Comment Re:Has anybody mentioned (Score 3, Funny) 225
Dude, it's the Government. That $5 wrench cost at least $25,000.
Dude, it's the Government. That $5 wrench cost at least $25,000.
... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.
Where I live they haven't bothered to make any provision for back up power to the repeaters on their coax plant. Power goes out? Kiss your phone service goodbye, even if you've got the battery in your modem. They finally did upgrade us to DOCSIS 3, about eight months ago, so now our peak hour speeds have gone from atrocious to tolerable FWIW.
Because an arbitrary number can be objective
Can you believe someone wrote that and thought it was a smart comeback?
Abby someone.
God bless you, anonymous coward. You made me laugh.
Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.
They're not. The GP obviously doesn't realize that Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable quite some time ago.
Who the hell was the donor?
It might not have anything to do with MGS, but it sure as hell better be a publicity stunt, because anyone involved in an actual human head transplant surgery will need to lose their medical licenses and go to prison for a very long time.
Or be hailed as the greatest surgeon who ever lived.
There is no middle ground with this one.
I don't disagree that blocking was the right choice. What I question was whether Comcast's current monopoly practices in the face of pressure across all business sectors (some more than others) are enough to make this merger make sense as a strategic business decision.
2-3 years ago where I live, you had a "choice" of high speed Internet -- DSL from CenturyLink, permanently stuck in the sub-2 Mbit/sec range or Comcast at 10+. A local Internet provider has been wiring part of the city for fiber -- it's a pretty small area now, but they just announced an expansion and are even offer 10 gig. CenturyLink has been running fiber in residential neighborhoods over the past month.
So by the end of the year, it's possible that there will be far better choices than Comcast for high speed Internet. Obviously this isn't enough, only one place, limited availability, etc, but it shows that other providers "get it" and see that Comcast is ripe for the picking.
I think the pressures on Comcast's cable TV service are even greater from Netflix, Amazon, HBO's new streaming option, selective download services like iTunes, Roku "channels" and so on. You can get most content now without cable.
I'd be most worried if I was Comcast about the original content. Most of what underpins cable is having content, and it may not be unlikely that in the near future the content people want isn't even available on Comcast or any other cable service at all.
My sense is that it maybe wasn't good business.
The sectors represented by Comcast (content, cable, internet) all face a ton of pressure from various competition. Amazon and Netflix are actively creating content and building alliances with production companies. Cable is being decimated by streaming and downloadable content (accelerated by excessive cable pricing and poor customer service). Even Internet is showing signs of competition from municipal broadband and other providers -- CenturyLink, who is just about as awful as Comcast from a customer service perspective, just ran fiber optic cable down the poles behind my residential address. The utility guy I quizzed said it was for residential high speed internet.
The only way this deal made any sense was as a holding action -- give Comcast a bigger local monopoly slice and hope that they can milk the customer base and Netflix, et al, for enough cash that they can keep the wheel turning. Regulatory pressure, net neutrality, etc may even have limited that strategy, at least on the milk-the-content-providers department.
Mergers are expensive, from the deal costs to the business integration side and I really question whether at the speed their markets are changing that they can maintain customers and margins long enough to profit from the merger.
It also makes the business a lot bigger, which makes it slower to adapt and innovate, especially when it represents a sector that has traditionally relied on monopoly power and not innovation. Being a bigger dinosaur didn't help the dinosaurs.
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982