I have argue this for some time. If you want to prove to someone that our laws are already impossible for average citizens to know, just have them talk about what is legal and illegal in front of lawyers. They will quickly be told that not only do they not know what they are talking about, but they will also be told that the words used in laws have different definition than the same words used by the general population.
Re:not to be the pedant here...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. Nerd and geek are interchangeable depending on what region of the country you are in. It is more like arguing over six vs. a half dozen.
The biggest difference between men and women is opportunity. As in the opportunity NOT to work, or at least not be the primary bread winner. HUMANS are lazy. Any woman can find a man that will support her. Even the rattiest heroin addicted scumbag can find a man that will support her if she wants to, and is willing to put out. Men generally do not have this opportunity. The reality of this is taught to children from birth.
Given that PEOPLE are generally lazy and will take the path of least resistance, what you will find is that women as a group will take easier career paths than men as a group. Not because of hormones or where their genitals are, but because they are humans and behave the same as other humans who are in the same environment.
Until the time that little girls stop being taught that they can be a 'princess' that is supported by daddy until they get married and start getting supported by 'daddy', you won't see women working in the harder fields as much as men. You will see them frequently dabble in harder jobs during the transition between daddy and 'daddy' to bolster their self esteem, and you will see the small percentage of outliers that will buck the culture, but they will not be in the harder jobs in large percentages.
Again, this is not an XY vs. XX chromosome issue. It is a cultural one that begins when people are infants.
Yes, I have met people like that. They won't say it out loud that they believe it is some magic force, but they stop just short of it. I have honest to goodness offended people with the statement "Books are not inherently better than TV." I don't mean I've met people who disagree with that statement (which I have, and they are just as religious). I mean that they covered their mouth as it dropped open and said "You can't really mean that." with the same tone of voice they would have used if I said that crushing kitten heads was a great way to spend the holidays. In this area at least (Northern California) it is a down right common.
This doesn't explain why this attitude is so prevalent in the 20 to 40 year old demographic. Plus none of those 1800's folks were illiterate because of TV. Putting 'intellectual' content on the units is not going to change anyone's religion any more than the extremely high quantity and quality of content on TV has gotten them to stop seeing TV as a boogyman.
One problem that acceptance has is that there is religion around books and TV. It is this magical thing where if you read it in a book, you are somehow magically turned into a smart person, and if you see it on TV, you are somehow magically turned dumb. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, books are a force of good and TV is a force of evil. See previous story for a perfect example of people trying to prove this.
The problem for e-readers is that most people perceive them as falling into the TV category because the picture can change. They see them as TVs with REALLY slow refresh rates. Thus they are tools of the dark forces and will make you dumb by touching them. Since there is no hope of convincing these people that books and TV are not devices of good and evil, the only hope for e-readers is to distance themselves from TVs and its younger brother the computer.
Well, I think the dangers of hitchhiking are over rated, but there are dangers. Like most things, it's a numbers game. When you are ranked very high in the target group, and you play a lot, the risk goes up very quickly.
Here in California, we start at 12 cents a kwh and on my bills have gotten up 32 cents a kwh on the tail end of my bills. PG&E ramps up the cost of electricity the more you use. This means that energy savings always come from the most expensive part of the bill. The upgrades I made of new motherboard/processor/memory cost me ~$160 and dramatically sped up my machines. So, to pay for the machines I needed to reduce my energy usage by $160/$.32 = 500 kwh. My systems went from ~140watts idle to ~60 watts idle and ~180 watts under load to ~100 watts under load. So, we can say that they save ~80 watts given that few operations really push these new processors. My server runs 24/7 so that would be only 260 days to pay for itself. My wife's old machine would not properly suspend, so it ran basically 24/7 without load. That means that for 4 hours a day it reduces the watts by 80 and for 20 hours a day it reduces it by ~100. That means it pays for itself in a little less than 260 days. My system is under much heavier load and finishes these tasks much faster and can then move back down to a non-load state. While it runs on average ~16 hours a day, it has higher savings because we are reducing 180 watts down to 60. The least savings comes from my son's computer. That one might take a couple of years to pay itself off, but it is likely that he will not get another upgrade within 3 years so it will also pay for itself while giving him a better user experience.
It is great that there are places in the US that get their electricity at less than a third of what we here in California pay, but for us, it often makes sense to upgrade from a strictly cost point of view.
