lovehatethings

Alright, here's the deal. For those people who don't know or care much about net neutrality here are some basic facts and analogies you can use to understand it or explain it to your friends. And while I know that many of you do know this stuff, and will find this interpretation minimalistic at best, just remember: Celebrity Psychic Puppet Babies

The Basics

Net Neutrality says that data is data... I know, it sounds like an Aristotelian irreducable primary, but apparently Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mobility providers don't seem to agree. Even if I asked the average 18 month old to put a picture of a cookie beside a picture of a like cookie, they could do it. Conclusion One: CEOs at ISPs are younger than 18 months old, violating innumerable child labor laws and human rights.

When your PC's data is EVIL

When you pay for your internet connection, you are allowed to view hundreds of thousands of webpages every month and your internet service provider allows you download on your merry way. If, however, your ISP detects that you are using peer-to-peer technologies (Limewire, Bit Torrent, etc.) they will throttle your throughput without even knowing what you're downloading. Much like arresting you for travelling with an old Adidas gym bag because drug dealers often use old Adidas gym bags, ISPs are punishing you for your choice of delivery device instead of what's inside. Conclusion Two: ISP Execs are psychic because they know you must be breaking the law. Forget about the copyrighted text you could be reprinting in MS-Word or the html code you could be cutting and pasting into your new website via Notepad.

Thank you Psychic Babies may I have another?

When you pay for a data package on your cellphone or like mobile device, you would expect that all data would be included for the 20 bucks or so that you might be forking over. You would be wrong. Even though SMS/text messages are just data, you are asked and willing to pay for the extra service. In fact, the overcharge of 15 cents to send and 15 cents to receive a 160 byte text message equates to an obscene overcharge. How obscene? I will borrow the math from the fine folks at rantblogger.com.

"Let’s assume that all text messages sent in the U.S. are exactly the maximum size allowed, 160 characters. That translates to 160 bytes of storage space per message. One terabyte is equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and a terabyte costs $100 to store. Therefore, the cost of storing and transmitting one text message is approximately $0.00000001. If carriers charge $.20 per text message, that means the markup is almost 20,000,000%!"

Now, you may say that the transmission of the text message is where the real cost is buried, but according to University of Waterloo professor Srinivasan Keshav, "it doesn't cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

I'll try and reduce this math down to a manageable work-a-day example. Imagine you pay a dollar for a Happy Birthday sign at your local Dollar Store. You're more than happy that the sign which probably was made for two cents in labor and five cents in packaging, with twenty cents in shipping and a wholesaler markup of twenty-five cents is only costing you a buck. Can you imagine feeling grateful if you walked into the Two Hundred Thousand Dollar Store and bought the same sign? Guess what? If you and a friend are paying fifteen cents out and in, you just bought a $200,000 sign and loved doing it. Conclusion Three: You would think that this would make the Psychic Babies evil, but instead it just makes them like celebrities. A Hollywood A-lister can ask anyone to do anything for them and get away with it.

The Puppet Masters

But you can't have a Celebrity Psychic Baby without a scheming manager. If you're wondering how the government allows all of this to happen, it's due to The Puppet Masters who ply politicians with megabucks. If I represent a record label or movie studio that knows some people are pirating songs and movies, and using peer-to-peer software to do it, I want to convince ISPs to punish people for using the software with a blanket practice instead of actually doing the work and confirming who the pirates are. If I, as the head of a multi-national mobile technology concern, can convince government regulators like the FCC and CRTC to look the other way as I gouge customers for ridiculous amounts, why wouldn't I - especially when people are lining up to pay? 

The Not-So-Basics

So, to sum up, the self-evident equation A = A or data = data is what the advocates of net neutrality are proposing. In such a world, your bandwidth would be wide open no matter what you were using it for, your text messages would all be included in existing data plans, and the Ones and Zeroes that make up the data streams would not be discriminated against because their names were P2P or SMS. If you would be outraged that you could only go half the speed in your minivan because all minivans can hold more illegal goods when used in a criminal enterprises, you should be supporting net neutrality initiatives. If you think that a bank giving you a penny change for a $1000 bill is somewhat unfair, you could text all your friends about it, but instead you should support net neutrality. If you believe data = data, buy into the logic by taking action.

If you remember only one thing from this deconstruction of net neutrality, make it this: Celebrity Psychic Puppet Babies are costing you money and controlling your internet and mobile phone experiences. Fight the Celebrity Psychic Puppet Babies. So say we all.

oooooh... pretty colors... reminds me of an exercise I had students do once to stop at a busy commercial intersection and count the logos. Looks like the source is somewhere here.

