This is utter nonsense. Microwave communications are line-of-sight and only minimally regulated. And just like fiber optics, you can point as many lasers as you want, from tower to tower, for maximum throughput.
no country truly appreciates freedom until it's gone through a few decades of fascism and/or of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It seems it's time for the USA to have such an "enlightening" experience.
People that say such things are MASSIVELY ignorant about US history. We've slid far backwards lately, but there's no question the situation was, far, far worse various times in the past. Get back to me when we're interning all the Arab-Americans in camps...
Seeing that the vending machine was twice as expensive as a good deal on a six pack at the grocery, I got a small cube refrigerator. Saved several times the cost of the fridge.
It helps the economics that you were stealing electricity from your employer...
Also, you could have saved FAR MORE money buying generic brands of soda instead of the big guys. And much more still buying 2-litre or 3-litre bottles and using cups, instead of buying cans of soda. Can you find a can of Coke anywhere for under 12Â?
Now I drink water. Tap water, not bottled. No juice either.
I've lived in areas where, even after being run through high-end carbon filters, tap water tastes AWFUL. Perhaps reverse-osmosis would work, but that has lots of its own drawbacks.
Once you're buying spring water, soda can be less expensive.
Powdered drinks can be cheaper still, and can hide the awful taste of the nastiest tap water. Iced tea, tang, gatorade, lemonade, kool-aid, etc., etc.
health, more than money. [...] being healthier.
Soda and juice have calories, where water doesn't. If you're having difficulty maintaining a healthy weight, switching to water might help (or you might eat more and eliminate the gains). But otherwise, there's no reason to believe flavored drinks have negative health consequences. The vitamins and minerals in them can even be a minor positive to those with an unbalanced diet.
There's a bit of a nasty feedback spiral, making the issue worse.
Manufacturers are selling less, so they price their systems higher to bring in more money. The higher prices push even more people towards cheaper tablets, which might only be $50! Those further-declining sales numbers then push manufacturers to price their systems higher, which then pushes more people towards tablets, and on and on it goes.
The PC market is ripe for disruption, just as the laptop market was when netBooks came along. Somebody providing less powerful desktop computers for a much lower price, COULD compete with the uptake of tablets. But the entrenched players don't want to cannibalize any of their higher-margin products to do so. The sad thing is, they'd likely end up more profitable in the end, slowing the migration away from PCs and laptops.
The only thing holding tablets back from content creation, and many other roles is the operating system... If we could flash any Android device with a full-fledged Linux/X11 OS image, lots of us would buy tablets instead of laptops/netbooks.
Honestly, that content creation was going on just fine back in the days of Pentium-4 PCs, and the lowest-end tablets have more computing power than those. Storage is an issue, but 64GByte SDXC cards are good enough for most tasks, and USB host mode allows larger storage, up to full-sized spinning hard drives.
Content creators also find the current crop of desktop CPUs faster than necessary, if not more than they can utilize effectively... Tablets have the performance, input devices, and most of the connectivity you could want. What they lack is the software content creators would want. Linux wont make everyone happy... Many important tools need Windows or Mac platforms, but it would start filling some of that demand, and maybe be an alluring target to software developers (like Adobe) who haven't been interested in Linux before...
Republic Wireless can give you unlimite WiFi-only (VoIP) service with their smartphone for $5/mo. You can throw-in unlimited cellular talk/text (no data) for another $5: https://republicwireless.com/plans
This isn't a new thing, either. The old Motorola i1 iDEN based Android phone worked with BoostMobile's dumb phone plan, which also started at $7/mo, if you didn't mind painfully slow data service.
Smartphones *do* provide lots of value that dumbphones do not. Even if you're paying more for the phone service, if it eliminates your need for DSL/Cable internet service at home, it may be a wash... I know my $40/mo smartphone plan compares well to the $30/mo cheapest wired internet service I can get in the area. If I wasn't working in IT, I might consider dropping the wired service.
Similarly, I've saved lots of time, frustration, and fuel, having MapQuest on my phone, routing me around traffic.
No, no, no, no! As someone perpetually out in the fringes, allow me to correct this misconception once again...
