The first lie: “Our current infrastructure has served us well for almost a century but it no longer meets the needs of America?s consumers,” AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi said

Analog phones and analog dial tones perfectly serve everyone needing a voice call with another party, and they always will.

The second and 3rd lies: Cleland, a former White House telecom policy adviser, said that even if people wanted to keep the old system, “they are not making the switches anymore for this. And the engineers they need to keep it alive are retiring.”

The POTS system is fully mature, fully built. And there are fewer customers on POTS. So there is no need for new production switches, only parts to maintain the currently installed units. Which is why the industry stopped producing new units. But they haven't stopped producing parts. This argument is a red herring.

And when anyone says "nobody knows how to do it anymore, they're all retiring" you KNOW the entire argument is bullsh-t. This argument is literally the equivalent of saying "it's impossible to train new people to do this job". Ahem, if the job pays well, people will gladly learn to do it.

Make no mistake my fellow slashdot readers, the push by the telcos to switch the last mile of analog copper to digital has nothing to do with any of these 3 lies. It is all about profit motive. They have all been losing money as many customers have switched entirely to cell phones for voice, and cable TV for internet service. The city centric telcos want digital to the home phone so they can charge more for additional mandatory bundled services, generate more revenue by displaying ads on the new phones with big multi-line displays that people will be forced to buy, etc, etc. Want proof from the article itself?

'though the transition should not be harmed by “burdensome economic regulations,” such as mandates or price caps.'

This says the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) should be allowed to charge whatever they want for the new digital phone service. Every person but one they interviewed for that article is a paid shill for the ILECs.

"Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting scholar at Georgetown?s Center for Business and Public Policy, stressed that phone companies “must be allowed to repurpose the capital that is currently deployed to support their obsolete circuit-switched networks” during the switch to guarantee a competitive edge."

Since when does a public policy scholar shill the position of a corporate entity? "MUST be allowed... to guarantee a competitive edge."? When she and her study are funded by these corporate interests, not by the taxpayers.

Switching the last mile of copper from analog to digital is a big loser for the consumer from both a reliability of infrastructure and monthly cost perspective. Digital only phone service over copper will be inherently less reliable and will cost significantly more than POTS. Switching to digital won't save the telcos any money. They're banking on charging customers more for it, for extra mandatory services nobody wants or needs.

Judges don't force the NSA to do anything. Kiddie porn puts a judge in the slammer as quickly as anyone else. The "That's not mine, I didn't download that! And those logs must have been fabricated! I'm being setup!" doesn't work any better for judges than anyone else, when it comes to kiddie porn.

SandForce was purchased by LSI quite some time ago. LSI wanted directional control of the silicon to make sure future enhancements fit their needs. That and the fact LSI has always been a storage centric IP/ASIC company, making such an acquisition a perfect fit with their core business. The SF22xx controllers are used in all of LSI's enterprise PCIe SSDs, including the $35K, 3.2TB, model BFH8-3200:

http://www.lsi.com/products/flash-accelerators/pages/nytro-warpdrive-bfh8-3200.aspx#tab/tab0
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/LSI-Nytro-WarpDrive-BFH8-3200-solid-state-drive-3.2-TB-PCI-Express-3/3072358.aspx

If the SandForce controller is good enough for a $35K enterprise device it's more than good enough for your needs. Your shunning of the SF controllers, simply due to low OCZ product quality, is unwarranted. They're one of the two best (Samsung being the other) SSD flash controllers on the planet, hands down. OCZ's problems weren't due to the SF controllers.

To not spy is immoral. Spying on enemies prevented WWIII. Spying prevented the Cold War from going hot and killing billions of people. Spying on friends in the current era keeps them honest, so to speak.

I'm truly surprised govt hasn't figured this out yet. Hire Hooters girls and Chippendales guys for pat down duty and there'd be no more complaints. "But what about the gay complaint?" you ask? That's easy. Have the booth agent watch passengers' eyes. They'll invariably be undressing Ms tits or Mr buff. Then pair up the appropriate groper. "What about children?" you ask? That's easy too. Match the groper to the parent/guardian. If little Susie cries, Dad won't file a complaint because his eyes are glued to Ms Tits' tits. If little Jimmy cries, Mom won't complain because she's fantasizing about Mr Buff's package, etc, etc. And with such agents strip searches become unnecessary, because everyone but the guilty would gladly volunteer to be stripped down, most eager to have his/her cavities gently violated by such a groper.

