I think you'll find that this very expensive cable has sufficiently poor quality that it will impact the reception of data.

The idiots in question had this to say about the quality of their digital data:

If that's your starting point for idiocy, the only next step is to start painting equipment with magic symbols to repel gremlins and evil noise fairies.

I'm not sure if you read the follow-up article, but this bears repeating.

The cable that was used for comparison was the cheapest cable. In fact, it didn't even pass the Cat-6 certification tests done by Blue Jeans Cable after the even had finished.

But even with that nobody could tell the difference in the final sound quality.

I'm going to have to leave this now, but as a parting shot: The Washington post explicitly says that the FCC does indeed have the power to "preemt" state law (direct quote). (As I understand it without having to go via a court, though I assume that the state can sue the FCC if they want to appeal the decision).

Is this a mischaracterisation of the actual legal process?

I thought Sun's slogan was "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

That's not what I've read from the FCC ruling that nixed that law. I must confess that I haven't read it all, but can you cite that which supports your point? What I've read from i.e. the amicus briefs to the FCC the law prohibited the electric company from servicing someone that didn't get their electricity from same company (or wasn't "in the area serviced"), not that they did any of the things you mention. (And in either case the FCC didn't like that law and struck it down).

OK, I'll bite. What would be a fair characterisation then? Or isn't there a problem to begin with? (Again the FCC in their 2015 broadband report seems to think there is.)

And this is why I'm glad that I'm here, instead of over there. What purpose does the municipality serve other than to serve its inhabitants? And what better way to serve them than with infrastructure, especially that kind which succumbs to a natural monopoly anyway? (Running many different fibre networks is as dumb as running many different electricity lines, or roads, to a house).

Now, if you want to preserve the market, then by all means, do what we do here, and stipulate that the municipality can't offer service on said network, instead having to open it to all and sundry who want to do so. That provides the customer with both potentially high speed internet, even in out of the way places. If you look at the places where e.g. the local electric company rolled out fibre and was stopped by legislation (Tennessee?), these markets weren't served by anybody else, and still isn't), and you have a market for service where companies can offer there services. Legislating against the electric company pulling the fibre is just counter productive; legislating that they would have to open their network, now that would be another thing.

But as that would lead to real competition, at a lower total cost, not crony capitalism, I don't have high hopes for you...

No, its usually about twice that, with the rest in subsidies from the EU. But, the power of a co-op should not be underestimated. Since they can both do work and grant land (cheaply).

And when I check speedtest net, they list an average of $3.52/MBps which would give a much higher cost for 100/100. This article from the BBC also lists much higher prices; $90 for speeds over 45 Mbps on average. (Granted it's two years old).

Now, that rural infrastructure is subsidised is no surprise. Everyone does that, even you. Only problem is you only do it for phone service, which used to be important. We've said that internet service is equally important, while you don't. That's the gist of the problem.

And that's where your regulatory capture comes in. There have been numerous stories here on slasdot on states that have explicitly forbidden local municipalities to be involved in fibre/broadband, instead legislating that that can only be done by corporations. Who then don't actually deliver any infrastructure. Municipalities or co-ops are in most of these cases banned by law from addressing the problem. If that's not regulatory capture, I don't know what is...

Yes, sorry I meant co-op. As in "cooperative".

And of course I meant "oligopoly"...

And the subsidies are mainly EU, subsidies. Not Swedish per se. (And they're for rural areas. In the cities we have competition, which makes the market work.)

Myself, I pay $50 or so for 100/100Mbps including IP telephony. Fibre in an open city network (laid down by one of the utilities, district heating in my case), with my choice of ca eight different ISPs. I paid nothing for installation, but a more reasonable price would have been around $2500, which is what most people pay these days. In a rural setting you get about as much extra per drop in various (EU) subsidies.

Yes, that is true. However, even these parts of the country, at least in Sweden, have good broadband access. It's actually cheaper and easier for them than more urban areas, since there's more farmland/forest where digging is cheaper and easier. They're using national government money/legislative support to get a feed and then create co-ops to do the actual installation. It's been quite a thing for the past decade at least. (As a case in point a friend just got fibre to his farm, where his nearest neighbour is a kilometre away, at about the same time that his house, much more urban, was hooked up. Co-op in the country, and ISP in the burb.)

Now, when it comes to urbanisation, I would have always thought that the US was more urbanised than Sweden in particular (we're still in the process of urbanising), but according to Wikipedia you're less urbanised, by one measure at least. However, not by a lot. I'd say that the differences in degree of urbanisation does not explain the majority of the large differences in broadband access or price. My money is on other factors, chiefly unhampered oligopoly in the market combined with regulatory capture. Both of which we lack. (We even got the former government telecom company to start installing open fibre networks, i,e. where you have your choice of ISP, rather than being tied to just them. And we didn't even have to legislate, just compete... People realised a bad deal for a bad deal.)

(Interestingly Norway is much worse off, relatively speaking. Mainly due to a lack of government support. Instead choosing to leave it to the market, which means the telecom incumbent(s). Guess what the results are? Yepp, much more like the US. Lack of access, and where you can get it, more expensive.)

While I agree that places like Hong Kong are an anomaly, you also lag countries like Sweden and Finland...

