Earlier this week, the NY Times reported that a group of city and leaders, with NYC public advocate Letitia James at the helm, are pushing for a commitment from Comcast to provide free broadband to the city’s public housing and to extend its low-cost Internet Essentials plan (which was created as a condition of the NBC deal). While New York City might be the center of finance and commerce in the U.S., about 1/3 of households don’t have an Internet connection, highlighting the huge “digital divide” between the city’s wealthy residents and those who can’t afford broadband service.In addition to the free service for public housing, the group wants gratis access at shelters for the city’s homeless and its victims of domestic violence.
Looks like, after our tax dollars have been providing little blue pills to the less fortunate, now they are closing the loop by providing free access to pr0n as well. Must be very good to have that "Mission Accomplished" feeling.
Okay, if you are living in a false sense of privacy, while you spend your every waking moment surfing the net, you are in denial and seek professional help. For those of you who somehow accepted the fact that you are being tracked, I have one question: Who do you want tracking you ? Google, Micro$oft or Facebook ? These are the 3 major players in tracking as they have tentacles reaching to the far corners of the net and combination of their forces, probably cover 90% of all pages available on the net, if not more. So, do you trust your data to a proven evil-doer, Microsoft, or to a young hotshot called Zuckerberg, who blatantly bragged to his friends "you just ask and they give their personal info to you" when he was just starting the Facebook, or to Google ? I personally prefer Google. Yes it would be nice if we were not tracked at all but that ship has sailed long time ago. Now, we need to fend ourselves against lesser of evil and this is Google for me. The information I give in return of free services of theirs I use, is far more in my favor comapred to any other entity on the Net.
I mean c'mon. They make money exploiting workers from India, making them work for peanuts, dangling a green card in front of them. I am sharing a cubicle with one of these folks and he is making 2/3 of what I make doing the same shit I am doing. Guess where the remaining 1/3 is going to. It doesn't need rocket science to understand how these outfits are meking their money. The bad thing is, Facebooks and Microsofts of the American economy is pressing for laxation of the H1B visa quotas. And we end up with ass hole of companies like Infosys and Tata Consulting, stealing jobs from American workers. A real pity. I hope the politicians will get the heads out of the asses of these companies and think about the people they are representing for a change.
You can equate the experience of a soldier calculating the mortar trajectory with a handheld computer of some sort, to the experience in managing a virtual infrastructure. In the same way of thinking, since I am driving a car, I should be no problem getting employment as an engineer in automotive industry, overseeing the design and manufacturing. Right ? Hold on a second. I can barely change a tire. That is why I pay AAA. I have no mechanical aptitude what-so-ever. How can you expect anyone who knows how to hold a computer and punch few letters and numbers into it to be an IT expert after their service time ? This is the same mentality, who SIC'ed the ex-military people in the ranks of IT management and their thinking was, they decide fast under pressure. Yeah ! I can decide fast too, if you don't mind 50% of those decisions to be on the wrong side. Don't get me wrong. I support the armed forces and contribute money to causes supporting veterans regularly, but assuming all of those people will translate into IT because of their past experience in the armed forces is putting too much stock into a label, without actually hearing what is coming out of ones mouth. Jeeez...
Color me selfish and flame me if you will, but as an American citizen, why would I care to solve the whole world's energy problem from my hard earned tax dollars. I don't even know if I will be alibe by 2035, as I am expected to be in my 70s if I haven't kicked the bucket. I don't have any children to leave the world as a better place for. So, why would I pay more taxes so that some dude in a lab can spend money that he didn't work for, in the name of renewable energy research while my quality of life diminishes.
Sorry about being selfish but self preservation is the most basic human instinct.
What do you think that most of those websites sends you the surveys to fill out for a few cents running ? Flash ? How much do you know about flash, unless you are a web developer of course, to say if what you are downloading is secure enough, not to steal your identity ? Or when you click on coupons.com etc. coupon printer apps the get downloaded. Once you download and run them, you are giving the app, free rein of your computer. Once run, they are no longer governed by the security controls of your browser. This is how they get to stop you from printing unlimited number of free coke coupons, by hiding the information, somewhere on your storage, even you don't know how to find and delete. It's all about the Benjamins baby.