I am always suprised at how many people will happily get in a car with someone they don't know just because it has been called a 'carpool' instead of 'hitchiking'. I have a pal who's wife was arguing (well, more a debate) that it was a good thing to go to the carpool sites in our county, and find someone that is going to the same place as you. This is an attractive 98 pound woman. She would never consider hitchiking, but could not grasp that getting into a strangers car alone from a carpool parking lot is no better than doing it from any random freeway on ramp.
After getting no where with her, I pointed out to him what she had been saying. I have no doubt that they had a big argument about it because she now is adamantly against the idea of using the find a stranger in the parking lot method of carpooling. Some might think that I over stepped a line, but I really don't want to find out that she was found in a ditch raped an murdered. I know if I were a rapist, she would have easily been in the top 1% of target victim group because she is attractive, to small to put up a big fight, and was willing to get into a strangers car.
Simply put: Carpooling with strangers IS hitchhiking.
Each person needs to evaluate the risk/benefit of hitchhiking for themselves, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they are not the same thing just because it now has a PC name and the government encourages it.
Putting a bully in some kind of painful wristlock in front of a crowd, and warning him that you won't hold back next time, is all you need to do. The level of violence cannot exceed that of defence. It's when that occurs, that the bullied becomes the bully.
This is terrible advice, and just helps to promote MORE bullying. It is no different than telling someone "Hey, if your ever in a gun fight, you shouldn't shoot the guy. It's only OK to shoot the gun out of his hand."
Only using violence that does not exceed that of defense requires super human skills at fighting. If a bully knows that his options are to win or tie, and that he has no chance of being seriously hurt, you not only encourage the traditional bullies, but you also start inviting other kids that wouldn't normally take the risk, but see this as a golden opportunity to look tough without the risk of injury.
What I never understood was that often teachers took the side of the bully. I always assumed that probably the parents of those kids weren't much better and the teachers were just afraid.
That is a big part of the problem that usually gets ignored. It is common for teachers to side with the bully. This comes from all sorts of reasons.
Sometimes the the teachers think that it's good for the student to learn how to deal with bullies themselves.
Sometimes it is that the teachers don't like 'nerds' for whatever reason.
Sometimes the teachers were bullies when they were kids.
Sometimes the teachers were picked on by bullies as kids and now enjoy seeing someone else get it.
Sometimes the teacher is just a sick bastard that likes to see people getting hurt
Sometimes the teacher believes in a cast system, and thus believes it is the natural order of things for the bully to pick on the weak
Sometimes the teacher is just lazy and doesn't feel protecting the weak is worth the effort
Sometimes the teacher is afraid of what the bully will do to them if they get involved.
Sometimes the teacher sees the bully as an authority figure, and thus becomes a follower
People throw around the title of "Teacher" or "Principal" and forget that we are talking about people. That is all they are. So, the same kinds of attitudes you see from people who are not teachers will also be reflected in the portion of the population whose jobs have them working in schools. If you have ever heard someone (and I know you have) that kids should learn to deal with bullies themselves, you can be guaranteed that there are teachers who believe the same thing. The same goes for whatever else you hear people saying.
People forgetting that teachers are not some special kind of person, and that they are just regular people just makes the problem worse, because it makes them think the school is some kind of fairy tail land.
While I don't totally disagree with you, the problem with the "Teach them to fight" solution is that the bullies not only tend to get the same kind of training, but the ones who's parents encourage their bullying tend to get a lot more of the training.
No, you did NOT comment that the spanking argument needs some balance. What you did is make an out and out lie about people because they disagreed with you. And I quote:
The trouble is, as long as pro-spankers seem to be saying that spanking = good and more spanking = better, instead of discussing the merits of good spanking vs. bad spanking,
You have never met a single person that thinks spanking is always good, nor have you met a single person that beleives that more spanking is always better. YOU crossed the line when you started lying about people and claiming that they are abusing their children if they don't discipline your way.
In fact you have never met a single person who only uses spanking to punish. There are two groups: Those that use spanking along with other methods of punishment, and those that only use the other methods of punishment.
In fact it is the mental abusers that consistently say "There is never an excuse to hit a child." And thus are the ones refusing to have any balance or discussion on good spanking vs. bad spanking. This is by definition, because as soon as someone says that there is such a thing as good spanking, they are now in the pro spanking group.
