Vail at the Crossroads

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Nancy and I skied Vail years ago. It is a great mountain, but the term “village” really doesn’t apply any longer. Jared Jacang Maher asks if they must tear down a local landmark to save it. There’s been no shortage of controversy, including the defeat of two council members:

Crossroads not only stands at one of the town’s most prominent intersections, it’s a convergence point for wealth, power and mountain-sized egos, for small-town politics with big-city politicking. The official arguments may focus on topics like height and zoning, but citizens on both sides of the debate see the struggle as more epic, as a fight between Vail’s old-time founders and its younger newcomers for what the town is and what it should become. Emotions are high, and the stakes are huge. Because despite its theme-park attributes, Vail is a real place, with real residents who live and work here, who are born and die here, and who love and hate each others’ guts — all within town limits.

Like the facades of many of Vail’s early buildings, Crossroads is faded and cracked after decades of exposure to sunlight and snow. Built in 1969 on the East Meadow Drive corridor, the 60,000-square-foot, horseshoe-shaped complex wraps around a parking lot with three stories of condos sitting above a ground floor of retail. The two biggest tenants — Clark’s Market and the Crossroads Cinema — both pulled out last month, citing slow business and deteriorating facilities.

Reminds me a bit of the local Whole Foods / Hilldale / Sentry Foods battle.

Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality

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Tim Wu:

The Internet is largely meritocratic in its design. If people like instapundit.com better than cnn.com, that’s where they’ll go. If they like the search engine A9 better than Google, they vote with their clicks. Is it a problem, then, if the gatekeepers of the Internet (in most places, a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favored and disfavored uses of the Internet? To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?

Welcome to the fight over “network neutrality,” Washington’s current obsession. The debate centers on whether it is more “neutral” to let consumers reach all Internet content equally or to let providers discriminate if they think they’ll make more money that way.

TBL on Net Neutrality

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Tim Berners-Lee:

This is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.

Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.

Water Worries

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Ron Seely digs deep into Madison’s water woes:

Students at East High School were among the roughly 9,000 people who, for a short time at least, were drinking city water contaminated with high levels of an industrial pollutant that can cause liver, kidney or lung damage.

Nobody would have known that by reading the Madison Water Utility’s consumer confidence report data for that year.

The federal health standard for the chemical, carbon tetrachloride, is 5 parts per billion. In October 2000, the level in the city’s well No. 3 tested at 8.3 parts per billion.

But the utility’s annual drinking water quality report listed the maximum level found at only 2.9 parts per billion. Utility officials say it was a typo.

More:

Modern Joint Operating Agreements

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Dan Gillmor looks at Hearst’s deal with MediaNews Group to acquire four newspapers. Madison has had one of these for years – a $120M annual arrangement that has kept the Cap Times going despite its very small circulation. Joint operating agreements were protected by congress years ago, as a way to “preserve daily newspapers”. The time has long since arrived to eliminate this relic.

Dave Zweifel passes along his experience at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention recently.

A Word for Governor Doyle on the Broadband Expansion Tax Credit

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Wisbusiness:

Gov. Jim Doyle plans to sign the broadband bill passed by both the state Senate and Assembly on Tuesday, a top aide said Wednesday afternoon.

“The governor supports it,” said spokesman Matthew Canter. “In fact, he helped lead the way for it. It’s part of his Grow Wisconsin plan.”

The legislation will give telecommunications companies tax exemptions if they provide high-speed Internet service to parts of Wisconsin that lack it or are underserved – mostly in the rural and northern areas of the state.

I hope that Governor Doyle will insert some language into this bill that requires the recipients of this subsidy – local Telco’s – to provide symmetrical internet access, not the odd services they largely provide today where the downstream and upstream services run at different speeds. The internet is not TV. Our generally poor broadband service significantly limits the opportunities for emerging home based internet businesses and services. This is a trivial change and should be a no brainer for the Governor. Learn much more on these issues, including why the US is so far behind countries like Japan and Korea in true broadband (100mbps symmetrical speeds), here.
Om Malik tells us why this is important.

Organic Goes Mainstream

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Carol Ness:

Thirteen-and-a-half million servings of organic romaine, radicchio and baby greens. That’s how much Earthbound Farm, the biggest organic produce company in the country, sends across America from its gigantic San Juan Bautista processing plant every single week.

That’s one big bowl of salad — way bigger than when Myra and Drew Goodman started Earthbound Farm in their Carmel Valley living room in 1984. They now farm 26,000 organic acres.

1500 Square Mile Silicon Valley Wireless RFP

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802.11b Networking News:

The Joint Venture Silicon Valley public/private partnership has issued its RFP: The group of cities, counties, governmental bodies, and corporations want a wireless network of some kind–technology isn’t decided and could be a broad mix–that would cover Silicon Valley. Winning vendor(s) will be selected from the respondents to their RFP by September, and recommended to the 16 cities, San Mateo County, and 16 other jurisdictions that have signed on. I wrote in January about the scope and nature of this 1,500-square-mile potential project….