Many (most?) data centers I've been in have been buildings converted from some other use -- office buildings, warehouses, etc. But regardless of how they are built, they always seem to have relatively low ceilings, even in converted spaces where they rip out the ceiling grid.
I get the density argument, but I often wonder if someone built a data center with a 50 foot ceiling (a large, flat building) if you wouldn't gain some cooling benefit from convection that would be worth the sacrifice in vertical density versus the cost in intensive forced air cooling.
I'm sure tracking is a part of it, but do you really think that a manager with a deadline and a tight budget is going to block purchase of a keyboard or mouse or some other inexpensive peripheral that keeps an employee from being producing? That's shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupid.
Further, I don't think the tracking here is particularly onerous. I don't think this is a vending machine filled with expensive stuff, it's filled with inexpensive stuff that is largely disposable. The tracking is probably more valuable from an inventory control and ordering perspective than figuring out if Jane Q. Office is using too many mice.
The people with a gripe are probably the IT people because it does remove the discretion they have, although in my experience, the IT people are the ones who abuse the discretion -- people they "like" (no Facebook pun intended) get *good* replacement items -- wireless mice or keyboards, and the people they don't like get shitty, used items.
It's how I operated, although I used it more to sweeten pissy users instead of greasing people I liked, but you always played a little politics with it.
I'm generally with you on that kind of Chomsky-esque critique, but to some extent it's a rabbit hole because there's NO news organization big enough to put a newspaper at my front step that isn't going to suffer from the larger biases of culture.
Yes, there are smaller, web-based media and some smaller monthly and quarterly publications that buck this kind of trend, and they're worth reading, but they're not usually going to tell me what's happening TODAY in Syria or Syracuse. And they're also not above trading in conspiracy theories or the articles of faith of whatever niche they represent.
I know I've grown more conservative as I've gotten older, but I've been a long-time reader and subscriber to the NY Times (regular reader since college, subscriber since the first Clinton administration) and for me the NY Times seems to have gotten more and more politically strident in its editorial.
I don't mean to sound like a Fox News drone, either, but it's increasingly easy to see the Times simply avoid asking some questions in favor of others; too often it seems like the Democratic party and the left get fed softballs and reasonable ideas from the right or Republicans get ignored or just lambasted.
I keep reading it because at least for news content, especially international news, there's nothing that comes close in terms of quality of writing and detail of coverage, but for domestic content it seems to have lost that neutrality it once had.
No, I'm thinking about it as a pure data transport path, not the Bezos described way where information is sent about a data transfer that has/will/can happen over the more typical data transmission paths.
I'm curious what kind of throughput you could expect to get between two phones.
The way this is explained, you wouldn't need much to pass 512 bytes or less for even a long URL, but I'm kind of curious how much throughput you could expect with 'modern' phones that may have high resolution audio or if you connected the phones directly with a cable with a mini-stereo plug at both ends.
I'd imagine that the way it would actually be deployed would involved a lot of redundancy and error checking since it would be presumed there would be some kind of background noise to deal with, cutting the kind of throughput you could get, but even so the technique of using phone audio to transmit data might be something interesting for other applications that need to pass small quantities of data (contacts, low-res pictures, etc).
The judge is probably some lawyer not smart or connected enough to get a real judgeship, but connected enough to get this job. Basically it's a good guaranteed salary with the petty power over the people that stand in the courtroom.
I'm sure these judges are just cashing in long enough to pay off their second homes until they qualify for their fat pensions.
It's clear they are setting themselves up as middlemen, I don't see why they would bother with digital resale. I would think they would rather move further away from "purchase" and more into the subscription system where you pay continuously but never own anything -- netflix, spotify, etc.
There's just no percentage for anyone in digital resale, it's a concept that doesn't work unless they come up with some way of creating an uncopyable (and thus unposessable) digital file that somehow can have its ownership transferred but without being endlessly duplicated.
