the day the fcc convinced google to become an ISP : Dec. 29, 2006

so it appears that after seeing some concessions from at&t the fcc approved the at&t/sbc merger which will create a communications monolith that will control almost half of all telephone land lines in the United States. naturally, it's a big deal that has a lot of people talking. while there are some optimistic interpretations of the of the effects of the net neutrality provisions in the concessions for the most part folks are skeptical primarily because at&t's IPTV network is exempted from the neutrality provision and the DSL wireline access service that is governed by the provisions is only covered at speeds “up to” 768Kbps up and (presumably) 128Kbps down, which is barely better than dial-up and almost useless for VoIP and video.

in june google stated that it has no current plans to be an internet service provider [ emphasis mine ] but one has to wonder if goog is rethinking that decision now that it has 3 video properties and big plans for google talk. it's interesting to note that google doesn't seems to be doing just fine without peering any traffic with at&t.

maybe john dvorak was right all along:

"First, Google, the king of doing good work inexpensively, now has a cookie-cutter model on how to light up a city. Google's software engineers have the architecture. They know the problems. They know the costs. In fact, this initial model will inevitably be tweaked to be cheaper and more efficient in future rollouts. Combine this new knowledge with information developed in towns where other companies have done municipal Wi-Fi and you'll have a lot of people looking at this idea. If the spreadsheets show that they can beat the cable and telco companies at their own game, then expect a deluge of activity."

"This expansion of services is entirely possible and doable. And it all stems from the phone companies and cable companies arrogantly shooting off their collective mouths about tiered services, along with their cavalier failure to give the American public what it needs—universal and cheap high-speed access."

clean up spam with spamsoap?

i really do have plans to write about more than spam, but for now i guess that seems to be top o' the mind. kevin werbach has positive things to say about spamsoap, claiming that it's 99.9% effective. but $25/month? hrrrrm. how much is my time worth?

pointers to comparisons of spam filtering services are welcome.

"best" email sign-off not the best?

who knew signing off on emails with "best" is considered a "brush off"? for reasons that i can barely recall, i've been signing informal emails with "hi. ho." and "over. under." for as long as i've been using email. and over the years i've slipped into using "best" in more formal situations for exactly the same reasons as jason kottke, "sincerely" is too formal, "warmest regards" sounds a bit too, well, warm. but according to a separate poll, "best" really is considered only nominally better than no sign-off at all and a simple "thanks" is neither "overly effusive" or "overly brusque" for business correspondence.

will email die in 2007? revisited.

the new york times recently wrote about a subject i touched upon in "will email die in 2007" with "spam doubles, finding new ways to deliver itself" and the article contains the staggering statistic that unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 email messages. there's no reason to believe that in 6 months to a year that number will look hopelessly outdated since as nick carr writes, "Given enough eyeballs, no scam is too shallow."

my pain is so great that i've been contemplating taking the road travelled by others who are smarter than i and just letting gmail tackle the tsunami of spam. gmail's new and much adored mail fetcher feature which lets you fetch mail from any of your other, non-gmail accounts makes it that much easier, but it doesn't look like there's an easy way to separate the multiple accounts. i'm sure you could probably accomplish this by tagging email sent to given address, but i wish it were easier to keep them wholly apart without creating additional gmail accounts. it's also irritating that when i send email in gmail many mail programs show the email as having been "sent by gmailaddress@gmail.com on behalf of spoofed@snowdeal.org." ( admittedly that an anti-spam feature, but still it's aggravating ). and i'm not sure i can live without imap access to gmail outside of the native web interface as gmail only supports pop access ( although perhaps it is possible to "hack" imap support ). sigh. what to do?

how to buy the perfect gift.

apparently, just pretend that special someone is a stranger:

"People tended to be better at predicting another person's preferences when they thought that person was a stranger. This, the researchers suggest, is because when predicting what a stranger would like, we are forced to "rely on general and stereotypical information about the stranger, which can be quite diagnostic." But when predicting what our loved ones like, we "ignore this valid information" and rely on more intimate information "that is often found to be invalid or irrelevant when predicting product attitudes," Lerouge and Warlop report."

