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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (11828)	8/5/2001 10:52:46 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 12823

SUMMARY: Instead of demanding technology to adapt to them, institutions (if they are clever enough) try to find the right balance in between: the existing actors with high investments in legacy and the technologists whose new technology will destroy the value of the legacy. If they succeed, they will be kept in there. If the balance tend towards the legacy, they eventually will fall by its own weight and there is loss. If they balance tend towards the technologists, the whole legacy is destroyed (via technological obsolescence)and there is loss. Technologists, instead of making the institutions adapt to them or adapt themselves to the institutions, (if they are clever) they could do what was done with previous obsolete institutions; give them some ceremonial responsibility and get them out of the way. Like give the respect they think they deserve and go down with their business. The Swedes and English treat their obsolete monarchies this way. Or like people use obsolete religions nowadays just as a social institution. If they find strong resistance they have to execute the equivalent -in technology- of what the Cayman Island did for the taxman. If they succeed, instititutions being what they are, they will come back in a new disguise and slowly and almost imperceptible will takeover the place of the older, obsolete institution. ------------------------------------------------------------ Frank: However (you did know that that there would have to be an however, didn't you ;) Elmat: I only started reading after the however :-) Frank: do you really think that technology has outpaced institutions in a meaningful way? Elmat: Of course! Just look to the US constitution. The Constitution of the USA was drawn to deal with a country of farmers. It was the basic law of one nascent and weak state. Now it is still applied to a country of technologists of the most powerful country on earth. Technology Governors long for a time when technology was pure science, when Lawrence Livermore and the Dept. of Energy ruled, when we had the COCOM dictating in which country we could use a HP Spectrum Analyser, when an Iranian, Indian, Iraq or Palestinian could not develop high tech, because high-tech needed security clearance. When the Cold War was over and all that control they have from the top, collapsed, they are now trying to find ways to deal with the new realities. Trying competition by decree, Telecom Act of 1996, didn't work. It worked as a gathering of momentum and made all players, consumers, developers, the telecom industry, investors, look to telecoms in a way that have never had seen before. Telecoms -in the seventies- was like the water and sewage utility. But it didn't achieve what was intended: the shibboleth competition. Frank: Or, do the institutions more fittingly demand, as a matter of natural course, that the new technologies adapt to them? Depreciation schedules and quarterly reports being what they are, as it were. Elmat: Yes, the institutions do not fork-lift their laws. They amend and upgrade them. This has the potential of slowing down everything, because any time you touch a part of it, you touch everything. That is very good for the legal profession that profit in dealing with those arrangements. Frank: We put governors on technology, and it drives the technologists crazy. I know. I have a consult on this very matter pending for sometime this week ... Elmat: Technology has to be kept in a tight leash due to the potential of annihilating existing industries. Potential of laying waste in whole regions of the world. The potential of rendering useless huge investments in legacy technologies. Hence governors want to have the leash in their hands. I don't think the guys who produce content in Hollywood would let their grip on it by any technology. But there is a risk. The risk that one a day we have for technology the equivalent of the Cayman Islands. It is impossible to have a technology that adapt to the pace of the institutions. Institutions write their rules in granite. Technology burn them in CD's or store it in servers. The Securities and Exchange Commission was created to deal with the crash of 29. I don't like to go look. I fear I find it is also obsolete. PS: Frank those New Englanders will cancel my 10-year B1-B2 Visa, on the grounds of me being too subversive for their tastes, perhaps.

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (11828)	8/5/2001 1:29:25 PM
From: Phil Jacobson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Frank, all - Has anyone heard much about a new modem protocol that allows compression sufficient to enable 300K dial-up access? I recently read an article discussing this but lost the trade mag and wish I could find it. Seems to me that if this protocol were to work it might change the whole last mile debate quite a bit, to say the least, and provide significant opportunities to any wholesale dial service provider that could roll it out to local ISPs. Any information you have on this and on where I might research it further would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Phil