As for:
humans are strongly wired to hit things when frustrated
You leave out that it is also strongly wired in humans to first use psychological attacks. In fact, that goes beyond humans and includes most mammals and even many reptiles and birds. Evolution pretty well assured this, as the animals that attacked first were and are more likely to die and thus bred less than animals that scare their advisories from a distance.
At the end of the day, it is the anti-spanking group that refuses to have balance in the debate.
While I can say that I have seen spanking in public that was abuse, that is because spanking in public is rarely warranted, so you are only seeing the bad spanking. Psychological abuse on the other had... I see it all the time. In public. It is simply accepted. It is the norm. Psychological abuse is so much more common than physical abuse because very large portions of the population believes that leaving a mark = abuse and no marks = no abuse.
there is a lot of legislation that can be made to supplant the need for more technology.
And that right there is why 'environmentalists' are a problem. Most of the people that take on the 'environmentalists' badge are not out to solve environmental problems. They are out to alter your lifestyle to meet a moral standard that they set. This often includes the shunning of technology.
Sometimes it's cheaper to buy the new stuff than not to. I bought a new Athlon X2 5400 a little over a year ago to replace my Athlon 1.2. I plugged the whole system into a Kill-A-Watt to see the power draw. I calculated that it would take 10 months for the energy savings to completely pay for the upgrade. So, my faster computer is now not only free, but actually saving me money. Because of this, I have also upgraded my wife's computer, my kid's computer, and my server. My wife's computer and my server should be breaking even over the next month or so, and my kid's computer will have payed itself off in June.
I also downgraded my speakers. My old Klipsch 5.1 surrounds sound speakers sounded great, but they drew something like 45 watts. I replaced them with a generic set of 2.1 speakers that don't sound as good, but are more than adequate for the purpose, and I am now only drawing 2 watts.
That is one reason why giving young children a vaccine that prevents them from getting it when they are young and it is less severe so that they DO get it when they are adults is stupid.
Kind of off topic, but that is why it amazes me that most people are getting chicken pox vaccines for their kids. The yearly death rate for chicken pox was ~140. Way less than the flu. 50% of the deaths were in the 5% of the population that made it into adulthood without getting chicken pox. So, now it is standard procedure to give just about every kid a chicken pox vaccine that does not give them life long immunity the way getting sick would, but instead leaves them at best 20 times more likely to die from the disease by delaying infection into adulthood, or putting them on a life long regiment of booster shots.
When I am talking about conduit, I am talking about a 3 to 6 foot conduit. So, yes room to spare. Personally I don't think that fiber has even close to the bandwidth necessary to take us into what should be our near future. I should be able to pay for a 10 Gps fiber cable dedicated to me alone if I am willing to pay the rent on the tubes. With a 6 foot conduit, it would be feasable for my local ISP to run that cable to me. But at that point we are splitting hairs. When you can just pull more cables, what is a few Gbps between friends.;)
OK, the picture helps a lot. I was thinking of something more like the box with permanent gloves built in. You guys have been talking about a sneeze guard on steroids. This then leads to wondering if the paper suggestion is not really relevant to the original question. If the original question was how to have one page worth of instructions nearby, a small rolly cart with the laptop sitting on it would work just fine. I was under the impression that the guy wanted to run through formulas based on the experiment.
Ok, since these guys are talking about biological work, the issue isn't that the item needs to be sterile going in, it is that it needs to be serialized when it is done, and as you say, burning the paper is a cheaper and easier way to sterilize items after the work than what can be done with a computer? If so, then the previous comments make a lot more sense.
I do however think that a better solution than the city building the fiber network would be for the cities to build data conduits. They already run multiple conduits through cities. Sewer, Water, Storm Drains, perhaps even gas lines. Cities know how to run conduit. As far as I know, there are no entities in the US that currently run data conduit for public use within the US.
So, if the city built a conduit system similar to the storm drains, but reserved it for use as a data conduit, they could rent out that space to ANYONE that wanted to run data lines. Whether that is for telephone, internet or cable. This would allow true competition for telephone, internet and cable within their cities, while keeping down the long term costs of ripping up streets to do maintenance. This would also be a boon to local businesses that wanted secure dedicated lines. If a hospital in town wants a secure line to a lab clinic a few miles down the road, they could have an honest to goodness dedicated line run directly to the destination point. If a local ISP wants to start selling 100 megabit internet connections, they can run their own lines.
Best of all, if some new tech comes out that requires a different kind of cabling, then it doesn't require digging up all of the streets in the city to get it deployed. It is just a matter of pulling new cable through the existing conduit.
