Yep, I found the same when I watched Enterprise for the first time several years ago; it had some really good episodes. The best ones were in seasons 2 and 4. Season 3 was annoying however because of the whole Xindi arc which was obviously inspired by 9/11 and brought in a bunch of militarism that was absent in the first 2 seasons. And season 4 had an excellent 2-part set of episodes set in the Mirror Universe, which BTW had an excellent intro (unlike the rest of the Enterprise show; the opening intro and theme song were easily the worst part of the entire show).
Mars is 10.7% of the mass of the Earth, and a little over 1/2 the radius. I wouldn't call it "Earth-sized" at all. Venus is much closer.
No one is "excited at the idea that every single earth-sized planet may contain life"; they're excited because now there's a couple dozen candidates, so it's possible that maybe one of those 24 has some kind of life.
Sorry, no. Ebay is a mixed bag: every seller is separate, so when you find a seller who has a good reputation and sells genuine products, you can feel safe that future purchases will also be genuine. In addition to that, a lot of stuff on Ebay is still used/secondhand, sold by small-time sellers.
The problem with Amazon is that there's no way to only buy from particular sellers. Even if you supposedly buy from Amazon itself, if they're out of stock at the warehouse they're fulfilling your order at, Amazon will happily take products with the same SKU from some other seller's inventory and pass it off as their own, even if that stuff is actually counterfeit. In Amazon's world, every product with the same SKU is identical. Ebay simply isn't like this; every seller is a different entity, and fulfills their own orders. Ebay just gives them a place to advertise. It's still like a flea market, but at least on Ebay you can discriminate between sellers based on reputation, personal experience, etc. You just can't do that on Amazon.
Don't blame the parents. Parents who try to do what you say (let their kids roam around unsupervised) are derided as "free range parents" and get arrested by the cops, and their kids seized by CPS due to "negligence".
Also not everyone who shops at Wal-Mart is trash. There are people who are barley getting by and shop at Wal-Mart because they cannot afford to drop their entire paycheck on groceries.
Wrong, in the opinion of the AC you're replying to. According to him and other people like him, those people are trash, by definition, because they don't have a lot of money. He's probably an evangelical Christian Republican; their entire theology is that God loves rich people more, and that's why they're rich, and poor people have been shunned by God don't get his blessings and that's why they're poor.
Maybe I'm wrong (and this is quite possible--after all, HL Mencken said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans), but it seems to me that with Amazon turning itself into a crappy online flea market full of counterfeit merchandise, B&M isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
That said, Amazon has competition from other online sellers, including even Walmart.com, and of course Ebay, but also countless other smaller retailers that usually are more specialized, so B&M is going to continue facing stiff competition. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's retailing division is ever going to be profitable.
there are plenty of people whose distrust of science has grown to the point where they're totally irrational about it, though, and their gullibility when it comes to 'snake oil' cures for things has risen to epidemic proportions.
Yep, this sums things up quite well.
But one other place I'd blame is the education system: most people just have no idea what science is and how it works, so they get fooled by quackery and pseudoscience. Schools should really be teaching kids how to distinguish real science and medicine from BS, but they'll probably have lobbyists working against them if they do.
Because when the traffic is coming from Russia or someplace like that, a court order to that foreign country is going to be laughed at. Do you not understand how VPNs work?
I never thought she or others who claimed a problem were a nutjob, I was just issuing a warning that just because the medical establishment has some real problems with sometimes getting stuck on wrong and unscientific thinking for certain problems, or refusing to look at certain things, that this is no reason to jump to alternative medicine which has no scientific basis whatsoever, and that this is a real danger because people (and this is how alt-med thrives in fact) because people who have real problems who aren't getting any help, and frequently even any acknowledgement of their problem, from their medical providers can easily be lured into alt-med, similar to how people can get lured into a cult because their existing support systems are lacking and the cult takes advantage of this.
It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the problem and a good approach to isolating the exact cause: create a theory and then attempt to falsify it. It'll be interesting to see how your experiment turns out.
