Very good point. For example, you may remember a popular Sci-Fi Series called Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski absolutely killed himself making it, writing entire seasons by himself. It was a very successful show and has made a huge amount of money in DVD sales. Yet Warner Bros have done some amazing Hollywood accounting with it and have managed to make it all look in debt, so no-one gets a dime.
Hollywood accounting is not limited to movies. An example is the Warner Bros. television series Babylon 5 created by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting[citation needed]. The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993-1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt. "Basically," says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
I doubt that the licencing is that much ($20). If it was then surely someone would just stick vlc or mplayer in a box with a drive and sell it for $10.
Yes, but that would be "under the table." Wiki says $20/player while another source shows min $4/player for the DVD spec alone. MP3, JPG, VCD, etc. support each have their own fees.
Here's another article on fees: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050120A2004.html Quote: "Xinhua Online cited the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) as indicating that China produces 60 million DVD players and exports 45-50 million of them a year, with the exported DVD players subject to a royalty charge of US$20 per player."
Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75
That's a lot of extra pixels.
For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastleg ion/hd/
Granted, 1080 is 6.75 times bigger - my x4 figure compared to 640x480 was a "back-of-the-envelope" variety. Still, the fact that the built-in iPod (dedicated) chip can do 1/6th the work, and that the Apple TV can do MORE with an Intel chip means it's not out of reach for a reasonable price.
Of course, with a dedicated DVD player costing under $30 (or even $20 if you look), I have a feeling that a dedicated H.264 player might not get THAT cheap. IIRC, $9 of every DVD player is actually licensing costs.
Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.
Given that a little iPod can do the baseline profile at 640x480, I can't think that 1080 would entail a WHOLE LOT more work. OK, admittedly, it's ~4x the resolution, but we are talking about a little device. The specs for the AppleTV device say it will do 1280x1024 of h.264, so I don't think a DVD player with 1080 is out of line.
I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see.
I think the GP probably has a large collection of CDs of things encoded in DivX, and is just planning ahead to the stage of being able to easily watch those on a set-top box. From the quote, they understand that there MAY be some loss, but are willing to take a little for the convenience of not having to re-encode everything. They're probably hoping that the formats are close enough that there's a simple transform or something (a la XVID/DIVX/MPEG4 being related), but they're much different than that.
Now let's just hope it doesn't take an additional 6 months for this to make its way into the Linux version. Flash Player 9 for Linux came out some months after Flash Player 9 for Windows/Mac did.
Or, to say nothing of Flash for Linux/PPC, which still hasn't been released. The open-source version is OK, but quite a few sites have a hard-check for version of Flash before giving you anything, and will balk even if you have something "compatible".
I wonder what would happen if the public works water and sewer companies tried to do this? Maybe have 2 year contracts and charge by flush and you must pay a surcharge if you move for money they would lose? Pay it or shit in your backyard in an outhouse?
Notable is that where I grew up (suburbs of Chicago), the water/sewer billing system was that your sewer portion was double the water portion. If you used $50 worth of water one month, you got billed $100 for the sewer portion. Guess they couldn't find a reasonable way to meter the... other end. This meant that if you had a large expense of water (such as a pool or garden watering) that didn't result in sewer use, you still paid for it.
Also (regarding the surcharge for when you move): another suburb over here had a lawsuit when an unlicensed and drunk motorcyclist hit a median and sued (successfully) over poor road markings. The village instituted a surcharge on all houses for the next several years to pay for the settlement. If you moved out before the time was up, you also paid the remainder of your part of the settlement.
From talking to the people at the RIAA, they don't seem to care about the perception.
I think, as a whole, the RIAA doesn't care what people think of them. Their customers are the major record labels, and if the RIAA can act as the "muscle", then we won't associate these antics with the labels them. Face it; if the headline read "Warner Brothers Sues 80-year-old Grandma Without a Computer for Piracy", people would think negatively of the label and be less likely to buy their product.
Any bushel of corn converted to ethanol will come out of someone's mouth. It may be a pigs mouth or it may be a mouth in the 3rd world - but someone has to give up their food so that we can feed a car.
Recent figures put human consumption of corn at less than 5% of the US production. I've seen figures cited as low as 2%. It's coming out of the pig mouth.
