Right. But this is the era of "one weird trick" and "this revelation shocked scientists" and other wishful thinking. If you can't work "This is the most important video you will ever watch" into the article, nobody will pay attention.

from TFA, on "a back door just for the good guys": "Our founders understood that an Orwellian overreaching government is one of the most dangerous things this world could have"

Yes, agreed. But besides that, having the back-doors only available "for the good guys" is problematic for a number of other reasons, including:

a) "the good guys" in this administration may be replaced by "less than good guys" in the next administration

b) It only takes one "not so good guy" in the organization to take advantage of a back door for nefarious purposes (perhaps with the best of intentions)

c) The existence of a back door "just for the good guys" assumes that there is no exploit that anyone could figure out with today's technology up to the technology available up to the retirement of the last piece of equipment that contained that particular back door (which might be decades). When you design a system, do you take into account the technology that will become available to break into it 20 or 30 years in the future?

d) That the "keys" for such a universal back door would be so valuable that they would inevitably be sold by someone with access to the highest bidder, or because of political or religious motivations.

...and probably more reasons I haven't thought of at the moment. Put succinctly, a "back door" that's "only for the good guys" and remains such for any reasonable length of time is a virtual impossibility. That it exists at all means it will inevitably be exploited for personal or political gain at some point.

The FBI might be better served by just being better at cyber break-ins than anyone else. This would allow them to do the monitoring they desire, and have the added benefits of making them work for access, rather than just go fetch passwords out of a safe, and develop some in-house expertise that could be used against real cyber criminals.

Now that I think of that last part, if we really want the FBI to understand about cyber security, it's important from an evolutionary point to never give them easy access to anything.

Maybe I haven't had enough coffee yet today, but I'm not sure I see the connection between basing decisions on real published peer reviewed science and bankrupting big pharma.

Shrug. That works for me. Although we may have to work on them one agency at a time. Tell you what. You help with the EPA and I'll certainly help with the FDA (that sounds like a good idea anyway).

Basing policy decisions on data that can be peer reviewed -- why would this even be an issue? Isn't this better than "you can't do that, and we won't tell you why" or the nebulous "studies say". What studies? Secret studies. Ok...

Seems like a remote tower system might also be useful at a real airport in an emergency when the local tower is out of commission.

Are you really talking about the difference between 50 and 75 Mbits/second down? If you really are seeing issues with streaming netflix while someone else is watching an HD youtube video with a provisioning of 50 Mbits/second, there's something wrong, and it's almost certainly not your provisioning. I'd want to see how you laid out your network, check some stats from your router, look at what switches you're using, and check how your Netflix appliance is connected to the network.

I'd also want to do some speed tests. Back when I had Verizon FIOS (before they sold it to Frontier) I would find the network inexplicably slow some days, check the speed, and find that my provisioning had been downgraded to a lower tier. Call Verizon, they'd apologize and set it right. I could speculate why this kept happening, but they always fixed it when asked and it never happened again once Frontier took over the network.

> Verizon recently told a customer that upgrading his 50Mbps service to 75Mbps would result in smoother streaming of Netflix video.

Ok, not really. A salescreature working for Verizon said that. Now you could argue rightly that salescreatures are the "face" of the company to customers. If they lie to the customer (and this is without a doubt a really big lie) it reflects badly on the company, just as horrible service reflects badly on Comcast. (In their case they deserve it, but I digress.)

The problem I think is that 10 or 15 megabits per second is "good enough" for the great majority of consumers, and companies become hard pressed to justify faster and faster speeds, just as the CPU mips wars became nonsense after a certain point. There will always be power users, but for most people, the difference between downloading their pr0n in 1/4 or 1/8 of a second makes no difference.

I can imagine that it's especially bad for salescreatures. If the lowest tier provision is 20/5, (20 down five up) or even 15/5, it's hard to upsell, because ma and pa kettle doesn't really need anything more than that. So with quotas to meet, you can understand where salescreatures resort to embellishing the truth. After all, it's what they do.

I have friends and family members that are still stuck on "uverse" or some other crap 1 Mbit/sec DSL, and I recommend (where possible) that they upgrade to the cheapest (lowest tier) fibre (if available) or cable available in their area. The boost from 1 Mb DSL to 10 or 15 or 20 Mbits/sec (whatever is available) will change your life. The boost from 10-20 to 50 or 100 will not, unless you're a power user with truly ridiculous requirements.

That said, I have 25/5, and what I'd really like is 25/25, because I manage websites and upload content, but the local ISP does not have a plan for that. I'd have to pay $75/month for 100 down in order to get 10 up. Not worth it. I'm having trouble coming up with any use case where a single family dwelling could make use of 100 down, other than as bragging rights, and doubling the up speed isn't worth tripling the price.

I've heard-tell of some areas offering 100 down *and* 100 up. I have a hard time envisioning that. I'd like to try it, just for a weekend, to see how that much up speed changes my workflow.

And then I shake my head, and go back to work, because my connection really is good enough.

Really. You've lived long enough to learn to write somewhat articulately, and still don't understand about dialects and different spelling of words in different countries? Do you call all cultures not your own "ignorant"? Let's hope you don't have to deal with a global economy.

I suspect it's yet another tragic autocorrect.

And sonny, when you're in MY yard, it's "meter".

Hey, I made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs...

eztv. Fewer porn ads.

I agree, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why that shouldn't be true for all content.

This is one of the reasons I no longer pay for cable. What I can't get off the antenna on the roof or streaming, I do without.

But just assuming I wanted to pay $100+ a month for TELEVISION, the thing that would grate on me more than anything else is to be paying for, subsidizing if you will, content in which I have not the slightest interest.

In cases like MSNBC, where real viewership has dropped to the point where it no longer justifies advertising dollars, and the only thing keeping the station (and others -- I'm unfairly picking on MSNBC) is the contracts that the cable providers are locked into. The thing is, sports are (so they tell me) POPULAR, people actually *want* to watch them, will pay extra for sports packages on cable and satellite, and can be furious when a game is blacked out in their area. This is the least likely content type to care about being subsidized by the cable industry. What am I missing here?

I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.

But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.