Let me guess, you are either European or you live in one of the few US cities with really good public transportation (e.g. NYC or Boston). I grew up in semi-rural PA, lived in Boston for most of a decade, and I'm now living in a small town near a mid-size city with typical bare-bones public transit (i.e. poorly-run and inconvenient buses which only poor people ride). Your notions are charming but quaint and do not reflect reality for most Americans.

I do think that the drinking age should be lower, as I have always found it ridiculous that we have decided that 18-year-olds are mature enough to die in wars and elect the government, but not mature enough to handle a can of Schlitz. I am, however, pragmatic enough to recognize that the trend in our society has been to coddle the next generation to the point of helplessness until they're in their 20s or 30s.

There are individual exceptions, of course, but the reality is that far too many of the little 18yo shits out there are stupid enough to get loaded and try driving to the next "rager". It does no good to prosecute stupid people after they've killed themselves and/or others, so the compromise is to threaten them with prosecution before they do it. Expecting parents to take responsibility for raising their children to be responsible members of society hasn't worked so well, so, here we are.

How has it done that? I am genuinely curious... My wife works for a hospital, too, but I haven't heard anything about trashed finances. If anything, things are looking up, as there will eventually be better insurance coverage for lots of the people who show up.

If all you've got is 24 hosts (well, 23 and an uplink), then it's fine. I suspect that the reality he's alluding to is something more along the lines of multiple switches chained together off of the "core" switch. The problem is that lower-end switches don't have the fabric (interconnects between ports) to handle all those frames without introducing latency at best and dropped packets at worst. For giggles, try hooking up a $50 8-port "gigabit" switch to 8 gigabit NICs and try to run them all full tilt. Antics will ensue... The cheap switches have a shared fabric which doesn't have the bandwidth to handle traffic between all the ports simultaneously. True core switches are expensive because they have dedicated connections between all the ports (logically, if not physically... I'm no switch designer), so there's no fabric contention.

I'm not paying an extra $10/mo to not receive TV, I'm simply not saving $10/mo by bundling my internet access with a TV package.

Internet (no bundle): $49.99/mo
Total: $49.99/mo

Internet (with TV bundle): $39.99/mo
Basic TV package (+ taxes, fees, etc.): $35.00/mo
Total: $74.99/mo

So it's more like going out to dinner and not paying an extra $25 to receive "free" dessert included with purchase of a bunch of appetizers that I didn't want anyhow.

Twist the knife a bit more, will ya? :P

Solving the technical problems isn't a big challenge if you ignore all the politics and other nontechnical machinations at work. Realistically, there is no way the NFL, NASCAR, MLB, etc. would allow their content to be multicast without solid protection of their revenue streams. And to even get to that point, you either need to convince them to throw together their own multicasting infrastructure (complete with closed clients), or, more likely, some single entity needs to invent a magic "sports box" and strike deals with all the sports entities.

It's a mess. And all of that completely ignores the fact that the average consumer Internet connection is never going to be as reliable as plain old cable/satellite.

Probably not in a way that's acceptable to a dedicated fan. I watch OTA HD stuff occasionally which would work OK for NFL if you're happy with the local team (Go Pats!).

Incidentally, I do see sports broadcasting as being a major kink in the plan to dismantle traditional TV. It's not practical to stream live to everyone, and I'm not sure that multicast would work without some kind of closed hardware/software solution to restrict it to subscribers. Requiring a PC to watch is a nonstarter -- it'd have to be some kind of magic box with HDMI output.

I'm fortunate in that I live in a sparsely-populated state (Maine) which is still close enough to high-tech states (NH/MA) that I benefit from an 8Mbit downstream with little to no congestion even in the evenings. 'course, 8Mbit is still pretty pathetic to those FiOS bastards. :P

You can get cable Internet and not pay for TV. I am, anyhow. True, I pay an extra $10/mo because it's not part of a bundle, but $50/mo vs. $90/mo or $120/mo isn't hard math. I take the money I'm saving and buy shows a-la-carte on the xbox 360 or apple tv. Paying for each show seems weird at first, but when you think about it, at least you're directly supporting the programming you want, and not the 99.9% bullshit that's on cable.

