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Don't forget you can get very good fiber access in a large part of Minneapolis http://fiber.usinternet.com/

Would you like reasonably priced 10Gbps? No problemo! Ping times below 4ms? Done! yay!

I was lucky enough to have access to a home hookup on a lower USI tier for a while. It was of course far and away the best Internets around locally (altho now it's prompted CenturyLink to roll out). Coverage maps here http://fiber.usinternet.com/

Another thing I loved was Comcast was forced to slash its rates in the covered zip codes dramatically, finally resembling a reasonable price. The solid upstream is very good for getting videos online, altho its true that the chokepoint winds up being the Youtube server, not the pipe. The entire time, except when someone doing laundry unplugged the basement router, it never really bogged down & you could tell the peering points were not saturated like is always the Comcast experience.

I happened to run into a bunch of the USI staff at an event & they explained to me that while they didn't have much capital, the little bit they were riding on could suffice to slowly build out the network. It took awhile to develop a process w the city to get easements on the boulevards but now proceeds smoothly. Conveniently everything is reliable (who knew buried optical cables are more reliable than coax on poles?) and the whole city network gets like 4-5 service calls a day. They were actually happy to not have to bother providing TV service w its finicky boxes, because they don't cover the whole city.

The ping times to the U of Minn timeserver at 128.101.101.101 were around 2-4ms if you don't go thru a router.

Obviously they were a bit proud they'd been able to hang in the biz over those years, and considered themselves the "last man standing" against the big monopolies.

I'm making a radio broadcasting book, and I had a question about the New York water system that I never quite addressed.

It's on this picture: http://www.usinternet.com/users/kyledrake/newyork- radio.jpg

It's an old field strength determination from the 1920s. See the water area below the taller buildings with the '20' strength? Is that water salty, fresh, or a mix of both (salty-leaning, or fresh-leaning even)? The reason I ask, is because if it is salty, it shows with more signifigance the blocking ability of structures (as salt water is very conductive).

Thank you!

I thought Hollings was going to wait "a year" and allow the tech industry to come up with a solution before he entered it! Hmm.. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this is a guy that we can all trust.

Here are some images of Fritz Hollings in his later stages of the campaign. Enjoy!

The breakfast of champions
Fahrenheit 451 baby

I thought Hollings was going to wait "a year" and allow the tech industry to come up with a solution before he entered it! Hmm.. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this is a guy that we can all trust.

Here are some images of Fritz Hollings in his later stages of the campaign. Enjoy!

The breakfast of champions
Fahrenheit 451 baby

Not Peapod! Why, if we didn't have Peapod, then where would we get our groceries online? Oh, wait a second, we still have Webvan, Streamline, and countless other local companies. So there'll be a lot of shakeout among the various online companies, and the less successful ones will die or be bought out buy the more successful ones, but that's the market cycle as it's always been.

Even Ponzi's ventures eventually ran out of money and collapsed. This internet bubble is no different.

Yeah! I'm not an AC either, I'm Christoph...why can't I use my user ID and password if I don't accept cookies? Can't that can go in the URL?

Anyway, why don't I accept cookies? I don't believe in privacy online, I've posted my own medical information for that matter. But then I read Phillip Greenspun's explanation of how banner ads use them to track your browsing, without asking or informing you . I don't believe in privacy, but I do believe in informed consent!

I have used Internet Explorer's "prompt" option for accepting cookies; in order to read an online article on an ad-laden page, I'm asked to accept up to a dozen cookies(without explanation as to who's sending them, what they're for, etc.). This is obviously a gross perverion of the user prefernces model behind cookies. It's market research done covertly on me, without my informed consent. Which I would probably give if they asked, I just want to know what it's for. It could be MS research on what sites users of IE browse...shouldn't I be told that so I can choose not to cooperate? Is it wrong to want to say "No" to some market research and still have my shopping carts and Slashboxes? I may be wrong, but I'm commited to my point of view, so it feels very "right".