few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls
It seems a strange sentiment to express, on a technical site.
I've never been to China, and yet I know EXACTLY what their internet access is like. Anyone here can find out for themselves in 10 minutes flat, by hopping on a proxy located in China, and surfing around.
The only extra bit of knowledge that I gained through my extensive time dealing with it, is how incredibly random, frequently changing, and therefore frustrating and utterly-pointless the IP bans are. Send enough traffic over an IPSec tunnel in a short enough period of time, and expect it to be suddenly blocked one day, only to work again in just a few days.
or that there are more than enough planets with similar conditions to inhabit, to not have to displace or destroy an entire culture.
The Fermi Paradox doesn't say we should have been destroyed... only that we should at least be able to see evidence of other space-faring creatures, if they have had so much more time than us to expand and colonize a large part of the galaxy. ie. Why isn't a probe from Alpha Centauri AB orbiting the Earth? Why don't we see artificial lights there? Why haven't scouts come past to test the Earth's suitability for future use?
Another possibility is that we're left alone, because other civilizations have been contacted before, and once given technology, have self immolated themselves akin to giving firearms to the natives.
That's also just a variation on (and possible motivation for) the above Zoo hypothesis.
or we're won the interstellar lottery, and we are indeed the first who will learn a lot of lessons as we swarm across the galaxy once we figure out how to get off this damn rock.
"Few, if any, other civilizations currently exist" And/Or "No other civilizations have arisen (Rare Earth hypothesis)"
I find it fascinating that everyone here feels that what they've come up with in 5 minutes is somehow new and unique, and going to add to the 65 years of professional interest in the Fermi Paradox. Many of whom confuse the question, because they don't even know Fermi's Paradox.
So here I present the full list of possible answers to Fermi's Paradox, that everyone here thinks they just came up with:
Maybe travel at the speeds necessary to reach other star systems is impossible,
50% of light-speed would get you to the next solar system, in the same time it would take to get a university degree. From there, you or your offspring can choose to try again, and see what's on the next one.
You don't need exotic technology to colonize the universe... only if you want to jump from one to the next as easily as you visit your relatives, in fine, Hollywood-movie fashion.
This was already considered in the Fermi Paradox. It's fascinating to see how many people here obviously don't know it, yet are happy to chime-in on the subject.
and there ARE a TON of civilizations out there. But, they're all talking on some type of communication form - like Quantum CB or something - that we haven't discovered quite yet.
We're already on the verge of manipulating the heavens, moving small bodies where we want them. Where's the astronomical observations showing planets stacked-up in spots they couldn't possibly get-to, naturally? Where's the data showing a large dark, low-mass object, that could possibly be a Dyson Sphere? If there's lots of somebodies, more advanced than us out there, there should be some physical evidence that's practically visible from here.
It's incredibly ridiculous that people are asked to donate blood as a charitable act, while every other person and organization along the line, makes a hefty profit on processing and selling your donated blood, at astronomical rates, to people who have no alternative but immediate death.
If they offered even a trivial amount of money ($5 per pint) the numbers would be shored up in short order. Those with major reservations wouldn't suddenly run to the blood bank, but those who were thinking about it, anyways, would be encouraged not to procrastinate. And for the poor, struggling from paycheck to paycheck, $5 might just balance their budget during the occasional shortfall.
They already pay good money for plasma, so it's hardly unheard of.
TFA is 20 full-screen pictures of their product, and page after page of copy about how awesome the product is. Only barely a mention of some minor hiccups, that get treated as an industry problem, rather than the realities of an incompetent start-up that simply didn't know WTF it was doing.
And frankly, $140 for a set of 'sleek' bicycle lights makes me want to go on a killing spree.
Buy a couple 3-mode SK68 lights for $5/ea. Brighter than you could ever want, with high/low/strobe, and multiple zoom settings:
the instruction set is now so byzantine that x86 is a very difficult market to break into
The patents, which you can't get a license for, are the show-stopping problem. The complexity is not.
I have particularly fond memories of the later Alphas, which wiped the floor with everything up until and including the Pentium 4, and were very competitive even against Athlon 64 and Core2 performance-wise
Bull. Alphas wiped the floor with the original Pentiums they were up against, but with each successive generation, their lead was *dramatically* reduced. In the P4/Athlon days, there was no performance advantage left, and the only sales were from those with Alpha legacy software they wanted to keep running for another generation. Much like HP-UX and Solaris systems, today.