Considering other corporations are even worse, what is the point of fighting back?
You don't need to "fight back", and other corporations are irrelevant. Facebook is a non-essential service which provides nothing of value. It's just like having a cable TV package, for example (or worse, a package with ESPN). The simple solution is to stop using it and do something better with your time.
Facebook is not an essential utility/service like your water/sewer service, electricity, or even internet service. It's no more useful or essential than playing Flappy Birds on your phone.
I don't know about anyone else's phone; but my iPhone allows me to connect to the internet via cellular data.
No, it doesn't, not when there's insufficient signal strength because the nearest tower is too far away and you're in a big giant metal box which works as an effective Faraday shield. This is one of the main reasons large stores and malls offer free WiFi in the first place.
So depending on the particular store's location, which network your phone uses, and also your exact location within the store, you may have a choice between in-store WiFi or no data at all.
You sound much like my ex-wife. She had a problem with gluten for a long time and for most of the time, doctors told her it was "all in her head" since tests for Celiac disease all came back negative. We finally figured out while we were married that she was gluten-sensitive (all gluten, not just wheat like you), and if she avoided eating it she did much better and didn't get migraines and have CFS like she did with gluten.
But the long-term fallout was that ended up distrusting the medical profession greatly, and believes in just about any "alternative medicine" BS that promises to make her feel better. It was a significant factor in our divorce--that quackery costs a lot of money, and she simply couldn't be convinced that it was BS, despite the fact that she visited these quacks for years until *I* came along and figured out for her that her problem was gluten, and I'm an engineer, not a doctor (or quack-doctor); none of the quacks, despite all their talk about "holistic health" and all the various fads they jump on, could figure it out, and just fed her with a bunch of expensive "supplements" based on some stupid arm test.
So be careful not to go the other way. The medical profession does (did?) seem to have a problem in not acknowledging that there's a whole lot about human biology they don't understand yet, and ascribing symptoms they can't explain with existing tests to psychosomatic illness, but just because the medical profession is flawed doesn't mean the alternatives are any better--they're not.
It's really too bad that doctors aren't trained to be more like engineers. I can point to a bunch of things where the medical profession was lacking, or outright wrong, and it took a long time for them to come around. Phrenology is a famous example in the far past, but gut bacteria is a very current one: they're only now acknowledging how much of a role it has in our health, and how different it can be person-to-person. It wasn't very long ago that they thought the appendix was completely useless, and only now are they finally acknowledging its true purpose. So unfortunately, there's really not enough scientific thinking in medicine, and too many assumptions about the completeness of their knowledge. Personally, I think part of the problem is the lack of scientific background on the part of the practitioners; many of them tend to be religious after all, so they have a hard time accepting the role of evolution in our biology, and how that makes us all rather different from each other in very small but important ways. When you believe the "God created us in his image", that mindset isn't very compatible with how biology really works.
You don't need a crystal ball to point to movies that are highly-regarded right now. No one needed a crystal ball to know that Star Wars was an instant classic; the enormous popularity it had at the time indicated that in spades. This doesn't guarantee the movie will "stand the test of time", but it's a pretty decent indicator. I'll bet Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia were well-regarded when they were new too. There's always some movies that aren't well-liked at the time, and then become "cult classics" later like your Metropolis example, but those aren't the norm and that's not required for "standing the test of time". Most movies regarded as classics were popular when new; Ghostbusters (the 80s one, not the shitty remake) is another good example here, plus Back to the Future and Aliens and a bunch of other 80s icons. There haven't been any movies like that in the 2010s that I know of, though by asking the question in my previous post I did open the discussion up to see if anyone had any examples that in their opinion would qualify since I don't claim to be the preeminent expert on all movies for all time.
Am I supposed to believe that cell phones played any meaningful role in the miniaturization and affordable production of electronics in general, and the development of lithium batteries?
Um, yes? The reason lithium battery tech is as advanced as it is now is purely because of cellphones, as well as some other mobile devices (laptop computers, ipods, PDAs, etc., which have largely converged to smartphones and tablets). What else would it be? Nothing else uses lithium-ion batteries as much. EVs came more recently, after the big mobile-device explosion.
