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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 [...]
Archive for October, 2008
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The Trouble with White Spaces
October 27th, 2008 
Richard Bennett 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 [...]
Christopher Hitchens at this best
October 27th, 2008 Richard Bennett In Slate, see The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for science and learning
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are [...]
Glorified Piracy
October 22nd, 2008 Richard Bennett 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, [...]
Google open-sources Android
October 21st, 2008 Richard Bennett 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 [...]
Obama’s CTO short list
October 20th, 2008 Richard Bennett 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 [...]
Europe’s Choice
October 16th, 2008 Richard Bennett 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, [...]
If it’s Wednesday, this must be London
October 15th, 2008 Richard Bennett 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 [...]
A Turgid Tale of Net Neutrality
October 10th, 2008 Richard Bennett 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 [...]
The best in women’s wear
October 9th, 2008 Richard Bennett Y’all should go read about this amazing dress designer, Miranda Bennett, in Time Out New York
A very feminine and elegant woman’s line with a little edge and a lot of versatility. “For my current collection, I imagined a really well-packed suitcase,†she explains. “I wanted the pieces to function together and fit a woman’s daily [...]
