where's my frikin' lazur?

Just for the HSV crowd...

When i read this article, I thought to myself... "I guess the engineering students got tired of making stills in the dorms."

Peace on earth and goodwill towards men...

I stole this from Father Dan:

In Jerusalem, a female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, each day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was! She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, she approached him for an interview.

"I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?"

"For about 60 years."

"60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"

"I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims.

"I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship."

"How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?"

"Like I'm talking to a fuckin' wall."

All those Olympic sports? yeah, they're not...

I thought this would be a good time to go over my argument for why the Olympics are bullshit. Why now? Because I have studying to do, of course...

First of all, what is a sport? I've got what I feel is a pretty good definition, and if you disagree with me, while I totally respect your right to be a dumbass, you're still a dumbass. But going to the books, dictionary.com has this to say about it:

sport: n. an active diversion requiring physical exertion and competition.

I go further than this, but the physical exertion and competition parts are important components.

The first rule of determining whether something is a sport is whether a "judge" is involved. Stated more succinctly, there must be a clear method of determining a
winner and at least one loser by an objective set of goals. This anti-requirement for a judge is distinguished from that of a referee in that a referee is merely an interpreter of the rules, and whether they have been followed. A judge, on the other hand, is an individual charged with evaluating a performance and scoring it. You know where else they use judges? Beauty pageants. Art contests. Chili cookoffs. None of which anyone would argue are sports. There's a reason for that--because if your performance is subjective, its not a sport.

I'm not saying its not difficult. God knows I couldn't squeeze my ass into a pair of speedos and jump in the water with a bunch of synchronized swimmers (and not just because I'd be afraid of popping a boner around all the chicks) nor could I even pretend to be in the kind of shape that floor gymnasts have to be. But just because its hard, doesn't make it a sport.

The next qualification is that it has to be human-powered. You can use external apparati like a bike, but any work done must be done by humans. Guess what isn't human powered? Nascar racers. Horse races, too, for that matter. As much as it pains me to admit a Frenchman in bicycle pants is closer to being a sportsman than [insert racecar driver here], he is.

Next rule: all participants involved have to be able to compete in another competition (tragic ends and freak accidents notwithstanding). Everybody. Including deer, quail, squirrels, bass, catfish, and whatever the fuck else people hunt. Again, it may take skill and cunning, but that alone doesn't make a sport. [note: i'm willing to make an exception for those hot chicks Bobo says catch catfish with their bare hands from stumps, assuming the fish are released after being caught.]

Last requirement: it has to be ACTIVE, requiring physical exertion. My offhand way of stating this one is that if you can compete professionally while drunk, its not a sport. Bowling, as much as i enjoy it, is not a sport.

So who's disqualified here? A short list:

• NASCAR
• synchronized swimming
• most gymnastics
• the luge, ski jumping, and most downhill ski events (powered by gravity, not humans)
  
• hunting
• bowling
• paper football
• skateboarding
  
• chess
• darts and pool

"Real" sports, on the other hand, include:

• baseball (its a stupid fucking sport, but a sport nonetheless)
• football
• soccer
• cycling
• cross-country racing
• orienteering
• anything else that fits into my rules.

I hope this clears up all the confusion over why the Olympics suck.

Quote for the day

"The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but
if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head."
- Aristide
Briand

Interesting thought. Guess that just confirms everything I ever believed about the College Republicans....

18 fallacious arguments for god

Interesting article about an atheist addressing a theological class. His spiel boils down to 18 stupid reasons to believe in god; i don't agree with all of them the way he states it, but its still food for thought.

The onslaught begins...

The Republicans certainly haven't wasted any time--not even a month after being sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito is now sitting on a Supreme Court that has agreed to hear a case involving the federal ban on late-term abortions. In another story,
South Dakota's lege just passed a sweeping ban on abortions
within the state, essentially outlawing any abortion not immediately required to save the mother's life--note the terminology there. "Save a mother's life"--not just her health. In other words, if the pregnancy won't kill you, you're having a baby--it doesn't even matter if you were raped or molested by a relative.

