So we can all just accept at this point that the One Laptop Per Child project is a failure? The idea isn’t inherently untenable. Rather, like so many things in life, it all came down to bad organization, planning, and strategy. Sucks.
Edit: This is what made me sad.

Blasts from the past

There is this great Dinosaur Comics strip about saying stupid things on the internet. His thought is that after about five years, we gain the ability to look back on anything and laugh and say, “oh, but I was so young and stupid back then!” With that in mind, I present a few past online properties of my making.

  • Boogle – The front page of the Brandeis network scanner/file search engine I developed and ran for a while, until the legal atmosphere made it increasingly unsafe to do so. Everything works except the actual search. Check out the past logos for some fun times.
  • JehudaDaddy.com – A silly domain name registered on a lark and then filled with a silly little article.
  • Who Cares? – My freshman-year student senate campaign web site.

There is also one special entry that I found while poking around on an old backup CD-ROM. It is the site of my erstwhile web design business, Terrestrial Concepts. I was very proud of this site at the time; I pored into it tons of love and time and effort, and all of the HTML and web design tricks that I knew.

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

— "The Uneven Playing Field," a New York Times Magazine investigation of sports injuries. What's scary is that no one can figure out why A.C.L.s snap.

In the last several months, public mass transit ridership around the US has skyrocketed, while gas consumption is falling for the first time since 1991. Many transit systems are reaching capacity, which was unheard of even a year ago, and others are looking to aggressively expand, meaning more, better, and faster service. We’re starting to see the first benefits of higher gas prices, even as many other parts of the economy suffer.

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from Manchester, UK, decided to make use of the CCTV cameras seen all over British streets in order to film a music video. They performed in front of 80 different cameras, including those on city streets, in cabs, and on a bus, and then used Data Protection Act requests to recover the footage from the camera operators.

Comcast starts acting like a phone company

Comcast has all but confirmed that they are moving forward with a plan to implement clear bandwidth caps and overage fees in their cable internet service plans. This would mean that very heavy users of their internet service would be charged higher rates once they pass a certain monthly limit, currently proposed at 250GB.

I don’t have much respect for Comcast, and I’m always wary of any sort of entrenched monopoly doing anything that has the potential to harm customers, but at first blush this seems like a reasonable, open, and equitable solution to an ongoing and vexing problem. It is true that new internet applications increasingly focus on things like streaming video and moving around large chunks of data, and so-called “unlimited” broadband is an important component in the growth of these new services. In an ideal world, bandwidth would be plentiful and cheap.

Right now, in the US broadband market, bandwidth is somewhat constrained, but generally not terribly expensive. However, cable and telephone companies — the primary providers of service to something like 90% of American broadband users — feel that to expand and improve their aging and sometimes decrepit cable plant, they need to find new revenue models. Their other ideas include strange behavior like messing with internet protocols at a very low level to surreptitious disrupt certain types of traffic (and thus save their bandwidth bills by stymying heavy users), as well as the ludicrous idea of demanding that content providers pay for the bandwidth that their readers and viewers use. These violations of the concept of “network neutrality” would be harmful to pretty much everyone, except the broadband providers, who would make a bundle.

In that context, Comcast’s new idea of imposing reasonable bandwidth caps and charging reasonable overage fees, with reasonable procedures in place to inform customers and give them the occasional free pass, all in an open and documented and agreed to way, is the best thing I’ve heard so far in this whole ridiculous debate. Sure, I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my internet bill go up, and I’d certainly worry about whether Comcast might decide at some point to start lowering quotas and tightening enforcement. In a free market, all of these things would be fine, because more information would allow consumers to make more informed choices, including the choice to leave a company that is giving them a bad deal. Broadband internet is not a free market, but, in many markets, it is becoming an increasingly competitive one, as cablecos and telcos poach each other’s subscribers. We can rely on market forces, to a point, to keep providers like Comcast in line, and we can rely on increased scrutiny by the FCC, Congress, and the press to hold them to their commitments.

And so with all of those caveats and worries in mind, I accept, if not applaud, Comcast’s new direction, and look forward with at least a tiny bit of optimism and hope that perhaps there is light at the end of the net neutrality tunnel.

Geeking out over submarine cables

I’m having a lot of fun reading Pipe International’s blog documenting the process of building and deploying their PPC-1 undersea telecommunication cable. The cable is running from Sydney, Australia to Guam, where it will peer with other high-capacity submarine cables into various parts of Asia. It is fascinating to learn a bit more about the amazing advances in engineering that make the installation of a 6,500 kilometer long, 1.92 Terabit per second fiber-optic cable a reality. When it comes right down to it, they are building a massive infrastructure around a pair of tiny glass fiber cables that are each the width of a human hair. And through that itty bitty cable, they are able to pipe an amount of data equivalent to, oh, I dunno, some large number of Libraries of Congress per second. Or the example they use, a system that could accommodate the entire population of Australia simultaneously making overseas telephone calls.

Now, I know that a light channel that carries 10 gigabits per second needs to pulse ten billion times a second in order to work its magic, but I never really thought about that number: ten billion light pulses per second! And then, they multiplex it on different light wavelengths so that there are 96 simultaneous data streams, each 10 gigabits per second, which adds up to 960 gigabits per second, and then another cable doing the same thing in the other direction. All this over a fiber pair the width of a couple human hairs, traveling over six thousand kilometers over the ocean floor. And the time it takes for the data to get from Sydney to Guam? 35 milliseconds.

Yeah, when you think about it, its pretty damn cool.

I would join in their jubilation, but frankly I’m tired of being right all the time. It was fun for a while, but now it’s just depressing.

— Mark Pilgrim on Microsoft's decision to shut down their "PlaysForSure" music store, leaving their customers with music that no longer plays for anything.

“DC Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey found dead

It was apparently a suicide. How strange, and sad. Last July we spoke with her on the phone, back when she was in high spirits about her upcoming legal dispute. Needless to say, it didn’t go well for her, convicted on all counts and due to be sentenced next month to a multi-year jail term. All of her assets had been seized long before under ridiculous civil forfeiture laws.

I think all the members of the team agree that it is time to retire DC Phone List. In case you don’t remember, here is the background, here is the Hill article, and here is my On the Media radio interview.

★★★☆☆
Review

Transsiberian

American missionary tourists on a trip through the bleak landscape of Siberia by rail. The train itself tries to become another character, but doesn’t really succeed. A thriller that isn’t totally thrilling, this film starts of slowly and builds slowly and then ends really quickly, degenerating from intriguing and edgy to slash and bash, with a denouement that leaves you utterly unfulfilled. I guess what happens in Siberia stays in Siberia?

It is hard to describe much of the plot without giving things away, but the advertising copy is fairly accurate:

A Trans-Siberian train journey from China to Moscow becomes a thrilling chase of deception and murder when an American couple encounters a mysterious pair of fellow travelers.

I know it sounds like I didn’t enjoy the film, but I did, at least until the last 20 minutes, and then I didn’t anymore. I’d compare it to Sunshine, a 2007 sci-fi thriller with a similar problem: some great, slow setup of the characters and environment, edgy and intriguing, and then it all goes to hell in utterly random and implausible ways at the end.

Or perhaps more accurate is to look to something like A Simple Plan, the excellent and disturbing film that spotlights so clearly how one bad action and one big lie, left uncorrected, can build and compound and snowball out of control, leaving in its wake misery and pain. That’s what should have happened in Transsiberian, but it didn’t, and I’m not really sure why.