But they can be effectively exclusive, if the cost to build out is too high or an existing franchisee or operator makes it difficult to share resources. In my town, the simple answer is that one carrier was here first, which means a competing carrier would have to rely on revenue from customers who switch in order to justify a complete build-out. Not a great gamble, no big bucks here, particularly in the short term, so they don't bother, and we suffer under an effective monopoly.

I mean, if someone's willing to set up a competing service for free, there's no exclusivity rule to stop them. But I'm not holding my breath.

No. This, at least, is unsubstantiated FUD.

From Forbes.com:

A quick google search of Chattanooga and broadband turned up multiple articles agreeing that their local internet deployment has been a roaring success, particularly in bringing a new wave of business and revenue to the city.

Not every city is successful, but that's no reason for states to prohibit them from trying, if nothing else to give the monopolists an incentive to improve their crappy race-to-the-bottom service.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

Not if Windows 10 is as tied to using OneDrive and other Microsoft services as the Development Preview is now.
And Live Tiles has got to go, too. Such distracting, marketing, productivity-killing click-bait has no place in the office (or the start menu).

Wish I had points to mod you up. Makes me want to rent this again.

But it kinda is about mobile... taking marketing and design attention away from the desktop. The old saying goes, "rob Peter to pay Paul". Microsoft is, at best, neglecting the desktop and at worst making it suck, in order to support and even market their mobile platform... a mobile platform that nobody except Microsoft has any reason to care about.

I couldn't care less about Microsoft mobile. Between iOS and Android, there's not anything I see missing. If Microsoft would simply target and support those platforms for their Office/Exchange ecosystem, they might do pretty darn well. What's the need for yet another platform and OS, except blind greed for some pie-in-the-sky cashola App store?

What I do care about is the desktop, cause that's where me and most of the rest of the world get their work done. And it's not just that Microsoft is blatantly attempting to use their desktop penetration as a billboard to advertise and acclimate a captive audience the new mobile product... bolt a Start Screen and some touch capabilities and Metro compatibility on to Windows 8 or 10 and there probably would be no problems. What's so exceedingly frustrating, maddening, is what they arbitrarily, unilaterally take away.

They chose to yank the Start menu because, well, they just did. Drop a bunch of essential control panels and preview apps, even mail, and replace them with Metro apps because, well, there it is. Just like with the Ribbon in Office, they just chose to yank out the "File Edit etc..." menus because, well, who cares why, users will just get used to it. Aero? Gone, without even an option to get it back, along with a lot of other customization options, because, what? A little transparency made some tablet out there run out of battery? People actually believe that?

I'd compare it to GM coming out with a control stick on all models instead of a steering wheel, because you know, it's better, but that doesn't go far enough 'cause we don't have to drive a Chevy. More like the IRS choosing to collect our tax returns in Latin from now on because, well, Latin is so classic. You can opt out until extended support for English runs out in 2020, but eventually English will be gone and you'll be doing it the new way or nothing.

And just like with Vista, there are plenty of shills, loyal members of the Ballmer-Youth declaring it's all great and get used to it and it's wonderful. I don't understand these people. They're either getting paid by Microsoft, or they never actually USE Windows desktop for anything except as a launching pad for Steam or Chrome. For games or web-surfing, fine. You probably don't miss the Start menu and never really see much of the desktop-metro mess. Probably don't notice how ugly the boxy, non-Aero window decorations are, either, cause you're always in full-screen.

But if you actually have to get work done, have 5-20 windows in 4-8 different apps up simultaneously? For that, the Windows 8, 8.1, even 10 is an inexplicable step backward where Windows 7 works just fine and will continue to work until 2020, by which time Microsoft is either gone or putting out Windows 14. Maybe by then they'll have stopped making such stupid decisions and release a Windows 7.1 like they should have in the first place.

Agreed... but far easier said than done. Like secure e-mail or messaging, mature straight-forward backup solutions just don't exist.

My company was hacked with cryptoware, and thanks to automatic backups we only lost a day or two of data. But that's because we have staff and resources dedicated to taking care of these things.

How's mom and pop gonna do this? Macs have Time Machine, but even that requires an external drive for that single purpose. When buying a laptop or desktop, the average Joe, student, or grandmother doesn't think to plunk down another $100 for an external drive whose only purpose is insurance against "what if".

