Good question, but this follow up statement may be holding a clue:

Yeah, that blurb didn't help ya.

No, that isn't anywhere close to the markup on a text message sadly.

My 2.5GB data plan costs $20 per month. So divide $20 by 2,500,000,000 and that is the cost per byte (0.000000008 dollars per byte, or hairs of a penny). Meanwhile, you pay 30 cents per text message that you send (160 bytes). So the comparison is 0.30 (sms) vs 0.00000128 (160 bytes of data) or roughly 23,437,500% markup.

would you mind providing the math on how 9600bps increased by 20,000% comes out to 230GB/s ? I've looked it over a few times and I'm not seeing it. The network bandwidth speeds have increased massively in the last 31 years, but we're talking about substantial increases in usage following those bandwidth increases. It is essentially the same as building an extra lane on a highway and then wondering why the new highway lane is always full too - you made more room, so now more people use it. The same goes for mobile - they made the networks faster, and more people started using it because they could. Now they are finding that no matter how much they increase bandwidth the customers will increase usage.

• 1981: 2.5KB/s - 5.7KB/s (1G)
• 1991: 7KB/s - 14.37KB/s (2G)
• 1998: 25KB/s - 6.87MB/s (3G)
• 2009: 12.5MB/s - 125MB/s (4G)

Around here, nothing is obvious, especially when it comes to people professing the greatness of vi or emacs. You must have momentarily forgotten, but this is /.

On that tiger filled image alone you deserve every mod point available.

It costs $1.40 per foot for coax and $1.79 per foot for fiber to run a single line, not counting the cost to rebalance the network once the new line has been added, the cost of additional equipment, and the cost of infrastructure improvements to support it all (depending on distance you may need a repeater and injector, or if it is at the end of a maxed strand you'll need to extend the entire strand and run at least 2,000 feet of new fiber). Running cable to a person's home isn't as simple as just running up the pole and plugging it in. There are a lot of factors that go into it, and normally extending plant out to suit one person costs the company far more than they could make in a year from that user. Think of it this way: Would you spend $15,000 running cable to someone's home so you could earn $90 a month from them? how about $200 a month from them? Considering you're only making roughly $10-$30 in profit from that user, its going to take longer to recoup the cost of the initial investment than it will take for the plant they use to need replacement and maintenance (as most coax infrastructure runs last 5-7 years before replacement is needed). It sucks that your parents can't get cable, but don't blame the company for not just throwing capital down the drain.

It was magical for him...

Organizations big enough to use tape have been using hybrid disk / tape backup solutions for a very long time. We use locally stored centralized backups that we can push to remote sites from disk, and then also perform offsite backups nightly with tape. It is really the only way to go when you have multi-terabyte incremental backups.

You should have performed a better google search, since I buy LTO-5 tapes (1.5TB uncompressed, 3TB compressed) for roughly $60 each. Included in that cost is pre-labeling based on my specifications and series numbers from previous orders, and two day shipping. Roughly 1/3 the cost of the tiny tapes you found, and under half the cost of the comparable hard drive. Tape offers many benefits that you don't have in a hard drive, including better drop resistance (moron resistant), and the ability to be physicaly write locked (again, moron resistant). In addition you have tape libraries that swap tapes out automatically, so I can store a month worth of tapes in my library and not worry about someone else managing backups while I take vacation (moron resistant!) or wait out a bad winter storm. Don't get me wrong, tapes and tape libraries aren't for every company, but I have incremental backups upwards of 6TB (comparable to the full backups of people I've read here) and full backups roughly five times that. With the volume of data I manage I can't just keep ordering disks and controller cards, so tapes help me save time and money.

Symantec Advanced Pre-emptive Defense tech... SAP'ed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_(law_enforcement)#Sap