Currently, about 14% of the crop is going to produce fuel.
"Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution"
Don't you mean he's one of the people responsible for ending it?
Karl Rove's specialty was making the opponent look bad before making his candidate look good; give the electorate someone to vote AGAINST. You can count on a very dirty campaign coming up, complete with mud-slinging beyond compare. When we look back on the elections of 2008, we'll see low voter turnout due to an electorate that's just plain sick of it and don't want to be involved in such a process. Low turnout is traditionally in the GOP favor, and close calls will go to those who can game the system, which they also have a strong reputation of doing.
Karl Rove being out in the wild is simply a sign that we'll see the same as we saw in 2000 and 2004. 2006 was relatively mild at a national level since Karl wasn't involved in that one as much.
I couldn't find the original Mac disks, so I was using Ubuntu 7.04 on an old iMac for my daughters for a month until I ran until some hitches:
1) Video - some weird bug with this particular old-school iMac resulted in LONG delays, as the CPU and vid card fought over almost everything. Logging in would take about an hour from password to menus. Found a good article online that solved this. 2) Flash - some would say "no flash" is a good thing, but for a six year old kid, it's the world. Adobe doesn't seem to want to release flash for PPC, and with Apple dropping the platform, too, I don't see it ever coming out. I had to scour for the old 10.3 install disks and "give in". Still, it's a nice machine and nice OS.
However, a month later I rebuilt the home server and went from "Windows and a Debian VMWare image" to "Ubuntu 7.04 with a Windows VM image." Not going back. Nice setup.
There was a game that stayed on the top 10 list for well over a year, came with no instructions, but still could suck you in for HOURS. It didn't reward "twitch", didn't depend on the latest hardware, but still made a great time.
Of course, there are some debates as to whether it was really a "game", but I'm not sure if that really matters.
From the wiki: "The Millers began working on Myst in 1991 and released it for the Macintosh computer on September 24, 1993. It was the bestselling video game until The Sims was released." Pretty impressive.
Personally, I feel that gas taxes are one of the fairest taxes the government imposes, as it's an actual usage tax.
For a while, Oregon was one state where hybrids and electric were "double-charged" for state license registration. This was at the same time while Oregon was also giving a state tax break for buying one of those cars, so the left hand and right hand weren't talking.
Since Oregon relies on fuel tax heavily for the roads, the legislature felt that they were looking at a long-term dip in fuel taxes if more people started buying more efficient cars. It all started with talk of "paying their fair share" and how the owners of more efficient cars were effectively being freeloaders, and it eventually passed. Later, it was taken off the books.
I hear that spam is much like something called an "advertisement". I haven't seen these in a while, either. Maybe someone below will clear these things up.
Well that will tell them the mileage, but it wont tell them how many gallons of gas were used to achieve that mileage - unless you have to input your VIN every time you buy gas to track that as well.
I think the parent is referring to those computers with built-in MPG displays. The oil-change computer would grab THAT displayed number, which is readily available.
That would still leave the question as to whether it reflects a city or highway cycle, but just clarifying for the parent.
Yes! Original Disney characters like Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White must be protected! Taking other creators' characters and making millions out of them without paying a cent to those creators in return is a crime!
Actually, Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh were bought and paid for by Disney. There was some controversy by the family of Milne over the transfer, but those two are completely legit, and Disney is within its rights to protect those fully.
The others, as the sibling post reports (but missing the joke), are public domain. Disney's representations of them are fairly copyrightable, but ANYONE can write a story called "Snow White", "Sleeping Beauty", etc. and be untouchable. There's a line of books and DVDs from a company called "Good Times" productions that does cartoons and CGI on almost every Disney PD-based story, and they're all within the letter of the law. Some of them are quite good.
Also - when Amtrak was assembled years ago, each congress-critter wouldn't sign on unless a stop was added in his district, slowing down the trains and making them even less competitive. When you take Amtrak, you'd be amazed how many stops you make in little towns of 200-300 people and wonder "WTF?!"
The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s...
I've had quite a few low-end P3s pass through my hands, many with failing fans. I found that the easiest solution was to underclock the CPU and unplug the fan. Quietest system you ever did (not) hear.
For light web surfing and such, it still makes for a decent computer, and with enough RAM, Windows XP (or 2000) still flies well enough.
