The size theory does not hold water when you look at places like Australia and Canada, even New Zealand way down in the Southern ocean which is connected to everything by sea floor cabling has better retail speeds than most US cities. The major difference between the US and Oz/Europe is that the US ISP market is not a free market, it's a series of government granted monopolies which are by their nature are heavily weighted against consumer choice. Consumer choice is what drives competition in any market, the dismal state of retail internet in the US is entirely predictable and has nothing to do with an averaged US population density.

Trivia: Oz is ~0.8X the size of the US but the US has ~15X as many people. Canada is slightly larger than the US, shares the same continent with the US, has ~0.12X the US population, and yet both nations provide faster (average) speeds than the US.

The rest of the western world can clearly see that American's are getting screwed in broad daylight by telco's and health insurance companies because people like you still believe (and parrot) the ridiculous excuses these corporations and their pet poli-critters have to offer. Europeans are no more or less "geographically challenged" than Americans, rather your natural tribal instinct has been expertly manipulated* by corporate propaganda to fight against your own best interest. In other words we can see the root problems in the US and are trying to tell you there are better ways to structure the telco/health markets. It's you who does not understand what is happening to you and why.

manipulated* - We are all heavily influenced by what we read, hear and watch, the only effective defense is to practice self-skepticism, ie: don't just blindly accept one cherry-picked data point, pick your own comparisons and do some basic sanity tests on the "economies of scale" excuse.

Australia's land mass is comparable to that of the US but with roughly half the population of California, however there's more competition between ISP's in rural Ballarat than there is in downtown Los Angeles.\

I just tested my speed on zdnet and it comes out at ~18mbps, a pleasant surprise since it was ~12mbps for many years, the faster speed has not increased my bill. ZDnet also have an informative list of average speeds by nation, spoiler the US can't even keep up with NZ.

It can't be avoided. "Men at work" lost several million dollars because they had "stolen" 2 bars of "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree". It's almost certain the band had innocently re-invented the same sequence of notes. Most people (including the band) didn't notice until it was pointed out but once pointed out you can't miss it. M@W lost the case becuse the argument that they didn't "steal" it was irrelevant in the eyes of the law.

Can't play video games because they stereotypes women, can't listen to taylor swift because she stereotypes blacks, can't watch BBT because it stereotypes geeks....WTF is wrong with you people?

He has autistic tendencies, sex is simply not part of his routine because he's too busy with his other obsessions.

I read the speech yesterday, seemed rather tame compared to the hate US politicians regularly spout. His main point was that Ukraine must negotiate a ceasefire directly with the rebels. Russia has the upper hand, yet it is the Russians who are pressing for a diplomatic solution, Ukraine (and presumably their western sponsors) are refusing to negotiate with "terrorists". The bit about nukes was not a threat it was a defiant warning to the west, "don't fuck with Russia", it was made in the context of a plea to the west to help solve the dispute in a "modern way", ie: through diplomacy.

Putin has demonstrated he has a stronger influence over the rebels than the west has over Ukraine, a few days ago he averted a potential slaughter by calling on the rebels to open a corridor so that surrounded and outnumbered Ukrainian troops could withdraw, sadly I haven't seen any reports of efforts to defuse the situation by the Ukrainian government or the west. The consistent response of Ukraine to military defeats in various towns and cities has been to shell the people they are trying to "liberate" with heavy artillery. Such actions do nothing but kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and ultimately swell the ranks of the rebels.

I was born in 1959 at the height of the cold war, the enthusiasm of the western media to label Putin as a modern day Hitler is troubling, the fact that a large chunk of western society believes it, is frightening. The village idiot who's running things down here in Oz has been thrusting his chin in the air and sprouting macho bullshit, he's threatened to stop Putin attending the G20 meeting in Brisbane. He does not represent my views, my view is that our government should be supporting the call Putin made in the speech for a "modern" solution to what is essentially a proxy war between the nuclear heavyweights.

It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.

As for TFA, the picture clearly demonstrates Neandertals invented tic-tac-toe.

Renewables can and will eventually replace coal, that is a GoodThing(TM), sure they have an ecological footprint but (like nuclear power) it's virtually zero compared to coal. The question isn't nukes vs solar, the question is what combination of current technologies will replace coal's market dominance, current nuclear technologies cannot do this alone for several reasons, expense, limited fuel reserves, plain old fear. Solar is now significantly cheaper and certainly much cleaner than imported brown coal, which is why India has embarked on a solar project to supply power to 400M people (40% of the population).

Replacing coal sounds like a massive task but consider that every coal plant on the planet was built during my lifetime, some were even built and rebuilt. The economics is such that I'm now confident they will be replaced with solar/wind farms in the next 50yrs. The hydro dams are already in place and there aren't many suitable sites left for new ones. All forms of power generation must match supply to demand on the grid, ie: they need a buffer to be able to match the "wavy" demand curve of a typical city. Coal produces a flat supply curve (so called "base load"), it already uses the existing dams as giant batteries by pumping water uphill during off-peak times and pulling it back onto the grid during peak times. As renewables start replacing coal why would they not also use the existing hydro infrastructure to similar effect?

The radiation is harmful to wildlife but no where near as harmful as plain old human habitation. Wildlife thrives in the Chernobyl exclusion zone not because the radiation is harmless but because there are no people. The DMZ on the korean peninsula is the same, no people, plenty of land mines and wildlife.

BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit about excuses when the inevitable mega-fuck-up occurs.

"W" is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, W = 23 = 2 X 3 = 6 : WWW = 666. Isaac Newton wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666, in fact he wrote a lot more about theology than science. Thing is nobody remembers him for his prolific "contributions" to theology.

Believe what I say or I will hurt you

Not sure if it was opportunity or its twin, but one of them required a modem reset not long after landing.

I don't care if your bleeding from the eyeballs, leave my cigarettes alone!

My family treasure is box full of super-8 home movies from the early 80's and a projector that still works. There's about 3hrs worth of 3min films spliced together on 20min reels, the grandkids get a buzz seeing their parents as toddlers. The other bit of tech memorabilia I won't part with is my dad's 1976 HP21C calculator, still in it's original leather case, perfect working order but no manual, can't even find a copy on the internet. Most people I've shown it to have never heard of reverse polish notation, grandkids are unimpressed by it. :)

"misogyny, racism, and homophobia" were all considered pollitically correct in their day, and that's exacty what was wrong with them. Political correctness in the opposite direction is no better because it's also predicated on an ideologically driven notion of "balance". Telling women they should be on WP is no different to telling them they belong in the kitchen.