All-You-Can-Eat Broadband Is Dead: Time Warner to Charge by the Byte

I’ve never tracked my download usage, but I know I don’t go anywhere near these limits.  Yet.  But that could change as IPTV comes on board.  I would kill to go to an IPTV option today.  Being able to drop my stupid cable subscription for a fiber optic bandwidth to one box will be nice in the near future.

However, this is a bit scary.  What do you do when you reach the end of the bytes on the 26th of the month?  Start rationing?  Start hopping on your neighbor’s unprotected wireless?

But, when we were in Romania over the Holidays, one of my wife’s friends is an expert in the telecom industry and said the Net will start having major bandwidth problems in the next three years.  Mostly due to increasing access by the growing number of people on the Net but exacerbated by the individuals who are downloading video and will be moving to downloading hi-def fairly soon.  Net Neutrality is great, but you can bet the ISPs will use this as a way to try to bypass any bans by the government.

Canadian PM vows to defend Arctic - CNN.com

The story is interesting, especially if you, like myself, just relocated to one of the two countries in question.  The part of the story I find most meaningful about how the ‘Net has began to impact all forms of communication and relationships is summed up in this brief statement, “Denmark sent a letter of protest to Ottawa, while Canadians and Danes took out competing Google ads, each proclaiming sovereignty over the rock 680 miles south of the North Pole.”

Who knows, maybe one day soon, the U.N. will go virtual and build a new center in Second Life.

Going with the Wind - Popular Science

This is where you say, “What will they think of next?” or “Power to the people!” with the pun intended.  Pretty cool idea to make a wind turbine off of $300 in parts and some time.  I’m tempted to try this one of these years but it will have to wait until we have a house.  Something tell me the apartment complex might complain if I were to start propping windmills on the deck.

But giving people the ideas to develop their own devices will be huge.  Not only do you get to set your hand to freeing yourself from 100% reliance on the electrical grid, but you get to do it yourself.  Not just by dropping a few grand and having someone set it up for you.  And it is a good start towards bigger an better things.

If you’re into it, you should also check into the OScar open source automobile initiative.

Get on the Love Train

I’m not certain what is more important about the story.  First, it seems to tell us that standing up for someone else’s dignity is a good thing and may carry rewards.  Second, that you can’t trust good stories any longer because it may come from some evil marketing genius’ mind.  Either way, if it makes people feel good, should it diminish the result?

WIRED Blogs: Beyond the Beyond

Sterling makes a very interesting statement about the l33t in the blogging community.  The latest numbers I’ve seen are claiming that digital divide is closing.  Is it?  Well, the bits I’ve seen do show that more individuals are gaining access to computers and the Internet.  But this article helps show that it doesn’t really mean the individuals who have barely crossed the chasm are capable (technologically or with sufficient training and support) of meaningful contribution.  And certainly not on a regular basis.
In this case, the argument is how the blogosphere is very top-heavy.  Bloggers’ education and income will be in a higher bracket.  I’m willing to bet the majority of individuals are also white.   As such, the blogosphere is a good beginning to direct representation from the general community.  However, until technology reaches closer to that 99% coverage which will allow us to datamine the blogging community for a better consensus on the state of affairs in the use of technology.

The real benefit is how simplistic the creation and maintenence of blogs is becoming.  I’m assuming once the $100 computers hit the American market and cause a massive shift in the access of poorer households to access the Internet,  combined with an ease of blog access, will enable an uprising of individual bloggers from lower-income and possibly wider age range to add their voices to this current trend.

The question will become: once you give these individuals that level of voice, what will it empower?  This causes me to recall a discussion I had wth Doug Winiarski about how early settlers, in pre-American society, began to have “visions” of Heaven.  Since the religious elite claimed to be the only path to Heaven, dissenters rebelled by speaking of visions in which they visited Heaven and were shown a book containing the names of those for whom a place was already reserved.

This lent momentum to breaking the theological stranglehold the Priests and Ministers held over their population.  In turn, this empowerment, in the next generation, is believed to have created the spark which fueled the flames of the American Revolution.  —allow me to say I am probably butchering this ideal, but think I have the basic tenents of the theory down.

What then will allowing the poor and marginilized groups in America create in the next generation? Only time will tell…