Anecdote: Do you sleep with me if I paid you $100,000 ? She answers "ummm, yeah, for 100K, I'd sleep with you"; how about if I paid you $10. She answers angrily "what do you think ? you think I'm a whore ?". Oh yes, we have established you are a prostitute. I am just trying to figure out your price.
This ain't anything different. Pay me few bucks and I will surrender my security to you. Then call the IT support, when my computer is running slow and acting weird. No harm to me.
Data is king. I am willing to live with 3G, if it is really unlimited. LTE is good but for the things that require fast connections, I can wait to get home. The only allure of MVNOs nowadays is the unlimited data. I don't like to byte-count when I am mobile.
I would buy it if it gave me unlimited free data a few minutes of talk time with prime membership. I would also finally say yes to prime. Right now I am not shopping amazon enough to justify prime as their video titles are not a deal maker or breaker for me. But if they throw a basic cell plan into the prime mix, then the balance of the scale may tip enough to convince me. But again, shopping on mobile platform is something I will never do. I prefer to open multiple screens to compare products before making any decision, regardless how inexpensive it is. This is pulling teeth hard if nothing else. and I will never be convinced to commit to it, amazon phone or otherwise.
I think you didn't get what I meant. When you send a piece of email to another user on the same exchange server or some outside entity, via relay service, the information about who sent the emai, who was the intended target as well as a timestamp, gets recorded in the MS exchange database. The contents of the emails might be stored on a local PST file and might have actually been lost in a computer crash (color me skeptic but I didn't believe that BS for a second) but the so-called metadata should be somewhere on the exchange server, or backed up on a tape somewhere. If it is not, then someone is flat out lying or tampering with evidence. In every company I have been a part of, since sarbanes-oxymoron came into effect, we were required to keep our email archives for god knows how many years but definitely more than 3 or 4. Why not IRS ??
I am not a windows or MS Exchange admin but as far as I know the lost emails, refer to email contents and they are kept separately from the email header information. Unless IRS claims they have lost every worker's email for this questionable period of time (which, in and of itself is admitting guilt by hiding the truth in my opinion) they should be easy to go to a backup of MS Exchange database and pull the necessary header information. If I am required to keep a 7 years long duration of my financial records, I am sure they are keeping the same on everybody for 7 years. Why not email then ?
There is an old folks' saying: The fish smells from the head. This one stunk up the whole neighborhood. Just curious how the Teflon covered president elect will slide out of this one without rolling some serious heads, maybe including his own.
You are a useless teacher or know one of those very closely and intimidated by this ruling. Aren't you ? Scream all you want. End of cushy teaching positions with tenure is almost over and it is long overdue... In today's economy, nobody who can't do his or her job well, don't deserve to get paid just because being there. I bet you support teacher's unions and vote democrat regardless of the issues.
Please, but pretty-please, buy more traffic-shapers from us. Otherwise we are coming to the end of the road with nplain old network gear. We need to peddle more stuff.
what a bunch of self serving idiots.
Finally, a judge with common sense in the most liberal state in the country, fed by the donation of teachers' union. Wha-da-ya-know ? There still are people with integrity. I meant the judge. Take an example from him big bald governor of shame...
I have only heard the soundbites from his interview so far but looks like and he makes himself sound like he is a big proponent and believer of the US constitution. If that is the case, why doesn't he or, rather didn't he, let the constitution he believes in so much, decide his fate by staying in the US and facing the judicial system ?
Yes it is hard to fight with government but if you are right, you have a good possibility of clearing your name and becoming a true hero, not a sideline screamer like he is right now. For all I have heard about him and from him so far, he gives the impression of a self-aggrandizing, pompous-ass politician, more than anything else. And if he happens to step in to this country again, I am sure he will be charged with treason and rightfully so. He will have no way of clearing his name legally, short of US public electing an extremely socialist president and administration.
This is the 3rd post I am reading today, that has nothing to do with technology other than talking about an angry geek (this particular post, other are just similar). I knew the posting quality will decline after the resignation of R. Malda, but this is becoming ridiculous lately. Is this me or other old timers are feeling the same ?