33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names

i knew a "punt" was the indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle, but i'll admit that the other 32 were new to me.

linkage: 12.08.2006

wired news: Say Hello to the Goodbye Weapon:

"The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you've been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards -- and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too."

rebeldad: Everything You Wanted to Know About Dads:

"The media isn't doing dads any favors. The report ranks "media/popular culture" as the no. 2 obstacle to good fathering, behind "work responsibilities" but ahead of "financial problems" or "lack of knowledge." Of survey respondents, 65 percent agreed that "The media (e.g. commercials and TV shows) tend to portray fathers in a negative light.""

iht: MIT technology expert in coma after Hanoi traffic accident:

"Seymour Papert, an MIT professor emeritus and internationally known expert in technology and learning, was severely injured in a traffic accident and remains in a coma, doctors and colleagues said Thursday."

[ if you haven't already, go read the excellent "mindstorms". ] consumer reports: dirty birds:

"CR’s analysis of fresh, whole broilers bought nationwide revealed that 83 percent harbored campylobacter or salmonella, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease."

msnbc: Two species cooperate to hunt:

"The giant moray eel is normally a lone hunter in the dark. Now scientists find these eels may at times hunt in the daytime in the Red Sea, and surprisingly cooperate with another predatory fish, the grouper, which is also normally a solitary predator."

archaeology: Is "Apocalypto" Pornography?:

"Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.

What I saw was much worse than this."

instructables: Homemade instant oatmeal:

"Instant oatmeal is great for a quick breakfast at the office. Not only is it easy to make your own, the homemade version is more filling and less expensive (LESS EXPENSIVE! MORE FILLING! *ahem*) than the store bought stuff, and you can make it without all the sugar and preservatives."

[ via parenthacks ]

the new yorker: boom and gloom:

"The upshot: people may know when they're happy, but they often don't know what will make them happy."

lean back, relax, and enjoy the fact that mom was wrong about at least one thing.

not being vertically challenged, i'm always interested in new theories about posture and its relationship to back pain. it's with no small amount of amusement that i see that there's some support to validate something i've been doing for years - no matter how hard i try to sit up straight for long periods in a chair, i've found that i inevitably lean back about as far as possible with most office chairs to prevent lower back strain. i had developed a hypothesis that my problems are related to sitting in chairs designed for those of average height, but it seems that the healthiest angle for sitting may be reclining at 135 degrees regardless of your height:

"The tests revealed that sitting upright or slouched over for 10 minutes strained the erector spinae muscles, which run along each side of the spinal column. It also compressed the intervertebral discs in the lower back, resulting in a 20% water loss from the nucleus pulposus, the soft, jelly-like central part of the disc, which acts as a ball bearing. At the 135-degree angle, there was almost no water loss, muscle strain or compression."

maybe i can get the ergonomics team at work to cough up some one of those snappy humanscale chairs.

linkage: 12.01.2006

cjr: Fear of Yoga:

"Yoga has now ascended to the category of “platform agnostic,” the highest praise marketers can conjure for any kind of content, trend, or person. Translation? Consumers drop $3 billion every year on yoga classes, books, videos, CDs, DVDs, mats, clothing, and other necessities."

the wilson quarterly: artificial happiness: the dark side of the new happy class.:

"Dworkin presents a gallery of legal druggies who are so content with their artificial happiness that they have lost all incentive to take action against what made them unhappy in the first place. A man who stays married to a mentally unstable virago, lest a divorce enable her to clean him out financially and gain custody of their son, tells Dworkin, “My wife is still a bitch. I can’t stand her. But now I don’t care so much. I still feel good no matter what happens.” Dworkin believes that society is the victim when millions choose this stupefied state of least resistance, because it eventually destroys conscience and character on a national scale. As others have noted, we need only imagine Abe Lincoln, a clinical depressive, on Prozac: “Well, the Union is finished, we’re two countries now, and slavery is a fact of life, but hey, I feel good about myself.”"

businessweek: is the wal-mart model dead?:

"I think Wal-Mart, like Dell, is seeing the commoditization of price erode its competitive edge and reduce the value it brings to shareholders and consumers. The great supply-chain innovation that drove Wal-Mart's success is being replicated by others. Competing on price doesn't do it in the marketplace for Wal-Mart. It needs to compete on product differentiation--design and innovation--and here Wal-Mart needs lessons from Target."