The city doesn't have to worry about these kinds of lawsuits. The city gets to charge rent on the conduit. And the residents get a much better chance of having the latest and greatest technology in their neighborhoods.
Slashdot Mirror
I have argue this for some time. If you want to prove to someone that our laws are already impossible for average citizens to know, just have them talk about what is legal and illegal in front of lawyers. They will quickly be told that not only do they not know what they are talking about, but they will also be told that the words used in laws have different definition than the same words used by the general population.
Wrong. Nerd and geek are interchangeable depending on what region of the country you are in. It is more like arguing over six vs. a half dozen.
The biggest difference between men and women is opportunity. As in the opportunity NOT to work, or at least not be the primary bread winner. HUMANS are lazy. Any woman can find a man that will support her. Even the rattiest heroin addicted scumbag can find a man that will support her if she wants to, and is willing to put out. Men generally do not have this opportunity. The reality of this is taught to children from birth.
Given that PEOPLE are generally lazy and will take the path of least resistance, what you will find is that women as a group will take easier career paths than men as a group. Not because of hormones or where their genitals are, but because they are humans and behave the same as other humans who are in the same environment.
Until the time that little girls stop being taught that they can be a 'princess' that is supported by daddy until they get married and start getting supported by 'daddy', you won't see women working in the harder fields as much as men. You will see them frequently dabble in harder jobs during the transition between daddy and 'daddy' to bolster their self esteem, and you will see the small percentage of outliers that will buck the culture, but they will not be in the harder jobs in large percentages.
Again, this is not an XY vs. XX chromosome issue. It is a cultural one that begins when people are infants.
Yes, I have met people like that. They won't say it out loud that they believe it is some magic force, but they stop just short of it. I have honest to goodness offended people with the statement "Books are not inherently better than TV." I don't mean I've met people who disagree with that statement (which I have, and they are just as religious). I mean that they covered their mouth as it dropped open and said "You can't really mean that." with the same tone of voice they would have used if I said that crushing kitten heads was a great way to spend the holidays. In this area at least (Northern California) it is a down right common.
This doesn't explain why this attitude is so prevalent in the 20 to 40 year old demographic. Plus none of those 1800's folks were illiterate because of TV. Putting 'intellectual' content on the units is not going to change anyone's religion any more than the extremely high quantity and quality of content on TV has gotten them to stop seeing TV as a boogyman.
One problem that acceptance has is that there is religion around books and TV. It is this magical thing where if you read it in a book, you are somehow magically turned into a smart person, and if you see it on TV, you are somehow magically turned dumb. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, books are a force of good and TV is a force of evil. See previous story for a perfect example of people trying to prove this.
The problem for e-readers is that most people perceive them as falling into the TV category because the picture can change. They see them as TVs with REALLY slow refresh rates. Thus they are tools of the dark forces and will make you dumb by touching them. Since there is no hope of convincing these people that books and TV are not devices of good and evil, the only hope for e-readers is to distance themselves from TVs and its younger brother the computer.
Well, I think the dangers of hitchhiking are over rated, but there are dangers. Like most things, it's a numbers game. When you are ranked very high in the target group, and you play a lot, the risk goes up very quickly.
Here in California, we start at 12 cents a kwh and on my bills have gotten up 32 cents a kwh on the tail end of my bills. PG&E ramps up the cost of electricity the more you use. This means that energy savings always come from the most expensive part of the bill. The upgrades I made of new motherboard/processor/memory cost me ~$160 and dramatically sped up my machines. So, to pay for the machines I needed to reduce my energy usage by $160/$.32 = 500 kwh. My systems went from ~140watts idle to ~60 watts idle and ~180 watts under load to ~100 watts under load. So, we can say that they save ~80 watts given that few operations really push these new processors. My server runs 24/7 so that would be only 260 days to pay for itself. My wife's old machine would not properly suspend, so it ran basically 24/7 without load. That means that for 4 hours a day it reduces the watts by 80 and for 20 hours a day it reduces it by ~100. That means it pays for itself in a little less than 260 days. My system is under much heavier load and finishes these tasks much faster and can then move back down to a non-load state. While it runs on average ~16 hours a day, it has higher savings because we are reducing 180 watts down to 60. The least savings comes from my son's computer. That one might take a couple of years to pay itself off, but it is likely that he will not get another upgrade within 3 years so it will also pay for itself while giving him a better user experience.