And miniaturization? Are you kidding? Phones have been the biggest driver of that in the last 15 years. Go take a look at a typical laptop computer's motherboard, and then the main board of a typical smartphone. Smartphones have easily the most advanced miniaturization technology in the world now.
If you could teleport a relatively modern and functional cellular network back to the 40s, 60s, even the 80s, it wouldn't have made cell phones much more affordable or practical to the average Joe.
Who cares about the average Joe? Average Joes didn't have cellphones in the late 80s either, but cellphones did exist and were growing in adoption and popularity then. It took adoption by people with more money (or businesses willing to spend on them) to help the tech develop so that it could become more affordable. Technologies like that don't just develop all at once in some company's lab, and then enter the market at a low price point so everyone can afford them. That wasn't the case with cellphones, it wasn't the case with cars, it wasn't the case with just about anything. New stuff always starts out being expensive and having a limited market of either rich people or people willing to spend a large amount of their money on it. Have you forgotten that PCs used to cost thousands of dollars in the 80s, and that's before adjusting for inflation? An IBM PC cost a significant fraction of what a car cost back then.
You don't need to teleport a "relatively modern" cellular network back to the 40s or 60s, just the network they had back in the 80s (AMPS). They would certainly have been able to make use if it in the 60s at least. We all could have had affordable cellphones (80s-style) a decade or two earlier than we did. It's really hard to say when we would have gotten decent smartphones, but that's a bit of a separate question because smartphones are a convergence of a bunch of different technologies, not just radio communications interfacing with the existing telephone system. But we could have had workable cellphones earlier than we did. We had radiotelephones back in the 50s, after all.
I guess the point I'm trying to make (or at least started out trying to make) was that the movie studios don't need to try pursuing a low-profit-margin model, and that what they're doing now seems to be working just fine. Their ticket sales in the US have declined, but their prices have gone up, and their revenues are steady, and on top of that they have huge international audiences making up even more of their revenue, plus online/DVD/BR distribution on top of all that.
So I dispute your claim about "fewer and fewer people are actually paying for new works": the audience has expanded greatly with international sales. Even if you limit your scope to domestic sales, the decrease isn't that much; there's no proof that people are actually pirating that much, rather than people simply not watching as many movies, or watching them more on (paid) video (which explains why they take in more revenue now from at-home sales than theater tickets). Just look at cable companies: more and more people are "cutting the cord"; that doesn't mean they're "stealing" TV from somewhere. Instead, many people simply aren't watching TV at all, and are doing other things (which can include watching movies online, which really isn't the same). You seem to have an assumption that people are pirating more and more, and there's no proof of this at all. If anything, it's probably a very small part of the population that does this, as it's not *that* easy to do. The average person on the street doesn't know how to use BitTorrent. And just like in the days when software piracy was "rampant", the reality was that most instances of copying were by a small number of people who were copying *a lot*, and frequently not even using most of the stuff they copied. I knew a bunch of people like that in high school. It was like a game to see how much stuff you could amass.
The best I can imagine they might have been able to develop in the 1940s would have been analog cellular carphones. Leaving aside the "Needs a car so high cost of entry already", you're already looking at a niche market when you consider the selling point of modern cellular is that you can be connected at all times. Limiting it to when you're at your car would effectively remove that selling point.
Holy crap, what is with you people? The article is about cellular phones, not smartphones. Are you a teenager or something? For a long time, cellular phones *were* limited to being installed in cars or boats, or being carried around in giant briefcase-size bags. That didn't stop people from wanting them, only cost did. Back in the early/mid 90s, they even sold fake car phones, so people could install them in their cars and drive around town "talking" on them so that other people would think they could afford a car phone.
Only temporarily. Cellular phones were very expensive when they first debuted; they got much cheaper eventually. The faster you get something out there so people are using it, the faster demand will build (assuming more lower-income people want it) and the faster that will drive improvements to the technology.