The magnitude of these cases is enormous. In the first case, I fully expect the court to overturn the federal law--but not for the reasons you would expect, i.e., a respect for a woman's right to privacy and to make her own medical conditions. No, this one will be overturned because Roberts and Alito are both federalists, and a federal ban on abortion procedures is a violation of states' rights. In a way, I agree with the emphasis on states' rights, but I believe that would be a bad decision because this is a question of the civil rights of an individual and their right to privacy, and how far into that the state should be allowed to intrude.

This decision merely sets the stage for the battle that is about to ensue over the South Dakota law. This law is pretty blatantly in violation of constitutional case law and, i believe, in violation of the Constitution proper. The only reason for a state legislature to pass something like this is because of the conservative bent of the newly appointed justices. Roberts seems to have a certain grudging respect for precedent, regardless of his disagreement with the original decision, but Alito will almost certainly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, should this law come across his desk.

What's interesting to me is the wording of this law:

"The Legislature accepts and concurs with the conclusion of the South Dakota 6 Task Force to Study Abortion, based upon written materials, scientific studies, and testimony of witnesses presented to the task force, that life begins at the time of conception, a conclusion confirmed by scientific advances since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, including the fact that each human being is totally unique immediately at fertilization. Moreover, the Legislature finds, based upon the conclusions of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, and in recognition of the technological advances and medical experience and body of knowledge about abortions produced and made available since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, that to fully protect the rights, interests, and health of the pregnant mother, the rights, interest, and life of her unborn child, and the mother's fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child, abortions in South Dakota should be prohibited." [emphasis added]

Firstly, it makes the bold statement that "life begins at conception"--a belief I'm sure many in the anti-abortion crowd espouse, but ultimately unsupportable without resorting to religious rhetoric. Then there's the brilliant observation that each human being is totally unique at conception. If genetic uniqueness is the only requirement here for "life" beginning at conception, then every sexually reproducing organism on the planet is also a "life" that should be protected. And I'd love to know exactly what "scientific evidence" they have that life starts at conception.

Then there's the lines dealing with the mother's relationship to her child--if ever there was a clear indication that the South Dakota legislature is interested less in protecting the rights of their constituents and more in forcing the so-called American Dream on everyone, that's it. What gives them the right to protect ANY relationship?

The question isn't "when does life begin?" but "when does human life begin?" And there's nothing "human" about a developing embryo until at least the second trimester, and even that's arguable. The strategy here is clear, however. The goal of this law is not just to ban abortions but to assign the full status of a citizen to a collection of developing cells.

There's an important biological question to consider: is the life even viable? As many as 80% of micarriages are due to genetic abnormalities that are incompatible with life, so we're talking about assigning rights to entities which not only aren't clearly human, they're not even clearly ever GOING to be human life.

The next interesting portion of the law is this gem:

"Nothing in this Act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty."

So now its all the fault of the Big Bad Gyno. I don't really have strong feelings about this particular portion, since i'm fundamentally opposed to the bill in its entirety, but I did think it was interesting logic, since these laws usually do as much to penalize the mother as the doctor.

This is one of the few campaign promises Bush has actually made good on--appointing USSC justices that will support his and his cronies' outright assault on women's rights in this country. What kills me here is that in poll after poll, well over 60% of Americans support legal, available abortion in some form or under most circumstances. The lawmakers involved in these laws are clearly not acting in the interests of the public desires here, despite their rhetoric to the contrary.

Berkeley lectures as podcasts

One has to wonder how many more years traditional brick-and-mortar universities are going to be the rule rather than the exception. I've never been a fan of for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix or DeVry. The pursuit of knowledge is the chief purpose of a university; if you taint that with the necessity of running a profitable business, the priorities get muddled, and administrators start making compromises--first with the number of instructors, then with the quality of instructors, resources, numbers of students, et cetera ad infinitum.

