Is Google Planning To Fibre Britain? 184
Barence writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Google has emerged as a surprise contender to invest in Britain's fibre broadband network. The search giant yesterday announced plans to build a gigabit fibre broadband network in the US. The test network will see Google deliver fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) connections to up to half a million US homes. The move raises the possibility that Google is behind the Conservative Party's ambitious plans to deliver nationwide 100Mbits/sec connections by 2017. Parliamentary sources have told PC Pro that the Tories' plans were based on foreign investment in the UK broadband network."
Pure speculation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The problem in Britain is the last mile (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and that's the problem - companies willing to supply their own infrastructure.
See, most of them are willing.. but only to the places where there are lots of people, putting in cables to rural areas is just as expensive as town, but you find you have 1 or 2 subscribers instead of 1 or 2 thousand.
Virgin happens to be very lucky in that the companies who originally dug up the roads to lay the cables all went bust, so Virgin bought out the good bits and ignored the old debts. Otherwise there'd be no cable service. Sometimes I think that this is the only way to get FTTH - set up a company, tell everyone how 'new tech' you are, get loads of investment, spend it all laying fibre to everyone, go bust and let someone else deliver over your fibre. Job done, no doubt you'd also go away with a huge payout for being CEO regardless of how the company turned out, and everyone would have fibre connectivity!
Re:fuck off, Google (Score:5, Interesting)
You still haven't delivered the algorithms you promised to open 12 years ago.
Which algorithms and promises were those ? (honest question).
Your top executives believe that no-one online is entitled to privacy (unless he is a top Google exec, who will deny press information to journalists who publish information about him).
No, he said that if you do something and get it on record, there's a chance a law enforcement agency will request said record with a judge signature on top and Google (or whatever company they're requesting it to) will have to comply.
You require NSA clearance for any significant technical positions.
Care to point an example of this ?
Bla, bla, bla...
Re:Language abuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Verbing nouns has been with us forever, ...
One of the fun things I learned while taking some linguistics courses in college was the actual grammar of English. Several of the profs had fun assigning an analysis of English grammar late in their course, after the students had learned something about linguistic analysis. It turns out that our usual terms such as 'verb' and 'noun' are Latin word classes, and are pretty much irrelevant to English. English has valid word classes, but 'verb' and 'noun' aren't among them.
The sentence "Don't verb nouns" is a good illustration. Every native speaker of English instantly understand this, and knows that 'verb' is the verb. How do they know? It's because English syntax tells them that a word in that position is the 'verb', and a word in that other position is the noun. There's nothing in an English verb (except for 3rd person) that marks that word as a verb. Also, 'nouns' could be a 3rd-person singular verb form, but we know it's a plural noun, not because of its form, but because of its position in the sentence.
So 'verb' and 'noun', if they mean anything in English, don't describe word classes. They're the names of syntactical positions within a clause. Pretty much any "content" word (often called "substantives", as opposed to syntactic particles or relational words like prepositions) can be plugged into a verb or noun position, if their basic meaning makes sense there. This was done by Bill Waterson in "Don't verb nouns", as well as in the followup "Verbing weirds language", to good humorous effect. But these also pleased a lot of linguists, because they're both excellent examples of how the English language really works. The real proof that they're both correct English syntax is that we all understand them without any problem. And we understand (if only subconsciously) that they're funny because they violate the invalid grammar rules we've been taught in school.
Now if we could just get the school system to stop trying to impose Latin grammar on English, and teach actual English syntax. But I suppose that won't happen within our lifetime. And it might also eliminate much of the humor that we get out of the whole mess.