As far as I know, Sprint is the only carrier that does this. If every carrier was forced to allow this type of competition, I'm sure it would become the majority.
The other carriers do this, Sprint is just the one with the most MNVOs. Not sure about Verizon, but at least AT&T and T-Mobile also carry MNVOs with unlimited plans (text, talk, and data) for $40-$45. Straight Talk even lets you buy a SIM card for any T-Mobile or AT&T phone for $45/month unlimited everything. (But their customer service is reportedly the worst in the world.)
The reason that these aren't the majority is because the big four excel at marketing. They try to position themselves as the "premium" mobile providers with fancy phones and big expensive plans, and spin the MVNOs (and some of their own plans) as "budget" services for low-income consumers. If Apple products, cable TV, and SUVs have taught us anything, it's to never underestimate the profit potential of status symbols. To a majority of the populace, a cell phone is much more a status symbol than a necessity.
I did the research about a month ago. Since I don't use the carrier's services all that much (I don't make many phone calls, I use Google Voice for text messages, and turn off 3G data most of the time), I decided to go with Ting, the MVNO in TFA. I had to pay an outrageous amount for the phone (their low-end Android phones were too crappy to consider and there were no mid-level Android phones), but on the bright side, I'm looking at paying between $11 and $15 per month if I keep my usage low enough.
Since it is rare for a single process to require more than 4GB of its own address space, there is not much reason to migrate from i386 to amd64 on Linux
But then, if your hardware supports it, there's not a good reason not to, either. Unless you're one of the rare few that happen to need a particular version of Flash or Java, there's no advantage (and a slight performance penalty) to sticking with a 32-bit Linux distribution.
Also, it may be rare now to have a process that takes up more than 4GB of address space, but you'll be surprised how quickly that will cease to be true. The instance of Firefox that I'm using to write this is taking up 308MB of memory and that's only with a few tabs open. I imagine heavy users bump up against 1GB routinely.
I can't find the source at the moment, but there was a discussion on LKML where a few of the kernel developers were threatening to write a patch which refused to let a PAE kernel boot on AMD64 hardware.
Hence the rapid shift from 32bit to 64bit in Windows, but the much more leisurely migration on Linux and BSD.
I think you have those quite reversed...
When the first AMD64 processors were released, Linux was the only mainstream OS that could take full advantage of the hardware on day one because AMD actively worked with the open source community to get support for their chips in software like the kernel and gcc before launch. In truth, it wasn't that hard because Linux already had mature 64-bit support on other platforms (sparc, mips64) for years.
And for years, Linux was still the only mainstream OS that had good 64-bit support. The only thing holding users back were a couple of proprietary desktop applications that are now finally becoming fully obsolete. System administrators have been able to run full 64-bit Linux on their servers for what, 8 years or so.
But on Windows, everyone had to wait for software and hardware vendors to get their crap together in order to run anything decent. And I know a number of businesses who cannot and will not swtich over to 64-bit Windows any time soon due to legacy hardware and/or software requirements.
This is one argument I really don't get, and yet the FOSS library maintainers seem to be adamant that they must be able to break their ABIs whenever they want.
Yes, FOSS library maintainers want to be able to break their ABIs. They do it often. And that's fine. Why? Because we have this thing called versioning. You can write your application against libfoo.so.2, and the author of libfoo can rewrite the thing from ground-up and call it libfoo.so.3. And guess what? Your application works just fine because libfoo.so.2 didn't disappear from the face of the earth. You just install libfoo.so.2 and libfoo.so.3 side-by-side and everybody's happy. This is a primary strength of open source, not a weakness.
Most idiots just parrot the 'security through obscurity' thinking it's some compelling argument when it's really not. If the basis of your security is entirely reliant on the obscurity of your algorithms, etc. being private then it is bad. But using some level of secrecy as a first line of defense can be quite useful in preventing attacks.
