If this was a Libertarian Paradise, you probably would pay $500 dollars a month for landline service while someone in a densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month.

Why would that be so bad?

People that want rural living should pay for rural living and should not force urbanites to subsidize their quiet, peaceful life on the farm away from the noise of the city.

The US government has spent the past 50+ years using subsidies and regulations encourage people to get out of the cities.

What has it accomplished except to gut cities and spread asphalt everywhere?

I have to agree, but it's too bad in some ways, IMO.

I used to get so much joy programming the metal or tinkering with the assembly that came out of the compiler.

Doing that is still possible, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The dream of abstraction is a bit of a nightmare for those that like to get into the guts of the machine.

GPU programming is another example, though Mantle allows the programmer to get a bit closer to the hardware.

Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.

Citation, please, because Akamai's State of the Internet mostly disagrees with you.

But I'd take this in a heartbeat over an AMD counterpart. The maxwell chips are leagues ahead of anything AMD's got.

WIth one exception: the R9 280x when used for DP floating point compute.

For about $250 you can get an R9 280x that in one second will do one trillion double precision floating point operations. That's about 10x faster than the Maxwell cards.

With such a card AMD should have had the scientist/engineer space for GPGPU locked up by now.

But, you know, they're AMD, so...

Personally I love the GTX 750. It gives the biggest bang-for-the-buck and running at about 55 watts max or so it usually doesn't require a larger power supply. It can run completely off motherboard power going to a 16-lane 75 watt PCIe slot.

It's the perfect card for rescuing old systems from obsolescence, IMO.

The only trouble you might have is finding a single-slot-wide card if your system doesn't have room for a double slot card, though in my case I found a double-slot card that I could modify to fit in a single-slot of an old Core 2 Duo E8500 system.

And heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all, even with the mod I did. The low power of the card means less heat. Even if heat becomes a problem, the card is capable of slowly clocking itself down, though I've never seen that yet, even running Furmark.

Sub freezing temperatures aren't necessary.

In the UK, for example, for every one degree drop in temperature below 18C, deaths in the UK go up 1.5%. The risk of heart attack and stroke seem to increase with dropping temperatures.

And in the USA, the mortality rate is highest in January.

Vietnam shows a similar pattern.

The problem is that too many people think "science" is whatever a person credentialed by some authority professes.

That's wrong.

"Science" is more properly a way of thinking. A "scientist" should be anyone willing to put the evidence offered by reality above intuitions, guesses, dogma, culture, and any other authority while also being open-minded to all possible explanations consistent with reality. It's a skepticism, even skepticism of one's own theories -- "a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" as Feynman put it.

Sometimes even credentialed scientists forget that.

When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens.

I don't think this is a business issue. This is really more about one especially self centered generation looking out for itself and controlling most of the funding mechanisms.

If it were a race or ethnicity or religion it would be an obvious example of favoritism.

But they're the baby boomers so they get a pass, mostly because the people in a position to call out such BS are themselves baby boomers.

Most importantly, no one is even close to solving no limit -- where you are allowed to vary your bet size. That changes everything.

To the average joe poker player, I'd say what's most important here is that the perfect solution is only for a two player game.

Things become much more complicated when players>2.

That is a lie. Why would you pick classes that wouldn't transfer?

When I taught at Tri-County Tech, nearly all of my student's credits would transfer to real schools. Our classes were stupid easy and you got credit for some very hard college classes. It was a great scam for the students.

The real scam is that all this free and easy money doesn't go to education. It goes to educators -- educators all too willing to just take all that extra money to provide classes that are "stupid easy".

The students are just mules that move the money from tax payers to professional educators.

Free markets have utterly failed when it comes to infrastructure. Why should we trust it with something as important as communications?

"Utterly failed"? Stop exaggerating.

The right answer (whatever it might be) begins by being honest.

I think it's a little too early to completely rule out a connection.

The greatest variation in solar output over the course of a cycle is in the blue to ultraviolet part of the spectrum and that happens to correspond to frequencies of light that are the most penetrating to sea water.

It's possible then that the extra energy during previous vigorous sunspot cycles accumulates in the ocean over the course of many cycles and is slowly released later.

A weak cycle now might at the moment be partially masked by the release of decades of accumulated energy.

The spectrum is not that limited. I live in an apartment building and can see over 30 different wireless networks. I have absolutely no issues with my own wireless.

You can't compare the two situations.

What you're seeing are beacon frames. Even if 99% of them are trashed by noise, your wireless networking hardware will remember the 1% that get through and log the AP's information.