Well, yes, you are the only one who likes the beta. And let me tell you why...
The problems with the beta aren't about how it looks, but about how it works. Even the complaints about narrow text columns and excessive whitespace are based on how difficult those features make it to use the site for it's intended purpose (reading and posting comments).
In addition, the beta removes critical elements of the comment functionality, and it's largely based on Javascript. That functionality is the core of the site, and many in the Slashdot community (the people that actually post all these nice comments that everyone comes here to read) would rather pour battery acid in their shorts than allow Javascript to run on their browser.
Creating a Slashdot that looks like Beta, and functions like the current site would take any competent web designer no more than a few minutes (just some CSS tweaks), and it would be easy to maintain both looks, because switching stylesheets is easy. Unfortunately, that's not the approach they've taken, and so now they face the choice of either throwing away all the work they've done on the Javascript-based Beta (essentially they may as well start over if they do this) or having the bulk of their contributors leave, which would basically kill the site.
That's not really the point. This sort of security breach could have cost Facebook millions in stock value alone, to say nothing of potential losses in revenue. Paying such a niggardly amount is not only insulting to the value that the man has provided to the company, but it also says a great deal about how Facebook views its own investors, who would bear the burden of a sudden drop in stock value.
Computers work well for rigidly-defined rules, particularly for stuff like combat. If all you're doing is slaying orcs and such, computers can do a lot of it better.
Tabletop gaming works for less well-defined systems. No game has really, *really* gotten diplomacy right - it comes down to figuring out the right choices to make in a few menus. And clever players will be able to work better in a tabletop RPG - things that totally would work in the real world, but the official rules don't have anything for. With video games, maybe you can find a mod to add a button to let you do something, but with a tabletop game and a decent GM, you'll be able to create "rules" on the fly to handle it.
This was true until 2002, when Neverwinter Nights was released. The buillt-in toolset allows the DM pretty much the same flexibilty as the D&D PnP rules, while the extensive (and C-like) scripting language allows for all kinds of automation. If that's not spontaneous enough, there's also a DM client that allows the DM to manipulate the game with near-omnipotence(create "rules" on the fly). Just like PnP D&D, the DM can assume the role of NPCs while they interact with the party(there's your diplomacy). You can even setup a system that let's you use a MySQL database to dynamically generate new areas while a game is in progress.
I've played D&D since the '80s, and the only real limitation that I could spot with NWN was the fact that everyone needs a computer, so you either have LAN party, and cimmunicate outside the game, or you're limited to typing your conversations (which is just not as fun as talking to people). Well, I suppose you could use something like TeamSpeak, but it's still not as social as the sitting around a table with beer and snacks.
Actually, I've seen research that indicates the extreme intelligence attributed to dolphins is largely myth based on brain size. And most of the larger dolphin brain is simply focuses on their echolocation. The speed of sound is much greater underwater, and processing all that information requires much more brain devoted to it than our own sense of hearing.
Of course, much of the human brain is used for visual processing. What dolphins do with sound, we do with light. Well, except for the part where we would send beams of light shooting out of our eyes to illuminate our surroundings.
They are, but this is besides the point. We are not even "more safe" in any way. I think the best they could actually show is one guy convicted for sending $8.5K to some terrorist organization (that's after years and years of surveillance).
Other dozens (or is it hundreds?) of terrorist operations are stopped by regular police work or are made up.
More importantly, the whole point of terrorism is not to make the victims more or less safe, but to acheive a poltical goal. In this case, the goal (well, at least one of the goals) was to prove that the U.S. doesn't actually support freedom. Giving up those freedoms is essentially surrendering without even putting up a fight. It's also simple cowardice.
Every week, we sacrifice several times the number of lives lost to terrorism for the convenience of driving large boxes of metal at ridiculous speeds, but we run and hide under the bed and call in the drones the second anyone breathes the word "terrorist."
