Its wrong because the State has not mandated anything. Comcast signed a contract with the State agreeing to build out more infrastructure in exchange for an 11 year franchise permit.
This whole 1st Amendment shit is a red herring. Even if laying cable is "speech", Comcast signed a contract to do it, which isnt any different than Susan Bennet signing a contract to be the voice of Siri.
Here is the applicable text of the contract:
33. Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into uncabled areas during the term of this CPG. Comcast may satisfy this obligation either by fully funding the line extensions or by collecting contributions-in-aid-of-construction from customers pursuant to its line extension tariff. Any line extensions that are funded by a grant from any federal or state governmental agency shall not be used to satisfy this requirement. Comcast shall annually file with the Board and the Department a report that details all line extensions completed during the prior calendar year. This report shall, at minimum, describe the length and location of all completed line extensions and the funding source for such extensions.
There are a few more sections about line extensions, but only in the manner in which they are handled.
I suspect that the States intent was to get Comcast to wire up the islands in Lake Champlain, the so called "Grand Isles." The smallest of these islands has about 500 people living on it with the largest having about 2000 people living on it.
Of course, the people on these islands would already have a satellite solution for television if they wanted it and one of the lake's WISP (Wireless ISP) solutions for internet as well.
..and if Comcast didnt like the contract, they shouldnt have signed it.
I feel this way on both sides of this issue. Both Comcast and Vermont should be held to their contractual obligations.
If Comcast doesn't want to live up to the contract then they can pound sand and the court can decide how to make Vermont whole. I'm sure there are more than a few competing cable companies that want to service those areas, and I'm sure a nice big financial judgment against Comcast will delight the voters.
If the people of Vermont don't like whats in the contract then the voters should make it a key issue during the next election and vote out all the people involved in signing the bad contract, and additionally all the people they support too just to get the message across that signing contracts that are not in the peoples best interest will absolutely not be tolerated.
Also... an 11 year franchise contract? What the fuck?
You are proposing no security prior to card activation. They use a sequential or systematic series so that they dont need to maintain a database of unactivated cards.
I'm guessing you don't own a business or have ever worked front of house at a nice restaurant.
I was thinking the same thing. My employer easily gives out a thousand dollars worth of Dunkin' Donuts gifts cards each month to employees as part of various incentive programs (the Dunkin' cards are the runner-up prizes)
In what universe do you get a pin with a purchase of a gift card?
You take the card off the rack. You go to the cash register. They ask how much you want on it. They activate it with that amount. You walk away with it presumably to give it to someone that you dont care much about because otherwise you would have put thought into their gift. There is no PIN.
Indeed. What used to be the second richest country in the Americas is now the poorest county. The act that did it was turning on the printing presses. The motivation for doing it was trying to un-fail a failed economic idiology but thats a different matter.
The local Cable franchises lobby the State governments to put limits on the Local government.
They will also lobby the Federal government to put limits on the State governments. You can't win going down this road because this road is the wrong direction. Its backwards.
The Local governments should be putting limits on the State governments, which should be putting limits on the Federal government. Going about it backwards disenfranchises the People. There is only one Federal election. Your Federal voice is but one in an ocean of three hundred million voices.
Giving the Federal government Power over these things is a bad idea. Not only shouldn't the Federal government be involved, your State government shouldn't be either. The only non-local involvement should be the courts, and your town should be held to its contracts (don't sign bad ones, and hold your local politicians accountable when they do.)
I'm still not convinced that wired data infrastructure to the home will be relevant in 5 years.
Everyones homes are now filled with wireless things. Telephones, mice, keyboards, headphones, speakers, routers, and now even monitors. Its only a few dozen meters further to the road, only a quarter mile further to the intersection, only a few miles further to the interstate.
Look around and cell phone towers are everywhere. A few doubling's of that sort of infrastructure and nearly everyone is within a hundred meters of a tower. Someone will try to use the physical bandwidth limits argument here but for short ranges its a preposterous argument. Then then will try the line-of-sight argument but again for short ranges its a preposterous argument.
Until movies are encoded with voxels instead of pixels, I dont see any order-of-magnitude increase in bandwidth demand. Video resolutions and even frame-rate will increase over time, but we are already well into the diminishing returns of those multipliers.
Government does just fine for my water, sewer, electricity and gas.
None of that is Federal.
We are talking about a national fiber rollout here. Thats Federal. What does the Federal government do well? They are busy arguing over what your rights are while bombing the shit out of the middle east.
If the Federal government managed your drinking water then eventually things like the Flint catastrophe would happen on a national scale, ad even if you saw it coming you wouldnt have a voice. A Flint catastrophe is averted every year somewhere in the country because people have a voice in Local government. Meanwhile most of the country doesnt want the Federal government bombing the shit out of the middle east but we are still doing it.
