Interestingly, when I'm booted over to Windows for gaming, I often put my system in sleep mode so that my USB doohickies can keep recharging. While I was on Comcast, my system would wake up and not be able to resolve DNS names for several minutes. This happened no matter what DNS servers I kept it pointed at (Google's or Comcast's.) I could ping IP addresses like the name servers, but I couldn't resolve any names.

All that went away when I switched to Longmont's municipal service. System wakes up, internet's instantly accessible.

I tried CentryLink's 1MB DSL prior to Comcast but the latency was always shit with it. If my room mate was doing anything, I could see ping times in the 1 second range.

Sure, and the price will be a bit higher for people who decide to subscribe later. It's still very competitive with the other internet services in the area, especially since none of them actually offers gigabit speeds. I'm pretty sure my uploads to youtube go faster that transfers on corporate networks of any previous companies I've worked for at the moment. I'm also curious to see how I'm faring a couple years from now. The city does seem to feel that it'll be able to maintain these speeds, and they also claim they'll be able to turn a profit with the service.

I can also transfer my founding membership with my house if I ever sell it, which is a pretty sweet deal for anyone who wants to move in here.

The voting public still has to vote for them, something they often seem to forget.

Start a petition drive to put a referendum on the ballot to opt out of the state rule on municipal ISPs. The law specifically allows for cities to do that if enough people opt out. I believe a couple of other cities either have done that or are soon going to. It's taken Longmont a couple years to get everything set up to start deploying it, and they already had a fiber ring in place from the '90's. We'll probably be just about finishing up the last neighborhood in Longmont about the time the other cities are ready to start deploying theirs.

Longmont has run the numbers and thinks the municipal broadband can be profitable. I'm curious to see if they can maintain the speeds once 20,000 people are on the network, but I've also heard them say they think they can do that too. People who get on the bandwagon early get discounted rates as long as they keep the service. After a few months the prices will go up a bit for new subscribers, but they're still going to be very competitive with other services.

I live in Longmont, Colorado. Couple years ago we had a referendum and opted out of the state's blocking of municipal broadband services. They're currently rolling the service out in my neighborhood and their guys did an install at my house about a month ago. I'm getting the fastest internet service in the country for $59 a month. My youtube uploads go at around a gigabyte a minute. Too bad about all these state legislators who seem to feel the need to protect their constituents from super-fast internet speeds at affordable rates that the private companies never seem to feel the need to deliver. I guess luckily for them, most people have no idea what they're missing, or a lot of those guys would be getting kicked out of office right now.

Mythbusters tested that. The guy had to be flying something crazy like 1000 feet in order to cause any damage like that. Very few people sane enough to be allowed to fly a supersonic aircraft would ever actually fly one that low at those speeds. Plow into a bird and you wouldn't even know how you died.

Well since they're testing for the metabolites of the stuff, probably not unless you're in the habit of eating $100 bills.

Not impressed, and won't be until they can also provide the name of the male stripper whose cock you snorted it off of.

Congress will likely forbid this technology in the USA, lest it interfere with their favorite past time.

Back in the 80's at Robins Air Force Base, the fighter jets would drop a sonic boom on the area every week or so. They weren't any worse than a distant thunderstorm and significantly less bad than a nearby thunderstorm. I'm frequently surprised at all the hysteria over them, especially considering how often they occur over most of the continental USA (Never.) In the top 1000 things to worry about or be annoyed by, that shouldn't even be on the list.

They and Greece could convert to the Vietnamese Dong. The people are getting a whole lot of Dong anyway, so they may as well make it official!

After all the news stories from the past couple of years, it seems like you could just guess "Yeah, that's a penis" and be correct about half the time. Seems like most people if you give them a camera, they're going to take a picture of a penis with it. And subsequently post that picture to the internet somewhere.

In the places I've worked where management was just jumping on the buzzword bingo bandwagon, what was being done wasn't really "agile". It was more like "Let's adopt all the overhead of agile but not actually empower the developers or stop micromanaging them." So you end up with the same work load plus the overhead of a daily standup for a team that is way too big for actual agility (30 people, 26 are doing things that don't directly affect you,) and an iteration planning that is generally ignored because the team is always in firefighter mode anyway. You never see time allocated to write unit tests or refactor the code that keeps the team in firefighter mode constantly. So yeah, if you do it wrong, agile will fail.

I've been watching the idea since the early 00's. I've been on teams that have adapted the processes to work for the team and have been very successful doing so. I've seen a team get a cadence going and become extremely accurate at estimating new work for a product the same 5 people worked on for 5 years. During that time they also dramatically improved the quality of the code, reducing crashes that required weekend coverage to almost 0. Every once in a while they'd adjust their processes if things weren't working smoothly. Teams can work very effectively in an agile environment, if they're actually allowed to.

If you follow the evolution of agile, you see a lot of key concepts that get repeated over and over. The guys who wrote it understood that code is never perfect and never really correct the first time you write it. It pushes unit testing as a core component of the process. As with other things, making mistakes and correct them teaches you something about the problem, and so the whole process is designed around uncovering those mistakes quickly, throwing code away and rewriting it and constantly improving quality. The philosophy of most companies is that the developers should just crap something out that kind of works and then move on.

What it basically comes down to is just because your team is agile doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to write your code. Or manage the team. If you're looking for a silver bullet that will fix what's wrong with your company, agile isn't it. It enforces much more discipline than whatever crappy process you were using before that, but you really have to understand what it's about, and most people don't.

Every call center I've ever encountered is designed to ask you if you power cycled your thing and then call back if that doesn't work. If you call back, the person you speak to will ask if you power cycled your thing. You really have to put up a fight to talk to someone who can actually help you, assuming that such a thing even exists at that call center, and most people give up long before they reach that point. Most of the time you can find an answer with a bit of googling anyway.It seems like to pointless waste of money to have a call center that everyone is just going to hate and which will give everyone who calls into it a negative impression of your company.

A little bourbon will counteract the light quite nicely! And a little coffee in the morning will counteract the bourbon! Problem solved!

Depends on what you consider "Winning". Sure, something like 85% of US citizens have tried marijuana and it's now not uncommon for presidents to admit to marijuana and cocaine use in their past (But they'd never do it NOW, oh no!) But it's a huge windfall for privatized, for-profit prison systems and an excellent tool for oppressing minorities in ever-greater numbers. It's also been wonderful for anyone with an agenda of eroding the bill of rights and militarizing police forces. I'd go so far as to speculate that the difference between being president and not being president, for the last three presidents, was that they didn't get caught. Naturally that depends on exactly how much of what they had on them at any given time, but all 3 seem like the kind of people who'd have a pretty decent stockpile of stuff they like. And if you're a black dude, misdemeanor possession can easily be turned into multiple felonies.

So yeah, sucks for the average citizen, awesome for the people who actually make the laws.