I know it's fun to hate on government, but large scale private enterprise is in nearly all respects actually worse than government. They are just as crippled by process, just as risk averse, just as hidebound, and just as likely to award mediocrity. The only real difference is that private enterprise will be profit motivated so they will make all of the above mistakes for even worse reasons than the government.
Actually, in some ways it's grown even worse than the difference between profit motive vs. public service. The rise of the large-scale corporation was accompanied by a drive to wring the maximum possible efficiency out of the corporate structure. Since large organizations were considered the ideal, a great deal of effort went into finding ways to make those organizations run as smoothly as possible. The government was able to apply these theories to its own expansion in the middle of the century, so you generally find that departments that date from that period still function with a high degree of efficiency (those that haven't been axed by later cuts).
The problems started with the adoption of downsizing and outsourcing as the norms for corporate ideals. The resulting race to the bottom not only wreaked havoc with long-term employment stability and any semblance of quality control, but it also deprived the government of a vital source of management theories, one which couldn't really be replaced.
The question is, how will RH help Centos? That isn't very clear from this announcement.
If I had to guess,(and I do -- I have no inside knowledge) I'd say that they'll help the CentOS team by keeping them apprised of upcoming changes to RHEL, and so reduce the lag between a RHEL version release, and the equivalent CentOS version.
Well, I'd say that Microsoft disagrees with you. Consider this -- their current ad campaign for Windows, which includes primetime television spots, is almost entirely taken up with bashing a Chromebook. No more catchy music or complex choreography, just a plain ad using a reality TV star to talk about how a Chromebook doesn't have all the stuff that Windows has (oddly not mentioning BSODs), and so is worthless.
Maybe Microsoft is spending millions of dollars because they're bored, but that ad sounds like fear to me.
I wasn't suggesting that Apple is the only company that is a front for a marketing agency, though they are among the most egregious. Microsoft, for instance, owes its success almost entirely to marketing, as its flagship product has always been mediocre at best. It's become the norm in the modern marketplace to substitute marketing for product quality as a way to gain market share.
What Apple does, though, as I mentioned above, is deliberately target those who are technically illiterate. By marketing themselves as stylish and easy-to-use, they've focused on the artsy-hipsters-and-grandparents demographic. You would never catch Apple cheating on a benchmark, because their target market wouldn't know a benchmark if it slapped them in the face. Apple's approach has always been to limit choices as much as possible ('just give them one button") so that any moron can use it. Seems like it works.
More seriously, and in my defense, it's exactly the sort of comment I've come to expect from Apple fanboys. My apologies for having confused you with one.
Well, no, it doesn't. In fact it proves nothing of any sort when it comes to the quality of the hardware, though it may suggest that they are using cheap hardware, and thus reaping massive profits from their huge markup.
Apple's success is in marketing, and they deilberately market their products to the most vulnerable, least technically-informed demographic so that they can use Foxconn boards and other low-end hardware without their customers realizing the extent of the ripoff.
Or you could even spend an extra $40 on your "Windows" box and buy a copy of MacOS. Then you could run wahtever Mac software you wanted and still pay half the price for the hardware.
It astonishes me that anyone actually believes that Mac hardware is somehow superior -- they're Foxconn boards fer Chrissake.
This was actually the plot of a Heinlein (if memory serves) short story. The main character became wealthy by devising a box that detected commercials by their louder volume, and muted the volume until the commercials were over.
if you REALLY think the road was started by bush and the republicans only a few years ago you clearly dont know your history. The road you speak of has been laid and paved long before bush was even born.
Well, that's certainly true. It was Nixon who first came up with the idea of a healthcare marketplace, and a wonk from the Heritage Foundation who added the idea of the individual mandate. It was Gingrich who first wrote it into a bill, and Romney who first implemented the system.
So it wasn't Bush and the Republicans who designed and paved the road to Obamacare... just the Republicans. It fascinates me that after finally getting what they've been after for almost 40 years, the Republicans can't stop whining about how it's the end of the world.
