"Anyone who thinks I'm going to 'discard' my TV just to buy a GoogleTV (or an Apple or Ubuntu TV for that matter) is fooling themselves. Okay, sure, if I was so inclined I could sell my 'old' TV on craigslist, but you know what, even that's more than I want to do."

I understand that you're not very interested in Google TV, but if you're interested enough to post a comment on it, you should be interested enough to spend ten seconds finding out that it's available primarily via STBs, as well as being built into TV sets. Selling your TV is not necessary.

I was wondering the same thing. I guess if there was a "killer app" for white space spectrum, we'd have heard about it. This page summarises it so; "Unlicensed spectrum opens the door to all kinds of uses, but the use most commonly talked about is to provide fixed and wireless broadband Internet services. It could also prove a good technology for moving video and other bulky data types around the home."

"They're actually more incompetent now, both technically and in customer service, than they were as NTL."

Sorry, but as a former NTL and current Virgin customer (few years gap in-between), I just don't believe that is possible, although Virgin are pretty bad. But with NTL, every single time I changed anything about my account, they fucked something up, from day one. It took 2 months to get my cable modem out of them when I first signed up; I would phone up and say I hadn't received it, they'd say "sorry, it hasn't been sent, don't know why, we'll have it sent tomorrow". It wouldn't turn up, I'd phone again, same thing over and over, never got an explanation. I got free broadband from them for half a year after changing package once, they just stopped billing me; they'd cut off my connection every month, I'd phone up and say did they want some money from me, they'd say "Sorry, your account is in credit, I don't know why you've been cut off, I'll reconnect you." That went on until I changed package again. You simply cannot find a less competent organisation than NTL was back in the day.

If you're a Sky TV customer though, their broadband is cheap or even free, depending on the package, so for those people it's probably hard to beat.

Personally I'm on Virgin broadband, and if anyone was offering more than 2Mbps DSL where I live, I'd switch, but right now I don't seem to have an option. My connection used to be good, but something about the way they've implemented their traffic management, or perhaps some other aspect of their network changes over the last year, means that my connection at times is practically useless.

Oops, I replied to the wrong post.

It's spelt "litre" in the United Kingdom.

While many of the comments so far are focussing on the issue of toilets, as does the summary, it's the whole sewage infrastructure that's the issue. In the African cities I've been to, large areas don't have proper underground sewers, and sewage is carried in stinking open gutters at the side of the road; having any kind of toilet doesn't help if it's flushing into those open sewers. TFA talks about supporting construction of pit latrines in slums that lack any form of sanitation, so it seems they are being quite practical about working with the existing infrastructure.

That's the only interesting part though, the rest can be summed up as "Complete asshole behaves like complete asshole". There was nothing technical clever or new about what he did, although he went further than most such incidents I've heard of, but few slashdotters will be at all surprised that that kind of thing is possible. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen more often, more subtly ... or does it?

For two, I don't really see any reason why an advertiser would even be interested in having Joe Bloggs, 121 Main Street, x100,000. Why would they even care about that detail? (a) If I wanted to advertise to huge numbers of people, I would much rather give facebook my advert + target demographic once, and let facebook handle the load of sifting which people fit that demographic and serving the ads accordingly, than deal with contacting 100,000 separate people myself.

One reason why advertisers want that data is junk mail (the paper kind). There was a documentary recently showing that here in the UK, 25% of the Royal Mail's revenue comes from delivering junk mail. Almost nobody reads the stuff that doesn't address them by name, but if they've got your name and address then people will generally at least open it and take a look, and that is very valuable to advertisers. If they can e.g. send you an offer on motor insurance just when your current insurance is about to expire (price comparison sites have been known to sell that kind of data, for example) then it's gold. Don't underestimate how much advertisers want to do that kind of individually targeted advertising.

That would drive me nuts.