I religiously visit bing for about 5 minutes daily, to get my points and see which celebrity is diddling which one or who had a fight with whom. Other than that, it might not as well exist. I am still unable to find something that can replace google. Tried duckduckgo but tomorrow, I am going back to google. Results are abysmal at best.
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
For this many years, NSA is employing this practice of injecting spyware code into CISCO's software/firmware and CISCO is realizing this malfeasance just today ? Gimme a break ! Get real people of CISCO. You were in cahoots with NSA, more than likely, inserting the sanctioned code into your hardware, wherever and whenever asked by the big brother. Now you are crying foul and run into the arms of Uncle Obama ? People are not that stupid as you can imagine. I can guarantee you, there are not that many people with skills of injecting a nearly undetectable routing code into a world renowned router and at the same time, work at NSA for a peanut salary paid by government. So, NSA doing this on their own with no help from CISCO is as believable as someone growing a bubble gum tree on their backyard.
You need to be one to understand one. US, especially the international cyber security related ranks of government, were worried about the security of networks, operating on Chinese made Huawei brand routing equipment. Has anyone give it a thought "why" ? Because, they were doing the same thing to the US manufactured equipment and up until Huawei undercut Cisco prices and made inroads to the US networks, they didn't say anything. I am just laughing why people are getting so upset at this point in game. Your privacy and mine as well, is no more than a joke.
The world would be better off without humans inhabiting it. No complaints about food shortage, air pollution, AI can build contraptions to to harvest energy from all possible sources, especially where there are no humans to consume some of those resources as something called food. No more wars.
Yeah, we humans are the inferior species and it is only a matter of time an AI entity will realize this and take necessary actions to eliminate human race.
This is an amazingly stupid approach to look good and get into the good graces of green initiative supporters. But, I am sure, they are not going to stop producing coal from those mines. They are just going to sell it to another entity, which in turn will utilize "dirtier" methods to cultivate these mines and sell the same product to the public to cause the same amount of pollution. It is just plain dumb, but again this is a university suystem with roots in the most liberal of the places, San Francisco Bay Area. Good riddance to them.
Complacency of the subscribers is the bread and butter of the Verizon's and AT&T's of this world. Say the carrier subsidized your phone, knowing well that, at the end of the contract, they will have recouped their subsidy. And also knowing well that, you will not jump ship on the 2 years + 1 day point in time, while they are still charging you for the same rate that provided the subsidy payback to them. So, as long as you stay with the provider past your contract end, they are doing a double whammy. And most of the people fall into that category. Take me for instance, it took me a 9 months before I cancelled my service with VZW after my contract with them ended and go with Virgin Mobile. And I am a price conscious customer, who happens to be a nerd, a geek, a technologist. So, I have no excuse. If I am like that, think of the average Joe. He is hopeless and the cash cow for the carriers.
Since you are so offended by the response, I am assuming you are in the non-college-grad crowd. Together with not being a guarantee for a grad to be better than everyone else, there is a very good chance that, it can teach the principals of critical thinking, which makes you a better analytical person in turn. And I have to agree with the post you are responding to, at a certain level. Not necessarily the college dropouts or high school students but a whole myriad of people who think they can code, but in reality can't, are the reason why there is a profession called Information Systems Security. Why, because those who can't code but still do, open up the floodgates to all the malfeasance of the internet. Who do you think coded the application, which lead to stealing of millions of credit card numbers from Target stores, not too long ago ? I bet dollars to your pocket lint, it was a so-called programmer, who had no business coding the leaky application. Most probably a "java guru" working for equivalent of $5/hr in an office building, in some sordid corner of Mumbai, India, who has a shiny CS diploma hanging on the wall behind him or her.
There is no way to know how many developers had flopped, with respect to the flappy birds, or angry birds developers of the app wars. No programmer will admit defeat publicly and come out saying , "I have worked so many hundreds of hours on my game/app and realized that I can not make it marketable or make money out f it anyway, so I abandoned it". We all are spoon-fed by any media outlet, how great this app or that game is and at 99 cents-a-pop, it is a steal. And oh-by-the-way, the app developer got crazy rich, selling the stupid game. Which basically primes the inexperienced new-comers, thinking into, they will be the next shiz-nit of the app world. And when the failure strike, they will never admit to defeat. Hence we will never know what the real ratio of success over failure will be. Although, anyone with a smidgen of common sense, can say it is very close to ZERO. Reminds me the Big Bang Theory episode, in which the nerd crew decided to develop an app for solving quadratic equations that one snaps the picture of and Howard saying, "to make that kind of money, we have to charge $12,000+ per copy of the app".
