A Decade into “Always-On” Internet

from christian sandvig discussing the current state of bandwidth in america.

In other words, Comcast has monopoly power in cable television in many markets. It has set its 250 GB/month cap so that it is impossible to buy television over its Internet service (take that, Netflix!) or to use free Internet video services in lieu of cable TV (take that, YouTube!), thus maintaining its monopoly in video. By the way, that is the definition of a violation of antitrust law. Hello, Justice Department?

related, i received this notice on 12/16.  then another about two days ago.  my phone sits on wi-fi the entire day except, usually, the two hours i’m commuting during a 5-day work week.

looking at my phone statistics (assuming since i’ve owned the iphone 4, not previous versions - but without logging into at&t’s web site, not sure), i’ve sent/received a total of 19.4 GB of data over their cellular network.  my girlfriend and i pay, on average, $150/month to have both of our iphone 4 devices supported by at&t’s network.  on top of that, another $100/month for verizon to grant us internet access and cable television over their fios network.

it costs me $3,000 a year to stay “always-on.”  so, yeah, of course i agree with this shit.

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

Consider a set of classic experiments designed by Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, first conducted in the 1940s. The research featured a series of short films about a blue ball and a red ball. In the first film, the red ball races across the screen, touches the blue ball, and then stops. The blue ball, meanwhile, begins moving in the same basic direction as the red ball. When Michotte asked people to describe the film, they automatically lapsed into the language of causation. The red ball hit the blue ball, which caused it to move.

This is known as the launching effect, and it’s a universal property of visual perception. Although there was nothing about causation in the two-second film—it was just a montage of animated images—people couldn’t help but tell a story about what had happened. They translated their perceptions into causal beliefs.

"...all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts."

theatlantic:

“Anyway it only makes sense if you assume those premises; that all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts. This flies in the face of everything we actually know or experience of human life. But once you start thinking that the market is the model for all human behavior, that’s where you end up with.”

—

This interview with David Graeber on “What Is Debt?” is one of the most thought-provoking things published this year about the premises of finance. (via moorehn)

i do this sometimes.

Christmas 2011

ratcliffe-lee:

tried using storify as a place to gather all the media our family created around the holiday.

also updated the fam. blog theme.

The View From Nowhere

excellent modern media critique.

undoubtedly, in an effort to foster non-opinion, thought leaders move to voice leaders and we’re left with a majority that no longer is rooted in any form of critical thinking.

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

as jigga said, on to the next.

Admit when things don't make sense.

attentionindustry:

The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.

And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.

Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them,…

this is getting printed and subsequently handed out.

happy holidays from dead trees and common sense.

update:  graham gunn is awesome. 

Regarding TheNextWeb's Shit-Ass Website

How long it takes to load the page is part of the reading experience. Bandwidth is not free, and not universally fast. People are using 3G for chrissakes. If every article on the web weighed 3 MB, you’d eat through a 2 GB data cap by reading only 20 articles a day. Not watching video — just reading.

it’s sort of like shooting yourself in the foot when your business model is selling advertising based on people visiting your web site.