Category Archives: things getting worse

still confused by Net Neutrality?

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I am.

At first it seemed that the best case scenario would be to have a government owned digital superhighway … and let competition innovate. And keep prices low.

But can the government do anything efficiently?

If corporations build “the tubes”, shouldn’t they be able to charge what they want for using them?

Certainly. If there was competition.

But most people have 3 choices: phone company or cable company or satellite. Sadly, that’s not competition enough.

If the Internet Service providers (TELUS, Shaw, Verizon, etc.) have their way, your internet service will be about as good as your current TV service.

The worst case scenario is explained in a fun, graphic way on a new website. Click through to see it – TheOpenInter.net

Scary.

(via TechCrunch)

Bill of Rights in Cyberspace

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There are many Bills of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example.

Jeff Jarvis is working on a Bill of Rights for the internet:

I. We have the right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak freely.
III. We have the right to assemble and act.
IV. Information should be public by default, secret by necessity.
V. What is public is a public good.
VI. All bits are created equal.
VII. The internet shall be operated openly.

I think he’s more on the right track than anyone else.

Corporations often try to deny you those rights to maximize their profits. Especially internet service providers.

Politicians try to deny you those rights when corporate lobbyists buy their votes.

Citizens will have to demand their “rights” online, or they’ll be eroded. … Imagine a nation where you must log-in to the internet with a passport, and the only website you can access is the Central Propaganda Department.

Read more – Bill of Rights in Cyberspace, amended

Things are getting worse on the internet right now. I’d like to think it will sort itself out in the end. Eventually people will demand freedom. Politicians will still pocket money from lobbyists, but explain they can only do so much.

job in Nova Scotia $243,000/yr

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Hey Anne,

You should run for the job of chief of the Glooscap First Nation northwest of Halifax.

Tax free, of course.

You’d be replacing this lady.

It’s hard work, though, as that band has 87 people.

… Maybe you’re better off to only run for councilor, a job paying between $210,000 and $260,000.

Isn’t Canada a great country?

on loneliness – Roger Ebert

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I’ve almost never felt “lonely”.

It’s a condition I know nothing about.

Film critic Roger Ebert, a bit of an internet shut-in himself, has read 80,000 comments on his blog. Many, he tells, are from lonely people looking for connection with strangers.

… For days I’ve been reading waves of messages from the lonesome, the shy, the alone, the depressed. Some who live as virtual hermits. Some who have few or no friends. Some who rarely speak with their families. Some who have never dated, or ever had sex. Some who consider it a good day when they never speak to anyone. Some who are sad to be alone. Some who are relieved. Some who can’t do it any other way. …


A meeting of solitudes

He reflects on loneliness in that post, and an earlier one – All the lonely people.

… After all that, Roger’s not sure whether or not the internet actually helps the lonely.

need a passport to get on the internet?

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One day we’ll wish we listened more closely to Cory Doctorow and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, two spokesmen who can explain today why your internet freedom is at risk. And why copyright law is the beginning of the end.

Thought provoking.

One entertaining example of the benefits of free internet: a TED talk -Re-examining the remix

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube (20min).

There’s a war happening right now and most people don’t realize it. Dinosaurs fighting change. … I really hope dinosaurs go extinct.

Governments have a big role to play in deciding internet freedom. Many of the American politicians who supported a free internet lost in the mid-term election. It looks bad in the USA.

In transit at the Beijing airport yesterday I had to swipe my passport to access the internet, same as in Rome earlier this summer. Is that the future of your internet?

average teen – 3,339 texts / month

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An American study …

… more than six texts per waking hour …

… 43% of teenagers now say texting is the #1 reason they get a cell phone.

… Teens are sending 8% more texts than they were this time last year …

… Voice usage has decreased by 14% …

Details via Mashable

d texting texter

PROPOSED Great Bear Rainforest PIPELINE

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I’m all for developing the Oil Sands. But it sounds like this is not the best way to sell it to China.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

… International League of Conservation photographers in the Great Bear Rainforest.

