You're correct... satellite broadband can be had in the US for far less than $400/month. ViaSat and WildBlue's services (may or may not qualify as "broadband" depending on your definition) start at around $50/month. The GP's citation of $400/month for satellite broadband refers to "business class" VSAT data service. Residential satellite Internet is heavily oversubscribed, often north of 100:1. Also note the Fair Access Policy terms under which you will be throttled for excessive data usage.

For some use cases, the results will be indistinguishable at the lower price point; for others they will be very different. Think of the difference between the two as being T1 service from a business provider vs. home cable or DSL service.

Actually, you don't - at least not in most places. In order to decrease roaming charges (and prevent phones from draining battery deciding between two sets of towers) your home carrier only allows roaming in geographic areas (called LACs) where they have no infrastructure at all and another carrier does. So your carrier could have only two towers in a county and another carrier has 50, but since your carrier has some infrastructure there you are not going to see any towers from the other carrier. You are only going to see the "other network" in areas where your carrier has no presence at all, so when you see you are on "other carrier's network" you see their coverage in that particular area, but you have no idea if their coverage is good or bad in other areas.

All the US carriers have detailed coverage maps on their websites and that's probably the best way to figure out who has what where.

Slashdot's usual BS political linkbait headline has nothing to do link the actual story. This is not about French vs. US aircraft, France vs. the US in general, or anything like that. If you read either of the linked TFAs, they say specifically that:

• India had a multi-stage competition for their medium multirole combat aircraft (MMRCA) program with many bidders to replace their previous fleet of Russian MiG-21s and French Mirage 2000s.
• In April, they deselected a variety of applicants including the Swedish Saab, the Russian OAO United Aircraft, and the American Boeing and LockMart.
• The final stage of the competition was between the French Rafale and the Eurofighter Typhoon (built in UK, Germany, Italy and Spain). Indian law requires the contract to go the lowest bidder, so the Rafale won.

Both of TFAs talk about how this decision is a blow to the Eurofighter, not to the US - not anymore than it is to Sweden or Russia. It is just another poorly edited (or edited at all?) Slashdot anti-US linkbait, flamebait article.

I swear I'm almost done with Slashdot except that it still has some informative comments on science stories, I need to just browse that section and ignore the rest since they just piss me off.

I told myself I was never going to engage in a Slashdot "information wants to be free" debate again, and I know this is karma suicide, but what the heck. This post tees up the question perfectly.

If the person who made it says it should, then yes. If you don't like that, you should download the work of someone else who doesn't think that it should cost money.

That's the whole part of "fair" that I think most Slashdotters either don't get or willfully ignore. If you make a thing, you should get to decide under what terms other people can use it - you can say what it costs or if it's free, just like you can say that code you write is GPL or closed. You made it, so that's your right (at least for the time specified under current copyright law). I hope that everyone who has written software and published it under a certain license should agree with that.

If I don't like it, I should go find a GPL-licensed alternative to your closed source/payware software, or a creative-commons alternative to your payware entertainment. It is not my right, however, to say "you think your creation is closed but it should be open" or "you think your thing is worth $X but I don't so I will just take it." Just like it is not someone else's right to say the GPL-licensed code you wrote should actually be BSD or closed. If you made this thing, you should get to decide how it is distributed. That's what I think is fair.

And please note that I say this as a once-upon-a-time ravenous Napster downloader. I pirated - or whatever you want to call it - lots of music because 1.) it was free and easy, 2.) there was no legal equivalent, and 3.) I wanted to. But I never tried to delude myself that I was fighting a war against copyright or the corrupt MPAA or anything like that... I just wanted free music and it was easy and I was poor, so I did it.Ten years later I'm not poor so now I try to buy everything I want that's digitally available, and in fact have over the years bought most of the stuff I downloaded illegally over the years which I ended up actually listening to.

I have never condemned anyone for downloading music/videos/whatever illegally - how can I when I used to do it myself? What I do condemn people for is deluding themselves that the people who make things have no rights as to how those things should be distributed. I think that is just being dishonest and pasting an ideological justification on top of a very human behavior as an excuse.

Who? Seriously. Think about the parties involved. AT&T threw everything it had to get it to pass. Verizon sat on the sidelines, as did Google and the other big tech players. The only ones in really vocal opposition were Sprint and lots of consumer groups - are you really suggesting they out-spent AT&T?

Or is it maybe just possible that the US political system is not the simplistic "which corporations spent the most buying politicians" you seem to think it is? Can't you honestly just admit that sometimes - sometimes - it isn't all black and white?

I applaud your sentiment since SOPA/PIPA etc. are stupid. But your comment is not reflective of reality. Google is based in the USA. So is Apple. So is Intel. So is Cisco. So is Facebook. So is Microsoft. So is Oracle. So is Red Hat. So is Qualcomm. So is Yahoo!. The list goes on and on.

