Why TV Networks Should Support Net Neutrality

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Nice tongue-in-cheek post by Mark Cuban.

If you run a TV network, broadcast or cable, you should be spending a lot of money to support Net Neutrality. You should have every lobbyist you own getting on the Net Neutrality train. Why ? Because in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal. In such an environment, all bits content with each other to ride the net.

When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all.

When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options .

That is good for traditional TV.

He’s right. But will they be smart enough to get it?

What Microsoft really thinks of Linux

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Well, what it told the Securities and Exchange Commission in its annual 10-K filing.

“Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.”

Translation: Microsoft for the first time acknowledges Linux as a serious competitor to Windows, especially on netbooks.

Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley for spotting it.

Digital residents vs digital tourists

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My esteemed colleague Doug Clow has just posted a very thoughtful blog post about the glib terminology we use to describe different degrees of familiarity with technology.

I think we should stop talking about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” altogether. It’s unhelpful and unclear. A better distinction might be between “digital residents” and “digital tourists”.

I’ve never liked the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, as introduced/popularised by Prensky, and the “born digital” idea as applied to people (rather than, say, media artefacts) is profoundly problematic. I’m not the first or only person to raise this – lots of people have criticised it. (And with very flaky Internet access at the moment, I can’t link to or cite to them … which is a bit annoying but saves me the bother – good job this isn’t a proper academic paper.)

He cites four reasons for disliking the ‘native/immigrant’ dichotomy:

1. Moral issues in “appropriating language about indigenous people and human migration”.
2. The fact that the categories are not fixed in generational terms: “as is widely attested, there are plenty of retired-age people who have great facility with digital technologies, and spent large amounts of time online, and plenty of teenagers who struggle with them and find them overwhelming and alienating”.
3. The fact that the ‘native/immigrant’ terminology “attributes inherent, unchangability to one’s approach and use of technology. One cannot aspire or attempt to become a digital native: one either is or one isn’t. There are plenty of people who come to digital fluency at a later stage in life than infancy.”
4. It sets up “an insurmountable barrier of incomprehension between teachers (by definition digital immigrants) and learners (by definition digital natives)”.

I’m with him on #2 through #4. #1 seems a bit, well, wet somehow.

Doug suggests that we think in terms of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital tourists’. I think that’s much more insightful and productive. In fact, having just come back from Provence, a part of the world I love but in which I never participate fully because of my limited linguistic and cultural knowledge, I can see exactly why some people feel uncertain and unsure of themselves in cyberspace. They’re tourists in that space, whereas I’m a resident.

LATER: A comment on Doug’s post points out that the same distinction was made by Dave White on the Oxford Online Education Blog about a year ago.

Lies, damn lies and… er, damn good jobs

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Interesting NYT piece today:

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

Hmmm…. Must tell my statistician colleagues. They’ve been rather depressed lately.

On this day…

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… in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing an estimated 66,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

On this day…

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… in 1963, the US, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Moscow banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

Are emails legal and binding? Don’t bet on it.

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This is interesting (from The Register):

A series of emails and phone calls were not sufficient to establish a contract, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The communications did not contain enough information or the formal qualities necessary for a contract to have been made, it said.

Language school the European Language Center (ELC) used to use vacant summer accommodation and teaching space at the University of Plymouth for its courses. The University told ELC in 2005 that it would have less space available in 2006.

ELC later claimed that emails and phone calls in which the University told it that it would have less space available and which contained estimates that it might have 200 beds available constituted a contract to provide that amount of space.

Plymouth County Court ruled that the communications represented a contract, but the Court of Appeal disagreed…

This doesn’t mean that you can’t do contractual business by email, but the four elements needed for a legal contract (at least in England and Wales) must be present. They are, according to their Lordships:

“an unconditional offer, an unconditional acceptance, a consideration and an intention by both parties to create a legally binding relationship.”

Ah, that lovely word: consideration.