I think the ultimate solution to this and all piracy is a low enough pricing model where the cost of the thing is low enough that the idea of reselling it when you are done doesn't mean anything. The.99 cent song comes pretty close to this, although the $10 album seems a little too expensive to fit. They sure haven't figured out how to rent a digital movie, though, without too many restrictions (24 hour playback, etc) and the cost of digital movie and TV show purchases is ridiculous relative to the restrictions.
It's hard to see how they don't go this way within 10 years. IIRC, at some point LTE native phones are supposed to be VoIP over LTE anyway, meaning all access is via VoIP anyway.
I'm sure, though, if it does become available it would be some kind of thing they upcharge the hell out of or lock down to be an Apple only feature or something.
Rare is the private school that doesn't somehow, somewhere get public money, which comes with all those lovely strings attached, including mandatory reporting.
Further, while the school district has at least the hope of public policy exposing a data sell out, a private school has far less oversight and usually a lot greater financial pressure.
Homeschooling is a great idea in principal, it's a tough idea to actually implement in practice and there's also no guarantee you won't want or need services from your public district which could cause you to get sucked into the database.
Whatever the situation is, it sure seems like a huge moral hazard for local school administrators. They have an ethical obligation to protect children's data, but they have a self-interest in successful careers, which can be judged by how much money they bring into the district.
My guess is that money and status trumps children's privacy, even among the people you'd presume "think of the children."
None of this would be an issue if the cell phone vendors and the cell phone companies worked out a VoIP setup for the phones that would allow cell phone numbers to have a presentation on multiple devices simultaneously.
If they could do this, then you would just pick which device you want to bring with you and you could answer and make calls on whatever was handy. Going on a trip and want to pack light? Bring the 7" tablet. Going out? Bring the 4" phone. Sitting on the couch with the 10" tablet, but left the phone in the bedroom? Answer the call on the tablet.
Not real throughput and certainly not *guaranteed* throughput.
I've had business class customers subscribe to the top tier of Comcast's service (100 down, some double-digit amount up) and throughput never met that even running Comcast's own (likely biased) speed test.
My understanding of this is that when you buy a higher speed tier, you get that tier provisioned on your modem but after that, you're competing with any number of people on your broadcast domain and ultimately on your node for upstream capacity.
Comcast may provision your *modem* to a higher speed, but it doesn't really make much difference if the node's upstream has limited headroom.
I think all prosecutions are political, in several dimensions.
They're political because criminal law is political -- it is the outcome of a political process, legislative lawmaking.
They're political because prosecutors are political; in many (most?) places in the US the county attorney is a directly elected position, and the person who wins that job has an inherently political mindset and at minimum a public constituency, and in practice, a much larger private constituency -- police, judges, politicians, etc. Even in situations where the position isn't directly elected, it's arguably more political because the positions are appointed by politicians and are often at an elevated political level (eg, assistant US attorney).
And then there's the power political component -- prosecutorial power, is, like many forms a power more or less depending on how you exercise it. So there's an element of wanting to use prosecutorial power in a way that enhances it rather than detracts from it, and that generally means winning, so you pick easier targets.
IIRC, Blackberry's newest OS allows for some way to run Android apps.
If LG can figure out how to make that kind of translation work, this may end up looking semi-smart for them. I think the smartphone vendors are a little touchy about being beholden to Google for Android and there's not an easy way out short of starting from scratch.
webOS may be closer to scratch than customizing Android, but if the same effort results in an OS they control (and can possibly license to others..) that also runs Android apps, they may have something.
And it may be something they use to sell semi-smartphones -- something cheaper and more stripped down than a full-on smartphone that someone normally only in the featurephone category may find appealing, or some kind of rebrandable OEM hardware play for a company like Facebook who has been linked to a "Facebook phone".
The fear scenario is always that the Iranians will leverage a nuke into closure of the Straits of Hormuz. But what does this really mean?
