Archive for December, 2010

Updated: Benoit Felten Trashes Cellular in Excellent Rant

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Those who advocate for cellular as real broadband piss me off as much as they piss off Benoit Felten. See the video.

He says that advocating for cellular as a replacement for fixed network requires good writing skills — and technological ignorance.

I agree.

Update: Felton tweets: agold_stats Alex, just to clarify, I’m not thrashing cellular, I’m thrashing cellular ONLY.

BP Helped Lockerbie Terrorist

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Another story from Wikileaks.

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi threatened to cut Britain “off at the knees” if the terrorist wasn’t sent home.

No word in the papers as to whether BP drilling rights were mentioned, as has been rumored. However, we assume BP and other British interests in the area would have been kicked out of the area. Likewise, Libya may have cut the flow of oil exports to energy-starved Britain.

Wikileaks matters — and one has to wonder whether a certain faction at the State Department decided which documents would be leaked.

Columbia School of Journalism: Getting Media Right: A Call to Action

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

Getting Media Right: A Call to Action” was hosted by the Columbia School of Journalism on December 2, 2010. It opened with an introduction by Bill Moyers and a clip from his 2003 show on media consolidation.

Then FCC Commissioner Copps addressed the session (the video is archived at the link above). He opened by thanking the Columbia School of Journalism and the “pathbreaking research of the New America Foundation.”

Copps pointed out that Reagan’s FCC Commission chief had called the television “a toaster with pictures” by which he meant to say that it did not need to be regulated. Most of our current problems can be traced back to the Reagan administration. As Copps has noted in an article in The Nation, Reagan’s FCC “went on to dismantle nearly every public-interest obligation on the books and to enable a tsunami of media consolidation. The results have been disastrous — reporters fired, newsrooms shuttered and our civic dialogue dumbed down to fact-free opinions and ideological bloviation.”

Copps noted that the urge to be a monopoly appears again with every new technology. In order to prevent the re-monopolization of the information industies, Copps proposed:

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Wikileaks News

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

With even the White House trying to block Wikileaks and conspiracy theorists saying that the CIA orchestrated false rape charges that have already been dropped once, you may be wondering where to get your wikileaks news.

Try WL Central.

Note: by posting this leak, I’m told I have lost the ability to ever work for the government. This is a poorly managed and heavy handed intimidation campaign.