Well DOSCIS 3.0 supports up to 24x8 channel configuration which would max at 1029.12 (912) Mbit/s and an upstream of 245.76 (216) Mbit/s. Heck even a 4x4 config is 171.52 (152) Mbit/s down and 122.88 (108) Mbit/s up. I use a DOSCIS 3.0 modem for my connection, but I don't get anywhere near those kinds of speeds because my provider chooses not to offer them...

My aunt and uncle are not poor by any means. But they are certain they are the 'wealthy' that needs lower taxes all the time. I find it hilarious, since they don't even make $100k/year and most of the policies they talk about needing so much don't even start until twice or three times what they make. They however don't know that and even showing them the wording of the laws doesn't manage to get the point across to them.

So yes, some people really do think they are that 'upper middle class' (which I'd assume means the 4th percentile of five) even when really they are in the 3rd at best.

And 'middle class' economically has never been considered what it takes to have two cars, a tv, and the means to feed your children. Economically it means the 3rd percentile of five when splitting up the population of the country giving low and high values to the income brackets of that percentage of the population.

I do everything from coding to writing presentations or documents and any other business related tasks on my little 9 inch 3 year old Asus Transformer Tablet. Sadly gaming is the one thing I see a lack of on my android tablet, most games require the internet to work and want to suck my wallet dry nickle and diming me. I tossed my laptop as anything other than a video playback device when I'm at home (instead of using a TV), so I can watch something while doing other tasks on my desktop... Most of which is gaming really. I don't think the Surface 3 Pro is going to redo my thinking on use cases for a tablet, the only thing it might add is gaming, but that is best with a keyboard+mouse or a controller and I may as well just use a desktop for that price instead.

I doubt congress would manage better, in fact I can practically guarantee that any legislature on regulating telecommunications would looks worse after congress is done with it. After all many lobbyists write the bills that their paid congress critters then present as their own. Most never even read what they submit. To many big words and such for them it seems and to many babies to kiss to keep their cushy jobs to do that sort of work themselves.

Except that the consumer ISPs are the ones who should be paying and certainly Netflix was already paying their ISP (Level 3 primarily) for the bandwidth they needed. The problem here is that the consumer ISP customers want what is on the other end of Level 3's links and Consumer ISPs don't offer anything except end users that anyone else wants.

The problem is large consumer ISPs can through the weight of having all the consumers in the face of other entities like netflix and force them to pay even though there is absolutely no reason to. The traffic is decidedly one sided and it's all requests from Comcast and other consumer ISPs for data held on other networks by other companies.

I find it hilarious that they can manage to say they are innovating now on broadband. My service has gotten a faster quoted speed maximum download bandwidth over the years, but isn't even half of what you can do with DOSCIS 1 and far less than what other areas can get with DOSCIS 3 (which is actually the level supported by their provided modem). DSL is even weaker with 1 MB/512k DSL being the only competing service offered by verizon for $10 less a month than my cable internet (20x slower for $10 less a motnh, hmm that's some crazy numbers). DSL in my area doesn't even count as broadband with the FCC!

Broadband has been stagnant already for years in large swaths of the US with only big cities in areas with lots of money getting good internet service. I live just outside a city of 150k people and they couldn't give a rats ass about us. Their are no 'upgrade plans' now. And becoming a common carrier will not effect any rate of upgrades that don't exist.

The republicans actually said no because they insisted it was congresses place to handle the matter and wanted less stringent rules that what wheeler was proposing. It was a matter of three saying 'this is enough for now' and the other two saying 'this is not nearly enough to help or telecomm overlords'. So don't go congratulate the republicans on their sense.

This was not a partisan fight as some sources make it sounds. It was both sides wanted to help their 'friends' and screwing over the american people along the way.

See this depends highly on where you live. No one in my extended family gives cell phones to kids until they can buy one themselves and my older relatives my parents age often don't have cell phones at all and the ones that do certainly don't own smart phones.

