On AD 2008 April 16 Wednesday 07:48:23 PM -0600, Chris wrote: > The apologists' arguments are old, tediously repetitive, and inevitably wrong.
These may be regarded as pro UTOPIA arguments and neither of them are wrong. 0. Choice: Rather than being involuntarily beholden to $AUTOCRATIC_ISP you get to chose $AUTOCRATIC_ISP. Qwest does this also, but only under *government* duress. 1. Technology: Current DSL speeds fill up nearly all the available bandwidth of copper twisted pair. UTOPIA offers symmetric bandwidth of 15 and 50 Mib. In the laboratory researchers have successfully transmitted data along a single fiber at a few hundred Gib with no foreseeable effective attenuation in sight. I am not pro UTOPIA, I am pro choice. If Qwest and/or Comcast were rolling out fiber networks instead of UTOPIA and if they would keep their hands off my packets I would probably be fine with that too. Why settle for inferior technology at the behest of a monopoly or two because some astroturf organization wants to spin UTOPIA as socialist? > >From the beginning, UTOPIA hasn't passed the smell test. To see how > misguided it is, one need look no further than the original 20-year > mortgage. If someone today offered you a free copy of today's most > powerful computer, would you take it if it meant you couldn't use any > other computer for the next 20 years? How about 30 years? But > that's what UTOPIA does: it saddles citizens with 20 (or 30) years of > debt obligations on something with a lifespan of a decade, at best. > And like most government programs, those who pay vastly outnumber > those who benefit. I find the financing argument rather tedious myself. :) > If the news reports are to be believed, UTOPIA has failed to meet its > own objective measures. (Shock!) And those objective measures were > supposed to be conservative. It's a boondoggle, plain and simple. > When is enough enough? Evidently the UTA didn't think the truth was as persuasive enough as socialist insinuations which are only quite amusing. :-) Justin /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
