While AT’s computer is a Ferrari, or maybe it’s a 1982 DeLorean, the Cemestos Gardens PC is piece of crap. It won’t play music anymore. There’s no song in its hard drive. I click on itunes and it back talks ever so politely:
itunes has detected a problem with your audio configuration…
Of course there was last week when this first happened and we did a system restore. It worked fine till about an hour ago.
Stupid computer.
In my house, I’ve really kinda prided myself on, if not living off the grid, trying to rewire the bastard to work better for me. Course, doing anything outside of the box that our infotainment overlords have seen fit to grant us is quasi-illegal half of the time, which doesn’t necessarily temper my pride in doing it, but does keep me from reporting it a lot of the time. In fact, the ‘Tumor is still one of the bigger Google hits for “comcast has received a notification by a copyright owner”, if that tells you something (find the post on your own time, I’m on a roll).
Wait, whats the point? How did this turn into an anti-telecom rant?
AT&T/Bellsouth are working mighty hard on getting into the cable TV racket, and they’re wanting to cut corners to do it. In the state of TN, they’ve got their lobbyists putting out a bill to start the cable franchising to work on a statewide, rather than a local level. The deal has been for years that the TV is franchised municipality to municipality, thus helping to ensure that they don’t ‘cherry pick’ locations that would be more profitable than others in delivering their services. Changing this would make it more affordable for a new company to start delivering services.
Obstensively, this is in the vein of ‘providing competition’, which would ‘lower prices’ and ‘increase services’, which happens so frequently in the cable TV market. We heard this cry trumpeted a few years ago by the FCC, when they deregulated the telephone market to allow things like the ATT/Bellsouth merger, which, as I understand, hasn’t done much to lower prices.
Problem is, as the Oak Ridger pointed out, this will result in the loss of some income thats been a part of the budget for many moons, not just for this, but for pretty much every other town in the state.
Comcast is against the idea, simply because they don’t want to see the competition get an easier entry into the markets that it services, but they’d stand to see some gain out of it, because as the state changes the rules, they’d be able to opt-out of any previous contracts.
I’m on the fence on this, frankly. I love seeing cable and telephone companies duke it out, but I don’t think any solution here will be of the best interest to consumers.
So, I suggest putting on your Arr eyepatch, and trying to squeeze the best deal out of what you have.
This post brought to you by a distinct lack of attention, and the urge to just get something written today…
No.
No.
No.
I’m practicing for the next time someone asks me to volunteer for something.