Repeat after me: x86 has zero inherent architectural advantage!!!
x86's complex instruction set does have some performance advantages. The smaller size of common opcodes reduces the memory and bus bandwidth needed, for a nice little gain. It also made it easy to keep tacking extensions on, since they weren't limited to a specific number of fixed-width instructions. It similarly lent itself to OoO and pipelined execution better than many other simpler architectures.
The big advantages it has is (1) economies of scale and (2) the higher profits of a mass market that generate more revenue to be pumped into R&D.
Completely wrong. Many proprietary architectures got MORE R&D money than x86, at least for a time.
x86 being open meant the sale price of the CPU was the only cash Intel/AMD/etc. would get out of it... With proprietary architectures, a fast processor helped not just sell more processors, but the entire PLATFORM. Selling the rest of the single-source proprietary hardware, software, support services, etc., etc. was quite profitable, and some of that money went back into CPU development, to keep the entire market alive. This is the same reason IBM's POWER architectures is alive and well, and (occasionally) performance-competitive with x86. Other companies just couldn't keep the model going.
While Intel is sitting on an impressive pile of cash and R&D potential, their attempts to match ARM in performance/W are so far unsuccessful when looking at non-biased benchmark results
Intel is at a decade's disadvantage, over ARM in R&D on low-power chips, and ARM's success has kept Intel out, and prevented Intel getting market effects and profits to further development. Just having a pile of cash doesn't make it happen, and doesn't prove whether something is technically possible or not. Boeing has a pile of cash, yet they aren't making all the drone aircraft, either... Microsoft has a pile of cash and can't break-in to mobile... Apple has a pile of cash and can't keep-up with Android. etc., etc.
Also, framing this as an Intel versus ARM fight is dishonest. MIPS was huge, long before ARM, and is still found in many embedded devices, like your WiFi AP/router, the architecture is getting lots of R&D by the Chinese government who wants a domestic designed/produced chip, and was one of the players in the PDA days, yet also got steamrolled by ARM when smart phones debuted. Never mind SPARC, SH-3, Power, etc.
You don't need to know anything complicated about the situation to realize this is bad. ALL you need to know, is that INFLATION in the US stays around 3% year over year.
So, a 2% budget increase, is really a 1% cut.
Keep this in mind at work, when you're getting your annual performance reviews. If you aren't getting at least 3% each and every year, you're getting your pay CUT.
Companies with a policy that pay increases can't be more than 3% (or less), absolutely infuriate me. Those smart enough to intelligently object, usually get the problem worked-around. However, it's still a company policy that says, in no uncertain terms, that every employee who has performed superbly, must get penalized, year over year, as a punishment for remaining employed by that company. They're encouraging you to jump ship and get a higher salary elsewhere. Then, you could possibly come back, getting signed-on at a much higher starting salary than they were willing to give you while you stayed with the company.
Institutional knowledge is valuable, and companies go out of their way to destroy it. </rant>
Ultimately the stock price is a reflection of the company, not the other way around.
There is NO MECHANISM in (non-dividend) stocks, that forces the value to have any relation to the value of the company. When a company brings in more profits, the piece of paper is not magically changed. It's value is how much other buyers think it's worth, which is based on what they think they'll be able to sell it for.
Think of it this way... If Apple got a huge windfall of cash that nobody knew about, AND THEY DIDN'T ANNOUNCE IT, how would it affect Apple's stock price??? Like MAGIC, Apple became more valuable, yet their stock price didn't change!
All the damn time, a company's stock is highly overvalued. Calling it a rare event that is doomed to correct itself in short-order is nonsense. It will OVER-correct itself when the bubble gets too big and the entire sector necessarily crashes, but that's about all. Companies can counter this, by buying-back stock at a given price, and issuing more stock at a given price... Or they can offer dividends. But otherwise, it's all a hell of a lot of speculation, which isn't ever tied to any actual value, until/unless the company is liquidated to its stockholders.
Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage [...] As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.
Sprint has free roaming onto Verizon's network wherever theirs isn't available. If you really need great coverage in remote areas, but don't want to pay through the nose for it, sign-up with Sprint (proper Sprint. Not Boost/Virgin/MVNOs/etc) and keep using Verizon's towers. In-fact, RepublicWireless actively promotes this aspect of their dirt-cheap cellular plan, though they'll throttle you very quickly when you start using data while roaming on Verizon.