The problem with using nukes as a threat is that it has to be plausible that you might actually use them and that there's some end game after the mushroom cloud.
With the US and Soviets this was plausible -- both countries had massive stockpiles of weapons, global delivery systems, hardened command and control systems, public commitment to MAD, and some kind of plan for post-nuclear exchange (even if it was unrealistic).
With Iran the problem is that they can't step up to the MAD plate. They don't have global delivery systems, they don't have a nuclear-hardened command and control systems. There is no end game after setting off a nuke. The outcome for Iran after using a nuclear weapon is obliteration, the functional end of "Persian" as a meaningful culture and the end of Iran as anything more than a name on a map for a place that's not able to sustain people anymore.
The Iranians would be MUCH better off with a distributed conventional cruise missile system if they want to try to close the straits. Sinking a couple of ships with cruise missiles would demonstrate their capability and will without inviting apocalypse. The US and its allies will have to think many times before retaliating and be willing to commit themselves to a sustained and difficult conventional war with strong asymmetric/terrorist possibilities. They want to fire a nuke? Push the red button over there, wait 20 minutes until you hear the bell sound. Your glass surface won't be fully cured for 24 hours, though.
Given the right commitment from the West, the Iranians STILL may face obliteration, but it seems a lot less likely that pusillanimous politicians would have the guts to, say, carpet-bomb Iranian cities and cause massive civilian casualties. You'd more than likely see major air strikes against predominantly military targets followed by a bunch of diplomatic action designed to negotiate something before Iran lost its territorial integrity or internal political control (which they might lose via civil unrest anyway).
So many sites are so Javascript heavy that it only takes about 3 months after the release of whatever the latest iPad is for it to start feeling slower.
It almost feels like the site developers were like "finally, more CPU, I can throw more JS into iPad web sessions."
When using a site like NYTimes.Com and writing a comment to a story was almost undoable on the iPad 1 due to massive lag between keystroke entry and the letter showing on the screen. When I upgraded to the 3 it was usable, but less so if I was using the onsceen keyboard instead of a bluetooth keyboard.
Lately it seems to be getting slower, so I can only assume it's the level of Jscript on the site doing it as they bias towards iPad 4 and mini.
Banking regulations, wire transfer regulations, currency regulations and limits, etc etc etc. The money system is highly regulated. Follow that.
And then cook 'em ALL up in a big RICO pot where all the executives and individuals involved can each be on the hook for $100,000k and 20 years in prison.
The big problem with Internet fraud is that there's this narrow focus on how easy it is to do tasks "anonymously" on the Internet, without realizing that it takes an entire support system -- ISPs, hosting, money transfers, etc. It's one thing to send stuff out and just be annoying -- you can spam from a coffee shop. But if you want to make money, you have to collect money and that requires some kind of support system.
If the government started doing this it wouldn't take very many prosecutions of Mercedes-driving executives otherwise engaged in "legitimate" business to start paying closer attention to who they business with.
It won't make this kind of fraud go away completely, but it would make it much more difficult.
I didn't think of net metering, I guess that makes sense -- instead of storing (with loss) your overage, you just pump it into the grid and consider the utility power you use at night to be just the power you gave them earlier in the day (it's not, I know, I'm just making kind of a metaphor).
I know batteries are a pain in the ass. My dad has a custom-bus conversion motorhome and he has a battery array/inverter/charger/generator setup and he's always griping about battery cost and maintenance. I think he should have put solar cells on the roof tied into the battery charging system; it would have given him a longer run time without generation, engine
Have you heard of Iron Edison nickel-iron batteries? These look like a great alternative to lead and lithium chemistries for fixed installations. They can take a beating and have a 20 year lifespan. It might make sense to use this instead of others.
It strikes me that omitting the battery bank means you are tied to grid power whenever there's not enough sunlight, which in the northern part of the US would mean more than half the time in the winter and all night in the summer.
