Agreed. Not only are many of the ads asinine, Youtube actively blocks free speech. This has prevented people from - for example - giving real information on Ivermectin during the pandemic. BTW, in case you are one of the deluded and fooled, Ivermectin is NOW listed as an safe and mildly effective drug for Covid-19. You know, after demonising it in the public space and anyone associated with it.

I listen to a reasonable amount of music online.

An ad popping up in the middle of an extended-play song ...................... enragening.

It's more or less true. There were a couple of days where Youtube told me that blockers were EVIL but gave me a exit X from the pop-up and then played the video without ads... but that now is also gone. uBlock wins again.

Welcome to the Youtube arms race.

Most likely, there is no major competition in the market, and PC sales on the whole have slowed considerably. A modern 6800K processor is as close as you'll come to a leap forward, but it's $1100 Canadian and requires a similarly expensive motherboard + memory. Same with similar chips.

Meanwhile the cheapest system on the market is as fast as a moderately high-grade enthusiast computer from 2010 and probably has reasonable 3D graphics onboard, with a SSD drive it will feel quite snappy.

So, a) not a lot of market demand for faster systems, b) lots of tablets and game consoles for entertainment out there, c) moderately faster systems exist but cost keeps them low-volume, d) very low-percentage demand for faster computers - definitely less than 1% that will pay a premium for it, e) the majority of gamers are young-ish and they play largely twitch games even on PCs which are more GPU limited than CPU limited.

Hold the shift key down when you reboot, and keep it down until the login screen.

Source: I own an ISP.

But it's not. This requires - at present - a databasing system that can methodically lower interference between nodes and divvy up the bandwidth between different houses. Because the frequency penetrates so well and has so much distance capability, interference is a constant and potentially crippling problem. That also causes major issues with country borders, since it is easily possible to interfere with transmissions of another base station from 100+ miles distance.

The article makes it all sound like you just buy some device, plug it in and whallah, you're online at up to 600Mbps. Not to mention that 600Mbps refers to "air speed," which means all the signalling, all the channel boundaries being removed, all the error correction data, all the retransmissions, etc. In other words, nothing like 600Mbps to the end user. But hey, don't let that get in the way of $ale$ amirite?!

Yep. Pretty much nobody needs 1Gbps for any legitimate purpose, much less 10Gbps. Very specific special cases.... maybe.

... really?

Tried to update to 4.8.4 (manually) and it won't read my BNX2 firmware. 4.7.10 is fine.

So much for 4.7 being a long-term release (iirc)

That is *very* outlier pricing.

MOST law enforcement officers abuse their positions in various ways. Your view is highly inaccurate.

Tens of millions won't get you very far. Maybe a small city, say 20,000 people.

Clearly, whoever that is you're chatting with has never run a business or worked a serious job in IT.

This is it, in a nutshell. The future is largely dystopian. People, on the whole, are completely inure to the issues of governmental trespass in their lives, and thus it is unlikely to be stopped before it is an everyday nuisance (and threat) in the lives of those who are not. They trust the government because they don't seem to understand that the government is a faceless bully made up of many corrupt and self-serving individuals. The cream sinks to the bottom in government.

Just a note: there are technical reasons for data caps and they are absolutely not bullshit claims about network congestion. Probably they can be fixed, for metric shitloads of money, and they probably will be over time.