#fiber cable price

[candidoptronix]

Diwali Dhamaka Offers - Free Products with Fiber Optic Cable Purchase

Don't miss the festival of offers this Diwali 🪔🕯️!

Buy Optronix Fiber Cable and light up your connectivity with a FREE product. It's a celebration of connections and savings.

Validity 1st to 12th Novermber 2023

Get yours now! our Website- https://www.optronix.in

[hfcltech]

What is the Fiber Optic Cable?

A fiber optic cable consists of a core, cladding, kevlar, ferrule, and connection, among other parts. The optical fiber components are typically enclosed in a protective tube that is suitable for the environment where the cable will be used and separately coated with plastic layers. The fiber core is polished and prepared to transmit data once the core components have been put together. A single, extremely thin glass strand the width of human hair makes up the core. It is the transmission medium for light pulses and there is a cladding layer covering the core. Light is reflected into the core as it is encircled by it. 

Having more bandwidth and faster speeds, optical fiber cables are ideal for transmitting voice, data, video, and telemetry signals. Additionally, they are less expensive than copper wires. Defence and aerospace applications rely on optical fiber cables for transmitting sensitive data as it has greater physical security since, unlike copper systems, all hardware and electronics can be put in one central location.

As fiber optic technology advances, the possibilities of fiber optics will increase. Fiber optics can be upgraded to support higher bandwidths and speeds. HFCL's OFC products and capabilities have constantly been evolving to meet varied market demands. ADSS Cable, a featured product of HFCL, is cost-effective and faster compared to underground deployment. Click here for more information

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Utah’s getting some of America’s best broadband

TOMORROW (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.

This broadband service is, of course, delivered via fiber optic cable. Of course it is. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband delivery, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable caps out at 50gb/s – that is, fiber is 1,000 times faster:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g

Despite the obvious superiority of fiber, America has been very slow to adopt it. Our monopolistic carriers act as though pulling fiber to our homes is an impossible challenge. All those wires that currently go to your house, from power-lines to copper phone-lines, are relics of a mysterious, fallen civilization and its long-lost arts. Apparently we could no more get a new wire to your house than we could build the pyramids using only hand-tools.

In a sense, the people who say we can't pull wires anymore are right: these are relics of a lost civilization. Specifically, electrification and later, universal telephone service was accomplished through massive federal grants under the New Deal – grants that were typically made to either local governments or non-profit co-operatives who got everyone in town connected to these essential modern utilities.

Today – thanks to decades of neoliberalism and its dogmatic insistence that governments can't do anything and shouldn't try, lest they break the fragile equilibrium of the market – we have lost much of the public capacity that our grandparents took for granted. But in the isolated pockets where this capacity lives on, amazing things happen.

Since 2015, residents of Jackson County, KY – one of the poorest counties in America – have enjoyed some of the country's fastest, cheapest, most reliable broadband. The desperately poor Appalachian county is home to a rural telephone co-op, which grew out of its rural electrification co-op, and it used a combination of federal grants and local capacity to bring fiber to every home in the county, traversing dangerous mountain passes with a mule named "Ole Bub" to reach the most remote homes. The result was an immediately economic uplift for the community, and in the longer term, the county had reliable and effective broadband during the covid lockdowns:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Contrast this with places where the private sector has the only say over who gets broadband, at what speed, and at what price. America is full of broadband deserts – deserts that strand our poorest people. Even in the hearts of our largest densest cities, whole neighborhoods can't get any broadband. You won't be surprised to learn that these are the neighborhoods that were historically redlined, and that the people who live in them are Black and brown, and also live with some of the highest levels of pollution and its attendant sicknesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

These places are not set up for success under the best of circumstances, and during the lockdowns, they suffered terribly. You think your kid found it hard to go to Zoom school? Imagine what life was like for kids who attended remote learning while sitting on the baking tarmac in a Taco Bell parking lot, using its free wifi:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/02/elem-s02.html

ISPs loathe competition. They divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "new world" and do not trouble one another by trying to sell to customers outside of "their" turf. When Frontier – one of the worst of America's terrible ISPs – went bankrupt, we got to see their books, and we learned two important facts:

The company booked one million customers who had no alternative as an asset, because they would pay more for slower broadband, and Frontier could save a fortune by skipping maintenance, and charging these customers for broadband even through multi-day outages; and

Frontier knew that it could make a billion dollars in profit over a decade by investing in fiber build-out, but it chose not to, because stock analysts will downrank any carrier that made capital investments that took more than five years to mature. Because Frontier's execs were paid primarily in stock, they chose to strand their customers with aging copper connections and to leave a billion dollars sitting on the table, so that their personal net worth didn't suffer a temporary downturn:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

ISPs maintain the weirdest position: that a) only the private sector can deliver broadband effectively, but b) to do so, they'll need massive, unsupervised, no-strings-attached government handouts. For years, America went along with this improbable scheme, which is why Trump's FCC chairman Ajit Pai gave the carriers $45 billion in public funds to string slow, 19th-century-style copper lines across rural America:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Now, this is obviously untrue, and people keep figuring out that publicly provisioned broadband is the only way for America to get the same standard of broadband connectivity that our cousins in other high-income nations enjoy. In order to thwart the public's will, the cable and telco lobbyists joined ALEC, the far-right, corporatist lobbying shop, and drafted "model legislation" banning cities and counties from providing broadband, even in places the carriers chose not to serve:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

Red states across America adopted these rules, and legislators sold this to their base by saying that this was just "keeping the government out of their internet" (even as every carrier relied on an exclusive, government-granted territorial charter, often with massive government subsidies).

ALEC didn't target red states exclusively because they had pliable, bribable conservative lawmakers. Red states trend rural, and rural places are the most likely sites for public fiber. Partly, that's because low-density areas are harder to make a business case for, but also because these are also the places that got electricity and telephone through New Deal co-ops, which are often still in place.

Just about the only places in America where people like their internet service are the 450+ small towns where the local government provides fiber. These places vote solidly Republican, and it was their beloved conservative lawmakers whom ALEC targeted to enact laws banning their equally beloved fiber – keep voting for Christmas, turkeys, and see where it gets you:

https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map

But spare a little sympathy for the conservative movement here. The fact that reality has a pronounced leftist bias must be really frustrating for the ideological project of insisting that anything the market can't provide is literally impossible.

Which brings me back to Utah, a red state with a Republican governor and legislature, and a national leader in passing unconstitutional, unhinged, unworkable legislation as part of an elaborate culture war kabuki:

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/24/1165975112/utah-passes-an-age-verification-law-for-anyone-using-social-media

For more than two decades, a coalition of 21 cities in Utah have been building out municipal fiber. The consortium calls itself UTOPIA: "Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency":

https://www.utopiafiber.com/faqs/

UTOPIA pursues a hybrid model: they run "open access" fiber and then let anyone offer service over it. This can deliver the best of both worlds: publicly provisioned, blazing-fast fiber to your home, but with service provided by your choice of competing carriers. That means that if Moms for Liberty captures you local government, you're not captive to their ideas about what sites your ISP should block.

