a leaky bucket that starts out full of water, and gets drained to some level when a cell's value is set:

SLC == "The bucket is either totally empty (0), or has some water in it (1)"

MLC == "The bucket can be totally empty (00), non-empty to ~33% full (01), 33%-~66% full (10), or 66-100% full (10). After 1/3 the water leaks out, the cell's value is corrupt.

TLC == same idea as MLC, but the bucket has EIGHT levels instead of four. Do the math to figure out how much metaphorical water can leak out before the cell's value becomes corrupted.

BIOS eeproms are also a larger process than high-density flash, so the buckets themselves are larger while the leaks remain relatively constant in size. In other words, you're comparing a metaphorical 55 gallon drum with a slow drip that has to be completely empty to change from 1 to 0 to a thimble with 8 tick marks on the side and a leak of the same size.

If you're storing anything besides DVDs that need to be capable of direct casual playback on a DVD player, you're better off just burning the files (or even the .iso file of a DVD) to a non-LTH BD-R disc.

M-Disc is just a non-LTH BD-R with DVD geometry. It's an elegant solution for preserving DVDs in a way that gives you the best of both non-LTH BD-R and casual playability of a DVD, but it's stupid to spend M-disc prices for bulk data backup, including digital photos, when you can buy a brand new BD-R drive and two 25-gig non-LTH discs for what you'll spend on a 10-pack of 5-gig M-discs alone.

There's nothing exotic about BD-R anymore. DL and 3L BD-R discs are pretty expensive, but single-layer 25-gig non-LTH BD-R discs are cheap online, and an OEM-wrapped bare drive with software bundle costs maybe $50 more than a DVD+/-RW drive. And if you have a laptop that doesn't officially have a BD-R drive, you can probably buy a bare drive on eBay and swap it out yourself as long as your computer isn't a Macbook or weird ultra-ultra-thin PC notebook. For more normal laptops, there are basically two optical-drive form factors with two loading-forms (tray or slot). As long as you don't mind cannibalizing the bezel from the laptop's original drive, the hardest part of the whole thing is the bezel swap.

One warning: 95% or more of the BD-R discs you'll find at any retail store (Best Buy, Tiger Direct, etc) are going to be LTH, and manufacturers don't exactly bend over backwards to make it obvious that the discs in a package ARE LTH type. Make sure you consult Google -- or at least Newegg -- before buying blanks, and if the discs are less than a buck apiece, they're almost GUARANTEED to be LTH.

If you use LTH discs, all longevity bets are off. LTH discs are inferior junk made with cheap organic dye, just like DVD+/-R discs are. LTH discs exist for exactly one reason -- cost reduction. Genuine phase-change discs aren't cheap to manufacture, disc manufacturers spent lots of money tooling up to make blank DVD media based on organic dyes, and LTH lets them repurpose it for making cheap BD-R media. If you're burning a disc that only has to last until next week, go ahead & use LTH. If you're burning a disc that you want to be readable (at least, without expensive data recovery and bit rot) 25 years from now, spend a few bucks more on phase-change media.

Use non-LTH BD-R media. It's seriously the best media we've ever had for long-term archival storage, hands-down, no contest. Unlike DVD+/-R, it's phase-change magneto-optical WORM... the laser liquefies the plastic, the magnet orients little shiny planar mirrors, the plastic solidifies, and the bits are about as close to 'carved in stone' as you're likely to ever get. As a technology, it's not cheap... but it definitely minimizes the number of things that can go wrong over a ~25-year timeframe:

* decouples media from its player... the achilles heel of hard drive-based backup schemes. A broken hard drive means a spectacularly expensive data-recovery job. A broken BD drive means buying a new one.

* phase-change MO media doesn't bleach or darken with age... and if it's going to delaminate or anything (like early optical discs often do), it's overwhelmingly likely to happen sooner rather than later (while you still have the originals available to re-archive if necessary).

* I think we can safely accept that future evolution to optical discs will remain downwards-compatible with reading older media. Seriously, CDs are THIRTY YEARS OLD, and any Blu-Ray player from China can still play them just fine (plus everything that's ever been commonly burned/stamped into them). A 2037 Apple Eve might have the masses drooling over its legacy-free minimalist purity, but the rest of us will have a 600 petabyte optical drive manufactured by a sweatshop in Uganda or Haiti that can read old BD-R discs just fine (at least, after opening it up and soldering a wire across two pads on the circuit board to make it think it's supposed to be their $6,000 enterprise version instead).

What's kind of sad is that technically, VGA *did* have some of the same low-level capabilities of the C64 (besides sprites, obviously). At least, if you had a VRAM-based card like the ET4000. They just weren't supported by the BIOS, so they were (almost) never used in commercial software. You had to know how the video subsystem was wired together, where the various control registers were mapped, and bitbang them directly by hijacking system timers and dead reckoning.

One of the more hardcore examples I remember involved setting an interrupt handler to fire on VBLANK, using THAT handler to set a timer to fire (by dead reckoning) at the moment you hoped would give you enough time to pre-load the 486's registers, NOP a few cycles, then blindly ram new values into the VGA card's control registers during (what you hoped was) the horizontal retrace. From what I remember, it only worked (in 1991, at least) on a Tseng ET4000 video card (I'm pretty sure it required VRAM to avoid bus contention). As far as I know, no commercial software EVER took advantage of this trick, but lots of Eurodemos did.

