The state of tech journalism is starting to become a serious problem for society.

As of the time of this journal entry, I have not heard any old media outlet mention Comcast's crusade against network neutrality as background for the merger story.

This deal demonstrates Comcast's confidence that they can stop efforts to preserve the neutral nature of the internet. Preferred delivery of NBC/Universal content is the aim of the purchase of a 51% stake from GE.

If network neutrality is an administration-wide goal, the FTC should stop this deal; or, at the very least, delay approval until the FCC rulemaking is complete.

Slashdot should prepare itself for a coming crapflood of anti-NN astroturfing, now with extra John Birch Society rhetoric.

During a recent Glenn Beck interview on Fox News, a representative from Brent Bozell's MRC (who is a blogger on NewsBusters) stated that "[Net neutrality is] Socialism on the Internet".

It's hard to determine what the interview is about exactly, but the bit about Net Neutrality was woven into a narrative about some kind of Marxist/Fascist takeover of the Internet and talk radio. ClearChannel's desperate defense of the 1996 Telecommunications Act (they hated the localism regulations that the '96 law killed) has been combined with the anti-NN campaign into yet another juvenile Red Dawn fantasy, which now appears to be canon in the right-wing echo chamber.

Briefly, cable companies and telcos are now in bed with the far-right.

I watched it live, but complete transcripts of the interview are hard to come by, for some reason (it could just be me; I don't run scripts from sites like Fox's). Bits and pieces are available, and the quote appears in Google's cache. Not that there's any doubt that this campaign has begun (apparently some time in August): http://www.google.com/search?q=network+neutrality+socialism.

On a related note: This "online strategy" goes after nerds, too: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/10/us_radio_spectrum/.

On a partly unrelated note: Google seems to be getting better at using the various ways that timestamps are being marked up, and hopefully authors and designers will be using <time> more often in the future. Looking for patterns in the timestamps of obvious astroturfing could be a fruitful.

Your comments were a pretty good read.

I'm not a pilot IRL, but I do hack on FlightGear from time to time, and I'm totally fascinated by aviation.

This is one of the things that keeps me on slashdot. For every story, there's a good chance that someone with relevant experience will comment.

To anyone who was concerned about a reported 0-day exploit and two (!) largish hosting services shutting down SSH: Probably not.

http://www.dshield.org/diary.html?storyid=6760

http://lwn.net/Articles/340483/

Ayn Rand was wrong.

Rand asks us to take as a given that her conclusions necessarily follow from a logical examination of humankind, hence the term, "objectivism."

The sophism aside, the scientific advances of the last 50 years make it near certain that her conclusions were flawed; in particular, advances in the understanding of animal behavior, neurology, and cognitive science.

We now know that altruism and empathy are assets. We know that they have a biological foundation. And, rationally, we know that we possess these traits for an evolutionary reason.

If Rand could examine our existence with logic (as scientists do) now, she would have to accept that her understanding of human drives was, at best, incomplete.

But if she were alive today, I don't think she would. Her examination was not, as she believed, of the human condition; it was of herself.

She dissected her own mind and found a person with what is now known as Dissocial Personality Disorder.

To anyone taking seriously the fears about a public option, allow me to sum up the argument:

Government is slow, bureaucratic, inefficient, and always inferior to the private sector. Except when it isn't, in which case it is unfair competition.

Heh. Reminds me of all the ISPs suing municipalities.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft, I do remember "before the Internet" (I'm sure you guys mean the web). I also remember you trying to fucking kill it.

If you're wondering why things are broken, slashdot is now using a cdn to serve their javascript. You have to allow fsdn.com

The new slashcode is super.

The ajax with the scrollbar (that is just awesome), the achievements system (have you clicked on someone else's achievements and seen what happens?), the speed... Holy crap. It's just great.

To those whose browser/os can't cope with it currently: Take some comfort in the knowledge that it is working *awesome* for me (aside from maybe the markup in the firehose...).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99961163

Awful idea, surely implemented with crapware, hatched from a Faustian bargain with academic textbook publishers.

The story says that the price of an electronic textbook should be "about half" the price of paper textbooks. The discount should be *much* deeper than 50%, as colleges are allowing the publishers to destroy the second-hand market and take away the ability of students to hand down or retain their books. Criminal.

