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December 16, 2008
In the wake of yesterday’s repudiatathon of the WSJ.com’s misleading, inaccurate, biased, and wrong article on Net neutrality, the NY Times weighs in with a crisp, clear, and right-headed editorial.
December 15, 2008
We now have the second iconic moment of the Bush presidency. This is how he’ll be remembered, if only because shoes seem to be so psychologically powerful: Khrushchev is remembered in this country for pounding his shoe on the UN’s lectern, and Adlai Stevenson is remembered for the hole in his shoe.
(NOTES: The first iconic moment was Bush speaking under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. And this post’s title is a Firesign Theater quote.)
Stephen Schultze as usual has a helpful post on the WSJ’s misreporting of Google’s supposed violation of the Net neutrality principle that Google has long supported. Steve points to Google’s Rick Whitt’s reply and to an aggregation of posts that makes it clear that this issue is being spun — and rather clumsily — by the WSJ into something it isn’t.
David Isenberg provides excellent, fightin’ analysis, including the following:
In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.
cThe concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.
Since the edge caching Google is proposing is about access, not delivery, there’s no problem.
Net neutrality is not about everyone having equal access to the Net. Net neutrality is not about Google (or Microsoft or WSJ.com) being able to pay for fatter pipes, faster servers, or fancy-pants caching equipment that keeps the most-requested pages in memory and ready to go. Net neutrality is about not letting the carriers decide whose bits are more important than others once those bits have entered the network. It’s about the carriers not slowing down the Internet telephony bits from competitors or delaying your YouTube bits because the carriers think their “The Nanny” re-run bits are more important.
I do have to stand in admiration of whatever PR person pitched this story to WSJ. Masterfully done!
LATER: Scott Rosenberg on the inadequacy of the WSJ’s response. Harold Feld on what Google is up to. Tim Karr on the entrenchment of Net neutrality. Richard Bennett on why this is non-news (and why Net neutrality is non-neutral, or at least a myth).
Mamamusings points to Twalala, which shows you your Twitter stream on your iPhone (of which I don’t have), but includes what look to be some useful filters. For example, you can “mute” someone who perhaps is twittering some event excessively (= me). You can use Twalala in your Web browser, too.
December 14, 2008
From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words:
An automated spelling checker attached to a word-processing program is one of the curses of our age. In the hands of an inexperienced, over-hasty or ignorant user it readily perpetrates dreadful errors in the name of correctness. One example appeared in a piece in the New York Times in October 2005 about Stephen Colbert’s neologism “truthiness”: throughout it instead referred to “trustiness”, the first suggestion from the paper’s automated checking software. In September 2006 an issue of the Arlington Advocate included the sentence, “Police denitrified the youths and seized the paintball guns.” The writer left the first letter off “identified” and the spelling checker corrected what remained.
In 2000 the second issue of Language Matters, a magazine by the European Commission’s English-language translators, included an article by Elizabeth Muller on the problem with the title Cupertino and After.
Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from “co-operation” (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into “Cupertino”. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, “cooperation” does get automatically changed to “Cupertino”, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and Word’s programmers, the obvious “co-operation” comes second.
Hence “Cupertino effect” for the phenomenon and “Cupertino” for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.
A search through the Web pages of international organisations such as the UN and NATO (and, of course, the EU) finds lots of examples of the canonical form of the error. A 1999 NATO report mentions the “Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe”; an EU paper of 2003 talks of “the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes”; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for “improving the efficiency of international Cupertino”. And so on.
Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in The New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.
It could be worse. Leave out one of the “o”s from the beginning of “co-operation” as well as the hyphen and you might be offered not “Cupertino” but “copulation”. Now that would be an error to write home about. Or perhaps not.
Everyone loves these spellchecker prejudices, but I didn’t know they had a name. (Thanks to my brother Andy for the link.)
December 13, 2008
No, Ethan Zuckerman has not come out against same sex marriage. Rather, the Christian Science Monitor has a perfectly wonderful article by Vijaysree Venkatraman about Ethan’s concern that we spend too much time on line reading that which confirms our views and hanging out with people like us. Nice photo of him as well…
Blown to Bits is an excellent, clear, thoughtful, fair, readable explanation of how the Internet works, the effects it is having on our society, and the effects we may want our society to have on it. And now, six months after publication, it’s available for free download under a Creative Commons license.
Tweetag automatically creates tags for tweets and shows you the tag cloud for any term you’re looking for. At the moment, it only looks at the past 24 hours’ tags, a limitation the Belgian folks behind this hope to remove if they get a little money coming in.
December 12, 2008
Every inspirational moment — well, 40 of them — you will ever need, all wrapped in one maudlin, ridiculous package:
All I can add is: Hang in there, baby
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