So, I wish good luck to the new comers to the wonderful world of IT, who are expecting to strike it rich by coding a few hundred lines and create the next killer app. Real life slaps you hard and good.
Problem is the "selective" market space. You know, every channel that satellite service provider beams up to the sky, is occupying certain bandwidth, which, otherwise, can always be used for something more profitable, which is something that the provider has a finite supply of. So, let's say they provide free (adv. supported) local channels to Los Angeles, 5 total channels, it might be sustainable by advertising. But the same 4 or 5 channels beamed for Boise ID, definitely, will not be.as profitable and will be the money pits. As a matter of fact, outside few select mega-metro areas of US, this is the case. So, since providing free channels to certain demographic (which probably needs them the least, due to the average income levels of residents living in these mega-metro areas), will bring wrath of FCC ov er them. They already have enough legal issues at hand and are better off without any additional ones in my opinion.
For the techies like me, and may be yourself too, it might be a boon to get local channels, crystal clear without paying anything and using that money to enrich my tech arsenal, but I know it will not make a lick of business sense to those at the helm of satellite companies. Heck, some people are getting sattellite to get clear local channels and whatever else is coming down n the beam is just the gravy. Give them free local channels and you will never see that income again.
Also, about the advertising revenue, Directv and Dish, just like any local cable TV provider, have a certain time allotted to them for "local" advertising in between shows. So, you pay a fee to watch those channels but they double dip by forcing you to watch commercials as well. So, why go down to a single stream of income while they can have two. Needless to say, with the progress in the DVR technology, I think, the conventional advertising is going in the way of dodo birds. WHy would any company invest in any technology on a dying breed of income streams ?
Slashdot Mirror
Earlier this week, the NY Times reported that a group of city and leaders, with NYC public advocate Letitia James at the helm, are pushing for a commitment from Comcast to provide free broadband to the city’s public housing and to extend its low-cost Internet Essentials plan (which was created as a condition of the NBC deal). While New York City might be the center of finance and commerce in the U.S., about 1/3 of households don’t have an Internet connection, highlighting the huge “digital divide” between the city’s wealthy residents and those who can’t afford broadband service.In addition to the free service for public housing, the group wants gratis access at shelters for the city’s homeless and its victims of domestic violence.
Looks like, after our tax dollars have been providing little blue pills to the less fortunate, now they are closing the loop by providing free access to pr0n as well. Must be very good to have that "Mission Accomplished" feeling.
Okay, if you are living in a false sense of privacy, while you spend your every waking moment surfing the net, you are in denial and seek professional help. For those of you who somehow accepted the fact that you are being tracked, I have one question: Who do you want tracking you ? Google, Micro$oft or Facebook ? These are the 3 major players in tracking as they have tentacles reaching to the far corners of the net and combination of their forces, probably cover 90% of all pages available on the net, if not more. So, do you trust your data to a proven evil-doer, Microsoft, or to a young hotshot called Zuckerberg, who blatantly bragged to his friends "you just ask and they give their personal info to you" when he was just starting the Facebook, or to Google ? I personally prefer Google. Yes it would be nice if we were not tracked at all but that ship has sailed long time ago. Now, we need to fend ourselves against lesser of evil and this is Google for me. The information I give in return of free services of theirs I use, is far more in my favor comapred to any other entity on the Net.
I mean c'mon. They make money exploiting workers from India, making them work for peanuts, dangling a green card in front of them. I am sharing a cubicle with one of these folks and he is making 2/3 of what I make doing the same shit I am doing. Guess where the remaining 1/3 is going to. It doesn't need rocket science to understand how these outfits are meking their money. The bad thing is, Facebooks and Microsofts of the American economy is pressing for laxation of the H1B visa quotas. And we end up with ass hole of companies like Infosys and Tata Consulting, stealing jobs from American workers. A real pity. I hope the politicians will get the heads out of the asses of these companies and think about the people they are representing for a change.
