Nothing will change until lots of people die (not just from the effects of such, but also things like "the boomer generation fuck off"), and/or the billionaires get hit in the wallet.

Same old story.

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?

You said home ISPs sought to deploy Trusted Network Connect about 20 years ago. It hasn't happened. What's holding it up? The rise of mobile devices, smart TVs, and other devices incompatible with the remediation means available in quarantine?

If likes and boosts are overrated, then is there a way to find others' posts about a topic or to get more replies to my posts?

From the summary: "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing." As I understand this, paid downloads did not lower prices of AAA games because of retail price parity contracts. Paid downloads did, however, make the $5 to $20 tier for indie game pricing viable.

One thing not mentioned in the summary is that publishers of games distributed in physical copies owe a royalty to the age rating agency of each region in which a game is published. Publishers of downloadable games do not, instead relying on self-certification through the IARC form. The age rating agencies allow this because it's a lot more practical to update a game once it is found to have been misclassified.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who ever posts in the tag for a particular toy line. Either I guessed the wrong tag, or I'm the only person on fedi interested in that topic. Which is more likely?

The summary states that Reddit owes the OP a reason why the user was banned, as well as a complete, untruncated copy of the user's posting history.

The summary states that the relevant law is Article 17 of the EU's Digital Services Act.

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.

Toxoplasma gondii infection can lead to a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions.

There's a difference:
- In the case of a remote test, those who fail are not out the cost of travel and accommodation.
- In the case of an in-person test, those who fail are out the cost of travel and accommodation.

Not even denied for inability to afford last-minute travel to a city where the exam is held?

How much of that is related to GOG's reputation for being selective about what games and genres they accept? I get the impression that GOG is a bit more "curated" than some other PC game stores. The curators don't really want visual novels (a style of menu-driven adventure game). And apart from new releases by CD Projekt (which owned GOG before the end of 2025), I suspect that GOG seeks to poach "catalog" games that have already been successful on the competing store Steam as opposed to having a game at day one.

Sources include GOG forums (thread; thread)