But the latest trend seems to be a move towards highly competitive, quality schools like Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford making recorded lectures and other materials available for free--an altruistic gesture, to be sure, and certainly one appreciated by myself and many others, but also one that portends greater trends in the coming years.

Right now these materials are free, and in the cases linked above, likely to remain so. I'm betting that over the next few years, we'll see many other universities following suit, but restricting access to the materials. Some will probably be made publicly available, especially from public universities, but I imagine most will be accessible through the kind of portal most schools already have for their students. In combination with existing online courses, this may well change the nature (and please god, the COST) of attending higher education. Making it through an entire semester while attending a minimum of classes is already something of a rite of passage for many freshmen; if lectures were made available online, it could easily become the rule.

Keep in mind of course that many schools already offer online courses that never require a student to see the inside of a classroom--professors offer office hours and answer questions via email. Students beginning school today are almost guaranteed to take at least one or two classes this way. The greatest advantage of these classes is also its greatest weakness. By taking students out of the classroom, they often flounder while trying to grasp the course material without benefit of a guide, and while their professors may make themselves available, students often cannot come to a professor's office because of work or other obligations. Recorded lectures may well bridge that divide, giving students the guided tour of course material, but on their own time.

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Best blonde joke ever

It took me a little while to get it, but its pretty funny. here's the link.

Seriously, George...

Hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted money on an unwinnable war. Laws that take away the civil rights of millions of Americans. Tax cuts that, among other things, subsidize the cost of a new Hummer to the tune of 25k. Dramatic cuts in funding for higher education loans. A brand new entitlement and blatant giveaway to pharmaceutical companies under the guise of a Medicare prescription drug benefit. A major expansion of government through the creation of the Homeland Security Department. Major no-bid contracts awarded to political cronies to rebuild Iraq and New Orleans. Cuts in research grants in renewable energy, and elimination of funding for wetlands restoration. Law that made it nearly impossible for a family to declare bankruptcy while not requiring any sort of reform of lending practices. Cancelled a 2004 deadline for automakers to develop high mileage cars.

All those laws to choose from, and you pick this to be your first veto?

Truth is stranger than fiction...

Or is it life imitating art?

Noah's publisher...

(courtesey Pharyngula)

Thank you, Captain Obvious...

Bin Ladin vows "Nyahhh, You'll never take me alive, coppers!"



Did somebody forget to tell him that taking him alive was never really part of the plan?

Things That Chap My Ass #42: Self-checkout lines

Today what’s chapping my ass is those asinine self-checkout lines popping up left and right in stores all over the place. What these stores are doing are replacing several checkers with these checkouts and a “supervisor”, in what can only be a concerted effort to ruin my day.

It never fails: someone will take a look at the seemingly interminable lines formed up behind the traditional checkouts and compare it to the line of zero people at the self-checkout and quickly run to that one before someone else gets there first. Keep in mind, these fuckers are the same cretins who were never able to program their VCR’s, and yet they still feel completely capable of handling a grocery-store scanner, touchscreen, coupons, ATM, and screaming brat in their buggy all at once. Meanwhile, because of my zero-tolerance policy towards things that piss me off, I get into the normal checkout line behind the grandmother with two buggies of groceries for her fourteen grandchildren (who are all present and engaged in what can only be called an all-out assault against the candy aisle), a herd of water buffalo talking on their cell phones and counting their food stamps, and the hot chick in a business suit who I’m certain is a complete Amazon in the bedroom. 20 minutes later, I’m walking out the door with my groceries and a fake phone number while the Jetson family in the checkout next door is still trying to get the machine to scan their coupons.

At this point, whoever I bitch to about the idiocy of those machines will respond with some variation of the following “[laugh] Yeah, i know, I hate people that don’t know how to use those! I always zip right through but…” I cut them off there because they’ve already made the mistake of letting me know that they’re not only an idiot, but also an idiot in denial. No, you don’t zip right through those checkouts. You want to TELL me that so I think you’re cool. You may even believe it, but that’s just because you had the sort of mother who always patted you on the head when you brought home that D- in Underwater Basketweaving (which also turned out to be your first choice for a career) and told you how proud she was of you for trying.