IIRC, the reason that the Nile valley was settled and farmed had less to do with rainfall, and more to do with the regular, seasonal floods that acted as a natural irrigation system for the floodplain. The area probably was less arid than today, but the (twice-yearly?) floods made the floodplain fertile.
Even the National Organization for Marriage, an extremely anti-gay organization...
Is that really true? I don't think so. As far as I know they only want to maintain the definition of marriage that has existed in all the states only what, 10-15 years ago? That is the same definition that existed since well before the republic was formed.
No, they are decidedly anti-gay. I can remember an extended interview with one of their leaders where he described a vast gay/liberal conspiracy to destroy American culture starting with the destruction of marriage. He blamed the increase of heterosexual divorce on the corrupting influence of gay culture. Actually, now that I think on it, he held up his own life as an example of just that -- his own parents were divorced, and blamed gay people for causing that divorce.
I've grown so used to hearing the outrageous that I'm pretty inured to most idiocies, but this guy had me floored. Not since W's "disassemble" comment have I been more stunned by something I've heard on national media.
There is much work to do. If one group wants to help by adding educational tools, that is certainly one useful thing. But Gates is right that there is a very broad spectrum of changes needed to bring regions out of poverty, and Internet access alone is not enough.
And, of course, there's the aspect of all this that everyone seems to overlook -- connectivity is not education. It may make it easier to get educated if it's used in conjunction with an education program, but in and of itself the internet is a piss-poor educational tool. The sheer volume of misinformation, minutiae, gossip, and punditry dwarfs the sorts of knowledge that are actually useful, much less the subset of that knowledge that would be useful to someone in the developing world.
Those of us who use the internet as a reference tool are used to that unreliability, and we can afford it. If the information on how to make cheese that we found on some website turns out to be wrong, then we shrug and toss the results in the garbage disposal. Folks living on the edge of subsistence don't have the luxury of experimentation.
I was never a fan of Gates while he was running Microsoft, and I've always thought his methods were on the shady side at best, but the efforts of the Gates Foundation to tackle real problems, particularly unpopular, ignored, and solvable problems, have to be respected. Gates may have been a lousy coder and no real techie, but maybe that's a good thing.
Why wouldn't they oppose a government program to put them out of business? Would car dealerships be upset if the city government opened up a lot and undercut their sales with taxpayer money? Is the government entering a market really competition when they can have all the tools of government to help them succeed?
Because it's not going to put them out of business -- it just means that they can't keep gouging their customers for mediocre service. Government exists to serve the public interest, which public broadband clearly does. If a national quasi-monopoly wants to try and offer better/cheaper service, then they're welcome to try.
What they have no right to do, however, is interfere with the political process. They do not get a vote, because they are not people, and I've never seen any viable argument for allowing corporations (or anyone else) to buy votes.
Very unpleasant thing about this is that western media perform very poorly in this regard, especially since run-up to Iraq war. I attribute this to general situation and 'lack of good arguments' on western side - which directly correlates to our latest economic (2008 crash and afterwards) and social (rise of police state) troubles.
I'm not sure it's that complex. Just look at goals. The goal of media outlets in the US/UK has been, for years, to provide entertainment. This is probably most obvious for Fox, but it applies almost universally at this point. The result has been an increasing tendency to identify news channels with market segments (political left, right, or center) and news that is driven by viewer response rather than editorial judgement.
An unintended (but highly important) consequence of the infotainment model is the power it gives to the subjects of news stories, because actually having the subject on-camera is far more likely to get viewers' attention than reportage from the same old journalist/talking head types. The subjects realize this, and have been limiting that access as a way of rewarding or punishing various news outlets. Combined with the decline of (boring) investigative journalism, this has really put polticians in the driver's seat with regard to their PR management.
Note: If you're thinking that the above comments don't really apply to newspaper and blog news sources, then consider what sorts of newspapers and blogs have become popular, and what sort of articles they use to draw readership.
No doubt.