Well, I wasn't the one using it, but in late 1998, I was working at a printer -- a big industrial one, with huge lithographic presses. The prepress department there was transitioning to using Macintosh G3s for DTP work, and I was there to help with that. The reason for the transition was that their old DTP needs had been served by some sort of DEC minicomputer.

It was about the size of a fridge, with dual 8" floppy drives, so I'm hoping it was a MicroVAX, but I don't recall. Each workstation wired into it had a VTerm, as well as a Barco graphics monitor and a mouse. You'd type in commands to their DTP software on the VTerm, then view the work as a line drawing on the Barco (all it was capable of -- photos had to be pasted in by hand) and adjust it with the mouse.

They'd been using the thing since the early 80s, but apparently it was breaking down and they were having trouble pulling people out of retirement to fix it, and that, plus the new digital press they were building, forced the transition to Macs.

The company got bought some years later, but is still in operation, so I guess things more or less worked out.

You make a lot of interesting points, the intersection of contracted forces and pregnancy is an interesting one that I haven't put much thought into, but I'd thought I'd just limit myself to this one point.

The main difference between police and fire fighting I would say is that the former has physical requirements they're based on a situation that will never arise. I.e. police (like most soldiers to tell the truth) train and prepare for a situation that will never come. The overwhelming majority of police never draw their service weapon in the line of duty for example. And comforting crying children after a traffic accident, or filling in the umpteenth burglary report can of course be fulfilled with a minimum of physical prowess. (OK, most uniformed police in "outer" service do a bit of impromptu wrestling during their stint, so there's that. But we also know that this is where WPCs fair the worst. And in Sweden we've seen an up-tick in police brutality reports as we've had more WPCs. They have to go for the Mace/pepper spray instead of wrestling...)

With fire fighting it's different in that they actually train for what they'll do. Fire fighting does actually involve the hard physical work that the requirements are put there to ensure that they can perform. OK, they don't do a lot of dragging their downed comrades to safety, but there's plenty of other stuff (i.e. smoke diving) that actually is as tough as it looks.

So with that in mind, it's not at all surprising that we'll see more female police than fire fighters. The jobs are different in that with police you can get away with skirting requirements due to whatever pressure or other consideration as those requirements are there to ensure performance during an emergency. In fire fighting, those requirements are there to ensure you can manage to do your regular duties.

So, it depends on whether you're training to train, or training to fight...

P.S. In the Swedish army we were taught that the Israeli experience was that while women soldiers in combat postings did fine, the men around them didn't. The "cave man reflex" (not my terminology) made men expose themselves far to much when women were in danger, to the detriment of the mission. But perhaps that's the sort of macho behaviour that training and indoctrination can deal with, and I don't know how large this effect was in either case. It's just a point of interest.

While that is a laudable sentiment, and one that I can get behind, don't be surprised if you end up with approximately no women in your battalions.

We've seen the exact same thing happen in Sweden. Female fire fighters (well, not necessarily them per se, but other's speaking for them) complained about the macho culture that prevented women from being fire fighters. The had the numbers to support their arguments, there were very few females that were deemed to pass muster.

So, instead of the somewhat arbitrary previous hiring process, that did contain standards but also left room for judgement, quite a lot of work was put into defining what the actual requirements that had to be met to be a passable fire fighter were researched, tested and put into practice in the major fire departments in the larger cities.

The results were quite telling. At the smaller departments that kept the old process in the interim, the same abysmally small number of female applicants were hired, but in the cities, with their brand spanking new, objective, doesn't-leave-anything-to-subjective-judgement, not a single female fire fighter was hired after. Not one. *)

And if you look at the statistics that's not really that surprising. When you have strength, endurance, and psychological requirements that only a relatively small portion of the male population can pass, the number of females who could pass it in the general population becomes close to zero to begin with. And when you combine that with the small number of women who could see themselves in that line of work and even apply, it becomes a once-in-a-blue-moon even that the stars have aligned so that you will get a woman who both can pass the requirements, and would be interested and willing to do so.

*) A few years after two women actually managed to pass the physical requirements test by having been coached specifically. So out of 1000 fire fighters in my city there are now two women that are qualified for actual fire fighting (including "smoke diving"). The first time they tried coaching four women from neighbouring cities that already worked as fire fighters, but none of them passed... And just for reference, the physical requirements aren't completely over the top: Being able to run 3000 meters below 13:15, 30 kg bench press 35 times in under one minute, or lifting a 15 kg bar to the chin 40 times, etc. etc. These are requirements I myself would have had a shot at 25 years ago before I got old, slow, weak and fat, and I was no prime specimen of the male gender, far from it.

The physical differences between the sexes, at least in modern societies, are just that large. And if you say that "Women are OK, but you know, given the requirements there won't actually be any women," have you then actually opened up the position to women?

It gets even better. In project management terms we also actually try and quantify the "unknown unknowns", not just the "known unknowns". Rather, at the outset we try to get a feel for the risk that things will crop up that we didn't or couldn't foresee or plan for. This is based on things like; Have we done something similar in the past? (i.e. our degree of experience) What is the state of knowledge in the world about this task? What's the state of science? How good have we been at dealing with unforeseen consequences in the past? Can we limit the impact of any unknown unknown to a part of the system/project? (i.e. were are the risks the largest, can we do without those parts in a pinch?) etc. etc.

Any project manager that doesn't deal with the unknown and unknowable unknowns isn't doing their job. Its called risk management...