Verizon has national pricing, but apparently some regions have lower regional pricing for some reason. I happen to live in one of those regions where FiOS services are between 10 and 25% cheaper than the national pricing. I didn't even realize it until I saw your post. Specifically, in my town each speed costs what the tier below it costs on the national pricing chart. I have no idea why.
Before I had FiOS, I had Comcast. 7M/512k cost $61/month (including $12 for "basic cable", but the internet was $14/month more if you didn't have any TV service). $67/month for 20/20 is a bargain. I actually pay extra for statics, but probably not the average user. Most people don't need 50Mbit, so I'm not surprised there aren't many takers. The upstream is nice, but the best part for me is the stability. I'm going on 3 years uptime on my line. With comcast there was plenty of downtime, and router reboots, and all sorts of nonsense. I used to have my router on a networked power switch so my server could reboot it when the connection went down. In contrast, the ONT just works, I plugged it into a 3U UPS, and just don't think about it. The only way I'll have downtime is if a tree falls on my line or if the power goes out for more than 48 hours.
On Main Street in the center of my town, people keep horses and sheep. I don't think you could categorize my town as anything buy "rural".
However, Boston is 30 miles to the east of me. I've got Fiber to my house. Nobody in Boston does.
Why do I mention this? It's because the problem is much more complicated than you imply. We've got a city with a high population density with no access, and rural farming communities with the option for 50Mbit symmetric connections, because while it's typically easier to serve a higher density population, the problem reverses when you start talking about a place where everything is hundreds of years old. It's hard to lay cable in a city that has gone through hundreds of years of layered construction projects, so those of us in the sticks end up with service first.
We need to come up with our own solutions. The only way we can be compared to European and Asian countries is in these statistical analyses. We can't always adopt their solutions. If you look at the European cities that have high penetration, they're generally fairly modern cities (even if they're "old", because many of them have had non-voluntary infrastructure resets (read: wars) over the years) compared to some US cities. We need solutions custom tailored to each of our regions. There isn't one magic solution.
You don't need a T3 to get 45Mbps now that we have FTTP. You can have your 50Mbps for in the $100/month price range.
It's not 1Gbps, but it's also not nearly as bad as you say. It's pretty impressive considering how far apart people live here compared to Korea. You have to spend orders of magnitude more money on infrastructure per customer, so it only makes sense that the cost of the service reflects that.
Granted, not all of the ILECs are installing FTTP... This is a problem. Any ILEC executive that signs off on an FTTN plan instead of building out the last mile should be water-boarded.
I plastic OLED panel doesn't break when you drop it either, and it doesn't have to roll. Rollable displays will be hard to keep flat, you'll have to worry about creases, etc.
Light emitting displays are annoying anyway. Ideally somebody comes up with a display that resembles a printed surface.
I'm not the only one that sees no appeal at all in rollable displays. What appeal do *you* see in a rollable display? Do you think we should go back to scrolls and scroll cases from books? Do you not see the similarity?
Ideally, computing, communications, and encryption would become sufficiently ubiquitous that we don't have to carry our computers around with us anymore (This is already true for many people). Then you don't have the problem of making something both portable and comfortable. You can pick one to zero detriment.
If the studios spent some of that "label overhead" for artist development instead of treating it as another "profit" column without labeling it as such, you could bring the average marketing costs *way* down. Think $0.10 instead of $2.40.... After all, if 90% of pop hits weren't from one-hit-wonders you wouldn't have to spend all that money introducing a new face every month.
Of course that requires a business plan with a greater than 3 month outlook, and if they did that they may realize suing their customers wasn't such a good idea either... Even less overhead!
Additionally, publishing royalties + label profit should be less-than or equal to artist's royalties. If copyright law needs to be adjusted to help this change along, so be it.
Like I said, other people around here have similar problems. It may have to do with geography... Other responders saying they have no trouble have indicated that they use their radios to the south and/or west of here. Changing the angle of the signal would cause obstructions to have different effects. The steeper the angle, the more bridge the signal has to get through before it gets to your car, or the shorter a structure or tree has to be before it blocks line of sight... I have yet to drive this car farther south than New Jersey since I've only had it a few months. Next time I drive south I'll try it out and see if the behavior changes.
