But.... The Federally backed Student Loan program expansion happens to be associated with a HUGE increase in money borrowed for... Hold on to your hat... College education... Which just happened to take place at the SAME TIME as... Hold your hat again.... Tuition increases...
But nothin'... quit stutterin', boy, people'll think yewr stoopid
If you read my post at all, you'd see I am also not in favour of student loans. Universities should be publicly funded and available to any citizen/resident or at the very least the student should be able to fund their education and living expenses with a part-time job.
This whole idea of student loans is stupid and supports this whole obsession America has with credit and going in to debt to get stuff - top, middle and bottom all suffer from this same thing.
Say, could all that be somehow related? Might there be a cause and effect relationship between the Fed making more money available and students borrowing more for tuition AND THEN tuitions going up? I think so...
Same thing is going to happen with healthcare.. Total costs are going up... You can bet the farm on that.
So basically you didn't read my post at all. Try replying to what I actually wrote and only then can we have a coherent discussion.
Again, for you, but as we have identified in other posts, your situation is an anomaly.
Secondly, the choice between DSL and cable isn't really choice.
Besides that, for the vast majority of subscribers, only one of those options actually offers (properly) high speeds -- and in a significant portion of cases the DSL on offer barely squeaks above the *old* definition of broadband.
So yes, there is a problem.
But it's also noteworthy that you've neglected to reply to my replies to other comments, just this and one other;)
Publicly funded healthcare works when the healthcare PROVIDERS aren't charging the insurance (private OR public) 3 or 5 times the actual price of the service. I was talking to a guy just last night who told me that paying for his surgery was "only" about $70k compared to the $300k they would have charged his insurance (and he'd still have been stuck with 20% of that).
I'm not talking about subsidizing student loans - getting an education shouldn't require a massive student loan, subsidized or not, nor should it require parents to start a college fund the day they get the positive pregnancy test. Students should be able to afford to pay for university and their living expenses by themselves with *at most* a part-time job and come out of it without any significant debt - like it used to be in the US and still is in some other countries.
In the US, both of these things though seem to be the "free market" at work - providers of education and health are charging whatever the hell they want, and in both cases are charging amounts that are inflationary, exploitative and far beyond reason - as we already know, per capita spending on both of these things in the US is far higher than anywhere else yet the quality/outcome is far lower by comparison.
Having private education and healthcare for those who can afford it and want the extra perks (Ivy League universities, for example) but to deny those who can't afford it *any* option whatsoever (ie, no university or healthcare for you, poor person!) is not.
The average student shouldn't *have* to rely on scholarships and/or student loans just to pay for their degree even at random-state-U, but should have the option to apply for those things if they want to go for something specific.
and/or the incumbent would probably sue the newcomer for anything and everything, so the newcomer would have to have very deep pockets to get anywhere.
1 pipe (who you don't deal with), multiple retailers (who you do deal with).
So long as said infrastructure provider is sufficiently regulated in that they can't charge $500/mo for access to the pipes, you might be on to something;)
In your neighbourhood, perhaps. But as mentioned in a previous post, your situation is an anomaly and as a result, you are enjoying something 90+% of the rest of the country does not have.
This is ***probably*** due to citizen objections rather than government... kind of a NIMBY/DON'T INCONVENIENCE ME!!!!/Environmentalist etc deal.
This is what happens when politicians don't stand up to those people who are blocking genuinely important/beneficial projects and say "this is for your own good, like it or fuck off".
Unfortunately, it's when that attitude permeates the thinking of projects for the greedy/power hungry types (NSA, TSA, etc - name your poison) that such thinking is problematic.
If you think the government is cheaper, you are sadly mistaken. Even with profit built into the equation, government is never going to be cheaper, better, faster.
Government things aren't really *meant* to turn a profit, but when they do, you seem to get some sort of refund sometime in late April or early May. The thing about government projects - unlike private projects - is that they're meant to serve everybody, so they average things out, so while *YOU* might pay 10 cents more a month on your Internet bill, someone 10 miles out of town can now get the same services at the same speeds for the same price as you can... and cities like Seattle can finally feel what it's like to have Broadband.
or it will drive up your taxes.
Then learn to deal with paying more than 1.5% tax (as recent filings of certain normal everyday individuals I know recently revealed their effective rate to be) and not getting massive multiple-thousand-dollar refunds every year.
There's nothing really wrong with higher taxes when it benefits the people... Maybe if your taxes were a bit more reasonable (and you slowed down on all the war stuff), your infrastructure might not be decaying, you could afford to pay teachers properly, water would be free and clean, and I wouldn't be paying $14 a month to the city separately for garbage collection.
IMHO - I prefer capitalism's problems over the alternatives...
What, like subsidized healthcare and education which actually benefits the citizens of the country?
To each their own, I suppose, but some things just stink of a ripoff.
