Correct. You are not typical. Your experience may be very normal in a community you would identify with such as asexuality, or it could potentially be associated with a disorder, such as hyposexuality.

Your situation may be entirely healthy and rewarding for you, and that's great. And, frankly, you have probably saved a lot of money, time and heartache compared to many of us on the other side of that spectrum! I would just caution you not to use it as a yardstick for most other people in judging questions of sexuality.

If it costs $2,000 to run the fiber from your neighborhood DSLAM-equivalent to your home NID - which in the US is a pretty common price - do you still think that would be worthwhile to you?

As it is, Verizon et. al. are paying that cost now and you are paying for it in inflated monthly connection fees but not in direct upfront costs. If most households had to pay for that upfront but got lower monthly bills, how many do you think would accept? Would it be enough for telcos to have a critical mass of customers in any given area? Probably not.

Think of how many US households in dense urban areas - the prime customers for fiber rollouts - cheat themselves out of their own money getting payday loans because they can't spare an extra couple hundred dollars, let alone "investing" a couple thousand in order to get lower bills or better service over the next several years to follow. Or think of how many people buy cellphones for free with a two-year contract that they could have saved money on if they had more cash upfront.

Moral of the story: buying and owning your own "local loop" would work for the 1% but not - at least in the US - for most of the population. And having the government own the last mile isn't free, it just means that the 100% pay higher taxes for it somehow, and there is probably a better way to serve the needy with those dollars than last mile ownership.

Well, frankly, yes. Verizon has said for several years that the cost of rolling out FTTH for FiOS was so high, and the adoption rate low enough, that they are done with expanding it for the foreseeable future. Verizon is a business, and FiOS just isn't making much profit. And that is with Verizon having no obligation to share its fiber with other providers, unlike the copper TDM network sharing requirements for UNE-P and DSL. If Verizon had to treat FiOS like a utility and/or line share, it would have been deployed in even fewer places or not at all. It sucks, but it's true.

To be treated as a utility generally means to be compensated in a "cost-plus" environment. You are allowed to charge consumers what it costs you, plus a little margin. Fair enough for water and electric, say, but those are industries where the infrastructure was built a long time ago and a need to upgrade customer-facing physical plant is not really an issue. Bu if you want to build a new power plant, or a sewage treatment plant, you have to go to a state/local Public Utilities Commission and ask permission to raise your rates to cover it, which can take a long time for review and approval. Imagine doing this every time you want to buy a new OC-3, refresh your CPE/modems, or install new wireless towers! Network upgrades will slow to a crawl. Being a regulated utility is good for steady state maintenance and uptime but bad for capital-heavy upgrades and investment.

People forget that even though the old "Ma Bell" phone network was regularly upgraded, that wasn't because of regulation. Ma Bell was actually a business with a regulated/utility portion (local phone service) and an unregulated portion (long distance and other services). For decades, the unregulated part of their business made enough money that it effectively subsidized the regulated local phone service infrastructure and upgrades. When Ma Bell was broken up, local phone service rates actually went up because the ILECs no longer had the unregulated, profit-making businesses to subsidize them. And it is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if ISPs were treated as utilities and were not using TV, phone or other high-profit services to subsidize Internet access.

No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.

The story is "slow news day" Slashdot click bait (see also Snowden, Assange, Android vs. iOS fanboy wars) that has been hashed and re-hashed endlessly. Some people think Comcast is right not to give free peering bandwidth to non-peers like Level3 and Netflix. Other people think it is incumbent upon Comcast to give free peering to Netflix or Level3 anyway because it will improve the experience of their paying subscribers. Both sides argue vociferously and neither convinces the other of anything. Move along, nothing to see here.

Your brain cells will thank you for reading just about anything else on the Internet, with the exception of foxnews.com or pitchfork media.

Yes, you will. In fact, that's the whole point - people shop at Amazon and Wal-Mart because it saves them money. Both are known widely for leveraging their scale and supply chain efficiencies to sell goods for much lower costs than any competitors.

If you're trying to suggest that eventually Amazon and Wal-Mart will be the only two employers in the US, then that's a different argument. Wal-Mart is well-known for low wages, but Amazon's employees are typically paid in a range that is high vs. the US median, but low vs. other high tech companies. Living in Seattle, I know some of my Amazon employee friends seem underpaid at $100-$120K/year around here, but I doubt that figure would get them much sympathy in most of the country.