No, because the USAPATRIOT Act gives the FBI the authority to get this information from the telcos.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for properly spelling and capitalizing the real name of the USAPATRIOT act. Every single time someone simply calls it the "Patriot" act, it buys into the misdirection that it's somehow "patriotic." By using the proper caps, we clear up that it's just an acronym, and could just as easily stand for Puppies Attacking Toys Rolling In Orange Trails. After all, you're not against puppies, are you? More likely, Politicians Attacking Tired Retirees In Our Time.
"All my mother-in-law wants is a phone that can be loaded with 100 minutes for emergencies to call a tow truck or her husband and she wants those minutes to never expire."
For true emergencies, any working cell phone can still make 911 calls (or cellular version thereof *999 - whatever). That's free - no carrier, no bills. In many areas, the local police or cell phone stores will take donated old cell phones to give to local women's shelters and to shut-ins for just this purpose.
Look around the house, find a phone from a provider you no longer use or whatever, and charge it up and give it to her. The biggest hassle is usually the battery - those lithium batteries have a 'shelf-life' of about three years before they can hold no charge at all. They hold their existing charge quite nicely on the shelf, but their capacity is what goes down.
Second, think about the peripheral benefits of everything NASA has done, not just the pretty pictures.
NASA's tech briefs used to be quarterly publications (not sure if they still make them) listing all of the recent patents and designs by their engineer's. It was a usually a very cool soft-cover book of about 200 pages with lots of not-so-obvious stuff. One that stood out in my (nine year old) memory was a suitcase that contained a folded-up catwalk stairway that you could unfold anywhere. Many of the other things were way over my head at the time.
Let's also not forget the drive toward miniaturization, driven largely by the need to fit all of those electronics into a light, small package for lift-off (late 60's). Or so many of the medical advances that NASA directly brought to light.
NASA's contribution to the world is MUCH more than pretty pictures of outer space.
There is a part of me that wonders why public schools haven't added finger printing to their student ID process.
Actually, my daughter's school district uses thumbprint as a means of having a child pay for lunch. Kid gets scanned at start of enrollment, parent deposits money online, and child pays for lunch with thumb at the register. Smart move in that it takes money out of the lunch room where other students or the employees can profit from theft/coercion.
Of course, it's creepy and invasive enough that the school provides an "opt-out", but then your kid can't buy lunch in the lunchroom. Since it's Sodexho food, it's no loss to us (pretty unhealthy food - the company was featured in "Supersize Me" movie). But the long-term implications are pretty creepy, and I wonder where it will lead in a few years. Will thumbprints be part of standard registration soon enough?
There's a huge difference between drug use and drug *abuse*. Profile based on behaviour, not based on chemical testing. If someone's a lazy obnoxious git, by all means fire him if he doesn't shape up, regardless of the reason.
For larger organizations, esp. government or those that work with the government, it can be very difficult to fire anyone after hiring them, regardless of cause. For example, I understand that at Motorola, an employee who fails a drug test is offered firing or on-the-clock drug counselling. After class is complete, they are retested. If they fail, they are sent back to class, etc.
BTW: it's worth mentioning that some would consider a drug user or abuser a BETTER candidate for some jobs, esp. commissioned sales. With a strong incentive to earn personal money, they can be pretty aggressive in sales.
I can tell you that AT&T's position is pretty goofy. As the former SBC in the area, their fear campaign against community-based broadband was pretty brutal. They bombed the mailboxes with little flyers like here and really soured me more on the company. Now they come around and claim that we need the exact service they were shooting down last year. Sheesh. Those boxes are also pretty huge.
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI.
Come again? 7,000/70,000=10%, so 1 out of 10 employees - a more substantial number. However, I doubt that all 70K of the employees have a computer - janitor, etc.
Sure, everybody breaks the law or does things that they are ashamed of once in a while...but if everybody does it, what's the big deal?
There's an Ann Raynd quote that shows up here on a regular basis, that effectively boils down to this: if enough stuff is illegal and everyone's a criminal, the power comes from the enforcement, and not the law itself. ANYONE can be arrested on convenience - and convicted - as needed, and nothing even needs to be "trumped up." The threat of arrest is a serious enough deterrent, but actual conviction is worse. If you have a problem with your neighbor, make an anonymous call and turn them in for anything and they're in trouble. Driving laws are often given as examples; in the course of driving for a mile, you're probably breaking SOME law, such as following too closely, or driving too slowly.
