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Sunday, January 15, 2006
Why 
| | I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf. It takes time, but it happens [...] Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK [...] But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead. |
From consumerism to producerism
| | The digital lifestyle I see portrayed so alluringly in ads is not possible when the Internet plumbing in our homes is as pitiful as it is. The broadband carriers that we have today provide service that attains negative perfection: low speeds at high prices. |
| | It gets worse. Now these same carriers - led by Verizon Communications and BellSouth - want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas... |
| | ...the superabundance of content in the Internet's ecosystem is best explained by its organizing principle of "network neutrality." The phrase refers to the way the Internet welcomes everyone who wishes to post content. Consumers, in turn, enjoy limitless choices. Rather than having network operators select content providers on our behalf - the philosophy of the local cable company - the Internet allows all of us to act as our own network programmers, serving a demographic of just one person. |
| | Today, the network carrier has a minor, entirely neutral role in this system - providing the pipe for the bits that move the last miles to the home. It has no say about where those bits happened to have originated. Any proposed change in its role should be examined carefully, especially if the change entails expanding the carrier's power to pick and choose where bits come from - a power that has the potential to abrogate network neutrality. |
| | That's good, but it would have been better, two paragraphs up, if Randall talked about how the Net allows consumers to become producers. |
| | What we used to call consumerism is now giving way to producerism: the ability of anybody to produce. (Like, for example, I'm doing right now.) This is the huge thing that the Verizons, Comcasts and SBCs of the world still don't get. If they provided real broadband (you know, like they have in France, Korea and Japan), made service symmetrical, and started enabling, rather than crippling, the ability of anybody to produce, they'd open a far larger territory in which to do business than the sum total of whatever they might extort from Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft. |
Coincidence?
| | Kasper Retvig: I've been taking Tylenol and it also made me able to sleep. However, I also had very strange and wierd dreams. |
| | Same thing happened to me. In fact, I'm up now, futzing around, because the strange dreams bore and annoy me. Also because I'm coughing almost constantly. |
Underheard
Found Angeles
| | I can't tell ya how good it feels to get positive responses to my photoblogging. I know photo tours from the sky bore most people, especially when I take long digressions into geology. But they're fun to do, and educational for the kid (who likes sitting by the window too, and often participates in the effort). |
| | So yesterday I got an email from a Real Geologist, thanking me for making the effort — and offering to help, should we ever put together a book of interesting aerial photos. (Which I still think is a good longtail idea.) |
| | And now I just saw Sean Bonner's latest, digging my aerial photos of Los Angeles. I'll have to shoot his place from the sky, next time I fly over it. If it's visible. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure it's right under the plane (and possibly out of sight) in this shot here. |
| | The shot above, by the way, is of ice floes, I believe in Hudson's Bay. When I have time, I'll add descriptions to the photos in the set. |
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