… now threatened by a proposal from Enbridge to bring an oil pipeline from the Tar Sands and supertankers to BC’s wild coast. …

related – The Adventure Blog – Update On Great Bear Rainforest Expedition

… and no religion, too.

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Imagine there’s no country, It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.

It’s depressing to see how much media attention Pastor Terry Jones has gotten. I condemn religious nitwits of all denominations and call for consumers to boycott media trying to cash in on this story.

Here’s a much more important story, a more important man:

… Last week, we celebrated the wedding of my daughter, Pallavi. A brilliant student, she had won scholarships to Oxford University and the London School of Economics. In London, she met Julio, a young man from Spain. The two decided to take up jobs in Beijing, China. Last week, they came over from Beijing to Delhi to get married. The wedding guests included 70 friends from North America, Europe and China.

That may sound totally global, but arguably my elder son Shekhar has gone further. He too won a scholarship to Oxford University, and then taught for a year at a school in Colombo. Next he went to Toronto, Canada, for higher studies. There he met a German girl, Franziska.

They both got jobs with the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, USA. This meant that they constantly travelled on IMF business to disparate countries. Shekhar advised and went on missions to Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Kyrgyzstan and Laos. Franziska went to Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Russia. They interrupted these perambulations to get married in late 2003.

My younger son, Rustam, is only 15. Presumably he will study in Australia, marry a Nigerian girl, and settle in Peru.

Readers might think that my family was born and bred in a jet plane. The truth is more prosaic. Our ancestral home is Kargudi, a humble, obscure village in Tanjore district, Tamil Nadu. My earliest memories of it are as a house with no toilets, running water, or pukka road. …

read more – Times of India – My family and other globalisers

… Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute with a special focus on India and Asia. His research interests include economic change in developing countries, human rights and civil strife, political economy, energy, trade and industry. He is a prolific columnist and TV commentator in India, well-known for a popular weekly column titled “Swaminomics” in the Times of India. …

On the one hand we have incredible globalization, a mixing of religions, cultures and ethnicities. On the other, a few backward isolationists: Mennonites in Canada who have religious objections to all photos (including driver’s licenses) due to the Second Commandment prohibition against Graven images, for example.

I truly hope Mr. Aiyar and his family are the future, not followers of Terry Jones.

Thanks Peter and Warren Long.

P.S.

… We should respect the Mennonites freedom of religion. But they shouldn’t get driver’s licenses.

the science of horoscopes

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Man has been studying the stars since the beginning.

Right?

No wonder we trust horoscopes:

… Researchers at the University of Wales interviewed 34,000 youngsters aged 13-15 last year and found that nearly as many of them believed in horoscopes as believe in God.

In America, over 125 million people say they believe in astrology and at least seven in ten check their horoscope regularly. …

Telegraph

My friend K checks hers every day and has even saves them for me when she found them particularly apt.

Horoscope Art

But horoscopes in newspapers began only in in August 1930 in the Sunday Express:

… just after the birth of Princess Margaret. Editor John Gordon wanted a story on her birth but with a new angle, so Cheiro (then the biggest name in astrology) was asked to do her horoscope. Cheiro was unavailable, so the job went to R H Naylor, one of his assistants. The result was “What the stars foretell for the new princess” (24 August 1930 page 11) …

It took off from there.

Idiots everywhere consult these things now. Yeesh, we deserve extinction.

why does Twitter persist?

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It’s terrible.

Like Facebook with 5% of the feature set.

Yet every company, celebrity and website feels obliged to tweet. (Even me with my 3 blogs.)

Have you heard about the upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network, based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires?

If Hollywood can make an overly dramatic film about the early years of Facebook, why can’t we make an overly dramatic movie about Twitter? Or at least the trailer to that movie! …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

The movie rights for Googled: The End of the World As We Know it (2009) have been acquired.