Either way, this merger might be sufficient to get me to overlook the brief outages. It bothered me that my car had XM when I liked the Sirius content better anyway. If they merge the content, there will be more things that I enjoy, which could better justify the price.
And yeah, I exaggerated the tree thing in my initial post.
My XM radio was standard equipment on my car (as was the mp3/CD changer). The placement of the antenna is the same on every Acura. I'm not the only person who has the problem, either. Other people who live near me with a variety of cars and equipment (Massachusetts & New Hampshire) have the same complaints.
By "passing" a tree, I mean driving down a road with 50+ foot pine trees one or each side of the road for a bit (which is pretty common around here). It's not really just driving by one tree that does it.
I hate commercials too... But I hate losing signal when I go under a bridge, or when there's a big tree next to the road, or when it's cloudy. I hate it even more when I paid $120/year for that signal...
So I just listen to CDs instead. If you get a changer that plays MP3 CDs it takes a long time to even get through all the songs, much less get tired of them.
Should I take a play from your book and attack your reading comprehension skills?
Just how do you think it's "likely to produce 100% false positives?" What data do you have to back up this assertion? Perhaps you should've said "likely to produce mostly false positives" and that might've been something I would let pass. But since you want to be such a stickler for words, I just can't in good faith let it go without a challenge. So, step up and defend your point, sir! Or not... I've already provided most of my reasoning behind this when I mentioned that nobody has ever made a dirty bomb attack. Additionally though, it would seem to me that somebody who makes a dirty bomb would shield it to prevent detection. This is especially true now that they know about this detector.
So, since you're destined to lose on this particular point, I'll cut to the chase: this method of detection is likely to produce more false positives than real ones. That being said, 99 false positives will not kill you, but 1 missed positive just might. I'm sure, in your infinite wisdom and all-seeing, all-knowing omniscience, you are perfectly happy to pretend that you're comfortable that 1% might escape detection. 99% looks like such a big number, doesn't it? It's a great strawman to throw out there. What if the ratio is more like 100,000/1? 1,000,000/1? If we keep detecting cancer patients and cats, but never a dirty bomb the numbers will get that ridiculous. 100/1 doesn't seem so bad, but what ratio *is* bad?
The number of people in this country who are likely to be stopped because they've had radiation therapy (or because their co-traveling pets have) is shockingly, amazingly, pathetically, dismissively, undeniably small. Your willingness to argue so unsuccessfully on behalf of such a tiny minority certainly makes you the most compassionate person on the planet, but it doesn't gain you any recognition in the intelligence department. Somehow, I doubt you're doing it "for them." No, you're doing it for you because you have a bone to pick, an axe to grind, and a chip on your shoulder so big it's blocking your vision. I said it before and I'll say it again: methinks thou dost protest too much. Reading comprehension again. You clearly think I was only complaining about inconveniencing people, when I very clearly also complained about paying for it.
Now, you're also very likely to use the tired old canard of "there are more effective ways of doing this job without encroaching on our freedoms." Let me guess. When I tell you you're putting words in my mouth again, you'll tell me I'm ineffective at communications because you're unwilling to admit that you made a groundless assumption.
Modern tests place you on a normal curve with 100 as the average score, however as described by the Flynn Effect, the average score increase by about 3 points per decade weighed to the lower end of the scale. So effectively, when the scores are re-centered half the population is above average, but as time goes on most of the population is above average until they recenter the scores again, etc...
And I said that the above median distribution was normal.... It looks like the right half of a gaussian plot with a standard deviation of 15.
1. No, it's pay once. This should have been obvious. 3. There doesn't seem to be a lot of market overlap between people looking for high-def video for their home theater, and people looking for portable video. 4. It's irrelevant for several reasons. Mostly because the players are backwards compatible, so people don't need to give up their DVDs to watch BluRay, but it's also irrelevant for all the same reasons that the installed base of SD televisions is irrelevant to the adoption of HDTV. It only affects "when", and not "if". 5. My point is that there are plenty. Lack of content is no longer an impediment to HD adoption. 6. You're just wrong here. I can fairly easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at 12' away from my 47" set. But ignoring that, if what you say is true you've essentially debunked your original argument, so I'll consider this point closed. 7. The only thing stopping you from doing the same thing with BluRay is that you have to buy a new drive, and that the files take up more space if you don't re-encode. 8. Excuse me? I was serious. Most people don't do what you were describing in your 8th point. This is basically indisputable. If you think most people are ripping DVDs to a hard drive, you just don't get around much. I don't know what brains have to do with it. 9. Put them side by side on identical displays, and we can pick any tester with 20/20 vision you want for the double blind test. Joe Random will know which one was upscaled and which one was high-def every time. I'll bet money on it. Upscaled content is very nice looking, but when you have a high-def version of the same content readily available the difference is clear as day.