Before the analog went away, nobody around here used an antenna. I bought my Winegard 8800 and Antennacraft Y10-7-13 antennas during the long transition. Of course I checked out the analog stations while I was at it... They were horrendous. Sure, you could tell that there was a signal there, but it was only barely perceptible that there were sharp edges and lines burried somewhere in the static if you focused hard enough. I TRIED watching news on the strongest of those awful analog stations, but after fives minutes I had a headache from the loud static over the audio and very quickly gave up straining to try and see anything. It was an immensely miserable experience.
After the transition to ATSC, most digital stations in the market come in strong and clear most of the time, with minimal breakups. While those are annoying, it's an occasional annoyance intertwined with PERFECT picture and sound, rather than a constant annoyance that nobody in their right mind would tolerate.
I have some criticisms of the current situation... A couple major broadcasters have cut down their signal power in the process, and the FCC stupidly allows another broadcaster on the came channel from almost the same direction (from here). Those two major channels missing might be a deal-breaker for some who would like to be rid of the crazy cable/satellite TV bills. However, it's infinitely more practical to use an antenna than it was with analog, and the proliferation ofnetworks on sub-channels has greatly increased selection.
Most people's complaints stem from the switch of some stations from VHF to UHF spectrum, which only propagates 2/3rds as far, and requires a different antenna than the old stations. My big complaint is that, if HALF the VHF spectrum was going to be abandoned, the FCC should have forced the rest to jump to UHF, too, so consumer antenna systems could be half as expensive, eliminating the need for VHF-hi antennas entirely (outside of Alaska). That might have gotten more people putting up antennas, and more incentive for stations to continue broadcasting at full power levels. Instead,the FCC is planning to turn the UHF band into swiss cheese, selling off bits to telcos for cellular services, forcing some back onto VHF-low where modern VHF antennas don't even work, and leaving some on UHF, again necessitating expensive antenna systems.
Problems with the transition to digital broadcasts are self-made, and makes me think we should have skipped it and dropped broadcast TV entirely. Either let it improve and succeed, or kill it entirely...
You put your child down for a nap, and he ends up crying for 45 minutes, right in the next room, because you're busy working on something, and don't hear him.
Ever considered replacing the speaker in the baby monitor with a small electric motor? You wouldn't be able to understand a conversation, but you should be able to differentiate quiet noises from loud ones, quick short noises for ongoing. etc.
I'm guessing upuv meant "what felt like about a week" - in the end it's clear he states it's an hour. I could imagine myself making the same hallucinations.
No, he said the reviving process was "over an hour". That paragraph is talking only about that part of the process, and the sentence before it said: "It felt like it all went down in a few minutes." Again, obviously referring to the reviving process.
I knew tapes were the cheapest and most cost effective backup solution
Only if you have large-enough scale... For a small business, the up-front cost of a couple tape drives will exceed the ongoing savings of tape versus HDDs for quite a while.
it sounds as if it will keep pace with HD and SSD technology to keep staying relevant.
It will continue to improve, but it is NOT "keep[ing] pace". Notice how they say tape is about half as expensive as hard drives for the capacity? A few years ago it was an order of magnitude cheaper. And years before it was (relatively) much cheaper still. Spinning rust has been narrowing the gap dramatically for many, many years.
I can't recall any personal harm from overseas communications latency taking a few extra milliseconds;
It generally works in the opposite direction... Folks outside the US have very tempting hosting services in the US, but the latency makes using the services quite unpleasant.
I thought it was pretty obvious... If you've ever SSH'd into a server over-seas, you've seen some nasty lag due to latency. For quick jobs you tend to tolerate it and do as much locally as possible, because it's pretty painful. If you've ever called someone on the other side of the planet, you've faced some pretty high latency that makes two-way conversation awkward. Similarly, if you take the "Web 2.0" sites that make extensive use of javascript bits all over the place, and put them on the opposite side of the planet, the added latency makes the site painful to use.
There could be a lot of benefits from lower-latency fiber optics, and this project only makes it clear there is demand for it.
So now that the latency of light through glass is undeniably a costly limitation, what's next for fiber optics?
You'll still need the total-internal reflection whatever the material, but perhaps something with a refraction index closer to c? Water-filled tubes? Hollow tubes filled with a gas?
NY to Chicago is a pretty short run. While everyone is ranting about the economic/political aspects of this move, we'd all benefit if intercontinental telecommunications links had 50% lower latency.
Not all America is like Texas or San Francisco, plenty of empty spaces to be fulfilled with roads and cars.