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The direction I thought you were going with this post but didn't, is that Apple has largely cut out the need for 'normals' to grovel for wisdom from geeks. What tech-savvy folks see has a restrictive, brain-dead set of choices and functionality is actually a carefully-chosen experience which is intended to satisfy the vast majority of Apple's target users. The end result is fewer opportunities for folks to get lost down ratholes of options which cause them to be overwhelmed and ask for help. Instead, they are able to figure things out fairly intuitively rather than needing to memorize paths or having to learn implementation details to understand why things are the way they are. They just are because The Jobs made them that way.

Personally, as a certified geek who makes his living banging away in a shell all day, I am not at all threatened by this direction in personal computing. In fact, I find it highly refreshing to be able to see my friends and family using high technology without any need to constantly ask me how to do mundane tasks. My wife has been using macs for over a decade, as do both of her parents. I've gotten more phone calls for help with setting up and using the A/V equipment than computers (recently largely solved by getting them a Harmony remote).

Love or hate Apple, one has to admit that they have set the bar quite high for making technology accessible to 'normals'.

Now, to head off the trolls, yes I am now going to go put on a beret and fellate my Apple-branded pink unicorn while it sips a latte.

I apologize for what was a bit of wine-induced insensitivity. It sounds as if you had a really hard time of it due to bullies and clueless administrators, and I sympathize as someone who has long suffered from anxiety and insecurity.

My intent wasn't really to undermine your experiences, but to hijack your post to further my agenda of martial arts and general physical fitness as being a great way for males to experience the full range of their genetic potential. Or something like that.

I just wish I'd discovered the confidence-building experiences of martial arts and strength training when I was young and impressionable. I think I would have been a happier person, and I think that a lot of other guys suffer from social castration in our female-focused modern western societies. Don't get me wrong... I understand that this social model is more stable and generally better for the species; it just often leaves males aimless and impotent unless they're able to channel those energies effectively.

What do you weigh... 98lbs wet or something? 400 calories a day?!?!?

I totally agree that people generally eat too damn much, but saying one meal a day is enough for most people is bonkers.

I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don't make each meal huge, though. In general, I try to make my lunch meal the biggest, although sometimes the dinner meal winds up being most calorific because it's so damn tasty (learning to cook is nice).

I'm also physically active and muscular, so that helps a lot. I'm 6'1" and ~ 190lb, but pretty well defined. I decided that I didn't want to follow my dad into early heart attacks and so I've found ways to make physical activity fun. Running barefoot and martial arts are much more interesting than slogging it out on a treadmill and using machines in a gym.

I have to ask... Why is that such a bad thing?

Generally speaking, anyhow. I understand that you personally may not have been prepared for a physical fight against someone you perceived to be bigger and stronger, but I see this as a problem with our modern society. Males are effectively neutered in Western society. Evolution has bred us to be muscular and twitchy, and yet we are expected to always be thoughtful and ... soft.

I was not a jock in high school. I did play soccer in middle school and did field/track in 9th grade, but nothing after that. It's not until the past 10 years that I've discovered that I was missing out. And for the past two years I've been doing Systema... It's totally changed my perception of the world. I feel that kids these days (gerroff mah lawn!) are missing out by not being physically active, and in particular they don't benefit from any martial arts. In the days of yore kids would have fights to settle spats, and it taught everyone their own limits as well as the usefulness (and uselessness in some situations) of fighting as conflict resolution. These days, fighting will get you detention or worse (a trip to the police station for popping some jerk in the mouth?)

This leads to seriously screwed-up kids with bottled emotions who decide that their only option is to come to school heavily armed and shoot the crap out of everyone. That's not right.

Let kids settle things out on the schoolyard. They'll learn a lot more from it than if we wait until they bring a bomb to school.

Oy WILL kill yew!