Author: RB

Valleywag goes all profound

You don’t normally associate Valleywag with profundity, but damned if they didn’t go there today:

This is why geeks shouldn’t try to change the world. Nor should they be held accountable, as Scoble’s trying to do to Kaplan, for not changing the world. They aren’t equipped to. They are ignorant of the real world. They live narrow, insular lives defined by their monitor screen, a reality that has very little to do with the outside world. It’s a world that they cannot learn about by searching Google, and a world they can’t change by writing a blog post.

I’d have to agree with that. Geeks (and other sheltered, middle-class children) don’t have the knowledge of the real world to effectively change it. That’s the problem with things like political blogs and idealistic blogger conferences. Bloggers gravitate to causes with snappy labels on them, like “net neutrality”, not to causes they understand.

And you really can’t help until you know what you’re dealing with.

Roaming the afterlife

A dead Malaysian ran up a $218 trillion cell phone bill and people are mystified:

A Malaysian man who paid off a $23 wireless bill and disconnected his late father’s cell phone back in January has been stiffed for subsequent charges on the closed account, MSNBC has reported. Telekom Malaysia sent Yahaya Wahab a bill for 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit, or about $218 trillion, for charges to the account, along with a demand from the company’s debt collection agency that he settle the alleged debt within 10 days, or get a lawyer.

It’s actually very simple. Dead people can communicate with the living through the simple mechanism of Electronic Voice Phenomena, documented in the movie White Noise, by leaving recored messages. They’ve apparently figured out that cell phones are way cooler than voice recorders, and they’ve all been having a ball calling living friends and relatives and shooting the breeze. As these calls come from an area with exceptionally high roaming charges, the bill seems high, by living human standards. Which is just another example of what a limited perspective we have on stuff.

Two Degrees of Douglas Adams

Richard Dawkins dedicated The God Delusion to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams introduced Dawkins to Lalla Ward, the former actress to whom Dawkins is now married. Adams and Ward knew each other from working together at Doctor Who, where Adams was a script editor and writer and Ward was the magic princess of the planet Atrios and the second incarnation of Time Lord Romana.

Adams also co-wrote a sketch for Monty Python’s Flying Circus (episode 42, A Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party.) Go forth and impress others with your grasp of trivia.

For extra credit, Ward was briefly married to Doctor Who number four Tom Baker, hence Doctor Who and Dawkins are spiritually connected three different ways.

What is Wikipedia?

I hope this clears things up:

Wikipedia is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in which participants play editors of a hypothetical online encyclopedia, where they try to insert misinformation that they are randomly assigned when they create their accounts, while preventing contrary information from being entered by others. Players with similar misinformation to promote will generally form “guilds” in order to aid each other.

The source is a very rude little wiki, the Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Bud Selig’s Travels

Isn’t this ironic as all get-out?

While Barry Bonds was breaking the home run record in San Francisco, baseball commissioner Bud Selig was in New York, preparing to meet with his chief steroids investigator.

Selig watched Bonds’ 756th homer on television Tuesday night, then met with George Mitchell on Wednesday before returning to Milwaukee, a person with knowledge of Selig’s whereabouts said.

Commissioner Selig is responsible for the Steroids Era in baseball (by refusing to do any testing until last year) and he couldn’t be bothered to see the fruits of his labor. Hypocrite.

Whaddup, bitches?

I won’t be able to say that in New York if this law passes:

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.

The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.

Somebody should bitch-slap Councilwoman Mealy before she embarrasses her momma again.

This is a fine example of slippery slopes in action. The Council banned the use of the “n-word”, so why shouldn’t they ban the “b-word” as nearly as offensive? And then “fatty” because it’s nearly as offensive as “bitch”, and then “retard”, and then “dullard”, and then “not exactly a genius”. Why not ban all the words in the English language, on the grounds that each one can hurt somebody’s feelings if used in the right context?

Then New Yorkers, who used to be the freest people in the world until they started banning smoking in bars and fast food and hard words, will just sit in their many corners banging their heads against their many walls and moaning, almost imperceptibly, about the abject emptiness of their lives.

The bitches.

What could you do with fat fiber?

Doc Searls wants to know what you would do with a Gigabit fiber connection between your dwelling unit and the Internet. My answer: nothing I couldn’t do with Verizon’s standard 15 Mb/s connection. Am I missing some vital need that I have and don’t know about? Tons of bandwidth is cool until you get the bill for it, and paying for more than I need doesn’t seem all that smart to me.

White Space Faux Pas

The great white space coalition’s submissions to the FCC are a big bust:

A group of companies including Microsoft and Google had hoped to convince regulators that some new devices could carry high-speed Internet connections over television airwaves without interfering with broadcast signals.

But it didn’t work as planned, according to a report released this week by the Federal Communications Commission. After four months of testing, the agency concluded that the devices either interfered with TV signals or could not detect them in order to skirt them.

Why am I not surprised?

See more discussion by free marketeer Jerry Brito at TLF and by consumer warrior Harry Feld at Public Knowledge.