As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, Utahns in UTOPIA regions have their choice of 18 carriers, and competition has driven down prices and increased speeds. Want uncapped 1gb fiber? That's $75/month. Want 10gb fiber? That's $150:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/15/utah-locals-are-getting-cheap-10-gbps-fiber-thanks-to-local-governments/

UTOPIA's path to glory wasn't an easy one. The dismal telco monopolists Qwest and Lumen sued to put them out of business, delaying the rollout by years:

https://www.deseret.com/2005/7/22/19903471/utopia-responds-to-qwest-lawsuit/

UTOPIA has been profitable and self-sustaining for over 15 years and shows no sign of slowing. But 17 states still ban any attempt at this.

Keeping up such an obviously bad policy requires a steady stream of distractions and lies. The "government broadband doesn't work" lie has worn thin, so we've gotten a string of new lies about wireless service, insisting that fiber is obviated by point-to-point microwave relays, or 5g, or satellite service.

There's plenty of places where these services make sense. You're not going to be able to use fiber in a moving car, so yeah, you're going to want 5g (and those 5g towers are going to need to be connected to each other with fiber). Microwave relay service can fill the gap until fiber can be brought in, and it's great for temporary sites (especially in places where it doesn't rain, because rain, clouds, leaves and other obstructions are deadly for microwave relays). Satellite can make sense for an RV or a boat or remote scientific station.

But wireless services are orders of magnitude slower than fiber. With satellite service, you share your bandwidth with an entire region or even a state. If there's only a couple of users in your satellite's footprint, you might get great service, but when your carrier adds a thousand more customers, your connection is sliced into a thousand pieces.

That's also true for everyone sharing your fiber trunk, but the difference is that your fiber trunk supports speeds that are tens of thousands of times faster than the maximum speeds we can put through freespace electromagnetic spectrum. If we need more fiber capacity, we can just fish a new strand of fiber through the conduit. And while you can increase the capacity of wireless by increasing your power and bandwidth, at a certain point you start pump so much EM into the air that birds start falling out of the sky.

Every wireless device in a region shares the same electromagnetic spectrum, and we are only issued one such spectrum per universe. Each strand of fiber, by contrast, has its own little pocket universe, containing a subset of that spectrum.

Despite all its disadvantages, satellite broadband has one distinct advantage, at least from an investor's perspective: it can be monopolized. Just as we only have one electromagnetic spectrum, we also only have one sky, and the satellite density needed to sustain a colorably fast broadband speed pushes the limit of that shared sky:

https://spacenews.com/starlink-vs-the-astronomers/

Private investors love monopoly telecoms providers, because, like pre-bankruptcy Frontier, they are too big to care. Back in 2021, Altice – the fourth-largest cable operator in America – announced that it was slashing its broadband speeds, to be "in line with other ISPs":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/immortan-altice/#broadband-is-a-human-right

In other words: "We've figured out that our competitors are so much worse than we are that we are deliberately degrading our service because we know you will still pay us the same for less."

This is why corporate shills and pro-monopolists prefer satellite to municipal fiber. Sure, it's orders of magnitude slower than fiber. Sure, it costs subscribers far more. Sure, it's less reliable. But boy oh boy is it profitable.

The thing is, reality has a pronounced leftist bias. No amount of market magic will conjure up new electromagnetic spectra that will allow satellite to attain parity with fiber. Physics hates Starlink.

Yeah, I'm talking about Starlink. Of course I am. Elon Musk basically claims that his business genius can triumph over physics itself.

That's not the only vast, impersonal, implacable force that Musk claims he can best with his incredible reality-distortion field. Musk also claims that he can somehow add so many cars to the road that he will end traffic – in other words, he will best geometry too:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Geometry hates Tesla, and physics hates Starlink. Reality has a leftist bias. The future is fiber, and public transit. These are both vastly preferable, more efficient, safer, more reliable and more plausible than satellite and private vehicles. Their only disadvantage is that they fail to give an easily gulled, thin-skinned compulsive liar more power over billions of people. That's a disadvantage I can live with.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

Image: 4028mdk09 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rote_LED_Fiberglasleuchte.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[the-californicationist]

Hi! I’m not sure if you’re doing request if you aren’t don’t worry but If you are could you please write whatever you’re down for, a little Drabble of Simon and reader going yarn shopping! I just came back yarn shopping myself and I’ve been giggling at the names! One I picked is called “tutti frutie

Thank you so much for the ask!! This is such a cute idea. Hope you enjoy the story <3

Twelve Row Repeat

Your wonderful man, Simon Riley, has his heart set on a sweater for Christmas. So, you drag him to the yarn shop to make him squish the skeins.

“And you’re sure you want this one? There are some other —”

Simon reached over you, towering behind you in his motorcycle gear and black medical mask, snatching the paper pattern from the small rack,

“This is it.”

“Okay,” you flipped open the small pattern booklet, “Great.”

This was not great. 

Simon had only been asking for one thing all year. Each time Christmas came up in conversation, he’d just shrug and mention his sweater. It was your own fault, really. You’d been frequenting a new local yarn shop by your flat, and he’d begrudgingly tag along. His big brown eyes would cut over a sharp glance to you when the price rang up on the till, but he didn’t complain. One night, while you were scrolling through heirloom-style sweater patterns on your phone, daydreaming about the knitter you would someday be, he stopped you, pressing his thick fingerpad to the screen,

“Aye. That’ll do me.”

“Si,” you shook your head, “I’m not that good, yet. Those are much harder than they look.”

“Nah, you’re brilliant,” he planted a chaste kiss on your mouth, silencing your protests, and left it at that. 

So, now, here you were, hunched over the small pattern library of your favorite shop, digging through the advanced section of Aran sweaters, staring at sleeves with cables and twelve-row repeats. It was enough to make your mouth dry. 

But, he believed in you, and you wanted to trust yourself that you could handle it. Bucking up the courage, you grabbed a few notions and headed over to the yarn wall, dragging Simon behind you. 

You stood side by side as you stared at the collection. It was organized by weight and brand, color-coded for fiber type. It was one of your favorite places on earth. Sometimes, even when you didn’t bring your man with you, you’d come and dig through the cubbies, squishing the cakes and skeins, letting them whisper to you about what they wanted to be. It was important to you that you listened to the yarn. Just because you wanted to make a blanket with a particular yarn didn’t necessarily mean it would feel good on your needles. You needed to listen and feel… and most importantly — squeeze for softness.

“Alright,” you said, galvanized, “What color?”

“Black.”

“No.”

There was no way in hell you were spending six months staring into the blackness trying to decipher the knits and purls and cables of a Level 4 sweater.

Simon huffed, but he was smiling. You could see the way his cheek creased up underneath his eyes. 

“Green,” he relented, then grabbed your arm in his gloved hand, snatching you away from a pretty sage color wool, “Dark green.”

You glared up at him, but you set your sights on a dark green merino. It called to you like a siren’s song. And, at the price per skein that you assumed that it was, you were about to help Simon find out just what kind of gift he was asking you for. 

Your hand reached out to grab the carefully wound ball. It was soft, with a very slight halo, and the emerald hues varied only a little through the strands, letting you know that it had been hand-dyed with the utmost care. You flipped it over to read the name: Spruced Up. As your fist delicately closed around the skein, you nearly sighed from the plushness of it. You wanted to bury your face in it already, and it wasn’t even knitted up. 

You checked the weight. After measuring Simon at home, you knew you needed to over buy. Who knows? You told yourself. Maybe I’ll even get some gloves out of this. It would be fun to match with him.

