No offense, but I have to call BS on this:

These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul.

Well, It's true. They're starting to integrate into other assets, as Time Warner points out: Many cell phone providers are hooking cable modems up to their towers to boost speeds. Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices. But the majority of towers being deployed only have a T1 or equivalent for the backhaul.

Except you aren't. Parts of their network do, sure, but a lot of towers don't. And you don't seem to understand how these cells mesh together. Your cell phone can, in a typical urban environment, probably talk to over a dozen towers. But it doesn't. It usually talks to the nearest one; To keep transmitter power low and keep wireless "slots" free in adjacent cells. But there may only be 1 or 2 4G towers, but maybe 5 3G, or phone-only towers.. or whatever. My point is that it's a mixed environment. They can even have you talking on one tower while making a data connection on another, and all of this is being handed off all the time when you're mobile. Sometimes a tower oversaturates and hands traffic off to another one, or forces your phone to downgrade; It'll say 4G but it's only talking on 3G, for example.

Yeah. Why do you think the data allowances are so low, while believing the network capacity to be so great? It strikes me as a big flaw in your line of reasoning.

Yeah, actually. I do. The Obamacare website, as much of a failure it was, still cost the American public a tiny fraction of what they're paying in excessive profits to the insurance industry. We would need thousands of Obamacare website fails to equal just what we're losing this year to these people -- and getting nothing in return. We're lining their pockets.

People bitch about the government and toss around terms like "massive overspend", people like you, and they haven't got a single goddamned clue about how much everything else in their life costs them. Bank overdrafts. Insurance markups. Mortgages. Student loans. Cell phone 'hidden fees'. You're being bled dry by the private sector at a rate many multiples what the government takes from you. But you bitch about the government because that's what the talking heads on TV tell you to do.

You sit down someday with your checkbook and parse out how much these government "scandals" actually cost you, and I will be amazed if you even hit 1% of your gross income. And yet, companies like this steal 5, even 10% of your income... and you just bend over and grab your ankles with a smile.

Moron.

It may be a punishment, but it's not a deterrent of any kind, in even the slightest. The fact is that most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most offenders are first-time. They made a bad call, and they got busted. But our lack of focus on rehabilitation, the fact that somewhere around 80% of Americans are now near or below poverty guideline according to recent reports coming out now, suggests that the major motivator of criminal activity today is desperation. And we reward them for our society's lackluster economic performance, high expectations, taxes, and cost of living, pushing them to do it, by taking away any future potential to get a real job. Every job that pays much more than minimum wage requires a background check. If you have ever even been arrested, let alone charged with a crime, chances are good you will not get any job, regardless of qualifications, that's any better than burger flipping, telemarketing, or cleaning rich people's houses.

And you know what that does? It pushes them into more crime. Prisons might as well be named Crime University. Everyone who's in will tell you there schemes. You go in for check fraud, and you come out knowing fifty new types of fraud, and no job prospects. It leads to one, inevitable conclusion.

And people wonder why the whole goddamned country is falling down all around us? It's easy: We're a good Christian country. And as a good christian country, we punish and oppress, we guilt, we lie, and we shit on the poor and downtrodden, while offering them token charity and telling ourselves they're morally weak and thus deserve what's done to them. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.

And then we wonder why record numbers of them are snapping, grabbing a gun, and going around shooting up schools, hospitals, and every other place where people congregate and there's a government presence. Because we don't let anyone cry, we don't help anyone who asks for it, and because they can't cry tears, and can't find help, they cry bullets, and find an outlet for their anger in the blood of innocent people.

They're all very pathetic. They're oversubscribed by many thousands to one; Your shittiest cable provider doesn't hold a candle to how pathetically oversubscribed the average mobile provider is. These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul... it only takes a couple of phones to saturate those links. You will never, ever, get the full-rated OTA speed. Anywhere.

And they employ super-massive buffers; They're the reason buffer-bloat has become a problem. Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy. Bandwidth is irregular and employs highly manipulated QoS to allow access to a select few websites at full speed, while taking the piss out of the rest of them -- there's a reason Facebook loads quick, while a site like, say, Slashdot, takes 30 seconds or more.

The FCC needs to not just run bandwidth tests, but suss out their QoS; People need to show that anything but the top 50 websites give absolutely terrible performance. You can get your google results in seconds, but it might take several minutes to load up the homepage of the restaurant you were searching for.

That's old. Here's a current model fully automatic milking robot. The cows aren't pushed around. They're fed tastier food at the milking robot, so they go there willingly. Milk cows need and want to be milked; it relieves pressure. They're herd animals, and will mostly do what the other cows are doing. By exploiting normal cow behavior, the cows do part of the work, and the milking robot does the rest. RFID tags on the cows and tracking computers will detect cows that are having problems.

