At some point, you have to start trusting people/organizations/companies.

What you're really saying is, "You don't have a choice, so just suck it up, princess. Privacy is so 20th century."

No, you don't have to trust people/organizations/companies who have not earned your trust. You are the one paying. Use the power you have as a consumer. Weaponize your purchasing power.

And always, always reserve the right to just say "Nope, I don't need it, I don't want it, and I'll find another way."

Rather than argue with them, bet them money. If they are so certain of the quote, let their stubbornness make you richer. Mine stupidity. And slapping them with their own wallet my wake them up. 2 benefits.

I remember back on 2004. My girlfriend in Japan had 100/100Mb fibre and it cost her about ã20/month.

I don't believe you (about the "girlfriend" part, not the "fiber" part).

Yeah, but voters are getting big government anyway! It's just that it's the even worse kind of big government -- the kind that spends all its money unaccountably on the military-industrial complex (and increasingly, the prison-industrial complex) instead of providing services to constituents.

history has shown over and over and over again that big government is very bad.

Too much of anything is bad. Some water is good for you, too much and you drown. Some big company influence is good for us; but too much and we get corporate fascism and/or corporate communism (which may degenerate to regular communism).

The slippery-slope fallacy can be used to justify any position.

Overly-influential banks already had a big hand in crashing the world economy recently and almost got us into another Great Depression. (True, gov't mistakes contributed to it, but run-away greed was the main cause.) I thank Big Gov't for having prevented another Great Depression...in this case.

There are more than two parties. The trick is that you have to care about them at the local level first in order for them to become relevant at the national level later.

What conservatives often fail to grasp is that "less government" and "more competition" are sometimes at odds. We need referees to enforce a competitive environment. It's too easy for big co's to buy away competition. We want them using their resources to make better & cheaper mousetraps, not to keep out other mousetrap makers.

Most voters don't know the difference. They don't know what they are missing in order to get a "smaller gov't". They hear the oligopoly viewpoint because the oligopolies pay a lot of money to get their view out there and to get politicians to mirror their view.

So 87% of Americans have Microsoft Access. Thanks for clearing that up :-)

Technically 100% of Americans have potential broadband access; it would just cost an arm and leg to get it in many places. For example, a billionaire may have high-speed satellite connections if their mansion is in a remote area. Having access is not a "Boolean value".

If one wants a practical formal definition of "having access to broadband", then one may have to apply a price threshold.

It is true those countries are more compact, making economies of scale easier, BUT even well-populated areas of the US still have limited, unreliable, and gimmick-heavy choices. I'm one. Thus, population density is not the full reason. We are doing something wrong in the US.

It looks and smells like oligopoly-based crony-capitalism controlling the strings, but you are welcome to present alternative explanations.

Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?

No, just red shirts.

They changed "mainframe" and "server hosting" into "cloud", "client/server" into "rich client", "statistics" into "data mining" and "big data", the original Mac look into "Shading-free GUI's" or the "flat look", and "embedded" into "Internet of things". It's not the new technology I have trouble keeping up with, but rather the new names for old shit.

Next you know the young whipper-snappers will take "variables" and call them "dynamic constants" and rave about the New Way of Programming.

How'd you get a blank post past the lameness filter?

Soylent is often tastier.

I don't care how good it tastes. I'm not eating anything made of people!

azimuthally

Saying that word is like a party in my mouth.