My favorite analogy so far is: good security is layered like an onion. So, changing your SSH port to something other than 22 is not going to fool an attacker who is pretty sure that you probably have an SSH daemon running on your machine. But doing so lowers your attack surface significantly against random skript kiddies and less skilled crackers. Every layer you add reduces the attack surface that much more, until the only way someone is going to break into your system is if they happen to know exactly how it's set up and happen to have a couple of 0-day vulnerabilities at their disposal.
If you downplay all of the easy things which offer trivial security on their own but when put together, add significant security, all you're left with is a single barrier between root and the attackers. What are the chances that the barrier is perfectly bug-free and impenetrable? Even OpenBSD has shipped with security issues in the default install and that's probably the most hardened-out-of-the-box OS there is.
I tried Groove IP, and it looks like most of the time, all you have to do is install the app and sign in.
However, when testing it out with another phone, I found that the delay in the audio was too high to carry on a normal conversaion. On the order of 1 - 1.5 seconds. I couldn't find any settings in Groove IP that would lower it. Doesn't seem to be a problem with Google Voice because I carried out the same test on my computer (over the same wifi) and the latency was well within tolerable.
I might use Groove IP in a pinch, but not for normal chatting.
When I got hired at my current job, my first assignment was to go to store.apple.com and rack up around $3000 on a new computer. I chose a MacBook Pro with a few accessories.
I had used Linux almost exclusively for over a decade, but tried to give OS X a fair shake for daily use. After two months of struggling, I couldn't train myself out of certain things that are very common in all of the major Linux desktop environments. (Focus follows mouse, middle click to paste, customizable panels, a fully-featured terminal, etc, etc.) Every time I tried to Google for a way to make OS X behave the way I wanted, the end result was always, "oh, Macs can't do that."
So I installed Linux and haven't looked back. I'm just more productive with it and I can bend it to my will.
I take it a step, further, though: I own my own domain and have made it a practice of using a custom email address for each site I need to log in to, i.e. sitename@mydomain.com
This is what I liked about using gmail: you can append a +whatever to the username part of the address to let you know when a company sells or misuses your address. The downside is that in 2012, a good 50% of websites still don't understand that "+" is a valid character in an email address.
When I set up my personal email server, I added this line to/etc/postfix/main.cf:
recipient_delimiter =.
Which does the same thing as the gmail "+" delimiter, but is accepted by every website I've come across. (Since firstname.lastname@example.com is a very common address format.)
Seeing as Android is open source, are there any x86 ports of CyanogenMod? Even for just running in a VM like VirtualBox? Seems like having such a thing would at least increase user/developer interest.
I know there have been some x86 ports of Android, but those have either been for very specific hardware (e.g., a certain model of netbook) or poorly maintained.
Adafruit are great. They produced an enhanced clone of the legendary Roland TB-303 bass synth and sequencer, then open sourced the circuit diagrams.
Right on! I built three x0xb0xes. Sold two, kept one. Need to get that thing out and work on some more choons...
Unlike the dozens of prevous 303 clones, they actually cloned the sequencer which was as essential to the appeal of the machine as the synth section.
It's not fair to call the sequencer a clone. Although similar to the 303's sequencer, the x0xb0x sequencer is more flexible, easier to use, and superior in almost every way. I often see DJs and musicians on YouTube use the x0xb0x as a stand-alone MIDI sequencer for other gear.
I can understand why the RIAA and MPAA would be interested in this happening, by why would an ISP want to do this? The act of monitoring the activity of their customers requires a lot of dedication to packet capturing and inspection which would cost a lot of money.
Not really. I work for a company that sells solutions to ISPs (and others) for detailed analysis of the traffic on their network, right down to the application level. Unless you're subscribed to some local mom-and-pop DSL provider, your ISP already know exactly what you do with your Internet connection. The hardware and software to do this is not terrifically expensive anymore. And usually, it has the ability to do things like DDoS mitigation and on-the-fly load balancing as well. (We sell boxes that can do deep packet inspection at a rate of 40 gigabits per second. And if you need more than that, all you have to do is buy more boxes!)