US Car ownership is around 780 cars per 1,000 people, which is an overwhelming "majority", as I said earlier.
I would recommend, in special, reading about Katrina and New Orleans - yes, New Orleans is a USA city, located in a state called Louisiana (I'm making it easir for you!).
Is there something non-functional about your brain? I said the majority of people can charge from their cars, and you go on a rant about red-herrings like a few random bits of car trivia?
People that will not have access to a garden where their cell phones could be charged by solar panels.
Again proving you have NEVER used a solar panel, or feel the need to make-up nonsense to double-down on your baseless point... Solar panels do not need direct sunlight. They do not need to be outside. They work even with low levels of incident light.
I don't see why you keep coming back if you can't get two neurons together to form a logical argument in favor of your point.
the majority of the people in this world don't own a car
It's unmistakably clear that this story is specifically about the US, where what I said holds. Bringing in irrelevant issues from other parts of the world is utterly pointless and only serves to confuse the issue unnecessarily. I can only assume you're doing so because you don't happen to like the facts I provided, which undermine your opinions...
Solar chargers will help. for sure. But only on sunny days - and emergencies don't happens only on clear, bright, warm and sunny days,
This is nonsense... Solar panels continue to work well even on extremely overcast days. You do not need "clear" "bright" or "sunny days". And "warm" doesn't enter into it AT ALL.
Of course your blanket assertion is nonsensical on its face... The deserts, where it's bright, clear, and sunny 99% of the year, have power outages, too... In fact there, the grid is most heavily loaded on the hottest, brightest, warmest days. And yes, before you say anything else stupid... there are indeed many tens of millions of people living in the deserts of the US, from Southern California to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Nevada, etc., etc.
different services have different characteristics, and so have different resilience to different kinds of emergencies.
That's so painfully obvious that it's just banality to bring it up. If you want to suggest some SPECIFIC situation where POTS does better that is significant enough to be worth the cost of maintaining the 4X redundant infrastructure of POTS, be my guest... but you haven't done so yet.
in special, long term blackouts where a powered plug will be something that you simply will not have access.
Long-term blackouts don't exist in the modern western world. In areas that are highly vulnerable, people buy generators. And a tiny little solar panel costs about $5, NOTHING next to the cost of a smartphone, and will indefinitely provide enough talk time for emergency use.
cell phones are useless a few hours after a electrical blackout (as no one will be able to charge their phones)
I'd say the majority of smartphone users already have a solution for that... Anyone who has ever used their smartphone for navigation bought a $5 car charger, and will be able to charge up their phone, and their neighbor's, for at least a few days.
Personally, I've got a pocket-sized $10, 1W solar panel that'll charge AAA/AA batteries, and/out output to USB, so I'll be good to go indefinitely (as will anyone else who has ever gone camping) and I'll keep my immediate neighbors up and connected, too.
the analog phone operators can redirect their power supplies in order to keep the phone lines working
POTS has problems with being overloaded after disasters, too. Authorities used-to encourage people to look for pay phones and hang-up the handset if they've fallen off to help... POTS is superior, but it benefits from its' declining use, in the same way cell towers suffer from their popularity. Cell towers, like POTS, could be designed with more call capacity. Government agencies like the FCC simply have not set a high enough bar for cellular service, to ensure available in emergencies, like they formers did with POTS.
You can restore cell service in matter of hours with a mobile cell site.
You can IN THEORY. In reality, cellular service is usually out for several days after a disaster. If the FCC is willing to enforce such uptime requirements on cellular services, things might improve.
What good is a fixed, "simple" phone if your house isn't there any more?
It's pretty rare for a HOUSE to move. If/when it happens, you walk over to your neighbor's house, or the nearest unmoved building, and use their POTS lines. You and your area isn't entirely unreachable to the outside world just because the 3-hour battery in the nearest cell tower ran out of juice.
One of the biggest issues when a disaster strikes is locating people. POTS doesn't do anything to help with this.
No, that's not really an issue, and cell phones wouldn't help with it. Authorities would be vastly overwhelmed TRYING to find EVERYONE from their cell phone signal. Instead, they go around picking-up those people who are the easiest to reach. By the time most people have reported in, and police have sorted through thousands of missing persons reports, it's days later, and anyone who has been disable, is long since dead, just like their cell phone's battery...
