Month: September 2008

Read David Brooks

Conservative friends especially need to read David Brooks today on the role of experience and prudence in the conservative movement:

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said…

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

H/T to Daniel Drezner.

We can be conservative and libertarian without being stupid, folks. Really.

Ars Technica botches another story

Why is it so hard for the tech press report on the broadband business with some semblance of accuracy? I know some of this stuff is complicated, but if it’s your business to explain technology and business developments to the public, isn’t it reasonable to suppose you’re going to get the facts right most of the time?

Case in point is Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, the hugely popular tech e-zine that was recently purchased by Conde Nast/Wired for $25 million, healthy bucks for a web site. Lasar is a self-appointed FCC watcher who seems to consistently botch the details on targets of FCC action. The most recent example is a story about a clarification to AT&T’s terms of use for its U-Verse triple play service. The update advises customers that they may see a temporary reduction in their Internet download speed if they’re using non-Internet U-Verse television or telephone services that consume a lot of bandwidth. Lasar has no idea what this means, so he turns to Gizmodo and Public Knowledge for explanation, and neither of them gets it either. So he accepts a garbled interpretation of some AT&T speak filtered through Gizmodo’s misinterpretation as the gospel truth of the matter:

Ars contacted AT&T and was told by company spokesperson Brad Mays that the firm has no intention of “squeezing” its U-verse customers. “It’s more a matter of the way data comes into and travels around a home,” Mays said. “There are things (use of PCs, video, etc.) that can impact the throughput speed a customer gets. We are not doing anything to degrade the speed, it’s just a fact of the way data travels.”

The AT&T guy is trying to explain to Lasar that U-Verse TV uses the same cable as U-Verse Internet, but U-Verse TV has first call on the bandwidth. The cable’s bandwidth is roughly 25 Mb/s, and HDTV streams are roughly 8 Mb/s. If somebody in your house is watching two HDTV shows, 16 of that 25 is gone, and Internet can only use the remaining 9, which is a step down from the 10 Mb/s that it can get if you’re running one HDTV stream alongside an SDTV stream.

This isn’t a very complicated issue, and it shouldn’t be so muddled after multiple calls to AT&T if the writers in question were mildly up-to-speed on IPTV.

Lasar botched another recent story on Comcast’s agreement with the Florida Attorney General to make its monthly bandwidth cap explicit as well, claiming that Comcast had adopted the explicit cap in a vain attempt to avoid a fine:

Ars contacted the Florida AG about this issue, and received the following terse reply: “We believe the change pursuant to our concerns was posted during our investigation.” When asked whether this means that when the AG’s probe began, Comcast didn’t post that 250GB figure, we were told that the aforementioned one sentence response explains everything and to have a nice day.

In fact, the cap was part of its agreement with Florida, as the AG’s office explains on its web site:

Under today’s settlement, reached with Comcast’s full cooperation, the company has agreed not to enforce the excessive use policy without prior clear and conspicuous disclosure of the specific amount of bandwidth usage that would be considered in violation of the policy. The new policy will take effect no later than January, 1, 2009.

And everybody who follows the industry knows that. The Comcast cap is also less meaningful than Lasar reports, since Comcast says they’re only going to get tough on customers in excess of the cap who are also in the top 1% of bandwidth consumers, so simply going over 250 GB won’t get you in trouble at the future date in which everyone is doing it.

The tech press in general and Ars Technica in particular needs to upgrade its reporting standards. It’s bad enough when Ars trots out opinion pieces on network neutrality by Nate Anderson thinly disguised as reporting; most sensible readers understand that Anderson is an advocate, and take his “reporting” with the necessary mix of sodium chloride. But Anderson doesn’t consistently get his facts wrong the way Lasar does.

It would be wise for Ars to spend some of the Conde Nast money on some fact-checkers, the better to avoid further embarassment. We understand that Gizmodo is simply a gadget site that can’t be counted on for deep analysis, and that Public Knowledge is a spin machine, but journalists should be held to a higher standard.

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The interviewer’s name was Charlie

Sarah Palin scored points for knowing her interviewer’s nickname, but didn’t do so well on the actual questions. Most notably, she went all “moose in the headlights” when asked about the Bush Doctrine. Jim Fallows explains why Palin’s ignorance is troubling:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Fred Kaplan’s recap in Slate is excellent:

The other spine-chilling moment came when Gibson asked about her recent comment, in a speech at her church, that the war in Iraq is “a task that is from God.” (ABC then showed a YouTube clip of the speech.) Palin tried to finesse the question, saying that her remarks were only “a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words” that we should pray not that God is on our side but that we are on God’s side. Gibson didn’t back down, noting that she had in fact gone on to say, “There is a plan, and it is God’s plan.” To this, Palin replied:

I believe that there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good. I believe that there is great hope and great potential for every country to be able to live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie, and I believe that these are the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That in my worldview is a grand—the grand plan.

