On Jan 18, 2013, at 9:34 AM, Bill Rising <[email protected]> wrote: > Heh heh. Somehow I'm not as superstitious about tech stuff (rule: expect the > worst) than about sports (never mention any hopes or dreams).
Go on, say it! "The Red Sox will win the World Series!" But you have to say it for it to catch on because I don’t really mean it. I feel that I do have telephone redundancy already because we actually use Skype and Google more than long distance, so I can already make emergency calls. It's exactly as reliable as a VOIP would be. The only thing keeping me from cutting off cable too is Reds baseball during the summer. MLB.com won't let anyone within about 100 miles of Cincinnati stream a Reds game. Maybe I should just revert to Milwaukee as my National League team (or figure out a proxy server). <rant> Perhaps the idea that bothers me most about the whole modem thing is the Big Brother aspect of it all. Time/Warner can invade my home network whenever it wants. In 1984 the law was changed so the telephone companies provided a connection to the house and what you connected to it was your own business — within reasonable limits. This almost instantly created an explosion of telephone products and services. The cableopolies are fighting this from happening to Internet service. The lobbies for the telecom giants are fierce. For example, they've managed to get regulations installed in several states making it almost impossible for cities to install their own high-speed public networks to compete with the giants. South Carolina is just the latest of the group. Why don't we have gigabit fiber to the home? The telecom lobbies are fighting anything that smells like it. It takes a giant like Google to fight back because the government doesn't have the gonads to do it. The giants want both local monopoly and the freedom to do what they want with the monopoly. It didn't work with the railroads monopolies, electric monopolies or telephone monopolies. Why can’t we learn from history? </rant>
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