Nate Anderson has a good summary on a new FCC report on the subsidies needed to bring broadband to underserved and unserved areas.  The FCC estimates that bringing a combination of 4 Mbps DSL (using 12,000 foot loop lengths) and 4G wireless to rural America would cost roughly 23.5 billion dollars in subsidies.  Going directly [...]

If we listened to all the stories of how far behind U.S. mobile Internet service is, this Engadget review of iPad service plans would come as a complete shock to us since Americans have a relatively good deal.  Customers in Japan who opt for a long-term contract have to pay ¥2,910/month ($31.2/month based on 5/11/2010 [...]

A post on Saturday mused on the difficulty of combating the simplistic memes of the Free Culture Movement. The theme is continued today, this time by examining the simplistic memes that characterize conventional news media — with a bit on the Congress tossed in for good measure. The Washington Post has a feature called Story [...]

Speta produces an article which examines the proposed merger between NBC and Comcast. He points out that Comcast will be the majority owner and is already the nation’s largest distributor of cable services. The company already owns several of its own channels including sports, news, and political content.

Content & Copyright ars technica, The death of the album (in handy graph form) (May 10): “the shift to digital singles, the death of the album, and the rise of streaming. To an industry accustomed to fattening up on album-only CD revenue for two decades, this new world has been tough to accept.” Chicago Reader, [...]

The Wi-Fi Alliance and Wireless Gigabit Alliance have agreed to cooperate in the “WiGig” standard which will allow short range wireless networking speeds of 6 Gbps using the unlicensed 60 GHz millimeter wave.  The range will be limited to ~30 feet and most likely within the same room since the propagation characteristics of 60 GHz [...]

A difficulty in dealing with the Free Culture Movement is that its paladins are skilled propagandists, expert at feeding buzzwords into the discussion stream and at making it somehow vulgar to disagree with them and to support the firms and people who actually do the work of the nation.

Free Press has assured us that net neutrality couldn’t possibly have a negative impact on investment, so this is clearly just a coincidence.

ABI Research looks into the application and acceptance of cloud computing amongst the US consumer. Cloud Computing is a technology used where applications are web based and off site of the users computer.

My predilection is for representational rather than abstract art. It need not be photographic; Impressionism is fine, for example, and most German Expressionism, but there must be something to anchor me to the real world and orient my response. Pure abstraction seems to me like a bit of a con – I must accept something as great art on pain of branding myself a philistine.