Oh, where I grew up, the lines were at 24.0 kbps 15 years ago. They've gotten worse since then.

Most of the dial-up options are not really workable now either because the phone lines have degraded to the point of near-uselessness, or the ISPs have just turned off the dial-up gear.

"Which is not an argument for whether it should be free."

Of course it's an argument. If you have a fixed budget, which every municipality does, does that fixed number of dollars go into more service, or into lower or free fares? Those dollars come from somewhere, and there's a limited supply of them. One can argue, philosophically, about whether or not fares should be free. But here in the real world, my tax dollar can only be spent once, and I'd rather have the practical argument about how to spend it. Even the linked article points out that surveys of actual low-income people who are the intended beneficiaries of free fares show they agree with more frequent and reliable service over free fares.

"No transportation does not."

I assume you mean "no transportation is guaranteed to get you where you want to go," which is a nonsense argument. (If I've misinterpreted, then I apologize, but the written sentence is hard to parse.) I'm guessing that your argument would be something like walking can't, eventually, be guaranteed to get me somewhere because I could be hit by lightning on the way. Or, with an intense irony, run over by a car.

The fact of the matter is that my car is far more reliable in getting me to places I want to be when I want to get to them. The train and the bus have both failed me before, repeatedly, and I use them basically to get to work or to special events, both places I don't really want to drive to for obvious reasons. Buses that don't show up and trains that get stuck in lengthy delays due to various issues of all kinds, both of these have happened more than once. I had to leave a concert right before the encore once to catch the last train of the evening, before midnight on a weekend, and I know that had I driven, I'd have been able to stay for the whole show and then meet the artist rather than risk being stranded. Trying to act like these things don't exist doesn't make them go away.

It doesn't matter what it costs if it's not frequent and reliable, a very common problem in the US. If it comes once per hour and doesn't always show up, nobody will take it regardless of cost because there's no guarantee it will get them where they want to go when they want to get there.

Honestly, money spent making the bus "free" would be better spent making it more frequent and reliable.

I mean, did anyone really expect them to come out and say "You know what? DoJ is right. We *are* a monopoly that needs to be broken up!"

Of course not. If they had, that would be news. This is not.

No, this isn't right, at least in the US.

In most cases, all carrier antennas are on the same rack. So if Verizon is on the top rack of the tower, then ALL of Verizon's gear is on that top rack, so the height is the same. There are certain towers, specifically the "stealth" ones made to look like ridiculously huge flag poles, where that's not the case, but the vast majority of cases do have the antennas at the same height. In many cases, the same antennas are being used for 3G and LTE, and sometimes also for 5G-NR.

Separately, the frequencies in use are very similar. Verizon uses 850 MHz CLR spectrum for CDMA/EVDO, and is using 700 MHz upper-C block spectrum for LTE (along with other higher bands). 700 and 850 are similar spectrum with similar reach.

Other carriers are similar. AT&T uses 850 MHz or 1900 MHz for UMTS, while using 700 MHz lower-B and C blocks for LTE (along with other higher bands). T-Mobile runs GSM on PCS (1900 MHz) and/or AWS (2100 MHz) along side LTE on 600 MHz spectrum and, in many places, 700 MHz lower-A block spectrum, which actually should have better range than PCS/AWS. In the area I'm most familiar with, US Cellular has CDMA and LTE on the same 850 MHz CLR spectrum on the same rack of equipment. Range should theoretically be the same, but it is not.

CDMA, which is 2G rather than 3G, did have excellent range. I could make a call on it, albeit somewhat broken up, at -104 dBm; LTE wouldn't even connect until that signal level came up another 15 dB. I can't speak to GSM or UMTS.

Better solution is to just remove the Firefox Snap and replace it with the Firefox .deb. Or, take it a step further like I did and tear out snapd completely and blacklist it.

"OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received."

So I should expect that ssh will not work properly when I eventually get this functionality in 24.04? Is there nothing that systemd won't absorb and destroy?

What race? There is no race. Either people use the dollar or they don't. Having a buzzword-powered digital version of the dollar won't change that.

Crazy idea--built standards-compliant webpages and you won't have to care about browser version numbers at all.

Interestingly, the US Cellular and T-Mobile data maps are actually not terrible from my experience in places I go, at least in the car. The US Cellular one might actually be a touch pessimistic. The Verizon map looks exaggerated, and the AT&T one is weirdly vague in a way the others aren't.

If they move away, you're going to cut their pay, but also make them rack up travel expenses to visit the office? Depending on how frequently and how far away, that could end up costing more than just staying in an expensive area.

I just signed into my account to post the very same thing. I'm not clear how this is possible in a typical installation. If you're using some type of dynamic beam forming such that you know what direction the antenna is aimed,, then I could see using the round-trip time to figure out the distance and thus calculate the location, but that assumes you're not utilizing a reflection instead. (Or, worse, more than one.) That's more likely the higher you go, and you can't really do that type of thing at lower frequencies because the equipment size on the tower just gets out of control.

I assume you mean AT&T. Sprint is the one suing AT&T for rebranding their LTE as "5G E".

This is false. I have no idea where this is coming from. There are about 20 PBS stations that sold spectrum in the 2016-2017 auction the FCC held to channel share, and considering there are hundreds of PBS stations out there, it's certainly not "most." And among those, most are not "renting" from commercial licensees.

The complete list of such stations and what they're doing follows:

KOCE Los Angeles, CA - shares on KSCI (commercial; no programming was lost)
KLCS Los Angeles, CA - shares on KCET (non-commercial)
KQEH San Jose, CA - shares on KQED (its PBS sister station, which was already airing its programming)
WEDY New Haven, CT - shares on WEDH (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast)
WXEL West Palm Beach, FL - shares on WPBT (its PBS sister station)
WUSF Tampa, FL - shares on PBS WEDU and sold the license to them
WYCC Chicago, IL - shares on PBS WTTW and sold the license to them
WCMZ Flint, MI - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WTVS/WDCQ
WNJN Montclair, NJ - shares on WNJB (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WNJT Trenton, NJ - shares on WNJS (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WPBO Portsmouth, OH - went off the air entirely; PBS remains on WOSU/WKAS/etc.
WLVT Allentown, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial; no programming was lost)
WYBE Philadelphia, PA - shares on WBPH (commercial) and sold the license to WLVT
WVIA Scranton, PA - shares on WNEP (commercial; no programming was lost)
WRET Spartanburg, SC - shares on WNTV (its PBS sister station, of which it was a 100% simulcast; no programming was lost)
WVPY Front Royal, VA - shares on WVPT (its PBS sister station)
WMSY Marion, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WSBN Norton, VA - station was already off the air for financial reasons
WVTA Windsor, VT - station will share on WVER, its PBS sister station of which it is a 100% simulcast, and will refill lost coverage with booster signals that are being built right now
WMVT Milwaukee, WI - shares on WMVS (its PBS sister station)

The vast majority of the above did not have any change in resolution. To the extent there's a change in bandwidth, newer encoders have better performance, and you cannot measure picture quality from bandwidth alone.