I think Google finally discovered what the real numbers were and its as simple as that. Running the infrastructure is only half the battle. If you run such a service you need customer support. You need people maintaining the infrastructures. You need people doing installs. You need a marketing department.
Google has never been about maintaining existing customers. Its always been about getting new customers. In a rapidly expanding market its "good business" to do things this way. You can't run an ISP this way. A city like KC needs a lot of personnel to run an ISP.
Its all fun-and-games when your "customer support" consists of running email directly into/dev/null. We all talked about this issue with Google constantly well before it started down the ISP path. In fact I bet if you look at the first slashdot article about Google fiber that comments about its horrible customer service were all over the place. Its because customer service is expensive. Its so far been much cheaper for them to land a new customer than it has been to recover a disgruntled one. Once these markets saturate you often see Google replacing them with new ventures, trying to keep the cheap model going.
Not sure what made me laugh harder; trying to compare chess to boxing in terms of demand, or claiming that the 37 people watching a "major" chess event somehow created unfathomable streaming problems.
The last WCC had an estimated 2 million people simultaneously streaming the live event feed, and these streaming viewers were allowed to switch between 3 different camera views. Lots of other streaming coverage was also available, with live analysis by various GM's taking place. All told the estimated viewership was between 100 and 200 million people. Thats very similar to boxing, you dumb ignorant fuck.
Exactly, and it completely counters the "history lesson" hand waving peddled by magusxxx, which was trying to insinuate that in the 1980's that people paid $50 for a 40 second fight.
The grocery stores in the downtown district near me have what I consider to be an atrocious selection of "name brand" carb-heavy crap. Isle after isle of it. Of note is that this is where the poor people shop. Suburban grocery stores (with more middle and upper class customers) stock a lot more variety with much less shelf space dedicated to those "name brands.", and even have significantly larger produce and deli sections.
I dont know why this is exactly, but my theory is that at least in part that urban people are more susceptible to advertising, driving up the demand for "name brand" items in those areas for whatever reason (possibly higher unemployment rates means higher advertising consumption.)
I would think that a little less cynical interpretation of the government's role is in order.
If the "carbs are good" mantra was the result of corporate influence over government departments, and corporate influence over government departments has continued to grow since then, then problem is even worse now.
There was no cleansing event that made these departments any better than they were. We must conclude that they are probably worse now, and any claim to the contrary is exceptional and thus requires exceptional evidence.
This leads to some interesting "counter intuitive" results. (Junk food for breakfast)
How do you define "junk food?"
I was diagnosed a type-2 diabetic ~6 years ago. My diet at the time included what I now understand to be insane amounts of carbohydrates. Most of my meals were almost pure pasta (Spaghetti, Hamburger Helper, Lasagna,...) and the rest also contained at least food-pyramid levels of carbohydrates. I was never a big sweet eater, with my only real constant sugar sin being what I put in my coffee and the Little Debbie pastry I have for breakfast.
When I cut nearly all those carbs out of my diet my blood sugar levels were pretty crazy, but I was determined to END my insulin resistance, not just manage it like every physician was telling me to do. What the physicians were telling me just didnt seem logical. My body moved into an insulin resistance mode to defend itself from all the insulin my body was producing, which itself was being produced to defend itself against all the blood sugar being produced from the carbohydrate consumption.
I got the carbs down, to get the blood sugar down, to get the insulin levels down, to slowly end the resistance. It worked. The physicians are astray from the solution, at least for me.
Anyways, do you consider the Little Debbie I eat for breakfast "junk food?"
Some major chess events also experience unfathomable streaming problems. I think the issue is that the people hired to manage the streaming are the same people they previously hired to set up their low traffic web pages.
1980's boxing events werent single fight though. While Mike Tyson often finished off his opponent somewhere in the first 3 rounds, it was still a multi-hour event with other weight classes often also having important bouts.
Why is everyone so pessimistic about everything Musk does?
The left hates him because he is a billionaire and loves capitalism.
The right hates him because Tesla took money from the government in the form of environmentalism loans, many of which they predicted would never be paid back (and as they predicted, many didn't, although Tesla paid back theirs, early.)
Slashdot Mirror
Its wrong because the State has not mandated anything. Comcast signed a contract with the State agreeing to build out more infrastructure in exchange for an 11 year franchise permit.
This whole 1st Amendment shit is a red herring. Even if laying cable is "speech", Comcast signed a contract to do it, which isnt any different than Susan Bennet signing a contract to be the voice of Siri.
