According to Teletruth.org‘s Bruce Kushnick (from a mailing list):

I just went through the “Biannual Review” materials, WC Docket Number 02-313. I’ve attached below what the Bells’ lobbying group and association, the USTA [U.S. Telecom Association], is asking for the removal of all documentation and accounting requirements, just to name a few items.

I consider this entire process an outrage and the FCC should immediately halt this proceeding and start all over again. Record Shredding should be illegal and not sanctioned by the FCC.

The FCC is in violation of every conceivable part of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (as amended). It has gotten only 17 comments and reply comments (6 from the same person) for one of the most important discussions — making sure that the Bell companies keep accurate accounting books.

There was no effort on the part of the FCC to make sure that small businesses were included in these discussions, a condition of the Reg. Flex Act.

Teletruth recently conducted a campaign in New Jersey, with phonebill auditing firm LTC Consulting, to collect phonebills. We discovered that 50% of all phonebills had mistakes — mistakes that cost the customer money and which they can file for a refund. — and it can be thousands of dollars.

I can’t find information about this at the FCC site, but Kushnick is respected by people I respect.

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Make sure you vote today, assuming, of course that you are a US citizen, legally registered to vote, and in basic agreement with me.

If you do not agree with me, then please do vote anyway. But keep in mind that if you push the chad all the way through, you have destroyed your ballot. So you just want to lightly “dimple” the ballot with your choices, as per this official instruction sheet from the US Dept. of Elections:

(But seriously, if you are a Massachusetts resident and you want to register your disagreement with Senator Kerry’s spineless vote in favor of the Let W Declare War When His Popularity Flags Act, you can write in Randall Forsberg. But you have to do it as follows to have it count as anything other than a vote for “other”: “RANDALL FORSBERG, 950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.”)

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Gen Kanai has a fascinating blog entry asking what the advent of game console telephony will mean. Both Xbox and Sony are adding the ability to talk with other online gamers via headsets:

The obvious thought here is that Microsoft and Sony will soon both have international IP telephony networks built around their gaming consoles.

What would it take to publish a “game” CD for these boxes that turn them into free IP phones?

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Slate’s daily press round-up notes:

The Los Angeles Times notices a new study that found that people with severe back pain felt three-times worse when their spouses were in the room and tried to soothe them. It’s not that the sufferers hated their loved ones, it’s that—as many people who seen a small child trip have suspected—humans feel more pain when others take notice. Or, as one researcher put it, “The solicitous spouse has become a cue for a more intense pain experience.”

No. The solicitous spouse has become a cue for a more intense sympathy experience.

I mean, what else is the point of pain?

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Ned Batchelder, who turns out to be a fellow Brooklinian (Brookliner? Brooklinite? Brooklinista?), has an eclectic young blog that seems to care about programming, usability, and language as an object. By “language as object” I mean thinking about it as shapes (Halley’s Alphabetical Order (or Halphabetical Order, if you prefer)), collections of letters (pangrams) and accidental meanings (puns). And he quotes Quentin Tarrantino from a 9/23 New Yorker article:

“They don’t have anything on you, but it’s time in the cycle to take you down. So they kill you with verbs and adjectives. ‘He lumbered into the room.’ ‘He hesitated over the shrimp.’ ‘Gesticulating wildly, the motormouth Tarantino…’ Hey, fuck you, you wanna-be novelist!”

That’s a couple of days after Ned’s written “Want to quickly see how a Unicode string comes out in UTF-8?” Like I said: eclectic.

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Charlie Green has found a site for college teachers who feel oppressed. In particular, he points to an interview about the (non-)importance of hypertext. It’s an “edgy” (= obnoxious) piece, typical of academic squabbles except without the usual pretense of civility. The intro says:

Noted author John Seagrave has been vilified for his criticism of yet another academic literary fad, this time something called “hypertext.” The most vicious reaction came recently from Professor Dion Gigo of the MIT Computer and Other Languages Department; Dr. Gigo is one of the nation’s foremost proponents of hypertext. Seagrave responds here to Gigo’s allegations.

Here’s a taste of the tone:

Rojas: Why was Gigo so angry?

Seagrave: Newly minted PhD.

Rojas: The importance of being important.

Seagrave: Yes. She’s thirty years old and has spent all but five or so of those thirty working hard for parents or surrogate parents in a meritocracy… now she actually has to do something with her life that may run the risk of someone telling her she’s less than brilliant.

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Dan Gillmor has a terrific column today on what it’ll take to get broadband going in this country. And he even has some words of encouragement for the FCC.

What would we lose by calling the telecom giants’ bluff? Maybe a couple of years of rapid broadband deployment, though what they’re deploying now — DSL and cable modem connections — runs at such a slow speed that it can only be called broadband if you stretch the definition. In South Korea and other places where deployment is going strong, speeds are much faster and prices much lower…

Another wild card has appeared, and it’s the most exciting of all, because we might be able to give the monopolists what they’re demanding and still have genuine competition.

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Halley wonders why “m” comes before “n” in the alphabet since “m” clearly builds on “n.”

What an odd thought.

Might as well go all the way. Here’s what seems to me to be a more rational alphabetical order, following Halley’s Sequential Principle.

Upper case:

Lower case:

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From Mark Dionne comes this article from the Independent in the UK:

Albanian and Russian observers sent to monitor American elections

A high-level delegation of European and North American election observers – including members from Russia and Albania – arrived yesterday for a week-long mission to watch Florida’s mid-term elections, which take place on Tuesday.

Let us hope that our comrades to the east can help us live up to their ideals of democracy.

On the other hand, given that Florida continues to improperly exclude tens of thousands of voters, mainly African-Americans, because they’ve been misidentified as former felons, the chances of the election being fair are nil to begin with.

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An incident on Sunday. A US response on Sunday night. A war on Monday. An election on Tuesday.

Just a thought on Saturday.

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