Daily Archives: November 13, 2005

How To Get Faster Municipal Service from Incumbents

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How To Get Faster Municipal Service from Incumbents:

“Lompoc, Calif., may have three options for broadband, accidentally: The city is at the center of this long and fair look at why municipal wireless is becoming a widespread phenomenon, and the reporter covers the warts and fair skin equally. But there’s a gem in this article, because it explains how any smaller town could get its service upgraded by incumbents at no expense. First, the mayor or city manager along with the council announces a surprise plan to offer subsidized or free wireless throughout the town with a private contractor handling cost and risk. Second, they fight back attacks by the incumbents to scotch the plan in the media or through special elections. Third, the incumbents commit upgrade resources to serve the town. Fourth, the town decides not to build, and enjoys its 21st-century broadband upgrades. Now, Lompoc can’t be accused of this strategy, but the incumbents should have egg on their face when they describe the expensive upgrades to cable and DSL installed in the city–only after the city’s plan to put in wireless first and fiber later was well underway. The head of the town’s wireless project said Comcast promised service upgrades for 10 years–probably from analog to digital cable for starters–and that the work to upgrade the network (which was finished this year) was done only in response to Lompoc’s plans. Likewise, Verizon admitted in this article that Lompoc was low on its list for improving DSL service and performance. This is interesting when you contrast it with the complaint of incumbents that those who ‘regulate’ them will compete against them. Regulation is a funny animal. Most telecom regulation is at a national level; franchise regulation is local. The ‘regulation’ they’re talking about is not whether a company has the right to provide service, but rather the rules and fees by which a company can use city facilities, such as light poles, conduits, and so forth. This form of regulation is really another aspect of a city’s right to self-determination. It can be used as a blunt instrument. In fact, Philadelphia reportedly prevented the entrance of a competitive cable company for years, restricting customer choice and favoring an incumbent franchise holder. But should the converse be true–should towns and cities be required to offer free or regulated (that word again) access on a non-discriminatory basis to everyone? We’ve seen that: that’s the trenching regulation. If you lived in, say, Palo Alto, Calif., during the dotcom boom, you have already seen trucks open up your street, put in cable, close it up, and then another set of trucks come in the next week. It may be that local bodies ‘regulate’ the incumbent cable and telecom providers, but they apparently have no leverage over them, otherwise Lompoc would have no reason (and no citizen support) for their fiber and wireless buildout…

Seniors Embrace Blogs

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AP:

There’s Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal, Dogwalk Musings, and, of course, the Oldest Living Blogger.

“It’s too easy to sit in your own cave and let the world go by, eh?” said Ray Sutton, the 73-year-old Oldest Living Blogger and a retired electrician who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It keeps the old head working a little bit so you’re not just sitting there gawking at TV.”

Google: What Lurks In It’s Soul?

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George Dyson:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: “When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?”

Sony’s Evil DRM: Lawyers Run Amok

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EFF:

Now compare that baseline with the world according to the Sony-BMG EULA, which applies to any digital copies you make of the music on the CD:

  1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.
  2. You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”
  3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.
  4. You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates
  5. Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.
  6. The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.
  7. If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.
  8. You have no right to transfer the music on your computer, even along with the original CD.
  9. Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.

Amazing… Bruce Schneier has more.

Blogs Saving Arts Journalism

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Terry Teachout:

The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it.

Posted in Art.

Madison’s Martens on the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit

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Wall Street Journal:

Bill and Barbara Marten of Madison, Wisc., buy medications from Canada and New Zealand to save money. Bill, 68, and Barbara, 69, are skeptical a Medicare drug plan can beat what they’re paying now for their prescription drugs.
Bill Marten has marked his calendar. This Saturday, he plans to take another stab at the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Finder.