Hint to supporters of this scheme: The promise of technology in education is greater access for more people to information and insights, and new ways to organize information with metadata. In other words, people *sharing* in ways never before possible. You're proposing the opposite.

The story contains a contradiction that illustrates how this faculty and the new electronic distributors misunderstand the nature of the web. In the first section, "Changing With Students":

However, never in the rest of the story is an implicit assumption questioned; that is, the property that makes Wikipedia and YouTube special is that you interact with them by clicking around with an lcd panel. YouTube and Wikipedia have something much more powerful in common: Almost limitless information contributed by and accessible to anybody, efficiently organized with tons of meta.

The executive vice-president of CourseSmart and evangelist for the publishers' model of "e-book" distribution, Frank Lyman, was interviewed for the story (why?). On their humorous misunderstanding of what a blog is, I found a link to a nytimes article that isn't favorable to their plans.

Such awful reporting, with apparently no research, so soon after I was singing their praises. File this one under "breathless reading of press releases."

NPR's All Things Considered discussed PS3 supercomputing in its Science Out Of The Box segment.

It's old news to most of us, and it's short on details (it's just 2 minutes long), but it cheered me up. It's nice to see a major media outlet with a some science and technology literacy.

Granted, there have been some stinkers on NPR; credulous readings of press releases and interviews with tech "experts" (people with fake nerd glasses whose only qualification is being operate an iphone without assistance), but Jacki Lyden did a great job with this story. Go NPR.

"Piracy" is part of the cost of doing business.

Freedom comes before before profit.

You are not entitled to profit.

Innovation is better for an economy than "content".

As corollary, said economy will be fine with you being smaller, or non-existent.

Alan Greenspan:

First of all, let's recognize that this is a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event.

Ah, good. Glad that's all sorted out, then.

To my Libertarian friends:

After 28 years of laissez-faire orthodoxy, I think the results are in.

Btw, we could have implemented a Canadian-style health care system with the money that it's going to take to bail out the financial marketeers. In addition, having a healthy (and richer) population and businesses with health care off of their books would have boosted productivity (possibly even making up for or exceeding the cost to the Treasury) and kept more manufacturing in the United States.

It's time to put down your copy of Capitalism and Freedom, stop calling anyone with empathy a "collectivist", and take a long hard look at the state of the world (including the giant counterexample that is China).

I promise not to rub your noses in it (much).

Recently, in this thread, I was led to the wikipedia article on net neutrality for a, err.., creative definition of Net Neutrality:

Access to all legal content, but not via means that violate agreed-upon terms of service: This approach guarantees access to all legal content which is available by means that do not violate agreed-upon terms of service, harm others' quality of service, or abuse the network (e.g. by monopolizing bandwidth). This approach allows for more flexibility in network management practices and innovation in the development of economical service plans for consumers. It requires full disclosure of terms of service, and also of the behavior of software which is offered to users for operation on the network. Anticompetitive practices, such as blocking of content that competes with products furnished by the provider, are strictly prohibited.

Peculiar. That sounds like the exact opposite of NN. Sounds familiar, too. Oh, look, the author cited a reference!

14 Brett Glass's Seven Network Neutrality Principles and Guidelines for Appropriate Regulation http://www.brettglass.com/principles.pdf

Okay. No one would have the nerve to cite themselves for a wikipedia edit, right? Let's see, it's an anonymous edit, from 66.119.58.200. Hmm... just one edit from that IP... increase power to the main deflector array... triangulate the signal with my dangerous-to-the-network hacker tools and...

OrgName: CORE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
OrgID: CBS-129
Address: 400 East First
City: Casper
StateProv: WY
PostalCode: 82601
Country: US

If Mr. Glass's attempt to re-define NN to mean that ISPs can do whatever they like as long as there is some boilerplate language in a ToS succeeds, I will lose all faith in the intellectual abilities of human kind. If this spoonful of sewage can bring down the whole conversation so easily, I will throw my computers away and spend the rest of my days in state parks, living in a tent.

I would like to submit to the distinguished gentleman from Wyoming that if your cause needs you to change definitions with anonymous edits on wikipedia, there may be something wrong with your cause.