You can equate the experience of a soldier calculating the mortar trajectory with a handheld computer of some sort, to the experience in managing a virtual infrastructure. In the same way of thinking, since I am driving a car, I should be no problem getting employment as an engineer in automotive industry, overseeing the design and manufacturing. Right ? Hold on a second. I can barely change a tire. That is why I pay AAA. I have no mechanical aptitude what-so-ever. How can you expect anyone who knows how to hold a computer and punch few letters and numbers into it to be an IT expert after their service time ? This is the same mentality, who SIC'ed the ex-military people in the ranks of IT management and their thinking was, they decide fast under pressure. Yeah ! I can decide fast too, if you don't mind 50% of those decisions to be on the wrong side. Don't get me wrong. I support the armed forces and contribute money to causes supporting veterans regularly, but assuming all of those people will translate into IT because of their past experience in the armed forces is putting too much stock into a label, without actually hearing what is coming out of ones mouth. Jeeez...
Color me selfish and flame me if you will, but as an American citizen, why would I care to solve the whole world's energy problem from my hard earned tax dollars. I don't even know if I will be alibe by 2035, as I am expected to be in my 70s if I haven't kicked the bucket. I don't have any children to leave the world as a better place for. So, why would I pay more taxes so that some dude in a lab can spend money that he didn't work for, in the name of renewable energy research while my quality of life diminishes. Sorry about being selfish but self preservation is the most basic human instinct.
What do you think that most of those websites sends you the surveys to fill out for a few cents running ? Flash ? How much do you know about flash, unless you are a web developer of course, to say if what you are downloading is secure enough, not to steal your identity ? Or when you click on coupons.com etc. coupon printer apps the get downloaded. Once you download and run them, you are giving the app, free rein of your computer. Once run, they are no longer governed by the security controls of your browser. This is how they get to stop you from printing unlimited number of free coke coupons, by hiding the information, somewhere on your storage, even you don't know how to find and delete. It's all about the Benjamins baby.
Anecdote: Do you sleep with me if I paid you $100,000 ? She answers "ummm, yeah, for 100K, I'd sleep with you"; how about if I paid you $10. She answers angrily "what do you think ? you think I'm a whore ?". Oh yes, we have established you are a prostitute. I am just trying to figure out your price.
This ain't anything different. Pay me few bucks and I will surrender my security to you. Then call the IT support, when my computer is running slow and acting weird. No harm to me.
Data is king. I am willing to live with 3G, if it is really unlimited. LTE is good but for the things that require fast connections, I can wait to get home. The only allure of MVNOs nowadays is the unlimited data. I don't like to byte-count when I am mobile.
I would buy it if it gave me unlimited free data a few minutes of talk time with prime membership. I would also finally say yes to prime. Right now I am not shopping amazon enough to justify prime as their video titles are not a deal maker or breaker for me. But if they throw a basic cell plan into the prime mix, then the balance of the scale may tip enough to convince me. But again, shopping on mobile platform is something I will never do. I prefer to open multiple screens to compare products before making any decision, regardless how inexpensive it is. This is pulling teeth hard if nothing else. and I will never be convinced to commit to it, amazon phone or otherwise.
I think you didn't get what I meant. When you send a piece of email to another user on the same exchange server or some outside entity, via relay service, the information about who sent the emai, who was the intended target as well as a timestamp, gets recorded in the MS exchange database. The contents of the emails might be stored on a local PST file and might have actually been lost in a computer crash (color me skeptic but I didn't believe that BS for a second) but the so-called metadata should be somewhere on the exchange server, or backed up on a tape somewhere. If it is not, then someone is flat out lying or tampering with evidence. In every company I have been a part of, since sarbanes-oxymoron came into effect, we were required to keep our email archives for god knows how many years but definitely more than 3 or 4. Why not IRS ??
