ignorance is bliss. maybe.

a study finds that 60 million Americans don't care, don't want broadband, don't want to pay for it, and find the internet either offensive or dangerous.

so, for the FCC to "achieve US global leadership in high-speed Internet", they just need to build the infrastructure, then give to everyone it to everyone for free. its their choice if they don't want to get online.

i really don't know why.

... some people are just plain naive.

almost wish it was true.

yes, this is our life now.

the difficulty of putting thoughts down (or not)

damn, haven't blogged in a while. maybe the blog is largely dead.

ever since i started using a PC, my pencraft has completely deteriorated. i used to write prose and poetry with ink and paper. now i've done away with all of them (including the prose and poetry part).

blogging solved the itch to write somewhat, even if i was just doing it for myself (my comic blog has lots of funny gems - well, to me that is). but the volume of that does rival or exceed anything i wrote pre-computer era.

but at the same time, you run into the risk of not being able to put anything interesting (again, primarily to yourself) on your blog, with time considerations, and if it isn't your bread and butter. or you go into a funk and brood with writer's block.

recently, i've found myself reborn in a way with twitter, microblogging as much of my thoughts as i can. i had a great run tweeting inside an ER, and i was wondering if my friends were actually witnessing my death via the internet.

the loss of lengthy exposition, both in reading and writing, is pretty much the sign of the times. nothing much holds our attention span for so long, and we can't even write a decent email at times. i try to compensate by committing thoughts to the web, but even that requires you fire up the computer. in the last holdouts i see, my wife is fond of sending actual cards to family, even with just a few written words meant to connect somehow.

despite twitter's 140 character limit, i find myself not being hampered by it, and expanding my train of thoughts to several tweets. of course, this may be the issue with text messages, because you're actually paying for it, and thus are constrained to squeeze in as much info as you can in one message. which is crap because so much is lost in the message, you run the risk of being misunderstood, and also not to mention, you perpetuate the devolution of spelling, grammar and punctuation. i try not to fall into that trap with twitter.

perhaps soon we will just be down to communicating with mashed letters, numbers and symbols (u a$$!). the spoken word could devolve into grunting. oh, the irony.

Safe Fox

soon to be the new monopoly?

die like weeds. apt.

geekspeak: how you start buying stuff online.

blog is dead.

for those without cable

watch the Magic go to the NBA Finals! or the Cavs live to play another day. either way, go to atdhe.net.

alas, Encarta, we hardly used ye.

come on
let me hear you say
F the RIAA

shame on you, Time Warner.

and they'll sell us the cable they'll hang us with

Cable companies want to gouge us a lot more, says this NYT article:

The cost of providing Internet service is about to fall even more, as cable companies install new technology, called Docsis 3, that will both increase their capacity and allow them to offer much faster download speeds.

So far, however, companies in the United States have chosen to use Docsis 3 as an opportunity to offer far more expensive Internet plans. Comcast has introduced a new 50-megabit-per-second service at $139 a month, compared with its existing service that costs about $45 a month for 8 megabits per second. Time Warner just announced it will charge $99 for 50 megabits per second.

By contrast, JCom, the largest cable company in Japan, sells service as fast as 160 megabits per second for $60 a month, only $5 a month more than its slower service.

Why so cheap? JCom faces more competition from other Internet providers than companies in the United States do.

the restaurant bill analogy does not apply for cable. you set up all-in-one plans to lure customers, then you complain of the usage. tell you what - open up a la carte service for cable TV channels and maybe we can discuss this usage pricing thing for the Internet.

must ... go ... find ... friend.

hooray for the internet!!!