Anecdote: I wanted to get a prescription for some basic antibiotics recently (precautionary). Walk-in doctor wanted $200-something before they'd even take a look plus $some unknown amount for the medication. Bugger that - I'd have rather spent the money on a trip to Panama (they give you a health card at the border, even as a tourist) and got taken care of there.
Now imagine if I wanted something more than just that - because insurance doesn't usually cover precautionary stuff: do I put up with the skyrocketing costs in the US or go somewhere that doesn't try to bankrupt you for getting sick? I think the latter. (Obviously, there's a reason my travel insurance used to cost me 2.5x as much per day when the US was on my itinerary as compared to anywhere else in the world - even places like Iraq and others ending in "stan").
Almost everything you cite is something that doesn't directly sell services to the people.
Government should NEVER be used in place of private enterprise.... Trust me...
As someone who comes from a country (New Zealand) where when I was in high school we used to ENVY you Americans with your >1 megabit cable but which now has an very well regulated telecom sector with a single infrastructure provider for most of the country who is building a nationwide fiber network which is actually doing what was promised AND where the majority of consumers in the country have a choice of 30+ ISPs who compete on price, customer service and various other value features rather than "we own this territory", I can say with reasonable certainty that you are demonstrably wrong and as such, I cannot "trust you" -- especially considering where I live now (Illinois) and the options available to me in the states I'm looking at moving to (somewhere on the east-coast).
The problem is that your situation is an anomaly. The vast majority of the country does not enjoy the choice you have.
I consider myself fairly lucky to live where I do - I get reasonable speeds at reasonable prices, however, I'm looking to move to another state in a few months and one of the significant deciding factors as to where I'll live is based on which provider(s) is/are in the area, and I'm not having much fun trying to make this decision. I may actually end up living in an "out of the way" place or worse neighbourhood JUST because the Internet provider in that area is better than another more convenient place.
Which is completely stupid - I shouldn't have to do that. I would rather have a choice of several retail providers no matter who has the physical cables running in to the house.
Providing services over government-run infrastructure would have no effect on peering issues between any two private companies (eg Comcast & Netflix or Verizon & Netflix) - the cores of those ISPs are still independent and private, just the last (and probably middle) miles are not;
BUT when you have government-run infrastructure done properly, it would be provided by the government to the ISPs as a wholesale layer-2 service only, meaning that it's open, meaning that you as the consumer would have your choice of Comcast, Verizon, Cox, TWC, Charter, CableOne, AT&T, Sonic, Monkeybrains, Clearwave Google etc as your ISP - and when you as the consumer have that kind of choice, ISPs have to compete on metrics other than "we own this territory" and "screw you, you have a 2-year contract"... metrics such as price and good customer service.
The governmental involvement in your life? Making sure the infrastructure works. (This can also be achieved with a private company if regulated accordingly) Need tech support? Call your ISP - they have the SLA with the infrastructure provider so any problems get solved fairly quickly. Have an issue accessing Netflix on your current ISP? Quit that ISP and move to another one. Changing is basically a matter of the new ISP provisioning a new username/password combination to put in to your router.
Case study: New Zealand (Chorus - a private, for profit company - is mandated to provide ADSL/VDSL/FTTH infrastructure on a wholesale basis to ISPs at regulated prices, ISPs provide retail services at whatever prices they deem fit, but consumers have a choice of 30 or so ISPs no matter where they live). Since this all came about in the mid-to-late 2000's, NZ's internet situation has improved quite a lot, both as far as speeds and prices are concerned - IIRC I was paying about $200/month for 2mbit/s wireless with a usage cap of about 100GB in 2005 - and before that our options were 384k satellite with the uplink provided by POTS or 128k ADSL. Most of the country never even had cable TV or Internet (some cable infrastructure is in Wellington and Christchurch - SKY satellite was the only way to get pay TV until IPTV and Internet-based TV came along in the last couple of years).
The UK and a few other countries are also doing things in a similar way. None of them are perfect, but on the whole, consumers are benefiting when there's open infrastructure.
I own several Nokia devices, including feature phones, "future phones" and smart devices (both S60 and S^3) - but not a single Windows phone (for what it's worth, I'm also a former resident of Finland up until shortly before Elop happened).
Irrespective of how much you may love Elop and think that Nokia was going down the tubes, are you seriously going to sit there and bitch about Nokia devices which are difficult as shit to break, hold a charge for ages and don't need to be restarted every other week and champion the shiny-shiny produced by Apple and other OEMs which offer devices up with so much crap on them that they *do* need to be restarted frequently, don't hold a charge and can be destroyed by dropping them from less than 2 metres?
