FiveThirtyEight.com is the most interesting election horse race site. It’s run by Nate Silver, the Baseball Prospectus stats guy, who does the most thorough analysis of polling data, sophisticated in a way that only a Sabermetrician can fully appreciate. Silver rejects the “tightening race” narrative that we’ve started to hear, as he looks at state [...]
Like several other engineers, I’m disturbed by the white spaces debate. The White Space Coalition, and its para-technical boosters, argue something like this: “The NAB is a tiger, therefore the White Spaces must be unlicensed.” And they go on to offer the comparison with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, arguing as Tom Evslin does on CircleID today [...]
Commenting in Spiked on the Lessig School of digital piracy enablement, Andrew Orlowski traces the odd course of progressive thought on creativity:
In polite company, sympathy for copyright is in short supply, while for politicians, the ‘creative economy’ is little more than a platitude. Such attitudes are most deeply held amongst people who consider themselves liberal, [...]
I lost my Blackberry Curve somewhere in England last week, so I ordered an HTC G1 from T-Mobile as a replacement. The Curve doesn’t do 3G, so it’s an obsolete product at this point. And as I’m already a T-Mobile customer (I chose them for the Wi-Fi capability of their Curves,) the path of least [...]
According to Business Week, Obama’s CTO will be one of these guys:
Among the candidates who would be considered for the job, say Washington insiders, are Vint Cerf, Google’s (GOOG) “chief internet evangelist,” who is often cited as one of the fathers of the Internet; Microsoft (MSFT) chief executive officer Steve Ballmer; Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeffrey [...]
Andrew Orlowski explains the state of Internet regulation in both the US and Europe in The Register:
For almost twenty years, internet engineers have persuaded regulators not to intervene in this network of networks, and phenomenal growth has been the result. Because data revenues boomed, telecoms companies which had initially regarded packet data networking with hostility, [...]
The Net Neutrality event went well in Brussels yesterday, and today I’ve set up shop in London for another go-round. I love London. I’m within walking distance of the British Museum, McDonald’s, and Krispy Kreme, and two tube stops from some Kerala food. It rains like Portland, just to discourage the tourists, but not so [...]
An article by Glenn Derene on net neutrality in Popular Mechanics is getting a lot of attention this week. It attempts to define net neutrality – always a perilous task – and to contrast the positions of our two presidential candidates on it:
…there’s no accepted definition of network neutrality itself. It is, in fact, more [...]
My next personal computer is going to be an ultra-portable tablet. I’ve never bought a laptop of my own, since my employers tend to shower me with them, and they’ve had so many drawbacks I couldn’t see any point in shelling out for one of my own. But recent research shows that we’re officially in [...]
Now that the whole world knows that Skype’s Chinese partner, TOM, has been censoring IM’s and building a database of forbidden speakers for the government of China, Skype President Josh Silverman had to respond:
In April 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that TOM operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages, and it [...]
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