I'm a Comcast customer. Despite the horror stories they've largely been fine for me and I haven't had any major issues. I have their 100Mb service and consider it on the high end of being a reasonable value. I only subscribe to one of their low end TV packages (costs about $35/month) because their TV offering are WAY overpriced for what you get. There are about 10-15 channels I give a crap about and I'm not willing to pay more than I am now. I've thought about dropping the TV altogether but I do like to watch some TV now and then. TiVo makes it bearable to do so. A package with more channels would double the price I pay and I'd get maybe 3-5 extra channels I might watch. Just not good value.

Basically I'm waiting for ala-carte TV or a service through our network connection that provides basically the same thing. (No Netflix, Hulu, etc aren't there yet) I consider TV a frivolous luxury and I'm not about to drop $200/month for a bunch of channels I'll never watch.

You are aware that sealed connectors are a thing, yes? I run a company that makes wire harnesses and it is a pretty straight forward exercise to make a water tight sealed connector good to reasonable depths. (It's very easy if you don't care about bulk) I don't know if this is the case here but I suspect it wouldn't be terribly hard for Apple to make a port water tight when open or connected. You could have corrosion of the pins over time, particularly with salt water but it would have to be pretty bad to compromise the seal.

Kind of stupid to post things that are so easily refuted.

Obama was a US Senator longer (3-Jan-2005 to 16-Nov-2008) that Palin was Governor of Alaska (4-Dec-2006 to 26-July-2009). Plus Obama was a member of the Illinois senate for 8 years. Palin was mayor of Wasilla (population 7,800) and served as Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission for less than a year. All other jobs held by either one were nothing on a national stage or significant enough to count as meaningful experience. So no, Palin did not at any time have more experience in public office than Obama.

You mean except for being a US Senator and Secretary of State?

Based on what? You clearly have your facts wrong so any opinions you might have based on your incorrect assertions are based on false premises.

It's also a brilliant way to make less terrorists a short time later. Can't say that I approve of baiting people like this but I also can't say I'm overly sad that the world has a few less lunatics in it.

Seriously, Texas has to be pretty close to the top of the list of stupid places to go in guns-ablaze over a perceived insult. These are people who have been known to put gun racks on golf carts. Even if they survive the attack Texas has the death penalty and isn't afraid to use it.

Demonstrably not true.

There was a 4.2 earthquake in western Michigan yesterday. An earthquake that size isn't news particularly in California. It was barely news in Michigan and they don't get earthquakes that size.

Doesn't work, not at scale anyway. The notion that location doesn't matter is a myth. Silicon Valley is what it is precisely because the people that make it what it is are located there. Move them somewhere else and Silicon Valley doesn't exist - not as we know it. Detroit is the automotive capital of the world because of the people and companies that are located there. You cannot skype that into existence. It doesn't work. You have to have the people actually living and working there.

Don't forget that Detroit metro has among the highest density of engineering talent in the country and has for the last 50 years. There is a LOT of technology in the area already and it's not particularly hard to find talent. The biggest problem in Detroit has historically been getting funding for ventures. There is nothing quite like the VC base there is in Silicon Valley. Of course that's true almost everywhere else

That has nothing inherently to do with being in California. I've never lived much west of the Mississippi and I've never signed or even been asked to sign a non-compete in well over 20 years. While they are legal in my state they are not particularly common.

You missed one. A third thing it is good for is grid level load leveling. If there is storage capacity in the power network you can significantly reduce the effect of fluctuating demand to the companies generating the power. Coal and nuclear plants take a while to respond to changing demand. If demand spikes then the power stations have more time to react.

Which is exactly what I said. Consumption (delivery) of power is a variable cost. If you consume no power because you have solar panels then no cost is incurred to the power company. Maintaining the infrastructure to deliver that power is largely a fixed cost so if an end consumer wants to tie into the grid they should rightly incur their share of the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.

Those are variable costs as they vary with units of power sold.

Simply part of the variable cost of power sold. Similar to shoplifting losses for a retail store. It's a known part of the cost of the product being sold. If they don't sell the power then no cost is incurred to buy it or produce it.

What price the power company pays for the power delivered to end customers and where it comes from is largely irrelevant to the end customer. Electrons are fungible assets. Whether they produce it themselves or they buy it on the spot market or buy it on contract isn't important as far as you and I are concerned. They are paying for some fixed amount of grid maintenance and some variable amount of power delivery regardless of who actually produces the power. The equation doesn't change just because they buy the power from a third party.

I'm a certified cost accountant in my day job and this argument falls flat if they are actually charging in a rational manner for their services. The cost of maintaining the grid is (or should be) a separate charge from the cost of the electricity you actually use. Maintenance is a (roughly) known fixed cost, usage is a variable cost. If the person maintains a connection to the grid it is a fairly straightforward proposition to charge them a flat rate for the privilege which covers their portion of the infrastructure maintenance. Infrastructure maintenance cost is not generally strongly dependent on usage for electricity so they don't have wear issues as a general rule. If they aren't separating charges like this then they are Doing It Wrong.

The only reason the utilities have to be upset is just that they aren't making as much money.

In my experience it's mostly disinterest and/or fear. They haven't needed it most of their lives, they are quite set in their ways and they aren't terribly interested in learning something new. They will loudly proclaim how they "just don't get this stuff" but usually that's an excuse for not wanting to learn because their brains work fine. If it's really easy the might give it a whirl but if learning requires real effort they usually cannot be bothered.

The guys who own my company are about 70. They are quite intelligent but will repeatedly ask me the same questions ("how do I print this", etc) despite having been given the explanation plenty of times. It has nothing to do with their brain but they just don't care about the answer so they don't bother committing it to memory. Easier to just ask someone else who has bothered to care.

Wrong. It is because of economics. There simply isn't enough business available to support a competitive set of ISPs where I live. I live in a town with about 10,000 residents on the distant outskirts of a major metro area. There is zero chance that any new ISP would be able to win enough business to make the investment worth their while.

I have a phone company and a cable company both of which could offer service to my residence but do not offer equivalent service. The phone company technically provides DSL service to near me but it is FAR slower and economically a non-starter. The only other option is to go LTE through the mobile phone providers but due to data caps that too is an economic non-starter. It's just not competitive at all and there is no reasonable prospect of it becoming so no matter what my local government does.

Even if my locality were to invite every ISP in the world to come play the simple fact is that in the semi-rural area where I live there isn't enough business to support more than one or two lines to my house. Since the government does not require the ISP to be separate from the company providing the wire to the house then there is effectively no way for any new entrants to make money. The capital costs of building out their own network are astronomical so there has to be a pretty substantial company backing it and enough business they can capture to make it worth their while.

I don't. The economics of the situation are plain and a regulated monopoly will get me better service than any feasible set of competitors where I live. The best case I could realistically hope for is a duopoly which isn't a prospect to get excited about.

Who is your ISP? Mine is Comcast and they very much deserve to be regulated rather heavily. I have a "choice" of precisely one ISP where I live and I can assure you that they abuse the privilege. I want them to provide me a pipe to my house and get out of the way. They do not need to be in the business of determining what speed packets should be delivered to my location. Particularly if they start prioritizing their own content (Comcast owns NBC for instance) over what I actually want to watch. There is NO benefit to me as the consumer for my local telecom monopoly to not be regulated. None.