take your interval

Last month, I wrote about Comcast and its practice of secretly limiting peer to peer internet protocols while telling its customers they were paying for unlimited access to the internet. My concern then was an article in the New York Times that reported the government’s intention of taking control of the internet due to this secrecy on the part of big ISPs. I made this plea to Comcast:

Just be honest with your customer. If you can’t handle the bandwidth demanded by your consumers, say so. Whether you use pricing to regulate demand or control the supply, just be up front with your customers. That way, we can avoid governmental toll booths on the information superhighway.

Clearly, Comcast listened to me.* How else can we explain this week’s press release from Comcast and P2P giant BitTorrent?

Comcast Corporation and BitTorrent, Inc. announced today that they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management…

Comcast announced that it will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic…

“Additionally, we plan to more than double the upstream capacity of our residential Internet service in several key markets by year end 2008…”

Comcast has acknowledged their inability to meet current demand and have unveiled their plan to change that. It includes working with other ISPs and the P2P companies that are causing the ‘problem.’ Now the government has no reason to get involved. You’re welcome*.

*My ego isn’t quite that big, yet.

The NY Times has an op-ed piece from Paul Krugman that simplifies the cause of the US’s current economic exhale. He doesn’t get into whether or not the Federal Reserve needs to be anywhere near the monetary system, but I’ll let that slide, this time:

If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.

But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?

Why does the financial system need salvation?

Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?

The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.

Read the rest here.

For anyone following the Obama/Wright diversion, here’s and article worth reading called Just a Typical Black Person:

Good thing for Martin Luther King admirers – blogs, talk radio, and 24/7 cable news “analysis” weren’t around in the Sixties.

King might not have the status of patron saint in the temple of American civil religion. Then again, King is safely dead. While America may be the land of “second-chances,” its people are definitely not the type to give props to a prophet while he or she is alive.

In criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam, King said America was “one of the main purveyors of violence” in the world. Imagine King, with his sing-song black preacher cadence, saying that over and over and over again on CNN.

Longtime readers of this column might say this is typical Sean Gonsalves fare. And it’s true. So, let me explain just how typical I am.

I’m just a typical American who happens to be black, and no matter what Limbaugh says about Barack’s grandma, there’s a difference between typical and stereotypical.

The rest can be read here.

Self-labeled life long liberal (< understatement>I think he writes plays, too< /understatement>) David Mamet has had a change of heart. It seems conservatism is his new home:

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Now, in my experience, anything Mamet writes is worth reading and anything he directs is worth seeing. This commentary in The Village Voice is no different.

While I don’t agree with everything he says, his view on the innocuousness of corporations, for example, since their unfettered growth and political power are signposts on the way to fascim, I do agree with his general outlook. Namely, that the marketplace is better at solving problems and providing opportunity than an interventionist government. It was an interventionist government that designed and empowered the modern corporations in America, granting them the same rights and privileges as citizens under the law, and insulating their leaders from the consequences of their actions wherever possible. Here are a few more examples of good intentions gone wrong.

I may have missed it but I didn’t find where Mamet shared his view on personal liberties. If he’s stayed on the left in that regard, I think he’d fall under a more libertarian label, but who knows?

In the end, I still care more about Mamet’s next movie (Red Belt looks interesting) than I do his politics, but it’s worth taking note whenever a member of the entertainment business shares a well-thought out political position (regardless of what that position is).

It seems the arms dealer branch of the defense department made another oops involving nuclear technology. At least this time, it didn’t involve completed warheads.

The New York Times is reporting a slight distribution error in the arms dealer branch of the defense department. Turns out, when Taiwan asked for batteries, they got fuses for nuclear warheads instead, an error that went undetected for a year and a half.

The fuses have now been returned, and an investigation and confirmation of inventory will be launched, likely similar to the investigation launched after last year’s ‘inexcusable’ mistake that resulted in armed nuclear warheads flying full across the US from North to South. It would be nice if this earlier investigation revealed the fuse fiasco, but I’m afraid Taiwan’s integrity is our savior here. They discovered and reported the error to the US.

While mistakenly shipping highly specialized nuclear missile fuses won’t likely bring about a nuclear driven ‘terrorist’ attack, there’s no reason to think that any given nuclear missile part isn’t capable of being similarly mislabeled and shipped to any of our arms clients (and we have many), since we were unable to detect this or last year’s nuclear errors before they took place.

I wonder if the attorney general would be surprised yet again at the scope and location of this threat?

Finally, one has to ask, if Russia or China made a similar shipping error to one of its arms recipients, how understanding would the US be? Let’s hope China, who isn’t exactly friendly with Taiwan and has been financing our deficit for years, is feeling generous.