August 30th, 2008 
Richard Bennett I ran the Speedmatters test on my Comcast connection today, just for the fun of it (OK, I’m bored with this Obama vs. the Moose Hunter stuff.) This test is sponsored by the Communication Workers union, as an argument for taxpayer subsidies for broadband. The results I got are not what they’re hoping for:
So my [...]
August 29th, 2008 Richard Bennett Hmmm. (Skip the first 8 minutes, it’s just the old man rambling.) She’s young, good-looking, inexperienced, a bit ideological, and a member of a marginal group; just like Barack Obama, actually. But she’s running for VP, not to be the big dog. She’s not at all embarrassing, not a Katherine Harris, Harriet Miers, or Dan [...]
August 28th, 2008 Richard Bennett Comcast has modified its terms of use to clarify that “excessive use” is 250 GB per month. If you download more than this, and are on the list of heaviest users, you’ll get a letter from Comcast telling you to dial it back. If you don’t you’ll be canned. Over-limit fees are not part of [...]
August 27th, 2008 Richard Bennett The LA Times boils China’s Olympics down to their real essence:
Yet what planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable. The near-hysterical drive by Chinese leaders to put on the biggest, most spectacular sporting event ever, and to engineer a [...]
August 26th, 2008 Richard Bennett I hate to say “I told you so” (actually, I love it, but play along), but the director of the Beijing games’ opening and closing ceremonies touts the obedience of his countrymen in boosting his own work:
China’s most famous film director, Zhang Yimou, who directed both ceremonies, said only Chinese performers were skilled, disciplined and [...]
August 21st, 2008 Richard Bennett John Schwartz generally works the tech beat at the New York Times, but he’s written a fine review of “Snow Falling in Spring”, a children’s book about Mao’s China. We join the narrative in the middle of the account of the Great Leap Forward:
…Neighbors contribute their cooking pots and cutlery for the cause. When Li’s [...]
August 21st, 2008 Richard Bennett David Smith confronts the Google myth for The Observer, including accounts of the pilgramages politicians take to Google HQ:
Shortly after Obama’s pilgrimage to the ‘Googleplex’, it was the turn of David Cameron. Cameron was accompanied there by Steve Hilton, his director of strategy, who has since moved permanently to California with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, [...]
August 20th, 2008 Richard Bennett If you don’t know who Jeremy Clarkson is, or don’t have a sense of humor, you won’t get this, so go read The Guardian:
Downing Street always posts responses to petitions and normally the replies to the jokey ones are pretty terse. But last night, in response to the Clarkson request, it put up this.
Okay, it’s [...]
August 20th, 2008 Richard Bennett Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues at the FCC have issued their Comcast order, available at this link. They find some novel sources of authority and apply some interesting interpretations of the facts. I’ll have some detailed commentary after I’ve read it all and checked the footnotes. It’s an amusing exercise, if you like [...]
August 17th, 2008 Richard Bennett Now that Michael Phelps has won 17 dozen gold medals with chocolate chips and the world has been made safe for democracy for another Olympiad, we can turn to more trivial matters such as the technology policies of our presidential candidates. Friday McCain (the old white guy) released a tech policy statement that was very [...]
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