ASYLUM

* tumbleweed

Yes, I've been silent a long time. Far too busy, between assorted Christmassy stuff, ploughing through the monster that is House of Leaves, work, trying to figure out where to direct my future, trying to keep my intelligent article intake high, socialising, and spending time with Scary, there's been precious little for blogging. I shan't bother with a recap of the intervening period except to note that the ice-skating was exhausting fun, so I'm thinking of taking up rollerblading as the next best thing, when the weather gets warmer.

I'm considering starting a second blog. Yes, yes, I know, why do that when I hardly ever update this one? Well, because it would be focussed on tech issues, which would almost certainly bore the crap out of anyone (anyone? Bueller? anyone?) who reads this. So, in its own prescribed area it would go.

Hell in a Handbasket

Some recent news articles; a notable recurring theme is the use of copyright/trade secrecy laws to subvert democracy. Oh, and general bastardy.

• Secret laws

• Secret police

• Election fraud

• Walk Out

• No idea if this is right or not

• Fucking telcos

Regarding that last link:

Whether or not you agree with Whitacre, you can understand his frustration. Companies like Google and Yahoo pay some fees to connect to their servers to the Internet, but AT&T will collect little if any additional revenue when Yahoo starts offering new features that take up lots of bandwidth on the Internet.

I say: Bollocks! Yahoo (and any other content provider) doesn't "take up lots of bandwidth on the Internet". They use bandwidth to their upstream connection point, which they pay handsomely for. And their customers use bandwidth at the ISP end — which they pay through the nose for in the States, where this little contretemps is going on, despite receiving a tiny fraction of the bandwidth available in, say, asia. The telcos have no case here. This is purely about greed.