You can't expect most people to get a license. Instead, you should probably suggest buying FRS/GMRS radios these days. I know GMRS emergency repeaters and monitoring stations are all around, and the greater range of CB radios might give them the advantage. The former, though, might be as cheap as $10. That's a pretty inexpensive emergency communications backup.
Verizon just forces customers to provide their own power out of cheap and laziness. They could easily string one copper AC line along with their fiber. They could provide power from the grid at less than it costs YOU to operate their horrible boxes, and fail-over to distributed natural-gas generators in telco boxes in every neighborhood.
Instead, have the electrical costs hidden, and not needing the generators saves the up-front expense, as well as giving them an easy out when their service goes out, claiming most people's backup batteries wouldn't last that long, so their service outage didn't actually affect anyone...
Frankly, Verizon is a huge monster, that can't even hold itself together, bigger than AT&T ever was, and is long overdue to be broken up into at least 3 different business units (since they are functionally different companies anyhow). The saving grace this time around is that there are some smaller competitors, thanks to advances in technology. But the monster still looms large, and harms an unimaginably large number of people every year.
I've worked with Verizon and Time Warner Business, and I'll take the latter any day. Your dismissive "browsing facebook" remark has no basis in reality... The cable companies' business units are real, honest to god telcos at this point, and I know a number of huge companies that are hosting servers using business cable co's service. Even the big telcoms are using cable co's connections and bandwidth for some of the internet-based services they provide.
The amount of BS I've had to put up with from Verizon far outweighs the imaginary benefits folks like you say they provide. I've seen MASSIVE delays, double-speak, incompotent technicians abound, teeth-pulling, numerous outages, incorrect billing, and plenty of outright lies from Verizon. They're practically a criminal enterprise at this point. Hell, one of their incompetent technicians told me he had to report Verizon to the public-utilities commission to get this home phone & internet service fixed. Personally, I've seen the same thing, with DSL service not working, and no technician comming when scheduled. I just opt for Time Warner in that case.
But I would forgive their horrible consumer service if their business service was decent, but it's as bad or worse. They will BS you for months at a time about all your redundant internet links going out simultaneously, and NEVER seend out a technician to check WTF is going on with their equipment. Even when they're responsible for getting everything up and working, they'll leave you with a useless mess that'll take longer to fix than a straight setup.
I give the cable co's credit for doing none of this BS, having almost as reliable service,having vastly better service and support, being far cheaper in either the best or worst case, and just plain not lying through their teeth at every turn.
the russians eat too much carbs. the only people on the planet to eat pasta and bread and potatoes together. and then they wonder why they get diabetes
I don't know of any top marathon runners with diabetes, yet they ALL carb-load.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you bothered to post, you could have the decency to post a link...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/
http://abcnews.go.com/International/mexican-police-find-stolen-truck-radioactive-cargo/story?id=21091737
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2013/1204/Hijacked-radioactive-material-found-in-Mexico.-How-dangerous-was-it
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/4/-extremely-dangerousradioactivetheftinmexicoiaea.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/stolen-cobalt-60-found-abandoned/2013/12/04/7d3fe3f8-5d42-11e3-8d24-31c016b976b2_story.html
This is utter nonsense. Microwave communications are line-of-sight and only minimally regulated. And just like fiber optics, you can point as many lasers as you want, from tower to tower, for maximum throughput.
People that say such things are MASSIVELY ignorant about US history. We've slid far backwards lately, but there's no question the situation was, far, far worse various times in the past. Get back to me when we're interning all the Arab-Americans in camps...
The "Ã"s are cent symbols. /. murders unicode.
It helps the economics that you were stealing electricity from your employer...
Also, you could have saved FAR MORE money buying generic brands of soda instead of the big guys. And much more still buying 2-litre or 3-litre bottles and using cups, instead of buying cans of soda. Can you find a can of Coke anywhere for under 12Â?
I've lived in areas where, even after being run through high-end carbon filters, tap water tastes AWFUL. Perhaps reverse-osmosis would work, but that has lots of its own drawbacks.
Once you're buying spring water, soda can be less expensive.
Powdered drinks can be cheaper still, and can hide the awful taste of the nastiest tap water. Iced tea, tang, gatorade, lemonade, kool-aid, etc., etc.