1. No legal options that aren't pay-per-view 2. No legal options that aren't pay-per-view or subscription based. Poor selection. 3. Portable video has nothing to do with this. 4. Irrelevant. 5. There are more HD channels now than there were SD channels when VHS became popular. 6. 720p is obsolete. 1080i will be broadcast only. 1080p is the only format to care about for pre-recorded media. One format. 7. Less DRM than downloads. 8. You're not normal. 9. Only for blind people. And Farojuda fanboys.
If you don't see how the majority of engineering students, much less the majority of the population, can be of above average intelligence, then I certainly hope that you are not an engineer. If you are an engineer I would suggest that you brush up on your math, and realize that just because nice Gaussian distributions make for good textbook math problems doesn't mean that real life populations fit into a Gaussian distribution. In fact, while the distribution of IQ for people with above-median intelligence is normal, it's not necessarily the case for people with below median intelligence. This is likely due to a variety of illnesses and defects that cause a disproportionately high decrease in function. In other words, more than half the population *is* above the average intelligence level, because many people with below-median intelligence are still above average intelligence.
Either way, that was not what I was saying. Whether you have learned the required material in a given engineering class or not has nothing to do with "average". You either learned what you were supposed to learn, or you didn't. The reasons why may not even have anything to do with intelligence at all.
it's obvious from viewing commercial software that CS isn't held to the same standards as engineering. I can't argue that point, because at many schools it is true. But some CS students are held to the same standards as the other engineering disciplines at the same school.
No respectable engineering professor grades on a curve.
Either you know how to (create an algorithm that produces the proper results in the proper time|make the bridge stay standing|chose the correct materials for the project|make the parts fit together) or you don't. Just because the rest of the class couldn't do it right either doesn't mean most of you should get a 'C'.
Way to justify your position with incorrect analogies...
I didn't say "I've never been caught in a dirty bomb attack". I said "Nobody has ever been caught in a dirty bomb attack". People are mugged on a regular basis. Of course we should have protections against that. Your other analogies in your second paragraph are equally idiotic, and somehow you've decided that I "find [them] logical".
I also didn't say we shouldn't protect against dirty bombs in any way. I said that this was an unreasonable measure, since it is likely to produce 100% false positives, and because the level of inconvenience for those affected (high) is unreasonable compared to the level of threat (minimal).
Before you get crazy calling things my own logic, you should make sure you're basing that on what I actually said, and not what you thought I meant.
Good, Honest IP Lawyers - These are usually unemployed, or stuck in low paying academic jobs
IP lawyers which profit off the fear of their clients. These guys lie about the requirements and risks of various IP issues, charge dozens of billable hours to write copyright header comments for the company's source code, tell companies that if they run their product on Linux they'll be forced to open all the code, etc. They usually also dabble in helping companies file bogus patents.
IP lawyers which help their clients come up with a fake cover for their real licensing motives. That's what we have here. They generate endless legalese to try and dissuade a company's customers from behaving in a way that is inconvenient for the company.
If you want to have a "rewarding" conversation with an IP lawyer, you need to figure out which bucket they are in so you can understand the motivation behind their selected language. If you assume "logic", or "reason" are involved you may as well just bang your head against the wall.
If so, I'm actually quite happy about it. If somebody is transporting a radioactive cat is found, they're detected, nobody gets their fur in a fluff, and everybody goes their way. If somebody is transporting a dirty bomb or components thereof, they're detected and law enforcement deals with it. Right. I mean there's been so many dirty bombs going off all over the place that it's totally worth inconveniencing medical and veterinary cancer patients...
Oh wait. Nobody has ever successfully detonated a dirty bomb, and experts say the damage would come from the explosion and the panic (exactly like a regular bomb), not the "dirty" part anyway. Why are we wasting money on this crap again?
