Friday, July 2, 2010

He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

We have heard a lot of talk lately about broadband infrastructure -- much of it in the Explaining Voice after a couple of beers, but the Frau Doktorin is used to that -- but also from the Government. Reinventing the economy, cutting edge of innovation, productivity gains through e-commerce, all that. I think this translates into "Not enough people are downloading bootlegged music and movies and porn, what with the shonky dial-up connection," which is impeding the gubblement's desire to clamp down on copyright violations like all the cool countries are doing, i.e. they need to facilitate the flow of information before they have an excuse to regulate it.

Anyway, this has exacerbated the rivalry among NZ telephony companies, vying for the lucrative contract to bring bit-torrents to every small town in the country and allow every isolated farm station to take its rightful place in the global bestiality-porn economy.
This is all very well and no skin off my nose to spite my face, but when those rival companies wake me up before noon with unseemly altercations out in the street, competing for the limited space available to install new cables while each trying to sabotage the other's overhead installations, then I have to say that the corporate-welfare market model has failed.

The Telecom team are at the left, trying to upgrade their existing copper cables to an ASDL x.616 protocol with old-fashioned lion-and-griffin-based poles. The Telstra-Saturn team are on the right, putting their faith in graphene-monolayer phonon conduction technology mounted on a state-of-the-art dragon hybrid pole.

The dragon was definitely making most noise.

14 comments:

ckc (not kc) said...

...clearly, the invention of the dialogue balloon was a "good thing"

Smut Clyde said...

John F. Ptak is the expert on the invention of hte word balloon.

Substance McGravitas said...

The Telecom team are at the left

...

The Telstra-Saturn team are on the right


Aha! Knee-jerkery settled!

All well and prope.

ckc (not kc) said...

...maybe we need an explaining voice "explain-off" :-)

mikey said...

Optical transmission and MEMS engineers wanted. Must have PhD in Animal-Based Communications Protocols and specific experience in Dense Wavelength Mythical-Beast Multiplexing. Additional consideration given to those who can subdue angry villagers.

Send resume, salary requirements and photos of slain mythical beasts to helen@waite.com...

Smut Clyde said...

the invention of the dialogue balloon was a "good thing"

A couple of rather surreal dialogue balloons from Albrecht Durer here.

One of the speakers is saying "Everything that goes out now re-enters the source from which it flowed", so his speech balloon forms a closed loop.

ckc (not kc) said...

...I'm imagining a klein bottle dialogue - where to put the speaker?

mikey said...

...I'm imagining a klein bottle dialogue - where to put the speaker?

Um, in the liquor store down the street from Time Magazine?

mikey said...

Trust me on this. You do NOT want to find yourself involved in a blog thread where your hatred of Joe Klein is deemed insufficient. Because then you are the enemy of all that's good and right in the world...

Smut Clyde said...

a klein bottle dialogue

That would by definition be a monologue.

I made you a joke about projective-plane speech balloons, but I eated it.

Hamish Mack said...

Good lord look at poor Smut with his axe in the middle of the competing phone companies. I did warn him about going to live in the new Harry Potter Suburb but even I did not think it would get quite so fraught. Smut's Doublet looks quite disturbed.
Interesting to see Telstra/Saturn have the magical Keruru of Modern and Efficient Messaging on their side. It's wrong to make generalisations, of course, but that bird couldn't find its own arse inside a paper bag.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Smut's Doublet looks quite disturbed.

He's just happy to see you.

Smut Clyde said...

Something something jerkin off something something.

tigris said...

Smut's Doublet

Always with the twins.