Once there was an actual criminal going around a large office park at a place where I previously worked that would walk in wearing a VERY fancy suit and kindof wander around stealing laptops, electronics, etc. and then walk out. Nobody could ever identify him except that he was in a fancy suit, and nobody dared question what he was doing so as not to get in trouble for offending somebody important. Not saying any of these places were supposed to be highly secure, but was quite a problem for a while and he always got out before anyone noticed or realized what was going on.

Then he walked into our office which was a startup, and he was obviously not familiar with the "atmosphere". As soon as he got in by following behind somebody, several people said "What the **** are you wearing a suit for and what the **** are you doing here?", took a picture of him, and escorted him out.

No way 20 per DVD is right... just the physical cost of disks is higher than that... even $20/disk... lets say it is rented once a week for a year before its obsolete... that's 40 cents per rental... plus shipping both ways has gotta he another 40 cents minimum

Even worse, a huge chunk of the market for "occasional" or "light" users of netflix has now been destroyed.

The people who've left for price reasons are those who (like me) were happy paying $8/month for the ability to always have a DVD to watch in case you wanted to, and always have instant movies to watch. On average I got about 3 physical DVDs per month, sometimes less, and 1-2 instant old movies or random shows. From what I've heard, netflix's cost is $1 per physical DVD, and not a lot for the instant "junk." So, they lost a highly profitable customer they're making $5/month on. But, they get to keep the customers who pay $8/month and get probably about 4-6 DVDs a month (otherwise redbox is probably better) making them barely profitable. And, they get the customers who pay $16-20 a month for mail+instant and get again at least 4, but likely more, DVDs a month plus now will demand better instant selection which must be costing them a good chunk. All these customers have lower profit margins... good job netflix.

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.

I think the silkworms get "reprocessed" into silkworm food.