When I was young some neighborhood kids were doing this, driving by and hitting mailboxes with a bat. So my dad installed our mailbox onto an upside down L shaped poll that would happily swing in the hole it sat in. The next time we heard them drive by:
- we hear boom (from the bat hitting the mailbox),
- then a crashing sound as the mailbox swung around and knocked their back window out.

That stopped them pretty quickly.

Been living in my house for over 4 years now, AT&T refuses to admit that what they are giving me (3Mbps down/1Mbps up for $55/month) is not broadband. Spectrum says AT&T will help so they refuse to talk. I do live in a "rural" area, but I have a friend less than a mile away getting 60Mbps from Spectrum for $35/month, the big Telco are too big, it would sure be nice to have more than a single option for wired internet... some small ISP's competing would do wonders... even if just two of the big ones were competing things would improve...

You don't. It's simulations all the way up and turtles all the way down.

And the other relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1205/
He went way off this chart! lol

I would love it if AT&T would consider giving me 4Mbps, been stuck with 768kbps for a long time now with no hope from AT&T whatsoever, and no other options out there other than expensive high latency satellite.

Did anyone else read that as "Human Limbs Evolved From Shark Fins Thanks To Sonic The Hedgehog Game" at first? I was trying to figure out how playing the Sega game would change shark fins into human limbs...

Hahaha. Yeah of course I could buy another dsl line. 80 bucks a month for 1.536Mbps. Still not fast enough. Plus, AT&T won't even bury the line they did put down. They won't even come out to check if we can get faster speeds. No way we'd ever actually get that second slow as hell line.

I don't think this has anything to do with caps. I have AT&T DSL and as I mentioned on a previous story today, all I can get out of them is 768kbps. I can *barely* stream SD netflix without too many buffering breaks, no way in hell I'm going to stream a 4k movie.

All these are great ideas, lol, technically would work; I'm an electrical engineer working in the wireless world so I am certain I could get it up and running. None of that helps when you aren't good friends with the neighbors.(-; I'd really rather just be able to purchase the bandwidth they obviously are able to provide.

Correct, too far for WiFi to be reasonable between properties.

I've been arguing with AT&T for nearly a year now about getting a faster connection to our house. We live in the "woods", but no more than 10 miles from places with enough people to provide them with pretty fast U-Verse speeds. All they can provide me is 768kbps, no amount of begging and pleading has ever even gotten a tech out to even *check* if they can give me more (our direct neighbor gets 6Mbps, still slow but nearly an order of magnitude higher than mine). They have though promised to send someone out a few times... just a technique to get you to shut up for a few weeks. We can't get cable, sat has way too high latency for what I need and cell service is shoddy at best. So, here I am paying AT&T 40 bucks a month for 768kps just to make sure I have a "reliable" connection; still goes out sometimes but way less than the cell connection.
Sigh.

http://xkcd.com/1581/

What? Is this implying that they want to make suggestions about what to do in the present and future to change the future without being the least bit concerned with forecasting the future? I don't think I would listen to anyone who wants to make important changes/suggestions without them being very concerned with attempting to predict the future of the situation at hand.

Also,

As an EE having taken many econ classes, I can wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

I've lived in the NO area my entire life. I was in college at Tulane University when the storm hit. It changed my life. In a big way. I was living in an apartment in the city at the time. The night before we all realize that this was no normal storm coming, this one was different. My family and I quickly got a plan together to get ourselves to Texas, we had family to stay with in Corpus Christi. Got there, storm comes, we watch the city and area around it crumble before our eyes*. Within two days me and a few others in my family (mainly healthy men, elderly/children/sick stayed back) made it back to where most of them lived a bit north of NO. The city itself was still shut off from the outside world so we still didn't know really what things were like there. Where we were was no better though, the country outlying the area where my family lived was also cut off in it's own way. We had no cell service, no power, no water, no access to 911 or the fire department. There were no gas stations open and not even an FM or AM radio station still broadcasting. It was weird. There was no one willing to travel on public roads without a 4-wheeler, a chainsaw, and a shotgun. Too many trees in the road everywhere and too many looters trying to steal everything in the area, even far from the city...
After dealing with the immediate things we could deal with we went back to Texas and as a group stayed there for a couple weeks. I didn't leave. Tulane was still shut down so I went to A&M for a semester. Also weird. I walk into admissions and enrollment with no records of anything. No high school records (high school also in NO and shut down completely at this point) no college records. No way to even access a bank account at this point. So, they just told me to take what I thought I needed to take regardless of the pre-reqs, and gave me full tuition and books and room and board (I will forever be grateful for the people there at TAMUCC for making that part of the experience very pleasant). After all that and things have setlled down I return back to Tulane, in the middle of the first semester back (a week after the next tuition is due of course) they announce 'whoops, not enough funding left after reconstruction efforts, we are going to cancel all engineering curriculums'. This understandably pissed off a lot of people. (seriously, who gets rid of civil engineering right when the city probably needs them more than ever before in history). What this all meant to me was that now I had been to two different schools, about to have to jump to a third. None of these schools would accept all the credits and each wanted their own little courses here and there; thus took me 6 years with summers to get a B.S. Electrical Engineering degree without ever having failed a single class.

tl;dr: Katrina fucked up my life.

*I had tears starting when I wrote that, this experience will forever be exceedingly emotional to me to recall.

This does seem pretty cool, but editing?
TFS:

And TFA: