Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Penny Arcade! - Fine Distinctions
Seems the Penny Arcade crew is talking up Steven Brust's Jhereg. I found the entire series to be quite enjoyable, and worth an occasional reread.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Backs to the Future
It looks like the trolls of Terry Pratchett's Discworld have a human counterpart with respect to their spatial metaphor for time.

Monday, June 12, 2006

"Do the needful?!" I get countless emails from people whining about what problems they are encountering, ended with the vacuous, nonsensical, phrase, "Please do the needful." If you are going to ask me to do your job for you, at least do it politely in grammatical, well-formed English.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Having read a bit more about the bill in question, I would have to agree that the debate is kind of silly. Of course, this silliness got started by SBC declaring that Google was making money off SBC's back. Cable competition is good. SBC charging content providers for higher QoS is regressive.
» Net neutrality extremism versus common sense economics | George Ou | ZDNet.com
Oy, and this is more of the same. Here's the basic thing that both these guys are missing: without net neutrality, the free (as in both beer and speech) internet disappears. Right now I pay a flat fee for all the content and interaction I can eat. If I have to pay for content, I go somewhere else where it's free. The Markey Ammendment might be a bit extreme. I think the bandwidth providers should have the ability provide QoS according to packet type. But as soon as you allow them to restrict by content provider, poof!, the internet as we have known it disappears, and we go back to the world of AOL, Compuserve, and the BBS's, and we go back to a homogeneous, lowest-common-denominator media stream, instead of an interactive, empowering communications medium.
MercuryNews.com | 06/09/2006 | Network neutrality? Welcome to the stupid Internet
Welcome to the world of oversimplification. The argument about net neutrality hasn't been about type of content, but whose content. If Yeehaw!'s search results are just OK, but you can get them in one third the time of GaGa's results, most people will go to Yeehaw! for their search. The worst case scenario here is that I will have to choose my ISP based on what content I want, after the companies that can't or won't submit to the robber barons' tolls disappear.