No thanks, I'll sit here with my primary device - a Nokia N8-00 which I got back in January 2011 - which kicks the ass of any other phone I've been able to find for being a phone but also working perfectly well with modern websites, a better camera than most phones on store shelves now, has an FM transmitter so I can listen to my music collection while I'm driving with controls that are easier to use than those on the car radio and even old versions of Nokia maps kick Google maps any day of the week (says my experience driving through the Appalachians a few months ago) AND it works offline AND it has useful features like a speedometer. It also has HDMI (if I so desire to use it) and DLNA (if I so desire to use it - yes, it even works with Chromecast).
The only real complaint I have is the micro-USB connector wasn't great... but then again, nothing I haven't seen millions of Android folks complain about, either, so, bluetooth.
So what am I missing out on? Not much. I might not be able to run Candy Crush or whatever on my device, but that's not something I care about. I have Skype and some other key apps, I have email, I have a couple of non-SMS messaging apps, I have PuTTY, I can open PDFs... I'm probably going to use this thing until they dismantle the 3G networks because it probably won't die - it's outlasted... err... 3 Androids and an iPhone (all cracked screens/fell apart) that my SO has had in roughly the same timeframe.
So what if it's old? I don't have to put up with half the shit I would on iOS and Android. It. Just. Works.
As for Maemo, issues such as those you are describing happen during development, but unlike certain other manufacturers, these issues did not relate to a final release, and comparing them to even old versions of Android/iOS is stupid because it suggests that Android/iOS were bug free during development. I remember versions of Android being incredible amounts of suck - 2.1 I think had an issue whereby something to do with text messaging failed entirely (found that out when I got my mother an Android phone with 2.1 on it several years ago... guess what it was replaced with!?), and it didn't stop there - 4 and 5 have all seen more than their fair share of issues relating to the exact same things you're complaining were happening during Maemo's development. Maemo could have been a great transition for Nokia were it to replace Symbian in that segment and the dumbphone OS, well... it's a dumbphone OS, probably hadn't really been touched significantly in years - what do you want?
Disclaimer, I also have 2 Android devices - a small Samsung phone with 4.4 I think and a Nexus 7 with 5.1 IIRC. The phone is basically unusable as a phone, but it does make a decent enough WiFi hotspot for the times where I need one.
Not in the US, though... anyway, long story short: my punishment ended up being some minor work on the school website.
Hopefully this kid has a clue and tells the principal to fuck off (in a more diplomatic way, of course) and encourage the principal to report him to the IRS: chances are he's not earning a cent OR if he is, whoever is buying the pictures or paying the advertising probably has a W-9 or something (if he's making over $600 per customer, otherwise so long as he files, he's good), and an IP lawyer would surely LOVE for the school to claim copyright when there is no formal or informal contract/agreement in place for the kid to be taking photos on behalf of the school.
And if he gets suspended? Well, that could be a problem for the principal because there's no legal justification (the kid wasn't doing anything actually wrong, especially since he is, in fact, the owner of the images under law) and violations of privacy can't really occur in a public place, can they?
The only questions I have are: was he using his own camera and did he upload the images at home? If the answer to both of these questions is "yes", the kid should be in the clear.
Excuses excuses. Population density doesn't explain why places like Seattle have such shit Internet - or many other urban areas with similarly shit access, for that matter.
Existing middle-mile routes have plenty of capacity (dark fiber, spare wavelengths or even simply unused megabits, depending on who is selling) available on them, and it's not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things.
The public isn't necessarily asking the telcos to run last-mile fiber to Joe Ruralman's ranch from the nearest town which could easily be 50+ miles away - Joe Ruralman probably has satellite or something - 99% of the public is merely asking for decent access in their town, and if it's a town with more than some arbitrary number - say 1,000 households - there aren't that many excuses that can accurately justify why those households don't have better access.
Especially because in northern Europe (where some countries have lower density), I *can* get fiber to the summer cottage and the nearest neighbour is several miles away while the nearest town is a few dozen miles away, and I can get it with my choice of ISP *because* it [the infrastructure] is a public utility.
If you actually read the article, the 30% number is an anomaly in one county. The vast majority 90% and above, are non-emergency use (Burger King is closed and I'm hungry) or malicious pranks. The simplest solution is to require all phones to be registered via drivers license or state ID and billed a nominal fee $1/month on a credit card to be active for 911.
This would be very inconvenient for the millions of foreigners who visit the US every year. As someone who is resident in a country where this *is* required (India), not only is it a bad, bad idea, but it also provides (yet) another avenue for fraud (unscrupulous dealers giving out cc information or double/triple/quadruple billing the card for the $1 for profit and/or for registering the phone to a buddy who then uses it maliciously and then the innocent foreigner gets stopped and detained at the border on his way out. It might sound like an extreme situation but this sort of thing does happen.
