A lot of what shows up on Google Maps, especially in larger metro areas, has been photographed from planes. They're only up on nice VFR days, so there's no atmosphere in the way. Better resolution satellite stuff from Digital Globe will be nice to see, but aircraft will continue to dominate the commercial aerial imagery sector for quite awhile.

The one that always got me was "AOL Deutschland GmbH."

I believe he's speaking of HushMail.

It was pretty heavily implied that he was speaking about blocking these attacks on GMail. Thankfully, Google hasn't quite achieved the ubiquity needed to interfere with other ISPs' traffic.

Yet management somehow still gets their bonuses, so who gives a fuck?

Reminds me of the quote about "big data" being like sex in high school. Nobody's really sure what it is, but everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.

I'm a Comcast TV and internet subscriber (not really by choice, as in many places it's the only solid option). Over the past few weeks I've seen an ad from, by, and for Comcast promoting this service... over and over and over. It shows a kid in school with some narration about how everything would be better if only he had access to the internet, then he goes home, and imagine that! A Comcast truck is sitting outside his home, hooking up some internet service!

Comcast loves kids, loves schools, and wants to help all students do research for their education! Yeah, right. This is a very low cost (or free), but also extremely low service plan. You have to be around or below the poverty level to qualify. The local news did a segment recently and the way they presented it, Comcast won't be letting you sign up unless you can prove that you qualify for food stamps and free school lunches. I'm not looking to go into a welfare debate, but living in a city with a fairly high number of section 8 residents, many of the folks who would qualify for the Internet Essentials plan are already paying Comcast for much better services using subsidies from other sources.

I love the idea of internet access being available to everyone, but don't think for a moment that Comcast is doing this out of some kind of corporate benevolence. It was required the last time they were involved in a giant merger (buying out NBC) and they're finally getting around to promoting it in hopes of their next giant merger (with Time Warner) being approved.

I tweaked the page for the doughnut theory of the universe last December, adding a new link for the acronym CMB (cosmic microwave background). But my link for CMB pointed to the entry for Color Me Badd, that 90's R&B group whose best-known song was "I Wanna Sex You Up." It looks like someone finally noticed while they were fixing an unrelated typo in the article, and fixed it back in June, so it was up there for 6 months or so.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice...

The patch already exists, now it's up to our cell carriers to distribute it.

Thanks!

Who is Verizon not fucking over? I'm not even their customer and I feel like I need some lube, just from hearing about these things. I would never, ever buy any service from Verizon. Every business they're in, they seem to take pleasure in punishing their customers just for using what they tried to purchase.

It's bad enough dealing with Comcast, but thankfully I don't rely on them for all of my services (despite their best efforts) and Sprint treats me pretty well for cell service.

Surely you're not talking about Netflix? If you're an ISP, Netflix will peer with you for free at 8 major POPs. They will even give you caching servers to put at your border. If one service is consuming 75% of your transit, someone probably does have a busted model but it isn't Netflix.

To some extent I'm sure it's still happening. As a Comcast subscriber I have access to an online streaming service called "WatchESPN" that lets me watch various ESPN channels on my computers or phones, as long as I'm on my Comcast internet connection. I don't use it, but I guarantee you that part of my monthly fee is paying for it, just like I don't watch any of the ESPN TV channels but I know a big chunk of my monthly cable TV fee goes straight to them. Of course ESPN also offers ESPN3.com which requires an additional monthly subscription on its own.

There used to be a chart with a nice breakdown of how much the average cable subscriber's bill goes to each of the content providers. ESPN was by far the biggest chunk, Disney/ABC took a good portion, etc. I'd love to see a recent breakdown if anyone has one.

Wow, I hadn't thought about that in years! Got another laugh at its expense, thanks for the reminder. Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.