We will not live forever?

According to many futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, we are destined to live very very long lives. Evidence of this is the fact that people are living longer. However, I read some conflicting evidence the other day that made me think. I wanted to share it. It said basically that we are not in fact living longer. People are living the same amount of time in the extreme as they did 200 years ago. However, a more accurate representation of the data is to say that a higher percentage of the population is living to very old age. Bleak prospects for infinite life. I was hoping to live to see Superbowl MXII. The only saving grace might indeed be the transfer of my brain to a computer and hope my RAID array doesn't fail and I lose 2 weeks worth of memories from backup.

Verizon vs AT&T mobile broadband

I just did a cross country trip to head to a funeral. The funeral was nice, but thats not what this post is about. Its about Verizon and AT&T mobile broadband, or more specifically Verizon mobile broadband (pre-pay no contract) and AT&T via tethered connection (iPhone). The setup was that I figured I could get some work done by using a mobile internet connection while on the road. I used Verizon on the way there, and AT&T on the way back. The results are that Verizon had much better speed in more places. That is very true, when I did have service, it was awesome. However it was very unreliable, constantly disconnecting whenever you switched cell towers. Also, vast parts of Kentucky and West Virginia had no service what so ever. AT&T via MyWi was a very reliable service (which is great for persistent connections), but it was dog slow. I got effectively dial-up speeds pretty much the whole way. I partly believe the unreliability of Verizon was due to poor software, but there is no way to tell for sure.

Which should you choose?

Verizon if you don't care about persistent connections and aren't traveling through Kentucky or West Virginia.

AT&T if persistent connections are required or your traveling through some dead states.

Or heck, you could do both, and use whatever is best at the time.