"And the municipalities are nullifying the will of private citizens."

Every time the politicians running a municipality enact something desired by less than 100% of the residents it's "nullifying the will of private citizens", but it's also enforcing the will of other private citizens. If it does something which nullifies the will of a majority of the residents, said politicians will find themselves replaced come the next election.

Almost all of the members of the NC legislature are not residents of Wilson and I daresay the ones who voted for that law were more concerned with what TWC wanted than what Wilsonites did.

I feel reasonably sure that the elected officials in Wilson who got Greenlight started were residents of Wilson and a lot more in touch with the wishes for faster broadband of their fellow residents, wishes which TWC and Embarq weren't interested in dealing with until Wilson started Greenlight, and then, as I recall hearing at the time, all of a sudden they started whining about how they were going to "real soon now".

In my neighborhood in a different NC city, where we're only about 3 blocks from a switching station, I heard "real soon now" about DSL as Carolina Telephone and Telegraph became Sprint became Embarq became CenturyLink. At some point I gave up and went with cable modem.

He wants to believe it, therefore it must be true.

Actually the FCC is preventing states from nullifying the will of municipalities.

Make no mistake, these laws, no matter what rationales are offered, are only about protecting outfits like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from competition, and keeping certain areas reserved for them until they feel like getting around to providing service in them.

I could do it, if I had access to the Telco rights of way that were "franchised" away to the local Cable monopolies during the early part of the 80s. We are 35 years later, and haven't improved the delivery model.

Actually, it has to do with Franchise agreements between _______ cable and the local municipalities, which is NOT Capitalism, but some bad version of utility.

Bring me fiber via local Municipality, and let me choose which set of services I can get, from whatever company that wants to offer for whatever price the market will bear. Municipal owned COLO that gives market access to any company that wants it.

No, it isn't a public utility. It is a "franchise agreement" between the Local Municipality and the Corporation. The fact that this is the way things have always been done doesn't mean it has to continue this way.

I propose that instead, we bring FIBER to a COLO, from where the citizens can CHOOSE (market forces) the options and features they desire from the multitude of companies that offer these services.

BY moving the issue of "last mile" ... to a COLO rather than neighborhood corner, it solves all sorts of market issues.

Sigh. You really don't get economics at *all*, do you? (Dragonslicer, talking to you too.)

The very concept of "get away with raising the price" shows an incredible lack of understanding. The optimal price is a function of supply and demand. If a company charges less than the optimal price, they will make less money off their available supply than would otherwise be the case. If the company charges more than the optimal price ("oh my $DEITY they are getting away with it!") they will price themselves out of the range of some of their potential demand, and wind up with unsold supply. Both of these options reduce revenue, but there's nothing impossible about them; they're just bad for business.

Hopefully this is reasonably understandable. Of course, things get a bit more complicated when you consider the ways in which supply and demand can be manipulated. For example, setting a high price on a luxury can actually increase demand, up to a point, and if you have a monopoly you can restrict supply to keep prices (and profits) high as well. There's also funny, semi-irrational effects like customer/brand loyalty, where some people will voluntarily give one company a monopoly on their business.

What regulation does (at the first order) is add a new cost of doing business. This cost reduces the money a company has available to obtain supply. Thus, the balance of supply and demand shifts; when supply goes does, unless demand goes down commensurately, the optimal price goes up. The company does take less profit, yes, but (assuming demand stays constant), not by the full amount that the regulation costs them; their customers also pay more.

The catch is that demand for that company's product only remains constant when the price goes up if all of their competitors are subjected to the same regulatory cost and commensurately raise their prices as well. If not - for example, if one company is subjected to a charge that all the others are not, and they compete for the same customers - then the company being regulated will lose about that much in profit. They will probably be able to recoup some of that by accepting lower supply but raising prices a little and relying on their loyal customers to keep buying that supply, but they will end up with less money.

Mind you, it should come as no surprise that regulation, when viewed from the perspective of a single established company, is pretty much always bad. View it from other perspectives, though, and it can be quite good. A company that wants to break into a monopolized market may be able to undercut the regulated competition. A potential customer who was previously not served due to being insufficiently profitable (not unprofitable, just not maximally profitable for the company) may now be able to purchase goods or services. Somebody who was completely unrelated to the company but was being harmed by an externality of its business (for example, environmental pollutants) will have their life improved.

The question is, would you pay 1/2 the price if it was ... better?

OnePlus has a lot of detractors, but the issue of price and bloat has been answered, at least in the Phone Arena.

Bandwidth is absolutely a physical thing. There is a physical hard limit on bits per second of information transmitted through any medium. There is also a significantly tighter (though growing) technological limit on our ability to transmit, route, and receive those bits in the physical transmission media we currently employ.

Saying "transmitting a lot ... data uses nothing" is ridiculous. It uses part of the limited supply of bandwidth. This bandwidth can be expanded by installing more transmission media (cable, fiber, microwave antennas, network switches, etc.) wherever the bottleneck happens to be, but that costs money too, and companies won't do it unless they expect to be able to capitalize on the increased capacity.

And the external case's USB - IDE chip inherently differs from an external adapter's USB - IDE chip...how, exactly?

Socialism requires forced compliance to government will under threat of guns, fines or other forms of governmental aggression to force compliance to arbitrary rules created by those government.

See ObamaCare; forcing people to buy a product they neither want or need, under threat of the IRS, Dept of Treasury and the full force of the US government, and calling it a "Tax", in an effort to create a "health care utopia".

I've trained my mom, (older, confused) to call me immediately if she is confused about something someone calling her is telling her. It works, because she understands that I will protect her.

Well, the left loves to belittle religious "extremism" while siding with religious extremists. A nice progressive democracy in the middle east is derided by many in the left, while at the same time, these same people side with people who support groups like ISIL and Al-Qaeda. It is absolutely amazing the straining at gnats that goes on.

USB serial port plus Zmodem and your good to go.
I don't see the big issue.

Checking reviews is an idea that I'm already behind.

But my point is simple: Only suckers and halfwits think that they "get what they pay for," as if price is some indicator of quality.

(Which one of those are you?)