For us here in Norway PSTN/ISDN was our bad time, when the one monopolist could charge pretty much everything they wanted. When we got DSL, the market was deregulated and lots of offers showed up. In the US, far more people get Internet via cable, which obviously has far more reason to protect their traditional business. As for recent fiber roll-outs it's really the power companies that got the ball rolling there, eyeing an opportunity to break into a new market by running fiber optics as well as power lines. Obviously the incumbents couldn't sit around and watch that and it became a race to lay down fiber first, since it's rarely profitable to come second. So it's a very nice three-way race to roll it out, though the prices are fairly steep.

Broadband is a description of the technology, not of bandwidth. The FCC is a technical organization, so why can't they use the correct name?

Except if you got a bad batch where some kind of material or production defect will cause many disks to fail near simultaneously. The overall MTBF might be true for all the disks they produce, but unless you make a real effort to source them from different batches over time you can't assume that's going to be your MTBF.

Aww! So cute! Size has nothing to do with it - Europe is larger than the US, contains more people, and contains many places with a far greater quality of life. Hint: money is no measure of quality of life. You'd know that if you read.

Keep telling yourself that and see just how long your decrepit infrastructure lasts. Every single country has legacy systems, so clearly that is not an excuse. That only makes sense if you truly believe the US is some wonderland of technology the rest of the world has only recently adopted, which is such an absurd notion it defies belief someone can actually hold it in the 21st century, when information which dispels said notion in seconds is available at the click of a mouse button.

You're not special.

That problem is in your head. The rest of us folks simply understand that they're describing the method.

It is costing them resources to serve up content you obviously want to see (hence you being there in the first place), yet you can't see that? I think the problem here lies more in your brain than in the advertising of the sites you visit. If the advertising offends you so much, don't visit their site. That simple.

Don't try bringing logic to this party. He wants the content he values for free, and doesn't care that his attitude (if extended to everyone else) will cause that content to simply disappear, or become so diluted it won't be worth reading. He simply doesn't get that. No amount of eloquence can convince him of his rampant, selfish asshattery.

And HOSTS files can't block inlined advertising (of which your spamvertising posts are a great example), whereas adblockers can do that effortlessly.

Go get some help. You need it. I await your replies where you pretend to be a whole different bunch of people all agreeing that I'm some sort of messed up lunatic. Maybe you'll link to some of my comments and you and your made-up friends will judge me on them? I can't wait!

You seem awfully confused. A monarchy might be constitutional (as in the UK now), or a dictatorship (as was in the UK ages ago). A republic might be a dictatorship, or it might be a democracy. Using "republic" to talk about a system of government is pointless, as it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. The UK, for example, is a monarchy, yet the power comes from the people - the Queen is merely a figurehead, and can make no laws. The British police seem to be doing a far better job of protecting the people than the US's police do, so your argument seems entirely false, and based on nothing but wishful thinking and ignorance.

If you want to bang on about things and use these words, it might help to know what they actually mean, so you don't look really foolish in the process.

The vast majority of the cameras in the UK are privately-owned, and governed by strict data protection laws. Just saying.

Just ask Chareth Cutestory. He studied maritime law for years.

You're a crook, Captain Hook. Judge, won't you throw the book at the pirate.

You know it's not a contest to come up with the worst bullshit. If you're left with one person 95% of the time when you have 249 possible wrong answers, it's like being left with 4000 people when you have 999999 wrong answers. If all those are too close to tell apart you'll misidentify >99.9%.

Imagine for example that you wanted to find people by height and weight, as measured to nearest cm and kilo. It might work decently on a small group, but if you scale it up to a million people there'll be a lot of duplicates and then you're just guessing, double the population and you halve the chance of being right.

Developers and a ton of other professionals. If Linux/FLOSS could replace Windows, Office, Outlook/Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server that's probably 15 of Microsoft's $26 billion dollar revenue. Open source has not managed to commodify basic business and collaboration tasks, despite so many years of trying. It's not all about smartphones and tablets.

That's not the case here, and it's irrelevant. When I noticed the discrepancy between my camera's reported speed and my speedometer, I then compared it with a GPS-based speedometer app in my iPhone. The iPhone and car speedometer were in perfect sync. The camera-indicated speed was indeed extremely low, and so low that I have to think it was made deliberately wrong in order to provide misleading information in court, to fight in jurisdictions where such things are overlooked.

Let's say I was in court for some kind of accident, and I was going 70 MPH in a 60 MPH zone. The video recording of the crash shows the camera says 60 MPH, so it never comes up that I'm partially at fault because I was speeding. The other party in the crash is screwed by faulty evidence.