As long as your ISP is collecting data about the applications its customers are using, it's not at all difficult to monitor traffic for certain payloads or destinations, and then log the IPs of all traffic that matches. The better question to ask is: what are the ISPs getting out of this? Especially after SOPA and PIPA failed, what's in it for them?
"...collapses in value." There was certainly that big bubble, but other than that it's been fairly stable. Certainly for the last many months.
And in any event, all government-controlled currencies are susceptible to flucuations (even collapses) in value. This is always a symptom of some other problem rather than a problem with currency itself.
If in some bizarro world, the U.S. government adopted Bitcoin as the legal currency, they would only be able to affect its value as much as they do today with dollars: indirectly and by relatively small amounts.
The company I work for is very successful and has a great geek culture. We use agile methods and it has been working very well for us. We design and develop new features (and fix bugs) quickly, and we always ship on time. We're hiring like mad and can't get enough good developers in the door. I'm not going to name the company, but we hit the front page of Slashdot once in awhile.
The key is to pick the parts of both traditional development management and agile that make sense for the team and the product. For instance, some teams scrum every day, but my team only scrums twice a week. You can't buy an Agile for Dummies book, force the whole thing upon your developer teams, and then expect your productivity to skyrocket. Even when you think you have a good recipe, it should be constantly evaluated and tweaked or reworked when necessary. The whole point of Agile is to be flexible enough in your methodology that you can scrap or replace what doesn't work.
My advice to the submitter: Feed and water your hackers. As in, provide an unlimited supply of snacks and beverages. Bring meals in occasionally. Don't say no when they ask to put a MAME cabinet in the break room. Encourage them to socialize on company time. Let them work on side-projects which benefit their workflow. Avoid hiring managers from outside the company when possible and prefer to groom the smartest individuals for management positions if they're interested. Above all, give your lower-level managers and developers clear and realistic goals and an abudance of freedom to decide how to best meet them.
No. The hard disk, memory, and any other parts accessible through access panels in the bottom of the unit are user-serviceable and swapping them out does not void the warranty of any laptop that I've ever heard of. Maybe an Apple machine, but certainly not a Thinkpad.
I came here to say this. When a song has vocals (particularly hyper-compressed ones optimized for factory car stereos), I find it impossible to concentrate on anything else but the song. Even driving. Dunno if it's my ADD or if everyone is like this and just don't know it or don't care. If I want music for background noise, I generally reach for trance, downtempo, or pretty much anything that is elelctronic sans vocals.
Typically, I tune into one of several streaming stations, but I also maintain a YouTube playlist called music to hack by that I sometimes bring up at work when I want to drown out the office jibber-jabber and concentrate to some fairly rocking choons.
Appreciate the reply and I do agree that Memorial Day honors (and should honor) the veterans who have served but died for non-combat reasons or after their service for other reasons. But we have a holiday for veterans and other military service members and it's Veteran's Day. Memorial Day, as the name implies, ought to honor those who have died, in my opinion. Thanks to those who have come before me, anyone in the U.S. is free to disagree, however.:)
As a military veteran with friends and family who also served in the military (some who have been in combat), I'd like to offer you the most sincere heartfelt sentiment I can think of: Fuck You.
You don't even understand the thing that you're bashing. Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in battle, not everyone in the military. It doesn't much matter whether you agree with war, or the government, or the military, or whatever your favorite institutional boogeyman is, today is for those who volunteered to serve their country and paid the ultimate sacrifice. If anything, this should be the peacenik's favorite holiday because it highlights and emphasises the real cost of war.
And then there's the irony of posting as an Anonymous Coward...
Languages which are expressive are a little harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.
