Since we have been able to deliver landline telephone service and electricity to every home in the country we should have had no problem delivering broadband internet service to every home in the country by now.
Ehhhh... I mean, in fairness, it did take us over 50 years to accomplish that, and it really isn't quite 100% complete even today. It's over 95%, probably, and for the most part people who still lack service do so voluntarily, but still it's not quite there yet.
Also, if you take electricity as an example, much of that connectivity was achieved via multi-mile-long long stretches of high-tension overhead wire in exactly the way you can't deliver high-speed internet service.
Don't get me wrong. The fact that telcos today have largely adopted an attitude like they don't want or need new customers (but still deserve to keep raking in the dough all the same), and the palpable contempt they exhibit for the customers they do have, absolutely enrages me. And they could do a LOT more to solve these issues if they found it within themselves to just deign to give a fuck. They are, without question, the problem.
But that being said, we tend to forget that things like the electrical grid and the POTS network grew gradually and evolutionary, over the course of many decades, and often in tandem with regional development in general. Less than 30 years ago, growing up in Queens, NYC, our neighborhood still had both telephone AND cable TV wiring on overhead poles, right where it'd stood for the previous 4-5 decades. Electrical service had been buried, at one point, but the data services weren't part of that effort and ended up waiting another few decades before they finally went ahead and buried the whole mess. Digging up every road in a borough of NYC is the sort of logistical nightmare you don't undertake lightly, and don't repeat often.
And that's how you end up with stories of people who can't get broadband service because the fiber required to provide it is buried in the wrong place, or there isn't any buried fiber near their new-construction home, or the telco just doesn't feel like digging up the street for them, or etc.
The trend toward buried runs as the only method of running fiber (for good reasons), and the trend towards fiber as the only method of delivering sufficiently high-speed broadband, means that it's hard for the network to grow organically from a starting point of just a wire strung along a pole for a few miles. But that's how all of our previous networks started, and how they continued to exist for a LONG time — longer than residential fiber has even been a thing.
I don't have any good solutions to offer. I don't know if what we need is more point-to-point wireless, more satellite, or what. But I do see the technical and logistical problems, which become especially vexing when they're compounded with the network providers' disinterest.
It's a lot more difficult to lie to someone if they have evidence that contradicts what you're saying after all.
And it's even harder to get away with lying to someone, when they know you have the evidence that contradicts what you're saying. I think that's Congress' biggest fear, in making CRS reports public. It means they have to own all of that information, instead of just picking and choosing the facts that they find convenient.
If DiamondWare were "foolish" enough to let dw.com expire (foolish from a business perspective, since a two-letter domain obviously became a hot, and valuable, commodity) once it was "no longer needed", then Deutsche Welle could have swooped in and registered it without it costing them squat. (Well, other than whatever their registrar charged in registration fee, so like €10 maybe?) If they were that anxious to get control of the domain, I'm sure they were tracking the expiration date and poised to pounce the moment DiamondWare's registration lapsed.
Same thing if DiamondWare let dw.com lie fallow, in fact, since one of the requirements for holding a domain registration is some form of use. (Or it was, back then — I haven't kept up with the rules.) Even a single-page placeholder website is sufficient, but if there were no servers reachable under the dw.com domain at all then Deutsche Welle could've applied to have the registration forfeited and turned over to them. Again, minimal cost.
Obviously, the "smart" move for DiamondWare's new parent would've been to dangle in it front of DW and find out just how much it was worth to them.
Billy Joel's name (well, actually, the "logo" of his name) is trademarked in several categories of use — he sells recorded music, posters and other printed materials, and performs on stage as Billy Joel™. He set that up many years ago, in fact, long before most artists were giving any thought to such matters. (There's some contractual drama dating back to early in his career that's probably the reason behind it.)
But it's set up in just that way, very specifically trademarking the "typed drawing" (logo) in specific uses, presumably to make it legally enforcable. An attempt to trademark just his name itself, or to control things like domain registrations that simply use the letters "billyjoel", would stand a much better chance of getting invalidated by a court if he ever tried to protect it.
