No, it's very common to have "slow" internet speeds here because of telco/government collusion at the local level, and toothless regulation at the federal level.

Stop believing the density myth. Our infrastructure sucks because we have a cheap, paranoid, rabidly anti-government, and very loud segment of the populace that opposes all taxation and any spending that might benefit other people, and a handful of modern-day robber barons whose enormous profits depend on keeping them that way.

"The Cloud" is also somewhere in "The Internet", which Joe just knows is full of unsavory people. He may be past the hysterical there's-a-pedo-behind-every-keyboard phase, but he still isn't ready to trust it with sole custody of any files more important than kitten videos.

If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.

If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!

Right. So if you take the current glut of starches that we fat humans are eating and feed them to animals to produce fats and protein (at a conversion efficiency of ~1.5%) suddenly you no have much less food available. That might not be a bad thing, but it should be acknowledged in any alternate future dietary fanfic where the beef lobby beat out the corn lobby in Congress.

Well, it's a good idea. Given Vermont's granite and metamorphic dominated geology, drilling gas wells and fracking would probably liberate radon instead of methane!

It's a better example. Hours of disassembly to get the transmission out and open it up for the car vs. *point* "look, gears!" for the bike...

You probably wouldn't have a glut of food, the conversion ratio of feed calories to meat is pretty terrible, especially for cattle.

Even not-so-organized thieves are getting wise to tracking and remote wipe software. There was a story on NPR a week or two ago about the market in *cough* "found" smartphones in NYC that mentioned the resale value of a phone doubles if you take the battery out immediately after "finding" it.

If the data contains login details for online banking and investment sites, it has an immediate value of up to $all-your-money.

(And even if you're smart enough not to save those passwords, it probably contains your email login and password, which would let the thief reset your bank passwords, clear out your savings, and invest your whole 401k in "evil guy Caribbean beach retirement fund LLC".)

That would be the DSL provider with long queues and lots of lag, the cable provider with long queues and lots of lag, and the "4G" operator (more like 3.25G speed) with long queues, lots of lag, signal strength issues, and a 100MB monthly cap.

If this theory of competition between the duopoly worked, cable and DSL would both have better customer service and lower rates...