Soda and juice have calories, where water doesn't. If you're having difficulty maintaining a healthy weight, switching to water might help (or you might eat more and eliminate the gains). But otherwise, there's no reason to believe flavored drinks have negative health consequences. The vitamins and minerals in them can even be a minor positive to those with an unbalanced diet.
There's a bit of a nasty feedback spiral, making the issue worse.
Manufacturers are selling less, so they price their systems higher to bring in more money. The higher prices push even more people towards cheaper tablets, which might only be $50! Those further-declining sales numbers then push manufacturers to price their systems higher, which then pushes more people towards tablets, and on and on it goes.
The PC market is ripe for disruption, just as the laptop market was when netBooks came along. Somebody providing less powerful desktop computers for a much lower price, COULD compete with the uptake of tablets. But the entrenched players don't want to cannibalize any of their higher-margin products to do so. The sad thing is, they'd likely end up more profitable in the end, slowing the migration away from PCs and laptops.
The only thing holding tablets back from content creation, and many other roles is the operating system... If we could flash any Android device with a full-fledged Linux/X11 OS image, lots of us would buy tablets instead of laptops/netbooks.
Honestly, that content creation was going on just fine back in the days of Pentium-4 PCs, and the lowest-end tablets have more computing power than those. Storage is an issue, but 64GByte SDXC cards are good enough for most tasks, and USB host mode allows larger storage, up to full-sized spinning hard drives.
Content creators also find the current crop of desktop CPUs faster than necessary, if not more than they can utilize effectively... Tablets have the performance, input devices, and most of the connectivity you could want. What they lack is the software content creators would want. Linux wont make everyone happy... Many important tools need Windows or Mac platforms, but it would start filling some of that demand, and maybe be an alluring target to software developers (like Adobe) who haven't been interested in Linux before...
TracFone is advertising their android phones with $7/mo service: http://tracfonewireless.com/
Republic Wireless can give you unlimite WiFi-only (VoIP) service with their smartphone for $5/mo. You can throw-in unlimited cellular talk/text (no data) for another $5: https://republicwireless.com/plans
This isn't a new thing, either. The old Motorola i1 iDEN based Android phone worked with BoostMobile's dumb phone plan, which also started at $7/mo, if you didn't mind painfully slow data service.
Smartphones *do* provide lots of value that dumbphones do not. Even if you're paying more for the phone service, if it eliminates your need for DSL/Cable internet service at home, it may be a wash... I know my $40/mo smartphone plan compares well to the $30/mo cheapest wired internet service I can get in the area. If I wasn't working in IT, I might consider dropping the wired service.
Similarly, I've saved lots of time, frustration, and fuel, having MapQuest on my phone, routing me around traffic.
No, no, no, no!
As someone perpetually out in the fringes, allow me to correct this misconception once again...
Before the analog went away, nobody around here used an antenna. I bought my Winegard 8800 and Antennacraft Y10-7-13 antennas during the long transition. Of course I checked out the analog stations while I was at it... They were horrendous. Sure, you could tell that there was a signal there, but it was only barely perceptible that there were sharp edges and lines burried somewhere in the static if you focused hard enough. I TRIED watching news on the strongest of those awful analog stations, but after fives minutes I had a headache from the loud static over the audio and very quickly gave up straining to try and see anything. It was an immensely miserable experience.
After the transition to ATSC, most digital stations in the market come in strong and clear most of the time, with minimal breakups. While those are annoying, it's an occasional annoyance intertwined with PERFECT picture and sound, rather than a constant annoyance that nobody in their right mind would tolerate.
I have some criticisms of the current situation... A couple major broadcasters have cut down their signal power in the process, and the FCC stupidly allows another broadcaster on the came channel from almost the same direction (from here). Those two major channels missing might be a deal-breaker for some who would like to be rid of the crazy cable/satellite TV bills. However, it's infinitely more practical to use an antenna than it was with analog, and the proliferation ofnetworks on sub-channels has greatly increased selection.
Most people's complaints stem from the switch of some stations from VHF to UHF spectrum, which only propagates 2/3rds as far, and requires a different antenna than the old stations. My big complaint is that, if HALF the VHF spectrum was going to be abandoned, the FCC should have forced the rest to jump to UHF, too, so consumer antenna systems could be half as expensive, eliminating the need for VHF-hi antennas entirely (outside of Alaska). That might have gotten more people putting up antennas, and more incentive for stations to continue broadcasting at full power levels. Instead,the FCC is planning to turn the UHF band into swiss cheese, selling off bits to telcos for cellular services, forcing some back onto VHF-low where modern VHF antennas don't even work, and leaving some on UHF, again necessitating expensive antenna systems.
