Little Cold
Windchills made it to 40 below this morning.
Windchills made it to 40 below this morning.
Like this sticker.
Nothing says “I follow the crowds” like taking a picture of a Moleskine planner with a 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty.”
The printer has this… what is it?
For what it’s worth, my cell phone is thicker (by about a third) than the thickest point on Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Air. The thinnest part of the MacBook Air is 6 times thinner than my cell phone.
I find it easy to trust the hard-earned truths of a successful comedian. For example, here’s an excerpt from a recent A.V. Club interview with John Cleese:
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. There’ve been two or three examples where, just really laughing, it all goes away. I remember David Niven taking me out to dinner with Connie [Booth], my first wife. And we were sitting in the open air, drinking pinot grigio in the middle of Rome. There was an editor there, a really nice editor, but being British, he had terrible teeth—Americans have never seen teeth that bad, unless they read National Geographic. And David told us, “He’ll smile a lot, but he’ll never laugh.” Every time David made us howl with laughter, we glanced at the editor, who was roaring with laughter, trying to keep his lips together. Um, so what I’m saying is that when you’ve laughed like that with someone, it connects you at a humanity level.
Some great stuff in the full interview, if you have the time.
A short piece in which I continually widen the scope of the issues addressed.
The fact that I have precisely one choice for high speed internet in the capital city of Minnesota irks me to no end. For someone who will return to higher education and is currently freelancing doing webdesign, high speed internet is a need, not a want. So, I must pay what Comcast asks, and I have no other choice. As I said in the title, this sucks. Could it get any worse? I’m stuck as a customer of a coercive monopoly so… of course it could get worse. Read on.
As a practical, not hypothetical example, take a look at the media colossus that is Time Warner. This company includes AOL, Home Box Office, New Line Cinema, Time Inc., Time Warner Cable, Road Runner Cable, Turner Broadcasting System, The CW, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Cartoon Network, CNN, and DC Comics. Now, pick out two of those companies: Home Box Office (or more commonly, HBO) and Road Runner High Speed Internet. Buckle up, now it gets interesting.
Does anything about the relationship between these two companies, HBO and Road Runner Internet, strike you? Examine their business models: HBO sells premium cinematic and live content to home viewers, on demand. Road Runner Internet sells high speed access to the internet. OK, no overlap, no problem! But what if we described Road Runner Internet as a conduit to something like the Apple TV service, where you could rent premium cinematic content, on demand. Well now then, there seems to be some overlap, doesn’t there?
Put yourself in Time Warner’s shoes — users of their services can either buy HBO content at large markups or rent movies over Road Runner at reasonable prices. With HBO, Time Warner makes money… but with Road Runner, they lose money. In response to this conflict, Time Warner will not evolve their services to be more competitive, they will only raise prices to account for the data moving over their networks. How much data? Using the information from the Apple TV tech specs page, we can calculate that a movie like Ratatouille is about 2.4 gigabytes. How big is this? Well, consider that Time Warner is running a pilot program in Texas that limits monthly bandwidth usage to 5 gigabytes. That’s two iTunes rentals a month, provided you do almost no other internet browsing. Want 10 gigabytes a month? Pay more! In this way, Time Warner leverages its monopoly to raise the effective price of iTunes movie rentals. Diabolical, no? Steven Levy, writing in the Washington Post, recently articulated this same point:
Clearly it won’t just be inductees to the LimeWire Hall of Fame who are hit with excess charges.
Those penalties could be rough. Bell Canada, which meters service in some plans, charges customers who go over the limit $7.50 per additional gigabyte. (The Canadian dollar is worth about as much as the U.S. version these days.) That would jack up the $2.99 iTunes rental fee for “The Magnificent Seven” by 10 bucks.
Levy continues discussing the issue with an interesting factoid, on a topic dear to my heart:
Time Warner’s move illuminates some of the troubling issues facing the United States in the Internet era, where, in terms of penetration, we are in 24th place — behind Estonia — in the international broadband competition.
The truly sad state of internet access in the U.S. becomes even more glaring with a few more facts:
In the United States, where the Internet was born, we pay higher prices (seven times what they pay in South Korea) for slower speeds. (Japan’s users surf 13 times faster.) Though President Bush promised affordable broadband for all by 2007, tens of millions are still stuck with dial-up.
I wonder if, as Levy seems to articulate, internet devolution in the U.S. is merely a symptom of a greater problem — a stasis in innovation and government investment in driving science and industry forward. Let’s hope we don’t look back at this time and, with the benefit of perspective, see our country make stupid decision after stupid decision, condemning us to industrial, technological, and intellectual insignificance. Let’s hope crappy movie rental options are one of the larger concerns in this information age mess. Otherwise, we may be going nowhere rather quickly.
At our celebration dinner for Katy’s passing her oral exams and me getting accepted into school.
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