I'm not disagreeing with this in any way, but an expressive language which does a lot in a single line of code by definition means that it's harder for humans to read. And readbility is (in my opinion) directly proportional to maintainability. This is, perhaps, why Perl is sometimes derided as write-once, read never.
I don't know if heard this maxim somewhere else, but I think it's pretty accurate: You'll never understand a line of code as clearly as the moment you write it.
The market shifted. First, many Perl programmers shifted to PHP once the net decided security and economy of processing power were not goals on the table. Second, a lot of newer programmers are reliant on frameworks and other pre-built systems and learned the languages that go with those.
Do you maintain the website linked as your home page? If so, what's it running under the hood?
"Internal traffic" counts only towards Comcast's own content services like Xfinity. All other traffic (including to your neighbor) will whittle away at the cap.
Remember, data caps are not about network or quality management. They're about keeping the provider from becoming a "dump pipe" for premium content elsewhere. (In Comcast's case, high-def streaming TV.)
As a motorcylist, I very desparately want to see the day where most of the cars on the road are driverless.
When there's no traffic, cruising along on two wheels is the best thing in the whole world. When the road gets filled up with cagers, however, you start to fear for your life. Motorcycles are effectively invisible to car drivers. No matter how observant, courteous, cautious you think you are, studies have shown that you only *really* pay attention to objects on the road that are a threat to you. Or in other words, vehicles that are as big or bigger than you.
When we have driverless cars, I know I'll feel a lot better around them than their human-handled counterparts. They won't not notice me because they were too busy putting on lipstick via the rear-view mirror. They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane. Most importantly, they won't "mess with that biker guy" via brake-checking, tail-gating or otherwise try to get me to crash by coming too close or throwing things at me. (Yes, this actually happens and if you don't believe me I can forward you a few dozen YouTube videos to prove it.)
That's a nice broad brush you have there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it...
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
Where exactly did you get the impression that there are no bars, coffee shops, restaurants, user groups, meetups, or hackerspaces in America?
One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people.
A truly dizzying line of reasoning... Just because online games happen to exist does not mean nobody organizes LAN parties anymore. And honestly, how is a LAN party a social event? A bunch of gaming nerds cram themselves into a room to stare at their monitors with headphones on? Please.
Also, your notion that American culture is dominated by introverts is so wrong as to be hilarious. Introverts are routinely shamed simply for being intellectual, creative, shy, or socially awkward. The most popular prime-time sitcom right now in the U.S. is literally nothing but a solid half hour of poking fun at ridiculously stereotyped geek caricatures.
Look how well circular fluorescent bulbs went over: like a lead balloon.
Actually, circular fluorescent bulbs were very popular in the 50's and 60's, particularly in kitchens, in basements, over workbenches, and so on. Places in the home were people spent a lot of time and wanted an abundance of light. They fell out of favor later on because style and taste moved toward softer and warmer lighting, even in the more well-lit areas of the home.
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The other carriers do this, Sprint is just the one with the most MNVOs. Not sure about Verizon, but at least AT&T and T-Mobile also carry MNVOs with unlimited plans (text, talk, and data) for $40-$45. Straight Talk even lets you buy a SIM card for any T-Mobile or AT&T phone for $45/month unlimited everything. (But their customer service is reportedly the worst in the world.)
The reason that these aren't the majority is because the big four excel at marketing. They try to position themselves as the "premium" mobile providers with fancy phones and big expensive plans, and spin the MVNOs (and some of their own plans) as "budget" services for low-income consumers. If Apple products, cable TV, and SUVs have taught us anything, it's to never underestimate the profit potential of status symbols. To a majority of the populace, a cell phone is much more a status symbol than a necessity.
I did the research about a month ago. Since I don't use the carrier's services all that much (I don't make many phone calls, I use Google Voice for text messages, and turn off 3G data most of the time), I decided to go with Ting, the MVNO in TFA. I had to pay an outrageous amount for the phone (their low-end Android phones were too crappy to consider and there were no mid-level Android phones), but on the bright side, I'm looking at paying between $11 and $15 per month if I keep my usage low enough.