If you only want to make sure you have the best emergency (911) coverage, just make sure you get a dual-band phone from Sprint or T-Mobile (or MVNOs) so it has the right frequency to jump onto Verizon or AT&T's towers.
most Americans never travel outside their own state, let alone country
I seriously doubt the first assertion is true. But even assuming it's true for a small majority of people, can you blame them? When a Western US state is the size of 3 European COUNTRIES, it takes a lot more effort and motivation to leave them.
And for the second, since the country in question, happens to be the size of a the continent, and has the two largest oceans on either side impeding travel, it's not comparable to leaving an EU "country" at all. And the Western US is far, far worse off in that regard.
Compare the numbers of Americans leaving the country, to the number of Europeans who travel over 15000km from home, and we'll talk.
Funny, because I can't see where you actually disagree with much of what I've said. You just have the tone of a stockholder, and want to spin it to the positive, and paint all their problems and failures as minor issues that'll be fixed ANY DAY NOW...
Actually they completely rebuilt their network
I specifically mentioned the: "Network Vision" upgrades by name. What about it?
Pretty strange to "completely" rebuild everything, and yet come back without LTE everywhere. And even their 2G/3G coverage hasn't been improved the slightest bit in any areas where I frequently have problems.
Compare LTE coverage in 2012 to today and you can see a massive difference. You can't do that overnight.
It's not"massive" at all. Two years, and only a minor expansion of LTE. All other providers, including T-Mobile, have FAR, FAR better LTE coverage, and are also expanding it FASTER.
Sprint's major problem with 3G was the outdated backhaul.
No, that was a minor problem. The MAJOR problem was depth of coverage. Theirs sucks. Their Nextel/iDEN coverage was VASTLY better than their CDMA.
Actually WiMax was a use-it-or-lose-it deal. They had to deploy something to the 2.5Ghz bands or they would lose access, but LTE wasn't ready
That doesn't change the fact that they missed a huge opportunity to use their existing WiMax to get a lot of "4G" coverage quickly, and wasted lots of money duplicating effort, building out LTE, first, in the same areas that had WiMax.
the cost is so low that I would have to halve my water usage to save the cost of a lunch.
I know several people, living in just modest houses with very small lawns, who pay well over $100/month for their water bill, here.
Not watering the lawn here doesn't mean less-frequent mowing, it means not having a lawn at all.
A big chunk of the US is some degree of desert.
Anyways an easy way to help curb wasteful use could just be to install valves that automatically shut off whenever you surpass the authorized usage.
That would be illegal. Utilities aren't allowed to shut off service, even for non-payment, without an epic load of red-tape and procedures. Shutting off someone's electricity or gas in winter can result in serious illness or death.
Lack of water could be many, many, many times worse. No cooling (swamp cooler) in 120F degree weather. No bathing, no flushing toilets, etc, and in the extreme, just 2-3 days to live, if you don't have access to several gallons of it. I've even heard that lack of running water is sufficient reason by itself for code enforcement to condemn a building as uninhabitable, in most areas.
What's this? A an extremely general statement, turned out to have a few exceptions? The devil, you say!
I CLEARLY explained my opinion on fiber further in my comment. If you can't be bothered to read past line 3, I don't care what you have to say about any topic.
Last-mile is expensive, technology requires routine and LARGE investments for major upgrades, and there is a lot of RISK involved in every upgrade. If the upgrade path chosen doesn't work out as well as predicted, somebody has to foot the bill.
Municipal fiber could end up:
Very expensive and may need to be tax-pay subsidized to survive.
AND/OR
Completely stagnate after the first deployment. Heavy congestion pretty quickly, which is NEVER resolved (because that would cost lots of good money), little or no expansion to new homes, and possibly even skimping on repairs. And looking quite slow and antiquated in short order.
And that's just a few of the major, ongoing risks, assuming it's successfully built in the first place. It's not a sure-thing. City-wide municipal wifi deployments have completely failed on several occasions. A private company has to bare the risk, while a muni will expect (and get) bailouts when they screw up.
If everybody in an area wants to go that way, I won't try to stop them. But painting it as a magical, cheap, easy, no-lose situation is utterly ridiculous.
