I shall dub this network "The world barely keeping up with demand."

More like "demand barely keeping up with offering".

The truth is, consumers don't want to upgrade to the latest and greatest shit every 6 months in an economic slump.

It's like super high definition TV or Blue-Ray discs: people aren't finished investing in the previous generation technology that a new one comes along. Not to mention, the contents - movies and TV shows - are still shit, and people aren't interested in high definition shit anymore than they want low def shit.

In the case of 4G - and now 5G - it's even worse, because the price of data traffic over these networks hasn't come down nearly as fast as the available bandwidth has increased: it still costs a testicle per gigabyte, only with 4G, you lose a testicle in seconds instead of minutes. No thanks.

Well, you say that, but in actuality the rich run both parties, and the rich are getting what they want for the most part, and the rest of us are getting the short straws. This apparently partisan conflict is simply in the script. They re-examine the script every four years or so, decide if they'll run the same president, proceed to have him elected, and then we proceed to blame all of our problems on partisan politics.

Feeding the last mile is not a niche application.

In cities, it's reasonable to wire everyone up. In bumfuck, not so much. I live in bumfuck. I have three ISP options available to me, all of the WISPs. All of them crap. I am now on the one which is least crap. A notable percentage of Americans are in the same boat, or one which is indistinguishable from a distance. Population density is low enough and sectored antennas directional enough for wireless to be a last-mile solution for the USA.

On the other hand, it'll still require microcells...

Uh no. Detroit is a place where corporations (and thus, corporatists) were allowed to run amok with their greedy behavior. Nobody claims these people are the smartest among us.

Most of the density in sugar beets is water, which doesn't have caloric value.

It's in the public interest to have people homed and transported.

It's not clear that nationalizing the loan system would be a good way to actually achieve that, but clearly letting it be private isn't working either.

And neither gasoline taxes nor road use taxes are sufficient to pay for the roads. You can have a balkanized network of toll roads that would cripple commerce and personal travel alike, you can raise fuel taxes to european levels which is probably the fairest approach, or you can have what we have here where money from the general fund is spent on interstate highway maintenance. Of course, that could be done at the state level rather than the federal level, which would prevent states like California with the most miles of road, the most vehicles, and the most vehicle-miles traveled (due to having the largest population and lots of livable land area) having shitty roads while also having to subsidize the roads in other states. Mostly red states, they talk big about personal responsibility but they don't actually believe in that shit.

Even with all the rain that's fallen on California lately, we are still years of rain like this away from aquifer replenishment. This coupled with next year's El Nino may set back the complete inviability of the inland empire several years, but it's still coming because of our water use strategies. In short, water rights have become "use it or lose it" so people not using their water allotment are having their water rights taken away, down to their current usage. Fail to use the water for just one year, see what happens. So they're using the water to grow crap crops, or just pumping it and then selling it [illlegally] and the water goes someplace else to grow grapes or pot.

We are running out of useful water.

There are a number of approaches we might use to solve this problem. The one I favor is cutting off SoCal and letting them fuck off. Sadly, Los Angeles receives enough yearly rainfall to cover 100% of its needs in many years, but something like 99% of it runs straight into the ocean because that whole area is just one big sandbox.

This is becoming less important. Factory work is becoming more automated and the core of the "smart grid" concept involves electricity producers informing electricity consumers as to when they are permitted to use power. Industrial users are already being moved to these sort of systems but the vision is for entire societies to participate in essentially cooperative power distribution. The power can be used when the power is there, aside from the demands which basically keep people working. A little more stock will have to be carried so that the workers can keep assembling the widgets, but more and more widgets are now being assembled by machines as well.

Uh no. Fuck TEPCO. Everything they've said since the accident has been a lie, or gross incompetence of a totally unacceptable order. The workers have been heroic. TEPCO has been pathetic.

So use one of the number of alternate tethering methods?

I don't go out that much, thankfully. I have a Nexus 4 on a T-Mo SIM, replacing an Xperia Play (hey, it was a hundred bucks all in, including replacing the back plate.) Which is now my SIP phone, and I pay around ten bucks a month for that.

The plan I'm using costs $2/day for unlimited everything, only on the days when you use it. It only has EDGE but the $3/day plan has fancier mobile data. Much of my driving around is in the sticks where the 3G coverage is crap anyway, and this is adequate for navigation with google maps.

The only annoyance is having to pop out the SIM every time I want to try out a new ROM, since all of 'em default to mobile data enabled...

Possibly the MJ uses SIP INFO DTMF (or the equivalent) and the DTMF isn't being generated on the other end properly, or alternately, it doesn't and your DTMF sounded like poop and the menu system could handle it but some cc system you were handed off to couldn't.

I'm all for ending prohibition but lets not oversell it by claiming it will make a big difference to the level of gun violence in the US. Mexico maybe, maybe not, the existing Mexican cartels / US gangs will have to find something else to do and they are likely to look for something with a high ROI that their organization is already good at, kidnapping, extortion, protection racket, maybe a Mexican based resurgence in Caribbean piracy. I say they would need "something else to do because no good would come from allowing the big boys to survive by "turning legit", that simply opens the doors to legitimate political power for them.

Uh, what? Slow down there, you're getting all confuzzled.

Windows RT is not Windows. It is Windows' retarded younger sibling.