But then, if your hardware supports it, there's not a good reason not to, either. Unless you're one of the rare few that happen to need a particular version of Flash or Java, there's no advantage (and a slight performance penalty) to sticking with a 32-bit Linux distribution.
Also, it may be rare now to have a process that takes up more than 4GB of address space, but you'll be surprised how quickly that will cease to be true. The instance of Firefox that I'm using to write this is taking up 308MB of memory and that's only with a few tabs open. I imagine heavy users bump up against 1GB routinely.
I can't find the source at the moment, but there was a discussion on LKML where a few of the kernel developers were threatening to write a patch which refused to let a PAE kernel boot on AMD64 hardware.
I think you have those quite reversed...
When the first AMD64 processors were released, Linux was the only mainstream OS that could take full advantage of the hardware on day one because AMD actively worked with the open source community to get support for their chips in software like the kernel and gcc before launch. In truth, it wasn't that hard because Linux already had mature 64-bit support on other platforms (sparc, mips64) for years.
And for years, Linux was still the only mainstream OS that had good 64-bit support. The only thing holding users back were a couple of proprietary desktop applications that are now finally becoming fully obsolete. System administrators have been able to run full 64-bit Linux on their servers for what, 8 years or so.
But on Windows, everyone had to wait for software and hardware vendors to get their crap together in order to run anything decent. And I know a number of businesses who cannot and will not swtich over to 64-bit Windows any time soon due to legacy hardware and/or software requirements.
Yes, FOSS library maintainers want to be able to break their ABIs. They do it often. And that's fine. Why? Because we have this thing called versioning. You can write your application against libfoo.so.2, and the author of libfoo can rewrite the thing from ground-up and call it libfoo.so.3. And guess what? Your application works just fine because libfoo.so.2 didn't disappear from the face of the earth. You just install libfoo.so.2 and libfoo.so.3 side-by-side and everybody's happy. This is a primary strength of open source, not a weakness.
My favorite analogy so far is: good security is layered like an onion. So, changing your SSH port to something other than 22 is not going to fool an attacker who is pretty sure that you probably have an SSH daemon running on your machine. But doing so lowers your attack surface significantly against random skript kiddies and less skilled crackers. Every layer you add reduces the attack surface that much more, until the only way someone is going to break into your system is if they happen to know exactly how it's set up and happen to have a couple of 0-day vulnerabilities at their disposal.
If you downplay all of the easy things which offer trivial security on their own but when put together, add significant security, all you're left with is a single barrier between root and the attackers. What are the chances that the barrier is perfectly bug-free and impenetrable? Even OpenBSD has shipped with security issues in the default install and that's probably the most hardened-out-of-the-box OS there is.
I tried Groove IP, and it looks like most of the time, all you have to do is install the app and sign in.
However, when testing it out with another phone, I found that the delay in the audio was too high to carry on a normal conversaion. On the order of 1 - 1.5 seconds. I couldn't find any settings in Groove IP that would lower it. Doesn't seem to be a problem with Google Voice because I carried out the same test on my computer (over the same wifi) and the latency was well within tolerable.
I might use Groove IP in a pinch, but not for normal chatting.
When I got hired at my current job, my first assignment was to go to store.apple.com and rack up around $3000 on a new computer. I chose a MacBook Pro with a few accessories.
I had used Linux almost exclusively for over a decade, but tried to give OS X a fair shake for daily use. After two months of struggling, I couldn't train myself out of certain things that are very common in all of the major Linux desktop environments. (Focus follows mouse, middle click to paste, customizable panels, a fully-featured terminal, etc, etc.) Every time I tried to Google for a way to make OS X behave the way I wanted, the end result was always, "oh, Macs can't do that."
So I installed Linux and haven't looked back. I'm just more productive with it and I can bend it to my will.