Thing is, everybody does not need to be taught coding, but they really should be at least shown how to use a computer. In the same manner that everybody does not need a mandatory engine building class, though driver's education would be nice along with the basics on how to maintain an automobile.
It's funny that both you and the TFA mention car repair, because that's the analogy I've always used most with regards to computers and coding. I suppose I've always thought "If you're going to use it, you should at least have some idea how to fix it."
I'm not saying that you should be fixing it, just that you should know how major repairs are done. With cars, this means a working knowledge of the major systems and the likely repairs/replacements. With computers, it really does include coding, at least at some basic level, because code is the only way you really get to look behind the curtain, and it helps eveything else make sense.
It's hard to say for sure without knowing which state you live in, but most states heavily regulate electric power, right down to require government approval of rate hikes. In telecommunications, deregulation has been the order of the day ever since the breakup of Ma Bell, which used to actively encourage regulation. Combined with federal spending priorities of the last couple of decades ("Millions for the rich, not one cent for the poor!") and you get an environment where telcos can cut loose their less-profitable (or even unprofitable) rural customers with ease.
Oh, and the act of Congress that I mentioned was part of the New Deal, so it's been a while.
Except you can't blame municipalities for the cost when they're pretty much the only part of government that's been trying to provide low-cost access. Many municipal governments have tried to set up as ISPs for their citizens, and the costs are typically far lower than what you see from the cable/DSL duopoly. They've been lobbied and sued and otherwise lawyered to death for the effort, but at least they're trying.
And while you can't fix size, you don't really need to. Most of the long-distance fiber backbones have already been run, and most of the US population lives in urban or suburban areas. The bulk of the land area of the US is rural, and they may not get cheap broadband anytime soon (it literally took an act of Congress to get them electricity and telephone after all), but they're a pretty small minority.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, you are the only one who likes the beta. And let me tell you why ...
The problems with the beta aren't about how it looks, but about how it works. Even the complaints about narrow text columns and excessive whitespace are based on how difficult those features make it to use the site for it's intended purpose (reading and posting comments).
In addition, the beta removes critical elements of the comment functionality, and it's largely based on Javascript. That functionality is the core of the site, and many in the Slashdot community (the people that actually post all these nice comments that everyone comes here to read) would rather pour battery acid in their shorts than allow Javascript to run on their browser.
Creating a Slashdot that looks like Beta, and functions like the current site would take any competent web designer no more than a few minutes (just some CSS tweaks), and it would be easy to maintain both looks, because switching stylesheets is easy. Unfortunately, that's not the approach they've taken, and so now they face the choice of either throwing away all the work they've done on the Javascript-based Beta (essentially they may as well start over if they do this) or having the bulk of their contributors leave, which would basically kill the site.
That's not really the point. This sort of security breach could have cost Facebook millions in stock value alone, to say nothing of potential losses in revenue. Paying such a niggardly amount is not only insulting to the value that the man has provided to the company, but it also says a great deal about how Facebook views its own investors, who would bear the burden of a sudden drop in stock value.
Computers work well for rigidly-defined rules, particularly for stuff like combat. If all you're doing is slaying orcs and such, computers can do a lot of it better.
Tabletop gaming works for less well-defined systems. No game has really, *really* gotten diplomacy right - it comes down to figuring out the right choices to make in a few menus. And clever players will be able to work better in a tabletop RPG - things that totally would work in the real world, but the official rules don't have anything for. With video games, maybe you can find a mod to add a button to let you do something, but with a tabletop game and a decent GM, you'll be able to create "rules" on the fly to handle it.
This was true until 2002, when Neverwinter Nights was released. The buillt-in toolset allows the DM pretty much the same flexibilty as the D&D PnP rules, while the extensive (and C-like) scripting language allows for all kinds of automation. If that's not spontaneous enough, there's also a DM client that allows the DM to manipulate the game with near-omnipotence(create "rules" on the fly). Just like PnP D&D, the DM can assume the role of NPCs while they interact with the party(there's your diplomacy). You can even setup a system that let's you use a MySQL database to dynamically generate new areas while a game is in progress.