The theoretical scenario of someone being kidnapped and getting access to a phone with no sim chip is just bleeding heart BS. Whose phone is the kidnapee must likely to get? Their own? That had a sim in it right? Any kidnapper with half a brain smashes that thing first off as it has GPS and you can never tell if it is truly turned off. The kidnapper's phone? Shit that thing is sure to work, the kidnapper is making calls to his boss/ransom calls etc. He might turn it off, but it will be functional, though probably behind a password, which can still be bypassed for a 911 call.
When I'm in the US, I drive around a lot and as a result I find myself often in areas where, if I required assistance, I would like for my spare phone with no SIM (which I do keep in the glovebox) to be working if I needed to get ahold of 911 and for some reason the battery in my other phone was dead (not common, but it could happen). Case in point, in January I was driving through Arkansas on my way to Memphis in the very early hours of the morning and it just so happened that there was a blizzard, which meant that 1. The roads were perilous because no plowing had been done yet and 2. I had to be super careful... if I had been involved in an accident, that phone might have made a difference.
Right now, real people are dying because some little shits are abusing the system and tying up 911 and emergency response. As an alternative to the above, provide 911 with the unique IMEI id number of the phone, and if the emergency is a prank or for repeated non-emergency calls, BRICK THE DAMN PHONE by remote.
This much *might* be a good idea - or maybe not bricking it, but at least rate-limiting it. Alternatively, IVR prompts as mentioned above.
Don't be too sure. I recently had a 5x8" notebook (the physical paper kind) stolen while I was at a customer site (accessible to the public). They didn't take my wallet, tablet, phones or tools, but the notebook and pencil vanished. It even had my name & phone number in the cover, but, nothing.
While it didn't contain any passwords (ok, it contained one IP address/router admin password but I changed it as soon as I got back), it did contain notes from that night that I would have liked to have for wrapping up, as well as notes from other customer sites (switch and port information, but nothing beyond "this cable goes here" sort of stuff) and other things that I think of while out and about (and trying to store such things on my tablet is more arduous than pulling out the notebook and pencil).
Fortunately, most of my notes get transcribed to some form of an electronic version every other day or so, but those don't always come with the other things you can only really get when you draw something on paper (like lines connecting one idea to another) - and even though I didn't "lose" much, it still makes me very uncomfortable that someone else may have *any* of the information (assuming they can make sense of it or even read my handwriting).
Since when is Internet a low profit commodity? For that matter, since when was there even any real competition on Internet services?
There was a time when I was a teenager when my friends and I *envied* the megabit+ connections available in the US because all we got was 256k DSL (if we were lucky) or, more often than not, dialup. Since then, however, the local loop has been unbundled, meaning the telco became "just another retailer", while all the infrastructure was spun off in to a whole new company (which isn't allowed to retail, is regulated, and is profitable despite huge YoY CAPEX investments over the last several years).
All this caused a huge uptake in ADSL in the mid-late 2000s, then roadside cabinets became a thing, resulting in most of the population's DSL becoming ADSL2+ with speeds of 10mbit/s or more (subject to loop length, it was about 17 at my parents house last time I was there), then the equipment in the roadside cabinets was upgraded to VDSL2, making that available - although it hasn't been a big seller, in part because it's just a little more expensive per month and the modems themselves are also pretty expensive by comparison to ADSL2+ devices - but more importantly, around the same time as VDSL deployments were happening, the government announced the build of a nationwide last-mile GPON build.
Which they actually began building and is actually doing a good job at providing many areas - even smaller towns - with access to 100mbit/s (and in some cases, even gigabit) fiber.
To my understanding it's also roughly on-time and in budget (at least, neither timeframe nor spending have increased so much that it's resulted in the project being a boondoggle).
AND all this at retail prices I wouldn't have imagined even 5 years ago (like $99 for unlimited on fiber), because even that recently, data caps were hilariously small (you get a lot more for the same amount of money now, though).
The country I refer to is, of course, New Zealand.
Here's something you Americans might find interesting: in some other countries, when you pay for a TV channel, you don't get commercial advertising on those channels (except for ads about other programming on the network) - commercial ads were only found on free channels, because the basic premise was that the channel was supported EITHER by ad revenue OR subscription fees, not both.
At least, that's the way it was when I last subscribed to pay TV in Europe and Australasia in the late and early 2000s respectively - things might have changed since then.
How recently was this effected? Elisa (Finland) billed me over EUR 1,500 (about 20x my usual spend) before suspending my service without any form of warning in the late 2000s. I asked of them at that time why they hadn't at least called me sooner, say, when it had reached something like EUR 500.
I've since gotten in to the industry, and something I am particularly concerned about is "bill shock".
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. That first sentance was supposed to have a funny tag around it. Let's try that again:
But nothin'... quit stutterin', boy, people'll think yewr stoopid
But.... The Federally backed Student Loan program expansion happens to be associated with a HUGE increase in money borrowed for ... Hold on to your hat... College education... Which just happened to take place at the SAME TIME as ... Hold your hat again.... Tuition increases...