And when it comes down to things we're ashamed of, it even gets worse. No arrest of conviction is needed. Simple publication of said news can bring anyone down. Example: follow the case of Jack Ryan, an Illinois political candidate with an otherwise bright future. He and his wife (Jeri Ryan - Seven of Nine) divorce and allow the divorce records to be public - but not the child custody records. A Chicago newspaper and television station sue in California and obtain sealed records against the wishes of the parents, and suddenly Jack Ryan's political career is in a shambles because of what he likes to do in private. Actually, much more petty examples are common.
Watch for things to get extra ugly in the fall US elections. The GOP is planning on getting "personal" - see the Google cache of the missing MSNBC story.
Slashdot Mirror
Quote from the wiki:
Hollywood accounting is not limited to movies. An example is the Warner Bros. television series Babylon 5 created by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski, who wrote 90% of the episodes in addition to producing the show, would receive a generous cut of profits if not for Hollywood accounting[citation needed]. The series, which was profitable in each of its five seasons from 1993-1998, has garnered more than US$1 billion for Warner Bros., most recently US$500 million in DVD sales alone. But in the last profit statement given to Straczynski, Warner Bros. claimed the property was $80 million in debt. "Basically," says Straczynski, "by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Yes, but that would be "under the table." Wiki says $20/player while another source shows min $4/player for the DVD spec alone. MP3, JPG, VCD, etc. support each have their own fees.
Here's another article on fees: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050120A2004.html Quote: "Xinhua Online cited the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) as indicating that China produces 60 million DVD players and exports 45-50 million of them a year, with the exported DVD players subject to a royalty charge of US$20 per player."
Granted, 1080 is 6.75 times bigger - my x4 figure compared to 640x480 was a "back-of-the-envelope" variety. Still, the fact that the built-in iPod (dedicated) chip can do 1/6th the work, and that the Apple TV can do MORE with an Intel chip means it's not out of reach for a reasonable price.
Of course, with a dedicated DVD player costing under $30 (or even $20 if you look), I have a feeling that a dedicated H.264 player might not get THAT cheap. IIRC, $9 of every DVD player is actually licensing costs.
Also: I'll grant your point on this, esp. owing as to the "system recommendations" page linked from your page: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/recommenda tions.html WOW! A Pentium D at 3GHz and a 64MB video card to watch a 1080p video!
Given that a little iPod can do the baseline profile at 640x480, I can't think that 1080 would entail a WHOLE LOT more work. OK, admittedly, it's ~4x the resolution, but we are talking about a little device. The specs for the AppleTV device say it will do 1280x1024 of h.264, so I don't think a DVD player with 1080 is out of line.
I think the GP probably has a large collection of CDs of things encoded in DivX, and is just planning ahead to the stage of being able to easily watch those on a set-top box. From the quote, they understand that there MAY be some loss, but are willing to take a little for the convenience of not having to re-encode everything. They're probably hoping that the formats are close enough that there's a simple transform or something (a la XVID/DIVX/MPEG4 being related), but they're much different than that.
Or, to say nothing of Flash for Linux/PPC, which still hasn't been released. The open-source version is OK, but quite a few sites have a hard-check for version of Flash before giving you anything, and will balk even if you have something "compatible".
Notable is that where I grew up (suburbs of Chicago), the water/sewer billing system was that your sewer portion was double the water portion. If you used $50 worth of water one month, you got billed $100 for the sewer portion. Guess they couldn't find a reasonable way to meter the... other end. This meant that if you had a large expense of water (such as a pool or garden watering) that didn't result in sewer use, you still paid for it.
Also (regarding the surcharge for when you move): another suburb over here had a lawsuit when an unlicensed and drunk motorcyclist hit a median and sued (successfully) over poor road markings. The village instituted a surcharge on all houses for the next several years to pay for the settlement. If you moved out before the time was up, you also paid the remainder of your part of the settlement.