I've played D&D since the '80s, and the only real limitation that I could spot with NWN was the fact that everyone needs a computer, so you either have LAN party, and cimmunicate outside the game, or you're limited to typing your conversations (which is just not as fun as talking to people). Well, I suppose you could use something like TeamSpeak, but it's still not as social as the sitting around a table with beer and snacks.
Actually, I've seen research that indicates the extreme intelligence attributed to dolphins is largely myth based on brain size. And most of the larger dolphin brain is simply focuses on their echolocation. The speed of sound is much greater underwater, and processing all that information requires much more brain devoted to it than our own sense of hearing.
Of course, much of the human brain is used for visual processing. What dolphins do with sound, we do with light. Well, except for the part where we would send beams of light shooting out of our eyes to illuminate our surroundings.
civil liberties are worth being "less safe" for!
They are, but this is besides the point. We are not even "more safe" in any way. I think the best they could actually show is one guy convicted for sending $8.5K to some terrorist organization (that's after years and years of surveillance). Other dozens (or is it hundreds?) of terrorist operations are stopped by regular police work or are made up.
More importantly, the whole point of terrorism is not to make the victims more or less safe, but to acheive a poltical goal. In this case, the goal (well, at least one of the goals) was to prove that the U.S. doesn't actually support freedom. Giving up those freedoms is essentially surrendering without even putting up a fight. It's also simple cowardice.
Every week, we sacrifice several times the number of lives lost to terrorism for the convenience of driving large boxes of metal at ridiculous speeds, but we run and hide under the bed and call in the drones the second anyone breathes the word "terrorist."
I know it's fun to hate on government, but large scale private enterprise is in nearly all respects actually worse than government. They are just as crippled by process, just as risk averse, just as hidebound, and just as likely to award mediocrity. The only real difference is that private enterprise will be profit motivated so they will make all of the above mistakes for even worse reasons than the government.
Actually, in some ways it's grown even worse than the difference between profit motive vs. public service. The rise of the large-scale corporation was accompanied by a drive to wring the maximum possible efficiency out of the corporate structure. Since large organizations were considered the ideal, a great deal of effort went into finding ways to make those organizations run as smoothly as possible. The government was able to apply these theories to its own expansion in the middle of the century, so you generally find that departments that date from that period still function with a high degree of efficiency (those that haven't been axed by later cuts).
The problems started with the adoption of downsizing and outsourcing as the norms for corporate ideals. The resulting race to the bottom not only wreaked havoc with long-term employment stability and any semblance of quality control, but it also deprived the government of a vital source of management theories, one which couldn't really be replaced.
Which, of course, is exactly what reub2000 replied just over a screen down.
I really need to read ahead more ...
The question is, how will RH help Centos? That isn't very clear from this announcement.
If I had to guess,(and I do -- I have no inside knowledge) I'd say that they'll help the CentOS team by keeping them apprised of upcoming changes to RHEL, and so reduce the lag between a RHEL version release, and the equivalent CentOS version.
The strip clubs where the performers accept $1 denominations are on my list of places that I'd probably rather not set foot in.
Well, that's your problem right there. You don't go to put your foot in.
(Sorry ... couldn't resist)
Well, I'd say that Microsoft disagrees with you. Consider this -- their current ad campaign for Windows, which includes primetime television spots, is almost entirely taken up with bashing a Chromebook. No more catchy music or complex choreography, just a plain ad using a reality TV star to talk about how a Chromebook doesn't have all the stuff that Windows has (oddly not mentioning BSODs), and so is worthless.
Maybe Microsoft is spending millions of dollars because they're bored, but that ad sounds like fear to me.
I wasn't suggesting that Apple is the only company that is a front for a marketing agency, though they are among the most egregious. Microsoft, for instance, owes its success almost entirely to marketing, as its flagship product has always been mediocre at best. It's become the norm in the modern marketplace to substitute marketing for product quality as a way to gain market share.