When I read scary news stories, I often shudder, I sometimes twitter, I may even email a link or two. It has been a rare occurance that I have found myself blogging about a story. I suppose that when something strikes me as so horrific that it borders on the absurd, especially when the details therein expose the savagery of humanity, I feel thankful of where I live and the ability to not fear.

So what inspired this blog entry? The incredulous "wow" rating. The following quotations from a single story out of Malaysia:

"Police detainee A. Kugan was beaten to death over a six-day period which also saw him being "branded" 20 times." - wow.

"He died of kidney failure caused by muscle injury." - wow.

"The report also revealed intensive haemorrhage in several internal organs including the gall bladder, pancreas, adrenal glands and inside his skull." - wow.

"The report stated that Kugan's death was because of rhabdomyolysis, the rapid breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue caused by injury. The destruction of muscles lead to the release of the breakdown products such as myoglobin, which may cause acute kidney failure." - wow.

"the report also showed that Kugan's stomach was empty at the time of his death 'probably due to the fact that he was starved during six days of interrogation.'" - wow.

All of these facts come out under a headline that reads: "Beaten, branded in police custody" ...as though the six day duration ending in death wasn't important enough to make the headline. It boggles the mind and leaves me with my common syllable of incredulity: wow.

In an effort to cover up the beating, I suppose the doctor doing the autopsy must have been on the take as "the first post-mortem only examined the body from the chest up." - wow.

The follow-up autopsy, which I'm guessing is a common practice in a place where like doctors must treat broken ankles by trimming a patient's hair, revealed "the second, which examined the entire body, found 42 other marks, burns and contusions from the sole of his feet right up to his head. The pathologist declared, based on the post-mortem, that Kugan was beaten so badly that his tissues broke down and his kidneys failed." - wow.

Oh, by the way, the police were interrogating the man. Apparently they thought he must have known a shitload of information that they couldn't have got out of him after 72 or 96 hours of starvation and beatings.

This story gets 8 wows out of 5 on a rating system that makes more sense than the Malaysian police.

Okay... first off, if anyone outside of Canada ever thought they saw a cheap game show, they were never in the Great White North during the 1970's. Grand prizes included toaster ovens, dinner for twos, and the cash sometimes almost went to triple digits. Included below are some clips from some of the cheesiest games ever played on television.
 
The Premier Episode of the Mad Dash

 
Check out Alex Trebek's 'fro in Pitfall (admittedly this show had a budget)

 
Definition actually lasted until the 80s, but still brings the cheese

 
Pay Cards was produced in Canada and syndicated to the US... so you know it was good!

Concerning an explanation of The Garnish Continuum, deriving meaning from the blinking lights around you every day, and using Twitter as an evolutionary tool.

I remember, as a child, watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind and being in partial disbelief that any intelligent alien species could expect humans to derive message from the synthesized light show echoed by the mothership. (See video clip below if you have no idea what I'm talking about.) I'm starting to think that, alone at my desk, the concept of the blinking light has become a de facto medium that we derive a whole bunch of message from even though we do not realize it.

My television, cable box, and surround sound system all have a steady red light on to indicate they're off (a bit paradoxical don't you think?) My cable modem has alternating flashing and steady green and orange lights to indicate throughput and connection, and even in the dark without seeing or remembering the faint, small abbreviations underneath each light, I can usually determine the health of the connection. My wifi router has a more cosmic icon set of cerullean blue symbols of which I recognize the unclosed circle and vertical line indicating power and the radiating wifi waves, but there are several I have no clue about except that I think I would be able to tell if and when something bad was happening.

My monitor has a steady green and my mouse a steady red. The USB hub and microphone mixer are congruous in a solitary steady blue indicator. My USB microphone has a small rectangular steady red peering into my soul like the HAL9000 on a vision quest. The cordless phone a steady red. The PC, as a small solar system snapshot, of a large blue circle overtop the flashing smaller red circle which indicated hard drive workload.

All of this light, all of these icons, all of this meaning create a sort of inverse to Plato's cave analogy. If this room was bathed in ambient light the indicators would become less noticeable and lose some of their meaning. Instead, the darkness has focused the knowledge and the message.

I somehow have the urge to craft a model of a mountain from my mashed potatoes.

Get your pop culture retro fix on with the Cap'n, the Count, Frankenberry and Mr.T.
 




 
And as a special bonus a rare episode of the Sugar Bear cartoon before cereals were afraid to put "sugar" in their names.
 