It is great that there are places in the US that get their electricity at less than a third of what we here in California pay, but for us, it often makes sense to upgrade from a strictly cost point of view.
Shhhh... There are enough people that can't grasp that dogs are not human equivalents as it is. Don't start feeding their psychosis.
I am always suprised at how many people will happily get in a car with someone they don't know just because it has been called a 'carpool' instead of 'hitchiking'. I have a pal who's wife was arguing (well, more a debate) that it was a good thing to go to the carpool sites in our county, and find someone that is going to the same place as you. This is an attractive 98 pound woman. She would never consider hitchiking, but could not grasp that getting into a strangers car alone from a carpool parking lot is no better than doing it from any random freeway on ramp.
After getting no where with her, I pointed out to him what she had been saying. I have no doubt that they had a big argument about it because she now is adamantly against the idea of using the find a stranger in the parking lot method of carpooling. Some might think that I over stepped a line, but I really don't want to find out that she was found in a ditch raped an murdered. I know if I were a rapist, she would have easily been in the top 1% of target victim group because she is attractive, to small to put up a big fight, and was willing to get into a strangers car.
Simply put: Carpooling with strangers IS hitchhiking.
Each person needs to evaluate the risk/benefit of hitchhiking for themselves, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they are not the same thing just because it now has a PC name and the government encourages it.
Putting a bully in some kind of painful wristlock in front of a crowd, and warning him that you won't hold back next time, is all you need to do. The level of violence cannot exceed that of defence. It's when that occurs, that the bullied becomes the bully.
This is terrible advice, and just helps to promote MORE bullying. It is no different than telling someone "Hey, if your ever in a gun fight, you shouldn't shoot the guy. It's only OK to shoot the gun out of his hand."
Only using violence that does not exceed that of defense requires super human skills at fighting. If a bully knows that his options are to win or tie, and that he has no chance of being seriously hurt, you not only encourage the traditional bullies, but you also start inviting other kids that wouldn't normally take the risk, but see this as a golden opportunity to look tough without the risk of injury.
Of course that advice works exactly the same for the bully that want's to improve his bullying skills.
What I never understood was that often teachers took the side of the bully. I always assumed that probably the parents of those kids weren't much better and the teachers were just afraid.
That is a big part of the problem that usually gets ignored. It is common for teachers to side with the bully. This comes from all sorts of reasons.
People throw around the title of "Teacher" or "Principal" and forget that we are talking about people. That is all they are. So, the same kinds of attitudes you see from people who are not teachers will also be reflected in the portion of the population whose jobs have them working in schools. If you have ever heard someone (and I know you have) that kids should learn to deal with bullies themselves, you can be guaranteed that there are teachers who believe the same thing. The same goes for whatever else you hear people saying.
People forgetting that teachers are not some special kind of person, and that they are just regular people just makes the problem worse, because it makes them think the school is some kind of fairy tail land.
While I don't totally disagree with you, the problem with the "Teach them to fight" solution is that the bullies not only tend to get the same kind of training, but the ones who's parents encourage their bullying tend to get a lot more of the training.
That's not fair. OnStar can also route all audio from your car to any law enforcement group that wants to keep an eye on you!
The trouble is, as long as pro-spankers seem to be saying that spanking = good and more spanking = better, instead of discussing the merits of good spanking vs. bad spanking,
You have never met a single person that thinks spanking is always good, nor have you met a single person that beleives that more spanking is always better. YOU crossed the line when you started lying about people and claiming that they are abusing their children if they don't discipline your way.
In fact you have never met a single person who only uses spanking to punish. There are two groups: Those that use spanking along with other methods of punishment, and those that only use the other methods of punishment.
In fact it is the mental abusers that consistently say "There is never an excuse to hit a child." And thus are the ones refusing to have any balance or discussion on good spanking vs. bad spanking. This is by definition, because as soon as someone says that there is such a thing as good spanking, they are now in the pro spanking group.
As for:
humans are strongly wired to hit things when frustrated
You leave out that it is also strongly wired in humans to first use psychological attacks. In fact, that goes beyond humans and includes most mammals and even many reptiles and birds. Evolution pretty well assured this, as the animals that attacked first were and are more likely to die and thus bred less than animals that scare their advisories from a distance.
At the end of the day, it is the anti-spanking group that refuses to have balance in the debate.
