Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Yeah they’re going to be sending angry schoolmarms right into your home office to rap you across the knuckles with heavy wooden rulers. Well, virtually anyway:
Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.
“If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use,” according to the company’s updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.
Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.
Not to worry, this is the United States. Of course there’s still a right way and a wrong way to do this. The right way would be to do what cell phone companies do, which is to offer plans selected by the customer, to project their usage. If you want to sign up and you think you’ll be using more than 250 GB, you pick a different plan and pay extra.
And, being this is the United States, and Comcast made the wrong decision, the competition of the marketplace will fix this fine and dandy. We don’t need me or one of my friends to take over this place and make these companies do things the right way. We believe in freedom of the customer to wear the Internet out, as long as he hits himself in the billfold and nobody else; and we believe in the freedom of companies to make boneheaded decisions about how to treat their customers, and succeed or fail by those boneheaded decisions. Freedom all around, that’s our motto!
Or is it.
As Web usage has rocketed, driven by the popularity of watching online video, photo-sharing and music downloading services, cable and phone companies have been considering various techniques to limit or manage heavy usage.
But Comcast has come under fire from a variety of sources for its network management techniques. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission investigated complaints by consumer groups that it was blocking peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent, and earlier this month ordered Comcast to modify its network management.
Comcast has said that by the end of the year it will change its network management practices to ensure all Web traffic is treated essentially the same, but has also been exploring other ways to prevent degradation of its Internet service delivery. [emphasis mine]
Hey Founding Fathers! I’m a time traveler from 2008! In my time we’ve modified this government you’re putting together now, into a predatory leviathan that gives orders to private entities about how to sell commodities to each other, like molasses, leggings, silk, tobacco and sugarbeets.
What would they say?
Ah well, being a bunch of clueless old dead white guys & all, they wouldn’t understand the nuances of our nation’s history, most notably the Red Lion v. FCC ruling from the Supreme Court back in 1966.
Before 1927, the allocation of frequencies was left entirely to the private sector, and the result was chaos. It quickly became apparent that broadcast frequencies constituted a scarce resource whose use could be regulated and rationalized only by the Government. Without government control, the medium would be of little use because of the cacaphony of competing voices, none of which could be clearly and predictably heard. Consequently, the Federal Radio Commission was established to allocate frequencies among competing applicants in a manner responsive to the public “convenience, interest, or necessity.”
As is the case with a lot of the SCOTUS rulings from the 1960’s, generations later we’re only now beginning to appreciate the full scope of damage done by them. Radio is a “scarce resource” (the phrase is used extensively throughout Red Lion); therefore, some centralized office is needed to assign the frequencies and prevent this “cacaphony”; the Federal Government’s authority is conferred entirely on the basis of that logistical need for coordination.
From that we had the Fairness Doctrine. You own a radio station, you interview Al Franken for half an hour, maybe I can petition the FCC to force you to let me come on for thirty minutes and offer a rebuttal. And maybe the FCC will say yes. You’ll stammer “B-b-but I was just interviewing him about the weather in Minnesota and how things are going in general” and maybe the apparatchicks will say — We don’t care, Mr. Franken is a political figure, therefore you put out political content.
The First Amendment protects you from that kind of meddling if, for example, you splashed a transcript of your interview of Al Franken on a billboard by the side of the freeway. Not a scarce resource, you see. But there are only so many radio channels to be parceled out; this is what separates the radio from the billboard and, for that matter, from leggings and sugarbeets.
Nation of veal calves. We’re becoming a nation of veal calves. The story of Comcast’s bad policy is a story of an encroaching nanny state, and quite a frightening one at that — for the cure is just as bad as the disease. Both involve “oversight” from some supposedly wise and beneficent authority, which in turn is qualified to be neither wise nor beneficent. And, we’ve neglected to go through that obligatory hoop-jumping by which the Internet is supposed to be somehow categorized as a “scarce resource” subject to regulation, more like radio and less like sugarbeets. We didn’t even ponder the question. This is the most alarming thing of all; a commodity is subject to possible depletion, and the debate’s over. Right away, we’re putting some wise, all-knowing demigod into some capacity in which he can tell others when to jump, how high, and when to come back down again. And after we’ve done that, we won’t even care about what his name is. Just another nameless, faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat with power over life and death.
And so I know what the Founding Fathers would say.
The same thing they’ve said, in my dreams, every time I’ve traveled back to tell ’em what’s going on.
“Uh, two thousand eight minus seventeen seventy-six equals two hundred thirty-two…gee…well, that kind of sucks.”
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