The size theory does not hold water when you look at places like Australia and Canada, even New Zealand way down in the Southern ocean which is connected to everything by sea floor cabling has better retail speeds than most US cities. The major difference between the US and Oz/Europe is that the US ISP market is not a free market, it's a series of government granted monopolies which are by their nature are heavily weighted against consumer choice. Consumer choice is what drives competition in any market, the dismal state of retail internet in the US is entirely predictable and has nothing to do with an averaged US population density.

Trivia: Oz is ~0.8X the size of the US but the US has ~15X as many people. Canada is slightly larger than the US, shares the same continent with the US, has ~0.12X the US population, and yet both nations provide faster (average) speeds than the US.

The rest of the western world can clearly see that American's are getting screwed in broad daylight by telco's and health insurance companies because people like you still believe (and parrot) the ridiculous excuses these corporations and their pet poli-critters have to offer. Europeans are no more or less "geographically challenged" than Americans, rather your natural tribal instinct has been expertly manipulated* by corporate propaganda to fight against your own best interest. In other words we can see the root problems in the US and are trying to tell you there are better ways to structure the telco/health markets. It's you who does not understand what is happening to you and why.

manipulated* - We are all heavily influenced by what we read, hear and watch, the only effective defense is to practice self-skepticism, ie: don't just blindly accept one cherry-picked data point, pick your own comparisons and do some basic sanity tests on the "economies of scale" excuse.

Australia's land mass is comparable to that of the US but with roughly half the population of California, however there's more competition between ISP's in rural Ballarat than there is in downtown Los Angeles.\

I just tested my speed on zdnet and it comes out at ~18mbps, a pleasant surprise since it was ~12mbps for many years, the faster speed has not increased my bill. ZDnet also have an informative list of average speeds by nation, spoiler the US can't even keep up with NZ.

Read up on jumbo frames.

Did these unintentional releases coincide with solar flares or CMEs hitting the station? Did they occur when the ISS was in the SAA?

It can't be avoided. "Men at work" lost several million dollars because they had "stolen" 2 bars of "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree". It's almost certain the band had innocently re-invented the same sequence of notes. Most people (including the band) didn't notice until it was pointed out but once pointed out you can't miss it. M@W lost the case becuse the argument that they didn't "steal" it was irrelevant in the eyes of the law.

They obviously have a plan....

Can't play video games because they stereotypes women, can't listen to taylor swift because she stereotypes blacks, can't watch BBT because it stereotypes geeks....WTF is wrong with you people?

He has autistic tendencies, sex is simply not part of his routine because he's too busy with his other obsessions.

What? I pored over the article and the US BLS link in it to find the source of these statements. Aside from a pull quote that appears as an image in the article but isn't even in the article itself and is unattributed, could someone find me the source of this statistic?

Because I'm a software developer in the United States with a Masters of Science in Computer Science. All of my coworkers have at least a bachelor's degree in one field or another. And my undergrad very much so started with a sink-or-swim weed out course in Scheme and then another in Java. Yes, they were both easy if you already knew how to code but ... this article almost sounds like it's written by someone with no field experience. Granted that's a low sample set, I'd like to know where the other half of us are. Everyone keep in mind that a Computer Science degree is a relatively new thing and there very well may be elderly coders doing a great job without technically a degree in computer science.

The only way I can see the misconception spreading is that people who use Wix to drag and drop a WYSIWYG site (for you older readers that's like FrontPage meets Geocities) erroneously consider themselves "software developers".

Sure there is a legal basis for criminal charges.

You charge the guy with "reckless driving resulting in death", instead of what might be a more serious charge, lke "reckless driving resulting in death while texting"

The guy still killed someone with his car while driving. He should still be charged.

I read the speech yesterday, seemed rather tame compared to the hate US politicians regularly spout. His main point was that Ukraine must negotiate a ceasefire directly with the rebels. Russia has the upper hand, yet it is the Russians who are pressing for a diplomatic solution, Ukraine (and presumably their western sponsors) are refusing to negotiate with "terrorists". The bit about nukes was not a threat it was a defiant warning to the west, "don't fuck with Russia", it was made in the context of a plea to the west to help solve the dispute in a "modern way", ie: through diplomacy.

Putin has demonstrated he has a stronger influence over the rebels than the west has over Ukraine, a few days ago he averted a potential slaughter by calling on the rebels to open a corridor so that surrounded and outnumbered Ukrainian troops could withdraw, sadly I haven't seen any reports of efforts to defuse the situation by the Ukrainian government or the west. The consistent response of Ukraine to military defeats in various towns and cities has been to shell the people they are trying to "liberate" with heavy artillery. Such actions do nothing but kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and ultimately swell the ranks of the rebels.

I was born in 1959 at the height of the cold war, the enthusiasm of the western media to label Putin as a modern day Hitler is troubling, the fact that a large chunk of western society believes it, is frightening. The village idiot who's running things down here in Oz has been thrusting his chin in the air and sprouting macho bullshit, he's threatened to stop Putin attending the G20 meeting in Brisbane. He does not represent my views, my view is that our government should be supporting the call Putin made in the speech for a "modern" solution to what is essentially a proxy war between the nuclear heavyweights.

You founded 4chan. Care to elaborate on any of the undoubtedly countless times shit has gotten real?

You know, things you wouldn't tell WSJ when you were seeking solvency but are juicy crazy stories?

We're super big fans of C&Ds here and I would like to know what happened with your C&D to Moot.it. How did it come about and what was the resolution?

Canvas (site, not the HTML5 element) and DrawQuest were killed earlier this year. I used it briefly in its beta form and thought it was a neat idea. Any chance you could elaborate on why it was shut down? The e-mail I got was brief and vague -- were you facing copyright issues? Monetization problems? Image space issues? Care to spill your lessons learned?

It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.

As for TFA, the picture clearly demonstrates Neandertals invented tic-tac-toe.