“Okay, tiger,” you smiled up at him, “We need thirteen of these.” 

He grabbed the ball from you and checked the tag,

“Thirteen? Are you havin’ a laugh?”

“You’re a big bloke,” you shrugged, “And this is a complex pattern. Just give me your hand. I want you to feel it.”

He hesitated, doing the mental math for the cost in his head. But, he gave you his hand and let you remove his glove.

You placed the skein back into his palm, staring in wonder at the sheer size of it, and told him,

“Okay, now squish.”

Simon squished. He was careful, now that he knew the price of what he was holding, and he looked down at it in surprise.

“Soft…” He commented in a half-whisper, looking up into your gaze with amused surprise. Then, he squished again, indulgently, and his timbre changed to something a little more insidious, “Soft like you, lamb.”

Your pet name rumbled out of his mouth as no small threat. You saw him reaching for you, and you caught him before he could snake his other hand fully under your dress, grabbing for your thighs to tease the soft, plump flesh there.

“Hey! If you get me kicked out, you definitely won’t get your sweater.” You smirked, bumping him with your hip, promising him he could be naughty later, just not here.

Simon helped you haul your purchases up to the counter and paid for the entire lot, not even grimacing at the final total. He patiently waited while you used their in-store winder and swift. You enjoyed the way he studied you as you practiced the skills of your craft. His faith in your abilities really made you feel like you could accomplish anything you set your mind to. 

Finally, with your yarn and notions packed and stowed carefully in his bike’s saddle bags, Simon handed you your helmet and commented, 

“Looking forward to seeing your progress, love.”

“I’ll keep you posted. Might even let you squish my yarn again…” You winked when his head turned back to you, getting excited by your tone.

“It’s not the yarn I want in my hands, little lamb. Get on this bike before you get yourself into trouble.”

AO3 Link

*Sorry, my knitting knowledge is basic, but I tried to do my homework. I can make a scarf and that's about it!

[mysterymanjoseph]

It is Just Business: mysterymanjoseph and tokufan400

Joseph had heard from one of the companies under his corporation's umbrella of a new customer, putting in large orders for construction materials, electrical wiring, conduit, ducting, fiber optic cable and the like. In order to make a good impression, Joseph decided to travel to that companies headquarters when the representative of this new customer arrives to finalize the deal. Waiting in the conference room for the representative to arrive, Joseph says, "For an order this large, I might be able to give them a discounted price, would be worth it to get a repeat order from them." He glances over at a table alongside the far wall, various bottled waters, ice teas, fruit juices, a coffee machine, that can be used to make hot tea, and various light snacks neatly arranged. He thinks, "Well, hope this is not 'overdoing' the welcome to them."

@tokufan400

[mixelation]

heya, so i've read your fic "it's about magic eyeball biology" right when it came out on AO3 but i just saw it's not online anymore. is there a way you'd be willing to send me the file? I REALLY like it and I was reading it basically every day for a few days because it made me laugh

i pulled it because i was getting comments about it on other fics and that was super annoying. but i guess i don't have a problem reposting it to tumblr. some notes:

this is an AU based on a bunch of jokes in this tag (chronological order)

someone asked about how weird it would be to be an SI and find out about the eyeball symbionts, so i wrote about tori finding out. this fic is a joke. it is not "canon." no one in plasticity, mutagenicity, or any other fic of mine has eyeball symbionts. i do not find it interesting, amusing, or fun to explore this concept in other fics. i do not want comments or questions about it. please respect this

the word i chose to use is "symbiont," which in my experience is the more common term used by people who study symbiosis. "symbiote" is from marvel.

Tori was successful in not vomiting the first time she watched an autopsy. Her stomach churned uncomfortably, but she ignored it, watching Keizo’s hands and pointedly not looking at the face of their latest victim. If she just focused on the steady removal of organs from the abdomen and not the face, she could pretend they weren’t from a person. 

Then Keizo moved on to the head, and she had to look. He pried open the eyelids, and her stomach rolled. 

“The eyes aren’t so bad,” Keizo narrated, voice gruff and bored. He held the lids open with one hand while he cut away with the other. “I like to use curved scissors to-- pay attention-- cut through the fascial sheath, and then you can cut away the orbital muscles and it’ll pop right out. Orochimaru-sama isn’t going to let you touch anyone with a doujutsu, so don’t worry about damaging the…”

Tori frowned, barely listening to Keizo, as the victim’s eye did pop right out. It was smooth, almost a perfect sphere, with the dark brown iris raised ever so slightly. Pink viscera clung to it in Keizo’s hand. 

“Hold on,” Tori interrupted, twisting her neck to try and look at the back of the eyeball. “Where’s the… you know, the optic nerve?”

She was pretty sure the optic nerve was, like, huge. It was a bundle of over a million nerve fibers or something insane like that, if she remembered the human anatomy unit correctly. Her teacher had called it a “bridge cable.”

Then again, that unit was from an advanced high school class, and Keizo was looking at her like she was particularly stupid. Even if he was mean, violent, and uncooperative, he definitely knew more about cutting out eyeballs than Tori.

“Is it smaller than it looks in cartoons?” she tried. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Keizo sneered. “Here, you do the second eye.”

That was the good thing about eyes, Tori supposed. You got two for the price of one. 

He passed her the curved scissors, which were slick with whatever goo lined an eye socket, and Tori hesitantly put down the notebook she’d been writing in. Feeling very light-headed, she copied Keizo’s movements, gently separating the victim’s eyelids and praying something would happen to intervene in what she was about to do. A fire alarm going off, or a earthquake, or fuck-- she’d take the hideout being actively attacked over this. 

No act of god stopped her. Her hands were shaking so hard that she accidentally punctured the sclera and transparent, goopy vitreous started leaking out. 

The eye did pop right out, though. There was no nerve at the back, and no evidence of one in the back of the pink socket. 

Looking into the face of dead, eyeless person, she could either feel the horror at what she’d done seeping into her very bones, or she could wonder: What the fuck?

xXx

She asked for an anatomy book. 

“I don’t see what the point is,” Kabuto told her. “You’re getting hands-on experience.”

“I want to know how things work when they’re still alive,” Tori replied. 

“Well…” Kabuto rolled his chair back from his desk towards a narrow bookstand of books and scrolls he kept in his clinic. “I suppose Orochimaru would approve. Here, you can look through this while we wait for that drug to kick in.”

He handed her what was clearly a picture book meant for children, a deeply condescending smile on his face. Tori pressed her lips together to prevent herself from saying something disrespectful, then forced her face into a polite smile. 

There was a chapter on different senses, and she slowly flipped through the chapter on chakra networks in mild interest, before she found the two-page spread covering sight. 

Mother of Christ, Tori thought. 

She hadn’t found an optic nerve because there wasn’t one. 

xXx

Part of Tori’s argument for why she shouldn’t be dissected like a frog was that there was no reason to think there was much special about her biologically, including her own anatomy. She thought it would be safer to simply not say anything.

But now she knew. She knew every person in this world was a walking sin against logic, and that knowledge, sitting in the Oto clinic with Kabuto, was a horrible, heavy burden that made it hard to breathe.