I would think that battery banks would be a big benefit for ROI, especially if you got aggressive with conservation as you would be able to run with little grid power all the time, and especially at night.
Finally, commercial wireless carriers are a way of providing an alternate means of internet connectivity in places which are notoriously hard to get connected such as dense urban areas
Yeah, before Minneapolis put in its 802.11 wireless system, I "only" had six choices for Internet access. True, four of the cellular providers were kind of expensive and limited for the usual kind of home internet access, but there was also DSL (with multiple ISP choices) and Cable for high bandwidth and lower cost.
I'm fine with commercial wireless offerings, I'm less fine with unlicensed spectrum designed for consumer use being compromised by commercial users with access to better equipment than I can get from the local computer store.
There *should* be more spectrum overall, with some usable by commercial entities but the rest should be limited to non-common-carrier commercial and consumer use.
I expect this at the State and especially more local levels.
It's my perception that the lower the level you get in government, the more controlling and power-hungry the officials are and the less they care about rights. And, more worryingly, usually the better access they have to law enforcement willing to enable abuses of power.
We're all familiar with the high profile abuses by the FBI or other federal agents, but really, it seems like they have a lot higher risk profile in terms of abuse (even if they have more power).
I worry more about getting dicked around by a municipal official who has friendly cops on his speed dial than I do a Federal bureaucrat who has to jump through 19 hoops to get Federal law enforcement to do his bidding.
I'd like to see commercial use of this spectrum illegal.
IMHO, the issue isn't too many consumer devices, it's too much commercial use of the spectrum (like the city-granted monopoly wireless franchise) that insists on using the good channels at max power everywhere.
I don't have an issue with businesses using wifi internally or the coffee shop, but I do think it's crappy that the spectrum meant for localized, low-power usage gets stepped on by entities broadcasting everywhere at max power.
It makes me want to point directional antennas at the municipal wifi antennas and just pump noise at them on all channels and let them "accept all interference."
Slashdot Mirror
...to global multinationals?
Many (most?) data centers I've been in have been buildings converted from some other use -- office buildings, warehouses, etc. But regardless of how they are built, they always seem to have relatively low ceilings, even in converted spaces where they rip out the ceiling grid.
I get the density argument, but I often wonder if someone built a data center with a 50 foot ceiling (a large, flat building) if you wouldn't gain some cooling benefit from convection that would be worth the sacrifice in vertical density versus the cost in intensive forced air cooling.
I'm sure tracking is a part of it, but do you really think that a manager with a deadline and a tight budget is going to block purchase of a keyboard or mouse or some other inexpensive peripheral that keeps an employee from being producing? That's shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupid.
Further, I don't think the tracking here is particularly onerous. I don't think this is a vending machine filled with expensive stuff, it's filled with inexpensive stuff that is largely disposable. The tracking is probably more valuable from an inventory control and ordering perspective than figuring out if Jane Q. Office is using too many mice.
The people with a gripe are probably the IT people because it does remove the discretion they have, although in my experience, the IT people are the ones who abuse the discretion -- people they "like" (no Facebook pun intended) get *good* replacement items -- wireless mice or keyboards, and the people they don't like get shitty, used items.
It's how I operated, although I used it more to sweeten pissy users instead of greasing people I liked, but you always played a little politics with it.
I'm generally with you on that kind of Chomsky-esque critique, but to some extent it's a rabbit hole because there's NO news organization big enough to put a newspaper at my front step that isn't going to suffer from the larger biases of culture.
Yes, there are smaller, web-based media and some smaller monthly and quarterly publications that buck this kind of trend, and they're worth reading, but they're not usually going to tell me what's happening TODAY in Syria or Syracuse. And they're also not above trading in conspiracy theories or the articles of faith of whatever niche they represent.
I know I've grown more conservative as I've gotten older, but I've been a long-time reader and subscriber to the NY Times (regular reader since college, subscriber since the first Clinton administration) and for me the NY Times seems to have gotten more and more politically strident in its editorial.
