Or it means the plane flies backwards.

Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).

I like the idea of using a floor drain to remove gas.

I am an underwater fire fighter, you insensitive clod?

I'd raise the question of price. Just because you have a 25 Mbps option doesn't mean it is priced in an affordable fashion. If your local ISP offers 25 Mbps a month for $300 a month it is available but not affordable. I'm not saying that it needs to be extremely inexpensive, but merely rolling out an "option" and then pricing it such that you know you'll rarely need to deploy it shouldn't give the ISPs the right to claim all of those users have this as an option.

Do you know how much tax payer money has been given to the telecoms for the very purpose of implementing broadband nationwide? We've already paid them and so far got very little in return.

We got exactly what they promised us*.

* Promises retroactively changed after the telecoms lobbied the government to declare the promises retroactively fulfilled even when they weren't really.

In many cases, these government sanctioned monopolies are the result of the dominant corporation buying influence in the local or state government and getting a law passed that outlaws competition (or places so many hurdles in front of it that it might as well be outlawed). For example, the state laws that say that local governments can't launch their own municipal broadband initiatives even if the big corporations don't serve these local areas. The state laws were bought and paid for by the corporations who simply don't want to compete against anyone else (especially not municipal broadband) even if "compete against" means the municipal broadband serves and area that they don't serve. (If they ever decide to one day serve that area then they'll have to compete and that can't be allowed!)

Either that or they'll add "Broadband Improvement Tax" to their below the fold charges. Of course, it won't really be a tax and the money won't really go to improving their broadband access. You can rest assured, though, that your price won't go up!*

* The advertised price, that is. Not counting all of the below the fold "taxes" and fees that they add in.

True. As much as people like knocking PHB's and management in general, there are some problems where a technological solution isn't appropriate and a management solution is.

Yep. And this costs way less than bringing in and swapping out a part.

I don't see any real reason not to just spin the spare drives.

Bomb an ATM in America? One way ticket to Gitmo.

If you bomb an ATM, you go to prison, not Gitmo. Gitmo is for getting around that pesky Sixth Amendment thing, not for actual criminals.

But it's all up to you guys. What I am telling you is what I, and many millions of older generation of Chinese had gone through --- we do not trust the authority, we do not trust anyone but ourselves

And neither did the people who did the killing in China. The idea, inherited from Lenin, was to have a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries guarding the masses - in your terminology, "sheeples" - under absolute authority of the Party. Mao and Stalin then took this idea to its logical conclusion.

What I'm saying is that calling people "sheeples" is inherently anti-democratic. You can't trust sheeples, after all. Also, no society can survive unless the majority of its members stay put most of the time, which seems to be the going definition of "sheeple". And so you can at most let them play at ruling themselves when nothing's at stake - but as soon as there's trouble on the horizon, it's time for the shepherds to take control. Which they did in China, and are trying to do in the US. The results speak for themselves.

It's a fine example of how cultural memes perpetuate themselves, even when it'd be better they didn't. Much as you might hate the Chinese government, you still carry its - for a lack of better word - spirit with you. And there's no easy way to get rid of it.

Which is hilarious considering that bible thumpers tend to be the "kill em all and let god sort it out" type. Why else are executions so much more common in the bible belt? The more moderate religious people are the live and let live ones.

If you're locked up for years, despite having done nothing wrong, I'm not sure I see much difference.

And that doesn't even get into how your life could be ruined after the "oops, sorry about the imprisonment. You're free to go." Your old job definitely won't be available and new job opportunities might be skittish about hiring someone who went to prison. Even if they've expunged your record, people might still know you went to prison, might still think of you as guilty, and treat you as such. In short, your suffering might not end once you get out of jail.

There's a good reason that our justice system is supposed to be stacked in favor of the defendant.

Think about it. We're not going to discover alien life by having it drop by for a visit. We're going to discover them by long-range communications, and reply the same way.

Lasers might not be a bad way to get a decent amount of bandwidth between stars, and we'd need a big freaking one to be visible at astronomic distances.