And how exactly is that a problem? I guess you never experienced the "bag phones" of the 80s; they were pretty close to backpack size.
If the FCC had approved spectrum for cellphones 4 decades earlier, we would have had cellphones significantly earlier than we did. No, we wouldn't have had slate-style touchscreen smartphones in 1966, but we could very well have had the carphones and bagphones of the 80s back in the 60s (though more primitive and expensive), and we probably would have had the market penetration of mobile phones we enjoy now back in 1990 (though again, they wouldn't be as advanced as ours, I'm talking ones like the circa-2000 Nokias). It's quite possible our electronics technology might be even better now if this had been done, because the demand for smaller cellphones would have driven more development at an earlier time.
Absolutely wrong. I guess you weren't old enough to see how cellphones got adopted in our timeline and how the adoption drove the technology. They started out as expensive gadgets for rich people who wanted to always be in touch, and then for real estate agents where it was a real boon to their business to be reachable by clients while they were out looking at houses. Eventually, it became affordable to more and more people as costs came down, and then as other people saw how useful they were, demand rose, again driving the technology in a feedback cycle.
RC planes and Ham radio never had such popularity, and never had such potential. RC planes have little practical use (only now are we seeing any with drones, and that was helped a lot by them being able to hover, something only recently achievable in an RC machine and doable by any amateur), and Ham radio has zero privacy, no interface to the telephone system, and requires significant licensing which alone puts it well out of the reach of most people. Cellphones have always been useful; the only thing holding them back was cost (and for a while, size, but they had car phones way back which is still a big improvement over no mobile phone service at all, and they also had "bag phones").
I used to have a regular, cheapo residential-class Cox connection when I lived in a Cox service area. The few times I had a problem, whatever call center person I got actually was able to solve it (much to my surprise). And when they upgraded their systems and my old modem was no longer compatible, they sent me a brand new Surfboard free of charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I found the same when I watched Enterprise for the first time several years ago; it had some really good episodes. The best ones were in seasons 2 and 4. Season 3 was annoying however because of the whole Xindi arc which was obviously inspired by 9/11 and brought in a bunch of militarism that was absent in the first 2 seasons. And season 4 had an excellent 2-part set of episodes set in the Mirror Universe, which BTW had an excellent intro (unlike the rest of the Enterprise show; the opening intro and theme song were easily the worst part of the entire show).
Mars is 10.7% of the mass of the Earth, and a little over 1/2 the radius. I wouldn't call it "Earth-sized" at all. Venus is much closer.
No one is "excited at the idea that every single earth-sized planet may contain life"; they're excited because now there's a couple dozen candidates, so it's possible that maybe one of those 24 has some kind of life.
Sorry, no. Ebay is a mixed bag: every seller is separate, so when you find a seller who has a good reputation and sells genuine products, you can feel safe that future purchases will also be genuine. In addition to that, a lot of stuff on Ebay is still used/secondhand, sold by small-time sellers.
The problem with Amazon is that there's no way to only buy from particular sellers. Even if you supposedly buy from Amazon itself, if they're out of stock at the warehouse they're fulfilling your order at, Amazon will happily take products with the same SKU from some other seller's inventory and pass it off as their own, even if that stuff is actually counterfeit. In Amazon's world, every product with the same SKU is identical. Ebay simply isn't like this; every seller is a different entity, and fulfills their own orders. Ebay just gives them a place to advertise. It's still like a flea market, but at least on Ebay you can discriminate between sellers based on reputation, personal experience, etc. You just can't do that on Amazon.
Don't blame the parents. Parents who try to do what you say (let their kids roam around unsupervised) are derided as "free range parents" and get arrested by the cops, and their kids seized by CPS due to "negligence".
Also not everyone who shops at Wal-Mart is trash. There are people who are barley getting by and shop at Wal-Mart because they cannot afford to drop their entire paycheck on groceries.