I don't mean to sound like a Fox News drone, either, but it's increasingly easy to see the Times simply avoid asking some questions in favor of others; too often it seems like the Democratic party and the left get fed softballs and reasonable ideas from the right or Republicans get ignored or just lambasted.
I keep reading it because at least for news content, especially international news, there's nothing that comes close in terms of quality of writing and detail of coverage, but for domestic content it seems to have lost that neutrality it once had.
No, I'm thinking about it as a pure data transport path, not the Bezos described way where information is sent about a data transfer that has/will/can happen over the more typical data transmission paths.
I'm curious what kind of throughput you could expect to get between two phones.
The way this is explained, you wouldn't need much to pass 512 bytes or less for even a long URL, but I'm kind of curious how much throughput you could expect with 'modern' phones that may have high resolution audio or if you connected the phones directly with a cable with a mini-stereo plug at both ends.
I'd imagine that the way it would actually be deployed would involved a lot of redundancy and error checking since it would be presumed there would be some kind of background noise to deal with, cutting the kind of throughput you could get, but even so the technique of using phone audio to transmit data might be something interesting for other applications that need to pass small quantities of data (contacts, low-res pictures, etc).
The judge is probably some lawyer not smart or connected enough to get a real judgeship, but connected enough to get this job. Basically it's a good guaranteed salary with the petty power over the people that stand in the courtroom.
I'm sure these judges are just cashing in long enough to pay off their second homes until they qualify for their fat pensions.
It's clear they are setting themselves up as middlemen, I don't see why they would bother with digital resale. I would think they would rather move further away from "purchase" and more into the subscription system where you pay continuously but never own anything -- netflix, spotify, etc.
There's just no percentage for anyone in digital resale, it's a concept that doesn't work unless they come up with some way of creating an uncopyable (and thus unposessable) digital file that somehow can have its ownership transferred but without being endlessly duplicated.
I think the ultimate solution to this and all piracy is a low enough pricing model where the cost of the thing is low enough that the idea of reselling it when you are done doesn't mean anything. The .99 cent song comes pretty close to this, although the $10 album seems a little too expensive to fit. They sure haven't figured out how to rent a digital movie, though, without too many restrictions (24 hour playback, etc) and the cost of digital movie and TV show purchases is ridiculous relative to the restrictions.
It's hard to see how they don't go this way within 10 years. IIRC, at some point LTE native phones are supposed to be VoIP over LTE anyway, meaning all access is via VoIP anyway.
I'm sure, though, if it does become available it would be some kind of thing they upcharge the hell out of or lock down to be an Apple only feature or something.
Rare is the private school that doesn't somehow, somewhere get public money, which comes with all those lovely strings attached, including mandatory reporting.
Further, while the school district has at least the hope of public policy exposing a data sell out, a private school has far less oversight and usually a lot greater financial pressure.
Homeschooling is a great idea in principal, it's a tough idea to actually implement in practice and there's also no guarantee you won't want or need services from your public district which could cause you to get sucked into the database.
Whatever the situation is, it sure seems like a huge moral hazard for local school administrators. They have an ethical obligation to protect children's data, but they have a self-interest in successful careers, which can be judged by how much money they bring into the district.
My guess is that money and status trumps children's privacy, even among the people you'd presume "think of the children."
I think bigger would be even better. Maybe no more portable than a laptop that point, but around the house it would be far more visually immersive.
None of this would be an issue if the cell phone vendors and the cell phone companies worked out a VoIP setup for the phones that would allow cell phone numbers to have a presentation on multiple devices simultaneously.
If they could do this, then you would just pick which device you want to bring with you and you could answer and make calls on whatever was handy. Going on a trip and want to pack light? Bring the 7" tablet. Going out? Bring the 4" phone. Sitting on the couch with the 10" tablet, but left the phone in the bedroom? Answer the call on the tablet.