The picture book Kabuto had loaned her had explained vision to her the way Tori thought an alien who’d never even seen a human and also who didn’t have sight themselves might explain it: special cells at the back of the eye reacted to light, and then that information was transferred directly into the brain via a complex network of chakra, and this was not even the worst part. 

The worst part was that eyeballs were an entirely separate organism. A mutualistic creature that colonized newborn baby eye sockets and then metamorphosed into basically a giant eyeball that fed visual information into the brain in exchange for protection and nutrients. 

“During pregnancy,” the book had explained in a little Did you know? box, “a mommy’s body makes special hormones, which tell the visual symbiont to make babies too! The babies are called larvae, which have lots of little tentacles to help them move around. They like to stay with mommy, though, and so they find the baby when she holds it. Sometimes, when there’s a problem with mommy and she can’t donate larvae to her baby, a doctor can help daddy’s eyes make babies, or sometimes another mommy will donate!”

Tori was going insane. She was going to hyperventilate. What the FUCK!

“This is the worst thing I ever read,” she muttered to herself, eyes stuck on the book. Whatever drug Kabuto had given her was making her dizzy, but she felt like her vision was laser-focused and perfectly taking in the bright cartoon of two eyeball symbiont creatures. “Is this a joke? This has to be a joke.”

She was vaguely aware of Kabuto frowning at her. “A joke?”

“Visual symbionts?” Tori squeaked out, sounding and feeling hysterical. 

“Yes…?” Kabuto repeated. 

“No,” Tori argued. “No way.”

Bemused, Kabuto dug out more textbooks, these ones meant for actual medical professionals. He flipped through passages on syndromes related to host-symbiont genetic incompatibilities, being colonized by more than one symbiont, symbiont maldevelopment and absenteeism, chakra incompatibilities, if the symbiont spontaneously regrew its tentacles and left your head in order to start its sexual reproductive cycle. 

“Is this…” Tori felt like she couldn’t breathe. She felt more apt to vomit than she did when she’d fucked up trying to cut out someone’s eye. “Is this a genjutsu…?”

“Did you really not know about them?” Kabuto asked. “I thought you had biological training.”

Tori had to work very hard not to break down into hysterics. 

xXx

The good news was that “I have a special nerve that connects my eyeball to my brain and lets me see” sounded exactly as insane to both Kabuto and Orochimaru as “eyeball symbiont creature” did to Tori. 

Well, no, that wasn’t really good news. But she felt vindicated at both their absolutely baffled looks. 

She had to explain it three times– dropping words like “optic chiasma” and “retinal blind spot” before Kabuto believed her enough to press his fingers to her temple and send chakra into her eyes. 

“There is something there,” he said, sounding deeply perplexed, and Orochimaru perked up like a child receiving a Christmas gift. “I think-- yes, it’s a nerve.”

“I think you should be able to see it,” Tori said, “if you shine a light into the pupil.”

They did. Tori did indeed have a white spot at the back of her eye, right where her optic nerve entered her eye. 

“You’re like a cephalopod,” Orochimaru informed her, sounding like a dog owner telling their pet they were a very good girl. “This is how their eyes are arranged, an absolutely beautiful evolution. Oh, but the approach of the nerve is different. How fascinating.”

The examination ended with Orochimaru gleefully jabbing a needle into both Tori’s eyes. This was uncomfortable and painful, and he talked about how the presence of an optic nerve might be part of her future vision. 

At least this backs up my story, Tori thought as Orochimaru’s cool hand held her face down.

xXx

Orochimaru strolled into lab the next day and pulled Tori aside to go over the results of her test with her. He took her down the hall to an office, which was surprisingly homey, all things considered. Orochimaru’s office was lined with bookshelves, and had a nice wood desk and a comfortable looking chair behind it. There was an ornamental lamp, which along with the desk chair, were the closest to “creature comforts” that Tori had seen in Oto so far. 

She sat opposite to Orochimaru, in a much less comfortable chair. He spread a scroll out on the desk in front of her. 

“Do you know how to read the results of a DNA test?” he asked. 

“Uh,” Tori answered. “Not like whatever you’re about to show me.”

He hummed back at her, not at all bothered. “Ah, your otherworldly science. You should tell me about that later. For now…”

He explained how he’d compared the DNA extracted from her eye to DNA extracted from the hair he’d ripped off of her previously. They had matched exactly. He’d also ran her eye DNA against several visual symbionts they had on file, across many vertebrate taxa, and found no match at all. 

“Your eyes are one-hundred percent Tori,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

“...thanks?” Tori tried. As a joke she added, “I grew them myself.”

“Hmm,” he answered. “I wish I had more of you, and more of other animals from your world. I’d like to study how they evolved.”

“I don’t understand how they didn’t evolve here,” Tori told him honestly. They had a special socket and everything! “I think… do other animals have eyes here? I’m pretty sure eyes evolved more than once. In my world, I mean.”

Orochimaru leaned back in his seat, eyeing her indulgently, a smile tugging at his lips. “The leading theory is that the symbiont started as a flesh-eating parasite that attacked proto-eyes in vertebrates, and then evolved with us until it simply replaced our eyes. Most babies are born with soft tissue in their sockets, to feed potential symbionts, and some think that growth is left over from millions of years ago when our ancestors had their own eyes.”

“Oh,” Tori said, unsure how to respond to that. She’d been taught parasitism and mutualism were opposite sides of the same symbiotic spectrum, so moving from one end to the other made sense. “Well, that happens sometimes.”

Orochimaru laughed. 

They chatted. Orochimaru was good at answering questions thoroughly and without making Tori feel like she was stupid the way other Oto residents did, and he nodded along to her talking about whatever eyeball-related thing that came to her mind. Red-green colorblindness being a sex-linked trait, for example, was an extremely interesting topic for Orochimaru. 

“So do you not have the genes for photoreceptors at all?” Tori asked curiously. 

Instead of answering her immediately, Orochimaru had started writing down notes to himself. With the exception of occasionally labeling a tube or sample, Tori had never actually seen him write anything down before, and he scribbled with a sort of fervent focus. 

“I’ve never looked,” he said eventually. “There’s evidence for photosensitivity in those without symbionts, but… It would be interesting to use your genome to search for any analogous loci…”

Because the conversation flowed easily, Tori eventually felt bold enough to ask:

“So is this why you can just pass sharingan around like hot potatoes?”

Orochimaru paused in the middle of writing, blinking at her. 

“Hot potatoes?”

Tori blushed, and then backpedaled. “I know you… uh, Sasuke is going to get into a fight with Danzo at some point.”

She gestured at her forearm, and Orochimaru let a loud, rasping laugh. 

“I don’t think Danzo can see particularly well with those,” he said, eyes mirthful. “But I suppose eye transplants would be quite difficult with a nerve to connect, wouldn’t they?”

Tori nodded. She was pretty sure they weren’t even possible. There were… a lot of problems, there. But if the eyeball was supposed to be an external creature, it had to be easier to pass them around. 

“They have quite a high success rate here,” he answered, tone flippant as he played with the pen in his hand. “Unfortunately, an eye transplanted into a non-related host can rarely be coaxed into reproducing.”

“Huh,” Tori answered. “Why?”

Orochimaru’s lips quirked up into a smirk. “Perhaps that can be your next project.” 

xXx

It didn’t get to be Tori’s next project, because Oto ended up going up in flames. 

