>. Seriously. The only thing Google really does is sell advertising; everything else they do can be seen as a means to that end,

Yep. Just like TV, which has been delivered via satellite since the 1980s. And radio. They make their money from ads.

Also like newspapers and magazines - subscriptions only pay for the paper they are printed on. The reporters, editors, etc are all paid for via ads.

Over 90% of all web sites too.

Enjoy your smoke signals.

Satellites aren't actually a new thing. NBC, CBS, and ABC have been using them for decades "to provide a commodity they already make money on ... allowing them to use that commodity to make even more money."

You might also remember the big satellite TV dishes from the 1980s, and Dish Network, etc.

Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal for them to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast. Take your time, I'll wait.

I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
   

Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast.

I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
   

As mentioned in the story you linked to, they had AAA in 2013. Two months after that story, they were downgraded due to the excessive debt load for the municipal fiber, which isn't fiscally sound.

>. . I see no reason that can't work for internet connections as well.

That is an interesting point. I'm not sure about all of the reasons one has often worked well and the hasn't. Perhaps having a board of volunteer citizens deploying a brand new $200 million technology project is different from having them oversee the maintaince of 100-year-old power lines in many ways. If a private company, such as the Edison Company, had already built a high-speed fiber network like they did the power network, and that network only needed to be maintained rather than constantly upgraded we might see more similar results .

I don't think they can just wait out the shutdown of the low-margin producers, then bump the prices back up. Or at least, they can't bump them back up very far, because the technology used by the low-margin producers will not be lost. It will likely get a little bit better. So they'll have to keep the price low enough that the low-margin producers can't re-enter the market.

It's even possible that tires get a little more longevity due to regenerative braking, which tends to be smoother and gentler than friction braking. The limited battery capacities of current EVs probably help as well, since they encourage efficient driving, which means no hard braking or acceleration.

I'm not sure if these factors make a measurable difference in tire wear, but it's plausible.

However, Windows 8 still rules if for no other reason than the easy OS reset/reinstall/wipeout feature

What about the applications which are the entire reason to use the computer in the first place? You've just thrown all of those away as a consequence of a vunerable system and they have to be set up again.

Even without malware infections I've had to re-install MS Office twice on a users MS Win8 machine due to it getting configuration information messed up. MS Win7 doesn't seem to have that problem, so it appears that there are even incompatibilities between the current MS Office and the current MS Windows!

Lack of adapters has never been my problem.

The problem with alternate crap releases at MS is the common one of losing experienced people over time and the new people having to come up to speed.
You see it in other industries with things like safety, where there are utterly ridiculous fuckups, then ten or more years of smooth running, then another utterly ridiculous fuckup because the people that had even heard of the earlier mistake are long gone.

The MS culture at one point meant the disposal of the weakest link in every team, no matter how good the team was, so that was a barrier to continuity. Apparently that has changed, but there appear to be a few practices in the place that still limit continuity so that every few years completely new teams have to learn how to reinvent wheels and make their mistakes in the process.

It's common in software in general and large software companies in paticular.

it's slow unless you through massive hardware at it

I've got some 32 bit stuff with 4GB of memory running ZFS that still can saturate gigabit if you ask it for a file. Not the sort of thing you want a few people hitting at once but still not slow even on crap hardware. In general terms a ZFS filesystem that is nearly full gets very slow but that's something that afflicts others as well.
You have a point with send but it still shits all over rsync in terms of speed so if there's a rare chance of interruption it's tolerated.

I had a typo. When we CAN'T do a better job than the private companies we compete with, we partner with them.

If the entire model seems completely foreign, consider state colleges and universities, who compete with private colleges to attract students. We're the same. We're a government agency just like the University of California is, and we compete just like UC competes with private universities.

>. State governments ban local governments from creating broadband networks at the request of telecom monopolies and you stand on a pulpit and preach about government non-interference. They are interfering by granting these monopolies in the first place!

We're in agreement there, 100%. Governments shouldn't grant monopolies to their donors. Where we see things differently is that perhaps you've never heard of Suddenlink or any of the two hundred other cable companies that aren't Comcast and Time Warner. Suddenlink just upgraded everyone to 50-100Mbps at no additional charge. Suddenlink gave me their technical manager's cell phone number when the customer service agent realized I knew more than he did. There is no evidence that only the corrupt politicians can run an ISP. In fact, we see that Suddenlink does it quite well, and their customers are happy. Google fiber has many happy customers, some getting the service for free*. So to make it illegal for Suddenlink to come in and offer better service than Comcast, at a lower price, is stupid. Not stupid for the politicians - Comcast is paying for their campaigns. Stupid for voters who support such nonsense.

If a city wants to getting into the ISP business, fine. Chances are, it fails and they sell the fiber to Google, after the taxpayers lose their ass on it. That's fine if they want to try, though. What they shouldn't do is make it illegal for Suddenlink to offer better service than the cirlty, at half the price the city charges.

I work for a government agency that competes directly with private companies. We offer some of the best programs in the world, and have world-renowned staff because if we didn't do a damn good job the private companies who do would get our customers. When we can beat the private competition, we partner with them to offer services customized for the needs of of local citizens and our other customers. The "other customers" pay our bills, local citizens get our services for free - without even funding us through tax dollars.

While ZFS on linux is pretty good and I'm using it on a few things it's still a bit behind the other versions in speed and reliability. At the moment BSD is still a long way ahead if you have a lot of disks and want raidz or raidz2.
I had a failure on every disk of a sixteen disk pool when setting up on linux late last year for example, just after I'd copied a few TB to it - there's still some edge cases where it falls over and dies. Reinstalled with BSD it was much faster, nearly twice as fast, and hasn't had any problems. Of course twice as fast doesn't always matter since it doesn't take much to saturate gigabit.

However you can set stuff on on BSD now for reliability and later you can just import those ZFS pools from BSD into linux with a one line command. I've done that with a web server I first setup in BSD, with mirrored disks in the pool, and then when I reinstalled as linux I just had to import the pool and I got all the contents back, all neatly mounted where they should be.

It probably won't take very long for ZFS on linux to catch up but for the moment BSD has some advantages. I love how ZFS will work even if you shove the disks into a different machine with different controllers and even a different operating system. No more worrying about whether you can get a replacement RAID card of the same model when things die.