Increased commercial competition in European television has resulted in a major decline in the quality and diversity of programming – Shockingly, as major conglomerates buy up independent stations and start ratings wars with public television, broadcasting across the board suffers.

Changing the Tune – A fun and disturbing little scifi story about a near future litigative society where everyone gets upset and offended at everything so that they can bring instant, computer-mediated “micro-suits” against each other to make money from “pain and suffering” (via BoingBoing).

Why Are We Fighting Over The Last 1%? – Bob Frankson points out that the broadband component of new cable networks is only something like 1% of the available bandwidth, the rest is taken up by the cable companies with video content, continuing to preserve their natural monopoly and getting away with it. This is stupid — with IP service, anyone can deliver video just as anyone can deliver data. Allowing the cable companies a continued monopoly is stupid and bad for society. Even if it means cable companies need to take big hits or even get run out of business, it is worth it because unrestricted access to the bandwidth will serve society sooo much better. The possibilities really are unimaginable at this point.

What happens when you sign up for Verizon’s new FIOS service – While they seem to know what they’re doing, the process of installing fiber is apparently very complicated and time-consuming, and its unclear whether they’ve worked out all of the kinks. One would hope that for new planned developments and apartment buildings all this stuff would be pre-wired and we could just forego the legacy copper phone lines and such in favor of a single fiber cable. One thing is clear: Verizon is throwing a heck of a lot of money at this project. I’m sure the idea of taking over both internet connectivity and TV service from the cable companies is a pretty good incentive to make this happen…

In development, forget the corner cases and just do the 80% – “[W]e just don’t care. Not because we’re lazy or sloppy or naive — in fact, just the opposite. Our apathy towards the edge case is born out of bitter experience.” (via Luis)

Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine – An editorial (or something) that seems to have been written soon after the doctrine was repealed. Provides some good examples of its use.

Bicycle seats cause sexual disfunction – I’ve (re-)discovered very quickly just how uncomfortable bicycle seats are, but I guess I sort of figured that if everyone uses them they must be fashioned that way for some logical reason. This article basically says no, we just have silly-shaped, uncomfortable bicycle seats that just happen to cause sexual disfunction for *no* good reason whatsoever. Huh.

Why Joss Whedon should stick to television – Slate offers a spot-on analysis of, well, basically what the title says. Due to very complicated and ongoing circumstances things reached a point where Joss made the movie Serenity, which, in my estimation, is awesomely wonderful. But it would have been a lot more wonderful had the show Firefly been able to run its course. We have entered an era where quality television storytelling is becoming at least slightly more regular, and TV is not looked upon simply as the “boob tube,” with movies as the higher art form. Rather, people seem to be getting sick of standard Hollywood dreck and rediscovering television as new shows come along with strong storytelling. Joss is a master of such storytelling, and to some extent his talents for conceiving rich universes and complete, three-dimensional characters is wasted when working in a palette constrained to 2 hours. A warning to those who haven’t yet seen Serenity: the article contains a pretty major plot spoiler, although it does not reveal any specific details of the event(s) in question.

A new study claims that more religious societies generally have higher rates of violent crime, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, and suicide. I don’t doubt that religious practice that teaches tolerance, love, and mutual respect can have a strong influence for good. However, most ferevent religious believers teach that their path is the only righteous one and that non-believers should be pitied, converted, shunned, or even destroyed. When religion promotes intolerance, hatred, and disgust, not to mention when religion demands its adherants defy basic logic and scientific principles, I can see why it would cause great ills in society.

A webified version of the 1984 pamphlet distributed by the campaign to allow bicycles on the T – Justice at last!

Salon offers a perfect review of Serenity that encapsulates what is so great about the show and how the movie relates. An especially good read for those who saw some of the series and found it only tolerable.

Emory student government declares “war” on WashU – The student government president stormed into an emergency meeting wearing military fatigues and had his War Department escort the senate’s president pro tem out of the room after he protested the legislature being dissolve and the campus being put on a war footing.

