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.

heavily regulation of Slashdot editorial skills.

search mydomain.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1

There, problem solved.
No need to say thank you...

It's the scourge of futurists everywhere: The space elevator can't seem to shake its image as something that's just ridiculous, laughed off as the stuff of sci-fi novels and overactive imaginations.

I've first heard of space elevators decades ago, and not once have I read or heard anyone saying it's a ridiculous or laughable idea. All I've heard is that it'd be a really great, smart and economical way to access space, if only a strong and light material could be found to prevent the cable from being several miles across in diameter at the base and collapse under its own weight. Where did the story's submitter get that from?

Which is to say, not much.

Yes but, Australia being upside down, the bottom is at ground level.

Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund for the service outage that happened after the deal went through.

I'm not sure you realize what a "service outage" is. A power or water cut is an outage. Unresponsive Facebook or Whatsapp servers is a minor inconvenience at best, and might even be viewed as a life improvement event.

The word BULLSHIT jumps to mind whenever Facebook is mentioned.

You probably smell tapas too after the 50th trip.

More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.

As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.

More likely a sign of the effect of society on the decision of having a child: either the couple is poor and decides they can't offer the child a good life, or they're still student and they prefer to wait until they're done with their studies and have stable jobs and incomes... that sort of thing.

You don't want to go to Mars? Please by all means, keep your bullshit on Earth and let us evolved human beings make a fresh new life on a fresh new planet without you!

Yes you're right: Google is good, really really good. And they're so good that, when customers/users have a choice, they choose Google... until Google is the only provider left, and then you have a monopoly and you're trapped because there's no other service left to switch to.

It's already happened: want to upload Youtube videos? You have to subscribe to Google+ and its invasive TOS. Don't want G+? You have to use Vimeo or Dailymotion or other inferior online video services. And because Google has grown so massive, they have the means to drive Vimeo and Dailymotion out of business for good.

See where this is going?

This is not reactivism, this is fighting monopolies. Monopolies are bad: whichever way they come about, they're bad news. The telcos you complain about behave this way precisely because they're monopolies.

That's what I call Google fiber: this goddamned company is trying to control anything, from the OS (Android) to carrier to search engine to the entire freaking internet.

Don't you see? It's not the digital divide we should fear, it's the Google monopoly. Once they control everything, they'll dictate what you can do and not do on their internet.

Super-fast internet connectivity attracts internet users like honey the proverbial fly. That's why Google offers it. Once we're stuck in the honey though, we'll be in real trouble...

You mean if one were to send an email from Munich to Paris, it'd cross the Atlantic and come back?

Depends... Sometimes the German Army brings it directly in person.