No, you’re not any better at those checkouts than the next guy. There’s a lot of scientific reasons for that, but most of them revolve around the user being an idiot so I’m not going to hash them all out. Suffice it to say that the next person who claims they actually can go through those lines and doesn’t have 10 years of being a cashier at Walmart under their belt had better be prepared for a brilliant tongue lashing.

File this under "Huh?"

Remember that rule from Scream, the one where virgins live to the end of the movie and sluts die a horrible death?

Apparently the Italians see it as a matter of law.

I can't even begin to count the ways this is fucked up. Since when does "No" mean "No, as long as you're my first"? Is the psychological damage from being raped or assaulted any less if you've been with someone before? I think a few million victims of rape and sexual assault might have a problem with that reasoning.

So much for European enlightenment...

Alec Baldwin just doesn't get it...

Baldwin's latest diatribe just underscores the obvious to me: neither he nor Huffington's gets it.

When a rich, arrogant, douchebag like Baldwin stands up and points the finger at everyone else, your average joe will sit up and take notice, alright. What he notices is this douchebag hollywood psuedointellectual who he wasted $8 bucks on at the movie theater is telling him what to think again. What would you do if a douchebag like Cheney or Baldwin on either side of the very wide chasm separating those two from the rest of us started telling you what to do and think? You'd probably do what everyone else does and change the channel.

Alec, if you really want to help change the country, shut the hell up. You're screwing the rest of us.

Cheney's Big Deal

maybe its just me. I can definitely see it just being me. But in the last three days I've lost count of how many pundits I've heard commenting from one side or another on the whole Cheney hunting incident, and I honestly have to wonder...

What's the big deal?

Two old rich white guys go into the woods, only one walks out--what exactly is the downside to this?

Virtual economies and real economies intersect

[another post for my microeconomics class--kind of geeky but i figured i'd put it here anyway.]

I think it was about 15 years ago that I first read Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sci-fi novel about a once-fictional future in which there were two worlds: meatspace, or the real world we all live in, and the Metaverse, which was a virtual reality hooked into virtually every facet of life in the novel. Individuals existed as avatars in the Metaverse, virtual surrogates for their flesh-and-bone bodies, and using these avatars, people interacted on many levels ranging from entertainment to business. Businesses and entrepreneurs even opened virtual storefronts with which to interact with their customers' avatars. In many ways, Snow Crash was the single most influential book in the lives of many future software developers, and it played a huge role in transforming the internet from the Department of Defense project of its inception to the more consumer-oriented version we all use today.

As is so often the case with science fiction, tomorrow is now today, and we are rapidly approaching a world in which the Metaverse is not merely a figment in the imaginations of sci-fi fans, but a functioning world in its own right. This real-life Metaverse is rooted in many online games known as MMORPG's, a tongue-twister of an acronym that stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game"s. These MMORPG's pioneered the use of 3-D graphics and computers to allow online interactions between geographically separated players. As they grew in popularity, so too did the value of time spent in-game grow. Many, if not all, MMORPG's share a common trait in that game-time is spent collecting loot of various kinds: armor that gives a character an edge in a fight, a special weapon that might endow the possessor with additional powers, and many other kinds of trinkets. The rarity of some of these items made them valuable not just in the virtual world, but in meatspace as well. Many players began auctioning off their loot on sites like Ebay, allowing other players with enough money to bypass the many hours spent building up a character in-game by purchasing the fruit of another's labor.