This is what I liked about using gmail: you can append a +whatever to the username part of the address to let you know when a company sells or misuses your address. The downside is that in 2012, a good 50% of websites still don't understand that "+" is a valid character in an email address.
When I set up my personal email server, I added this line to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
recipient_delimiter = .
Which does the same thing as the gmail "+" delimiter, but is accepted by every website I've come across. (Since firstname.lastname@example.com is a very common address format.)
Seeing as Android is open source, are there any x86 ports of CyanogenMod? Even for just running in a VM like VirtualBox? Seems like having such a thing would at least increase user/developer interest.
I know there have been some x86 ports of Android, but those have either been for very specific hardware (e.g., a certain model of netbook) or poorly maintained.
Right on! I built three x0xb0xes. Sold two, kept one. Need to get that thing out and work on some more choons...
It's not fair to call the sequencer a clone. Although similar to the 303's sequencer, the x0xb0x sequencer is more flexible, easier to use, and superior in almost every way. I often see DJs and musicians on YouTube use the x0xb0x as a stand-alone MIDI sequencer for other gear.
Not really. I work for a company that sells solutions to ISPs (and others) for detailed analysis of the traffic on their network, right down to the application level. Unless you're subscribed to some local mom-and-pop DSL provider, your ISP already know exactly what you do with your Internet connection. The hardware and software to do this is not terrifically expensive anymore. And usually, it has the ability to do things like DDoS mitigation and on-the-fly load balancing as well. (We sell boxes that can do deep packet inspection at a rate of 40 gigabits per second. And if you need more than that, all you have to do is buy more boxes!)
As long as your ISP is collecting data about the applications its customers are using, it's not at all difficult to monitor traffic for certain payloads or destinations, and then log the IPs of all traffic that matches. The better question to ask is: what are the ISPs getting out of this? Especially after SOPA and PIPA failed, what's in it for them?
And in any event, all government-controlled currencies are susceptible to flucuations (even collapses) in value. This is always a symptom of some other problem rather than a problem with currency itself.
If in some bizarro world, the U.S. government adopted Bitcoin as the legal currency, they would only be able to affect its value as much as they do today with dollars: indirectly and by relatively small amounts.
Counter-anecdote:
The company I work for is very successful and has a great geek culture. We use agile methods and it has been working very well for us. We design and develop new features (and fix bugs) quickly, and we always ship on time. We're hiring like mad and can't get enough good developers in the door. I'm not going to name the company, but we hit the front page of Slashdot once in awhile.
The key is to pick the parts of both traditional development management and agile that make sense for the team and the product. For instance, some teams scrum every day, but my team only scrums twice a week. You can't buy an Agile for Dummies book, force the whole thing upon your developer teams, and then expect your productivity to skyrocket. Even when you think you have a good recipe, it should be constantly evaluated and tweaked or reworked when necessary. The whole point of Agile is to be flexible enough in your methodology that you can scrap or replace what doesn't work.
My advice to the submitter: Feed and water your hackers. As in, provide an unlimited supply of snacks and beverages. Bring meals in occasionally. Don't say no when they ask to put a MAME cabinet in the break room. Encourage them to socialize on company time. Let them work on side-projects which benefit their workflow. Avoid hiring managers from outside the company when possible and prefer to groom the smartest individuals for management positions if they're interested. Above all, give your lower-level managers and developers clear and realistic goals and an abudance of freedom to decide how to best meet them.
No. The hard disk, memory, and any other parts accessible through access panels in the bottom of the unit are user-serviceable and swapping them out does not void the warranty of any laptop that I've ever heard of. Maybe an Apple machine, but certainly not a Thinkpad.
I came here to say this. When a song has vocals (particularly hyper-compressed ones optimized for factory car stereos), I find it impossible to concentrate on anything else but the song. Even driving. Dunno if it's my ADD or if everyone is like this and just don't know it or don't care. If I want music for background noise, I generally reach for trance, downtempo, or pretty much anything that is elelctronic sans vocals.