Congratulations, you read THREE whole sentences into my comment before you flippantly posted a reply. That's a whole 10% of the way! A few more hours, and I'm sure you can make your way through it all!
The obvious problems here is #3/#4 merging meaning less consumer choice and higher prices and worse customer service ahead.
CHOICE: 2 bowls of candy, and 2 bowls of steaming dog crap, isn't a lot of "consumer choice". If a merger turns that into 3 bowls of candy, then consumers will have MORE choice as a result of the merger. That's a big "IF," but both outcomes are possible.
PRICES: While prices could rise a bit, AT&T and Verizon are both desperate to get a foothold in the prepaid cellular market. To do so, they have dirt-cheap service plans that are nearly competitive with Sprint and T-Mobile, without that whole lousy coverage issue. I don't see how SprinTMobile will be able to raise their prices much, without losing all their customers to pre-paid plans from the big two.
My guess is that Sprint has seen the writing on the wall, and wants T-Mobile precisely for GSM.
GSM and CDMA are both DEAD, the very second their LTE networks have equivalent coverage area.
And the market for international travelers, who want to keep using their cell phones, is positively MINUSCULE. I doubt practically ANYBODY other than Verizon Execs are signed-up for Verizon's "Global" service plans.
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Frankly, the Nextel merger could have given Sprint the best network and LTE coverage around, as a happy-accident... Nextel, with their 800MHz spectrum had great coverage, on-par with Verizon's, particularly in mountains, valley, indoors, etc. AT&T and Verizon spent their 800MHz spectrum on 3G networks and have none left. They're using 1900MHz spectrum for their LTE networks, with a resultant reduction in coverage depth.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlapped their early WiMax deployment, resulting in no net-gain of extra coverage area.
I'm cautiously hopeful that this merger will be what they need, to finally compete. But each time before that they've gotten a big opportunity, they've squandered it. From the outside, Sprint seems to be deeply dysfunctional and lacking in any foresight or innovative ideas, copying the big two in the slowest and least efficient way, possible. The opportunity they have to merge the Sprint and T-Mobile LTE networks with dual-band phones, and quickly deprecate their 3G networks, seems just as likely to be squandered and bungled.
Neither telecos nor cable operators were able to accurately predict the future two decades out. I don't see why municipal fiber operators will be any more prescient.
And despite your accusation, if you'd actually read through my comment, you'd see I didn't suggest fiber would need to be replaced within a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems a strange sentiment to express, on a technical site.
I've never been to China, and yet I know EXACTLY what their internet access is like. Anyone here can find out for themselves in 10 minutes flat, by hopping on a proxy located in China, and surfing around.
The only extra bit of knowledge that I gained through my extensive time dealing with it, is how incredibly random, frequently changing, and therefore frustrating and utterly-pointless the IP bans are. Send enough traffic over an IPSec tunnel in a short enough period of time, and expect it to be suddenly blocked one day, only to work again in just a few days.
"They choose not to interact with us"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Human beings have not been searching long enough"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Zoo hypothesis"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Fermi Paradox doesn't say we should have been destroyed... only that we should at least be able to see evidence of other space-faring creatures, if they have had so much more time than us to expand and colonize a large part of the galaxy. ie. Why isn't a probe from Alpha Centauri AB orbiting the Earth? Why don't we see artificial lights there? Why haven't scouts come past to test the Earth's suitability for future use?
"It is dangerous to communicate"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's also just a variation on (and possible motivation for) the above Zoo hypothesis.
"Few, if any, other civilizations currently exist" And/Or "No other civilizations have arisen (Rare Earth hypothesis)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I find it fascinating that everyone here feels that what they've come up with in 5 minutes is somehow new and unique, and going to add to the 65 years of professional interest in the Fermi Paradox. Many of whom confuse the question, because they don't even know Fermi's Paradox.
So here I present the full list of possible answers to Fermi's Paradox, that everyone here thinks they just came up with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
50% of light-speed would get you to the next solar system, in the same time it would take to get a university degree. From there, you or your offspring can choose to try again, and see what's on the next one.
You don't need exotic technology to colonize the universe... only if you want to jump from one to the next as easily as you visit your relatives, in fine, Hollywood-movie fashion.