Two things came to mind upon hearing her say these words. First, they sound like the earnest answer given by a contestant in a beauty pageant when the M.C. asks her about world peace. (Sorry to seem sexist, but it’s true; read it again.)

Second, and more to the point, do we want someone a heartbeat away from the presidency—and a 72-year-old cancer survivor’s heartbeat, at that—to possess both impetuousness (“You can’t blink”) and holy certitude? Isn’t that what we’ve had, actually in the Oval Office, the past eight years?

Robots are wired to react a certain way, but people are required to think.

Here’s the bonus beauty queen interview for comparison:

In other news, Lorne Michaels Wants Fey for SNL’s Palin:

Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels said the show is talking with Tina Fey about playing Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin at some point this season, possibly as soon as this Saturday’s season premiere.

This would be superb, of course.

Sarah Palin, Abuser of Children

Newsweek has some interesting back story on Sarah Palin’s Troopergate scandal. Three years ago, the Alaska courts found she had engaged in a form of child abuse and told her to stop:

Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers’ union about how Sarah Palin—then a private citizen—and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were “not job-related,” and that Wooten was being “harassed” by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten’s behavior and character. “Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse,” the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: “Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives.”

The emotional abuse of children suffering from their parents’ unpleasant divorce is a very serious matter, one that casts doubt on the mental stability and judgment of the adults involved. Given that Palin acted this way from one step removed – it was her sister’s divorce, not hers – makes this behavior even more troubling. If I hadn’t already decided not to vote for Palin because of her lack of intellect and experience, this would have turned me around. We don’t need any child abusers in the White House.

Palin faces the firing squad

Obama still has a healthy lead in the electoral college, which will only increase as Palin has to speak in public without a script. Nothing to worry about, the McCain campaign can’t keep her in seclusion forever.

She’s supposed to do an interview with Charlie Gibson tomorrow, but there are apparently all kinds of off-limits topics, like the pregnant daughter. That’s an interesting topic alongside Palin’s cutting back the funding for a teen mother’s center in Alaska, of course. And I take it there are similar issues around funding for special-needs babies as well. And I’d love to know why she left a church where people speak in tongues while trying to get elected governor, and why she lost her first attempt to win statewide office as Lt. Governor.
Originally posted as a comment by Richard Bennett on Broadband Politics using Disqus.

Our Efforts Bearing Fruit

Regular readers are aware of my Op-Ed criticizing Google’s rapacious ways, written for the San Francisco Chronicle and subsequently re-printed in the Washington Times. That doesn’t happen too often, BTW. The Wall St. Journal reports that the Justice Department is paying attention:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Google shares tumbled 5.5%, or $24.30, to $419.95 in 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Yahoo shares were up 18 cents to $18.26.

For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

An 80% market share in search ads is not good for democracy, of course, so we applaud the impending suit in advance.

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Electoral Math

Apparently many Americans vote with their sex organs. In the latest polls, McCain leads Obama:

Many of the shifts toward McCain stem from gains among white women, voters his team hoped to sway with the pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. White women shifted from an eight-point pre-convention edge for Obama to a 12-point McCain advantage now.

So while McCain is a cynical bastard for putting an unqualified woman on his ticket, he’s not stupid.

Kevin Martin threatens Comcast

Kevin Martin is upset that Comcast has challenged his authority by filing a lawsuit against the FCC for making up law out of thin air. The Chairman of the FCC expressed his scorn by releasing a statement that makes him sound like one of the dumbest men in America:

“Given Comcast’s past failure to disclose its network management practices to its customers, it is important Comcast respond to the many still-unanswered questions about its new management techniques,” Martin warned in a statement released this afternoon. Most notably, what exactly does Comcast mean when it says it will have a “protocol agnostic” management system in place by the end of the year?

And as for the bandwidth limits that Comcast has now announced: “How will consumers know if they are close to a limit?” Martin asked. “If a consumer exceeds a limit, is his traffic slowed? Is it terminated? Is his service turned off?”

Let’s see if we can help the Chairman:

1. The “end of the year” is December 31, at midnight. In urban areas, people will make noise and drink a lot. It would be good for Kevin Martin to be among them.

2. Comcast has said they’ll write a *very mean letter* to customers over the 250 GB limit and among the top 1% in bandwidth consumption. It was in the papers, but not on the funny page.

3. I won’t define “protocol agnostic” as that subject was covered, at length, the order the FCC’s lawyers wrote in the Comcast matter. Martin should have one of them explain it to him.

Where did Bush find this person?