Another cool capability that was very rarely used: you could rewrite soft fonts on the fly. As far as I know, exactly two real apps actually DID it... the MS/DOS 6 shell, and ProTracker. They replaced whatever was under the mouse with a 3x3 matrix of custom characters, then redefined them to whatever characters they replaced & XOR'ed a mouse pointer on top. Kludgy, but elegant in a way.

OMG. You just reminded me about my first (sort of) "robot" -- I connected an Erector Set motor's power lugs to the switched power traces on the cassette interface of my c64 using alligator clips, and attached a weak rubber band to pull it back. It was utterly useless, and did nothing besides pivot a rod back and forth, but it WAS technically a crude robot capable of moving atoms via software ;-)

Thank ${deity} I didn't fry the cassette port. That would have really sucked, and it's the kind of thing that doesn't even OCCUR to you when you're ~12 years old :-D

> If you can not program Java without an IDE, you can not program at all.

It's not the language syntax per se, it's the fact that there are thousands of objects, with thousands of different constructors and methods whose syntax-consistency falls somewhere between "clusterfuck" and "bukkake" (read: Swing).

I mean, for ${deity}'s sake... we didn't even get to have a real constant representing UTF-8 Charsets until Java 7 (java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets.UTF_8) that could be used without having to explicitly try/catch for an UnsupportedEncodingException that's frankly impossible per JLS unless you used the old String-named syntax and misspelled it.

> We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics.

No, we're just temporarily semi-stalled on a plateau waiting for realtime hardware-accelerated ray tracing to commercially arrive.

The fundamental problem is that AT&T is too big now for its own good. Everyone -- including AT&T's own shareholders -- would be better off if the federal government broke up AT&T again... but THIS time, into AT&T Wireless and U-verse, with their fiber, ROW, and trunk lines held by a third company as a co-op jointly owned by ATTWS and U-Verse (so ATTWS couldn't stop U-Verse from aggressive expansion, and U-verse would HAVE to aggressively expand to remain relevant & profitable).

The hard part would be structuring the third company's charter to ensure that AT&T Wireless and U-Verse both had the right to lay their own fiber within their shared ROW, and could fiber connectivity to others without being able to limit the other partner's ability to do the same. So U-verse could sell fiber to Sprint & T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless could sell fiber to Comcast, even if neither one would willingly sell fiber to their "partner's" fiber customers.

IMHO, making the third company truly independent (instead of a bitterly fought-over co-op between the two new AT&T fiefdoms that neither could truly control) would be a mistake on par with Britain's Railtrack experiment. When you have one company that only owns bulk infrastructure, its main incentive is to spend nothing and wring every bit of equity it can from it while running it into the ground. On the other hand, if there were two companies at each other's throats (AT&T Wireless and U-verse) with every tragedy-of-the-commons incentive to overbuild & try selling surplus capacity to others, that's exactly what's likely to happen. And when it comes to fiber, more == better.

> One more thing...and this is a FCC policy thing...We could create an "emergency" mode where a quad-band cell phone will talk to any network in range

Most high-end Android phones ALREADY have all the hardware they need to do that. Google "MSM8960", and be happy knowing that it's inside most of the high-end Android phones sold in the US over the past 2 years or so. The only reason why an AT&T Galaxy S3 (for example) can't roam on Sprint or Verizon is Qualcomm's fucked up licensing model, and American cellular carrier business policy. Ditto, for Sprint and Verizon phones roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile, but in THEIR case, it's even MORE fucked up... most of THEIR phones CAN roam on GSM, but they get Qualcomm to hardcode the radio modem firmware to blacklist AT&T and T-Mobile so it'll refuse to use them, but still allow GSM roaming outside the US.

LTE is still problematic (mostly by carrier intent), but as far as network cross-compatibility within the US goes, 800-vs-1900MHz and CDMA-vs-GSM hasn't been a hardware-limited constraint on high-end Android phones and recent iPhones (since at least the 4 or 4S) in YEARS.

> Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.

If, and ONLY IF, companies wanting to replace POTS wireline with wireless are required to satisfy the same availability and reliability standards they were required to meet with POTS (including backup power for everything upstream from the end user and beyond his direct control). Right now, they aren't.

The difference is that 25 years ago, it took a direct hit by a category 5 hurricane to make a visible dent in the phone network. There was no need to rebuild the phone network, because most of it never quit working in the first place. After Hurricane Andrew, people came home to neighborhoods so completely destroyed, they had to count streets and driveways to find the wreckage of their house... and more often than not, if they plugged a legacy-style phone into a phone jack, it worked. You can use Google to find stories from the Miami Herald about people who came home to a pile of rubble... and a very loud "off-hook" sound coming from a phone buried underneath.

Compare that to now, where a goddamn slow & sloppy tropical storm (like Isaac) can take out U-verse and Comcast for at least half the day (Which is exactly what TS Isaac did, in northern Dade and southern Broward counties) just because a few distant neighborhoods (where their regional network operation centers are located) lost commercial power for a day, and they didn't have enough backup power to keep them running. It's DISGRACEFUL.

As for #2, your house might not be "there" (in the sense of being habitable) any more, but if the storm is still in progress, working phone service is still a good thing to have.