What Apple does, though, as I mentioned above, is deliberately target those who are technically illiterate. By marketing themselves as stylish and easy-to-use, they've focused on the artsy-hipsters-and-grandparents demographic. You would never catch Apple cheating on a benchmark, because their target market wouldn't know a benchmark if it slapped them in the face. Apple's approach has always been to limit choices as much as possible ('just give them one button") so that any moron can use it. Seems like it works.
Dang it, that's what tags are for!
More seriously, and in my defense, it's exactly the sort of comment I've come to expect from Apple fanboys. My apologies for having confused you with one.
Well, no, it doesn't. In fact it proves nothing of any sort when it comes to the quality of the hardware, though it may suggest that they are using cheap hardware, and thus reaping massive profits from their huge markup.
Apple's success is in marketing, and they deilberately market their products to the most vulnerable, least technically-informed demographic so that they can use Foxconn boards and other low-end hardware without their customers realizing the extent of the ripoff.
Or you could even spend an extra $40 on your "Windows" box and buy a copy of MacOS. Then you could run wahtever Mac software you wanted and still pay half the price for the hardware.
It astonishes me that anyone actually believes that Mac hardware is somehow superior -- they're Foxconn boards fer Chrissake.
This was actually the plot of a Heinlein (if memory serves) short story. The main character became wealthy by devising a box that detected commercials by their louder volume, and muted the volume until the commercials were over.
if you REALLY think the road was started by bush and the republicans only a few years ago you clearly dont know your history. The road you speak of has been laid and paved long before bush was even born.
Well, that's certainly true. It was Nixon who first came up with the idea of a healthcare marketplace, and a wonk from the Heritage Foundation who added the idea of the individual mandate. It was Gingrich who first wrote it into a bill, and Romney who first implemented the system.
So it wasn't Bush and the Republicans who designed and paved the road to Obamacare ... just the Republicans. It fascinates me that after finally getting what they've been after for almost 40 years, the Republicans can't stop whining about how it's the end of the world.
IIRC, the reason that the Nile valley was settled and farmed had less to do with rainfall, and more to do with the regular, seasonal floods that acted as a natural irrigation system for the floodplain. The area probably was less arid than today, but the (twice-yearly?) floods made the floodplain fertile.
Even the National Organization for Marriage, an extremely anti-gay organization...
Is that really true? I don't think so. As far as I know they only want to maintain the definition of marriage that has existed in all the states only what, 10-15 years ago? That is the same definition that existed since well before the republic was formed.
No, they are decidedly anti-gay. I can remember an extended interview with one of their leaders where he described a vast gay/liberal conspiracy to destroy American culture starting with the destruction of marriage. He blamed the increase of heterosexual divorce on the corrupting influence of gay culture. Actually, now that I think on it, he held up his own life as an example of just that -- his own parents were divorced, and blamed gay people for causing that divorce.
I've grown so used to hearing the outrageous that I'm pretty inured to most idiocies, but this guy had me floored. Not since W's "disassemble" comment have I been more stunned by something I've heard on national media.
There is much work to do. If one group wants to help by adding educational tools, that is certainly one useful thing. But Gates is right that there is a very broad spectrum of changes needed to bring regions out of poverty, and Internet access alone is not enough.
And, of course, there's the aspect of all this that everyone seems to overlook -- connectivity is not education. It may make it easier to get educated if it's used in conjunction with an education program, but in and of itself the internet is a piss-poor educational tool. The sheer volume of misinformation, minutiae, gossip, and punditry dwarfs the sorts of knowledge that are actually useful, much less the subset of that knowledge that would be useful to someone in the developing world.
Those of us who use the internet as a reference tool are used to that unreliability, and we can afford it. If the information on how to make cheese that we found on some website turns out to be wrong, then we shrug and toss the results in the garbage disposal. Folks living on the edge of subsistence don't have the luxury of experimentation.