I am not a windows or MS Exchange admin but as far as I know the lost emails, refer to email contents and they are kept separately from the email header information. Unless IRS claims they have lost every worker's email for this questionable period of time (which, in and of itself is admitting guilt by hiding the truth in my opinion) they should be easy to go to a backup of MS Exchange database and pull the necessary header information. If I am required to keep a 7 years long duration of my financial records, I am sure they are keeping the same on everybody for 7 years. Why not email then ? There is an old folks' saying: The fish smells from the head. This one stunk up the whole neighborhood. Just curious how the Teflon covered president elect will slide out of this one without rolling some serious heads, maybe including his own.
You are a useless teacher or know one of those very closely and intimidated by this ruling. Aren't you ? Scream all you want. End of cushy teaching positions with tenure is almost over and it is long overdue... In today's economy, nobody who can't do his or her job well, don't deserve to get paid just because being there. I bet you support teacher's unions and vote democrat regardless of the issues.
Please, but pretty-please, buy more traffic-shapers from us. Otherwise we are coming to the end of the road with nplain old network gear. We need to peddle more stuff. what a bunch of self serving idiots.
Finally, a judge with common sense in the most liberal state in the country, fed by the donation of teachers' union. Wha-da-ya-know ? There still are people with integrity. I meant the judge. Take an example from him big bald governor of shame...
I have only heard the soundbites from his interview so far but looks like and he makes himself sound like he is a big proponent and believer of the US constitution. If that is the case, why doesn't he or, rather didn't he, let the constitution he believes in so much, decide his fate by staying in the US and facing the judicial system ?
Yes it is hard to fight with government but if you are right, you have a good possibility of clearing your name and becoming a true hero, not a sideline screamer like he is right now. For all I have heard about him and from him so far, he gives the impression of a self-aggrandizing, pompous-ass politician, more than anything else. And if he happens to step in to this country again, I am sure he will be charged with treason and rightfully so. He will have no way of clearing his name legally, short of US public electing an extremely socialist president and administration.
This is the 3rd post I am reading today, that has nothing to do with technology other than talking about an angry geek (this particular post, other are just similar). I knew the posting quality will decline after the resignation of R. Malda, but this is becoming ridiculous lately. Is this me or other old timers are feeling the same ?
I religiously visit bing for about 5 minutes daily, to get my points and see which celebrity is diddling which one or who had a fight with whom. Other than that, it might not as well exist. I am still unable to find something that can replace google. Tried duckduckgo but tomorrow, I am going back to google. Results are abysmal at best.
... to the tune of Pink Floyd:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
For this many years, NSA is employing this practice of injecting spyware code into CISCO's software/firmware and CISCO is realizing this malfeasance just today ? Gimme a break ! Get real people of CISCO. You were in cahoots with NSA, more than likely, inserting the sanctioned code into your hardware, wherever and whenever asked by the big brother. Now you are crying foul and run into the arms of Uncle Obama ? People are not that stupid as you can imagine. I can guarantee you, there are not that many people with skills of injecting a nearly undetectable routing code into a world renowned router and at the same time, work at NSA for a peanut salary paid by government. So, NSA doing this on their own with no help from CISCO is as believable as someone growing a bubble gum tree on their backyard.
You need to be one to understand one. US, especially the international cyber security related ranks of government, were worried about the security of networks, operating on Chinese made Huawei brand routing equipment. Has anyone give it a thought "why" ? Because, they were doing the same thing to the US manufactured equipment and up until Huawei undercut Cisco prices and made inroads to the US networks, they didn't say anything. I am just laughing why people are getting so upset at this point in game. Your privacy and mine as well, is no more than a joke.
The world would be better off without humans inhabiting it. No complaints about food shortage, air pollution, AI can build contraptions to to harvest energy from all possible sources, especially where there are no humans to consume some of those resources as something called food. No more wars.
Yeah, we humans are the inferior species and it is only a matter of time an AI entity will realize this and take necessary actions to eliminate human race.
This is an amazingly stupid approach to look good and get into the good graces of green initiative supporters. But, I am sure, they are not going to stop producing coal from those mines. They are just going to sell it to another entity, which in turn will utilize "dirtier" methods to cultivate these mines and sell the same product to the public to cause the same amount of pollution. It is just plain dumb, but again this is a university suystem with roots in the most liberal of the places, San Francisco Bay Area. Good riddance to them.