But nothin'... quit stutterin', boy, people'll think yewr stoopid
If you read my post at all, you'd see I am also not in favour of student loans. Universities should be publicly funded and available to any citizen/resident or at the very least the student should be able to fund their education and living expenses with a part-time job.
This whole idea of student loans is stupid and supports this whole obsession America has with credit and going in to debt to get stuff - top, middle and bottom all suffer from this same thing.
Say, could all that be somehow related? Might there be a cause and effect relationship between the Fed making more money available and students borrowing more for tuition AND THEN tuitions going up? I think so...
Same thing is going to happen with healthcare.. Total costs are going up... You can bet the farm on that.
So basically you didn't read my post at all. Try replying to what I actually wrote and only then can we have a coherent discussion.
Again, for you, but as we have identified in other posts, your situation is an anomaly.
Secondly, the choice between DSL and cable isn't really choice.
Besides that, for the vast majority of subscribers, only one of those options actually offers (properly) high speeds -- and in a significant portion of cases the DSL on offer barely squeaks above the *old* definition of broadband.
So yes, there is a problem.
But it's also noteworthy that you've neglected to reply to my replies to other comments, just this and one other ;)
Publicly funded healthcare works when the healthcare PROVIDERS aren't charging the insurance (private OR public) 3 or 5 times the actual price of the service. I was talking to a guy just last night who told me that paying for his surgery was "only" about $70k compared to the $300k they would have charged his insurance (and he'd still have been stuck with 20% of that).
I'm not talking about subsidizing student loans - getting an education shouldn't require a massive student loan, subsidized or not, nor should it require parents to start a college fund the day they get the positive pregnancy test. Students should be able to afford to pay for university and their living expenses by themselves with *at most* a part-time job and come out of it without any significant debt - like it used to be in the US and still is in some other countries.
In the US, both of these things though seem to be the "free market" at work - providers of education and health are charging whatever the hell they want, and in both cases are charging amounts that are inflationary, exploitative and far beyond reason - as we already know, per capita spending on both of these things in the US is far higher than anywhere else yet the quality/outcome is far lower by comparison.
Having private education and healthcare for those who can afford it and want the extra perks (Ivy League universities, for example) but to deny those who can't afford it *any* option whatsoever (ie, no university or healthcare for you, poor person!) is not.
The average student shouldn't *have* to rely on scholarships and/or student loans just to pay for their degree even at random-state-U, but should have the option to apply for those things if they want to go for something specific.
Then you need to figure out another way because the "free market" isn't working.
and/or the incumbent would probably sue the newcomer for anything and everything, so the newcomer would have to have very deep pockets to get anywhere.
Now you're starting to make some sense.
1 pipe (who you don't deal with), multiple retailers (who you do deal with).
So long as said infrastructure provider is sufficiently regulated in that they can't charge $500/mo for access to the pipes, you might be on to something ;)
In your neighbourhood, perhaps. But as mentioned in a previous post, your situation is an anomaly and as a result, you are enjoying something 90+% of the rest of the country does not have.
This is ***probably*** due to citizen objections rather than government... kind of a NIMBY/DON'T INCONVENIENCE ME!!!!/Environmentalist etc deal.
This is what happens when politicians don't stand up to those people who are blocking genuinely important/beneficial projects and say "this is for your own good, like it or fuck off".
Unfortunately, it's when that attitude permeates the thinking of projects for the greedy/power hungry types (NSA, TSA, etc - name your poison) that such thinking is problematic.
If you think the government is cheaper, you are sadly mistaken. Even with profit built into the equation, government is never going to be cheaper, better, faster.
Government things aren't really *meant* to turn a profit, but when they do, you seem to get some sort of refund sometime in late April or early May. The thing about government projects - unlike private projects - is that they're meant to serve everybody, so they average things out, so while *YOU* might pay 10 cents more a month on your Internet bill, someone 10 miles out of town can now get the same services at the same speeds for the same price as you can... and cities like Seattle can finally feel what it's like to have Broadband.
or it will drive up your taxes.
Then learn to deal with paying more than 1.5% tax (as recent filings of certain normal everyday individuals I know recently revealed their effective rate to be) and not getting massive multiple-thousand-dollar refunds every year.
There's nothing really wrong with higher taxes when it benefits the people... Maybe if your taxes were a bit more reasonable (and you slowed down on all the war stuff), your infrastructure might not be decaying, you could afford to pay teachers properly, water would be free and clean, and I wouldn't be paying $14 a month to the city separately for garbage collection.
IMHO - I prefer capitalism's problems over the alternatives...
What, like subsidized healthcare and education which actually benefits the citizens of the country?
To each their own, I suppose, but some things just stink of a ripoff.
