I wish I had mod points to rate you higher.

For better or worse, I'm with Google precisely because they allow me to be ISP agnostic. For better or worse, they are the next best solution for me, with the best solution being to host my own email server of course.

I know that I shouldn't be surprised, and in fact I'm not. However, our AT&T rep has been telling us that AT&T would be rolling out LTE in my market "soon" for over a year. According to this map, we're not even on the "soon" list.

We switched to AT&T because they had the iPhone. Apple tech is a big part of our inudstry, and our President and CEO especially are big fans, and they decided that we couldn't do without. At this point though, 90% of our phones have gone out of contract in the past year and a half, and we've held off on upgrading with the assumption that the next iPhone will have LTE technology. Verizon already has excellent LTE service in our area, and I have always felt that they represented better customer service. I really wonder what AT&T can do to keep us from jumping ship. Probably nothing...

As a co-worker of mine put it: The odds of me winning 640 million in the lottery are 1 in 176, but the odds of me ever earning 640 million are nil.

While I'm all for promoting gender and sexual orientation equality, a post on Slashdot attached to a thread about ISPs refusing to comply with an order is not the place for such promotion. If this were an article about how HUD is working to decrease discrimination against LGBTQ persons, then sure. Promote the parent comment.

But it's not. So why the fuck was the way off topic parent promoted?

(No offense to parent. You make a good point, just it doesn't need to be promoted here.)
(Also, posting sans Karma bonus since my comment doesn't need to be promoted either.)

Of all the places I've been, Little Rock is actually one of the best places to drive. It's generally pretty good. My only complaint is the people who slow down to 15 MPH below the speed limit a good half mile before their exit ramp. That's what the exit ramp is for, guys!

By far the worst place I've ever lived was Atlanta. I would have at least one close call a week when I lived there. I really think it was the worst place I've had to drive.

Actually, properly adjusting your side mirrors can eliminate 90% of a car's blind spot. Every time I get in my mom's car, I have to wonder why half of the side mirrors are filled with the side of the car. I don't need to look down the side of the car. If there's something that close to me, I sure as hell hope I know it. I need to see what's actually in the lane beside me and behind me.

It's yet another artificial means of extending the gameplay of a game. Kind of like the "find this stuff" types of missions in a lot of modern games. Sure, I'd like to get 100% on a game, but am I going to bore myself to tears to do it? No.

But, that's modern multi-player FPS games for you...

And don't forget, packing them all into one car like it's some kind of clown car. The mob approach was really one of my favorite ways to complete a mission. I can remember being extremely anal retentive on a couple of missions and persuading the entire town since you got money for each citizen you persuaded.

But you're definitely right. The game did provide numerous ways to complete a mission, and on more than one occasion I would split my team up to accomplish multiple objectives at once.

Ah, but you are assuming that, just because you live in a community of that size, you naturally have good public transit. in my experience, that's not necessarily the case.

To give but one anecdotal example, I'll point out the transportation problem I experienced when I lived in Atlanta area. I lived and worked in the north suburbs of Atlanta and would have loved to be able to take public transportation to and from work, but it simply wasn't viable. I would have had to drive to the train station in my own suburb. We'll call that about five minute. Then I would have to take a train south into the center of the city. I would guess that to be a 30 - 45 minute ride. I'd then have to change trains and take a new train back north into the suburb I worked in. We'll call that another 30 - 45 minutes. I'd then be at a train station a good 3 or 4 miles from the office complex where I worked. With the closest bus stop being 1.5 - 2 miles away from the office. In an area where most of the roads don't even have sidewalks and so aren't pedestrian friendly. All of this to cover a distance that's only 18 miles when I drive it direct.

Public transportation from home to work in New Orleans was just as inconvenient. Not to mention, I wasn't really comfortable with riding the buses in New Orleans.

This is the point that I'm trying to make: just because you live in a population center of 200,000 or more, that doesn't mean that public transportation is available or viable. America has grown up as a car culture, and as such the majority of population centers are very car centric where transportation is concerned.

The less dense the development, the worse the problem seems to be in my experience. Not everybody lives and works in the dense urban developments that public transportation seems to be mostly designed around.

All I'm saying is: if you want Americans to drive less and take public transportation more, give us the egg before you take away the chicken.

While I voted Rootkit, I do feel the need to comment on the backwards compatibility argument.

What annoyed the heck out of me was the lack of any advertisement about the removal of that feature or any way to visually identify the backwards compatible versions from the versions with the compatibility removed. Unless you were paying attention to the industry when the feature was removed, you had no idea that it was removed.

When I bought my 40 GB PS3 a few years ago, I had no idea that it didn't include this feature anymore. The compatibility feature was one of the features I was most excited about when I purchased my PS3 as I was still playing several PS2 games at the time and liked the idea of only having one system to play them all on. I went out the following day to purchase a reader for my old memory cards and was told by the uber geek at Gamestop that the 40GB systemss were not backwards compatible. For the casual video game consumer such as I was back then, this was quite a disappointment.

I already moderated, but screw that. I feel the need to point out that this bill doesn't take into account that the US on the whole lacks viable public transportation systems in all but the largest and densest metropolitan areas.

For that majority of Americans who don't live in New York, Chicago, DC, etc., public transportation is simply not an option. Taking into account that most of us are probably living at our means or just below it, any sort of significant increase in our transportation costs would most likely have a dire impact on the economy on the whole as people begin to reach the point that they can no longer afford to drive our cars. We're already seeing some of that now with the price of gas as high as it is.

Lastly, this is America dammit. The roadtrip is practically as American as Baseball and Apple Pie. We've grown up with a culture that glorifies the cross country road trip. I for one don't want to give that up. :-P

I'm actually curious as to where said cameras are placed. I only make it down to New Orleans once or twice a year now, but would like to make sure that I'm not fined for speeding when I am down there.

On a side note, you just reminded me of the time that I got photographed blowing through a toll booth while getting on to the Crescent City Connection on the west bank side. I had a toll tag, but as I was blowing through the booth, I noticed that the green light never came on. Maybe I was going too fast? Either way, I never got that ticket in the mail. Maybe because I still had the temp tags on my car. LOL.

Although I've got to say that I find her more attractive these days on The Cape than I ever did on Firefly. Maybe she's like a fine wine and gets better with age?

Funny story. At a previous employer, one of the UPS nodes (I can't seem to recall the technical term here) was so close to capacity that if you attempted to bring up all devices on that node, you'd end up popping the breaker on that node, and would have to reset the breaker in the UPS. Long story short, because of that we couldn't rely on all services to return after an outage, so somebody would have to stick around to bring up all devices in the proper order, lest we lose 1/3 of our servers due to a popped breaker.

He can't drive 55!