Typically, I tune into one of several streaming stations, but I also maintain a YouTube playlist called music to hack by that I sometimes bring up at work when I want to drown out the office jibber-jabber and concentrate to some fairly rocking choons.
Appreciate the reply and I do agree that Memorial Day honors (and should honor) the veterans who have served but died for non-combat reasons or after their service for other reasons. But we have a holiday for veterans and other military service members and it's Veteran's Day. Memorial Day, as the name implies, ought to honor those who have died, in my opinion. Thanks to those who have come before me, anyone in the U.S. is free to disagree, however. :)
As a military veteran with friends and family who also served in the military (some who have been in combat), I'd like to offer you the most sincere heartfelt sentiment I can think of: Fuck You.
You don't even understand the thing that you're bashing. Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in battle, not everyone in the military. It doesn't much matter whether you agree with war, or the government, or the military, or whatever your favorite institutional boogeyman is, today is for those who volunteered to serve their country and paid the ultimate sacrifice. If anything, this should be the peacenik's favorite holiday because it highlights and emphasises the real cost of war.
And then there's the irony of posting as an Anonymous Coward...
There, I said it.
As a matter of fact, I am.
Psychologists don't have patients.
I'm not disagreeing with this in any way, but an expressive language which does a lot in a single line of code by definition means that it's harder for humans to read. And readbility is (in my opinion) directly proportional to maintainability. This is, perhaps, why Perl is sometimes derided as write-once, read never.
I don't know if heard this maxim somewhere else, but I think it's pretty accurate: You'll never understand a line of code as clearly as the moment you write it.
Do you maintain the website linked as your home page? If so, what's it running under the hood?
"Internal traffic" counts only towards Comcast's own content services like Xfinity. All other traffic (including to your neighbor) will whittle away at the cap.
Remember, data caps are not about network or quality management. They're about keeping the provider from becoming a "dump pipe" for premium content elsewhere. (In Comcast's case, high-def streaming TV.)
As a motorcylist, I very desparately want to see the day where most of the cars on the road are driverless.
When there's no traffic, cruising along on two wheels is the best thing in the whole world. When the road gets filled up with cagers, however, you start to fear for your life. Motorcycles are effectively invisible to car drivers. No matter how observant, courteous, cautious you think you are, studies have shown that you only *really* pay attention to objects on the road that are a threat to you. Or in other words, vehicles that are as big or bigger than you.
When we have driverless cars, I know I'll feel a lot better around them than their human-handled counterparts. They won't not notice me because they were too busy putting on lipstick via the rear-view mirror. They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane. Most importantly, they won't "mess with that biker guy" via brake-checking, tail-gating or otherwise try to get me to crash by coming too close or throwing things at me. (Yes, this actually happens and if you don't believe me I can forward you a few dozen YouTube videos to prove it.)
That's a nice broad brush you have there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it...
Where exactly did you get the impression that there are no bars, coffee shops, restaurants, user groups, meetups, or hackerspaces in America?
A truly dizzying line of reasoning... Just because online games happen to exist does not mean nobody organizes LAN parties anymore. And honestly, how is a LAN party a social event? A bunch of gaming nerds cram themselves into a room to stare at their monitors with headphones on? Please.
Also, your notion that American culture is dominated by introverts is so wrong as to be hilarious. Introverts are routinely shamed simply for being intellectual, creative, shy, or socially awkward. The most popular prime-time sitcom right now in the U.S. is literally nothing but a solid half hour of poking fun at ridiculously stereotyped geek caricatures.
Actually, circular fluorescent bulbs were very popular in the 50's and 60's, particularly in kitchens, in basements, over workbenches, and so on. Places in the home were people spent a lot of time and wanted an abundance of light. They fell out of favor later on because style and taste moved toward softer and warmer lighting, even in the more well-lit areas of the home.