The greatest thing about the advancements in web technology are that at least, for the time being, they continue. Don't get me wrong, I understand the PC is a tool that will eventually be replaced and the net, as we know it, will become radically different. Just as we went from Grammaphone to turntable to reel-to-reel to 8 track to cassette to CD to download, the PC does have a shelf life as does the this tool we call the web. But, for the time being, the learning curve is immense and expanding.

Perhaps the greatest advantages that I've found lately, however, are not necessarily discovering new websites or technologies, but new ways to use existing ones. Through integration, aggregation, and applications, web programmers are opening up vast new frontiers in web usage and viability.

As an example, I think I'm starting to "get" Twitter. And it's not that I didn't understand the technology or the concept or even the appeal that the platform had to some people. I'd figured there was a way to use the tool properly that I just hadn't figured out (and didn't even necessarily care to take the time understand). In the same way that many non-musicians listen to a jazz improv and find it confusing or self-indulgent noodling. There may even be some who love music and understand the appeal without necessarily it liking themselves. That's kind of where I felt with Twitter.

I was aware of Twitter a long time before I signed up and even longer before I really started exploring it. Going to my page at twitter.com just seemed stale to me. It seemed, for the longest time, like a weak pretender to a sole aspect of Facebook that was cool enough but not compelling. And I followed the requisite Twitterati to see them lifecasting (which I abhor) and tweeting pearls of wisdom to the adoring masses who sat around all day praying for the @reply. But, as anything on the web, one way communication isn't going to cut it and absolutely no one (I mean zilch) was following me.

I also knew that the easiest way to get followers was to ramdomly follow 10,000 people in the hopes that 1,000 follow you back. I've never been like that on MySpace or Facebook, so I certainly wasn't going to do that on Twitter. I much prefer to pursue an organic growth of followers and, at the time of writing this, I am following 117 people and have 114 followers. Of those followers I assume a certain percentage of spammers and dead profiles. I'm thinking that somewhere around the 100 mark is the stage one critical mass it took for me to find a balance between being just updates from Twitterati and more meaningful content from people that I have formed some sort of relationship with, even if it's just online. I suppose I could have reached higher numbers quicker, but I don't know that I would have cared about what anyone was saying at that point and, as such, may have lost interest altogether.

In addition to reaching this first step of discovering the benefits and relative potential of Twitter in capture my interest in more than an obligatory refresh or two every hour to see how many dozen tweets Scoble had up, the evolution of the API and its associated tools became what truly galvanized this new experience. I found Tweetdeck and, in doing so, gained a whole new appreciation from Twitter by simply being able to visualize the workings and the interactions. I started up search columns devoted to specific hastags and events. I was starting to add followers based on shared interests or, at the very least, evidence of an ability to contribute to something I cared about instead of randomly throwing darts at a print out of the fail whale.

And in learning this first step where I'm getting more out of Twitter than I thought possible, perhaps the most important thing I've learned about this, and other microblogging platforms, is that the API rules the roost. The explosive evolution of snippet commentary has all of its value in aggregation, and in aggregation the value is in the content, and in its content the value is in the users. I know enough to know that a thousand or ten thousand random follows on Twitter will not get me any of the value that 100 thoughtfully chosen contacts will.

Be it Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, or any social network, you and your content are indistinguishable. Just as when you are not in the room, all that remains is the story of you, social networks are ALL story. The stories are told through podcasts, blog posts, references, subreferences, suggestions, advice, maxims, insights, and links. The snippets are you. How many close friends do you have in real life? How many regular friends? The interaction with one friend over one drink on one night of the week will give you more content and sources for relevant aggregation than a thousand random snippets.

I think I've started to "get" Twitter, but, even better, my hope is that I haven't even started to "really get it".

Those of you in the US probably haven't been following the #belltwit hashtag on Twitter to know that Bell Mobility in Canada has been giving us an example of how NOT to market to a web-savvy generation.
 
After Twitter removing SMS updates in Canada a few months back (to great dismay) Bell scooped up the monopoly on SMS tweets only to announce that there would be a 15 cent in and out charge ON TOP of existing text plans as tweets were considered "premium".
 
That was modified 18 hours ago to only include outgoing (which is still ridiculous). Just earlier this evening the issue was finally resolved in Bell "cutting a deal" with Twitter to use its API in a way that would cost any additional amount to those already on text message plans.
 
Please check out smsless.com to find the real disturbing stats on the price gouging that occurs with SMS/text messaging and join "Text Nothing Day" on the 15th of each month.