Problems with the transition to digital broadcasts are self-made, and makes me think we should have skipped it and dropped broadcast TV entirely. Either let it improve and succeed, or kill it entirely...
Ever considered replacing the speaker in the baby monitor with a small electric motor? You wouldn't be able to understand a conversation, but you should be able to differentiate quiet noises from loud ones, quick short noises for ongoing. etc.
No, he said the reviving process was "over an hour". That paragraph is talking only about that part of the process, and the sentence before it said: "It felt like it all went down in a few minutes." Again, obviously referring to the reviving process.
Would have been quicker and easier to look it up, yourself, than asking here, and waiting for a response:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#shoe-shining
Only if you have large-enough scale... For a small business, the up-front cost of a couple tape drives will exceed the ongoing savings of tape versus HDDs for quite a while.
It will continue to improve, but it is NOT "keep[ing] pace". Notice how they say tape is about half as expensive as hard drives for the capacity? A few years ago it was an order of magnitude cheaper. And years before it was (relatively) much cheaper still. Spinning rust has been narrowing the gap dramatically for many, many years.
It generally works in the opposite direction... Folks outside the US have very tempting hosting services in the US, but the latency makes using the services quite unpleasant.
I thought it was pretty obvious... If you've ever SSH'd into a server over-seas, you've seen some nasty lag due to latency. For quick jobs you tend to tolerate it and do as much locally as possible, because it's pretty painful. If you've ever called someone on the other side of the planet, you've faced some pretty high latency that makes two-way conversation awkward. Similarly, if you take the "Web 2.0" sites that make extensive use of javascript bits all over the place, and put them on the opposite side of the planet, the added latency makes the site painful to use.
There could be a lot of benefits from lower-latency fiber optics, and this project only makes it clear there is demand for it.
I might be inclined to give Terry a pass, except his rants took a very dark turn, and racism can't be written off as a symptom of schizophrenia:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4437621&cid=45402353
So now that the latency of light through glass is undeniably a costly limitation, what's next for fiber optics?
You'll still need the total-internal reflection whatever the material, but perhaps something with a refraction index closer to c? Water-filled tubes? Hollow tubes filled with a gas?
NY to Chicago is a pretty short run. While everyone is ranting about the economic/political aspects of this move, we'd all benefit if intercontinental telecommunications links had 50% lower latency.
US Car ownership is around 780 cars per 1,000 people, which is an overwhelming "majority", as I said earlier.
Is there something non-functional about your brain? I said the majority of people can charge from their cars, and you go on a rant about red-herrings like a few random bits of car trivia?
Again proving you have NEVER used a solar panel, or feel the need to make-up nonsense to double-down on your baseless point... Solar panels do not need direct sunlight. They do not need to be outside. They work even with low levels of incident light.
I don't see why you keep coming back if you can't get two neurons together to form a logical argument in favor of your point.
I have schizophrenia, and yet I'm still smoking something...
Why can't Terry?
It's unmistakably clear that this story is specifically about the US, where what I said holds. Bringing in irrelevant issues from other parts of the world is utterly pointless and only serves to confuse the issue unnecessarily. I can only assume you're doing so because you don't happen to like the facts I provided, which undermine your opinions...
This is nonsense... Solar panels continue to work well even on extremely overcast days. You do not need "clear" "bright" or "sunny days". And "warm" doesn't enter into it AT ALL.
Of course your blanket assertion is nonsensical on its face... The deserts, where it's bright, clear, and sunny 99% of the year, have power outages, too... In fact there, the grid is most heavily loaded on the hottest, brightest, warmest days. And yes, before you say anything else stupid... there are indeed many tens of millions of people living in the deserts of the US, from Southern California to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Nevada, etc., etc.
That's so painfully obvious that it's just banality to bring it up. If you want to suggest some SPECIFIC situation where POTS does better that is significant enough to be worth the cost of maintaining the 4X redundant infrastructure of POTS, be my guest... but you haven't done so yet.