Kinda sorta correct but only in a very narrow sense of "talk to." True, you can't currently roam across VoLTE carriers - which is why all these phones will still carry 3G chips for a long time to come. HOWEVER, when you make a VoLTE call, the carrier routes it back to their PSTN switches, and where it goes from there is immaterial - to a land line, to another carrier, to a data-less feature phone, wherever. So it's not like having a VoLTE phone means you can only call other VoLTE users on the same carrier - you can call whomever you want, wherever. It's just the VoLTE capability itself on that phone that is restricted to where you can use it.

At least it will eventually fly. All the "worst ever" list would consist of massively expensive R&D efforts that never produced a flying aircraft, like the XB-70 Valkyrie, the Boeing 2707, or to a lesser extent ones that were cancelled but had some of their R&D incorporated into a different aircraft like the B-1A. Aircraft that were expensive to develop and saw only a few flights would also top that list, like the Tupolev Tu-144 SST or the Hughes "Spruce Goose".

The F35 has been a huge clusterf**k - largely because it had some wholly unrealistic goals to start out with (*cough* V/STOL *cough*) - but aviation history is full of clusterf**ks that out-clusterf**k it by a significant margin.

Why the over-reaction? Ooh, we have a treaty that has been negotiated in secret for a year. Of course, it tends to ignore that 1.) ALL treaties are negotiated in secret, and 2.) treaties do not take force in the United States unless voted on and ratified by the US Senate, which will certainly take every opportunity to publicly expose and fight over every last detail. Never mind, that's enough reason to have a revolution!

Read up sometime on the spirit of 1789 and how it resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, shattered the lives of millions and embroiled Europe in a series of wars that would last for 20 years. I'd recommend Citizens by Simon Schama.

WTF are you talking about? Are you seriously denying the existence of the Reign of Terror from the Storming of the Bastille through the Thermidorean Reaction and even after? Why is that bullshit? It was a very, very shameful and terrible time in human history, and is extremely well documented. The same thing tends to happen in many revolutions by the way, where the revolutionaries "eat their own" and make life difficult for everyone in the process - see the USSR after Lenin's death while Stalin consolidated power. Again, try some serious historical reading.

It is very fair to say that it is good that France got rid of its monarchy. It is not a fair or smart thing at all to say that the revolution of 1789 with all its terrible aspects and consequences was a good thing to be emulated or reprised.

Nice idea, but you could be waiting a very long time.The only two times I'm aware of this happening is in music downloads and old video games (e.g. GOG.com). Why these two markets? Because a song or an ancient game past its prime is a "cheap" asset that there's little for the content provider to lose on. Nothing has happened yet in the higher dollar-purchase value markets of movies, TV, e-books, AAA video games or AAA productivity software titles to convince the content creators that DRM isn't making them more money than if they got rid of it.

Not to say it might not happen someday, but for now content providers appear to have done the math on their more valuable assets (i.e. anything that isn't a $0.99 song or a five-dollar retro videogame) and decided DRM isn't hurting them, it's helping. So don't hold your breath.

WHY the hell would they do that? They pay lots of money for those TV channels. You would not be paying them any money for them. Why, from their perspective, is that bad?

Maybe did you mean that was the best thing they ever did, since your life is more "productive and lively" with no TV for the last five years?

I'm very curious. What country are you in? What does "4G" mean to you (LTE, HSPA+, WiMAX)? What are the throughput speeds? Is there any cap?

Perhaps, but my wife is neither a fairy nor a ballerina, and our daughter still latched onto those pretty quickly. All this despite the absolute minimum of exposure to "girly" mass media.

I'm not trying to suggest that all gender traits are inherent rather than socialized. I'm just saying that not all gender traits are socialized rather than inherent.

Also, I would really prefer that my wife not dress like a coal miner.

Not necessarily. When we had our first girl, my wife and I deliberately kept her away from all things Disney and princess-y to avoid just this situation.

Guess what happened? By age two, she was already trying to wear mommy's high heels and had firmly decided her future vocation would be fairy ballerina - all without ever having seen a Disney/Barbie/whatever TV show, not having any dress-up dolls, or any of the other stereotypical toys that I had always assumed were what caused the gender role identification in young girls. It turns out that some little girls just love "girly" things because it's baked into their DNA somewhere.

I have no dog in this fight - I have literally never heard of "Ira Winkler" before today, at least that I remember. But from a quick review, the linked page seems needlessly argumentative and dismissive. Do you really need to take shots at people for saying cliches like "opinions are like a**holes - everybody has one?" Is that a reason to disqualify this guy from having an authoritative voice?

Again, I don't know this guy and there may be dozens of reasons to blow him off as a blowhard douchebag. The linked article, however, seemed very biased and did not appear to provide those reasons conclusively. Can anyone provide a link to something resembling an impartial view of this guy and his work?