Assorted catch-up post.

[grysar]

Happy birthday to ardweden and ecruizer

Slate has an article on the real world effects of ending net neutrality. Apparently the BBC is offering a peer-to-peer style iPlayer for accessing thousands of hours of BBC video. ISPs want to charge a fee because they think their networks will be swamped. Farhad Manjoo shoots this down quite effectively:

You may have a hard time seeing the naked gall in this offer. Hey, you might say, if the BBC wants to offer video, why shouldn't it pay ISPs for network space it uses?

Easy answer: Because customers already paid for that space!

Check out Tiscali's home page. Right there in big, inviting type, you see an offer for "unlimited" broadband service for just 8 pounds a month.

Practically speaking, this may mean that ISPs may eventually move back to usage charge based models. I'm okay with that. I tend to think of net access as a truck that I can dump anything I want on, a series of tubes, a utility like electricity. If I use more, it's fair to ask that I pay more. But I'll dang well use it for whatever I please. Go fungibility.

In other news, I'm actually generating a bit of a backlog of starred Google reader items. (Starring is my new technique for noting articles I want to share/post about). The delay occurs because I'm trying to save some effort for when I have an actual blog. Main obstacle to that is thinking of the name.

I'm pondering some combination of data, quantitative, rabbits, turtles, wonk, liberal, or the like. When I think a bit more about it I'll probably have a poll to see if any of them go over better than just using my name. However, I doubt that will happen until after SandwichCon.

Happily the work situation is pretty settled for the moment. I'm still on a rather rough draft of our next deliverable, but my boss likes it so I'm not stressed.

In personal news, went to a wedding of a friend of kamalloy on Saturday and a crab-fest on Sunday. Both went pretty well, although Map Quest related navigational problems marred the latter. Also, one person being intentionally vague about their work made me wonder again if the intelligence community is really the best bet for me. I enjoy analysis but I'm an extrovert and I tend to do some of my best thinking when I have someone handy to call me on B.S. That said, as a work party I went to Saturday night reminded me, such B.S. calling works best with friends and not just colleagues. Not that the colleagues were being jerks about it, it was just a bit harder to communicate. That said, I tend to make friends with most of the people I work with, so that substantially mitigates the problem.

Comments

[capfox.livejournal.com]

How about Liberal Turtle Data Wonk, then? It'll make you sound foreign, and thereby exotic. =P

And I agree; the ability to talk about one's work with others is very helpful, and I'd have a very hard time giving it up as well. Thus, I am also not planning on going into intelligence service any time soon.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

::snickers:: I like it. I actually am considering going with a logo of a rabbit in a turtle shell. It fits my various animal mascots well and is pretty dang unique.

Makes sense, but have you considered the military? I hear they're always hunting for just your demographic. (I do really wonder some times if these people are actually trying to win the war).

[capfox.livejournal.com]

Heh. Ah, the military. Yeah, I wouldn't go there. I expect at some point the rules will change, but I also expect to get Canadian citizenship at some point, so probably by then I won't be so eligible anymore, anyway.

[kamalloy.livejournal.com]

Just be careful about having four-word titles that end in "Turtle." ;p

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

We have pay-for-usage here in Australia. Apparently we're one of the few countries that still does it, but it's really not that bad. Although due to Youtube and Bittorrent they are thinking of making it pay-for-total-usage rather than just pay-for-downloads since uploads have spiked dramatically in the past couple of years. I don't really care, because I pay for nearly 10 times the amount of bandwidth that I actually use. (There not being very many "high throughput but moderate bandwidth allocation" plans out there)

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'd have no real objection to charging for total volume and not just downloads, it's a fair modification to reflect changing usage patterns.

Good to know it's still a workable system.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

The only major problem is that there's a lot of "cheap" broadband plans out there which feature paltry monthly fees, equally paltry bandwidth allocations, long contracts and exorbitant usage fees for any use beyond the normal allocation.

Quite a few people fall afoul of these because hardly anybody keeps reading the fine print. Although admittedly quite a few companies use these just as a way to get the customer to start using broadband and then offer the ability to switch to a plan with a higher monthly data allowance.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Huh. The equivalent of that for cell phones has fallen out of favor in the U.S. I think people got too wise to them and now they're no longer profitable since they're used by people with minimum needs.

[ecruizer.livejournal.com]

Greg, thanks for the birthday wishes! Hope you are doing terrific! We'll have to catch up, would love to hear more about your current job adventures....