The evolution of these virtual economies has led to the creation of virtual worlds whose raison d'etre lies not in gameplay but in building true economies, complete with virtual money, exchange rates, goods, services, and most importantly, interactions between "players". Second Life, the virtual world featured in the article linked above, is one such world created entirely by players using avatars, just as in Snow Crash. Participants, through their avatars, provide services ranging from virtual real estate rental to training for meatspace emergency workers. The potential uses for such virtual worlds is endless. Imagine a day when we attend class not in brick-and-mortar universities, but in just such a virtual environment. Instead of hurrying to beat rush-hour traffic for that 8AM class, students will be able to simply log in from their desktop at home, while enjoying a hot cup of coffee and breakfast. Office meetings too could be easily conducted for offices with many employees spread over a wide geographic range--a commonplace situation in today's world of global services and outsourcing.

on becoming liberal...

Glenn Greenwald has a great article on the usurpation of the labels "liberal" and "conservative" by the far right; my favorite quote (stolen from Andrew Sullivan's blog:

"It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush.

Greenwald goes on to talk about how Sullivan has gone from golden-boy status to pariah of the right, simply because he no longer supports the fiasco that is the Bush Administration.

Definitely worth a read, if only for a lesson in what lies ahead for those who don't drink the kool-aid.

Dear Mom...

Dear Mom,
I'm writing you to let you know that your prayers have been answered: your little boy has returned to the flock. I am officially renouncing my apostatic and blasphemous opinions on the existence of God and JesusChristOurLordAndSavior.

You see, I had a revelation, all because of this guy, and now, all those questions I never had ever since I was a child have been answered. This guy had this book that had some hebrew name that sounded like Bubble, or Babble maybe. Anyway, this book told me everything I needed to know, especially about evolution.

I really kind of hate to give up that particular belief, because it seemed to make so much sense! Apparently though, I must have misunderstood things about it, because there's all these holes in it! Do you know what this guy says? He says that evolution says that GRANDPA WAS A MONKEY!!!! I don't remember reading that in any of my textbooks in evolutionary biology or genetics or microbiology or geology or any of my other science courses (and as long as i've been in school, you and I both know how many of THOSE i've had!) but this guy was in a NEWSPAPER so it MUST be true!

Remember that bedtime story you used to read to me about that guy with the big boat that he put all the aminals in, and I always would ask if he put ALL the aminals in, and how they all fit? Well, this guy has the answer: he used babies. I don't know why that didn't occur to my five year old little brain, but i'm sure glad he figured it out, because its been keeping me awake for years!

He even let me in on another little secret: its this silly evolution thing that's at the root of all our problems in this country--everything from racism to gay marriage (I guess i'm going to have to stop working for that one too--my gay friends will be so disappointed. :( ) I don't know exactly what the connection is, but again, NEWSPAPER GUY! It must be true!

I'm not sure exactly what he has to say about all the stuff in my biology books about evolution. Probably it's all just lies. I mean, I was in the lab the other day playing with some genes, but I couldn't SEE them, so for all I know I was really just playing with colored water. I think I'll drink it next time just to make my point. Anyway, like I was saying, I don't know what he has to say about things like conservation of genes across species, and developmental homology, and stuff like carbon dating, but he says the fossil record is all a bunch of bones laid down by water so the whole flood story HAS TO BE TRUE!!! I dunno though; there's a lot of bones in places there wasn't any water back then. Doh! There I go again--I keep getting sucked in by the "evidence" and forgetting that I WASN'T THERE and only GOD was there. And he wrote it all down in this Bubble Bobble book, so we have that to go on--its like an eyewitness account!

I can't tell you how relieved I am to be able to stop thinking for myself! That was all so much WORK all the time!


Your Dutiful and Loving Son,
Keith

2001-?

This blogger just picked up on a story about Bush being honored with a bronzed bust of him wearing a flightsuit, engraved with the dates of his presidency: 2001-?

At first, I just thought he was overreacting--bloggers on huffington's have a way of doing that--but look towards the bottom of the page at this little gem: Joint Resolution 24

I dont' see anything indicating the resolution's died in committee or anything, although I can't really believe such a bill made it out of committee.

enough is enough...