Wrong, in the opinion of the AC you're replying to. According to him and other people like him, those people are trash, by definition, because they don't have a lot of money. He's probably an evangelical Christian Republican; their entire theology is that God loves rich people more, and that's why they're rich, and poor people have been shunned by God don't get his blessings and that's why they're poor.
Maybe I'm wrong (and this is quite possible--after all, HL Mencken said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans), but it seems to me that with Amazon turning itself into a crappy online flea market full of counterfeit merchandise, B&M isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
That said, Amazon has competition from other online sellers, including even Walmart.com, and of course Ebay, but also countless other smaller retailers that usually are more specialized, so B&M is going to continue facing stiff competition. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's retailing division is ever going to be profitable.
He's a typical American; you shouldn't be surprised. Americans love to show off their ignorance and revel in it.
there are plenty of people whose distrust of science has grown to the point where they're totally irrational about it, though, and their gullibility when it comes to 'snake oil' cures for things has risen to epidemic proportions.
Yep, this sums things up quite well.
But one other place I'd blame is the education system: most people just have no idea what science is and how it works, so they get fooled by quackery and pseudoscience. Schools should really be teaching kids how to distinguish real science and medicine from BS, but they'll probably have lobbyists working against them if they do.
Because when the traffic is coming from Russia or someplace like that, a court order to that foreign country is going to be laughed at. Do you not understand how VPNs work?
I never thought she or others who claimed a problem were a nutjob, I was just issuing a warning that just because the medical establishment has some real problems with sometimes getting stuck on wrong and unscientific thinking for certain problems, or refusing to look at certain things, that this is no reason to jump to alternative medicine which has no scientific basis whatsoever, and that this is a real danger because people (and this is how alt-med thrives in fact) because people who have real problems who aren't getting any help, and frequently even any acknowledgement of their problem, from their medical providers can easily be lured into alt-med, similar to how people can get lured into a cult because their existing support systems are lacking and the cult takes advantage of this.
It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the problem and a good approach to isolating the exact cause: create a theory and then attempt to falsify it. It'll be interesting to see how your experiment turns out.
Considering other corporations are even worse, what is the point of fighting back?
You don't need to "fight back", and other corporations are irrelevant. Facebook is a non-essential service which provides nothing of value. It's just like having a cable TV package, for example (or worse, a package with ESPN). The simple solution is to stop using it and do something better with your time.
Facebook is not an essential utility/service like your water/sewer service, electricity, or even internet service. It's no more useful or essential than playing Flappy Birds on your phone.
I don't know about anyone else's phone; but my iPhone allows me to connect to the internet via cellular data.
No, it doesn't, not when there's insufficient signal strength because the nearest tower is too far away and you're in a big giant metal box which works as an effective Faraday shield. This is one of the main reasons large stores and malls offer free WiFi in the first place.
So depending on the particular store's location, which network your phone uses, and also your exact location within the store, you may have a choice between in-store WiFi or no data at all.
How much will it take for people to finally get a clue about how bad Facebook is?
You sound much like my ex-wife. She had a problem with gluten for a long time and for most of the time, doctors told her it was "all in her head" since tests for Celiac disease all came back negative. We finally figured out while we were married that she was gluten-sensitive (all gluten, not just wheat like you), and if she avoided eating it she did much better and didn't get migraines and have CFS like she did with gluten.
But the long-term fallout was that ended up distrusting the medical profession greatly, and believes in just about any "alternative medicine" BS that promises to make her feel better. It was a significant factor in our divorce--that quackery costs a lot of money, and she simply couldn't be convinced that it was BS, despite the fact that she visited these quacks for years until *I* came along and figured out for her that her problem was gluten, and I'm an engineer, not a doctor (or quack-doctor); none of the quacks, despite all their talk about "holistic health" and all the various fads they jump on, could figure it out, and just fed her with a bunch of expensive "supplements" based on some stupid arm test.
So be careful not to go the other way. The medical profession does (did?) seem to have a problem in not acknowledging that there's a whole lot about human biology they don't understand yet, and ascribing symptoms they can't explain with existing tests to psychosomatic illness, but just because the medical profession is flawed doesn't mean the alternatives are any better--they're not.
