Comcast and Verizon have an government-approved agreement to not compete. Comcast sold Verizon spectrum, and in return Verizon has stopped rolling out FIOS. Now you can walk into a Comcast store and buy Verizon Wireless Plans bundled with your cable sub, and buy Comcast subscriptions in Verizon Wireless stores in regions where FIOS isn't available.

What competition?

So, what you're saying, is you didn't know what anyone was talking about and opened your yap, and now you don't know how to extricate yourself from the thread without admitting you're an idiot and didn't read the post that was being responded to. You know, the one that implied the DoD was funding the development of Call of Duty for propaganda purposes.

I actually bought a new router within the last year. A "nice" Buffalo model with DD-WRT built in. Only to find out DD-WRT doesn't support native IPv6 (which my old, faulty NetGear did, go figure). They just support Toredo or other tunneled IPv6 solutions.

Man, was I disappointed.

I always found it amusing that the Author's Guild always seems to enthusiastically back whatever it is the publishers want to happen, even to the detriment of their supposed constituency...

I'd rather hear from authors, personally, than a group that fought against libraries/universities making electronic archives of books for research...

Look, if authors/publishers aren't happy with Amazon, they don't have to do business with them. They can sell their books direct to the customer, even in a format the user can load right onto their Kindle, nothing's stopping them. Saying Amazon is the "only buyer" is B.S. The term 'buyer' doesn't mean anything (in the way you're using it) when you're dealing with purely electronic goods. Amazon doesn't "buy" an inventory of ebooks to sell, there's no supply to monopolize.

Excluding (only for the sake of argument) outlier cases like textbooks, with significant expense spent on gathering and checking specialized materials, I don't believe for a moment the "fixed costs" for the average mass-published novel, self-help book, or whatever are anywhere high enough to justify the publishers' objections to Amazon's "maximum" price of $9.99 for an ebook. Let's see some actual numbers to back up these assertions.

And even if (again, for the sake of argument) it's true that traditional publishers' costs are high enough to justify $14.99 for an ebook, then maybe they should consider changing the way they do business to bring those costs down instead of illegally colluding to raise prices.

Yes, it's a serious question. How do you sell something with a reproduction cost of zero below cost?

How do you sell an ebook below cost? Do you pay a customer to take it?

...

Netflix isn't using any of Verizon's bandwidth.

Verizon's customers are using Verizon's bandwidth.

The climate on the gulf coast is too stormy, so the cane grown there is more fibrous than the stuff they grown in Brazil. As a result, the amount of sugar per ton of plant is embarrassingly smaller. We shouldn't be growing sugar cane in the U.S., and we should take off any import duties on sugar. Everyone would be better off.

I come from of one of those sugar growing areas. While I'm nostalgic about the cane fields near my home, as an adult I realize the only reason that cane exists is because of crazy tariffs and the state and local governments willing to look the other way on safety regulations.

A truly "free" OS would not have a "monopoly" market place for apps

Well good thing I can install alternative app stores on my Android phone, then.

You should look at U.S. Law 112-95 Section 336. In particular, it says to be an RC Plane:

In this section, the term ââmodel aircraftâ(TM)â(TM) means an unmanned aircraft that isâ"
(1) capable of sustained flight in the atmosphere;
(2) flown within visual line of sight of the person operating
the aircraft; and
(3) flown for hobby or recreational purposes.

This guy doesn't meet those requirements, hence his aircraft is treated as a UAS, and for those the FAA requires individual certification and a LOA.

There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.

ADS-B is not some sort of magic bullet, despite what they've told you. It *may* increase safety (though studies have shown all the glass we've put in cockpits probably does the opposite), but it's not suddenly going to prevent all collisions.

In addition, STUFF BREAKS. Your UAS that depends on ADS-B for sense-and-avoid isn't going to see that Bonanza with a transponder failure. If all the electrical systems in a manned aircraft go out, the pilot can still at least bring it down where it won't hurt anyone, the same is not true of a UAS. If you really want to be terrified, you should look at some of the FAA's results on simulating GPS system failures in a future, ADS-B only scenario.

And that's all irrelevant anyway, as there is never going to be a requirement (at least probably not in my lifetime) for manned aircraft to have an ADS-B transponder anywhere they don't already need a Mode C transponder. That will never fly, pun intended. The vast majority of private pilots will never need ADS-B out, as they don't fly where it matters. There are huge swaths of airspace you can fly in WITHOUT A RADIO, much less a transponder. This is a matter of philosophy: the airspace of the United States belongs to the people, and they should have free use of it. The FAA is only supposed to provide the minimum amount of regulation and oversight to keep everyone safe.

Finally the reason this stuff costs so much is the certification overhead (and the low production numbers). Sure, we could make it cheaper by cutting out certification requirements, but that goes back to my original statement: We'd have to accept lower safety levels. There is a legitimate argument to be made that the current certification regime may not actually result in increased safety, and that maybe it would be better for more aircraft to be equipped with SOMETHING, even if it's not certified, but that will require years of study to determine.

And as a final aside, the costs aren't quite that bad. The company I work for makes a pretty good ADS-B in/out solution for about $4k. You need a compatible transponder, too, but those aren't that bad. And a compatible display if you want TIS-B/FIS-B. Otherwise we have an ADS-B-in only solution that's battery powered and integrated w/ an iOS or Android device for about $600.

And they're nowhere near coming up with guidelines, as I'm pretty sure there's honestly no way to do this AND maintain current safety levels. At this point I'm pretty sure that manned and unmanned flight are just fundamentally incompatible.