I've been reading Andrew Sullivan for awhile, and I generally agree with his point of view. He's had several pretty decent posts on the Mohammed cartoon debacle today, and this one in particular had my blood boiling.

so here's my message to those threatening violence against those who publish this cartoon:

fuck you you limpdick asshat motherfuckers. fuck you and your 7th century attitudes. fuck you and your misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant, repressive, BULLYING attitudes. fuck you and your suicide bombs, fuck you and your fatwas, fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you.

in the words of one of your fellow limpdick asshat motherfuckers with similarly misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant attitudes,

"BRING IT ON." Bitch.

(thanks to
my very good (if politically misguided ;) ) friend The Pen, who saved me the trouble of tracking the pic down :) )

more timewasters...

Is anyone else old and geeky enough to remember Lemmings?

(and if you need another timewaster, sudoku has taken over my free time.)

color me surprised...

hamas is calling for a little peace and quiet

didn't think I'd see that day... if they don't watch it they may actually resolve some issues in palestine. can't have that!

Open letter to Islamic moderates: Get. Your. House. in. Order.

To the moderate Muslim community at-large:

I know you're out there. I have friends in your community. I have tried to study your history and your religion to understand what it means to be a Muslim. I, and many others like me, have spent the last four and a half years attempting to be the voice of reason in the debate over foreign policy in the US. And frankly, you're making us look bad.

I'm sure you're aware that in parts of the world Americans are hated with a passion usually reserved for pederasts and tax collectors. What you may not be aware of is that in other parts of the world, its the Muslim community that is regarded with such a vitrolic hate. Neither of us is fully deserving of our reputation; George Bush may dictate American policy, but he certainly doesn't speak, act, or think for me. Nor does Osama bin Ladin speak, act, or think for the entire Muslim world. Those of us attempting to observe some degree of rationality not only acknowledge this, but we've spent a lot of time pointing it out, in the hopes that by doing so, we'd remind those around us that the vast majority of the Muslim world wasn't made of the same intolerant fundamentalist stock as al'Qaeda and Hamas.

I haven't tried to stick up for you because I respect your religion. To be perfectly honest, I think your religion is as stupid as I think every other religion is--Christianity included. I do, however, respect and will fight for your right to practice it. Even though I think its stupid. You're probably wondering why I'd do so. The answer is: because its a basic human right to be stupid. Its a basic human right to believe something, and to profess that belief. I believe dearly in that freedom.

I think that freedom also applies to many other things. Speech, for instance. I think everyone has the right to say pretty much whatever they want. In fact, I love this freedom so much I'm exercising it right now. Somebody else recently did the same. A Danish newspaper dared to print an editorial cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammed (and yes, I intentionally left the capital P off) as a terrorist. Its the response from the Muslim world I'm writing to you about now.

From London to Jakarta, some of your brothers and sisters are calling for blood, while others swear by Allah to shed it. The exercising of the basic human right to free expression--tasteless though this particular incarnation might be--is as fundamental to a functional democracy as voting. To have these fanatics--especially those associated with groups that have already displayed a propensity for indiscriminate violence against civilians and innocent parties--do their dead-level best to intimidate and silence any whom do not share their fundamentalist views should be an affront to all Muslims who truly see Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance.

Its not like this is the first time. Ask Salman Rushdie. You've had plenty of opportunity to lead your brothers and sisters in Islam into the 21st century. Its ironic to me that as many Muslims as live in the West, the ONLY voice I've read condemning the intolerance displayed by these mobs is from the leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai: "As much as we condemn this, we must have, as Muslims, the courage to
forgive and to not make an issue of dispute between religions or
cultures."

I and the rest of my cohorts that make up the Liberal Agenda have done our best to keep in mind that you, the moderates of the Islamic world, are not the enemy. Let me be perfectly clear: we are the ones sticking up for you when you're not around to do it yourselves. We are the ones that take shit on your behalf from every uneducated hick redneck within a hundred mile radius every time a car bomb goes off in Gaza. We're the ones pointing out that the Palestineans have a side to their story that should be heard. Were Joesph McCarthy still around, we'd be the ones getting hauled up in front of the Committee for unAmerican Activities. And you know what else?

