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Comcast today announced that its gigabit cable Internet service will be available in Atlanta and Nashville early this year, with the next deployments coming to Chicago, Detroit, and Miami in the second half of 2016. Exact deployment dates haven't been revealed.

Today's announcement also said that Comcast's fiber-based 2Gbps service, which launched last year, is now available to 18 million homes as planned. That's a sizable chunk of Comcast's network, which passes 55 million homes and businesses in 39 states and Washington, DC. The 2Gbps fiber service launched first in Atlanta, spreading next to Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Nashville, and other metro areas.

While Comcast's fiber-to-the-home service—known as Gigabit Pro—delivers 2Gbps both downstream and upstream, it won't be available throughout Comcast's territory. Comcast says it does plan to bring gigabit cable to "virtually" its entire territory over the next two or three years. That's due to version 3.1 of DOCSIS, the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, which can bring gigabit download speeds without the need to deploy fiber to homes. New modems will be required.

Mighty No. 9 is Delayed AGAIN?! - The Rant is GO!

source: Lines on White

source: Bent Pins

Submitted by: (via randomencounterz)

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A year after the Federal Communications Commission changed the definition of broadband Internet to include only faster speeds, Republicans in Congress are still mad about the decision.

Using the new broadband minimum speed of 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload, the FCC's annual review of deployment this month said that broadband isn't being offered to about 34 million Americans. ISPs immediately criticized that assessment; yesterday their friends in Congress piled on.

Six Republican Senators—Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)—outlined their concerns in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday. (The Hill reported on the letter and posted a copy.) "We are concerned that this arbitrary 25/3 Mbps benchmark fails to accurately capture what most Americans consider broadband... Looking at the market for broadband applications, we are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25Mbps," the senators wrote. "Netflix, for example, recommends a download speed of 5Mbps to receive high-definition streaming video, and Amazon recommends a speed of 3.5Mbps. In addition, according to the FCC's own data, the majority of Americans who can purchase 25Mbps service choose not to."

The barriers to reusable rockets keep falling. Late Friday night Blue Origin posted a new video of its New Shepard rocket booster flying into space a second time and then landing safely again back in West Texas. This marked the first time a rocket booster has been flown into space, landed, and re-flown again.

Friday's launch to an altitude of 101.7km, which is just above the Karman line considered to be the boundary of outer space, follows a similar flight of the same booster in November. A month later, in December, SpaceX landed a much larger booster, the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, back at Florida for the first time. But even as SpaceX has begun testing that rocket, which will likely not fly again, Blue Origin has moved ahead to a second flight.

The rivalry between Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos and SpaceX's Elon Musk is spurring the race toward reusability, with the aim of driving down rocket costs so that more people and hardware can be launched into space. As the new video's tagline says, "You can't get there by throwing the hardware away." This may be a subtle dig at NASA, which is building an expensive, massive new rocket, the Space Launch System, which is entirely expendable.

Friday’s launch of the New Shepard rocket in West Texas renewed the tired debate about whether Blue Origin or SpaceX has achieved more in the reusable spaceflight game. These discussions first flared up in November, when no less than Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sparred on Twitter over the magnitude of New Shepard’s first flight into space and subsequent vertical landing. Ultimately the debate is vacuous and completely misses the big picture.

Each company has achievements to be proud of. Blue Origin landed first and now has taken the next critical step toward full reusability by reflying a booster. SpaceX also landed vertically, about a month after Blue Origin. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is a much larger and more powerful booster, flying a more dynamically challenging profile. Technically, its landing was more impressive. The company is also developing this capability while delivering payloads into orbit for NASA and the private sector.

There is no “better.” Both companies are kicking ass. I think a lot of people who read this probably share a common goal with me: we’d like to see wider access to space. We’d like to see colonization of the Moon, or maybe Mars, or maybe beyond. We’d like to see a highway to the stars. There is only one way this happens: dramatically reducing the cost of getting into space. And the way to do this is by reusing your rockets and spacecraft.

As soon as I saw optional star ratings being given for my performance on each mission in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, I was dubious about the campaign's length. The addition sent a small, clear signal: "Here's a thin excuse to play again on a higher difficulty." I'm not normally one to fetishize a game's length, as has been recorded on this very site numerous times. In the case of a Homeworld game, however, length can be a critical factor.

That’s truer than ever with Deserts of Kharak, because this new standalone game is actually a prequel to Homeworld, the original seminal space fleet strategy sim that Relic released back in 1999 (not to be confused with the recently Remastered re-release). That game began with the lost Hiigarans taking their first fledgling steps into space after millennia of grounding. Deserts of Kharak, as the name implies, takes place during their planetside exile. Here, tanks and mobile railguns take the place of interceptors and bombers, though the latter pair does make an in-atmosphere appearance here and there.

Homeworld, on-world

While the environment and style of strategy has changed, quite a lot of what makes Homeworld recognizable still remains. The music still swells with drums, strings, and the Armenian duduk (I'll admit I had to Google that last one). The technology is still flat, broad, and lifeless in a familiar way, just as the Battlestar Galactica reboot aped as much of the series' sense of style.

What carries over mechanically is... well, the way things carry over. Resources, vehicles, upgrades, and other elements developed in one mission can still be carried over to the next. The same goes for any losses that you incur, which makes every skirmish matter. Every loss—every second spent micromanaging conflict and harvesting—weaves a story of desperation.

The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet didn't come about because of any discovery about Pluto itself. Rather, it was triggered by the discovery that Pluto was one of what's likely to be a large number of bodies that orbit well beyond Neptune. These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), some of which are larger than Pluto, tend to have unusual orbits, passing outside of the plane of the Solar System, with their ellipses stretched out on one side, while passing closer to the Sun on the other.

But in recent years, scientists have been noting some odd patterns in the orbits of KBOs. For many of them, their closest approach to the Sun comes as they cross the orbital plane of the inner planets. Now, the researcher who helped identify some of the first KBOs has published a paper in which he identifies a possible cause of these patterns: a distant, Neptune-sized body that would restore our Solar System's planetary total to nine.

Undiscovered planets have a long history, dating back to the prediction of Neptune's existence based on oddities in Uranus' orbit. That success, however, led to a couple of fruitless searches, one for an inner planet that could get Mercury's orbit to behave, and a second for something beyond Neptune. While the latter search turned up Pluto, it was too small to influence Neptune's orbit, which further observations indicated was just fine without any additional fixes.

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Tagged: Death , KISS , lips

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