It's really too bad that doctors aren't trained to be more like engineers. I can point to a bunch of things where the medical profession was lacking, or outright wrong, and it took a long time for them to come around. Phrenology is a famous example in the far past, but gut bacteria is a very current one: they're only now acknowledging how much of a role it has in our health, and how different it can be person-to-person. It wasn't very long ago that they thought the appendix was completely useless, and only now are they finally acknowledging its true purpose. So unfortunately, there's really not enough scientific thinking in medicine, and too many assumptions about the completeness of their knowledge. Personally, I think part of the problem is the lack of scientific background on the part of the practitioners; many of them tend to be religious after all, so they have a hard time accepting the role of evolution in our biology, and how that makes us all rather different from each other in very small but important ways. When you believe the "God created us in his image", that mindset isn't very compatible with how biology really works.
You don't need a crystal ball to point to movies that are highly-regarded right now. No one needed a crystal ball to know that Star Wars was an instant classic; the enormous popularity it had at the time indicated that in spades. This doesn't guarantee the movie will "stand the test of time", but it's a pretty decent indicator. I'll bet Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia were well-regarded when they were new too. There's always some movies that aren't well-liked at the time, and then become "cult classics" later like your Metropolis example, but those aren't the norm and that's not required for "standing the test of time". Most movies regarded as classics were popular when new; Ghostbusters (the 80s one, not the shitty remake) is another good example here, plus Back to the Future and Aliens and a bunch of other 80s icons. There haven't been any movies like that in the 2010s that I know of, though by asking the question in my previous post I did open the discussion up to see if anyone had any examples that in their opinion would qualify since I don't claim to be the preeminent expert on all movies for all time.
Because your ISP isn't immune to a court order.
Am I supposed to believe that cell phones played any meaningful role in the miniaturization and affordable production of electronics in general, and the development of lithium batteries?
Um, yes? The reason lithium battery tech is as advanced as it is now is purely because of cellphones, as well as some other mobile devices (laptop computers, ipods, PDAs, etc., which have largely converged to smartphones and tablets). What else would it be? Nothing else uses lithium-ion batteries as much. EVs came more recently, after the big mobile-device explosion.
And miniaturization? Are you kidding? Phones have been the biggest driver of that in the last 15 years. Go take a look at a typical laptop computer's motherboard, and then the main board of a typical smartphone. Smartphones have easily the most advanced miniaturization technology in the world now.
If you could teleport a relatively modern and functional cellular network back to the 40s, 60s, even the 80s, it wouldn't have made cell phones much more affordable or practical to the average Joe.
Who cares about the average Joe? Average Joes didn't have cellphones in the late 80s either, but cellphones did exist and were growing in adoption and popularity then. It took adoption by people with more money (or businesses willing to spend on them) to help the tech develop so that it could become more affordable. Technologies like that don't just develop all at once in some company's lab, and then enter the market at a low price point so everyone can afford them. That wasn't the case with cellphones, it wasn't the case with cars, it wasn't the case with just about anything. New stuff always starts out being expensive and having a limited market of either rich people or people willing to spend a large amount of their money on it. Have you forgotten that PCs used to cost thousands of dollars in the 80s, and that's before adjusting for inflation? An IBM PC cost a significant fraction of what a car cost back then.
You don't need to teleport a "relatively modern" cellular network back to the 40s or 60s, just the network they had back in the 80s (AMPS). They would certainly have been able to make use if it in the 60s at least. We all could have had affordable cellphones (80s-style) a decade or two earlier than we did. It's really hard to say when we would have gotten decent smartphones, but that's a bit of a separate question because smartphones are a convergence of a bunch of different technologies, not just radio communications interfacing with the existing telephone system. But we could have had workable cellphones earlier than we did. We had radiotelephones back in the 50s, after all.