Here is the applicable text of the contract:
33. Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into uncabled areas during the term of this CPG. Comcast may satisfy this obligation either by fully funding the line extensions or by collecting contributions-in-aid-of-construction from customers pursuant to its line extension tariff. Any line extensions that are funded by a grant from any federal or state governmental agency shall not be used to satisfy this requirement. Comcast shall annually file with the Board and the Department a report that details all line extensions completed during the prior calendar year. This report shall, at minimum, describe the length and location of all completed line extensions and the funding source for such extensions.
There are a few more sections about line extensions, but only in the manner in which they are handled.
..like Vermont has the money for that...
I suspect that the States intent was to get Comcast to wire up the islands in Lake Champlain, the so called "Grand Isles." The smallest of these islands has about 500 people living on it with the largest having about 2000 people living on it.
Of course, the people on these islands would already have a satellite solution for television if they wanted it and one of the lake's WISP (Wireless ISP) solutions for internet as well.
Its not law, its contact.
..and if Comcast didnt like the contract, they shouldnt have signed it.
I feel this way on both sides of this issue. Both Comcast and Vermont should be held to their contractual obligations.
If Comcast doesn't want to live up to the contract then they can pound sand and the court can decide how to make Vermont whole. I'm sure there are more than a few competing cable companies that want to service those areas, and I'm sure a nice big financial judgment against Comcast will delight the voters.
If the people of Vermont don't like whats in the contract then the voters should make it a key issue during the next election and vote out all the people involved in signing the bad contract, and additionally all the people they support too just to get the message across that signing contracts that are not in the peoples best interest will absolutely not be tolerated.
Also... an 11 year franchise contract? What the fuck?
You are proposing no security prior to card activation. They use a sequential or systematic series so that they dont need to maintain a database of unactivated cards.
I'm guessing you don't own a business or have ever worked front of house at a nice restaurant.
I was thinking the same thing. My employer easily gives out a thousand dollars worth of Dunkin' Donuts gifts cards each month to employees as part of various incentive programs (the Dunkin' cards are the runner-up prizes)
In what universe do you get a pin with a purchase of a gift card?
You take the card off the rack. You go to the cash register. They ask how much you want on it. They activate it with that amount. You walk away with it presumably to give it to someone that you dont care much about because otherwise you would have put thought into their gift. There is no PIN.
Indeed. What used to be the second richest country in the Americas is now the poorest county. The act that did it was turning on the printing presses. The motivation for doing it was trying to un-fail a failed economic idiology but thats a different matter.
The local Cable franchises lobby the State governments to put limits on the Local government.
They will also lobby the Federal government to put limits on the State governments. You can't win going down this road because this road is the wrong direction. Its backwards.
The Local governments should be putting limits on the State governments, which should be putting limits on the Federal government. Going about it backwards disenfranchises the People. There is only one Federal election. Your Federal voice is but one in an ocean of three hundred million voices.
Giving the Federal government Power over these things is a bad idea. Not only shouldn't the Federal government be involved, your State government shouldn't be either. The only non-local involvement should be the courts, and your town should be held to its contracts (don't sign bad ones, and hold your local politicians accountable when they do.)
I'm still not convinced that wired data infrastructure to the home will be relevant in 5 years.
Everyones homes are now filled with wireless things. Telephones, mice, keyboards, headphones, speakers, routers, and now even monitors. Its only a few dozen meters further to the road, only a quarter mile further to the intersection, only a few miles further to the interstate.
Look around and cell phone towers are everywhere. A few doubling's of that sort of infrastructure and nearly everyone is within a hundred meters of a tower. Someone will try to use the physical bandwidth limits argument here but for short ranges its a preposterous argument. Then then will try the line-of-sight argument but again for short ranges its a preposterous argument.
Until movies are encoded with voxels instead of pixels, I dont see any order-of-magnitude increase in bandwidth demand. Video resolutions and even frame-rate will increase over time, but we are already well into the diminishing returns of those multipliers.
Government does just fine for my water, sewer, electricity and gas.
None of that is Federal.
We are talking about a national fiber rollout here. Thats Federal. What does the Federal government do well? They are busy arguing over what your rights are while bombing the shit out of the middle east.
If the Federal government managed your drinking water then eventually things like the Flint catastrophe would happen on a national scale, ad even if you saw it coming you wouldnt have a voice. A Flint catastrophe is averted every year somewhere in the country because people have a voice in Local government. Meanwhile most of the country doesnt want the Federal government bombing the shit out of the middle east but we are still doing it.
Well its far superior to a payroll tax. It least with a "service fee" only those that choose to use the service are paying it.
I think Google finally discovered what the real numbers were and its as simple as that. Running the infrastructure is only half the battle. If you run such a service you need customer support. You need people maintaining the infrastructures. You need people doing installs. You need a marketing department.