She didn’t even have time or energy to think about how everyone in this world was running around with symbiont eyeballs instead of regular eyes until months later, sitting in Sasori’s workshop and carefully stirring some foul-smelling concoction while he excavated someone’s insides so he could hide weapons inside or something. 

“You know, you guys should really invent magnetic stir-bars,” Tori said, eyeing the beaker of slowly bubbling sludge and wondering if the fumes could hurt her. 

Apparently Sasori was in a bad mood today, because he put the horrifying… scooping tool… down and turned to her fully. 

Like carving a pumpkin, Tori thought against her will, eyes fixated on the… organ scooper?

“What stupid thing are you rambling about now?” Sasori asked her, voice harsh. “You’re distracting me. If you make a single mistake with that poison--”

Tori was trying very hard to pay attention to Sasori’s threats and not think about all the horrible squelching noises of the organs she’d removed herself. It was better to listen to Sasori, really. Probably increased her chance of survival, even. 

There was movement behind Sasori. Tori squeaked in surprise. Sasori clicked his tongue in annoyance, picked up the organ scooper, and then used it to catch something right out of the air with the ease of a professional lacrosse player. 

“Oh, disgusting,” he said, staring down at it in evident annoyance. 

Something else plopped to the floor with an audible, vaguely wet thud. It rolled across the concrete floor, and Sasori trapped it against the floor with a firm sandal. Tori leaned over the bench to see what was going on, and saw the transparent ooze of viscera across the cement and gray tentacles trashing against the floor and the sides of Sasori’s sandals. 

“Is that an eyeball symbiont?” Tori asked, suddenly excited. She leapt to her feet and came to stand beside him, peering into the shell of the organ scooper. 

Sure enough, an eyeball with a halo of tentacles was rolling back and forth, desperately trying to escape. 

Holy shit, Tori thought. That was… that was amazing, actually. 

“It’s sort of cute,” she said. 

Sasori looked at her like she was insane. This was, apparently, such a bizarre statement that he didn’t immediately react to the eyeball finally lurching itself forward and out of the scoop. Tori caught it easily in one hand as it fell. 

“Don’t touch it,” Sasori hissed, grabbing her wrist. “Are you insane? It’ll induce your eyes too.”

“...what?” Tori asked, blinking back at him. “Oh, because the tentacles mean it’s trying to have sex?”

She stared down at the thing in her hand. The tentacles wriggled between her fingers. Kinky little bastards, weren’t they?

Sasori was looking at her with… awe wasn’t really the word. More like: What the fuck, I have never seen someone this carelessly insane before, and I am horrified that humanity could reach these depth. 

Which was kind of rude, actually, because they lived with Hidan. 

“What do you mean by ‘induce’?” Toi asked. 

“Do you not know how eyeballs work?” Sasori asked, sounding just shy of hysterical. 

Apparently, handling an eyeball symbiont in its sexual reproduction mode could induce a symbiont in a host to also leave the head and revert to its sexual cycle, so they could both run off and hopefully have an eyeball orgy with as many symbionts as possible. Tori guessed that made sense. The symbiont reproduced mainly asexually, but most things did occasionally run off to have sex. That was just life. 

Sasori was absolutely disgusted by the entire process. His symbionts were the only living part of him, and he was personally horrified by the idea of them crawling out of his head to make babies. 

He also seemed to be viscerally repulsed by the threat of a loose symbiont in someone’s living quarters, not because it might affect his housemates, but because he didn’t like the idea of more tentacled symbionts flopping around. 

“Is this like… an ongoing societal problem?” Tori wondered. Did people kill them on sight, or was this considered a beautiful miracle of life? 

She didn’t get to find out, because her question triggered a rant from Sasori about how much he hated them, and that they should just stay in people’s heads and look pretty like they were meant to. 

“Is it common to leave a dead host like this?” Tori asked when he calmed down. They couldn’t really move on their own unless they went into sex mode, after all… 

“Why are you still holding it?” Sasori demanded. His own disgust was the only thing keeping him from prying it out of her hand himself. 

“Oh, I don’t have a visual symbiont,” Tori said, blinking at Sasori. “I just grew my own eyes. Uh. Like an octopus.”

Sasori very slowly let go of her wrist. He stared at her, perplexed. 

The symbiont in her hand wriggled some more. Her own eyeballs stayed firmly in place. 

“...pick up the one on the floor,” Sasori said eventually. 

He wanted to keep them. He liked saving his puppet’s original eyes. Usually, when they left the host, he had to kill them and then isolate them for a week to be sure the hormones that could induce his own symbionts dissipated. That meant, once he was able to safely handle them, they were not in pristine condition. This, perhaps, contributed to why he hated them so much. They were frustrating art material. 

Tori thought, based on what she’d read about things doctors did, he was being a bit paranoid, the way some people didn’t like touching raw meat. 

“You’ll have to kill them and preserve them for me,” Sasori said, having fully accepted that Tori was a weird freak faster than she would have anticipated. 

Tori felt bad when she killed them, slipping a scalpel into their backs where Sasori indicated. 

“You’ll see more live ones,” Sasori sniffed when she complained. “This happens with about a quarter of my bodies.”

Fascinating, Tori thought. She’d never had one of her failed surgery… patients… do this. Maybe what they did in Oto also killed the symbiont? 

“And you don’t use all those bodies for full puppets, right?” Tori asked. “You won’t need every symbiont.”

“You can’t keep it as a pet,” Sasori sneered. 

Obviously she didn’t want a pet. She wanted to run some experiments. This was really interesting, after all! 

Instead of earnestly explaining this to Sasori, who seemed a bit on edge and likely to yell at her, she went for jokes at other people’s expense. He loved those. 

“I want to see if Jashin protects Hidan from them,” Tori told him, and he snorted. “Or see if we can get one to colonize Deidara’s mouth-hand.”

“He will kill you,” Sasori said, not without a hint of bemusement. “You’ll cut off all their tentacles next. I like to use curved scissors…”

[olderthannetfic]

This might be an odd or personal question, but could I ask how you started knitting and where you started as a beginner? Or what would you recommend? I’ve tried to join clubs and groups irl, but there’s so much drama and gossiping. When I said I didn’t want to take part in that aspect, they started ostracizing and gossiping about me. Any websites, yt channels or books you’d recommend for a beginner?

--

Haha.

My friend, this does not even register on the scale of deeply personal or odd questions people have sent me.

I've been trying to remember exactly how I started and why (like, even before this ask). I think it was on a family vacation to Scotland the summer before I started college. That would have been in 1999.

I taught myself from one of those awful 90s pamphlets with the line drawings. They're a nightmare compared to being able to see someone do the motions in person or even in a video. I had some awful plastic needles and no guidance on yarn and just knit with what I found at some shop there. Do not recommend!

I achieved what I wanted during college, which was to make a nice cable-knit sweater that I still wear, and then I got frustrated with crappy acrylic yarn and drifted away from knitting until a year or so ago.

The fact is, I basically didn't do beginner projects. I moved straight from making one rectangle to making grandiose sweaters or whatever else struck my fancy. (But if you want to know, I was using Viking Patterns for Knitting and a bunch of Alice Starmore books, all of which you can still buy.) I know plenty of people who did it this way, but you certainly don't have to.

And you definitely don't need to learn from a terrible 90s printed pamphlet!