Anecdote: I wanted to get a prescription for some basic antibiotics recently (precautionary). Walk-in doctor wanted $200-something before they'd even take a look plus $some unknown amount for the medication. Bugger that - I'd have rather spent the money on a trip to Panama (they give you a health card at the border, even as a tourist) and got taken care of there.
Now imagine if I wanted something more than just that - because insurance doesn't usually cover precautionary stuff: do I put up with the skyrocketing costs in the US or go somewhere that doesn't try to bankrupt you for getting sick? I think the latter. (Obviously, there's a reason my travel insurance used to cost me 2.5x as much per day when the US was on my itinerary as compared to anywhere else in the world - even places like Iraq and others ending in "stan").
Almost everything you cite is something that doesn't directly sell services to the people.
Government should NEVER be used in place of private enterprise.... Trust me...
As someone who comes from a country (New Zealand) where when I was in high school we used to ENVY you Americans with your >1 megabit cable but which now has an very well regulated telecom sector with a single infrastructure provider for most of the country who is building a nationwide fiber network which is actually doing what was promised AND where the majority of consumers in the country have a choice of 30+ ISPs who compete on price, customer service and various other value features rather than "we own this territory", I can say with reasonable certainty that you are demonstrably wrong and as such, I cannot "trust you" -- especially considering where I live now (Illinois) and the options available to me in the states I'm looking at moving to (somewhere on the east-coast).
The problem is that your situation is an anomaly. The vast majority of the country does not enjoy the choice you have.
I consider myself fairly lucky to live where I do - I get reasonable speeds at reasonable prices, however, I'm looking to move to another state in a few months and one of the significant deciding factors as to where I'll live is based on which provider(s) is/are in the area, and I'm not having much fun trying to make this decision. I may actually end up living in an "out of the way" place or worse neighbourhood JUST because the Internet provider in that area is better than another more convenient place.
Which is completely stupid - I shouldn't have to do that. I would rather have a choice of several retail providers no matter who has the physical cables running in to the house.
Providing services over government-run infrastructure would have no effect on peering issues between any two private companies (eg Comcast & Netflix or Verizon & Netflix) - the cores of those ISPs are still independent and private, just the last (and probably middle) miles are not;
BUT when you have government-run infrastructure done properly, it would be provided by the government to the ISPs as a wholesale layer-2 service only, meaning that it's open, meaning that you as the consumer would have your choice of Comcast, Verizon, Cox, TWC, Charter, CableOne, AT&T, Sonic, Monkeybrains, Clearwave Google etc as your ISP - and when you as the consumer have that kind of choice, ISPs have to compete on metrics other than "we own this territory" and "screw you, you have a 2-year contract"... metrics such as price and good customer service.
The governmental involvement in your life? Making sure the infrastructure works. (This can also be achieved with a private company if regulated accordingly)
Need tech support? Call your ISP - they have the SLA with the infrastructure provider so any problems get solved fairly quickly.
Have an issue accessing Netflix on your current ISP? Quit that ISP and move to another one. Changing is basically a matter of the new ISP provisioning a new username/password combination to put in to your router.
Case study: New Zealand (Chorus - a private, for profit company - is mandated to provide ADSL/VDSL/FTTH infrastructure on a wholesale basis to ISPs at regulated prices, ISPs provide retail services at whatever prices they deem fit, but consumers have a choice of 30 or so ISPs no matter where they live). Since this all came about in the mid-to-late 2000's, NZ's internet situation has improved quite a lot, both as far as speeds and prices are concerned - IIRC I was paying about $200/month for 2mbit/s wireless with a usage cap of about 100GB in 2005 - and before that our options were 384k satellite with the uplink provided by POTS or 128k ADSL. Most of the country never even had cable TV or Internet (some cable infrastructure is in Wellington and Christchurch - SKY satellite was the only way to get pay TV until IPTV and Internet-based TV came along in the last couple of years).
The UK and a few other countries are also doing things in a similar way. None of them are perfect, but on the whole, consumers are benefiting when there's open infrastructure.
I own several Nokia devices, including feature phones, "future phones" and smart devices (both S60 and S^3) - but not a single Windows phone (for what it's worth, I'm also a former resident of Finland up until shortly before Elop happened).
Irrespective of how much you may love Elop and think that Nokia was going down the tubes, are you seriously going to sit there and bitch about Nokia devices which are difficult as shit to break, hold a charge for ages and don't need to be restarted every other week and champion the shiny-shiny produced by Apple and other OEMs which offer devices up with so much crap on them that they *do* need to be restarted frequently, don't hold a charge and can be destroyed by dropping them from less than 2 metres?
No thanks, I'll sit here with my primary device - a Nokia N8-00 which I got back in January 2011 - which kicks the ass of any other phone I've been able to find for being a phone but also working perfectly well with modern websites, a better camera than most phones on store shelves now, has an FM transmitter so I can listen to my music collection while I'm driving with controls that are easier to use than those on the car radio and even old versions of Nokia maps kick Google maps any day of the week (says my experience driving through the Appalachians a few months ago) AND it works offline AND it has useful features like a speedometer. It also has HDMI (if I so desire to use it) and DLNA (if I so desire to use it - yes, it even works with Chromecast).