While I can say that I have seen spanking in public that was abuse, that is because spanking in public is rarely warranted, so you are only seeing the bad spanking. Psychological abuse on the other had... I see it all the time. In public. It is simply accepted. It is the norm. Psychological abuse is so much more common than physical abuse because very large portions of the population believes that leaving a mark = abuse and no marks = no abuse.
there is a lot of legislation that can be made to supplant the need for more technology.
And that right there is why 'environmentalists' are a problem. Most of the people that take on the 'environmentalists' badge are not out to solve environmental problems. They are out to alter your lifestyle to meet a moral standard that they set. This often includes the shunning of technology.
Sometimes it's cheaper to buy the new stuff than not to. I bought a new Athlon X2 5400 a little over a year ago to replace my Athlon 1.2. I plugged the whole system into a Kill-A-Watt to see the power draw. I calculated that it would take 10 months for the energy savings to completely pay for the upgrade. So, my faster computer is now not only free, but actually saving me money. Because of this, I have also upgraded my wife's computer, my kid's computer, and my server. My wife's computer and my server should be breaking even over the next month or so, and my kid's computer will have payed itself off in June.
I also downgraded my speakers. My old Klipsch 5.1 surrounds sound speakers sounded great, but they drew something like 45 watts. I replaced them with a generic set of 2.1 speakers that don't sound as good, but are more than adequate for the purpose, and I am now only drawing 2 watts.
That is one reason why giving young children a vaccine that prevents them from getting it when they are young and it is less severe so that they DO get it when they are adults is stupid.
Kind of off topic, but that is why it amazes me that most people are getting chicken pox vaccines for their kids. The yearly death rate for chicken pox was ~140. Way less than the flu. 50% of the deaths were in the 5% of the population that made it into adulthood without getting chicken pox. So, now it is standard procedure to give just about every kid a chicken pox vaccine that does not give them life long immunity the way getting sick would, but instead leaves them at best 20 times more likely to die from the disease by delaying infection into adulthood, or putting them on a life long regiment of booster shots.
When I am talking about conduit, I am talking about a 3 to 6 foot conduit. So, yes room to spare. Personally I don't think that fiber has even close to the bandwidth necessary to take us into what should be our near future. I should be able to pay for a 10 Gps fiber cable dedicated to me alone if I am willing to pay the rent on the tubes. With a 6 foot conduit, it would be feasable for my local ISP to run that cable to me. But at that point we are splitting hairs. When you can just pull more cables, what is a few Gbps between friends. ;)
OK, the picture helps a lot. I was thinking of something more like the box with permanent gloves built in. You guys have been talking about a sneeze guard on steroids. This then leads to wondering if the paper suggestion is not really relevant to the original question. If the original question was how to have one page worth of instructions nearby, a small rolly cart with the laptop sitting on it would work just fine. I was under the impression that the guy wanted to run through formulas based on the experiment.
Ok, since these guys are talking about biological work, the issue isn't that the item needs to be sterile going in, it is that it needs to be serialized when it is done, and as you say, burning the paper is a cheaper and easier way to sterilize items after the work than what can be done with a computer? If so, then the previous comments make a lot more sense.
Could someone explain what the situation is that would allow paper but not a computer?
I agree with you.
I do however think that a better solution than the city building the fiber network would be for the cities to build data conduits. They already run multiple conduits through cities. Sewer, Water, Storm Drains, perhaps even gas lines. Cities know how to run conduit. As far as I know, there are no entities in the US that currently run data conduit for public use within the US.
So, if the city built a conduit system similar to the storm drains, but reserved it for use as a data conduit, they could rent out that space to ANYONE that wanted to run data lines. Whether that is for telephone, internet or cable. This would allow true competition for telephone, internet and cable within their cities, while keeping down the long term costs of ripping up streets to do maintenance. This would also be a boon to local businesses that wanted secure dedicated lines. If a hospital in town wants a secure line to a lab clinic a few miles down the road, they could have an honest to goodness dedicated line run directly to the destination point. If a local ISP wants to start selling 100 megabit internet connections, they can run their own lines.
Best of all, if some new tech comes out that requires a different kind of cabling, then it doesn't require digging up all of the streets in the city to get it deployed. It is just a matter of pulling new cable through the existing conduit.
The city doesn't have to worry about these kinds of lawsuits. The city gets to charge rent on the conduit. And the residents get a much better chance of having the latest and greatest technology in their neighborhoods.