I was never a fan of Gates while he was running Microsoft, and I've always thought his methods were on the shady side at best, but the efforts of the Gates Foundation to tackle real problems, particularly unpopular, ignored, and solvable problems, have to be respected. Gates may have been a lousy coder and no real techie, but maybe that's a good thing.
Why wouldn't they oppose a government program to put them out of business? Would car dealerships be upset if the city government opened up a lot and undercut their sales with taxpayer money? Is the government entering a market really competition when they can have all the tools of government to help them succeed?
Because it's not going to put them out of business -- it just means that they can't keep gouging their customers for mediocre service. Government exists to serve the public interest, which public broadband clearly does. If a national quasi-monopoly wants to try and offer better/cheaper service, then they're welcome to try.
What they have no right to do, however, is interfere with the political process. They do not get a vote, because they are not people, and I've never seen any viable argument for allowing corporations (or anyone else) to buy votes.
Very unpleasant thing about this is that western media perform very poorly in this regard, especially since run-up to Iraq war. I attribute this to general situation and 'lack of good arguments' on western side - which directly correlates to our latest economic (2008 crash and afterwards) and social (rise of police state) troubles.
I'm not sure it's that complex. Just look at goals. The goal of media outlets in the US/UK has been, for years, to provide entertainment. This is probably most obvious for Fox, but it applies almost universally at this point. The result has been an increasing tendency to identify news channels with market segments (political left, right, or center) and news that is driven by viewer response rather than editorial judgement.
An unintended (but highly important) consequence of the infotainment model is the power it gives to the subjects of news stories, because actually having the subject on-camera is far more likely to get viewers' attention than reportage from the same old journalist/talking head types. The subjects realize this, and have been limiting that access as a way of rewarding or punishing various news outlets. Combined with the decline of (boring) investigative journalism, this has really put polticians in the driver's seat with regard to their PR management.
Note: If you're thinking that the above comments don't really apply to newspaper and blog news sources, then consider what sorts of newspapers and blogs have become popular, and what sort of articles they use to draw readership.
No doubt. Thing is, everybody does not need to be taught coding, but they really should be at least shown how to use a computer. In the same manner that everybody does not need a mandatory engine building class, though driver's education would be nice along with the basics on how to maintain an automobile.
It's funny that both you and the TFA mention car repair, because that's the analogy I've always used most with regards to computers and coding. I suppose I've always thought "If you're going to use it, you should at least have some idea how to fix it."
I'm not saying that you should be fixing it, just that you should know how major repairs are done. With cars, this means a working knowledge of the major systems and the likely repairs/replacements. With computers, it really does include coding, at least at some basic level, because code is the only way you really get to look behind the curtain, and it helps eveything else make sense.
In a word? Deregulation.
It's hard to say for sure without knowing which state you live in, but most states heavily regulate electric power, right down to require government approval of rate hikes. In telecommunications, deregulation has been the order of the day ever since the breakup of Ma Bell, which used to actively encourage regulation. Combined with federal spending priorities of the last couple of decades ("Millions for the rich, not one cent for the poor!") and you get an environment where telcos can cut loose their less-profitable (or even unprofitable) rural customers with ease.
Oh, and the act of Congress that I mentioned was part of the New Deal, so it's been a while.
Except you can't blame municipalities for the cost when they're pretty much the only part of government that's been trying to provide low-cost access. Many municipal governments have tried to set up as ISPs for their citizens, and the costs are typically far lower than what you see from the cable/DSL duopoly. They've been lobbied and sued and otherwise lawyered to death for the effort, but at least they're trying.
And while you can't fix size, you don't really need to. Most of the long-distance fiber backbones have already been run, and most of the US population lives in urban or suburban areas. The bulk of the land area of the US is rural, and they may not get cheap broadband anytime soon (it literally took an act of Congress to get them electricity and telephone after all), but they're a pretty small minority.
Well, it's not as if the Apollo project didn't have a few, ah, glitches like Apollo 1 and Apollo 13.