It might be noted that this move to automation occured _without_ an increase in the minimum wage.

i.e. they are doing it because it can contribute to their bottom line and "enhance" customer satisfaction.

  -- time to order in this kind of business is a large part of the expense, hence why they flocked to credit card systems to lose ~3% of their revenue, because it essentially eliminates cash handling time and balancing the books at the end of the shift (for that portion of sales).

(just out of high school, I worked at a Burger King in the drive through (1992). You had to make change in my head,. I could do it without error. Most others could not)).

Ham radio (well, packet ax25) is/was so slow that any kind of peer to peer exchange would be almost worthless by modern standards.

1200/9600baud is fine for station to station packet, but again, worthless for anything more modern.

Also, the cellular network interfaces with the PSTN, something HAM could technically do, but with a ton of restrictions on content and open to anyone to listen to.

ham radio has a good place in the toolkit in terms of emergency communications, but only than and only in small pieces until the cell networks recover.

You are misunderstanding the market that exists in areas served / subsidized by these funds.. Rural markets that lack infrastructure currently.

e.g. there is no competition to encourage .. in areas where it is high cost - low return, most companies won't take on the expense themselves with no possibility of payback.

Currently for these customers, the only option available is cellular data access, at high prices for comparatively small amounts of data.

And of course the skeptical take comment section is filled with non-researched and non-constructive comments about wind energy.

Almost as if being for or against green energy were an overt political statement than a well thought out business plan and energy policy.

(I'm from Kansas, we have nowhere near enough utilization of wind energy, despite several large wind farms in the western part of the state).

With that mentality, the US would never have completed rural electrification nor rural telephone service .. with a net effect of some parts of the US having never gotten out of third world nation conditions.

Is it sad that we've come so far as to have a company make a press release assuring customers and peering partners, that they will continue to abide by industry practices that have existed for decades?

People pay for speed of delivery, but that doesn't necessarily mean fast.. just predictable.

It's that time-to-market that has gotten some companies in trouble when dealing with chinese suppliers (capital is tied up for the 3 month lead time when ordering from China and shipping via container ship .. if someone is in a highly cyclical market than that lag time can put you out of business if you are not careful.

While Kansas City has some tech companies (Sprint, Cerner, Garmin) and a fair number of engineering firms .. it's not exactly a burgeoning tech center.

Completely impossible .. according to their ownership structure, 83% of the outstanding shares are owned by institutional investors.

Meaning, even if you created an artificial scarcity by buying up all shares available at any given time .. you'd still be way short of enough to effect change (and in any event, a bunch of individual investors wouldn't have any representation on the board).

You might be able to do it with an activist institutional investor like Carl Icahn .. but someone like him wouldn't be motivated to do anything like that. (e.g. against his own interests).

More specifically, Industrial, Scientific and Medical .. with the 2.4ghz band also being where microwave ovens "live"

Goes without saying with most people here .. but please tell me there is a court challenge in progress, as religious indoctrination has no place in public schools ...

and we wonder why STEM involvement is perpetually an issue in the US.

While FTTH everywhere is laudable, it might turn out to be impractical in the more rural areas and existing dense housing.

VDSL+ _should_ be enough for most uses if priced appropriately.

The larger problem isn't the actual contractor, it's in the selection process.

At least, the companies that get these huge jobs are the ones that can successfully navigate the bidding process, as well as those that have a track record of complying with that process.

It's a matter of the metrics used not matching the result desired.

ACA/Obamacare health exchanges have had a lot of screwups, but I don't know if it'd work any other way initially (based on the fact that there are hundreds of agencies and different systems to interact with,. any end to end testing would have to be on "friendly" / fake results.

I may or may not agree with their mission and goals, but given the fact that the government shutdown was more or less known about for months ahead of occurring, I'd like to think that the bureaucrats at the pentagon were simply doing their job by making these large contract awards instead of pretending that the shutdown wasn't going to happen.

e.g. it's a lot easier to deal with a delay in paying for spare parts on the tail end than it is to do without those parts on the front end.

Somehow I'd doubt the US would commit an international incident to get one guy.

To my knowledge, the US doesn't have ad-hoc military access to Russian airspace. To say nothing of the loss of life for what would at that point be an extrajudicial killing (aka - murder).