We can't FIOS in central Illinois. Actually, we can't get Verizon anymore - they sold all their phone and internet accounts in the area to Frontier (which has developed an abysmal reputation for their DSL, which is slower than advertised (and it's only advertised at the 700kb level) and has been unavailable more than 10 days last year in some parts of town. Which, to my mind, is absolutely awful. Comcast is better than Frontier, which is the only reason I have it.

They still are. They just hide their packet shaping from burst speed tests pretty well.

I never really understood why Cisco bought Flip in the first place. I thought GE had pretty much shown that conglomerates were not the way to go future? And Cisco was nowhere near being able to function as a conglomerate anyway. I don't think whoever made that decision asked, "How will buying Flip help us continue to dominate Brocade and other switch manufacturers?"
And who ever made the decision to just shut down Flip must have conversely asked this question: "How can I lose the largest possible amount of money for Cisco?"

that given Mr. Kavoosi's lack of basic vocabulary knowledge, it's a good thing that he hires other people to write the papers he sells. Someone one who doesn't know what the word 'ethical' actually means would probably have a hard time writing papers that use other large words. Unless, perhaps, they were writing papers for business classes...

I read a couple of years ago from somthing study that Usenix did that the industry average of servers per admin was 60ish for Unix and a little 80ish for Windows. In the shops I have worked in, the average of *nix servers to admin has usually been between 40 and 50. The average of Windows server per admin has been closer to 80-90. But that's because those shops simply had more Windows servers for nominal functions (DCs, wins servers, etc.) The numbers of users per server directly served on the *nix side was typically higher because you had fewer backend process type servers for the Unix side than you did for the Windows side.

This is all true. But the reason that copyright is no longer effective at protecting work is that people lose respect for copyrights when they are extended essentially forever. Return copyright to 20 or 40 years, and I believe people would be a lot more respectful of it. Moreover, a larger number of people would be willing to support harsher penalties for copyright infringment if it were considerably shorter, IMO.

One of the problems with online textbooks is that they lack any sensile association. Sensile associations help people remember. Remember the smell of that musty textbook, and you have a much better chance of recalling what was in that musty textbook. Remember the feel of that shiny textbook page, you are more likely to recall what was on the page. If we cut out the sensile area of recall, all the evidence I've seen points to lower retention and poorer learning of subjects.

You are placing an inordinate amount of trust in a group that we can pretty much assume is evil.

It took 3 years for vineyards producing primarily Merlot to recover from that 1 off the cuff statement that Giamatti adlibbed because they needed filler...

Ironically, the prized bottle that he digs out of his closet at the end of the movie? It's a Merlot/Grenache blend, heavy on the Merlot.