Long-term blackouts don't exist in the modern western world. In areas that are highly vulnerable, people buy generators. And a tiny little solar panel costs about $5, NOTHING next to the cost of a smartphone, and will indefinitely provide enough talk time for emergency use.
I'd say the majority of smartphone users already have a solution for that... Anyone who has ever used their smartphone for navigation bought a $5 car charger, and will be able to charge up their phone, and their neighbor's, for at least a few days.
Personally, I've got a pocket-sized $10, 1W solar panel that'll charge AAA/AA batteries, and/out output to USB, so I'll be good to go indefinitely (as will anyone else who has ever gone camping) and I'll keep my immediate neighbors up and connected, too.
POTS has problems with being overloaded after disasters, too. Authorities used-to encourage people to look for pay phones and hang-up the handset if they've fallen off to help... POTS is superior, but it benefits from its' declining use, in the same way cell towers suffer from their popularity. Cell towers, like POTS, could be designed with more call capacity. Government agencies like the FCC simply have not set a high enough bar for cellular service, to ensure available in emergencies, like they formers did with POTS.
You can IN THEORY. In reality, cellular service is usually out for several days after a disaster. If the FCC is willing to enforce such uptime requirements on cellular services, things might improve.
It's pretty rare for a HOUSE to move. If/when it happens, you walk over to your neighbor's house, or the nearest unmoved building, and use their POTS lines. You and your area isn't entirely unreachable to the outside world just because the 3-hour battery in the nearest cell tower ran out of juice.
No, that's not really an issue, and cell phones wouldn't help with it. Authorities would be vastly overwhelmed TRYING to find EVERYONE from their cell phone signal. Instead, they go around picking-up those people who are the easiest to reach. By the time most people have reported in, and police have sorted through thousands of missing persons reports, it's days later, and anyone who has been disable, is long since dead, just like their cell phone's battery...
You can't expect most people to get a license. Instead, you should probably suggest buying FRS/GMRS radios these days. I know GMRS emergency repeaters and monitoring stations are all around, and the greater range of CB radios might give them the advantage. The former, though, might be as cheap as $10. That's a pretty inexpensive emergency communications backup.
Verizon just forces customers to provide their own power out of cheap and laziness. They could easily string one copper AC line along with their fiber. They could provide power from the grid at less than it costs YOU to operate their horrible boxes, and fail-over to distributed natural-gas generators in telco boxes in every neighborhood.
Instead, have the electrical costs hidden, and not needing the generators saves the up-front expense, as well as giving them an easy out when their service goes out, claiming most people's backup batteries wouldn't last that long, so their service outage didn't actually affect anyone...
Frankly, Verizon is a huge monster, that can't even hold itself together, bigger than AT&T ever was, and is long overdue to be broken up into at least 3 different business units (since they are functionally different companies anyhow). The saving grace this time around is that there are some smaller competitors, thanks to advances in technology. But the monster still looms large, and harms an unimaginably large number of people every year.
I've worked with Verizon and Time Warner Business, and I'll take the latter any day. Your dismissive "browsing facebook" remark has no basis in reality... The cable companies' business units are real, honest to god telcos at this point, and I know a number of huge companies that are hosting servers using business cable co's service. Even the big telcoms are using cable co's connections and bandwidth for some of the internet-based services they provide.
The amount of BS I've had to put up with from Verizon far outweighs the imaginary benefits folks like you say they provide. I've seen MASSIVE delays, double-speak, incompotent technicians abound, teeth-pulling, numerous outages, incorrect billing, and plenty of outright lies from Verizon. They're practically a criminal enterprise at this point. Hell, one of their incompetent technicians told me he had to report Verizon to the public-utilities commission to get this home phone & internet service fixed. Personally, I've seen the same thing, with DSL service not working, and no technician comming when scheduled. I just opt for Time Warner in that case.
But I would forgive their horrible consumer service if their business service was decent, but it's as bad or worse. They will BS you for months at a time about all your redundant internet links going out simultaneously, and NEVER seend out a technician to check WTF is going on with their equipment. Even when they're responsible for getting everything up and working, they'll leave you with a useless mess that'll take longer to fix than a straight setup.
I give the cable co's credit for doing none of this BS, having almost as reliable service,having vastly better service and support, being far cheaper in either the best or worst case, and just plain not lying through their teeth at every turn.
I don't know of any top marathon runners with diabetes, yet they ALL carb-load.