The only real complaint I have is the micro-USB connector wasn't great... but then again, nothing I haven't seen millions of Android folks complain about, either, so, bluetooth.
So what am I missing out on? Not much. I might not be able to run Candy Crush or whatever on my device, but that's not something I care about. I have Skype and some other key apps, I have email, I have a couple of non-SMS messaging apps, I have PuTTY, I can open PDFs... I'm probably going to use this thing until they dismantle the 3G networks because it probably won't die - it's outlasted... err... 3 Androids and an iPhone (all cracked screens/fell apart) that my SO has had in roughly the same timeframe.
So what if it's old? I don't have to put up with half the shit I would on iOS and Android. It. Just. Works.
As for Maemo, issues such as those you are describing happen during development, but unlike certain other manufacturers, these issues did not relate to a final release, and comparing them to even old versions of Android/iOS is stupid because it suggests that Android/iOS were bug free during development. I remember versions of Android being incredible amounts of suck - 2.1 I think had an issue whereby something to do with text messaging failed entirely (found that out when I got my mother an Android phone with 2.1 on it several years ago... guess what it was replaced with!?), and it didn't stop there - 4 and 5 have all seen more than their fair share of issues relating to the exact same things you're complaining were happening during Maemo's development. Maemo could have been a great transition for Nokia were it to replace Symbian in that segment and the dumbphone OS, well... it's a dumbphone OS, probably hadn't really been touched significantly in years - what do you want?
Disclaimer, I also have 2 Android devices - a small Samsung phone with 4.4 I think and a Nexus 7 with 5.1 IIRC. The phone is basically unusable as a phone, but it does make a decent enough WiFi hotspot for the times where I need one.
Not in the US, though... anyway, long story short: my punishment ended up being some minor work on the school website.
Hopefully this kid has a clue and tells the principal to fuck off (in a more diplomatic way, of course) and encourage the principal to report him to the IRS: chances are he's not earning a cent OR if he is, whoever is buying the pictures or paying the advertising probably has a W-9 or something (if he's making over $600 per customer, otherwise so long as he files, he's good), and an IP lawyer would surely LOVE for the school to claim copyright when there is no formal or informal contract/agreement in place for the kid to be taking photos on behalf of the school.
And if he gets suspended? Well, that could be a problem for the principal because there's no legal justification (the kid wasn't doing anything actually wrong, especially since he is, in fact, the owner of the images under law) and violations of privacy can't really occur in a public place, can they?
The only questions I have are: was he using his own camera and did he upload the images at home? If the answer to both of these questions is "yes", the kid should be in the clear.
Excuses excuses. Population density doesn't explain why places like Seattle have such shit Internet - or many other urban areas with similarly shit access, for that matter.
Existing middle-mile routes have plenty of capacity (dark fiber, spare wavelengths or even simply unused megabits, depending on who is selling) available on them, and it's not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things.
The public isn't necessarily asking the telcos to run last-mile fiber to Joe Ruralman's ranch from the nearest town which could easily be 50+ miles away - Joe Ruralman probably has satellite or something - 99% of the public is merely asking for decent access in their town, and if it's a town with more than some arbitrary number - say 1,000 households - there aren't that many excuses that can accurately justify why those households don't have better access.
Especially because in northern Europe (where some countries have lower density), I *can* get fiber to the summer cottage and the nearest neighbour is several miles away while the nearest town is a few dozen miles away, and I can get it with my choice of ISP *because* it [the infrastructure] is a public utility.
If you actually read the article, the 30% number is an anomaly in one county. The vast majority 90% and above, are non-emergency use (Burger King is closed and I'm hungry) or malicious pranks. The simplest solution is to require all phones to be registered via drivers license or state ID and billed a nominal fee $1/month on a credit card to be active for 911.
This would be very inconvenient for the millions of foreigners who visit the US every year. As someone who is resident in a country where this *is* required (India), not only is it a bad, bad idea, but it also provides (yet) another avenue for fraud (unscrupulous dealers giving out cc information or double/triple/quadruple billing the card for the $1 for profit and/or for registering the phone to a buddy who then uses it maliciously and then the innocent foreigner gets stopped and detained at the border on his way out. It might sound like an extreme situation but this sort of thing does happen.
The theoretical scenario of someone being kidnapped and getting access to a phone with no sim chip is just bleeding heart BS. Whose phone is the kidnapee must likely to get? Their own? That had a sim in it right? Any kidnapper with half a brain smashes that thing first off as it has GPS and you can never tell if it is truly turned off. The kidnapper's phone? Shit that thing is sure to work, the kidnapper is making calls to his boss/ransom calls etc. He might turn it off, but it will be functional, though probably behind a password, which can still be bypassed for a 911 call.