Not real throughput and certainly not *guaranteed* throughput.
I've had business class customers subscribe to the top tier of Comcast's service (100 down, some double-digit amount up) and throughput never met that even running Comcast's own (likely biased) speed test.
My understanding of this is that when you buy a higher speed tier, you get that tier provisioned on your modem but after that, you're competing with any number of people on your broadcast domain and ultimately on your node for upstream capacity.
Comcast may provision your *modem* to a higher speed, but it doesn't really make much difference if the node's upstream has limited headroom.
I think all prosecutions are political, in several dimensions.
They're political because criminal law is political -- it is the outcome of a political process, legislative lawmaking.
They're political because prosecutors are political; in many (most?) places in the US the county attorney is a directly elected position, and the person who wins that job has an inherently political mindset and at minimum a public constituency, and in practice, a much larger private constituency -- police, judges, politicians, etc. Even in situations where the position isn't directly elected, it's arguably more political because the positions are appointed by politicians and are often at an elevated political level (eg, assistant US attorney).
And then there's the power political component -- prosecutorial power, is, like many forms a power more or less depending on how you exercise it. So there's an element of wanting to use prosecutorial power in a way that enhances it rather than detracts from it, and that generally means winning, so you pick easier targets.
IIRC, Blackberry's newest OS allows for some way to run Android apps.
If LG can figure out how to make that kind of translation work, this may end up looking semi-smart for them. I think the smartphone vendors are a little touchy about being beholden to Google for Android and there's not an easy way out short of starting from scratch.
webOS may be closer to scratch than customizing Android, but if the same effort results in an OS they control (and can possibly license to others..) that also runs Android apps, they may have something.
And it may be something they use to sell semi-smartphones -- something cheaper and more stripped down than a full-on smartphone that someone normally only in the featurephone category may find appealing, or some kind of rebrandable OEM hardware play for a company like Facebook who has been linked to a "Facebook phone".
The fear scenario is always that the Iranians will leverage a nuke into closure of the Straits of Hormuz. But what does this really mean?
The problem with using nukes as a threat is that it has to be plausible that you might actually use them and that there's some end game after the mushroom cloud.
With the US and Soviets this was plausible -- both countries had massive stockpiles of weapons, global delivery systems, hardened command and control systems, public commitment to MAD, and some kind of plan for post-nuclear exchange (even if it was unrealistic).
With Iran the problem is that they can't step up to the MAD plate. They don't have global delivery systems, they don't have a nuclear-hardened command and control systems. There is no end game after setting off a nuke. The outcome for Iran after using a nuclear weapon is obliteration, the functional end of "Persian" as a meaningful culture and the end of Iran as anything more than a name on a map for a place that's not able to sustain people anymore.
The Iranians would be MUCH better off with a distributed conventional cruise missile system if they want to try to close the straits. Sinking a couple of ships with cruise missiles would demonstrate their capability and will without inviting apocalypse. The US and its allies will have to think many times before retaliating and be willing to commit themselves to a sustained and difficult conventional war with strong asymmetric/terrorist possibilities. They want to fire a nuke? Push the red button over there, wait 20 minutes until you hear the bell sound. Your glass surface won't be fully cured for 24 hours, though.
Given the right commitment from the West, the Iranians STILL may face obliteration, but it seems a lot less likely that pusillanimous politicians would have the guts to, say, carpet-bomb Iranian cities and cause massive civilian casualties. You'd more than likely see major air strikes against predominantly military targets followed by a bunch of diplomatic action designed to negotiate something before Iran lost its territorial integrity or internal political control (which they might lose via civil unrest anyway).
So many sites are so Javascript heavy that it only takes about 3 months after the release of whatever the latest iPad is for it to start feeling slower.
It almost feels like the site developers were like "finally, more CPU, I can throw more JS into iPad web sessions."