I think, as a whole, the RIAA doesn't care what people think of them. Their customers are the major record labels, and if the RIAA can act as the "muscle", then we won't associate these antics with the labels them. Face it; if the headline read "Warner Brothers Sues 80-year-old Grandma Without a Computer for Piracy", people would think negatively of the label and be less likely to buy their product.
Recent figures put human consumption of corn at less than 5% of the US production. I've seen figures cited as low as 2%. It's coming out of the pig mouth.
Currently, about 14% of the crop is going to produce fuel.
Karl Rove's specialty was making the opponent look bad before making his candidate look good; give the electorate someone to vote AGAINST. You can count on a very dirty campaign coming up, complete with mud-slinging beyond compare. When we look back on the elections of 2008, we'll see low voter turnout due to an electorate that's just plain sick of it and don't want to be involved in such a process. Low turnout is traditionally in the GOP favor, and close calls will go to those who can game the system, which they also have a strong reputation of doing.
Karl Rove being out in the wild is simply a sign that we'll see the same as we saw in 2000 and 2004. 2006 was relatively mild at a national level since Karl wasn't involved in that one as much.
I couldn't find the original Mac disks, so I was using Ubuntu 7.04 on an old iMac for my daughters for a month until I ran until some hitches:
1) Video - some weird bug with this particular old-school iMac resulted in LONG delays, as the CPU and vid card fought over almost everything. Logging in would take about an hour from password to menus. Found a good article online that solved this.
2) Flash - some would say "no flash" is a good thing, but for a six year old kid, it's the world. Adobe doesn't seem to want to release flash for PPC, and with Apple dropping the platform, too, I don't see it ever coming out. I had to scour for the old 10.3 install disks and "give in". Still, it's a nice machine and nice OS.
However, a month later I rebuilt the home server and went from "Windows and a Debian VMWare image" to "Ubuntu 7.04 with a Windows VM image." Not going back. Nice setup.
There was a game that stayed on the top 10 list for well over a year, came with no instructions, but still could suck you in for HOURS. It didn't reward "twitch", didn't depend on the latest hardware, but still made a great time.
Of course, there are some debates as to whether it was really a "game", but I'm not sure if that really matters.
From the wiki: "The Millers began working on Myst in 1991 and released it for the Macintosh computer on September 24, 1993. It was the bestselling video game until The Sims was released." Pretty impressive.
For a while, Oregon was one state where hybrids and electric were "double-charged" for state license registration. This was at the same time while Oregon was also giving a state tax break for buying one of those cars, so the left hand and right hand weren't talking.
Since Oregon relies on fuel tax heavily for the roads, the legislature felt that they were looking at a long-term dip in fuel taxes if more people started buying more efficient cars. It all started with talk of "paying their fair share" and how the owners of more efficient cars were effectively being freeloaders, and it eventually passed. Later, it was taken off the books.
I hear that spam is much like something called an "advertisement". I haven't seen these in a while, either. Maybe someone below will clear these things up.
I think the parent is referring to those computers with built-in MPG displays. The oil-change computer would grab THAT displayed number, which is readily available.
That would still leave the question as to whether it reflects a city or highway cycle, but just clarifying for the parent.
Actually, Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh were bought and paid for by Disney. There was some controversy by the family of Milne over the transfer, but those two are completely legit, and Disney is within its rights to protect those fully.
The others, as the sibling post reports (but missing the joke), are public domain. Disney's representations of them are fairly copyrightable, but ANYONE can write a story called "Snow White", "Sleeping Beauty", etc. and be untouchable. There's a line of books and DVDs from a company called "Good Times" productions that does cartoons and CGI on almost every Disney PD-based story, and they're all within the letter of the law. Some of them are quite good.
Also - when Amtrak was assembled years ago, each congress-critter wouldn't sign on unless a stop was added in his district, slowing down the trains and making them even less competitive. When you take Amtrak, you'd be amazed how many stops you make in little towns of 200-300 people and wonder "WTF?!"
I've had quite a few low-end P3s pass through my hands, many with failing fans. I found that the easiest solution was to underclock the CPU and unplug the fan. Quietest system you ever did (not) hear.
