“Gentlemen, we’ve got to sink this Lisa Lionheart doll, and fast! It’s time to call in a favor from Washington.” – Malibu Stacy Executive “Yes. Yes, I understand. I’ll take care of it personally.” – Congressman “Dad, did you hear something?” – Lisa Simpson “I-unno.” – Homer Simpson After last Wednesday’s unprecedented strike and the [...]
Archive for the ‘The Information Superhighway’ Category
Mutual Ignorance
Other People’s Rules
“Stop it, you two, this is Thanksgiving, so glue friendly or I’ll take your glue away and then no one will have any glue to glue with!” – Homer Simpson “Dad, this isn’t about glue. It’s about territoriality. He only wants the glue because I’m using it.” – Lisa Simpson For the first time in [...]
Time Warner, the NFL Network, and Net Neutrality
“Hey, we’re making enough money, right?” – Doomed Costington’s Executive Despite it being dedicated to far and away the most popular sport in the land, and despite the fact that an unremarkable cable hookup has more than enough bandwidth to carry it in high definition, the NFL Network remains unavailable on the nation’s second largest [...]
Consumer Safety in the Digital Age
“As you know, Bart, your permanent record will one day disqualify you from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs.” – Mrs. Krabappel From the invaluable Bruce Schneier comes the valiant tale of an Austrian law student and his ongoing efforts to humiliate and expose Facebook for the pack of evil bastards that they are. [...]
Cutting Off the Digital Nose to Spite Copyright’s Face
“Man must learn to think of these horrible outcomes before he acts selfishly, or else I fear recording artists will be forever doomed to a life of only semi-luxury.” – South Park Detective As better internet connections find their way into more homes each year, the purveyors of print, radio and television, the decades old [...]
Monoculture
“Password? Hmm, password, how ’bout ‘guest’. No way! It can’t be, Jesus Christ, that is just baby town frolics.” – Sterling Archer One of the more amazing things about the increasingly connected world in which we live is the ability to combine so much functionality into a single device. Whether it’s a smart phone, a [...]
Institutional Cruelty
“What the hell are you doing?” – Kyle Broflovski “We’re playing Lambs.” – Eric Cartman There was high drama in Virginia today when uber-blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake tried to take David House to visit presumed Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning in the brig at Quantico. Hamsher’s full write up is here, and it’s well worth [...]
Assanges on the Head of a Pin
“How many monkey butlers will there be?” – Nelson Muntz “One at first, but he’ll train others.” – Bart Simpson Charli Carpenter has been a great addition to Lawyers, Guns & Money, and she recently posted a long and well thought out analysis of what it really means if Julian Assange’s transparent world comes about [...]
Wikileaks: The Red Menace of the 21st Century
“Hello, Milhouse? Can you keep a secret?” – Bart Simpson “No.” – Milhouse van Houten “Oh well, who cares?” – Bart Simpson All week there has been a steady flow of Wikileaks revelations from the document dump of American diplomatic cables. Unlike the last few times Wikileaks has found itself in the news, most similarly [...]
Minimum System Requirements
“That new robot is great, huh? He sure made me look like a pile of crap.” – Bender Back in the mid-90s, I had a theory about computers, the still fledgling internet, and technology in general. This was a time when CD drives, amusingly over-named CD-ROMS, were expensive peripherals and sound cards were just becoming [...]
Netflix, Net Neutrality, and Available Content
Foreground Checks
“According to our computer your credit history is not good. It says here that you’ve been pre-declined for every major credit card. It also says that you once grabbed a dog by the hind legs and pushed him around like a vacuum cleaner.” – First Bank of Springfield Employee “That was in the third grade!” [...]
Authoritarian Naivete
“Attention, this is an emergency broadcast. All is well in the school. My authority as principal is total.” – Principal Skinner When he was in junior high, a friend of mine said the word “fuck” within earshot of one of the principals. Naturally, this meant a trip down to the office. While my friend was [...]
Digital Adolescence
“Stan, poke your grandma!” – Randy Marsh There’s an old Chris Rock joke where he’s musing about why relationships are so hard to maintain. What he hits on is that relationships deteriorate because sooner or later you have to show the other person who you really are, and it’s all downhill from there: That’s right, [...]
Lucrative Minorities
“I know this is different than that time I washed your pants with the twenty in the pocket.” – Marge Simpson The always thoughtful James Fallows wrote the cover article for this month’s Atlantic Monthly. It’s about Google and the search behemoth’s efforts to keep journalism alive. Fallows’ trademark calm, his complete immunity to fashionable [...]
False Dichotomy
“You can either be a fairy or a queen, it’s wide open.” – Springfield Ballet Teacher There’s a neat article in last week’s New Yorker about the changes Apple and the iPad have made in the world of digital book publishing. Long story short, Apple and the iPad have broken Amazon’s monopoly on serious e-book [...]
The Right to Remain Connected
“Randy, where will you go?” – Gerald Broflovski “We’re gonna head west, there’s a rumor going around there might be some internet out there.” – Randy Marsh Someone, I think it was Atrios but I’m not sure, once pointed out that if you had told US Senators in 1992 that the internet would let every [...]
Of Apple and Naked Women
“I’m gonna go draw boobs on the Etch-a-Sketch!” – FBI Agent #1 “Go ahead, they always come out square!” – FBI Agent #2 There has been a recent dustup over Apple’s hypocritical enforcement of Helen Lovejoy style censorship at the App Store. (For those who don’t lust after every swanky piece of technology that comes [...]
Google Buzz: Homogenization FAIL
“These uniforms are a godsend. Horseplay is down 40%, youthful exuberance has been cut in half, high spirits are at an all time low.” – Principal Skinner “They’ve even begun blinking in unison.” – Lunchlady Doris Google has been getting a great deal of well deserved criticism over their haphazard and privacy destroying new feature [...]
The Most Profound Decade-In-Review Piece You Will Read (Unless I’m Wrong, Nobody Trusts Me, or No One Listens to Me)
“What else is on?” – Bart Simpson Cory Doctorow, one of the driving forces behind one of the world’s best websites once wrote a book about a post-scarcity society. (A “post-scarcity” society is one in which, Star Trek like, resources are not limited. Housing, food and other necessities have become so cheap as to be [...]
Simple Troubleshooting
“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia “Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2 “All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia “All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2 The [...]
Will Future Nazis Burn iPhones or Kindles?
“Stupid books.” – Bart Simpson There was a fascinating article up at Ars Technica this week about the history of what, for lack of imagination, everyone refers to as the “e-book”. The story begins in the late nineties when you couldn’t open a magazine without reading an article about how the internet was going to [...]
Sign of the Times
“Look, if you . . . if you do find internet, let us know, will ya?” – Stephen Stotch “How? You won’t have internet.” – Randy Marsh Yesterday morning I was engaging in the ancient tradition of wasting time on the internet. My Google results were coming in all screwed up and Firefox was blocking [...]
The Old In and Out
“Come on, you never went on a date with a guy just ’cause you were hungry?” – Bender/Coilette “Well, I . . . uh . . . I thought I might like him on a full stomach.” – Leela For the past year Susannah Breslin has been running two on-line projects, Letters from Johns and [...]