Luckily, nowadays, you can find a tutorial on just about anything on Youtube. I enjoy watching the technical and historical types discuss quirks of knitting you might not think of without years of practice or research.

Roxanne Richardson is great, for example.

Look for somebody old, not wearing a lot of makeup, and not talking about their indie dyeing/yarn business and you'll avoid most of the clowns who learned to knit five minutes ago and now want to be knitfluencers.

When I want a super simple technique tutorial, I usually end up looking at either Nimble Needles or VeryPink Knits. I find her super annoying, but her tutorials are spot-on. Norman's voice is much more soothing and I just enjoy his presence more, but both of them have good ultra close-up shots of what they're doing (which lots of vloggers don't because it requires special equipment).

I'd just figure out what kind of finished products you want to use knitting for and then find patterns and tutorials geared towards those.

Cables are relatively easy. Stranded colorwork requires a fair amount of physical coordination and some people find it rather difficult at first.

Circular needles are far more popular than traditional straight ones for people starting today.

Cotton yarn is relatively less nice to knit with than wool for most people, but it tends to be the natural fiber available at a low price point from major retailers.

Picking up general tips like that by watching various youtubers will help you pick a project that won't be too painful to work on.

People who naturally knit loosely should consider grippy bamboo or wooden needles. People who naturally knit tightly should consider slippery metal ones.

My biggest piece of advice is that you're usually better off with something "hard" that you actually like rather than a "practice" project you don't care about, at least after you've made like one rectangle to practice doing a knit stitch at all.

--

Finding community can be hard, and yes, some crafting hobbies are infested with drama.

But if you just want to know how to knit, you're way better off with some video tutorials and a nice pattern you like.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Ingek73 submitted this cute little house by the water in the Netherlands. It’s already been sold for €85,000 ($92,000). For that price, I’d grab it, too. 

It’s only 2 rooms, but it’s not small. This is a lovely room with the brick walls and pretty doors. So bright and cheery. You could make look like a dollhouse,

Going into the main living area.

Nice fireplace and a radiator for heat.

There’s also a heat stove- it must be plenty warm.

I thought the structure on the left was seating, but it’s the kitchen!

Look at this, a little sunken kitchie. 

How cute is this?

There’s a loo, but there isn’t any running water, so it has to be flushed with a bucket from outside. There’s an old rainwater well, though, so I wonder if water can be hooked up. 

Now, here we have a candidate for Killer Stairs, going up to the 2nd level.

There’s plenty room up here to make at least 2 bds. and even a family room. There are no utilities, but the current owner signed up for fiber optic cable. 

The historic little house was originally a bridge keeper’s home.

Look at this cute little sunken patio.

This is what it looked like back in the day. See the bridge? 

It was built way back in 1855 - I thought this was plaque, but I’m told that it’s a flood water line. 

It does need some repair and is only accessible by boat. 

I love this little house so much. It’s like a little slice of heaven on your own island. It would make a great art studio, too.

You can watch the boats go by.

https://www.funda.nl/koop/verkocht/dronryp/huis-42827550-headyk-51/

[eating-the-inedible]

Here is a list of the inedibles that will be in this bracket

Lava

Orbeez

Orange Joe (fictional "beverage" that's a combination of orange juice and coffee)

Doll shoes

Dirt

Pen caps

Mercury

Watermelon tourmaline

Comet/scouring powder

Moss

Paper towels

Play-Doh

Drywall

Marbles

CD

DVD

Dice

Kinetic Sand

Coins 

Fiberglass insulation

3DS Stylus

Plastic Bottle Cap

Chapstick

Babybell Cheese Wax

Paper

Bouncy ball

Human meat

Venus (planet)

Cascade dishwasher pods

Acrylic Paint

Magnets

Molten glass

Pens

Sea glass

Silica gel packet

Leaves

Cocoa butter lotion

Antifreeze

Pencil Toppers, the lil eraser things

Sand

Tumbled amethyst

Rubber Ducks

The rubber balls from the game Cranium Cariboo

Polly pocket clothes

Poison Dart Frog

Snow

0.1 uF Film Capacitor

The sun

Metal

Eraser

Tide pods

Phone charger wire

Those free wooden pencils you get at ikea (just the wood shell not the lead)

Liquid nitrogen

Aquarium gravel

the weird science juice in the beakers in those stock images

Origami star

Styrofoam cup

Sticky note

Collar of shirt

This submission form

Plastic straws

Glow sticks

Oil paintings

Candle wax

Glass

Nickel sulfate solution/Nickel plating solution

Silicone wristbands

Seatbelt

The wax paper under your Poutine

Forearm (doesn't have to be one's own)

Asbestos

Candy wrapper

“Okay so technically this is edible but I’ve had urges to just take a huge bite out of certain sea creatures before. Like just a chunk from an orca or dolphin or great white or seal, etc.”

“Those stupid wooden spoons”

Furbies

Scotch tape

Artificial grapes (the wax/plastic ones for display)

phone

THE FLESH OF MY ENEMIES

Crystals

Fire

The goo inside  Stretch Armstrong

Headphone wire

Raw steak

Art

Small colorful rubber bands 

Tinfoil

Pencil lead

Cattails (the plant)

Foamy soap

Liquid soap

Bar soap

Flourite

Shiny rocks

Grass

A hunk of random fish swimming by

A live goldfish

Toothpaste

Styrofoam

Price Tag Fasteners

The moon

Pool noodles

Smol frog

Destroying angel mushroom

the smoke coming out of the grain refineries two Mike's out of Gary, Indiana, Usa

Popsicle sticks

Cardboard

My hat

The tiny rocks in school playgrounds

Gasoline

Blue laundry detergent

Spray foam insulation

Battery corrosion

Fiber optic cables

Packing peanuts

Your mother

Pond water

Dry ice

Alkali metals

Chocolate shampoo

Ping pong ball

Bricks, like the stuff you'd build with. Minecraft bricks even, if you want

Hoodie drawstrings

Horse treats

Chalk

Copper (II) Sulphate Water / Blue Science Rock + Blue Science Juice

Ink

Floam

Fabric Paint

Oil paint

that one art piece of the banana taped to the wall

the hotdog somebody encased in resin

“the thin lego plates not the base plates but like the lego piece thats like 2x8 and they kinda look like hershey chocolate bar pieces”

One of those little hamsters

Model magic

Battery Acid (the drink)

manchineel apple

Rubber band ball

The lava lamp liquid

Blood

Rosin

Wax apples

That cake decoration that came with your slice and you're like 90% sure it's not edible... but what if ?

Soap bubble

Lush cosmetics' products

Plushies

Strawberry Shortcake's dolls with scented hair

Wood

Glue

Salt lamp

People who think children are not worth their consideration

Tarmac

Shampoo

Pennies

Poisonous berries

Chunky soft yarn

Crayons 

Rock

“whatever the Chuck E Cheese Ticket Muncher Machine is eating (it's not the tickets) (or the sound itself but that's neither a solid nor a liquid so this is just kind of holding hands with the hypothetical ticket muncher food)”

Snow globe liquid

Chisel tip whiteboard marker

Raw dough

Raw fuckin cactus. alive

Grape agate

Car seat

Succulents

Keys

Lock pick

Scrub daddy

Molten sugar 

Allergens

Lightning bolts

“Bark dust. Like the dirt/bark dust that's under the bark chips on a playground. Not the chips themselves. The dust.”

