Right now, something like 1% of all flu in the US that is attempted to be subtyped is NOT H1N1. See http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ So basically, if the person has the flu, it is almost definitely H1N1.
It does sound to me like a coded version of "We're supposed to pee in our own toilets and whatever else, but that is pointless. Everyone up on the ISS secretly agreed to ignore this nonsense and just not tell on each other, but are tired of having to pretend."
Not because of this at least, the telcos bought almost all of this spectrum.
See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/4g-war-conflict-of-interests-loom-behind-possible-dtv-delay.ars
Basically, Verizon wants to deploy their 4G cellular network using the spectrum that will be freed up, and Clearwire wants that to take as long as possible so they can get more users to sign up for WiMAX first (which is already somewhat deployed).
In reality, yeah a 4 month delay probably won't have much impact on the amount of customers either service gets since the demand isn't very high right now. I think pricing and service quality will make more of a difference. If it gets pushed back further, that could change.
Arguably, the people who sell hardware & related things to Verizon for 4G networks (some of which are in or affiliated with Obama's administration) have some to gain/lose depending on the timing. Probably not much because 4G will be deployed either way, but thats the argument.
To answer the question, there are two things going on.
One is the interference from the transmissions, which lowers the signal-to-noise ratio if you are on the same (or an overlapping) channel. The lower that gets, the more errors and the worse your performance. So to combat that, you can either use a different channel (1, 6, and 11 are probably the best to try, but you could just measure your performance on all of them and use whatever is best), or as you said force the use of a lower data rate (a lower data rate is more tolerant of low signal-to-noise ratios). Obviously there's a trade-off between having a more reliable connection with a lower data rate and having an unreliable connection with a faster data rate.
The second issue is channel reservation. Because of how 802.11 works, you can end up with a situation where one user is getting an unfair amount of bandwidth by basically telling the other users to be quiet. There are various settings which you may have access to depending on your router, such as the RTS/CTS threshold (try setting it to a very small value, may be better or worse depending on the situation), the backoff window size (which tunes aggressiveness), preamble (a long preamble helps when there is interference), etc.
So yes, just try different settings and you should be able to get an improvement.
for ever 1 kg of silk worm that you grow to eat, you will have to bring along at least 1 kg of silkworm food
I think the silkworms get "reprocessed" into silkworm food.
"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_