When I'm in the US, I drive around a lot and as a result I find myself often in areas where, if I required assistance, I would like for my spare phone with no SIM (which I do keep in the glovebox) to be working if I needed to get ahold of 911 and for some reason the battery in my other phone was dead (not common, but it could happen). Case in point, in January I was driving through Arkansas on my way to Memphis in the very early hours of the morning and it just so happened that there was a blizzard, which meant that 1. The roads were perilous because no plowing had been done yet and 2. I had to be super careful... if I had been involved in an accident, that phone might have made a difference.
Right now, real people are dying because some little shits are abusing the system and tying up 911 and emergency response. As an alternative to the above, provide 911 with the unique IMEI id number of the phone, and if the emergency is a prank or for repeated non-emergency calls, BRICK THE DAMN PHONE by remote.
This much *might* be a good idea - or maybe not bricking it, but at least rate-limiting it. Alternatively, IVR prompts as mentioned above.
Don't be too sure. I recently had a 5x8" notebook (the physical paper kind) stolen while I was at a customer site (accessible to the public). They didn't take my wallet, tablet, phones or tools, but the notebook and pencil vanished. It even had my name & phone number in the cover, but, nothing.
While it didn't contain any passwords (ok, it contained one IP address/router admin password but I changed it as soon as I got back), it did contain notes from that night that I would have liked to have for wrapping up, as well as notes from other customer sites (switch and port information, but nothing beyond "this cable goes here" sort of stuff) and other things that I think of while out and about (and trying to store such things on my tablet is more arduous than pulling out the notebook and pencil).
Fortunately, most of my notes get transcribed to some form of an electronic version every other day or so, but those don't always come with the other things you can only really get when you draw something on paper (like lines connecting one idea to another) - and even though I didn't "lose" much, it still makes me very uncomfortable that someone else may have *any* of the information (assuming they can make sense of it or even read my handwriting).
Exactly. Even bi-directional 500mb isn't easy to attain unless you're running some kind of traffic generator or something like that.
It's both absurd and awesome. I couldn't find the post on DSLR you were referring to though.
NZ and Australia are two different beasts. NZ's Internet market is doing pretty well compared to Australia. And has uncapped Internet now.
Since when is Internet a low profit commodity?
For that matter, since when was there even any real competition on Internet services?
There was a time when I was a teenager when my friends and I *envied* the megabit+ connections available in the US because all we got was 256k DSL (if we were lucky) or, more often than not, dialup. Since then, however, the local loop has been unbundled, meaning the telco became "just another retailer", while all the infrastructure was spun off in to a whole new company (which isn't allowed to retail, is regulated, and is profitable despite huge YoY CAPEX investments over the last several years).
All this caused a huge uptake in ADSL in the mid-late 2000s, then roadside cabinets became a thing, resulting in most of the population's DSL becoming ADSL2+ with speeds of 10mbit/s or more (subject to loop length, it was about 17 at my parents house last time I was there), then the equipment in the roadside cabinets was upgraded to VDSL2, making that available - although it hasn't been a big seller, in part because it's just a little more expensive per month and the modems themselves are also pretty expensive by comparison to ADSL2+ devices - but more importantly, around the same time as VDSL deployments were happening, the government announced the build of a nationwide last-mile GPON build.
Which they actually began building and is actually doing a good job at providing many areas - even smaller towns - with access to 100mbit/s (and in some cases, even gigabit) fiber.
To my understanding it's also roughly on-time and in budget (at least, neither timeframe nor spending have increased so much that it's resulted in the project being a boondoggle).
AND all this at retail prices I wouldn't have imagined even 5 years ago (like $99 for unlimited on fiber), because even that recently, data caps were hilariously small (you get a lot more for the same amount of money now, though).
The country I refer to is, of course, New Zealand.
Here's something you Americans might find interesting: in some other countries, when you pay for a TV channel, you don't get commercial advertising on those channels (except for ads about other programming on the network) - commercial ads were only found on free channels, because the basic premise was that the channel was supported EITHER by ad revenue OR subscription fees, not both.
At least, that's the way it was when I last subscribed to pay TV in Europe and Australasia in the late and early 2000s respectively - things might have changed since then.
300TB a month? Doing the math in my head puts that at very close to 1gbit/s throughput for 720 hours (30 days).
That's a whole lotta hard drives and/or machines they must have going, their electricity bill must be enormous :D
How recently was this effected? Elisa (Finland) billed me over EUR 1,500 (about 20x my usual spend) before suspending my service without any form of warning in the late 2000s. I asked of them at that time why they hadn't at least called me sooner, say, when it had reached something like EUR 500.
I've since gotten in to the industry, and something I am particularly concerned about is "bill shock".