Rep. Ed Markey formally introduced the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 today. Read the whole thing here. Mr. Speaker, from the beginning of Internet time until August of 2005, the Internet’s nondiscriminatory nature was safeguarded from being compromised by Federal Communications Commission rules that required nondiscriminatory treatment by telecommunications carriers. In other words, no commercial telecommunications carrier could engage in discriminatory conduct regarding Internet traffic and Internet access because it was prohibited by law. In August of 2005, however, the Federal Communications Commission re-classified broadband access to the Internet in a way which removed such legal protections. And how did the industry respond to this change? Just a few weeks after the FCC removed the Internet’s protections, the Chairman of then-SBC Communications made the following statement in a November 7th Business Week interview: “Now what they [Google, Yahoo, MSN] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. . . .” … Do we really have to wait till these corporate giants divide and conquer the open architecture of the Internet to make that against the law? These telephone company executives are telling us that they intend to discriminate in the prioritization of bits and to discriminate in the offering of “quality of service” functions – for a new fee, a new broadband bottleneck toll – to access high bandwidth customers, we cannot afford to wait until they actually start doing that before we step in to stop it. You can read the actual content of the bill here. If you care about […]

SA forum member echobucket threw together this vision of what a tiered internet would look like. shudder

If you haven’t seen Colbert’s roast at the White House Correspondent’s dinner, watch it at C&L. TMV has a good rundown of the various blogohedron responses to the performance- mostly positive, with much praise lavished on Colbert’s balls, and a smattering of “wow he totally bombed” comments from the right. But Bloggledygook has one comment worth discussing, I think, apart from the political aspects of the roast. He says, in response to a comment on his (rather abstract) post: BTW, if by poll standards 65% of Americans view Bush in a dark light, Colbert’s flame is burning at the wrong end. Scathing satire works against overwhelming public opinion, not with it. I don’t think its at all clear, regardless of poll numbers, that Colbert is just giving voice to ‘overwhelming public opinion’. It surely isn’t the overwhelming opinion of the Washington media and various political hangers-on, who weren’t laughing much during the act. And if there is such a vast discrepancy between the media and ‘overwhelming public opinion’, then Colbert’s satire was exactly on target. Satire doesn’t just work against public opinion, it works against any established, dominant opinion, and in this case that opinion is the MSM’s, which happened to be represented by everyone in the room. People forget that the novelty of TDS and TCR doesn’t come from mere topical and political comedy; people have been doing that for ages. The novelty is that these shows aim their satire at the media, which is a rather novel phenomena itself in its current incarnation. Almost all of Colbert’s jokes hit the government indirectly through attacks on the media; the policies themselves serve as throw-away punchlines to garnish the real target of his satire. And thats why people are so impressed with Colbert’s performance. It exposes both how much the […]

that I know. Here’s some stuff to make up for my slobbiness. From CNN: Warriors of the future will ‘taste’ battlefield A narrow strip of red plastic connects the Brain Port to the tongue where 144 microelectrodes transmit information through nerve fibers to the brain. In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls. A version of the device, expected to be commercially marketed soon, has restored balance to those whose vestibular systems in the inner ear were destroyed by antibiotics. … He likened the feeling on his tongue to Pop Rocks candies. From the “Of course we are embodied on the Internet” department: 52 percent of surveyed workers said that they would rather give up coffee than give up their Internet connection |link| Also, I have decided to become a single issue voter, which is a step up from not voting at all. I will give my vote to anyone whose platform supports a neutral, fast internet, and who supports something like the DMCRA. Yeah, I know this makes me a shitty American, but it is really the only issue I care about.

link (click on ‘Robotic Chair’)

Wired: VR Games Pit Pets Against Owners (via Engadget) “We want to enable pets to play games in a way very similar to the way human players’ play,” said RASTER’s Vladimir Todoroviæ, a collaborator working on the Metazoa Ludens project. “To play a computer game with your hamster would definitely make us think about where we have come with digital tradition now.”

Noelle models range from a $3,200 basic version to a $20,000 computerized Noelle that best approximates a live birth. She can be programmed for a variety of complications and for cervix dilation. She can labor for hours and produce a breach baby or unexpectedly give birth in a matter of minutes. She ultimately delivers a plastic doll that can change colors, from a healthy pink glow to the deadly blue of oxygen deficiency. The baby mannequin is wired to flash vital signs when hooked up to monitors. The computerized mannequins emit realistic pulse rates and can urinate and breathe.|link via Engadget|

Microvisions by Adam Rex Currently on auction at eBay. Link via BoingBoing.

