Could you repeat that? The bottom line of your post merged with the "reply" and "share" links.

I think saying Asimov's writing demonstrates the laws are bad is an oversimplification, at best. He used the laws to create and guide interesting logical and philosophical problems that could be worked out through the story. I always saw them as more like rules of a game that had to be followed rather than being presented as ideas that were simply bad.

Local loop unbundling only made sense for traditional DSL since there is typically a dedicated pair of wires back to the CO that some other company can tap into and truly provide better service. With Time Warner Cable, or even AT&T VDSL (U-verse FTTN), there's a lot of shared infrastructure between your home and the central office. That makes the prospect of "unbundling" the infrastructure from the provider less technically feasible.

In both cases there are already choices of ISPs: Earthlink Cable, and DSLExtreme TrueStream. The choice, however, is mostly an illusion. If the connectivity sucks, "having a choice of ISPs" doesn't really do you a damn bit of good, you're actually renting the same connectivity you would have had from the incumbent provider. Speeds and pricing (the things you really want competition for) are also pretty much dictated by the incumbent. About the only thing it's good for is the possibility of improved customer service or add-on services like email servers. With the incumbent taking the lion's share of the profit, those improvements tend not to be so great anyway.

With old telephone infrastructure not able to keep pace with old cable infrastructure, we're facing a true monopoly. We need to encourage deployment of new fiber infrastructure or other alternatives. I'm afraid making existing companies share their aging infrastructure isn't going to be very fruitful.

Is that how land-line phones work?

borders aren't that hard to keep.

Isn't that what East Germany said? Walls, landmines, razor wire, snipers, papers please... and they still leaked like a sieve.

Don't want to pester you, but I still haven't seen a way to send you the book. Just let me know.

I think you and I are nearly the same age. The novel's set in Chicago in the late 90's during the dot-com boom and bust, just when I got out of college. The dating scenarios may be appropriate to you now, but the tech world ought to be familiar to you, too.

And DOS commands are still quite useful. I find myself teaching younger admins DOS stuff on 'doze cmd.exe more and more. Sure, Powershell exists, but it's not ubiquitous yet, and oft-times Powershell running files as scripts is disabled by default, so batch files are still pretty useful (even if it's just a batch file to enable Powershell scripts and run the argument as a script).

Setting aside socialism, if the system was working anything approaching optimum for the current configuration of third party payers and patent holders and everything else, insurance companies would already be inventing (and/or buying inventors of) drugs and practically giving them away to their members (or cross-licensing them with other insurers cheap to get their members the best drugs available in multiple categories). As a side effect, insurance companies would inherently aim to reduce side effects (guess who pays when you have a heart attack because of taking some drug) rather than cover side effects up (see: VIOXX). It would also eliminate the (real or imagined) conflict of interest between finding cures and finding treatments.

I thought 3d printers and CNC machines required stable platforms. Even a guy whittlin' with a knife has the sense not to do it in a moving truck.

How do professional gunsmiths get their tools if no one will ship them? Is Fed Ex refusing to deliver only this specific gunsmithing tool because the intended users are amateur gunsmiths?

It's where a lot of refineries are located. The infrastructure there is also set up for distribution of refined products throughout the US.

No, no, it's in the secret cow level.