It's hard to be optimistic about LED efficiency improvements these days. The announcements of improvements made by manufacturers over the last few years have yet to make it to the market, and the units I've purchased in bulk typically don't match the ratings. The last project I built with high-efficiency LEDs required that I throw out about two thirds, and that I test every one individually. Of the ones that passed, several failed within the first 1000 hours of use.
140 lumens per watt by 2012 would be nice, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Are you just trolling?
If you're arguing against hand counted paper ballots, you're arguing against paper verification - you have to count the paper verification, or else it's not a verification! The verification would be used to show the voter that they selected the option they thought they did on the machine. They could also be counted if it was thought there was a problem with the election. Otherwise there's no point to having the machines at all.
Nor have you suggested such verification, despite ample opportunity to do so. That's just rediculous.
No sir, I'm afraid that if you believe that code review is 100% proof against backdoors [...] I said "reviewed machine", not "reviewed code". I have far too much experience with software development to think you could catch everything with a code review. Yes, a code review should be done, but tests should be run too. Mock elections to verify tallies, configurations, etc.
If you need a unanimous decision, then nothing can be trusted. Do you think code design, development, and review proceeds in a unanimous manner? If so, then perhaps you've never worked on a software project of significant size?
Split decisions on counting would only affect a small fraction of ballots. On the other hand, split decisions regarding the design and implementation of voting machines would affect every ballot cast by such machines. Again, just ridiculous. I've worked on many software projects with a wide range of importance. Sometimes it is important to get a unanimous decision, and sometimes it isn't. If you don't think it's possible, you're just wrong. Inarguably.
If you don't think a small fraction of ballots matters, you should go re-read your own posts about the Florida 2000 election.
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Did you miss that big hole in the coverage map?
Let me re-phrase. You missed the big hole in coverage that includes Boston and the immediately surrounding towns.
Verizon has national pricing, but apparently some regions have lower regional pricing for some reason. I happen to live in one of those regions where FiOS services are between 10 and 25% cheaper than the national pricing. I didn't even realize it until I saw your post. Specifically, in my town each speed costs what the tier below it costs on the national pricing chart. I have no idea why.
Before I had FiOS, I had Comcast. 7M/512k cost $61/month (including $12 for "basic cable", but the internet was $14/month more if you didn't have any TV service). $67/month for 20/20 is a bargain. I actually pay extra for statics, but probably not the average user. Most people don't need 50Mbit, so I'm not surprised there aren't many takers. The upstream is nice, but the best part for me is the stability. I'm going on 3 years uptime on my line. With comcast there was plenty of downtime, and router reboots, and all sorts of nonsense. I used to have my router on a networked power switch so my server could reboot it when the connection went down. In contrast, the ONT just works, I plugged it into a 3U UPS, and just don't think about it. The only way I'll have downtime is if a tree falls on my line or if the power goes out for more than 48 hours.
I have cows in my back yard.
On Main Street in the center of my town, people keep horses and sheep. I don't think you could categorize my town as anything buy "rural".
However, Boston is 30 miles to the east of me. I've got Fiber to my house. Nobody in Boston does.
Why do I mention this? It's because the problem is much more complicated than you imply. We've got a city with a high population density with no access, and rural farming communities with the option for 50Mbit symmetric connections, because while it's typically easier to serve a higher density population, the problem reverses when you start talking about a place where everything is hundreds of years old. It's hard to lay cable in a city that has gone through hundreds of years of layered construction projects, so those of us in the sticks end up with service first.
We need to come up with our own solutions. The only way we can be compared to European and Asian countries is in these statistical analyses. We can't always adopt their solutions. If you look at the European cities that have high penetration, they're generally fairly modern cities (even if they're "old", because many of them have had non-voluntary infrastructure resets (read: wars) over the years) compared to some US cities. We need solutions custom tailored to each of our regions. There isn't one magic solution.
You don't need a T3 to get 45Mbps now that we have FTTP. You can have your 50Mbps for in the $100/month price range.
It's not 1Gbps, but it's also not nearly as bad as you say. It's pretty impressive considering how far apart people live here compared to Korea. You have to spend orders of magnitude more money on infrastructure per customer, so it only makes sense that the cost of the service reflects that.