That's not a prototype or a demo. That's commercial technology. At least three other vendors also produce robotic milking systems.

Then there's the feeding robot the automatic manure removal system, and the barn cleaning robot.

Commercial farms are very heavily mechanized. There are dairy farms with 30,000 cows (enough to provide milk for a major city), but only 400 employees. Farm employment in the US is only 3% of workers. This is why.

Unless they mean something rather different by 'quantum encryption' than the present usage, it won't be of much use.

If you are particularly paranoid, and operate on the theory that your fiber isn't being tapped, quantum encryption comes in at a price that compares favorably to having trusted guys with guns stand around keeping people away from your fiber. If, however, you don't have the luxury of a continuous run between you and the destination (like, oh, almost everybody), the fact that a third party has access to your photons isn't news, it's how the network networks.

The last few will probably be stubborn; but today's technology has decimated agricultural-sector employment throughout the developed world already.

In the case of Australia, farmers represent a whopping 1.7% of the population, so even their total extirpation as an employment class would be relatively minor shift. Probably one with substantial cultural resonance; but just not that big in absolute or relative terms.

It's always funny when these sorts of comments are posted anonymously - like we aren't going to figure out the poster has some vested financial interest in whatever silly little fly-by-night company is being shilled in the anonymous post.

Do you have a lawyer who will take that case for what you can afford to pay them? If so, sure. Else, haha no.

Except I mentioned profit already, and you missed the fundamental point of your fundamental point that there should be limits to the amount of profit someone can bleed others dry over; And most insurance is mandated by law, and are strictly regulated, which as anyone knows... creates artificial monopolies. Why can't we just get 1,500 people together, and put that money in an account managed by the government, and let them manage the insurance? What benefit is served by allowing private for-profit companies to provide most forms of mandated insurance -- like car or auto, over government administration?

Afterall, we've already legislated that you have to have it... why then not take the next step and simply roll it into our taxes? I am not sold on the idea that the private sector can do a better job. Or better yet, why don't I do it and explain in gritty detail just how fucked over your "fundamental point" is here -- and how badly for-profit enterprise is screwing over all of us.

In 2010 there were 5,419,000 police-reported accidents. Source
The US population was 308,745,538 in 2010. Source
That works out to about 1 car accident per 57 people.
According to the CDC, the cost of those accidents collectively came out to "$99 billion, or nearly $500, for each licensed driver in the United States." That is about $41.67 per month.

Now how much are we paying? According to these guys, in 2010, the average expenditure $791, or about $65.92 per month. If these numbers are accurate, than that means that the administrative overhead and profit combined comes out to about 37%.

That means that over a third of what you're paying is above and beyond what's necessary. Now many have railed against medicare and numerous cases of gross incompetence, cost-overruns, and flat out fraud have come out of the program. I'm sure you've heard of it. But take a guess at the total cost of administrative overhead for that program. Okay, now here's the truth: It's about 1.5-2%.

So even the much-maligned medicaid program, routinely paraded out as an example of how our taxpayer dollars are being wasted... comes in at a fraction of the cost of private for-profit insurance.

Now, please... tell me how capitalism is saving us money. I fucking dare you.

Insurance isn't supposed to be about profit, it's supposed to be about cost-management. Say that for every 1,500 people, one of them will be in a car accident each year. The average cost of a car accident in terms of legal costs, replacement, etc., we'll say is $50,000 -- or about $136.98 per day. Let's add a 15% administrative cost -- that is, the cost to hire people and collect the funds. That's $157.53 -- Now divide that by 1500 and multiply it by 30.5 (the average length of a month) you get $3.20 per month per person.

And that's how insurance is supposed to work: Distribute the costs so that the one poor bastard that would otherwise be broke, bankrupt, and his life ruined, avoids that fate because the risk is distributed over a large number of people. The administrators take home a reasonable profit -- that is their salaries plus maybe 5%, which is about average profit for a successful business, and you call it a day. Then you only need to manage the edge cases -- that 1% that gets in lots of accidents for no apparent reason. And those should be pretty easy to detect... since, you know, they're getting in accidents a lot. Set a threshold beyond which it's statistically improbable it could be random chance just kicking one guy's ass, and you're all set.

There is no need for any of the rest of this. The reason they put it in, is the same reason our health care went to absolute and total shit: They're determining risk based on the individual, not the group, and maximizing profit. That is, insurance today has become about avoiding risk, not absorbing it.