There are a lot of good arguments against the current US Intellectual Property/patent policies, but "tech companies won't exist in the US" is not one of them.

Karma suicide in 3, 2, 1...

I know it's super cool on Slashdot to talk about how the US is the worst country in the world, it's a fascist dictatorship, all elections are run by corporations, Soylent Green is made by the Federal Reserve, etc. But honestly that is a very simplistic view of things that fails to account for the complex interlocking of interests that makes up US public policy.

If corporations really did "own" the US government...

• Why did the government deny AT&T's merger request with T-Mobile, even with the $millions AT&T spends on lobbying?
• Why do Federal and state governments keep laying taxes on tobacco, even with the $millions the tobacco companies spend on lobbying?
• Why did the Sarbanes-Oxley act pass when all big corporations absolutely hate it and lobbied against it?
• Why did the government reject the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to the US when the oil industry spent $millions lobbying for it?

The truth is that corporations or other interest groups that spend a lot on lobbying often get their way. But they don't always get their way or "own" the government - when enough people speak out against it, it does actually make a difference. We do have a democracy in the United States ... even if you don't like the outcomes sometimes. That means you should convince your fellow Americans to make smarter voting choices, not blithely dismiss the system as corrupt.

You are correct sir. I was thinking about gimballed self-pointing dishes when I wrote this, you are right about phased array antennas having no moving parts.

I have seen some pretty expensive ($20K+) phased array antennas. If you see these being mass-produced, let me know since I have yet to see these get over the chicken-and-egg hurdle of pricing to reach anything approaching a mass market.

I'm not sure I agree there. Once you're out of the atmosphere, the main source of signal attenuation for Ku/Ka bands is gone so the distance between 250 miles and 22,300 miles is not the main factor. It's more about compensating for doppler change and potentially needing to have the power to track multiple satellites to get around the issue of losing lock all the time and switching to a new bird.

I think this is another chicken-and-the-egg issue ... I assume you are not considering Iridium or Globalstar as "mass market?" And O3B IIRC is intended for ISPs, not end users. I'm not aware of any other LEO data constellations under development precisely for the reasons I outlined above about the higher cost of these systems. It's much simpler and cheaper right now to deliver satellite broadband via GEO birds, and while doing this over LEO may be technically feasible there are so many cost hurdles vs. 400-500 ms latency that I doubt anyone is going to spend the billions of dollars to do it

The issue isn't so much that it's hard - nor is it for the convenience of the NSA like one of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade suggested elsewhere. It's cost and reliability.

That fixed VSAT .75m or so dish you get installed outside your house for satellite TV or Internet is a reliable kit with no moving parts that costs at wholesale anywhere from $100 to $300 (excluding the satellite modem) for most configurations. (Some areas or situations require larger dishes that can run into the many hundreds or thousands of $$$.) You pay an installer $150 or so to come out and point it at the right satellite and test the system, and away you go for about $500 tops.

A phased array antenna, however, has LOTS of moving parts that can break or freeze up in bad weather. It also costs anywhere between $5000 and $30000 depending on your specifics, especially given that you need to bump up the transmitter power vs. an equivalent GEO radio to get equivalent data rates. Top that off with the fact that you're going to lose your connection everytime the LEO bird your dish was tracking goes over the horizon and it needs to lock onto a different satellite.

Long story short - you can shave 400 ms off your ping time at the cost of probably $5000-$15000 upfront cost. And that's just not a trade-off most people are interested in making. Never mind that I'm unaware of any commercial LEO data systems available today that provide greater than 9.6 kbps data rates...

See, I don't see it like that. There are many after-hours work calls or e-mails that I actually *want* to get because someone is helping me resolve a time-sensitive issue or because we are in different timezones and our calendars are all full during the day. The calls/e-mails after hours that I don't want, I simply ignore until the next morning. I also travel frequently for work and we will have all-day travel plus customer meetings/dinner that adds up to some very long days. But I have never tried to say that I won't be on an airplane or doing work-related tasks outside of 9-5 pm Monday-Friday.

My colleagues all have the same attitude, where work outside business hours is expected but nobody seems to mind too much, since generally if we put in a lot of extra hours one week, most of us will leave early or otherwise dial back some other week to make up for it. I get paid a pretty good salary to work outside strict "business hours" but I wouldn't put up with being called at 3 am for a firedrill or anything like that.

I'm very genuinely curious about this... whenever I see this discussed on Slashdot, I get the feeling that the majority of posters seem to be IT workers who are upset about being called/interrupted to resolve issues off-hours and hence the mindset about the extra work for no extra pay (that would certainly bother me too). It's definitely not the way I think about my job (I'm a product manager) but I get the feeling my situation is not the norm here. Is the issue that most Slashdotters are "on the clock"/have different job types than me, or is it just the attitude towards work in general?