We're getting fucking tired of it.

Get. Your. House. In. Order. These fanatics that infest your countries? They're not your friends. If they didn't have us to rail against, who do you think they'd be decapitating? Whose women would they be abusing and subjugating? Here's a hint: go look in a mirror.

You have an opportunity now, an opportunity to stand up and define Islam for the rest of the world. Take a stand--take a look around your communities and denounce those who would seek to impose their interpretation of a religion on the rest of the world, by any means necessary. Teach your children about Allah, but do not let them become infected with the hatred and intolerance Allah so clearly abhors. And failing that, learn to police your own, to keep your problems at home.

Because those of us on the other side of the Dark Ages are getting damn tired of doing it for you.

Its only extortion when a little guy does it...

[this is a post I made to my class blog in microeconomics]
I'm not sure if this is really "economics" news or just "AT is a bunch of extortionists" news, but the CEO of AT (presumably the AT that resulted from the recent acquisition of AT by SBC) wants to charge websites for access to consumers . The gist of the matter is that ATT wants websites, especially those with high-bandwidth items like digital movies, to pay them for the use of their network. Sounds like a reasonable proposition, right?

Wrong.

They want content providers to pay for access to a network which consumers have already paid for! In ATT's ideal world, they're charging the consumer a nice sum for internet access, and if you're a business, they add in a hefty surcharge for "guaranteed bandwidth" which is anything but. In this Financial Times article Ed Whitacre, CEO for AT is quoted as follows:

"I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud."

and later:

“Now they might pass it on to their customers who are looking at a movie, for example. But that ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.”

In the past and up to present, the way the model works is that both content providers and consumers pay for a connection to the Internet, with some measure of reliability theoretically present in this connection. In other words, if you pay for dialup, you don't expect to download the entirety of the iTunes Music Store overnight. Conversely, if you pay for a T3 line (a kind of high-speed internet connection used by businesses--UTSA probably uses a few of them for our outbound connection), you expect to have a guaranteed bandwidth of 45Mbps. For comparisons sake, your DSL line at home maxes out around 768kbps, less than 2% of the throughput of a T3. Key point: nobody gets a "free ride"--you pay for these connections, and you usually pay a LOT.

In practice, these rates don't mean much to the average consumer, because up until now, files downloaded (including web pages) have typically been considerably smaller than the connection's speed limit. In other words, if you're downloading a page that's 100K, and your bandwidth allows you to download 768kbps, you'll get that page in its entirety in a little over a second. We are on the verge of a new broadband economy, however; as digital media becomes more and more commonplace, more consumers will start using their internet connections for everything from digital phones that use the internet to make calls to downloading high-definition movies for playing on a Tivo or other set-top box.

What Ed Whitacre is talking about doing is using this shift in the usage patterns to basically extort money from content providers. If Blockbuster pays them X gazillion dollars to give their traffic priority, and Netflix decides not to, then what this means to the consumer is that you can rent Blockbuster movies over the internet and watch them that day, but if you like netflix (as I do) you'll have to wait a week or so while that movie downloads to your computer/Tivo.

AT problem is that they've built out this huge fiber network, starting during the dot-com years, that isn't paying for itself, largely because they went whole-hog into the proposition instead of building it out in stages in conjunction with demand. So now they want to extract more money from some subset of their customers, and content providers are the easiest target (largely because they've already screwed the consumer as much as they possibly can.) Essentially, this is laziness and ineptitude on the part of AT management. There are many much better ways of dealing with this problem, such as decentralized distribution (aka peer-to-peer networks such as bittorrent).

This reeks of big business and anti-trust violations. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that implementation of this business model will result in a DoJ antitrust investigation (assuming Bush is out of office when its implemented.)

(if anyone is interested in the tech side of this debate, email me and I'll be glad to clarify any of the geekspeak)