Imagine the work which would have been involved if what you are saying was true. They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?

You are right in saying that the bulk wiring - the connections which feed the telegraph poles - are now pretty much all underground. There aren't the masses of overhead wires which there were when I was a boy. The final connection to the houses though for the most part remain unchanged. Yes, new builds are all done using underground connections, but most houses are not new builds.

It would be phenomenally expensive to go around replacing all the final connections with underground ones. They haven't done it, and they aren't going to unless there's a separate reason to do it. Indeed, the poles in our road were all replaced recently, in quite an impressive operation. They carry both power and telephone connections to the houses. To replace a pole they had to disconnect everything at the top, temporarily support all the connections with a crane/platform thing, remove the old pole, fit a new pole, and then re-attach everything to the new pole. Now why would they do that if the connections were no longer in use, or even if they had any plans ever to put them underground?

ROFL. Can you imagine the trouble they'd get into if they did that? The ambulance chasers would have a field day.

Complete nonsense!

Try this - go to Google Maps, pick a residential location at random and then drop in to Streetview. Unless you've picked a very recent housing estate, you will find you can see lots and lots of telegraph poles.

It might be true to say that new developments don't now have telegraph poles, but the vast majority of the UK still does.

This seems to be a common problem. It was nearly three years from when they upgraded our exchange to when they did the cabinets. For the interim period you're in the weird position where querying the rollout information tells you that your exchange is in a state of "AO" (Accepting Orders), but if you try to order it you're told you can't have it. You can't get any projected date when it will be available, because if you go to the "When will FTTC be available?" pages you're told your exchange is already enabled.

I suspect it's a marketing thing - they do the exchange so they can claim that they've got a certain percentage of the country covered, then do the cabinets much later.

That said, having now got FTTC (not from BT obviously) it is very nice. Solid 40 Mb/s (which you won't get if you go with one of these ISPs who advertise stupidly cheap service) is suitably nippy. 80 Mb/s is an option, but probably not worth it unless you have some very unusual requirements.

Want to see real change and justice? Talk to the actual owners of Uber and see if you can convince them to make a better company.

Uber is run by libertarian psychopaths. Their thought process - though they would obviously never say it in public - is "nobody made you get into the taxi, tough luck".

Even the slightest voluntary attempt to try and ameliorate the risk involved would be an anathema - "nanny state regulation" or some such bullshit - to them.

Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?

Given the life and pay of a taxi driver, I'd go with "sweet fuck all".

People calling in "political favours" to be a *taxi driver* ? Did you even think about that before you wrote it ? Do you think garbage collectors get jobs through "political favours" as well ?

The problems in the taxi industries worldwide have nothing to do with regulations around safety, and everything to do with the regulations around taxi plates (or "medallions" I think they call them in the states).
Uber vehicles should be required to carry the same safety facilities as a taxi, including video/audio recording and driver duress buttons.
This sort of situation and the absurdly trivial solutions for reducing its risk (what's the cost of a few dash cams ?) were entirely predictable and the only reason Uber did not act proactively was because it's a company run by libertarian psychopaths who think rules shouldn't apply to them.

Global Warming is a theory. So is gravity. Are you worried about suddenly flying off into space ?

All the AGW models have failed, miserably.
If that were true it would not be getting hotter (or getting colder).
"It's not getting hotter as quickly as predicted, but it is getting hotter as expected" is not "miserable failure".

of course, its people who dont use X who always want to raise taxes on X
Similarly, the people who can easily afford the things taxes pay for are always in favour of eliminating them

And why I keep saying ALL Taxes are regressive. Please, tell me more about how a taxes that only targets the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% would be "regressive".

Did you actually read the article which you cite? It exactly contradicts your claims.

Such a devastating riposte, worthy of Oscar Wilde at his best.

I am reminded of an article I read a few years ago about some anniversary of the invention of the ATM. The American credited with inventing it, explaining how he did it, said he'd seen one in London, and so came home and invented it.

Yet my income is well below the poverty level, [...]
Then how do you afford the things you say you have ? Because a thousand bucks a month minus necessities like food and shelter, doesn't leave a lot left over to pay for iPads, big TVs and cars.
The rest of your post is just straw men and non-sequiturs.

Give them any ideas ? What do you think they've been doing for decades ? What do you think the whole point of "globalisation" is ?

Grab an LSI controller off eBay (IBM or Dell-branced) for <$100 and you can have another 8 SATA/SAS ports.
I've got 10 drives (6x2.5 + 4x3.5) in one of my Microservers.
Unfortunately ZFS shows up the weak CPU under heavy load, but most of the time (with an additional dual-port ethernet card as well) it's a real trooper.