Govt always fails because they let political correctness and other moronic concerns get in the way of practical solutions.

This is factually incorrect. A *smart* guy would have played this like "deep throat" and remained in the shadows for 40 years, completely anonymous. A smart guy would not have sought the lime light. A smart guy would not have been forced to flee his home and live under the thumb of the quasi dictator of a hostile foreign country, whose language he doesn't speak, whose culture he doesn't understand. A smart guy would not have sacrificed having control over his own life and future. Snowden is definitely not a smart guy.

Snowden was motivated by the attention lavished upon Julian Assange. Snowden was motivated by the "James Bond" factor. Snowden was motivated by his chance at 15 minutes of fame. Snowden was NOT motivated by a sense of patriotic duty to reveal truths about questionable NSA espionage tactics. This was simply a convenient means to an end. Snowden sought notoriety, and saw this as his only chance in life at achieving it. The opportunity presented itself, so he took it. Period. Snowden is not a hero. Snowden is an opportunist.

10 million words wasted on a non-story out of Omaha, which BTW is 70 miles from my keyboard.

The purpose of this bill is helping to figure out how to grow corn, and thus sustain the state's economy, in the face of "cyclical" weather events such as this year's drought. It has nothing to do with the left vs right "global warming" nonsense. People are motivated first and foremost by their wallets. Nebraska's wallet is filled by corn sales. The liberals (very few Democrats) in the Unicameral wanted a study about "humans ruining the climate". The conservatives, all the Rebublicans and most of the Democrats, simply want to keep the corn industry healthy. Which is why the word "cyclical" was added, to keep the study on point. This story didn't come out of California folks, where the liberals want to shut down all power plants but still demand their lights stay on. This is Nebraska, filled with conservative farmers. Most Democrats in Nebraska are conservatives, not liberals. This is one of the "fly over" states filled with "bumpkins", remember?

They don't give a rip about climate change. They just want to keep the corn growing. Again, a non-story ginned up by the "man is destroying the earth" religion of the far left environmentalist whackos.

You are either very young, a liberal, a female, have lived a very sheltered life, or of all of the above. Criminal sentencing has always had one goal, and only one goal: punishment, period. There is never "justice" for victims or their survivors. The "justice system", or "law", has never protected the innocent, removed economic incentive, nor rehabilitated violent offenders, or we'd have eliminated criminal acts already, there would be no police forces, etc. The only solution with violent offenders is to sentenece them to death. And the fallacy of the death penalty argument is this:

A death sentence and a life sentence are both a death sentence, with only one difference: latency to outcome.

Make no mistake. Opponents of the death penalty have no compassion for those who deserve it. This isn't about compassion or the punishment fitting the crime, or the innocent being mistakenly executed. It's about guilt. They are members of society. Society is the executioner, in their minds. They simply go bonkers knowing that they "had a hand" in the execution, have blood on their hands. Fighting the death penalty is about avoiding liberal guilt. Period. If not, they'd fight life sentences as well, because they are, after all, death sentences. The difference is that spineless liberals don't "feel" guilt when a murderer dies of "natural causes" at age 70/80/90 something, alone in a prison cell. There are no cameras around, no protests. No "attention". Thus, no feelings of guilt.

I'm going to pay you a visit, bind you, your mother, sister, girlfriend, wife, daughter(s), etc. I'm going to bind your head and tape your eyelids open so you see everything. Hear everything. Then I'm going to rape them one by one with a piece of 1" dia x 1' steel rebar in the vagina and anus. Then, while still concious, I will cut off her nipples and then disembowel her with a rusty dull box cutter. Whether she's dead now or still conscious, I'll then slowly saw her head off with a hack saw and place it on a pike in front of you, her dead eyes starinng into yours, her blood dripping on your feet. This, while you and the remaining women are forced to witness the terror in her eyes and her screams before her lights go out. You, struggle helplessly, but are unable to stop it, unable to save them. You are forced to watch me torture, mutilate, and behead all of the women you love. I call the police, and stick a post-it to your forehead with my name, address, etc, and walk out the door, forcing you to survery and relive the carnege before authorities arrive.

Going into my trial, you plead with the prosecutor to spare my life, because the death penalty is wrong, that it's only about a sadistic desire for vengeance...

Like "civilized" Europe you mean? Like Norway? Anders Behring indiscriminantly kills 77 and injures 319-- gets 21 years. Is this a "civilized" sentence?

