I hope they qualify what "free" & "broadband" mean. That could mean ad-supported, capped at 40 hours, and dialup speeds. In fact, why don't we just hand out AOL trial disks every month like food stamps and call the problem solved?

Google recently announced they were switching their Google for Education members to unlimited storage as well. This seems like Microsoft trying to one-up Google to me.

Single threaded processes don't necessarily need the latest generation processors because they just keep adding cores. Instead of trying to buy a new server, why not just accept a donation of a 3ish year old dell/hp/supermicro server. Lots of businesses & universities have a hardware rotation cycle for really good hardware. I've bought perfectly good poweredge servers that were a few years old for under $50 before at a university computer auction.

So how many of these countries have already sharded the internet behind their government firewalls, i.e. China/Russia? And we believe that all other governments are less corrupt and self serving than the US? I'm not a fan of the US Panopticon and stranglehold on critical infrastructure, but honestly, it's worked for several decades now why break it up? At least the US influence that conforms with the military influence we already have. It would be great if a multinational panacea existed to control it, but the closest thing we have to that today is the UN. It doesn't have a strong track record for being the most effective governing body out there. Corruption and government go hand-in-hand; one feeds the other.

Finally, I'm getting closer to owning a Mr. Fusion!

Cisco has pulled stuff like this for a while, but VMware this year did the same shenanigans. I'm seeing this being a growing trend for larger company certifications.

Good luck getting all your devices on a stable connection over 600mb. It is technically possible, but the topology and composition of your home coupled with the quality of your device adapters/antenna may prevent sufficient signal for those speeds. It's hard to beat CAT5e+ when it comes to Gb connectivity. You can get all the parts and tools you need to wire and terminate it all at your local big box hardware store (i.e. Lowes, Home Depot, etc).

I bet everyone gets a 2 month subscription to some junk AT&T service like being able to track your family's phones through their proprietary app.

Put plywood up on your walls for surface mount things like 110 or 66 blocks and any surface mount equipment. From a product standpoint, I've found the b-line flextray cable management system to be very nice and easy to install. I'd also invest in any kind of vertical flange cable management for your 2 post racks just to help keep from waterfalling your cables over the equipment.

For telecom, the best things we did was to put plywood up on the walls so we could mount any 110 or 66 blocks there as well as any surface mount equipment. I've also highly enjoyed the b-line flextray cable management system to move cables from point A to B within a room. Likewise, put a good cable management flange down the sides of your 2 post racks to reduce the temptation to just waterfall all your cables over the rest of you equipment. If you're dealing with servers, I recommend a mobile crash cart like you find in a hospital that you can just keep an UPS, computer, & 2-port KVM with all your tools ready to go and just wheel it between racks & servers.

Another component to consider is that bumping the specs for the OS can have a significant impact on DaaS/VDI offerings. Just increasing the RAM requirements by 1-2GB can be significant when you're running 50-250 guest OS on a single piece of hardware. Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping those specs as low as possible to make greater consolidation happen at a lower price point.

At what point does the number of comments become so large that the FCC can't possibly read them all? It's not going to be one person going through everything, so what is the likelihood that an intermediate person is going to get applying metadata or ranking the responses 100% correctly and without external influences?

One thing I've started doing is trying to diversify my networking gear. Instead of trying to lump a single piece of hardware for modem+router+wifi, or just router+wifi, completely shutting off the wireless parts of my WRT54gl then just buying a good wireless AP. This allows me to keep OpenWRT running on the WRT54gl just fine since I can't push more than 100Mb traffic through my ISP and keep all the nice routing, DNS, etc features working. It also means that when hunting for a wireless AP, I don't necessarily have to include open firmware compatibility as a requirement. It's also nice because if one piece bites the dust, I don't have to sink large amounts of cash into replacing the whole thing or if I need more hardline ports I can just change out the switch/bolt-on another one.

Nintendo has about a half dozen or less strong game series supporting the platform (Mario Kart, Super Smash Bro., Mario Party, Zelda, or Metroid for example). They royally hosed themselves when they released a next gen console without the backing of these series. Nobody wanted the console because they couldn't play the series games they loved. Instead, those people went out and bought a new media center or phone/tablet which doubled as a gaming platform. If they wanted to sell the WiiU, all they had to do was time their major game series release dates to within 6-12 months of the console release. This would have kept a strong console buzz going in the market long enough for Nintendo to get their console into people's home. Creating artificial product scarcity didn't help either.

This is the same approach taken with many industrial control systems (i.e. SCADA) that weren't designed to be used in an internet connected world.