US broadband sucks

Salon notices many other countries have decent bandwidth for less than we pay for the craptacular SBC service here:

Next time you sit down to pay your cable-modem or DSL bill, consider this: Most Japanese consumers can get an Internet connection that’s 16 times faster than the typical American DSL line for a mere $22 per month.

Across the globe, it’s the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month.

pilot added to no-fly list

‘No-fly’ action takes pilot’s job:

Cape Air pilot Robert Gray said he feels like he’s living a nightmare.
…
When Gray showed up for work a couple of weeks ago, he said Cape Air told him the government had placed him on its no-fly list, making it impossible for him to do his job. Gray, a Belfast native and British citizen, said the government still won’t tell him why it thinks he’s a threat.
…
The agency denied an administrative appeal by Gray and refused to disclose what information it had, but it provided Gray’s lawyers with a computer printout that indicated it was about a Robert Gray who is Hispanic. The Cape Air pilot is white.

another reason to hate wal-mart

Nutjob at Wal-Mart photo lab calls secret service on high school art project:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

MSNBC links terror warnings, Bush political trouble

Keith Olbermann writes:

Last Thursday on Countdown, I referred to the latest terror threat – the reported bomb plot against the New York City subway system – in terms of its timing. President Bush’s speech about the war on terror had come earlier the same day, as had the breaking news of the possible indictment of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation.

I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences – a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” – a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.

apple validates microsoft?

Over on his media center blog, Matt Goyer wrote that Front Row “really validates what we’re doing converging digital entertainment with the PC in the living room.”

So you’re saying that a product that “doesn’t even have feature parity with the first version of Media Center” from three years ago validates what you are doing? I guess the folks in Redmond need some help in the self-confidence department. :)