Do you speak from experience? I am and the real roadblock is cost and market inertia.

If I wanted to invest a lot of money into fiber optics and spend the next 10 to 20 years recouping my capital investment I do not believe city hall would be my roadblock. I would need to convince my investors and bank that we could recoup our money and make a profit despite the established carriers using their size and mostly paid for infrastructure to undercut us.

The reason that Comcast and others are offering higher bandwidths (without raising the cap) is not because of consumer demand but to defend their territory. It's hard to convince the bank that you will offer something not available elsewhere when they see commercials for "up to 150 mbps" offered at a price below what you would have to charge just to break even.

The only way I would be able to even apply for a permit and pay the franchise fees is by making an insane amount of profit in an internet related venture and I wanted to spend some of the profits to have direct access to my customers (or users). This would not only allowed me to experiment with services that require high bandwidth but also provide good public relations stories to advertise in my other markets. You know like Google does. Also notice how many large cities compete for their next fiber deployment.

I've almost gotten T-boned by a impatient driver pulling a similar stunt.

My street is one block away from a intersection with a traffic signal. The city decided that instead of putting another light synced with the intersection they would save money and prevent congestion by putting up a "Do Not Block Intersection" sign. The light was red and both west bound lanes were stopped and the the drivers in both of those lanes left enough room for me to exit my south bound road and turn east. Unfortunately the street I'm turning on has a turning lane that runs the length of the entire street and an impatient driver thought he could use it as a passing lane more than several car lengths away since he was ultimately going to make a left turn at the intersection with the signal. He had to skid to a complete stop when he realized that our paths would meet. I really wish they would put some concrete islands on the street to prevent this kind of bad driving.

Government bans competition. You can't very well expect an agency that claims a "natural monopoly" to not consider other "natural monopolies" both wise and judicious.

Not true. Anyone can start an ISP as long as they are willing to pay for the infrastructure to deliver the last mile connection to their customers.

Community fiber is still the answer - there are just so many hurdles that make it slow in coming.

You just criticized both the government and lack of competition and your answer is to eliminate competition and let the government run it?

The question that I don't see being asked: "Is there a 'web' language that warrants my employer paying me to learn and use?"

If I was an employer and had a lot invested in Perl, I would view any attempt to introduce yet another language into the shop with suspicion. Does the employee's suggestion merit consideration or is he trying to get me to pay him to learn a new language to pad his resume?

Would I rather have someone with years of experience using Perl work on my enterprise code or would I prefer to have someone with practically no experience in some other language or its associated framework using that language to develop my enterprise code?

Do I really want to fix what is not broken?

Short parking times are in the order of 45 to 60 mins.

We actually have shuttle buses that travel from a park and ride station near the suburbs to the stadium during the two annual college bowl games and other sport events. They close a route to only shuttle busses during that time. I've been able to park my car and be at the front entrance of the stadium in 20 mins.

They can always increase the meter rate while enforcing maximum time and possibly shortening them. The more active areas will have short term parking freed more often and if you need somewhere to park for a leisurely dinner or movie (possibly both) you can always use the parking garage.

I used to lease a parking space downtown for work, and they always had reasonable hourly rates for the people visiting downtown after hours. Some would allow you to reserve a spot. Even the city contracted garages had decent spots. The city provides a downtown shuttle for those who park in garages on the edge of downtown so you don't have to walk if you don't want to.

The only thing the auction app provides is a method for individuals to make a buck off of a public parking space from people who don't mind paying for a privilege that isn't offered

Baltimore has a population of 670,000. Between the parking garages and street parking, there's room for over three million cars to park in a one mile radius from Power Plant Live. There's also metro service, bus service, and light rail service. Maryland has a population of 5.7 million.

The population of Baltimore's metropolitan statistical area is 2.7 million. I doubt everybody in that 7 county area will all want to go to Baltimore every night.

Public parking is inaccessible because it's scarce; this scarcity also denies access to public roadways. This solution frees up some access to roadways, and lets you find out how much parking is being opened up--you can then decide if it's worth looking for a public parking space or just go to a parking garage, or take public transit.

So parking should only be accessible to those willing to pay someone to release it to them? We are still talking about an auction app.

Because the third party currently has rights to that public parking by writ of using it at the time. Otherwise I'd just call a tow truck to remove the Ferrari parked in my spot.

Not always true. Where I live there is a maximum time you can stay in a metered spot no matter how willing you are to feed the meter. This is to encourage people to use the lots for long term (2+ hr) parking which aren't really that expensive.

Also you fail to explain how the auction app doesn't provide an incentive to stay in that parking place until you make money off the auction. The result being that people not using the app or unwilling to be extorted are being denied a parking space.

Here are some questions about your so called solution:

How do people without access to the auctioning app get access to what is essentially public parking?

Why should someone pay a third party to have a chance to use public parking?

There are other solutions available to the city of San Francisco that doesn't require the use of an auctioning app.

I travel to the middle of nowhere with my laptop on a regular basis. It either bounces around the trunk of my rental car, get knocked around at the airport, get compressed in overhead baggage on a airline flight, subjected to who knows what while bumping around the nose compartment of a Cessna 402 , bake in the sun while I'm on the tarmac working an issue, or being invaded by sand particles or dust. Despite the unrecommended environment, I never had an issue with my MacBook Pro. I'm still with my MacBook Pro issued to me in 2010 while my colleagues are on their 2nd or 3rd HP or Dell laptop. My first work laptop was a Sony Vaio and it only lasted me 1 year, afterwards I purchased a MacBook Pro and used it for 2 years until the new MacBook Pro was issued to me by my employer. My wife still uses my late 2006 MacBook Pro and it works like new.

The only other person on my team that has a long lasting laptop uses an IBM branded Thinkpad/X40 which works well enough for testing components during intergration otherwise he uses a desktop workstation that we ship to the field. The problems we had with laptops are bad batteries, dead backlight/display, and the problem that plagued our Dell Latitude series - clam shell breaking at the hinges. We hadn't had any noticeable problems with the current high end HP laptops other then being heavier and bulkier than my MacBook Pro and lower battery life.

Regardless of the brand (Apple, HP, Dell, Lenovo) we paid similar price for the equivalent laptop. I don't know how you would consider a MacBook Pro laptop overpriced except maybe when you compare it to a consumer grade laptop sold at your local Walmart. I know several people who are happy with their low priced laptop but they rarely travel with them. They use them at school, sometimes at work, but most of the time safely at home. If you have a similar experience with your purchase then congratulations.

My current router allows me to grant guest access to my cable modem with no fear of the guests accessing my local network. Unfortunately thanks to Netflix and Amazon, I'm barely staying within my usage cap with Comcast as it is. Comcast is looking for any excuse to automatically "upgrade" my monthly service for an additional fee, and I'm not going to make that possible by giving away free internet access.