This was already considered in the Fermi Paradox. It's fascinating to see how many people here obviously don't know it, yet are happy to chime-in on the subject.
We're already on the verge of manipulating the heavens, moving small bodies where we want them. Where's the astronomical observations showing planets stacked-up in spots they couldn't possibly get-to, naturally? Where's the data showing a large dark, low-mass object, that could possibly be a Dyson Sphere? If there's lots of somebodies, more advanced than us out there, there should be some physical evidence that's practically visible from here.
Or it could just suggest highly-flammable plants have developed... Or it could suggest expansive volcanism.
It's incredibly ridiculous that people are asked to donate blood as a charitable act, while every other person and organization along the line, makes a hefty profit on processing and selling your donated blood, at astronomical rates, to people who have no alternative but immediate death.
If they offered even a trivial amount of money ($5 per pint) the numbers would be shored up in short order. Those with major reservations wouldn't suddenly run to the blood bank, but those who were thinking about it, anyways, would be encouraged not to procrastinate. And for the poor, struggling from paycheck to paycheck, $5 might just balance their budget during the occasional shortfall.
They already pay good money for plasma, so it's hardly unheard of.
"Field agent" is overstating it, I should have simply said "spy", but otherwise, you remember quite incorrectly:
"I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, undercover, overseas." ... "being assigned a name that was not mine"
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/...
That's patently incorrect.
Snowden claims to have raised concerns about the NSA programs, and the administration has patently denied this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Recently, Snowden claimed that he was a field agent. The administration has denied this, in no uncertain terms.
TFA is 20 full-screen pictures of their product, and page after page of copy about how awesome the product is. Only barely a mention of some minor hiccups, that get treated as an industry problem, rather than the realities of an incompetent start-up that simply didn't know WTF it was doing.
And frankly, $140 for a set of 'sleek' bicycle lights makes me want to go on a killing spree.
Buy a couple 3-mode SK68 lights for $5/ea. Brighter than you could ever want, with high/low/strobe, and multiple zoom settings:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006E...
Some $2 bike mounts:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AD...
And if you don't want to cut-out some red cellophane to fit, you can get a kit with red lens for the tail light:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000...
Batteries and Charger, < $13:
http://www.amazon.com//dp/B004...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004N...
The patents, which you can't get a license for, are the show-stopping problem. The complexity is not.
Bull. Alphas wiped the floor with the original Pentiums they were up against, but with each successive generation, their lead was *dramatically* reduced. In the P4/Athlon days, there was no performance advantage left, and the only sales were from those with Alpha legacy software they wanted to keep running for another generation. Much like HP-UX and Solaris systems, today.
x86's complex instruction set does have some performance advantages. The smaller size of common opcodes reduces the memory and bus bandwidth needed, for a nice little gain. It also made it easy to keep tacking extensions on, since they weren't limited to a specific number of fixed-width instructions. It similarly lent itself to OoO and pipelined execution better than many other simpler architectures.
Completely wrong. Many proprietary architectures got MORE R&D money than x86, at least for a time.
x86 being open meant the sale price of the CPU was the only cash Intel/AMD/etc. would get out of it... With proprietary architectures, a fast processor helped not just sell more processors, but the entire PLATFORM. Selling the rest of the single-source proprietary hardware, software, support services, etc., etc. was quite profitable, and some of that money went back into CPU development, to keep the entire market alive. This is the same reason IBM's POWER architectures is alive and well, and (occasionally) performance-competitive with x86. Other companies just couldn't keep the model going.
Intel is at a decade's disadvantage, over ARM in R&D on low-power chips, and ARM's success has kept Intel out, and prevented Intel getting market effects and profits to further development. Just having a pile of cash doesn't make it happen, and doesn't prove whether something is technically possible or not. Boeing has a pile of cash, yet they aren't making all the drone aircraft, either... Microsoft has a pile of cash and can't break-in to mobile... Apple has a pile of cash and can't keep-up with Android. etc., etc.
Also, framing this as an Intel versus ARM fight is dishonest. MIPS was huge, long before ARM, and is still found in many embedded devices, like your WiFi AP/router, the architecture is getting lots of R&D by the Chinese government who wants a domestic designed/produced chip, and was one of the players in the PDA days, yet also got steamrolled by ARM when smart phones debuted. Never mind SPARC, SH-3, Power, etc.
