On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:06 PM, David Krings <ram...@gmx.net> wrote: > > That is the part that I still don't get as a foreigner. Why is most of the > infrastructure here in the US in such a bad state?
That is the price we pay for things getting invented over here. Radio is another example. First time I saw a car radio in Switzerland and the name of the song was displaying I almost had a heart attack. Then I used something called TeleText to check the news on a TV, without internet access. Simple things to a European, but totally tomorrow-land stuff to an American. We may have invented TV and radio over here, but we also are stuck supporting the caveman-era technologies that were rolled out when they were first invented. The Europeans sat back, and watched us blow our fingers off with our experiments; and when the pain stopped and things started looking really good, they said "Hey, this whole radio thing is a brilliant idea, and we can include text in our broadcast as well." For Brooklyn, the problem is that the original cabling was hung from poles going behind all the houses. Say you are Verizon, and you want to do the Right Thing by putting in modern facilities. You are going to have to contact every tenant for every residence to get permission to go out back and replace that cabling. Let me know when you are done, assuming I live that long. -- Mitch, noting that the cable companies DID get to wire stuff where it belonged _______________________________________________ New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