Clear deodorant

Apple earbud wires

Eggshells

Squinkies

Hello kitty sweatshirt zipper

Preshredded mozzarella cheese

Scrap metal

Rose

All of the rocks at a crystal shop

Origami polyhedron model

Bubbles mixture

Cupcake liners

Hair gel

Curtain rods

Incense sticks

Incense cones

Metal thing that attaches eraser to pencil

Windshield wiper fluid

Plastic pencil grips

Wooden ice cream spoon

Book

Tree

The liquid in levels

Vanilla extract

Aroace flag

Coil incense

California state testing “next question” button

Spackle

Forbidden coal iron french fries

Garage doors that look like chocolate bars

Plastic takeout box

Velvet

Weird anime girl hair

Freezable gel ice pack

Clouds

Necklace chains

Nail polish

Pencil Shavings

Pool floats

Bao Dumpling

Spray deodorant

0.1 uF Ceramic Capacitor

Vanillish (Pokémon)

Fondant

Really fancy pillars

Computers

Favorite song

Tumblr

“THE LITTLE ORBS IN THE MOUSE (aka trackballs)”

“Any cutesy anime character like Chopper or Pikachu”

Wooden fan blades

Balsa wood sticks

Those blankets that look like tortillas

Microwave

Milk and golden honey softsoap

Batteries

1x2 lego pieces

Light bulbs

Slightly melted lounge chair

Cork (the material)

Pineapple coke

Fingernails 

Sparkly lipgloss

Race Car Tire Marble

Gold trophies

Konjac sponge

Shirt

Mandy the Slayer / Orange Spyderco Dragonfly Knife

Malachite

Heater

Glasses Temples

Typewriter keys

EVA foam

Airplane

Sword

Crumbs in the couch

Children

My wife's arm/shoulder

Records

Yellow ACE bandages

Neon Signs

Scented candles

[candidoptronix]

Optical Fiber cable Manufacturing -

Candid Optronix is one of largest Fiber Cable Industry in India. we have wide range of fiber cable - drop cable, Flat cable & optical fiber cable.

Planing to buy the OFC, get the fiber cable price on www.optronix.in

and also contact our branches, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi, Bangalore, Guwahti, Patna, Kolkata, Raipur..

[smazizul]

What do ISPs typically do?

ISPs provide customers with access to the Internet while also providing other services such as email, domain registration, and web hosting. ISPs can also provide different types of Internet connections, such as cable and fiber optic. The connection may or may not be broadband. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) states that to be considered broadband, a connection must have a download speed of at least 25 megabits per second (Mbps) and an upload speed of at least 3 Mbps.

Some of the largest ISPs in the United States include Comcast, Charter, AT&amp;T, and Verizon. In summary

An Internet Service Provider or Isp is a large telecommunications company that provides Internet access and other related services to customers. Some ISPs are the only providers in certain areas, while other areas offer consumers access to multiple ISPs. Consumers often look for good service with reliable speeds and a reasonable price when considering choosing an ISP. Take advantage of $100,000 in virtual money in a risk-free tournament

Test your trading skills for free with our stock simulator. Compete with thousands of Investopedia traders and trade your way to the top! Deploy a business in a virtual environment before you start putting your own money at risk. Learn the trading system so that when you are ready to actually enter the market, you will have the desired behavior.

[thoughtportal]

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.

That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every business and residence in the city. The network is to be open access, meaning that multiple competitors can come in and compete on shared central infrastructure, driving down prices for locals (see our recent Copia study on this concept).

As you might expect, regional telecom monopolies hate this sort of thing. But because these networks are so popular among consumers, they’re generally afraid to speak out against them directly. So they usually employ the help of dodgy proxy lobbying and policy middlemen, who’ll then set upon any town or city contemplating such a network using a bunch of scary, misleading rhetoric.

Like in Bountiful, where the “Utah Taxpayers Association” (which has direct financial and even obvious managerial tethers to regional telecom giants CenturyLink (now Lumen) and Comcast) launched a petition trying to force a public vote on the $48 million in revenue bonds authorized for the project under the pretense that such a project would be an unmitigated disaster for the town. (Their effort didn’t work).

Big ISPs like to pretend they’re suddenly concerned about taxpayers and force entirely new votes on these kinds of projects because they know that with unlimited marketing budgets, they can usually flood less well funded towns or cities with misleading PR to sour the public on the idea.

But after the experience most Americans had with their existing broadband options during the peak COVID home education boom, it’s been much harder for telecom giants to bullshit the public. And the stone cold fact remains: these locally owned networks that wouldn’t even be considered if locals were happy with existing options.

You’ll notice these “taxpayer groups” exploited by big ISPs never criticize the untold billions federal and local governments throw at giant telecom monopolies for half-completed networks. Or the routine taxpayer fraud companies like AT&T, Frontier, CenturyLink (now Lumen) and others routinely engage in.

And it’s because such taxpayer protection groups are effectively industry-funded performance art; perhaps well intentioned at one point, but routinely hijacked, paid, and used as a prop by telecom monopolies looking to protect market dominance.

Gigi Sohn (who you’ll recall just had her nomination to the FCC scuttled by a sleazy telecom monopoly smear campaign) has shifted her focus heavily toward advocating for locally-owned, creative alternatives to telecom monopoly power. And in an op-ed to local Utah residents in the Salt Lake Tribune, she notes how telecom giants want to have their cake and eat it too.

They don’t want to provide affordable, evenly available next-generation broadband. But they don’t want long-neglected locals to, either:

Two huge cable and broadband companies, Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen, have been members of UTA and have sponsored the UTA annual conference. They have been vocally opposed to community-owned broadband for decades and are well-known for providing organizations like the UTA with significant financial support in exchange for pushing policies that help maintain their market dominance. Yet when given the opportunity in 2020, before anyone else, to provide Bountiful City with affordable and robust broadband, the companies balked. So the dominant cable companies not only don’t want to provide the service Bountiful City needs, they also want to block others from doing so.

Big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast (and all the consultants, think tankers, and academics they hire to defend their monopoly power) love to claim that community owned broadband networks are some kind of inherent boondoggle. But they’re just another business plan, dependent on the quality of the proposal and the individuals involved.

Even then, data consistently shows that community-owned broadband networks (whether municipal, cooperative, or built on the back of the city-owned utility) provide better, faster, cheaper service than regional monopolies. Such networks routinely not only provide the fastest service in the country, they do so while being immensely popular among consumers. They’re locally-owned and staffed, so they’re more accountable to locals. And they’re just looking to break even, not make a killing.

If I was a lumbering, apathetic, telecom monopoly solely fixated on cutting corners and raising rates to please myopic Wall Street investors, I’d be worried too.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face

No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back. Take network policy, where rural turkeys in Red State America keep on voting for Christmas, then profess outrage when Old Farmer Comcast gets to sharpening his ax.

For two years, the FCC has been hamstrung because MAGA Senators refuse to confirm Gigi Sohn, leaving the Commission with only four commissioners. What do the GOP have against Sohn? Well, to hear them tell of it, she’s some kind of radical Marxist who will undermine free enterprise and replace the internet with tin cans and string.

