Indeed. This is a terrible piece of advice. Take it from someone who's had both in a lot of different places. If you don't care about SLAs and you want to hear 'Have you tried rebooting your cable modem?' every time there's an outage, then by all means, investigate cable internet service for your place of work.

I also have to chuckle a bit when he claims that cable will give your users the relative speed they get at home. Really? Maybe that'd be true if they frequently invited 49 other co-workers over to share their link at home.

I say the FCC should license a nice fat chunk of wireless spectrum for high power ad hoc peer to peer networking. Then people can put up their own antennas and run their own community-wide public access points. Then maybe the government can help out by connecting the major cities with the longer haul infrastructure. I have to wonder how big of a mess it would be to start, but I also kind of wonder if it might self-organize into a new internet. It'd be delightful to see Comcast's reaction to something like that.

Absolutely nothing. A 24 port gigabit switch makes a great foundation for a small to medium-sized network with typical business use. It's a stretch to call it a 'core', but anybody who tells you that you need some kind of crossbar fabric chassis switch at the center of your average branch office is just trying to sell you hardware and service contracts.

+1 OhYeahIGuessYerright

That's because BRE, TradeWars 2002, and LoD already exist. What's left to write?

Yeah, well if we put YOU in charge, spending on signage alone would triple.

But honestly, a lot of the problems he's talking about aren't Linux migration problems, they're problems with how things were being done. Converting this city from where it was at to Windows 7 and Server 2k8 doesn't sound like it would have been any easier. At least when they're done with this, they'll be on an open platform instead of another closed one.

High cost is really just a symptom of the actual fundamental problem.

The actual fundamental problem with health care is that new breakthroughs make it possible to live longer/better, but that they involve very expensive technology. This leaves us with money on one side of the scale and our lives (or the quality of our lives) on the other, and as individuals, we choose our lives or quality of lives every time. When you're facing terminal cancer, how much does the treatment have to cost before you say 'Nah, that's just too much money.'? A million dollars? A billion? If the treatment is available, you don't care what it costs, and advances in technology are constantly making new treatment available.

The problem is, to make health care economical, you have to convince people to draw the line somewhere and let themselves die. Pretty tough argument to make.

Only the absurdly rich come to the US for care, and they come here for absurdly expensive care that most Americans don't have access to. You're only making an argument that the very best care in the US is better than the very best care in these other countries while ignoring the fact that 99% of Americans don't care, because they aren't able to buy the very best care anyway. The average citizens in these nations do better than the average citizens in our own, and from a public policy perspective, that means a whole lot more than 'but the Prime Minister of X flies his private jet to the US when he needs surgery!'.

It ought to be illegal to even SEE nude pictures of underage children. Everybody involved should be in jail! If we don't keep the children safe, how will they ever grow up to enjoy the dystopic world we're building for them by keeping them safe?

Agreed. Instead, why not plug it in and leave it on for a while so that it can self-cremate?

So we all know where to pee.

The cost is the primary reason I don't have a Tivo anymore. When we bumped up to HD, the HD Tivo was something like $800, so we just went with TWC's DVR. I'm on the verge of going back to Tivo, though, because the box from TW is probably about the most useless pile of electronics you can possibly assemble and still legally refer to as a DVR. It sometimes just fails to record, and probably 4 out of 5 times, fast-forwarding or rewinding will desync the audio. Tivo was expensive, but it never had rookie problems like that.

Yeah, but what if you include a union with Microsoft-loving slashdot readers who actually ARE lawyers and who RTFA? NOW how big is the set?

The problem is that given two options, A and B, where option A provides huge profits within your lifetime and magnificent catastrophe for future generations, and where option B provides marginal profits within your lifetime and ever-increasing profits for generations to come, any capitalist would choose option A. You have to focus on something other than your own profit (or risk of loss) to pursue option B.