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Comment Where are you in town? (Score 1) 533

I'm getting 65 Meg down and 12 Meg up on my commiecast connection in Seattle... we pay for 50/10...

...That said, they had to come out and work on the lines, as before we were lucky to get 12 Meg down and 5 Meg up...

Just tangentially, it sounds like people living in the parts of town where the previous mayor was talking about implementing municipal broadband all got upgraded infrastructure, probably as the ISP majors tried to argue that municipal broadband wasn't needed. In contrast, I'm in Northgate, still reasonably dense and still well within in the city limits, but our neighborhood was outside of the areas marked for municipal broadband rollout -- and I'm still stuck with 4 down / 1.5 up.

Cheers,

Comment 1) Your map isn't Europe. 2) Size doesn't matter. (Score 2) 533

Not all of us think that. Some of us think "Puny European Countries". Have you seen an overlay of Europe verses the USA?

Have you seen a map of Europe? All of it, I mean. I have. Your map sure doesn't look like it. Apparently Poland is no longer European? Or Hungary? Or Finland? Etc.

Here's a slightly better example. Just eyeballing, it looks like all of Europe together (including places like Greece and Romania and Finland, etc.) is probably bigger than the lower 48 states of the US.

And please, stop with that ridiculous "population density" canard. Finland has better broadband than the US. Iceland has better broadband than the US. Former Soviet Bloc countries Bulgaria and Romania have better broadband than the US. Heck, even Utah has better broadband than most of the rest of the US, and Utah isn't exactly known as a cheek-by-jowl, high-population center. I live in Seattle, within the city limits in a reasonably dense part of town, and I can only wish I had a 50mbps symmetric up-down connection for $70 a month. Instead, the best deal I could find was an entry-level business plan bundled with phone service at 4mbps down / 1.5mbps up, for roughly $125 a month. Laughably bad, painfully expensive, infuriatingly limited.

The key common thread in the success cases is that the major ISPs don't get to dictate broadband policy. Population density and size of the country pretty much has jack shit to do with the issue (unless you want to go into meta-arguments about the size and density of a polity and how that impacts public policy).

Cheers,

Comment Re:autoplay sucks anyway (Score 1) 108

There is a legal obligation to focus on profits.

No, there is a legal obligation to act based on another party's interests, not based solely on another party's financial interests. Shareholders have interests other than money—having clean drinking water for their kids, supporting cultural growth, improving the quality of education, not getting buried in lawsuits from the government when you cross a legal line (though this one arguably is financial, just over the longer term), and so on. That's why you don't see shareholders suing companies for giving money to charities, for example. A purely financial misinterpretation of the word "fiduciary" would make such donations illegal.

Comment Re:Autoplay is EVIL (Score 1) 108

400 kilobytes? For 30 seconds of video? That's barely a hundred kilobits per second. Are you sure that wasn't a reference movie to content at a different URL? Because that's not likely to be anything approaching what most people would call "full quality" unless the content started out as a postage-stamp-sized cell phone video....

Comment Re:good plan (Score 1) 200

It is a government actions, specifically this lawsuit is based on the federal anti-trust laws, which are completely unconstitutional and illegal and detrimental to the economy in every way.

You're joking, right? Antitrust laws are only detrimental to one aspect of the economy: the unregulated ability for a few individuals or corporations to make an obscene amount of money at the expense of everyone else. When a monopoly exists, it gains an incredible amount of power over the free market that is not easy to overcome. At that point, a free market no longer realistically exists without government intervention, because the ability to break into that market becomes hopelessly compromised. To the extent that free markets are generally considered to be the epitome of a good economic system these days, clearly any government intervention required to ensure that such free markets continue to exist is justified, legal, and constitutional.

Comment The joys (and problems) of romaji (Score 4, Interesting) 143

Or, because its a Japanese module it is a word in their language. I don't know, something like "Hope".

Depending on how it's spelled in Japanese, it could be tons of different words.

Looking just at how it's spelled in romaji (the Roman alphabet), Kibo has no macron over the "o", which, strictly speaking, means a short "o" value. (Instead of syllabic stress as used in English, Japanese uses a concept called a "mora" by linguists, referring to the time length of a sound.)

(Also, because Slashcode is still not unicode-compliant, and is fundamentally US-centric, I'm using the ^ circumflex over vowels instead of the overbar macron, which Slashcode just eats and refuses to display.)

Kibo with a short "o" could mean:

  • one's youngest aunt
  • the size, scale, or scope of a thing
  • the Buddhist divinity Hârîtî, sometimes viewed as a goddess of childbirth and children
  • a family's death register

Meanwhile, kibô with a long "o" could mean:

  • hope
  • something planned and hoped for
  • a plan, planning
  • a deadly crisis, a critical moment
  • an unusual or wild plan
  • prayerful hope
  • the sixteenth night of a lunar month
  • starving poverty
  • a devilishly clever plan or plot
  • the fourteenth night of a lunar month
  • hopeful anticipation
  • deception, glamour
  • slander, blame, strong criticism
  • a plan to ensnare or entrap someone
  • a shortage or deficiency after running out of something

This range of meanings for the Japanese word kibo or kibô is almost silly, it's so broad. I hope this might begin to explain why written Japanese still uses kanji (Chinese characters) -- all of the above meanings that fall under one or two romaji spellings are each spelled differently when written in kanji.

Anyway, for the satellites, I'm pretty sure the intended meaning must clearly be youngest aunt. Or maybe it's a plan to ensnare or entrap someone? :-P

Cheers,

Comment Re:Here come the Samsung fanboys... (Score 1) 110

That only applies where the patent owner is the one selling the item, which is not what we are talking about here - check out the following line from that Wikipedia article:

A patent gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing into the U.S. the patented invention during the term of the patent

See the emphasis I have added.

Where a patented item is being sold by a third party to another third party, no exhaustion of rights exists - both parties are liable because both parties are individually breaching the patent holders rights.

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