Granted, not all of the ILECs are installing FTTP... This is a problem. Any ILEC executive that signs off on an FTTN plan instead of building out the last mile should be water-boarded.
I plastic OLED panel doesn't break when you drop it either, and it doesn't have to roll. Rollable displays will be hard to keep flat, you'll have to worry about creases, etc.
Light emitting displays are annoying anyway. Ideally somebody comes up with a display that resembles a printed surface.
How does rolling it up solve anything?
I'm not the only one that sees no appeal at all in rollable displays. What appeal do *you* see in a rollable display? Do you think we should go back to scrolls and scroll cases from books? Do you not see the similarity?
Ideally, computing, communications, and encryption would become sufficiently ubiquitous that we don't have to carry our computers around with us anymore (This is already true for many people). Then you don't have the problem of making something both portable and comfortable. You can pick one to zero detriment.
If the studios spent some of that "label overhead" for artist development instead of treating it as another "profit" column without labeling it as such, you could bring the average marketing costs *way* down. Think $0.10 instead of $2.40.... After all, if 90% of pop hits weren't from one-hit-wonders you wouldn't have to spend all that money introducing a new face every month.
Of course that requires a business plan with a greater than 3 month outlook, and if they did that they may realize suing their customers wasn't such a good idea either... Even less overhead!
Additionally, publishing royalties + label profit should be less-than or equal to artist's royalties. If copyright law needs to be adjusted to help this change along, so be it.
Like I said, other people around here have similar problems. It may have to do with geography... Other responders saying they have no trouble have indicated that they use their radios to the south and/or west of here. Changing the angle of the signal would cause obstructions to have different effects. The steeper the angle, the more bridge the signal has to get through before it gets to your car, or the shorter a structure or tree has to be before it blocks line of sight... I have yet to drive this car farther south than New Jersey since I've only had it a few months. Next time I drive south I'll try it out and see if the behavior changes.
Either way, this merger might be sufficient to get me to overlook the brief outages. It bothered me that my car had XM when I liked the Sirius content better anyway. If they merge the content, there will be more things that I enjoy, which could better justify the price.
And yeah, I exaggerated the tree thing in my initial post.
I don't see how... Unless the moderator is some sort of satellite radio fanboy.
It may have to do with geography.
My XM radio was standard equipment on my car (as was the mp3/CD changer). The placement of the antenna is the same on every Acura. I'm not the only person who has the problem, either. Other people who live near me with a variety of cars and equipment (Massachusetts & New Hampshire) have the same complaints.
By "passing" a tree, I mean driving down a road with 50+ foot pine trees one or each side of the road for a bit (which is pretty common around here). It's not really just driving by one tree that does it.
I have XM, and it came built in to my car, so I can't move the antenna. It's mounted to the roof.
I'd say about half the time bridges cause a gap (8-9 seconds after I've passed the bridge. My stereo must buffer.)
I hate commercials too... But I hate losing signal when I go under a bridge, or when there's a big tree next to the road, or when it's cloudy. I hate it even more when I paid $120/year for that signal...
So I just listen to CDs instead. If you get a changer that plays MP3 CDs it takes a long time to even get through all the songs, much less get tired of them.
You're sort-of right.
Modern tests place you on a normal curve with 100 as the average score, however as described by the Flynn Effect, the average score increase by about 3 points per decade weighed to the lower end of the scale. So effectively, when the scores are re-centered half the population is above average, but as time goes on most of the population is above average until they recenter the scores again, etc...
And I said that the above median distribution was normal.... It looks like the right half of a gaussian plot with a standard deviation of 15.
1. No, it's pay once. This should have been obvious.
3. There doesn't seem to be a lot of market overlap between people looking for high-def video for their home theater, and people looking for portable video.
4. It's irrelevant for several reasons. Mostly because the players are backwards compatible, so people don't need to give up their DVDs to watch BluRay, but it's also irrelevant for all the same reasons that the installed base of SD televisions is irrelevant to the adoption of HDTV. It only affects "when", and not "if".
5. My point is that there are plenty. Lack of content is no longer an impediment to HD adoption.
6. You're just wrong here. I can fairly easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at 12' away from my 47" set. But ignoring that, if what you say is true you've essentially debunked your original argument, so I'll consider this point closed.