Violent video games have made me want to go on a rampage and kill dozens of unarmed civilians indiscriminantly with an assault rifle. I think I'll immigrate to Norway, light up a youth retreat, then retire to 3 hots and a cot for two decades, thanks to Norway's "civility". I'll be out in time to move back to the States and collect my Social Secuity and Medicare benefits. Actually, being an entrepreneurial American, I'd setup "Norwegian Safari, LLC" and sell travel and in-country weapon acquisition arrangements to other Americans who'd like to take advantage of the "mass murder loophole" that exists in Europe. We dare not do it here because we'd get executed like Tim McVeigh, or more likely, killed in the act like Charles Whitman. But hay, it's open season in Europe.

On the contrary. Science is bringing us ever closer to seeing 'God' in full glory. At some point we will have a single equation, or series of equiations, which describe and predict the process of every phenomenon in the universe, at the smallest and largest scales. At that point, we will truly have discovered, and understand, what "God" is. This is the one true God, and it does exist. It simply is not the God humankind has invented throughout the centuries to comfort its ignorance and inability to explain phenomenon it does not understand.

The God people have invented is a just and righteous God, a moral God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The one true God not only causes earthquakes and hurricanes on Earth, the Taliban and US jets, that kill human beings by the millions, but the one true God also vaporizes entire solar systems when it causes stars to collapse on themselves then explode into supernovae. The one true God even causes entire galaxies to collide, likely causing the extinction of trillions of life forms.

The one true God is the only real enemy of mankind on Earth. If mankind doesn't realize this, stop fighting amongst itself, and use these warring resources to figure out how to fight and win against the one true God, it is doomed, as God will cause earth to be vaporized in about 4 billion years. Yes, God will kill every living thing on this little blue planet, including all the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, etc, etc. So when people sayd they are killing in God's name, I guess they're simply trying to get a head start on the big job ahead...

Are you sure they're physical caps, not virtual, or ethereal caps?

The "wasted material" will be due to measurement mistakes.

You are clearly clueless. Before you can speak intelligently about a subject you must educate yourself on that subject. For you to actually understand the magnitude of such a conversion you must first spend a week as an apprentice at an architectural firm in the US, then spend a week with a construction crew as they build a new house. Then you will spend a week working at a lumber yard. After all of that, then you can come back and comment intelligently in this thread.

You mean in the same vein that every product I buy in the US that's made in China has a instructions in 6 languages? No cost there...

It never ceases to amaze me how liberals think they have the answers to all of the world's ills which are always caused by those pesky Americans, and the Amercicans should have to pay to fix other people's problems. Such a conversion would not benefit any future generations of US citizens. So you just want us to convert to SI to makes things easier for everyone else. Do you work at the UN by chance?

Election cycles are 2/4/ 6 years. Not...gonna...work.

To what end? So foreign visitors are less confused when driving on or roads? Or to drive up small town ticket revenue until people become acclimated to kph? Both are great ideas... /rolls eyees

Converting the official measurement system simply for the sake of converting, to be like everyone else, is not a valid case for conversion, especially in the country with the world's largest economy. There has never been a piece of framing lumber, iron, or plumbing pipe sold in the US labeled with metric dimensions. The total cost in actual dollars, education, retraining, wasted material, etc, to convert these industries alone would likely equal the GDP of all but the top 20 coutries in the world. The amount of lumber wasted, thus more trees cut down, during this conversion period would surely put Greenpeace squarely against such a thing. Note: construction workers and plumbers are your high school classmates who got Ds in basic math. The first house constructed after such a conversion to SI will have to be rebuilt at least 3 times before it's done right, if then. Would you want to buy this house? Would you want to buy any house built during this transition phase? How about occupy the 100th floor of a high rise built during this transition? Commute over a bridge build during this transition? Recall the Minneapolis collapse? And those engineering mistakes were made using the well known and understood English system.

The US industries currently using SI do so because it makes sense and increases the bottom line: aerospace, automobiles, electronics, etc. These industries have significant exchange of engineering documents/data/people with overseas partners and contractors who only use SI. The building materials industry in the US has no such relationships so there is no advantage to doing this, only needless cost. There are other industries who would have zeo advantage here.

This is why the White House has taken the position it has. One of the great things about America is choice. Keep an eye on what happens with Obamacare, the single largest forced conversion of an industry in US history. Then think about those problems in relation to such a mandated conversion to SI.