Other nations upset US won’t relinquish control of “the net” to UN – Far as I can tell, the Department of Commerce hasn’t done *anything* that could be considered discriminatory or otherwise bad in their managment of the DNS infrastructure and the root servers. This talk by developing countries about being shafted when it comes to IP addresses is a joke. There are name registries per region, DNS has a common-carrier status, and there has not been any shortage of IPs, including netblocks being reallocated (i.e. revoked from people who have way too many) as needed. And if a point comes when the DNS system somehow gets untenable, nothing stops other countries from taking the (at this point, stupid) step of creating and using an alternative DNS structure. This is just silly political posturing by people who I would trust far less, at this point, to manage this thing competently and keep politics out of it.

The simple penny – Wish *I* had a blog where a simple post about coins would result in an 87 comment discussion of monetary practices around the world. Apparently America is pretty backwards when it comes to change. Hehe, get it?

A disturbing story of how Utah police stormed a legal rave party in Salt Lake City with no warning. The comparison made is to other high-energy events with large crowds and potential drug use, like NASCAR races and other types of concerts. It sounds like the concert organizers did everything right here, including hiring security to maintain order and search patrons, having ambulance crews at the party, and having representatives from DanceSafe on hand to verify that things were going well. At any large-scale gathering there will be some drug use, perhaps a bit of violence, people getting drunk, people being disorderly. So why storm a rave with helicopters, tear gas, and guns drawn when you wouldn’t do the same for any other event? The answer is probably a simple one — they don’t like those kinds of parties in Utah.

Slate offers another article about how treating clinical drug trial data as trade secrets is bad. The big problem with this being that the good results get made public when the drug is approved, but when it is tested for different uses and does not gain approval, we never officially know why, even when the “why” is something along the lines of “this drug dramatically increases suicidal tendancies in otherwise healthy adults.” An older article says that drug companies do shodd research, and of course I’ve already blogged about the general suckiness of the FDA, which is putting the companies it works with before the good of the public.

Understanding the scale of Hurricane Katrina – This neat interactive map thingy from the Boston Globe gives some sense of proportion for those of us who don’t know how big things are around New Orleans. In this overlay, which only serves to demonstrate size, not predict what would happen in a flood of the Boston area, Wellesly and Harvard are under water, but Brandeis is just barely spared. Too bad about Brookline, though, I’ll miss eating at Zaftig’s.

Two residents at Brigham and Women’s don’t like the medical inaccuracies of House and Grey’s Anatomy. They discuss the initial rise of medical shows, when every script was vetted by the AMA and doctors were portrayed as dispassionate superheroes focused solely on the patients’ needs, rather than having problems of their own. I agree the pendulum has dramatically swung to the point where on some of these shows the patients are barely relevent. Of course I disagree with their yearning to return to a time of self-censorship, but I do understand their broader point. One thing they did not bring up but that I wonder about is whether people perceptions of doctors as the kind of emotionally messed up (read: human) people portrayed on Grey’s and elsewhere is partially responsible (in addition to many other factors, of course) for the dramatic rise in malpractice lawsuits.

People are finally catching on to the idea that posting lots of personal details on thefacebook.com can have consequences. Partially because people are being too forthcoming, partially because other people are taking entries too seriously (hey, I’ve been there with my blog). I just find this amusing because this is the sort of thing we were talking about back before thefacebook.com even came to Brandeis, and I in fact had an email discussion with one of the site’s founders at Harvard discussing some of my and others’ concerns.

Quite the turn around when Palm starts shipping phones with Windows. Palm has been mismanaged for years and stopped innovating a long time ago. At some point it was split into two companies, one of which made the operating system and one which made the hardware. Palm didn’t come up with anything useful and new to utilize the capabilities of new hardware, meanwhile Microsoft threw gobs of time and money at another market they felt the need to dominate, and succeeded. I’ve played a bit with Windows CE (Pocket PC?) devices, and just have not seen any appeal at all in running a Windows environment on a tiny screen.