Comments for Richard Bennett

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:51:11 +0000

I’m sure he’d take that as a compliment.

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:01:45 +0000

I used to work with Howeird at Starlight. Odd fellow.

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:05:29 +0000

When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea–
Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!),
And our IP address was just 3.

And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin’,
‘Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon….

–Frank Hayes (More at the link above)

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by George Ou

George Ou — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:27:27 +0000

I’d like to see him buy “unbundled” dialup service. I used to pay $30 a month for just dial-up service and that didn’t include the cost of telephone service which was WAY higher than it is today. With the price of the phone service, I was paying $60/month.

Today, I pay $35/month for Internet-only 3 Mbps DSL which is 100x faster than 30 kbps (nobody ever got more than 30 on a routine basis) dial-up service. Yeah, the “good old days”.

Funny thing is that “the good old days” were never all that good. People like to say “they don’t build them like they used to” in reference to cars and boast about how their old car would barely get bent with a 20 MPH collision. Trouble is that they don’t consider what happens when your head rams into that metal dashboard at 20 MPH or that you’d probably die in a 40 MPH crash even if you had a shoulder harness seatbelt due to the lack of a crumple zone.

Comment on Are the FCC Workshops Fair? by Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:41:52 +0000

The Media and Democracy Coalition’s letter says, “We urge the FCC to explain how five of the workshops taking place this week could exclude public interest groups and consumer rights advocates.”

The reason why, of course, is that these groups would have little to bring to the party. At best, these groups tend to repeat the same mantras over and over again (“Big Companies Bad!” “Make Everything Free!”) without addressing the actual nuts and bolts of how to solve problems. And at worst, they’re shills (“astroturf” groups) which pretend to represent consumers while really representing the agendas of corporations. (Sascha Meinrath’s New America Foundation falls into this category. Its chairman is Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who channels millions of Googlebucks to the organization each year. Likewise, lobbying groups such as Free Press, Media Access Project, and Public Knowledge are puppets on Google’s strings.)

My small, private company — which puts service ahead of profit and whose interests are aligned with those of its customers — is a far better representative of consumer interests than any of the abovementioned groups.