I guess the point I'm trying to make (or at least started out trying to make) was that the movie studios don't need to try pursuing a low-profit-margin model, and that what they're doing now seems to be working just fine. Their ticket sales in the US have declined, but their prices have gone up, and their revenues are steady, and on top of that they have huge international audiences making up even more of their revenue, plus online/DVD/BR distribution on top of all that.
So I dispute your claim about "fewer and fewer people are actually paying for new works": the audience has expanded greatly with international sales. Even if you limit your scope to domestic sales, the decrease isn't that much; there's no proof that people are actually pirating that much, rather than people simply not watching as many movies, or watching them more on (paid) video (which explains why they take in more revenue now from at-home sales than theater tickets). Just look at cable companies: more and more people are "cutting the cord"; that doesn't mean they're "stealing" TV from somewhere. Instead, many people simply aren't watching TV at all, and are doing other things (which can include watching movies online, which really isn't the same). You seem to have an assumption that people are pirating more and more, and there's no proof of this at all. If anything, it's probably a very small part of the population that does this, as it's not *that* easy to do. The average person on the street doesn't know how to use BitTorrent. And just like in the days when software piracy was "rampant", the reality was that most instances of copying were by a small number of people who were copying *a lot*, and frequently not even using most of the stuff they copied. I knew a bunch of people like that in high school. It was like a game to see how much stuff you could amass.
The best I can imagine they might have been able to develop in the 1940s would have been analog cellular carphones. Leaving aside the "Needs a car so high cost of entry already", you're already looking at a niche market when you consider the selling point of modern cellular is that you can be connected at all times. Limiting it to when you're at your car would effectively remove that selling point.
Holy crap, what is with you people? The article is about cellular phones, not smartphones. Are you a teenager or something? For a long time, cellular phones *were* limited to being installed in cars or boats, or being carried around in giant briefcase-size bags. That didn't stop people from wanting them, only cost did. Back in the early/mid 90s, they even sold fake car phones, so people could install them in their cars and drive around town "talking" on them so that other people would think they could afford a car phone.
Only temporarily. Cellular phones were very expensive when they first debuted; they got much cheaper eventually. The faster you get something out there so people are using it, the faster demand will build (assuming more lower-income people want it) and the faster that will drive improvements to the technology.
And how exactly is that a problem? I guess you never experienced the "bag phones" of the 80s; they were pretty close to backpack size.
If the FCC had approved spectrum for cellphones 4 decades earlier, we would have had cellphones significantly earlier than we did. No, we wouldn't have had slate-style touchscreen smartphones in 1966, but we could very well have had the carphones and bagphones of the 80s back in the 60s (though more primitive and expensive), and we probably would have had the market penetration of mobile phones we enjoy now back in 1990 (though again, they wouldn't be as advanced as ours, I'm talking ones like the circa-2000 Nokias). It's quite possible our electronics technology might be even better now if this had been done, because the demand for smaller cellphones would have driven more development at an earlier time.
Why would you not use a VPN for that?
Absolutely wrong. I guess you weren't old enough to see how cellphones got adopted in our timeline and how the adoption drove the technology. They started out as expensive gadgets for rich people who wanted to always be in touch, and then for real estate agents where it was a real boon to their business to be reachable by clients while they were out looking at houses. Eventually, it became affordable to more and more people as costs came down, and then as other people saw how useful they were, demand rose, again driving the technology in a feedback cycle.
RC planes and Ham radio never had such popularity, and never had such potential. RC planes have little practical use (only now are we seeing any with drones, and that was helped a lot by them being able to hover, something only recently achievable in an RC machine and doable by any amateur), and Ham radio has zero privacy, no interface to the telephone system, and requires significant licensing which alone puts it well out of the reach of most people. Cellphones have always been useful; the only thing holding them back was cost (and for a while, size, but they had car phones way back which is still a big improvement over no mobile phone service at all, and they also had "bag phones").
I used to have a regular, cheapo residential-class Cox connection when I lived in a Cox service area. The few times I had a problem, whatever call center person I got actually was able to solve it (much to my surprise). And when they upgraded their systems and my old modem was no longer compatible, they sent me a brand new Surfboard free of charge.