/dev/null. We all talked about this issue with Google constantly well before it started down the ISP path. In fact I bet if you look at the first slashdot article about Google fiber that comments about its horrible customer service were all over the place. Its because customer service is expensive. Its so far been much cheaper for them to land a new customer than it has been to recover a disgruntled one. Once these markets saturate you often see Google replacing them with new ventures, trying to keep the cheap model going.
Google has never been about maintaining existing customers. Its always been about getting new customers. In a rapidly expanding market its "good business" to do things this way. You can't run an ISP this way. A city like KC needs a lot of personnel to run an ISP.
Its all fun-and-games when your "customer support" consists of running email directly into
This hand-waving that Google isnt "strong enough to stand up to these guys" is outright ridiculous and doesnt pass even a cursory smell test.
Google could literally buy all of these incumbents with its spare change. Stop being a partisan fuck Google fanboy.
"carbs are cheap" was never the mantra. It is merely the underlying fact that motivated the dishonest "carbs are good" mantra.
That official food pyramid is still there with the largest section still being carbs,
Not sure what made me laugh harder; trying to compare chess to boxing in terms of demand, or claiming that the 37 people watching a "major" chess event somehow created unfathomable streaming problems.
The last WCC had an estimated 2 million people simultaneously streaming the live event feed, and these streaming viewers were allowed to switch between 3 different camera views. Lots of other streaming coverage was also available, with live analysis by various GM's taking place. All told the estimated viewership was between 100 and 200 million people. Thats very similar to boxing, you dumb ignorant fuck.
Exactly, and it completely counters the "history lesson" hand waving peddled by magusxxx, which was trying to insinuate that in the 1980's that people paid $50 for a 40 second fight.
Which grocery store you are walking into matters.
The grocery stores in the downtown district near me have what I consider to be an atrocious selection of "name brand" carb-heavy crap. Isle after isle of it. Of note is that this is where the poor people shop. Suburban grocery stores (with more middle and upper class customers) stock a lot more variety with much less shelf space dedicated to those "name brands.", and even have significantly larger produce and deli sections.
I dont know why this is exactly, but my theory is that at least in part that urban people are more susceptible to advertising, driving up the demand for "name brand" items in those areas for whatever reason (possibly higher unemployment rates means higher advertising consumption.)
I would think that a little less cynical interpretation of the government's role is in order.
If the "carbs are good" mantra was the result of corporate influence over government departments, and corporate influence over government departments has continued to grow since then, then problem is even worse now.
There was no cleansing event that made these departments any better than they were. We must conclude that they are probably worse now, and any claim to the contrary is exceptional and thus requires exceptional evidence.
This leads to some interesting "counter intuitive" results. (Junk food for breakfast)
How do you define "junk food?"
...) and the rest also contained at least food-pyramid levels of carbohydrates. I was never a big sweet eater, with my only real constant sugar sin being what I put in my coffee and the Little Debbie pastry I have for breakfast.
I was diagnosed a type-2 diabetic ~6 years ago. My diet at the time included what I now understand to be insane amounts of carbohydrates. Most of my meals were almost pure pasta (Spaghetti, Hamburger Helper, Lasagna,
When I cut nearly all those carbs out of my diet my blood sugar levels were pretty crazy, but I was determined to END my insulin resistance, not just manage it like every physician was telling me to do. What the physicians were telling me just didnt seem logical. My body moved into an insulin resistance mode to defend itself from all the insulin my body was producing, which itself was being produced to defend itself against all the blood sugar being produced from the carbohydrate consumption.
I got the carbs down, to get the blood sugar down, to get the insulin levels down, to slowly end the resistance. It worked. The physicians are astray from the solution, at least for me.
Anyways, do you consider the Little Debbie I eat for breakfast "junk food?"
How did they manage to mess this up so hard?
Some major chess events also experience unfathomable streaming problems. I think the issue is that the people hired to manage the streaming are the same people they previously hired to set up their low traffic web pages.
One fight lasted less than a minute. No refunds.
1980's boxing events werent single fight though. While Mike Tyson often finished off his opponent somewhere in the first 3 rounds, it was still a multi-hour event with other weight classes often also having important bouts.
Why is everyone so pessimistic about everything Musk does?
The left hates him because he is a billionaire and loves capitalism.
The right hates him because Tesla took money from the government in the form of environmentalism loans, many of which they predicted would never be paid back (and as they predicted, many didn't, although Tesla paid back theirs, early.)
A franchise agreement is hardly a monopoly.
When they only issue 1 at a time, its a fucking monopoly you fucking statist cable company apologist fuck.