I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching.

Again, the almighty says stop changing the subject and answer the fookin' question

The thing is, you can accomplish everything in your theoretical peanut scenario with interactions between humans if they have adequate organization. But you can't accomplish any of that with SAP if you lack adequate SAP organization. So by spending the effort on SAP, what do you get? Maybe the same results if you're lucky and SAP doesn't explode, and now you get to pay for SAP.

Might as well just buy an AS/400 (can you even still do that?)

The last mile is still as fucked as it has been for the last five years or so. Only in a few major cities are we actually deploying any fiber. I still can't get anything as fast as a decent DSL connection at my home without paying massive fees for something carrier-grade; I would probably have to pay AT&T to run a new strand of fiber into my neighborhood. The copper in my neighborhood has been spliced and respliced, because it was inherited from Pacific Bell, and it is shit.

Useless wireless has become a ubiquitous plague. MK802 series. Ouya, reportedly. Pretty much every cheapass tablet etc. The Wii was the last device I bought without an external antenna which has good reception. My cellphone has moderately adequate reception (SEMC Xperia Play) and will work farther from the antenna than most laptops with a screen antenna, but that's not saying much.

The US and Canada have pretty similar problems in terms of both broadband penetration and television reception, related to population density and basic issues of geography. Where I live in the USA, it used to be possible to almost get four stations in via analog. Now two of them can't be picked up at all any more. I don't know of anyone receiving any DTV here at all.

But that's the point; you don't fill it with people who make the world great. You fill it with people who make the world grate. If the plane crashes, you can then fully comprehend ambivalence.

America's broadband networks led the world in one respect; this is where we got widespread broadband first. We lag in every other regard. Miles of shitty copper used for services it can't really handle is not a metric to brag about.

We get less for our money than almost anyone else, we have poorer penetration than almost anyone else... the former is because of corporate malfeasance, the latter is both because of that and because the USA is big. Nothing to be proud of either way.

If you can otherwise satisfactorily explain why Brits don't pronounce their Rs but Americans do, when Elizabethan English had a very hard R, you will win a small prize. There are numerous other examples. The whole argument does make sense, but you're only looking at one part of it; the logical part. Groups of humans don't work on logic most of the time.

Wait, what? All you need to know with chat is that this message came from the same guy as the last message. TLS is fine for that.

SAP is like an operating system for business intelligence applications. It has that much complexity. It's just further proof that those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it... poorly.

Sure, there's also stupidity and incompetence.

If the system can't be taken down for maintenance, in pieces if necessary and with redundance if necessary, then the initial design was incompetent. And if the system is based on SAP, then whoever made the purchasing decision was not only incompetent, but also stupid. A cursory look around will tell you that everyone with SAP and without billions of dollars is very angry.

You're seriously talking about a graphical change. This would be about fifteen seconds' work on an IBM mainframe, to diddle the format. If it isn't on SAP, then SAP sucks shit and no amount of your apologizing will change it any more than it would change Lotus Notes.

Blu-Ray has vastly more storage than a HD-DVD, so they can afford to use higher bitrates. Thus they were able to use MPEG2 until their codecs were stabilized because they had bitrate to burn. It would be best if you understood even the most basic particulars of the technologies involved before commenting on the situation.

I regularly get other routers for an order of magnitude less money. I am making a small collection of them for a project. So, if you want me to listen you won't tell me how to spend my money, HTH, HAND.

I have two WRT54Gs and a WRT54GS (note punctuation) and have run tomato on one of them. But one of my Gs failed and the other one is very short on flash so DD-WRT actually has more capabilities on it. Next time I see some at a yard sale I will be able to check the router database as I finally have mobile internet access, albeit EDGE only. At least it's cheap and on-demand.