When using a site like NYTimes.Com and writing a comment to a story was almost undoable on the iPad 1 due to massive lag between keystroke entry and the letter showing on the screen. When I upgraded to the 3 it was usable, but less so if I was using the onsceen keyboard instead of a bluetooth keyboard.
Lately it seems to be getting slower, so I can only assume it's the level of Jscript on the site doing it as they bias towards iPad 4 and mini.
Banking regulations, wire transfer regulations, currency regulations and limits, etc etc etc. The money system is highly regulated. Follow that.
And then cook 'em ALL up in a big RICO pot where all the executives and individuals involved can each be on the hook for $100,000k and 20 years in prison.
The big problem with Internet fraud is that there's this narrow focus on how easy it is to do tasks "anonymously" on the Internet, without realizing that it takes an entire support system -- ISPs, hosting, money transfers, etc. It's one thing to send stuff out and just be annoying -- you can spam from a coffee shop. But if you want to make money, you have to collect money and that requires some kind of support system.
If the government started doing this it wouldn't take very many prosecutions of Mercedes-driving executives otherwise engaged in "legitimate" business to start paying closer attention to who they business with.
It won't make this kind of fraud go away completely, but it would make it much more difficult.
I didn't think of net metering, I guess that makes sense -- instead of storing (with loss) your overage, you just pump it into the grid and consider the utility power you use at night to be just the power you gave them earlier in the day (it's not, I know, I'm just making kind of a metaphor).
I know batteries are a pain in the ass. My dad has a custom-bus conversion motorhome and he has a battery array/inverter/charger/generator setup and he's always griping about battery cost and maintenance. I think he should have put solar cells on the roof tied into the battery charging system; it would have given him a longer run time without generation, engine
Have you heard of Iron Edison nickel-iron batteries? These look like a great alternative to lead and lithium chemistries for fixed installations. They can take a beating and have a 20 year lifespan. It might make sense to use this instead of others.
It strikes me that omitting the battery bank means you are tied to grid power whenever there's not enough sunlight, which in the northern part of the US would mean more than half the time in the winter and all night in the summer.
I would think that battery banks would be a big benefit for ROI, especially if you got aggressive with conservation as you would be able to run with little grid power all the time, and especially at night.
Finally, commercial wireless carriers are a way of providing an alternate means of internet connectivity in places which are notoriously hard to get connected such as dense urban areas
Yeah, before Minneapolis put in its 802.11 wireless system, I "only" had six choices for Internet access. True, four of the cellular providers were kind of expensive and limited for the usual kind of home internet access, but there was also DSL (with multiple ISP choices) and Cable for high bandwidth and lower cost.
I'm fine with commercial wireless offerings, I'm less fine with unlicensed spectrum designed for consumer use being compromised by commercial users with access to better equipment than I can get from the local computer store.
There *should* be more spectrum overall, with some usable by commercial entities but the rest should be limited to non-common-carrier commercial and consumer use.
I expect this at the State and especially more local levels.
It's my perception that the lower the level you get in government, the more controlling and power-hungry the officials are and the less they care about rights. And, more worryingly, usually the better access they have to law enforcement willing to enable abuses of power.
We're all familiar with the high profile abuses by the FBI or other federal agents, but really, it seems like they have a lot higher risk profile in terms of abuse (even if they have more power).
I worry more about getting dicked around by a municipal official who has friendly cops on his speed dial than I do a Federal bureaucrat who has to jump through 19 hoops to get Federal law enforcement to do his bidding.
I'd like to see commercial use of this spectrum illegal.
IMHO, the issue isn't too many consumer devices, it's too much commercial use of the spectrum (like the city-granted monopoly wireless franchise) that insists on using the good channels at max power everywhere.
I don't have an issue with businesses using wifi internally or the coffee shop, but I do think it's crappy that the spectrum meant for localized, low-power usage gets stepped on by entities broadcasting everywhere at max power.
It makes me want to point directional antennas at the municipal wifi antennas and just pump noise at them on all channels and let them "accept all interference."