And again, that's with Apple's Time Machine, which is the closest thing to set-it-and-forget-it backup/restore I know of, particularly because it comes bundled ready-to-go with OS X. Windows, to my knowledge, has no comparable built-in product, nor do I know of any 3rd-party product that is easy enough to have saved grandma from cryptolocker. Seriously. Have you ever tried to support "old" people, like your uncle or the senior partner? They not only routinely use terrible passwords (e.g., their home phone number), they're PROUD of it. They'll look you right in the eye and tell you that nobody in the world is going to bother to hack little old me.

and don't think that makes it their problem and they deserve what's coming to them. If it's your boss or grandma, it's your problem.

Windows needs a turn-key backup/restore solution, out of the box. And as long as I'm pipe-dreaming, PC's are each sold with a second hard drive accessible only to the backup/restore app and can't be wiped even by administrator without entering a key. Or maybe there could be some cloud-based solution - nothing ever goes wrong with those.

AI not required. If movement detected in object of predetermined size within weapon range, shoot it until it stops moving. Example.

Reserve the AI effort for hunting/gathering ammunition.
We're all gonna die.

My brain hurts from you triggering that deep-buried memory. I'll be messed up all week with that stuff replaying through my head.

My young brain thought the space scenes in Galactica were awesome, and I totally bought all the mass destruction in the pilot. Cylons scared the shit out of me... like Berzerk come to life (with the same inevitable outcome). I was able to see past all the dumb stuff, particularly because Star Wars had left me so hungry for more like it and there was just nothing. But even back then I felt the show started to fizzle out after the Pegasus episodes.

Anyone can try Windows 10 for themselves if they have a spare box or can run Virtual Box. So far, "unelegant mishmash" is about right. Modern Apps seem like an emulation mode that intrudes on the desktop from time to time, even after taking steps to avoid them.
There's a lot of user feedback about improving the desktop over Modern-izing everything. All I want out of a new Windows is a better Windows 7, like performance improvements, bug fixes, a programming API that doesn't drive people insane, and more customizability (Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 are all less customizable than 7). But you get the feeling nobody at Microsoft wants to work on that old crufty Windows code and would rather plug on something all new - and bundling it with Windows is going to convince you to like it. At least the Preview Program gives you a chance to yell about it until it's released.

Thank you. Usenet, for example was a welcome, tolerant, even useful place. You could reasonably trust someone on misc.forsale to send you what you expected after receiving your check. I suppose in those days, if anyone ever posted something bad, their sysadmin would receive an e-mail and the would-be troller would have his account suspended... and that would be that. Internet was a privilege, and short of getting a job in computers or defense, graduation meant leaving it forever.

Fuck. The Eternal September was 21 years ago. Kids have grown up big enough to legally drink since then, never knowing a net that was free of Nigerian Prince scams or murder by Craig's List. Whose on my lawn? Get off my lawn!

Funny thing is, I always found the gaps between the keys problematic. If your fingers weren't right on the keys, you'd slip through or press two.

My favorite keyboard was the one that came with the IBM 6150 (aka, the IBM PC-RT). Soft keys but with great tactile feel, and completely programmable so you could easily swap the CTRL and CAPS LOCK keys. It was IBM's take on a silent keyboard but will all their (then) quality thrown in.

Got some serious WPM out of it, but I hold no hope for getting one working today :-\

Plausible. From my own experience, patience and restraint on the order of The Mahatma is required to get problems fixed over the phone with Comcast (and, as it turns out, an increasing number of other companies, too).

My advice is to get a friend (or paid representative) to call on your behalf, someone not emotionally involved and who won't blow his stack (and, consequently, say something stupid, like where you work) after being told many things that are obviously, frustratingly wrong.

Microsoft has never respected numbers much.
Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, Windows 95, NT 4, Windows 98, Win2000, Windows ME, WinXP, Windows 7, Windows 8.... you see? all over the place.
What they DO tend to respect is focus groups, and they maybe determined that 10 is sexier than 9, perhaps to imply more distance from (pfft) 8
(or steal from spotlight from OS X)?