general

From Open Left:

[...] Steve Jobs is eyeing a piece of the spectrum we fought for earlier this year and helped set partially free.
The company has $14B in cash (reserve price for the spectrum is $4.6B), is looking for a way to get around the carriers, and likes to control the user experience from end-to-end. Certainly it must annoy Jobs to no end that his beautiful products must operate on such a shitty set of networks. Apple may even partner with Google; Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, is on the Apple board. I don't know if Apple will make their network open; certainly it's less certain to do so than Google, though probably more likely to do so than, say, Verizon.

Still, it's probable that several Silicon Valley companies will bid, including but not limited to Google. Should one of them win the spectrum and build out an open network, this increases dramatically the changes of an overall win on net neutrality. Once we get real competition in wireless broadband, game set match for the worst of the cable and telecom nonsense. We'll still have a lot of work to do, but the darkest scenarios will never come to pass.

After all, net neutrality is really just a regulatory solution to a lack of competition in broadband markets. If you introduce real competition, there's less of a problem with net neutrality anymore. Art Brodsky in his latest amazing column compared the choices you get in this country, which usually boils down to two providers at most, such as Verizon or Comcast, to the choices you get in a country like England that has a sane policy of 'open access' for its internet infrastructure.

Trust Apple, trust Google. Somehow I don't think "treating all packets equally" is the same thing as having four monster providers vying to control your content every step of the way, but I'm just a civilian. More when I read Brodsky's amazing column. (In a few years I hope you'll come visit me on the "slow lane.")

Recommended: progarchives' Canterbury scene and Krautrock pages. Each has a selection of mp3s in streaming flash audio (entire songs, well chosen)--the utility displays the LP cover for the tune that is playing. These mp3s have been on the site for a while but this is a convenient way to listen to them and I suppose gets around intellectual property hassles. Interesting that Netherlands band Supersister is prominently grouped with Canterbury but musically it's undeniable. Great to hear Pudding en Gisteren on the internet. Had not heard of their album Superstarshine before.

Speaking of Dario Argento, a sprightly MIDI rendition of Claudio Simonetti's Tenebrae theme can be heard on this intro page for an Argento site.

california death fest poster [saved by jamesww]

especially like the illegible subtitles under the illegible band logos

"You guys are laughing, but this is my life.." --borna

Jim Henley on the American right wing "imams":

If you think about it, the Islamophobic Right are setting themselves up as Imams of a sort. I’m talking about the bedwetters at LGF and Jihadwatch and Gates of Vienna and WND and beyond, the professors and pundits who insist that the Koran “really means” that all Muslims must engage in violent holy war against non-Muslims, and that any Muslim who doesn’t do this is “a bad Muslim.” We’ve had irruptions of this sort of person in UO comment threads from time to time.

[...]

But aside from the absurdity of a bunch of haoles* declaring themselves the authoritative interpreters of a religion they don’t practice and don’t even like, think of the pragmatic problems. There are clearly lay Muslims and Muslim clergy who argue against the doctrine that all Muslims are obligated to wage real war on all non-Muslims. Why would Westerners try to cut the legs out from under these people? What moron tells the Muslim in the next cubicle or across the counter or down the street, “No, you fool! You need to try to kill me!”

The only answer I can come up with is, “the stupid kind of moron.” Going forward, I think we need to start referring to these people as what they are, radical Imams. Promulgators of anti-Western interpretations of Muslim doctrine. Mullah Atlas. Mullah Johnson. Mullah Malkin. Mullah Farah. Mullah Pipes. By their own logic, we should deport them. Okay, we should clap them into camps and torture them by their own logic, but I’m against that kind of thing.

*Hawaiian for "foreigners."