My esteemed friend James Cridland (@JamesCridland) has a nice pic on his Twitter account which shows him apparently laughing heartily. Most of the time this is fine, but it looks somewhat odd when he’s passing on some grim news — as here.
Maybe there’s an opportunity here: mood-sensitive images anyone?
This morning’s Observer column.
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make infatuated with their own ingenuity. Witness the heady talk about “the internet of things”. The basic idea is that we are moving from an era when the network connected human beings to one where a majority of the nodes on it will be devices: printers, cameras, monitoring devices, domestic appliances – yea even unto the humble toaster.
Two forces are driving this trend…
Extraordinary video of the Japanese earthquake as experienced in a public park in Tokyo. What’s astonishing is how calm the chap appears to be — and how steady is his camerawork.
The link came originally from the American Geophysical Union blog. Thanks to Charles Arthur for passing it on.
From today’s Guardian.
Democratic senator Al Franken has has issued a rallying cry to “innovators and entrepreneurs” at SXSW to fight back against Comcast and other companies lobbying to pave the way for a two-speed internet.
[…]
“The one thing that big corporations have that we don’t is the ability to purchase favourable political outcomes,” he said.
“Big corporations like the telecoms firms have lots of lobbyists – and good ones too. Every policy-maker in Washington is hearing much more from the anti-net neutrality side than the side without lobbyists. But everyone has more to fear from these big corporations than from us. [Their proposals] would benefit no one but them.”
In the US, where the net neutrality debate rages on despite a conciliatory bill by the Federal Communications Commission in December, telecoms giant Verizon is fighting the rules in a bid to allow internet providers to choose which content they can charge for. Net neutrality advocates fear that internet providers, most pertinently Comcast which controls a large stake in both TV and internet provision, could downgrade rivals’ content and boost delivery of their own.
“[On today’s internet] you don’t need a record deal to make a song and have people hear it, or a major film studio for people to see your film, or a fancy R&D job. But the party may almost be over,” Franken said.
“There is nothing more motivated than a corporation that thinks it is leaving money on the table. They are coming on the internet and wanting to destroy its freedom and openness. All of this is bad for consumers but an outright disaster for the independent creative community.”
Big corporations like Verizon and Comcast are not “inherently evil,” he added, but their duty to shareholders “to make as much money as they can” could change the internet for every American as they know it.
Comcast was last month accused of effectively erecting a tollbooth that puts competitive video streaming service, namely Netflix, at a competitive disadvantage. Franken on Monday accused Comcast of thinly disguising its “real endgame,” which he argued was “to put Netflix out of business”.
Yep.
See also Rory Cellan-Jones’s blog post about tomorrow’s ‘Ministerial Summit’.
From The Register.
A Welsh politician has learned an expensive lesson in libel and must pay a political rival £3,000, plus costs, thanks to a libellous Tweet he posted about the latter.
Colin Elsbury has now returned to Twitter to apologise to Councillor Edward John Talbot. Elsbury accepted that his claim that Talbot had been removed from a polling station by police during the June 2009 local election was untrue and defamatory.
Alongside £3,000 in damages, Elsbury must also pay Talbot's costs – estimated by the Press Gazette at £50,000.
Elsbury apologised for any distress, hurt, upset or embarrassment caused and accepted the statement was untrue.
Elsbury boasts a modest 28 followers on Twitter.
Boston.com has a harrowing sequence of photographs from a Japan devastated by the earthquake and its aftermath.
Amazing how powerful still images can be, even in a video-dominated world.
Terrific piece of data journalism in the Guardian.
We have identified 33 serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power stations since the first recorded one in 1952 at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada.
The information is partially from the International Atomic Energy Authority – which, astonishingly, fails to keep a complete historical database – and partially from reports. Of those we have identified, six happened in the US and five in Japan. The UK and Russia have had three apiece.
Using Google Fusion tables, we’ve put these on a map, so you can see how they’re spread around the globe:
This morning’s Observer column.
Here’s a tale of two societies. The South Korean communications commission is planning to boost broadband speeds in that country tenfold by the end of 2012. That means Koreans will get one gigabit per second (Gbps) connections by next year, which is 200 times as fast as the 5Mbps ADSL connection which is common in the UK. Meanwhile, back in the middle ages (aka Whitehall next Wednesday), a ministerial summit on “net neutrality” convened by the culture secretary Ed Vaizey will hear how Britain’s internet service providers (ISPs) plan to throttle still further the measly internet access they provide to the citizens of the UK in order to boost their bottom lines and reduce competition.
Now it has to be said that the principle of net neutrality is not exactly a staple of saloon-bar conversation, so most citizens will assume that next Wednesday’s discussions have nothing to do with them. In this, they are sadly mistaken – as they will discover if Ed Vaizey does indeed agree to let the ISPs violate or erode the principle…