For light web surfing and such, it still makes for a decent computer, and with enough RAM, Windows XP (or 2000) still flies well enough.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for properly spelling and capitalizing the real name of the USAPATRIOT act. Every single time someone simply calls it the "Patriot" act, it buys into the misdirection that it's somehow "patriotic." By using the proper caps, we clear up that it's just an acronym, and could just as easily stand for Puppies Attacking Toys Rolling In Orange Trails. After all, you're not against puppies, are you? More likely, Politicians Attacking Tired Retirees In Our Time.
For true emergencies, any working cell phone can still make 911 calls (or cellular version thereof *999 - whatever). That's free - no carrier, no bills. In many areas, the local police or cell phone stores will take donated old cell phones to give to local women's shelters and to shut-ins for just this purpose.
Look around the house, find a phone from a provider you no longer use or whatever, and charge it up and give it to her. The biggest hassle is usually the battery - those lithium batteries have a 'shelf-life' of about three years before they can hold no charge at all. They hold their existing charge quite nicely on the shelf, but their capacity is what goes down.
NASA's tech briefs used to be quarterly publications (not sure if they still make them) listing all of the recent patents and designs by their engineer's. It was a usually a very cool soft-cover book of about 200 pages with lots of not-so-obvious stuff. One that stood out in my (nine year old) memory was a suitcase that contained a folded-up catwalk stairway that you could unfold anywhere. Many of the other things were way over my head at the time.
Let's also not forget the drive toward miniaturization, driven largely by the need to fit all of those electronics into a light, small package for lift-off (late 60's). Or so many of the medical advances that NASA directly brought to light.
NASA's contribution to the world is MUCH more than pretty pictures of outer space.
Actually, my daughter's school district uses thumbprint as a means of having a child pay for lunch. Kid gets scanned at start of enrollment, parent deposits money online, and child pays for lunch with thumb at the register. Smart move in that it takes money out of the lunch room where other students or the employees can profit from theft/coercion.
Of course, it's creepy and invasive enough that the school provides an "opt-out", but then your kid can't buy lunch in the lunchroom. Since it's Sodexho food, it's no loss to us (pretty unhealthy food - the company was featured in "Supersize Me" movie). But the long-term implications are pretty creepy, and I wonder where it will lead in a few years. Will thumbprints be part of standard registration soon enough?
For larger organizations, esp. government or those that work with the government, it can be very difficult to fire anyone after hiring them, regardless of cause. For example, I understand that at Motorola, an employee who fails a drug test is offered firing or on-the-clock drug counselling. After class is complete, they are retested. If they fail, they are sent back to class, etc.
BTW: it's worth mentioning that some would consider a drug user or abuser a BETTER candidate for some jobs, esp. commissioned sales. With a strong incentive to earn personal money, they can be pretty aggressive in sales.
I can tell you that AT&T's position is pretty goofy. As the former SBC in the area, their fear campaign against community-based broadband was pretty brutal. They bombed the mailboxes with little flyers like here and really soured me more on the company. Now they come around and claim that we need the exact service they were shooting down last year. Sheesh. Those boxes are also pretty huge.
Come again? 7,000/70,000=10%, so 1 out of 10 employees - a more substantial number. However, I doubt that all 70K of the employees have a computer - janitor, etc.
There's an Ann Raynd quote that shows up here on a regular basis, that effectively boils down to this: if enough stuff is illegal and everyone's a criminal, the power comes from the enforcement, and not the law itself. ANYONE can be arrested on convenience - and convicted - as needed, and nothing even needs to be "trumped up." The threat of arrest is a serious enough deterrent, but actual conviction is worse. If you have a problem with your neighbor, make an anonymous call and turn them in for anything and they're in trouble. Driving laws are often given as examples; in the course of driving for a mile, you're probably breaking SOME law, such as following too closely, or driving too slowly.
And when it comes down to things we're ashamed of, it even gets worse. No arrest of conviction is needed. Simple publication of said news can bring anyone down. Example: follow the case of Jack Ryan, an Illinois political candidate with an otherwise bright future. He and his wife (Jeri Ryan - Seven of Nine) divorce and allow the divorce records to be public - but not the child custody records. A Chicago newspaper and television station sue in California and obtain sealed records against the wishes of the parents, and suddenly Jack Ryan's political career is in a shambles because of what he likes to do in private. Actually, much more petty examples are common.
Watch for things to get extra ugly in the fall US elections. The GOP is planning on getting "personal" - see the Google cache of the missing MSNBC story.