Heh: "...Lessing’s words should be taken somewhat in
context: the ditherings of an ignorant old women..."
Just in case you think that the US is going to enter a glorious phase of civil rights reformation if the Democrats get
elected next year, check it out:
Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports on the effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of
Nevada to require colleges to take more direct action in fighting “campus based digital theft” of movies and music. File
sharing, popular even when I was in college in the late 1990s, is by all reports going on in epic proportions on today’s
campus. The speed and unfiltered nature of campus computer networks is largely responsible for making this possible, and the
fact that so many young adults are connected in one place makes it part of the culture on campus. Simply put, it’s easy to
trade music, or even whole, fairly high-definition movies and TV shows, with your friends on campus and beyond.
This is kind of neat -- the game of Checkers has
been solved; mathematically, if you play correctly, you cannot loose. I.e. you're basically now playing tic-tac-toe with a
bigger board. Jonathan Schaeffer, the lead author, is now working on Poker, aka "never need to apply for a grant again".
Seeking the Alien Shore:
The guy I was connected to sounded like I just woke him up. The first thing he does is ask me my number again. It's not
1952 ... surely the number can be passed along with my call, right? And for that matter, why not shell out for call
display, you cheap bastards! This guy was sloooow. The first thing I said was I wanted to cancel my high-speed Internet
service. There was a too-long pause. He then told me he would pull up my file. Again there was inappropriately long pause. I
was tempted to ask if he was still there, but I got the feeling he was playing with me so I said nothing. I don't know where
I got this feeling, but it may be from the long periods of sensory deprivation while I waited for him. It was like he was
doing something else, like trying to get to the next level in Tetris. We went back and forth with questions and answers, and
with his long pauses, this took easily over five minutes. At the point where I expected him to tell me I was good to go, he
instead said he could not complete my request and would pass me along to someone who could. Stunned, I mumble, "ummmm,
okay."
Rohan covers the two major issues on net neutrality well:
The side of Net Neutrality I like is the one about not discriminating among destinations. If I place a VoIP call, my ISP
should not be able to prevent my using Vonage (or to permit it only if I pay more) just because it has its own VoIP product.
Such discrimination allows a carrier to take advantage of its near-monopoly situation in order to boost its other
non-monopoly business, and should be prohibited. A non-Internet example: I subscribe to cable TV, and when the cable company,
which also has media interests, bought a sports channel from another media company it decided to make it a “basic cable”
offering that every cable customer would have to pay for, including people like me who never watch it. The cable company had
never forced on its subscribers a longer established and much more popular sports channel that it did not own; this action
was taken only when it benefitted the cable company’s media division. This is the kind of discrimination I would like to see
prevented. If a carrier offers value-added services like VoIP, that’s fine with me, but it should not be permitted to
discriminate between its own services and those of others.
The side of Net Neutrality that I’m not so keen on is the one relating to “traffic shaping”. Here the ISP gives lower
priority to certain types of packets in order to keep the rest of the packets moving smartly. In particular, it gives lower
priority to BitTorrent packets. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer system for distributing large files, and is very good at that:
GNU/Linux distributions have been spread this way, for instance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of BitTorrent traffic
consists of audio and video distributed illegally, such as movies recorded by a video camera smuggled into a movie theatre.
Movie files are huge, and BitTorrent traffic now constitutes a large percentage of all Internet traffic. Net Neutrality
advocates say that this traffic should get equal priority. I don’t agree. If my ISP uses traffic shaping to slow down
BitTorrent, that’s just fine with me. Yes, that unfortunately slows down “legitimate” torrents as well, but I’d rather pay
that price than have the entire Internet slow to a crawl.
For the record, I don't think ISP should be able to discriminate between packets from different sources (without
losing common carrier privileges) and should be able to traffic
shape. The first means they cannot deliver a "superior" product, say video, by downgrading competitors. The second says the
little geek next door can't ruin everyone else's Internet experience on the Internet by spending all day downloading
movies.
If then (for example), Rogers wants to offer a "video downloading" package with all the bandwidth our hypothetical neighbor
needs, they cannot make it a "Roger's Video Only" deal.
Well
put:
I really only have one major issue with the social content sites out there right now. The content
sucks.
The problem is social content sites (digg, reddit, etc.) are a great blender mixing everyone's choices into a smooth
consistent blend. With a relatively homogeneous group, this doesn't matter so much but as more and more people pile into the
system, the worse the results become (i.e. it becomes so popular, no one goes there anymore).
What does this mean? Well, the obvious thing is that the market's still open for solutions. Partitioning users by taste into
different sites (as suggested in the starting link) is an inadequate solution (IMHO); but what if you could data mine a
facebook-like site. That would be killer.
This is kind of neat -- it's convert your Flickr (and other) images into little
business cards which they mail to you (via Coates).
This would make neat presents. Hmmmm.
Sony has created a Second Life-type thing for the PS3 called "Home". It looks really good, almost good
enough a reason to buy a PS3. You know, if you didn't have a first life.
It won't be available until the Fall.
Schneier:
We used to quip that "password" is the most common password. Now it's "password1." Who said users haven't learned anything about security?
Andy Ihnatko says "avoid the loony Zune":
"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. "So it's time to get paid for it."
Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?
Then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.
Take the Zune's one unique and potentially ginchy feature: Wi-Fi. You see this printed on the box and you immediately think "Cool. So I can sync files from my desktop library without having to plug in a USB cable, right? Maybe even download new content directly to the device from the Internet?"
Typical, selfish user: How does your convenience help make money for Universal? No wonder Doug despises you.
No, the Zune's sole wireless feature is "squirting" -- I know, I know, it's Microsoft's term, not mine -- music and pictures to any other Zune device within direct Wi-Fi range. Even if the track is inherently free (like a podcast) the Zune wraps it in a DRM scheme that causes the track to self-destruct after three days or three plays, whichever comes first.
After that, it's nothing more than a bookmark for purchasing the track in the Zune Marketplace. It amounts to nothing more than free advertising.
Neat, but:
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judging by the lineups, Asians in Toronto live lonely empty sex-free lives
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a PS3 can really take a beating -- that's a damned sledgehammer (the wii, not so much)
I've posted a brief review and comments last night about Enterprise 2.0 Camp 2 over on my technical blog.
From Slate:
There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.
The Sci Fi Network, NBC and Ron Moore are battling over royalities for the Battlestar Galactica "webisodes". Read all about it here.
Note: BSG has nothing to do with it really; this is a proxy fight for how creatives will be compensated in a post-TV world.
InfoWorld reports:
Sharp raised the bar for high-definition LCD (liquid crystal display) screens this week with the demonstration of 64-inch prototype with a resolution of 4,096 pixels by 2,160 pixels -- four times higher than current high-definition displays.
Now if they can shrink this down to 4" by 2", we'll be well on our way to a proper VR headset! Another 10, 15 years I guess.
Dear De Boer's Furniture/Pizza Nova:
When I visit your site, I want to find out about furniture/order a pizza. I do not want to LISTEN TO YOUR G*DD*AMNED THEME SONG/LISTEN TO YOUR G*DD*AMNED THEME SONG or have to CLICK THROUGH A F*CKING SPLASH SCREEN/NAVIGATE THROUGH YOUR SH*TTY MENU SYSTEM. Hint: NO ONE DOES. Please fire the subliterate retards you hired somehow through a wormhole back to 1995 and hire a competent web designer and get a real site that people can use.
Thanks for your consideration,
Me.
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