The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007) • Hacker News Board

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#201

Post by sim0nk » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:35 PM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #199

simoncion wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. If you have shell access to a Linux machine in a College of Engineering attached to some university somewhere [0], try this: 1)…

So ... where you ever able to get comcast to actually fix the problem?

hahahahahaha

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#202

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:45 PM UTC

projct wrote: post #105

mikeash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health care system is fine if you can afford it. The main problem with American health care is financial, and if you have good insurance (which should come with any good job) it's fine. Not great, but on par with the rest of the first world. Limited annual leave depends on the job. If you're in software engineering or similar, you're unlikely to have a problem. If you get offered a job that doesn't offer the annu…

Are they not really correct? I have (in the past) looked into all three of the things you rebutted and I'm not so sure the evidence agrees with you. It seems to me that the murder rate really is high for being a first-world country that isn't on the brink of collapse or recovering from it. Lowest number is for places with less than 10,000 inhabitants (roughly, read the details that go with the source to know what thi…

You seem to have completely missed my point about crime not being evenly distributed. Yes, the US murder rate is unusually high for a first world country. That does not, however, imply that most of the US experiences extreme amounts of violent crime. Most of the US is reasonably safe, with certain parts being unreasonably dangerous. To merely look at the average is like saying that the Dundee neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska is extremely wealthy since the average net worth of people in the neighborhood is over $9.8 million, when it's actually a bunch of middle class people plus Warren Buffett.

On the health care front, I have trouble finding anything that actually discusses the quality of care when you have access to the system, rather than discussing the quality of care for the country as a whole. This is the best I could find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_s...

Relevant summary quote: "Overall, results for mortality favoured Canada with a 5% advantage, but the results were weak and varied. The only consistent pattern was that Canadian patients fared better in kidney failure."

Two major confounding factors are overall health of the population (essentially, how much of poor American health care outcomes are due to being fat) and unequal access. Statistics for the country as a whole ignore these, and therefore are not relevant when deciding how the American health care system will treat an individual who eats well and has decent insurance.

Again, the US health care system has deep problems that need some serious attention, but as best I can tell, they are financial, not actually problems with the quality of care that's delivered to those who are able to receive it.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#203

Post by Goladus » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:11 PM UTC

robzyb wrote: post #150

Goladus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Murder rate thing is probably because an Australian national named Christopher Lane, in the US playing Baseball at college, was randomly murdered in Oklahoma this year. He was out jogging when a couple of teenagers ran up and shot him in the back for no obvious reason. Australian politicians immediately started telling people not to visit the US because it's so full of guns.

I've never heard of Christopher Lane before. Wait, actually, on second thought, I have. But that didn't have any impact on my opinion of the US. The murder rate statistic "thing" (as you described it) is based on the actual murder rate statistics. And my knowledge of US gun control.

Clearly, not a very nuanced understanding of what those statistics actually say (see post from mikeash above) or an intelligent perspective on the relevance of gun control.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#204

Post by lukateake » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

Last-Mile solution: blimps.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#205

Post by samolang » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:22 PM UTC

X4 wrote: post #160

anon4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WiFi is slow though, I just want a lan box. Start small in a part of the city populated by mostly young people - like university students. Buy ad time on the Discovery Channel. Run your cables through the air between buildings and over trees - it will fail with every storm, but it's cheap to replace. Hopefully you'll get big enough fast enough to put some proper cabling before regulation catches up with you.

>> WiFi is slow though, I just want a lan box. hahahaha :D OK, dear anon4, do you have idea what the fastest connection to the stock market today is, no? Hint, it's "wireless". High Frequency Trading set an arms race to have the best and fastest connection to the trade-market. Every nanosecond counts. TL;DR? Wireless is faster than Cable. Yup.

HFT use microwave, not WiFi.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#206

Post by X4 » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

Kell wrote: post #188

X4 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@pjc50 Thank you for your input, really appreciated. What you say is that proximity gives you more benefit than having antennas transmitting data 'wireless', right? I agree with that and I don't, firstly because "Quantum Teleportation (QT)" is available soon enough for a broader audience than just Physicists [1] and such "directed antennas" positioned in the same proximity to the datacenter as the 10G links can resul…

... Quantum teleportation as a mean of transmitting information ? You know that as of today, QT is completely unable of transmitting data... It transmits a quantum state instantly yes, but that "transmission" cannot in any way be used to transmit any form of data, it would be a severe breach of relativity theory. Look, it's the second sentence of the Wikipedia article on the subject : "Because it depends on classical…

» completely unable of transmitting data...

Flat out wrong.

Yes the references supplied were bad, I didn't bother looking deep enough for a good reference. I don't care if you believe that it's science fiction or comic science, it's there and the race to commercialization has already started. If you really care about what you say, then you should read this and stop being a naysayer: doi:10.1038/492022a

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#207

Post by Goladus » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC

Cub3 wrote: post #36

michaelochurch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might have experienced our healthcare. Even if he had insurance, our system is a clusterfuck that makes everyone worse upon contact. Or, he might be older than 30 and therefore not willing to deal with the puny two-week vacation allotment that is still socially acceptable from US employers. Or, he might have children who will have to be educated someday, and see that a system that combines astronomical tuition plu…

Australian here working for a major tech company with 5 weeks paid vacation, didn't even know 2 was standard in the US :/

I've worked in the US since 2001 and have never had less than 15 days paid vacation.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#208

Post by X4 » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:26 PM UTC

samolang wrote: post #205

X4 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> WiFi is slow though, I just want a lan box. hahahaha :D OK, dear anon4, do you have idea what the fastest connection to the stock market today is, no? Hint, it's "wireless". High Frequency Trading set an arms race to have the best and fastest connection to the trade-market. Every nanosecond counts. TL;DR? Wireless is faster than Cable. Yup.

HFT use microwave, not WiFi.

Oh great and microwaves are what, not wireless? C'mon please read what people write before you blindly accuse someone of being wrong. I wrote wireless NOT WiFi! But you know what, I'll still give you a free +1, because you tried to help.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#209

Post by samolang » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

X4 wrote: post #208

samolang wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFT use microwave, not WiFi.

Oh great and microwaves are what, not wireless? C'mon please read what people write before you blindly accuse someone of being wrong. I wrote wireless NOT WiFi! But you know what, I'll still give you a free +1, because you tried to help.

Microwave requires line of sight. That's where its advantage arises. You can't assume line of sight with a WiFi router.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#210

Post by anon4 » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

hippiehippo wrote: post #154

gcb0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke. i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk. i moved, less…

Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Romania, would beg to differ about the "free market fails if left alone". Between 2000 and 2010 it was basically a free-for-all for ISPs and each city had almost dozens of them running wires on poles, on apartment building facades, on... trees. And today you can get a 1 Gbps connection (in reality it works at 900 mbps in Europe and at around 300 mbps across the Atlantic) for le…

>had

Bulgaria here. We still have them - smaller ISPs who don't run proper cabling, it's just the major ones don't run their cables through trees any longer. And I want to note - even when they did ran them through trees and a storm would cut the cables or fry the routers, replacements would be put up within an hour. The only downside to me, as a consumer, is that during a storm, a lightning bolt might hit a cable and fry my pc, but that's a very very low probability and I just run the cable through a surge protector.