In retrospect, and to that end, the old model of offering a "guaranteed speed" with burstability, was a much more honest and fair model.

Its not the technology, but the industry mindset for backend infrastructure upgrades in a timely manner. The network technologies are there.

The bandwidth capacity on the network should be there regardless. Its not about abuse. I pay for phone service. Back in the day, on a POTs line you simply paid for access. Is it a problem if I am LITERALLY leaving the phone off the hook with a call connected to. . . anything? The capacity is there anyway, it needs to be, so who cares how much I use it? Data is the same way.Comcast now has raised their cap to 300GB, but almost 7 years ago it was 250GB. The public's usage of the global has probably double for the average user. Clearly Comcast has no interest in adequately scaling for this trend. Mobile data usage alone has doubled in the last two years in North America. I set up a new "Steam box" And in downloading 8 games, I ran up nearly 100GBs of Data on my FIOS connection. 36 GBs for Bioshock Infinite, 20 something GBs for Arkham City, 6GBs for Borderlands: The presequel. . .. and others. If your network can't handle me using the XXXMbps connection you provide, 24/7, as I see fit, then don't sell me that class of service. End of Story. I find it hilarious that they are raising the speeds they offer because they are scared of the expansion of real competition offering higher speeds at lower prices, but they are also attempting to further restrict access to those speeds through caps, rather than upgrading their infrastructure to support the bandwidth. The market should, theoretically, correct this by moving away from such companies. Hopefully this would force them to change, or lose the business.

This is a good move because Comcast already provides such rock solid and reliable routers! Yeah!

I've been running Fedora on and off since its first release, and I will admit I haven't installed most version since ~8 including 18. However, I had an install of the Fedora 17 XFCE variant on my laptop and was quite happy with it. I never recall Fedora being a distro that "just worked", there were usually several pages of install notes to go through from various people to fix everything on each release, and often times packages that were broken and needed to be compiled from source. Even as recently as Fedora 14 I installed the release, updated, and a borked version of MDADM cause my whole 7.5TB raid to be corrupted. I seem to recall (perhaps incorrectly) that its original break from RedHat was supposed to be evaluate, test, and mature new features, drivers, and Kernels before rolling it into RHEL.
I think I feel the way he does about Fedora, only toward ubuntu. It took two installs and hours of fudging to get 12.04 LTS installed on my gaming rig for the Steam Linux Beta.
A quote from Wikipedia.org:

"One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies.[5][6] Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux distributions.[7] A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2.[8] This promotes leading-edge software because it frees developers from some backward compatibility restraints, but it also makes Fedora a poor choice for product development (e.g., embedded systems), which usually requires long-term vendor-support, unavailable with any version of Fedora."

Most DSL services these days are, AFAIK, are considered "Best Effort", which means if your speed is low because you are too far from the CO? Sucks for you. Service spotty, but there are no problems on the circuit/with the modem/CO equipment? Its still best effort, SOL. Verizon and other companies (including the ISP I work at) are trying to phase these services out. In some cases like ours, we just don't sign up new customers and only support the legacy customers who we won't cut off, after all we still have the equipment and the lines to the premises already. They cost the customer a higher price for the amount of bandwidth you do get and they cost the carriers more to support than newer technologies like Fiber and DOCSIS using the local loop, partially because that infrastructure is aging, but also because of the way the network is dispersed. DSL requires a POTS line from the CO to the endpoint, that means a circuit switched connection which feeds only one customer as opposed to a virtual circuit that can be traversed by any number of users until it hits a saturation point. Verizon is also trying to phase out the required POTS lines for the same reasons as VOIP becomes more prolific and becomes the standard. It is common for Verizon to cut the POTS line feeding a location when FIOS is installed. Its a big problem, actually. We have customers who will sign up for FIOS for TV and Voice but they want to keep the DSL for internet because its still cheaper than FIOS, not realizing they can't use the DSL over FIOS, they flip after VZ cuts the copper. Phasing out DSL benefits everyone, you get more for your money and the carriers can make more profit. Sure you don't want to pay VZ 60 for a 6 down, 2 up FIOS connection but compare that to paying $15-20 for a POTS line and $20 for a 1.5Mb/256Kb or 768Kb/128Kb ADSL connection it becomes a no-brainer if you can squeeze out the extra cost.

I have noticed that while searching for an IT job that 99% of the listings I come across (at least in my region) want someone with 3-5 years experience and a degree, or you have to be certified in like 4 technologies. I have an associate degree in computer and communications technology and am about to get my cisco CCNA certification. Even with the certification, it seems everyone wants experience. Where are the companies looking to hire intelligent people who are willing to learn and have a strong base from which to build? Or is that not a viable option because no one is willing to pay them enough to stick around?

He didn't say it was apple. TL/DR Its Android. Well, I guess it could be WebOS. lol

Because, just as if I bought a dell computer I would install a copy of windows without the bloat, I do the same to my phone: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/blog/cyanogenmod-will-never-have-carrier-iq

Funny, it runs like ass on my 2.9Ghz core2quad with 6Gbs of RAM. I will have 20 tabs open, mostly forums sites and news articles I haven't read yet, a facebook page, no youtube or anything very flash heavy and I guarantee firefox is taking up over 500 megabytes of RAM, often pushing a GB. I can then kill 15 tabs and cut it down to Gmail, a couple forums sites, slashdot and facebook and now its only taking up 350 megabytes. The only plugin I run is adblock plus. I've also found myself very frustrated with it stalling, starts loading a page, hangs for 5 seconds, then continues. Definitely not all the time, but enough to piss me off and remeber it keeps happening. Doesn't sounds like the browser I championed for years as being snappy, bloatfree and reliable. This is nothing new, I've been lamenting for about a year now that I will be switching to chrome, I'm just freaking brand loyal with firefox. As the previous poster said I was using the mozilla suite and then Firefox before they even adopted that name. They now have consciously shifted to trying reduce the time it takes to get new features out the door with the new dev cycle, but I don't want new features or "rapid development", I want my web browser to load pages accurately, be quick about, and not to complain (or eat up a shit-ton of my RAM - not that I need it for anything else, I just want it to be available, just in case). P.S. I am still bitter I never received my poster with the names of all the people who donated money above a certain amount for the release of, I guess it must have been 1.0, and after multiple attempts to contact them after the fact, never received any sort of response from them.

You can also get these cheap from deal extreme if you want to just try it out with a handheld one. If you don't want to always block, only turn it on during tests.

"I've used the ~$200 Acer AspireRevo as a frontend. Full HD and everything." I know so many people who do this. Its definitely the way to go, it would cost you less than a mac mini (you can buy 2 for the price of a mac mini, which is overpowered for this application).

Seriously do this and set up a Raid-5, then grab handbrake and start ripping all your media to it. If you want to you can then buy an ION based nettop(around $200) and setup an HTPC wherever your TV is and get full hardware decoding of video, and your whole library on demand!

At least somebody RTFA. If these kids were just throwing snowballs, this would be absurd, but according to the press release: "As the officers arrived on the scene, the offenders threw shovel fulls of snow on the windshield of the plow and at an unmarked HPD vehicle. As the officers were exiting their vehicle, the offenders also threw snow inside the police vehicle." This isn't really just a simple case of "kids will be kids" its a case of "young adults can be complete morons".