View current page
...more recent posts
The US Senate is still scared of Bush even though the President's popularity numbers are in the low 30s. They can't even muster the votes for a toothless resolution on the Iraq War escalation, despite the clear will of US voters expressed last November. Supporting the troops means getting them out of there, you numbskulls, not letting Bush kill them. I believe I speak for the majority of Americans in saying, I don't trust Bush, why do you? (Answer: smear merchant Karl Rove has pictures of all of them in their underpants.)
A post from MyDD, minus the links, on the current Balkanized state of American cell phone networks, giving us a glimpse of a what a non-neutral Internet would resemble:
Matt's mentioned Tim Wu's most excellent paper on the American wireless scene twice now, but I don't think this horse is dead yet. Wu paints a nice -- and by "nice," I mean kinda horrifying -- picture of what an Internet missing the fundamental principle of neutrality might look like. Take, for example, the state of innovation in the cellular market. Here in the U.S., wireless carriers rule the roost. They control what phones hook up to their networks. Since equipment developers have to design for particular networks, carriers pretty much control their entry into the market. Carriers lock phones to their networks and cripple [them on] neat technologies like Bluetooth, wi-fi, and even call timers (so as not to have you compare your records to theirs). Couple that with no real standards for software development, and few people bother building exciting new cell phone apps. To get a snazzy new iPhone you have enter into a contract with AT&T/Cingular, which is roughly analogous to Apple telling you that your new MacBook won't go online unless you switch to Comcast. The way wireless works today, innovation is only tolerated if it benefits the carrier, not the consumer.
Wireline (you know, when phones have wires) is of course pretty different. Yeah, the landline phone companies once argued that it was technically necessary for theirs to be "totally unified" systems. But today we can hook up just about any device to a phone line -- like, say, a modem -- because we were smart enough to enshrine the idea of open networks into law.
Over at the Agonist, Ian Welsh has more on the American wireless landscape, written in sort of fairy tale prose. Whatever it takes. In convincing people of the dangers of a carrier-controlled Internet, I think we could do worse than to get them to reflect on their own personal experiences as cell phone consumers.
According to Grace Glueck (recently departed the Times because...why again, exactly?), Miklos Suba was a minor Precisionist whose specialty was Brooklyn cityscapes rendered fairly scrupulously. He wasn't a fantasist by any means. So what could have been happening in this picture, which will be shown at James Graham & Sons next month? Did buildings like this exist in 1929? Was the artist clairvoyant? These purplish towers could be the monster glass vanity projects lumbering into present-day Brooklyn.