You don't need to know anything complicated about the situation to realize this is bad. ALL you need to know, is that INFLATION in the US stays around 3% year over year.
So, a 2% budget increase, is really a 1% cut.
Keep this in mind at work, when you're getting your annual performance reviews. If you aren't getting at least 3% each and every year, you're getting your pay CUT.
Companies with a policy that pay increases can't be more than 3% (or less), absolutely infuriate me. Those smart enough to intelligently object, usually get the problem worked-around. However, it's still a company policy that says, in no uncertain terms, that every employee who has performed superbly, must get penalized, year over year, as a punishment for remaining employed by that company. They're encouraging you to jump ship and get a higher salary elsewhere. Then, you could possibly come back, getting signed-on at a much higher starting salary than they were willing to give you while you stayed with the company.
Institutional knowledge is valuable, and companies go out of their way to destroy it. </rant>
There is NO MECHANISM in (non-dividend) stocks, that forces the value to have any relation to the value of the company. When a company brings in more profits, the piece of paper is not magically changed. It's value is how much other buyers think it's worth, which is based on what they think they'll be able to sell it for.
Think of it this way... If Apple got a huge windfall of cash that nobody knew about, AND THEY DIDN'T ANNOUNCE IT, how would it affect Apple's stock price??? Like MAGIC, Apple became more valuable, yet their stock price didn't change!
All the damn time, a company's stock is highly overvalued. Calling it a rare event that is doomed to correct itself in short-order is nonsense. It will OVER-correct itself when the bubble gets too big and the entire sector necessarily crashes, but that's about all. Companies can counter this, by buying-back stock at a given price, and issuing more stock at a given price... Or they can offer dividends. But otherwise, it's all a hell of a lot of speculation, which isn't ever tied to any actual value, until/unless the company is liquidated to its stockholders.
Sprint has free roaming onto Verizon's network wherever theirs isn't available. If you really need great coverage in remote areas, but don't want to pay through the nose for it, sign-up with Sprint (proper Sprint. Not Boost/Virgin/MVNOs/etc) and keep using Verizon's towers. In-fact, RepublicWireless actively promotes this aspect of their dirt-cheap cellular plan, though they'll throttle you very quickly when you start using data while roaming on Verizon.
If you only want to make sure you have the best emergency (911) coverage, just make sure you get a dual-band phone from Sprint or T-Mobile (or MVNOs) so it has the right frequency to jump onto Verizon or AT&T's towers.
Nobody said these people are impoverished... Just that water can be expensive, and unmetered water would be instantly misused.
I seriously doubt the first assertion is true. But even assuming it's true for a small majority of people, can you blame them? When a Western US state is the size of 3 European COUNTRIES, it takes a lot more effort and motivation to leave them.
And for the second, since the country in question, happens to be the size of a the continent, and has the two largest oceans on either side impeding travel, it's not comparable to leaving an EU "country" at all. And the Western US is far, far worse off in that regard.
Compare the numbers of Americans leaving the country, to the number of Europeans who travel over 15000km from home, and we'll talk.
Funny, because I can't see where you actually disagree with much of what I've said. You just have the tone of a stockholder, and want to spin it to the positive, and paint all their problems and failures as minor issues that'll be fixed ANY DAY NOW...
I specifically mentioned the: "Network Vision" upgrades by name. What about it?
Pretty strange to "completely" rebuild everything, and yet come back without LTE everywhere. And even their 2G/3G coverage hasn't been improved the slightest bit in any areas where I frequently have problems.
It's not"massive" at all. Two years, and only a minor expansion of LTE. All other providers, including T-Mobile, have FAR, FAR better LTE coverage, and are also expanding it FASTER.
No, that was a minor problem. The MAJOR problem was depth of coverage. Theirs sucks. Their Nextel/iDEN coverage was VASTLY better than their CDMA.
That doesn't change the fact that they missed a huge opportunity to use their existing WiMax to get a lot of "4G" coverage quickly, and wasted lots of money duplicating effort, building out LTE, first, in the same areas that had WiMax.
I know several people, living in just modest houses with very small lawns, who pay well over $100/month for their water bill, here.
Not watering the lawn here doesn't mean less-frequent mowing, it means not having a lawn at all.
A big chunk of the US is some degree of desert.
