David Heinemeir Hansson has laid waste to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his diatribe “You couldn’t pay me to work for Ballmer”. The dubious “evidence” he uses is the comparison of Microsoft stock prices of the 1990s to the 2000s. The problem is that Bill Gates remained at Microsoft well after 2000 and the 2000 stock prices were artificially inflated.

Free Press has long claimed that Net Neutrality is crucial in protecting free speech, but now they have signed a petition asking the FCC to start monitoring “hate speech” over the Internet. The hypocrisy isn’t very surprising given that Free Press’ definition of free speech is far from what the definition in the Constitutional since they believe that free speech must be “free as in free beer”, but not free from government control.

As a refreshing alternative to the Apple iTunes store, I had grown quite fond of renting music for 10 cents a pop and owning them for 89 cents at lala.com.  Not only were the prices better, I didn’t have to deal with running iTunes on my computer which was a nonstarter for me because of [...]

In the defense of FCC Chairman Genachowski’s proposal to adopt an “lite Title II” regulatory framework for Internet transmission services, Austin Schlick (General Counsel of FCC) is using an often repeated argument that the certainty of regulation is better than the uncertainty of impending regulation.  Schlick argued: “If anyone in this room believes you’re going [...]

Is the cost of Internet service an economic barrier to individuals groups and businesses? We we do the math, the cost of bandwidth is either free to the individual or it is negligible for businesses.

74 Democrats (in additional to 34 Republican senators) have sent a letter to FCC chairman Genochowski telling him to stop his efforts to reclassify broadband under Title II. This is actually two more Democrats than the 72 that previously asked chairman Genochowski to back off on his proposed Net Neutrality rules.

Robert Scoble has given quite a bit of attention to startup Soluto which bills itself as “anti-frustration” software, a Windows PC crapware cleaning.  Perhaps it’s a bit too much attention as their servers have been completely overloaded for nearly a day and it’s making their anti-frustration software frustrating.  The software has largely been completely unusable [...]

Free Press wants us to believe that ISPs will start demanding fees from websites unless we stop them with new regulations, yet they contradict their own admission that ISPs don’t have the market power to block websites since content is king.

Well that didn’t take long, but it seems that the MPEG Licensing Authority is already looking to form a patent pool for VP8 and Google’s recently announced WebM project.  This really shouldn’t surprise anyone given the fact that the VP8 video compression codec has so many similarities to H.264. Now that we know that VP8 [...]

The blogosphere seems upset about AT&T’s announcement to increase its Early Termination Fee (ETF) for smartphones from $175 to $325 while decreasing standard phones from $175 to $150.  Given the fact that smartphones are becoming more capable and more expensive, and given the fact that consumers don’t want to pay up front, it seems only [...]