The reality is that Sohn favors policies that will specifically and substantially benefit the rural Americans whose senators who refuse to confirm her. For example, Sohn favors municipal fiber provision, which low-information conservatives have been trained to reflexively reject: “Get your government out of my internet!”

Boy, are they ever wrong. The private sector sucks at providing network connectivity, especially in rural places. The cable companies and phone companies have divided up the USA like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” setting out exclusive, non-competing territories that get worse service than anyone else in the wealthy world. Americans pay some of the highest prices for the lowest speeds of any OECD nation.

For ISPs, bad service is a feature, not a bug. When Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its books, which is how we discovered that the company booked the one rural customers with no alternative as “assets” because they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

We also learned that Frontier had calculated that it could make an extra billion in profit by bringing fiber to three million households, but chose not to, because it would take a decade to realize those profits, and during that time, executives’ stock options would decline in value as analysts punished them for making long-term bets.

We can bring fiber to rural America, and when we do, amazing things happen. McKee, Kentucky — one of the poorest places in America — used federal grants and its New Deal era rural electrification co-op to bring fiber to every household, using a mule called Ole Bub to run it over difficult mountain passes, and the result was an economic miracle:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The only Americans who consistently say they like their ISPs are people who live in the 700+ small towns that have run their own fiber, mostly in Red States:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

Small wonder that rural Americans prefer muni fiber to commercial ISPs’ offerings. When Trump’s FCC Chair Ajit Pai gave them billions in subsidies to improve rural connectivity, the monopolists spent it pulling new copper lines, not fiber — which would have been thousands of times faster.

Given all that, it takes a lot to convince rural Americans that municipal fiber is bad for them. Specifically, it takes disinformation. More specifically, it takes the lie that municipal fiber would result in “government interference” in users’ communications.

Boy, is this ever wrong. Private companies are free to set their own content moderation policies, and can discriminate against any viewpoint they wish. They can and do remove “lawful but awful” speech like racist diatribes, vaccine denial, election denial, and other conservative fever-dreams.

Contrast that with local governments, who are bound by the First Amendment, and prohibited from practicing “viewpoint discrimination.” This means that if a local government allows one viewpoint on a subject, they are generally required to allow all other viewpoints on that subject. This is how we get the Satanic Temple’s excellent stunts, like demanding that towns that display Christian icons on public lands also display statues of Baphomet right next to them.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/17/639726472/satanic-temple-protests-ten-commandments-monument-with-goat-headed-statue

When your town government runs 100gb fiber into your basement or garage, it will have a much harder time blocking you from, say, running a Mastodon instance devoted to election denial or GhostGun production than your commercial ISP will. Convincing American conservatives to hate municipal broadband was a gigantic self-own:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

Even worse is what rural America has been sold instead of municipal fiber: Starlink, the My Pillow of broadband. Starlink sells itself as blazing-fast satellite broadband, but conspicuously fails to talk up the fact that every Starlink user in your neighborhood competes for the same wireless spectrum as you, so the service can only get slower and more expensive over time:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

There’s been a concerted smear campaign against Sohn, and one of the major talking points is that Sohn is anti-cop because she sits on EFF’s board, and EFF wants to place limits on police access to commercial surveillance data. Which is wild, because one of EFF’s demands is limits on geofenced reverse warrants, where cops ask Google to reveal the identity of everyone who was in a specific place at a specific time. If you’ve heard about geofenced warrants lately, it was probably in the context of conservative outrage at their use in rounding up the January 6 insurrectionists.

Now, the primary use of these is to target Black Lives Matter demonstrators and other protestors, and EFF advocates for the normal Fourth Amendment rights that everyone is guaranteed in the Constitution. Conservative pundits didn’t give a damn about geofenced warrants until the J6 affair, and now they do — but they still insist that Sohn should be disqualified from sitting on the FCC because she shares their outrage at the abuse of private surveillance data by law enforcement.

All this raises the question: why have all these Red State senators made it their mission in life to block the appointment of an FCC commissioner who would deliver so many benefits to their constituents? It’s hard to say, of course, but Luke Goldstein has a suggestion in today’s American Prospect:

https://prospect.org/politics/democratic-majority-at-the-fcc-still-blocked/

“A torrent of lobbying money from the telecom industry has flooded Washington to block Sohn’s arrival at the FCC. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile doled out over $23 million lobbying Washington this year.”

And why would these companies spend millions to block Sohn from sitting on the Commission? Because she would help the Democratic majority pass policies that make broadband cheaper and faster for America, especially rural America where costs are highest and service is worst, and this will limit the telco monopolists’ profits.

There’s a new Democratic senate majority that’ll sit in 2023, so perhaps Sohn will finally be seated and start delivering relief to all Americans, even the turkeys who can’t stop voting for Christmas.

[Image ID: A hunter in camo firing a rifle whose barrel has been bent back to point at his own face. A muzzle flash emerges from the barrel. The hunter wears a MAGA hat. Behind the hunter is a telephone pole with many radiating lines. In the bottom left corner of the image is a 1950s-style illustration of a broadly smiling salesman, pointing at a box that is emblazoned with the logo for ALEC.]

[fibermarts]

QSFP28 Technology is The Most In-Demand Fiber Optics Technology

One technology in particular sticks out as a real game-changer in the rapidly changing world of data centers, where speed, efficiency, and scalability are paramount: QSFP28. QSFP28, short for Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable 28, is a powerful mix of speed and adaptability that is altering the industry. It has been quietly revolutionizing the way data is transported, processed, and stored.

Fundamentally, QSFP28 is a hot-pluggable, high-speed transceiver module that may be utilized for data and voice transmission. The amazing 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) per port data transmission rate of QSFP28 is what differentiates it from its predecessors. Because of its lightning-fast speed, QSFP28 is now the preferred option for network engineers and data center architects trying to keep up with the constantly rising needs of contemporary computing.

The capacity of QSFP28 technology to manage enormous volumes of data with ease is one of its biggest benefits. With the amount of data created at an unprecedented rate in today's data-driven society, having a dependable and fast data transmission infrastructure is crucial. This is where QSFP28 modules shine; they enable data centers to process and transfer data at blazingly high speeds, cutting down on latency and enhancing system performance in general.

Furthermore, QSFP+ Cable are available in many form factors, such as QSFP28-DD (Double Density), which improves scalability and flexibility by double the port density over standard QSFP28 modules. Because of its adaptability, data center operators may tailor the architecture and performance of their infrastructure to the demands of certain workloads, such as cloud-based apps, artificial intelligence, or high-performance computing.

The energy efficiency of QSFP28 technology is another important aspect. Optimizing power usage has become a top priority for data centers as they continue to struggle with growing energy prices and environmental concerns. Data centers may lower their operational expenses and carbon impact by utilizing QSFP28 modules, which are engineered to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption.

Furthermore, QSFP28 modules are compatible with a broad range of networking devices and protocols since they support many transmission protocols, such as Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel. In the long run, QSFP28 technology seems to have a very promising future. 

Follow our Facebook and Twitter for more information about our product.

[peppermintbuttlemon]

“How the fuck does A afford to live in London?”

that’s a very good question no one has a clue! London is one of the most expensive cities on earth…the prices are insane! How can she afford rent there without a stable job

I heard she installs fiber optic cables for AT&T 🤷🏻‍♀️