The Friday Bacon

I am sure you have seen this out on the Log Cabin somewhere. Originally a joke, but the visual design of the product is excellent.

Of Silent Passings

From The Fringe Element

I have previously mentioned how the origins of D&D are intertwined with southern Wisconsin. I have been chided, probably in response to the articles I have written regarding Gary Gygax. I have been chided for not recognizing the passing of Dave Arneson. Arneson is pictured above as the bearded guy on the left. The bearded guy in the center being accused of being the murderer is Gary Gygax.

Dave Arneson was instrumental in the creation of D&D back in the ancient days before anyone had thought of a role playing game or a character sheet, or a Dungeon Master. These words are so significant in my life that these men seem to be earth shattering geniuses. I find myself hard pressed to separate out how their original ideas have changed the face of gaming or created whole new dimensions of the paper, miniatures, board game, and video game industries.

Sadly, I never paid much attention to the names on my books which would have given me some inkling of the great men to whom I owe the many hours of nerdy squealing joy. Equally sad is the fact that often we never hear of significant people until after they have died. Arneson Died last week on Tuesday. He was only in his early 60's.

UPDATE: According to our commentator(commenter?) the man I identified above as Dave Arneson is actually Mike Carr. From my perspective this is conflicting information coming from third parties. If Wikipedia has taught me anything it is the value of verification on the internet. So, if anyone can positively identify those in the above image I will go off of that in the future. My goal was to post an image related to this article and not just swiped from Wikipedia, and thereby enrich the imagescape of the internet. However I would warn against using the images I post as a reference since it is abundantly clear I do not know who these people are.

Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.

Coming Home

The DOD recently decided to continue not awarding the Purple Heart to solders with post traumatic stress disorder. The blogosphere has been set aflame with the debate over the issue with one side arguing that this would make a substantial step toward acknowledgment, reducing stigma, and treatment of the disease within the military, and the other side trying hard to find new ways to say that PTSD doesn't exist while not overtly saying that.

This was followed the next day with the revelation that military suicides have reached a new record and have surpassed the rate of suicide in the general population. The close timing gave me pause to think about the significance of the two stories in relation to each other. I am not saying that awarding a medal for having PTSD would reduce suicide among military veterans. I just think that there needs to be a better way of serving those who have done their service to protect us. Having veterans among my family, friends, and co-workers, I have found that many of the combat vets are too proud too seek help even when they need it. You would think that psychologists could find a way to communicate directly with a soldier's experience and explain that getting treatment doesn't detract from their valor or self reliance. But I am not a soldier and I don't have any answers. I just don't like the toll that the psychological wounds of war are taking.

I Know What You Mean

Here I was innocently looking for pictures of cute hippo babies and there is this story about a hippo that was separated from its mother by the tsunami and it started hanging around with a tortoise. Awww, cross species cuddling right? And, BAM! the author has to throw in some anthropomorphizing religious BS.

Of Urinals and Broken Zippers

This is a picture of the pull tab from someones fly in the bottom of a uninal at my work. Its been there since before Christmas. Just wanted to share that with you.

The Friday Bacon

Three Panel Soul has a cute comic about bacon ice cream.

The Friday Bacon

This is me frying burgers and bacon together. it makes both of them taste much better than just combining the two after the cooking process.

Aparently the whole bacon thing wasn't original, even the concept of the Friday Bacon was thought up by some other blogger. I wish I had thought of it first so I could get all uppity.

Probable Cause II

(click here to view)

First, in answer to the "Case for Telecom Immunity," specifically: "2. Beyond the theoretical case for the warrantless program’s legality, the telecoms here specifically relied on written representations from the administration that the program had been reviewed by the president and determined to be legal." The question of the legality of this program is anything but theoretical, and the argument so often so cleverly invoked to defend this insidious assault on the very freedoms that Bush notionally seeks to defend.

Addressing the National Association of Attorney Generals, the debate surrounding the FISA renewal and telecom immunity was Bush's primary topic. In a case of misrepresentation, W says the target of the whole program of the big bad jihadis sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan, dialing their favorite operatives in Anywhere, Homeland. I would imagine being so far away from home, in a land where no one can speak their language, they would be pretty homesick.

However, evidence has emerged that the real target of this program may really be the e-mails. Which, makes me want to breath a sigh of relief, given the Bush Administration's track record of handling e-mail. It's not that the NSA, by means of this warrantless wiretapping program, invaded your privacy and cracked open a Pandora's box where probable cause and the very slim margin of institutional procedure that keep Americans from having to fear what goes bump in the night, but they probably wouldn't know how to manage it.

And if you were wondering how probable cause died, and if it will make a sound? I would say probably not. Our newest candidate for the vaunted 'Republicrat' status, Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes said that he hopes to bring the matter to a vote within a week. Also of interest, is the point that the House has seen and reviewed documents in relation to this matter, and they're "pretty much finished." So, what was in those documents? Or, were they mostly redacted? Some of the potential deals that are in discussion would continue to leave this entire matter beneath the lock and key of classification, away from the prying eyes of the interested or not public. The Senate version of the bill that has already been passed allows the Attorney General to wave his magic pen and pronounce everything legal and dismiss any and all related lawsuits.

For extra flavoring, try the aforementioned NPR coverage, now with audible delight. Or Senator Feingold issuing a public service warning about the already-passed Senate version.




Some editorialization from the Young Turks. Yes, the Democrats do suck.



And if you haven't seen Bush enough today, here he is addressing the National Association of Attorney Generals. And no matter how many times Bush said that his government told these telecommunications companies that the program that they were requested to participate in was legal, it clearly wasn't and every instance of him saying that the government said this program was legal before it saw the light of day could be used as evidence against him.

Jihad!

You cannot do this to my people! Your insipid behavior is boorish when contained within national boundaries, but becomes a fount of outrage when you export your stupidity and crash YouTube. How dare you attempt to interfere with my entertainment! How dare you impose nationalism on the log cabin! How dare you appeal to the base stupidity that you are attempting to fight!

Because of this, I feel a personal sense of responsibility to post the videos that were supposed to be suppressed. As for why anyone would want this to be suppressed, one can only imagine. As hard as this guy is to listen to, I expect his opponents would want anyone and everyone to listen to Geert's madness. For whatever it's worth, I hope the government of Pakistan is incredibly unhappy. Unfortunately for you, your most fanatical ideological opponents in the West are just as crazy as the extremists that seek to impose an ultraconservative version of Sunni Islam.


Part 1


Part 2