the tindog coffeehouse

The mainstream press is finally starting to catch on to the broadband caps issue.

It’s about time.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more. This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Meanwhile, ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are starting to get behind the push for P4P as a way to reduce the load on their networks while speeding up traffic. (Overview of P4P here.) That’s good news.

Previously:
Metered broadband: An experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: Throttled?
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

TVGuide.com seems to be the only rational voice regarding the recent scoring controversy in the women’s gymnastics competition.

On the uneven bars Chinese gymnast He Kexin tied with American gymnast Nastia Liukin, but the Chinese gymnast got the gold medal thanks to an obscure tie-breaking rule. The NBC announcers were naturally outraged.

But TVGuide’s Olympics blog puts it in perspective (emphasis mine):

A great night of performances in a variety of sports was tarnished Monday by some unattractive whining from the NBC gymnastics crew. The controversial tie-breaker in the women’s uneven bars certainly didn’t seem to make sense, but you have to wonder how much howling we would have heard if an American had come out top. China’s He Kexin and Nastia Liukin of the U.S. had identical scores, but a seemingly arbitrary formula gave the gold to He. NBC’s team — Al Trautwig, Elfie Schlegel and Tim Daggett — took great issue with this, and Trautwig even went so far as to question whether He felt she deserved the gold. Back in the studio, bellowing Bela Karolyi continued his ranting to Bob Costas, who did his best to remain impartial. I don’t remember anyone questioning Paul Hamm’s all-around victory four years ago, when a scoring error pushed his South Korean opponent back to silver.

The next event, the men’s vault, also involved a tie-breaker, one with a more clear-cut resolution — and no American athlete involved. The NBC team let that one go.

So just to recap: If there’s a scoring controversy that results in an American losing, then that’s wrong. If it results in an American winning or if no American is involved, then that’s OK.

Now, this is just wrong.

The Fox 5 news anchors in Las Vegas have had fake McDonald’s iced coffees in front of them for two weeks as product placement.

Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain.

In related news, those smiles aren’t genuine either.

Former Dateline reporter John Hockenberry has written a lengthy article for Technology Review about what he learned about network television news in the 9 years he worked for NBC. In the article he complains about the decline of TV news from a fact-reporting organization daring enough to embrace new technology to a technology-averse info-tainment machine constantly worried about its viewers’ “emotional center.”

While the article is interesting, it’s hard to take Hockenberry seriously as he doesn’t understand that he’s contradicting himself. He waxes poetic about the good ol’ days of Edward R. Murrow and how the technology of television “would take Americans ever deeper into the battlefield, and even onto the surface of the moon. Communication technologies,” he says, “transformed America’s view of itself, its politics, and its culture.”

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