7. The only thing stopping you from doing the same thing with BluRay is that you have to buy a new drive, and that the files take up more space if you don't re-encode.
8. Excuse me? I was serious. Most people don't do what you were describing in your 8th point. This is basically indisputable. If you think most people are ripping DVDs to a hard drive, you just don't get around much. I don't know what brains have to do with it.
9. Put them side by side on identical displays, and we can pick any tester with 20/20 vision you want for the double blind test. Joe Random will know which one was upscaled and which one was high-def every time. I'll bet money on it. Upscaled content is very nice looking, but when you have a high-def version of the same content readily available the difference is clear as day.
1. No legal options that aren't pay-per-view
2. No legal options that aren't pay-per-view or subscription based. Poor selection.
3. Portable video has nothing to do with this.
4. Irrelevant.
5. There are more HD channels now than there were SD channels when VHS became popular.
6. 720p is obsolete. 1080i will be broadcast only. 1080p is the only format to care about for pre-recorded media. One format.
7. Less DRM than downloads.
8. You're not normal.
9. Only for blind people. And Farojuda fanboys.
Any more?
If you don't see how the majority of engineering students, much less the majority of the population, can be of above average intelligence, then I certainly hope that you are not an engineer. If you are an engineer I would suggest that you brush up on your math, and realize that just because nice Gaussian distributions make for good textbook math problems doesn't mean that real life populations fit into a Gaussian distribution. In fact, while the distribution of IQ for people with above-median intelligence is normal, it's not necessarily the case for people with below median intelligence. This is likely due to a variety of illnesses and defects that cause a disproportionately high decrease in function. In other words, more than half the population *is* above the average intelligence level, because many people with below-median intelligence are still above average intelligence.
Either way, that was not what I was saying. Whether you have learned the required material in a given engineering class or not has nothing to do with "average". You either learned what you were supposed to learn, or you didn't. The reasons why may not even have anything to do with intelligence at all.
No respectable engineering professor grades on a curve.
Either you know how to (create an algorithm that produces the proper results in the proper time|make the bridge stay standing|chose the correct materials for the project|make the parts fit together) or you don't. Just because the rest of the class couldn't do it right either doesn't mean most of you should get a 'C'.
Where did you go to school?
Way to justify your position with incorrect analogies...
I didn't say "I've never been caught in a dirty bomb attack". I said "Nobody has ever been caught in a dirty bomb attack". People are mugged on a regular basis. Of course we should have protections against that. Your other analogies in your second paragraph are equally idiotic, and somehow you've decided that I "find [them] logical".
I also didn't say we shouldn't protect against dirty bombs in any way. I said that this was an unreasonable measure, since it is likely to produce 100% false positives, and because the level of inconvenience for those affected (high) is unreasonable compared to the level of threat (minimal).
Before you get crazy calling things my own logic, you should make sure you're basing that on what I actually said, and not what you thought I meant.
If you want to have a "rewarding" conversation with an IP lawyer, you need to figure out which bucket they are in so you can understand the motivation behind their selected language. If you assume "logic", or "reason" are involved you may as well just bang your head against the wall.
Too bad there's no (-1, Idiot) moderation... Troll is too good for this guy.
Oh wait. Nobody has ever successfully detonated a dirty bomb, and experts say the damage would come from the explosion and the panic (exactly like a regular bomb), not the "dirty" part anyway. Why are we wasting money on this crap again?
It's hard to be optimistic about LED efficiency improvements these days. The announcements of improvements made by manufacturers over the last few years have yet to make it to the market, and the units I've purchased in bulk typically don't match the ratings. The last project I built with high-efficiency LEDs required that I throw out about two thirds, and that I test every one individually. Of the ones that passed, several failed within the first 1000 hours of use.
140 lumens per watt by 2012 would be nice, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Split decisions on counting would only affect a small fraction of ballots. On the other hand, split decisions regarding the design and implementation of voting machines would affect every ballot cast by such machines. Again, just ridiculous. I've worked on many software projects with a wide range of importance. Sometimes it is important to get a unanimous decision, and sometimes it isn't. If you don't think it's possible, you're just wrong. Inarguably.
If you don't think a small fraction of ballots matters, you should go re-read your own posts about the Florida 2000 election.