The US already has near-ubiquitous coverage of populated areas. There used to be some well-known dead spots near me (in Ohio), but they're gone: Things work just fine in or around any town or village, nowadays.

That doesn't mean that doing so was cheap. Or that giving me 4G coverage down in the holler at my buddy's farm in Kentucky will ever happen (there is no central electricity implicit in those parts, and last I was there I might have had enough service to send an expensive text message once I climbed a hill).

One reason the U.S. will never have the fastest/best/cheapest internet or cell phone service is that some areas of the US are ridiculously rural, hilly, and hard to cover.

Which, again, reinforces my point.

The "Universal Service Fund", which we all (in the US) pay for with our phone bill, isn't providing for much Universal Service...much less the hard-wired bandwidth service of the sort that actually fucking works.

*clears throat* *ahem* Depending on locale, apparently: Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than other people.

So that's why I see bumble bees trying really goddamn hard to try to crawl inside of the little blossoms on my pepper plants* that they totally don't fit inside of at all.

It reminds me of myself, shaking down the couch for change for tobacco money before ATMs and credit cards became commonplace. Or rather, groping for the cigarette at the bottom of the recliner that I can see with a flashlight, but can't reach at all without looking like a monkey fucking a football and even then it isn't easy.

Or, as Rammstein said, "like an elephant in the eye of the needle." Whatever, you get my point.

*: Pepper plants, as all nightshades, produce nicotine in their foliage and presumably their flowers.

Basically what a cell signal already does when a user moves between towers, but Over The Internet. So probably already patented by 30 different companies.

This is why I would love to see a cheap data only service. There is no reason for smartphones to have dedicated voice/text service when it could all be taken care of by a data connection and a VoIP provider.

This is why cheap data service can't exist right now.

Someone has to build the towers, string the cables, install the radios and antennas. Someone has to change the oil in the genset, and (depending) rotate out the diesel. Someone has to maintain the aircraft warning lamp. Someone has to handle ESD (lightning) damage. And still, someone has to deal with farmers and their backhoes.

And mitigate interference and overlap issues. And deal with routing issues. And. And. And.

There's no way for a data service to be cheap: With modern codecs, voice (which is much, much better than my first digital/non-AMPS cell phone) already uses very little data, and Youtube uses lots. Which is why unlimited voice/text service is cheap, and genuinely unlimited data is like a hen's tooth.

I used to get consistently better bandwidth with my OG Droid on genuinely-unlimited 3G than on any public hotspot, so when I was stuck in one place for awhile (selling/"donating" blood plasma, for instance) I'd just stream Netflix over 3G instead of using Biolife's carrier-grade TDM-sourced Wifi.

But in doing so I knew that I was squandering a limited resource: Actual bandwidth, aka spectral capacity.

And the only way to increase that total available bandwidth is to have more towers with smaller footprints AND maybe an institution of like-minded people who securely open up their home routers for the world to use (didn't Vodaphone do this on the other side of the pond?).

But the first case involves lots of money (see above), and the second case involves cooperation and trust and hardware that is smart enough to configure itself to deal with interference mitigation autonomously.

Both concepts can have traction and will work with existing technology, though the latter will fall apart with non-stationary users since there's a -lot- to be desired in a given Wifi client device's ability to handle roaming between multiple disparate networks.

Bottle glass is one of the most recyclable things we commonly use: You just sort it by color (which can be automated), put it into the kiln with the other glass, and wind up with a product that is just as good as virgin material.

But transporting it is expensive, so much so that it can be cheaper to produce new glass from sand.

If it doesn't get landfilled, it typically just piles up waiting for a use. As I understand it, very little post-consumer recycled glass ever turns into anything useful.

Knowing this, I still recycle glass...but only because it keeps the bags that my actual garbage goes into from being cut up by broken glass, making it easier and cleaner for me to handle.

Waze has never been a simple GPS, which is why I use it every time I drive instead of my completely adequate Garmin ("simple GPS") that I haven't used in years.

You youngin's might not realize this, but the ability to set arbitrary caller ID information on outbound calls has been baked-in since day 0.

Indeed, but this isn't anything new.

Waze already knows where you are whenever you're using it. It's a critical part of the functionality that allows it to work.

Furthermore, there's an excellent chance that Google also knows where you are, whether you think they do or not.

Personally, I'm OK with this at this time. Waze has saved me hours of waiting in traffic on the freeway, and Google's Location History helps me generate accurate invoices without wasting time on note-taking.

Your opinion may (and perhaps should) vary.

Why can't you tether on Verizon? I do it all the time, and have since the OG Droid days. No big deal.

I've always wanted a browser that ignores all of those "suggestions" and just displays everything on the web in a uniform well readable style. Just not as boring as with disabling CSS completely.

The closest I've found for this is the Readability bookmarklet, which often does the right thing and produces readable text (including simple inline graphics!) in plain paragraphical form.

You don't want this at home.

This is technology helps solve density issues. Your home (unless you're into regular LAN parties) isn't a place that has those issues.

If you've got cat5 to 4 spots in your house where people tend to be, just put a dual-band 802.11 access point in each of those spots, dial down the power output, and done.

You can do this today.

20-ish years ago, I saw a Jensen car stereo with that feature: The detachable face had electrical contacts for only power and ground; the rest of the signalling was optical.

It made sense to me at the time, and I fully expected it to catch on....fast forward 20 years, and I'm still occasionally cleaning the contacts on my JVC car stereo to allow it to work at all.

And I've mangled enough Micro-USB connectors (just one, but that's enough) that I really don't like dealing with them on a regular basis.

We need to protect people from doing stupid stuff

No, we don't.

New cars tend to be much, much heavier. If it is true that performance is about the same, then it would serve as a testament to the increase in both engine output and efficiency.

They don't need the data.

They already don't have control over distributed demand.

Therefore they don't need control over distributed supply.

Joe stuffing 2kW into the local grid in a not-monitored-in-realtime, not-centrally-controlled fashion simply helps to offset Fred's not-monitored-in-realtime, not centrally-controlled air conditioner, or Tim's arc welder, or a concert venue firing up on a Saturday night, a 500-ton factory press, or...

Of course someone has to distribute this power, and that someone is "the power company." And that's what Joe pays them to do with the difference between buy/sell electric rates.

The only real story here is "Monopoly turns greedier; demands more cash." Everything else is complete unrepentant bullshit.

I use Waze for predicting travel time. It knows the speed of every regularly-driven segment of roadway with half-hour precision, and knows about (many) road closures.

It also tells you about traffic cameras, and active speed traps, and road hazards, and does a pretty darn good job of rerouting around sudden traffic jams and accidents automatically.

(Yes, this is spammy. No, I don't work for Waze. But I do edit their maps for fun, for free.)