There are tens of millions of people that get to make the following choice:
1. Dial up.
2. High latency capped satellite.

If they're "lucky" they one or two more choices:
3. Slow and asymmetric ADSL
4. Fast but capped LTE.

I have no desire to hold back the future but if you ask me to rate my frustrations with the residential internet marketplace in the United States a lack of gigabit+ speeds doesn't make the list.

Incidentally, the sentence that you quoted had the word "residential" in bold. You listed a bunch of potential business and academic applications to refute my assertion that connections like these are useless in the residential setting.

If you're working from home on a regular basis you can spring for a business class connection with the money you're not spending on transportation. Better yet, your employer should be paying for it. This thread is about residential use. I know that's a blurry line for a lot of people (myself included) but let's at least acknowledge that residential service is not intended for business proposes.

I guess the point that I was trying to make is why is the H-1B program any different than agriculture, taxi driving, or any other position that's stereotypically filled by immigrants? You can tout out the, "They're just doing the jobs that Americans don't want to do." line if you wish but it rings hollow with me.

The hostility here towards H-1B feels hypocritical to me. You're either in favor of the free movement of people, goods, and labor, or you're not. You can't cheer on immigration so long as they're limited to grunt work.

First World Problems. I feel for you. I really do.

It's one more reason to escape this dying area; I plan on moving to New Orleans in the next few months. If you think the state of our internet is sad try the dating or job pools in this part of Appalachia/the Rest Belt. :D

In fairness, a screwed up insulin level won't immediately kill you and the symptoms are recognizable by anyone with an understanding of diabetes or basic first aid training. Your link says that blood tests are still needed and it sounds like that pump exists not to save life but to make it easier. When they're using iOS to run a pacemaker we can talk..... :)

Velociraptors?

Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet. I'd rather see society make a concerted effort to get everybody a 10/10 connection than roll out gigabit speeds to a handful of lucky cities. We've got whole swathes of the country that are lucky to see T1 speeds on the download side and a pittance on upload. Of course, 25/25 would be better, 50/50 awesome, and 100/100 future proof.

As an aside, I'm jealous that you can max out your 150/150 FIOS connection but my old 15Mbps Verizon DSL connection dropped to <5mbit/s during peak hours. They haven't bothered to maintain their ATM network and gave up all pretenses several years ago when they capped DSL connections in our market at 3Mbps regardless of how good your loop is. My current apartment has a loop under 1,500 feet but they won't sell me a DSL connection faster than 3Mbps.

TWC neglects our area nearly as badly as Verizon; we didn't have DOCSIS 3 until 18 months ago and if you were unlucky enough to live on a congested node you'd see peak hour speeds dip below 1Mbps. This is a city of 50k with metro area of 250k, we're not talking about cow country. Head out into the sticks and you've got nothing but satellite or (maybe) LTE, neither of which makes for an acceptable wireline replacement.

And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues..... :)

1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.

1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.

2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.

2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.

2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......

2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......

2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......

Are you being factitious or serious? Because that scenario is well within the range of a 100Mbps connection:

YouTube @ 1080p = ~6Mbps x 2 = ~12Mbps
Netflix HD = ~5Mbps

That leaves you with more than 80Mbps for your PS4. At 70Mbps (a fair approximation of what you'll achieve with overhead) your 2GB game will download in about four minutes. You can bump the Netflix stream up to 4K (25Mbps) if you insist and still have more than half your connection left over for the game download that you just can't wait for.....

This may be a glib answer but I don't give two shits about 4K HD. I am not enough of a videophile to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p.

Even if I cared about 4K most codecs I've seen fall in the 15 to 30Mbps range. Netflix claims that you need 25Mbps. A 100Mbps connection is certainly ample.

You're going for the sarcasm, but that's really the only point I see for these mega speed tiers. I do a lot of Android hacking and regularly download ROMs in the 300 to 700 megabyte range. When I had my 10Mbps connection that meant killing 10 or 11 minutes of time while I waited for it to download. Now I can do it in 2 or 3 minutes, which is certainly nice, but it's hardly a fundamental change in the way I use the internet.

I currently have the luxury of mooching off a business class symmetrical connection (30/30) which has completely spoiled me. It's dedicated speed and has more upload than any consumer grade connection I can obtain. When I have to go back to a residential line I will miss that upload more than anything else. I can't match it where I currently live (TWC, 50/5 is the best here) or where I plan on living (Cox, tops out at 150/20 and is totally out of my price range, the most affordable tier is 50/5).

Frankly I'd rather have 10/10 or 20/20 with good contention ratios (i.e., I should be able to count on getting full speed most of the time, barring exigent and/or unforeseen circumstances) than one of these overpriced mega speed tiers that offers shitty upload with massively oversubscribed download.

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections. For most people it's all gravy once you get past 10-15Mbps and I'm not aware of any consumer grade gear that can take advantage of 2Gbps.

By the way, where's my fucking IPv6? That would offer more future proofing than upgrading my connection from 100Mbps to 2Gbps. Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection?

Aerospace is a huge hole in our plans for a carbon less energy future; you can replace fossil fuels with ships (nuclear) and transit (electric cars and trains) but I haven't seen any technology (real or imagined) that can do the job in aerospace. Short haul trucking is another hole that's going to be hard to fill, long haul can conceivably be replaced with trains but you're still going to need something to move goods from the rail network to their final destination.

Really? This site seems to have a liberal/progressive bent on most social issues, does that not carry over to immigration? Oh, I forgot, THEY TOOK UR JUBS!!!!