I'm married to a professional masseuse, and can get as much massage as I need. I still go to a chiropractor for neck and shoulder problems.

My thought exactly. It seems kind of pointless to increase speed while increasingly limiting data per month.

I can't imagine a robot replacing me as a self-sufficient homesteader. I'm not going to fire myself, and robots all becoming homesteaders to the point that there are no human homesteaders would be...weird.

Satellite internet access is so shitty. It goes out constantly, doesn't deliver on promised speeds, and has ridiculous data plans. I had one of the largest data plans at 10 GB a month. I had hunted to find the best satellite provider and got Wild Blue. The customer service, ugh, that was the worst. They knew you literally had no other options besides dialup so I would get charged with random shit and have to spend 5 days on the phone trying to get my money back. Eventually I had my internet cut off because they said I downloaded the Matrix (?) and demanded $200 as a settlement offer and I told them to duck off.

Garrett county Maryland, 500 MB, after that throttled to dialup speeds. That is not a typo. Please kill me.

3mbps satellite? I pay $70/month for "10 mbps" which actually gives me about 70 kbps. Only option for me, living at the intersection of buttfuck and nowhere. .5 mbps would be a huge relief. Dialup speeds on the modern Internet suck so much. Fuck you very much, exede satellite Internet.

Yeah, selling access to it would be leasing. I see what you mean with the retention of control, but unless these provisions were really terribly drafted selling access to it is going to be leasing activity, since it would be trading use of the asset for the rent, even if the use isn't exclusive and the control remains with the municipality.

I RTFA and got the first two words of the headline backwards, reading "Police State Acknowledge Use Of Cell Phone Tracking Device." Guess it's really the same either way, though.

I'd be ok with it too if it meant that Granny paid very little, but I think that we'll see Granny paying the same amount she currently is while everyone else gets to pay out the ass without being able to turn to alternate ISPs. It's not like this is really going to lower anyone's monthly fees, even Granny's; it's just an excuse to charge more. I would love to be proven wrong, but that's just not the business model these creeps run.

Yeah I was kind of wondering the same thing. If the power is supposed to be out for quite a while I'll put what I can from the fridge/freezer into a heavy duty 5-day cooler and eat things in the order I think they'll spoil. I'm probably biased because I tent camp a lot, but while power would be awesome in an outage I would see it a luxury and not a necessity. Food will spoil, that will suck, but I have enough non-refrigerated food stored that I'd be good for quite some time.

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, personally. I have some friends with them, and they love them, but my experience messing with them is rather "eh." What I do like is that ATT, Verizon, Sprint, etc, are all starting to really compete with each other. Service areas are being expanded, and since the coming of the iPhone other carriers are beginning to step up their game with their hardware. I love my Droid X, but I wonder if it would have come to market if not for the iPhone. In my (relatively rural) area, Verizon was the only available carrier until the iPhone hit market, and there was enough demand for the iPhone that ATT expanded into the area, giving us actual choices around here for service. Even if all carriers are bloodsucking jerkwads, at least with competition we get to choose our method of bloodsucking, and I think that, at least in my rural area, phone choices and coverage have exploded since the iPhone. Android, iPhone, 10-pound-brick-phone, whatever, at least now the carriers are trying to offer different things, and I think the market competition is great! I hope it continues!

While that holds for income tax, Medicare and Social Security taxes still come out, regardless of any other credits or deductions. That 7 or so percent has to be paid no matter how little you earn!

In a society completely driven by efficiency we become nothing more than cogs in a big machine we can't understand. Without engineers and scientists our ability to technologically advance would be brought to a halt, but without philosophers and historians our ability to connect to each other and our common history is similarly halted.