That would be illegal. Utilities aren't allowed to shut off service, even for non-payment, without an epic load of red-tape and procedures. Shutting off someone's electricity or gas in winter can result in serious illness or death.
Lack of water could be many, many, many times worse. No cooling (swamp cooler) in 120F degree weather. No bathing, no flushing toilets, etc, and in the extreme, just 2-3 days to live, if you don't have access to several gallons of it. I've even heard that lack of running water is sufficient reason by itself for code enforcement to condemn a building as uninhabitable, in most areas.
What's this? A an extremely general statement, turned out to have a few exceptions? The devil, you say!
I CLEARLY explained my opinion on fiber further in my comment. If you can't be bothered to read past line 3, I don't care what you have to say about any topic.
Last-mile is expensive, technology requires routine and LARGE investments for major upgrades, and there is a lot of RISK involved in every upgrade. If the upgrade path chosen doesn't work out as well as predicted, somebody has to foot the bill.
Municipal fiber could end up:
Very expensive and may need to be tax-pay subsidized to survive.
AND/OR
Completely stagnate after the first deployment. Heavy congestion pretty quickly, which is NEVER resolved (because that would cost lots of good money), little or no expansion to new homes, and possibly even skimping on repairs. And looking quite slow and antiquated in short order.
And that's just a few of the major, ongoing risks, assuming it's successfully built in the first place. It's not a sure-thing. City-wide municipal wifi deployments have completely failed on several occasions. A private company has to bare the risk, while a muni will expect (and get) bailouts when they screw up.
If everybody in an area wants to go that way, I won't try to stop them. But painting it as a magical, cheap, easy, no-lose situation is utterly ridiculous.
Closed source software is far worse, you just don't hear about it.
Congratulations, you read THREE whole sentences into my comment before you flippantly posted a reply. That's a whole 10% of the way! A few more hours, and I'm sure you can make your way through it all!
CHOICE: 2 bowls of candy, and 2 bowls of steaming dog crap, isn't a lot of "consumer choice". If a merger turns that into 3 bowls of candy, then consumers will have MORE choice as a result of the merger. That's a big "IF," but both outcomes are possible.
PRICES: While prices could rise a bit, AT&T and Verizon are both desperate to get a foothold in the prepaid cellular market. To do so, they have dirt-cheap service plans that are nearly competitive with Sprint and T-Mobile, without that whole lousy coverage issue. I don't see how SprinTMobile will be able to raise their prices much, without losing all their customers to pre-paid plans from the big two.
GSM and CDMA are both DEAD, the very second their LTE networks have equivalent coverage area.
And the market for international travelers, who want to keep using their cell phones, is positively MINUSCULE. I doubt practically ANYBODY other than Verizon Execs are signed-up for Verizon's "Global" service plans.
The Nextel merger worked out pretty poorly for Sprint. Remember why? Because their two networks were incompatible, yet Sprint was required to keep it operating. It didn't get 3G upgrades, yet they had to keep operating until quite recently. There was a massive customer exodus, and Sprint was left holding the bag.
T-Mobile, similarly uses a different and incompatible 3G cellular standard than Sprint, and on entirely different frequencies. Yet Sprint is out to do this all again.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Frankly, the Nextel merger could have given Sprint the best network and LTE coverage around, as a happy-accident... Nextel, with their 800MHz spectrum had great coverage, on-par with Verizon's, particularly in mountains, valley, indoors, etc. AT&T and Verizon spent their 800MHz spectrum on 3G networks and have none left. They're using 1900MHz spectrum for their LTE networks, with a resultant reduction in coverage depth.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlapped their early WiMax deployment, resulting in no net-gain of extra coverage area.
I'm cautiously hopeful that this merger will be what they need, to finally compete. But each time before that they've gotten a big opportunity, they've squandered it. From the outside, Sprint seems to be deeply dysfunctional and lacking in any foresight or innovative ideas, copying the big two in the slowest and least efficient way, possible. The opportunity they have to merge the Sprint and T-Mobile LTE networks with dual-band phones, and quickly deprecate their 3G networks, seems just as likely to be squandered and bungled.
Neither telecos nor cable operators were able to accurately predict the future two decades out. I don't see why municipal fiber operators will be any more prescient.
And despite your accusation, if you'd actually read through my comment, you'd see I didn't suggest fiber would need to be replaced within a decade.