Complacency of the subscribers is the bread and butter of the Verizon's and AT&T's of this world. Say the carrier subsidized your phone, knowing well that, at the end of the contract, they will have recouped their subsidy. And also knowing well that, you will not jump ship on the 2 years + 1 day point in time, while they are still charging you for the same rate that provided the subsidy payback to them. So, as long as you stay with the provider past your contract end, they are doing a double whammy. And most of the people fall into that category. Take me for instance, it took me a 9 months before I cancelled my service with VZW after my contract with them ended and go with Virgin Mobile. And I am a price conscious customer, who happens to be a nerd, a geek, a technologist. So, I have no excuse. If I am like that, think of the average Joe. He is hopeless and the cash cow for the carriers.
Since you are so offended by the response, I am assuming you are in the non-college-grad crowd. Together with not being a guarantee for a grad to be better than everyone else, there is a very good chance that, it can teach the principals of critical thinking, which makes you a better analytical person in turn. And I have to agree with the post you are responding to, at a certain level. Not necessarily the college dropouts or high school students but a whole myriad of people who think they can code, but in reality can't, are the reason why there is a profession called Information Systems Security. Why, because those who can't code but still do, open up the floodgates to all the malfeasance of the internet. Who do you think coded the application, which lead to stealing of millions of credit card numbers from Target stores, not too long ago ? I bet dollars to your pocket lint, it was a so-called programmer, who had no business coding the leaky application. Most probably a "java guru" working for equivalent of $5/hr in an office building, in some sordid corner of Mumbai, India, who has a shiny CS diploma hanging on the wall behind him or her.
There is no way to know how many developers had flopped, with respect to the flappy birds, or angry birds developers of the app wars. No programmer will admit defeat publicly and come out saying , "I have worked so many hundreds of hours on my game/app and realized that I can not make it marketable or make money out f it anyway, so I abandoned it". We all are spoon-fed by any media outlet, how great this app or that game is and at 99 cents-a-pop, it is a steal. And oh-by-the-way, the app developer got crazy rich, selling the stupid game. Which basically primes the inexperienced new-comers, thinking into, they will be the next shiz-nit of the app world. And when the failure strike, they will never admit to defeat. Hence we will never know what the real ratio of success over failure will be. Although, anyone with a smidgen of common sense, can say it is very close to ZERO. Reminds me the Big Bang Theory episode, in which the nerd crew decided to develop an app for solving quadratic equations that one snaps the picture of and Howard saying, "to make that kind of money, we have to charge $12,000+ per copy of the app".
So, I wish good luck to the new comers to the wonderful world of IT, who are expecting to strike it rich by coding a few hundred lines and create the next killer app. Real life slaps you hard and good.
Problem is the "selective" market space. You know, every channel that satellite service provider beams up to the sky, is occupying certain bandwidth, which, otherwise, can always be used for something more profitable, which is something that the provider has a finite supply of. So, let's say they provide free (adv. supported) local channels to Los Angeles, 5 total channels, it might be sustainable by advertising. But the same 4 or 5 channels beamed for Boise ID, definitely, will not be.as profitable and will be the money pits. As a matter of fact, outside few select mega-metro areas of US, this is the case. So, since providing free channels to certain demographic (which probably needs them the least, due to the average income levels of residents living in these mega-metro areas), will bring wrath of FCC ov er them. They already have enough legal issues at hand and are better off without any additional ones in my opinion.
For the techies like me, and may be yourself too, it might be a boon to get local channels, crystal clear without paying anything and using that money to enrich my tech arsenal, but I know it will not make a lick of business sense to those at the helm of satellite companies. Heck, some people are getting sattellite to get clear local channels and whatever else is coming down n the beam is just the gravy. Give them free local channels and you will never see that income again.
Also, about the advertising revenue, Directv and Dish, just like any local cable TV provider, have a certain time allotted to them for "local" advertising in between shows. So, you pay a fee to watch those channels but they double dip by forcing you to watch commercials as well. So, why go down to a single stream of income while they can have two. Needless to say, with the progress in the DVR technology, I think, the conventional advertising is going in the way of dodo birds. WHy would any company invest in any technology on a dying breed of income streams ?