I need Internet access to pay my taxes (my state no longer makes a physical tax form you can mail in) which certainly is a need as the alternative (not filling taxes) is illegal. It's also the means of communication with my current employer (who rarely calls me) and most potential employers. Having internet access in general is very much a need and not simply a want as I would not be a functional member of society without it.

They often do have a functional monopoly on 'broadband' as defined by the government. In my case I'm in a Time Warner area that may or may not become part of Comcast when they merge (and I have no doubt they will get the ok). My other options are 1mb/512k ADSL (which is internet access, but not 'broadband') from Verizon or 3G internet access from a number of cell providers (4G does not currently exist in this market of over 100,000 people) which all have considerably low caps that make them nonfunctional as primary internet sources. I probably could find satellite internet as well, but for extreme prices and limited capability that is even less 'broadband' than my other options..

So yes, I could have 'internet' from other people (most of whom are equally offensive)... But that is not a choice. I'm positive if Level 3 did shut the links to Comcast off that Verizon, AT&T, and at least three other providers would be turned off at the same time and that would cover 90% of my options.

I need internet for streaming media, general internet access, email, cloud storage, and gaming. Only one company allows me to do that effectively and even if I did switch to a worse service I'd lose the ability to do some of those.

Well resources abound in this system, though the asteroid belt is easily the biggest collection of 'easily accessible' materials. Setting up manufacturing in the belt (probably on Ceres, which has water for both oxygen generation and more conventional purposes) or in and around Mars (which is the closest to the belt). Ceres is a great place from a lot of perspectives though. Within 'easy' reach of raw materials, has a low gravity (helpful in transportation), access to massive amounts of water for food production. The problems are ferrying the people and starter materials to Ceres to set these systems up. That is where the initial expense falls.

I was using the rovers as my example of unmanned exploration. Daily updates with months to move a few km is exactly science at a slugs pace. Sure we've worked near miracles with what we have, but this is incredibly slow science and if we continue this tract then we will take decades to accomplish what we could with an on-site or at least an in-orbit team doing the same work in a fraction of the time. See something interesting? Redirect it in seconds. Want to get across the surface in a day rather than a month? Sure, we are in real time communications range we don't need to create significantly better AI or do 'daily updates'.

And comm range to Pluto is not 4-7 hours, that's the time light takes to get there. Radio is slower than light even in a vacuum and you sure are not using a laser link to Pluto... The system to send a coherent beam of light 4-7 light hours would be huge and require tons of power. So in reality a mars style rover on Pluto would get sent a message form Earth that would take roughly half a day to get there, then it needs to process the command, then it sends another transmission back with the same time lag. So a Pluto rover mission would require at least two days realistically for a single 'cycle'.

True to some extent, but with transmission and travel times factored in science becomes a very drawn out thing the farther we go. At some point having a 'rover' in say, the Oort cloud or on Pluto, is just to inefficient and humans will need to be closer or it will be the grand children of the original scientists analyzing the results of the vehicle launched by the grand parents. In this example it can take up to two decades to reach Pluto alone and even light can take 4 to 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. This would imply that we would send a command to move an inch or two and the next day get a response about that movement. This is science at a slugs pace. If we could just move the humans to the orbit of Pluto we now have real time science and the research can be sent back to Earth at a more sedate pace without issue.

Things like ISS were meant to make things like our life support more robust and show us ways to enhanced recycling and other capabilities to extend resupply. Sadly with extremely low priorities because of the expense to run these programs they have never advanced beyond baby steps.

Personally I can see why we favor unmanned missions, but I believe we need to reignite the spirit of exploration and actually fund manned space travel for research and development.

"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."

Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not. That is no longer the case when it comes to space. Most people don't understand why space is important at all outside of things like satellites that provides communications around the planet.

I was just watching some BBC stuff about labeling food and they said specifically that while some companies did use this system, it could not be mandated because of EU policies on it. So a company could chose to use a color coded system with readable information or not at their discretion. There estimate was that no more than half of companies were using the system.

So saying 'the UK has this system' is not entirely accurate.