As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:

- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre direct into my house.
- They didn't remove a damn thing.

Took about 20 minutes, judging by the CCTV.

It would take about the same time just to pull down the copper from my house safely (the above did not require closing or working in the road, for instance), then isolating that from the dozens of others in the road on the pole, then removing that all the way back to the cabinet. Which I know goes underground because when I first moved in a few years ago, the BT guy had to remove that cable from, basically, a huge puddle which was cutting my DSL speed from 75Mbps to 20Mbps (DSL is amazing, though, that it still worked!).

Until everything's fibre, you can't remove those old lines, it's just not practical. And then are you really going to mobilise a bunch of people to remove a small run of copper from every street?

I once did some maths and the IT at the school I work in has something like tens of thousands of km+ of copper wiring that's unused. One room can have 30+ runs of nearly-100m. That's 3km for one room, from where a building was previously wired to have an IT suite, but then changed purpose, etc. We could, in theory, take that pure-copper cable out and recycle it. That one school likely has more copper in it than my entire village.

The fact is that it's just not worth the effort. There are huge thick bundles of it, and while it wouldn't take that long to pull it all out (much easier than putting it in because you can largely just cut and pull the entire bundle), it's not worth doing so in terms of the cost of the raw copper. We know that because honestly much of the time, rather than re-use the old copper runs which we know to be Cat5e, we just run a new Cat6a run alongside them if we do need to wire something. And Cat5e has far more metal in it than old telephone line.

I cut something like 200 cables this summer alone. And I mean I cut the last 2 metres of them because they were in my way in the cabinets. The actual RUN of cable is still in the walls and going all over the building, 50, 60, 70m runs all over the place.

I bet that a single office or school demolition recovers more copper (and steel and other stuff) than an entire village of old telephone lines, and while it may be a factor on the demolition companies finances, it's not a huge one. Scrap metal, which you have to de-sheath, transport, etc. isn't as valuable as people make out. It's why nobody arranges a regular scrap-metal collection at my local council to come and just grab anything of value that they could. No. They do that for paper. They don't do it for metal unless you arrange it with them. There's not much money in it. The only people making money are the guys lobbing some bits of lead, steel and alumium on the back of their van until they have enough to get a couple-of-hundred-quid free personal backhander as part of their work when it's all been moved at the expense of their company's fuel expense account.

Yeah, all you need is 200 years for them to book enough appointments to actually pull the stuff down, and you're golden! (or at least, copper-coloured).

Like an online bookseller turning into a global retail warehouse then renting out their datacenter services, producing talking home assistants, and launching rockets into space?

A quick fact check:

a) Kennedy center: "Following the hearing, the Justice Department informed the judge that no physical changes or name additions will happen before October 8, 2026, leaving the issue in a temporary holding pattern while the legal battle continues."

b) Google: "As of August 2026, the administration is not currently held in active criminal or civil contempt of court in these specific cases, though it has come incredibly close."

(Of Note: The New Jersey item was a threat, not a finding of contempt.)

While google may "work" as you suggest, a random article in "The New Jersey Monitor" from half a year ago is not evidence.

There's a lot of FUD surrounding this claim, but when you drill down to facts, the US does not ignore court orders.

Post verified evidence if you disagree.

So your thesis is that injunctions against the government are simply ignored?

That's a strong position, I think I would have heard about it. Can you cite some examples, Mr. Anonymous Coward?

(Overturn on appeal or vacated after final decision doesn't count.)

Probably not.

As you may have noticed, there are 3 levels of criminal in this country.

If the government is doing something illegal, they just stop.
If a company is doing something illegal, they stop and pay a fee without admitting guilt.
If a person is doing something illegal, they go to jail.

This is the "government doing something illegal" category, which means they simply stop doing it. Justice is served, the system works, yadda yadda.

I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.

Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.

It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.

(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)

An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on

A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.

VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.

For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.

No, their argument is "because Democrat bias".

I don't want my tax money going to politicized institutions, period. I don't want my tax money supporting one side *or* the other, government support should be politically neutral.

The airwaves are a public resource, the government is supposed to manage that resource for the public good.

"One sided" is not the public good. About half the country is conservative, there used to be rules about political bias, it was abolished in 1987, and this has led to the sorry state of affairs we have now.

MSM is unending, incessant propaganda. Rage bait intended to persuade rather than inform.

If it's not going to use the public resource for the public good, then the MSM shouldn't be using that public resource.

(Of note: Fox news is an internet/cable channel, and does not require a broadcast license.)

There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.

Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).

And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.

I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.

(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)

(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)

I was saying this 20+ years ago when I was studying AI and its history back then, long before LLMs existed.

AI is, and always has been, exclusively nothing but exponentially-increasing requirements for logarithmically-plateauing results.

Any mathematician will tell you what that means in the end.

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.

This would be a good time to point out that every political argument has two sides and two points of view.

I've seen the arguments for both sides of this issue, and have come to the conclusion that there is merit for both. People should really look at the specific charges being made, with examples, before coming to any conclusion.

Every time someone tries to rein in the news media, it's received by shouts of first amendment, freedom of speech, chilling effects, and so on; and yet, this leads to insane situations. Google most egregious US media failures in the last 10 years for a list of incidents, and note how many of these affected major political events such as a presidential election or national policy.

Should a journalist be able to walk into a church during service and interrupt the proceedings, and not be held accountable because he's a journalist? Should a major news outlet be able to report something without at least a cursory check to see if it's accurate? Should an interview answer be swapped with the answer from a different question?

I've come to the conclusion that knee-jerk framing is on purpose, everyone wants to get "ahead" of an issue, and if an erroneous/misleading/false statement is made they will simply say "oops... I made a mistake" and there's no repurcussions... except that the lie went out to the audience and a small percentage got outraged in the right direction, regardless of whether the statement is true or not.

A "straw-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the most absurd terms and then attack the absurdity. A "strong-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the strongest possible terms and then try to attack it.

Choose the "strong-man" argument here. Find out what the administration is complaining about, and see if you can fault their logic.

Function did its job, exactly as designed.

Whether it's legal to use or not is dependent on jurisdiction and circumstances (and still hasn't been established!), but the function existing and allowing a user to use it is no bad thing.

Think a mugger demanding you access your bank accounts. Oh, no, look, the phone's stopped working...

a.k.a. throwing money at rubbish ideas, and seeing what sticks.

The greatest business strategy of all time /s