Sorry for the extended break, but I’ve got a prelim to write. I should be back to normal after the conference. Footnote 21 from my dissertation proposal, “Rethinking Machines”, section 2.3, in which I discuss the objection that my view is suspiciously pan-psychist. In other words, if I want to take out the trash, I can do it, I can get someone else to do it, I can get a robot or my pet to do it if I trained them in the right way, but waiting for the wind to take it out is rather futile. One might say the weather just isn’t very competent- it doesn’t play along. Oh dear god what am I doing with my life.

Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Stewart on the D&D forums about Bleecker’s article. The discussion is basically about the limits of participation, and Stewart does a pretty good job of bringing out some of the main features of the view. Its a bit long, but it gets better as it goes. By the end I think I build up to something like a response to Kripke’s criticism of meaning, which is a result I didn’t quite expect, but I’m very happy with it. Stewart starts by responding to my commentary on Bleecker’s article. Under that rubric, heres some examples of other things that ‘participate’: trees, rocks, clouds, weather, Mars, clothes, brick walls, terrists, wristwatches, what Well, Bleecker has a way of differentiating here: spimes are self-describing. They assert their presence, they make it an issue for others. Nothing you mention, except maybe terrrrritz and wristwatches, are assertive in this way. Yesterday I was driving and I used my eyes to query what was in front of me. The brick wall downloaded information in the carrier-form of photons onto my retina describing itself as a brick wall: but not just that it was brick wall, but what color it was, how high it was, how thick it was, how old it probably was, its exact spacetime location, whether or not it was an attractive brick wall, and what the current weather was (because if it was wet it was probably raining). As such, I knew I had to turn (because it asserted its presence to me) otherwise it would have been an issue for me had I ran into it. There isn’t a difference between being 6 feet tall, and saying “I am 6 feet tall”? Yes there is. But since we’re not talking about ‘mentalistic’ terms the point […]

Both via Endgadget “Internet Renaissance Robot” shuns chores, entertains instead This time it’s a robot that wants to present us with info, but instead of merely reading text off of an RSS feed or blaring a few music streams, the ITR bot works with its very own “RTML” language to present media with motion, voice, and emotion. Of course, this means content developers will have to create RTML content to be displayed by the humanoid bot, but it’s an interesting concept at least, and we look forward to seeing what happens. We can’t say we’re as optimistic as the Speecy Corporation, which dreams of the ITR being fifth major form of household media after radio, TV, PC, and mobile phone. Climber to wear HAL cyborg suit, carry quadriplegic man to summit The best part of this is not so much the suit as this bit from the FAQ: Q. Can we go to the bathroom or take a bath with HAL ? A. We are researching it now.

The internet is stupid. Kitsch with a sleek interface is still kitsch, even when it takes more kitschy technobabble to differentiate the currenty, Web 2.x kitsch from previous iterations of the same themes. The only things more stupid than the internet are the people who use it, and their dim understanding of the technology which supports their interactions is reflected in their limited vocabulary. Also, they don’t understand irony. Enter the “Manifesto for Networked Things” (PDF link via BoingBoing), by Julian Bleecker, who coins without shame the unfortunate second-order neologism ‘blogject’. “Blogject” is a neologism that’s meant to focus attention on the participation of “objects” and “things” in the sphere of networked social discourse variously called the blogosphere, or the social web As Bleecker immediately points out, this term ressonates with Sterling’s far more elegant term spime, which are searchable objects that can be tracked through time and space, and record their own histories and interactions with other objects. So a blogject is a species of spime, distinguished by the fact that it blogs. Bleecker prefers not to use Sterling’s term because, as he says, the semantics of ‘blogject’ are “immediately legible”. Well, its syntax is prima facie atrocious, but are its semantics any better? “Bloggers” loosely defined, are participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas — making culture — through this particular instrument of connections called the Internet. Although this comes off a bit heavy handed, I appreciate his understanding of blogging: it is a kind of internet-mediated social interaction that reflects our contributions to and interactions with a community. The internet not only facilitates these social interactions, but it unlocks many of the constraints of space and time such that entirely novel modes of interaction are possible, thus allowing for a expanded conception of participation. […]