Which is why Keith Urban was SOL. The best you can hope for in those situations is that if you wave enough money at the holder, they might be convinced to sell you the domain.
I'm 100% with you as far as this being an actual scandal, as opposed to the other total-crap "scandal". But perhaps — just in the interest of making it a bit less of a third rail — we can call this #PublisherGate?
I don't think the world needs any "real" #GamerGate, that hashtag is irreversibly tainted.
Re: Re:
Ehhhh... I mean, in fairness, it did take us over 50 years to accomplish that, and it really isn't quite 100% complete even today. It's over 95%, probably, and for the most part people who still lack service do so voluntarily, but still it's not quite there yet.
Also, if you take electricity as an example, much of that connectivity was achieved via multi-mile-long long stretches of high-tension overhead wire in exactly the way you can't deliver high-speed internet service.
Don't get me wrong. The fact that telcos today have largely adopted an attitude like they don't want or need new customers (but still deserve to keep raking in the dough all the same), and the palpable contempt they exhibit for the customers they do have, absolutely enrages me. And they could do a LOT more to solve these issues if they found it within themselves to just deign to give a fuck. They are, without question, the problem.
But that being said, we tend to forget that things like the electrical grid and the POTS network grew gradually and evolutionary, over the course of many decades, and often in tandem with regional development in general. Less than 30 years ago, growing up in Queens, NYC, our neighborhood still had both telephone AND cable TV wiring on overhead poles, right where it'd stood for the previous 4-5 decades. Electrical service had been buried, at one point, but the data services weren't part of that effort and ended up waiting another few decades before they finally went ahead and buried the whole mess. Digging up every road in a borough of NYC is the sort of logistical nightmare you don't undertake lightly, and don't repeat often.
And that's how you end up with stories of people who can't get broadband service because the fiber required to provide it is buried in the wrong place, or there isn't any buried fiber near their new-construction home, or the telco just doesn't feel like digging up the street for them, or etc.
The trend toward buried runs as the only method of running fiber (for good reasons), and the trend towards fiber as the only method of delivering sufficiently high-speed broadband, means that it's hard for the network to grow organically from a starting point of just a wire strung along a pole for a few miles. But that's how all of our previous networks started, and how they continued to exist for a LONG time — longer than residential fiber has even been a thing.
I don't have any good solutions to offer. I don't know if what we need is more point-to-point wireless, more satellite, or what. But I do see the technical and logistical problems, which become especially vexing when they're compounded with the network providers' disinterest.
Re: A good thing to be sure, but to who?
Re:
Same thing if DiamondWare let dw.com lie fallow, in fact, since one of the requirements for holding a domain registration is some form of use. (Or it was, back then — I haven't kept up with the rules.) Even a single-page placeholder website is sufficient, but if there were no servers reachable under the dw.com domain at all then Deutsche Welle could've applied to have the registration forfeited and turned over to them. Again, minimal cost.
Obviously, the "smart" move for DiamondWare's new parent would've been to dangle in it front of DW and find out just how much it was worth to them.
Re: Re:
But it's set up in just that way, very specifically trademarking the "typed drawing" (logo) in specific uses, presumably to make it legally enforcable. An attempt to trademark just his name itself, or to control things like domain registrations that simply use the letters "billyjoel", would stand a much better chance of getting invalidated by a court if he ever tried to protect it.
Which is why Keith Urban was SOL. The best you can hope for in those situations is that if you wave enough money at the holder, they might be convinced to sell you the domain.
Ref: Billy Joel is a registered TradeMark - Straight Dope Message Board
Re: This comment will probably be a lightning rod, but...
I don't think the world needs any "real" #GamerGate, that hashtag is irreversibly tainted.
Re: This is a sterling example of ad-hockery
I'm not sure it even rises to that level. In this instance, and especially with Warwick involved, feels more like "sad-hokery".
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