Texting-on-the-go is just the latest tech-created public nuisance, one that’s spreading quickly across a world still grappling with cellphone-addled drivers and wireless-headset users who appear to be speaking too loudly to no one in particular. Like driving cellphone users, mobile texters typing furiously into their cellphones, BlackBerry devices or iPhones can be safety hazards.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, several high-profile accidents may have had a role in prompting states such as New Jersey and Washington to outlaw texting while driving. Among the accidents the group cited: a cyclist killed by a texting teen driver in 2005.

But most of the time the victims are the texters, who wind up with bumps and bruises. Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s emergency room has been ground zero in Chicago for texting goofs. Located downtown near shopper-clogged Michigan Avenue, the emergency room is also close to the exceptionally busy lakefront path, where pedestrians and joggers share a lane with bikers.
[Mike Munoz]

James Adams, Northwestern’s chairman of emergency medicine, says he has treated patients involved in texting incidents nearly every day this summer. He says fallen texters are more prone to facial injuries: They tend to hold their devices close to their faces, so their hands are less likely to break their fall. “By the time their hands hit, their face immediately hits and they smash to the ground,” Dr. Adams says. The common outcomes are scraped chins, noses and foreheads, along with broken glasses.

I could pontificate for hours about TextFreaks. But I’ll just cut to the chase — Lemmings.

Linky

Mr. Byfield posted an article over at Datamation here. I must respectfully disagree with his analysis. Here’s why –

Look, even free costs money. Ask any father that has had a 4yo daughter bring home a stray cat. The fact is over the life of a product the support costs are the big dollar number not the buy. Having worked in the Enterprise Space I can tell you after getting your list down to potential candidates the next item on the check list is exit strategy! Not knowing how you will get out at the end its attendant costs can cost you many fold the entry price of the product. Ask anybody who used MS’s Enterprise Commerce Server, which is no longer available.

The allure of FOSS is not that you don’t spend any money on entry. Smart enterprises will get a support contract if they can for things like Red Hat, Sun Office, etc. Having that support pays dividends in saving in-house labor on searching for a solution. It helps mitigate the life cycle costs of the product. The real allure of FOSS is a reduction in lock in. Consider a product like Tivoli over say Nagios. Tivoli is an excellent product. But they have a game they play. The tool is broken up into salable components. It always seems that next component is in that next bundle. They don’t sell it ala carte. The database is proprietary, and transition costs to another product expensive. Nagios on the other hand is a use what you need philosophy. But your team will burn hours getting up to speed on Nagios. With Tivoli management can just write a check and have it deployed.

With the myth of ‘free’ dispensed with, still why use SaaS like services. Well in a nutshell ROI. The last company I worked for always had a quandary as to providing the necessary tools to everyone vs the attendant costs and support for those tools. The classic example is MS Project. In a perfect world everybody would get a copy. But why? In a large company less than 15% of the seats really need it. Not only that but tools like Project scream to be a shared platform choice. Project gains leverage when the project plan can be interactively edited by all concerned. Given those two factors using such a tool as a SaaS makes sense. You pay for the proper concurrent usage, share it online and when you are thru with it you discontinue use and the expense. The savings can be dramatic.

Finally there is the matter of ’scale’. Desktop applications are very different animals than something like Google or Twitter. You could not imagine something like Google as a desktop metaphor, the Google ToolBar notwithstanding. SaaS today has glommed onto tools like spreadsheets and Writers as it is a common metaphor with a large user base. But Saas will evolve and that evolution will look less and less like the desktop and more and more like Twitter, FaceBook and other interactive mediums. It is the only way one can scale and disperse the usage of such applications.

I might agree that for an Office Suite an Open Office on every desktop might make sense. But again, Open Office has the very nice trick of being a shareable tool. So why not load it on a in-house server and concentrate the admin costs to a single back end system. But the road is clear, having pushed applications out of the data center so people could get work done, we are now swinging back to the data center to help mitigate support costs. For common tools on every desktop leave them on virtual servers in-house. Those tools that are specialized, used infrequently and need to be shared. Rent, don’t buy.

In a very comprehensive article Extra, extra, read all about it - or, sadly, not @ Comment, John Ibbitson covers the woes of the current pulp media –

That’s about to change. Across the United States, newspaper revenues are declining, along with circulation. As the American economy totters on the edge of recession, those declines are becoming precipitous and more pronounced than elsewhere. The Newspaper Association of America reports that classified newspaper advertising shrank by 16.5 per cent in 2007.

Circulation declines are also accelerating: Nationwide, newspaper circulation as of March 31 was down 3.6 per cent from the same time the year before; the year before that, it was down only 2.1 per cent. The Standard & Poor’s Publishing & Printing Index is declining at three times the rate of decline of the S&P 1500.

The Sunday edition of The New York Times is arguably the best newspaper in the world. Its circulation has declined almost 10 per cent in the past year alone, although part of the reason was management’s decision to cut back on discounted papers.

We have covered that before of course no new news there. But what will survive/replace the pulp media?

Small town Editions

More on Pulp is Dead, Its Just Not Buried

As recently as a year ago, 50MBPS sounded like a ride on a rocket based on how we interacted with the web. As we look towards the rich media net that is here now and the even richer one that is just over the horizon, it’s clear that 50MBPS will be a strained connection very soon. It’s laughable that non FTTH providers are whining about strained resources and bandwidth hogs in view of these facts. Consider this from telco trade publication Telephony Online:

To estimate the demand, various analysts have attempted to calculate a household’s future maximum peak bandwidth requirements, using an approach like this (e.g., for an IPTV triple play provider):

• Video: Each of 3 TVs is consuming a live high definition (HD) video stream, while 2 DVRs are recording 2 additional HD streams, with each stream at roughly 8 Mbps.
• Broadband: Meanwhile, the household is surfing the web—let’s allocate 10Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream.
• Voice: IP voice is negligible (perhaps depressing for Telephony readers, but true in this rough analysis).

So, with five 8 Mbps HD streams, plus Internet surfing and voice, the analyst would estimate 50 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream. How much more could a household ever need?

The answer is much more, when downloading files to a portable media player is considered. Let’s say you want to load your portable media player with a few HD movies (even handheld screens will look much better with HD) to watch in your car, on a friend’s TV, at the beach, etc. How long are you willing to wait to download an HD movie to your portable player? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? 2 hours?

So is 50MBPS enough? The answer is clearly no.

Please remember that the fourth of July commemorates a group of well to do individuals with everything to lose committing treason against the British monarch in order to have the right of self determination. Many who did not lose their lives lost their fortunes and more to guarantee these freedoms to future generations. Refusing to compromise of our right of individual self determination in exchange for short term comfort or gain will guarantee more of the freedoms to our children.

Stay safe and have a great Independence Day !

Google may have been a bit too hasty in responding the the Obama army’s group of internet activists who are working tirelessly to squelch any criticism, negative information on, or challenges to their chosen candidate. To be fair, most candidates have a little army of activists doing the same sort of work, however, their effectiveness is directly dependent on the persons and/or systems responding to their complaints. We’ve often heard that failure to exercise prudent due diligence before acting against sites flagged by fringe activists has been an ongoing problem at Google’s Blogspot. Perhaps it’s just the fault of automated systems being gamed or perhaps it’s……I won’t speculate.  If you don’t run with the Daily Koz herd, it may be in your best interest to avoid Blogspot as the place to express your opinion.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com a Web site that opposes Senator Obama. They include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.

In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by activists supporting Senator Obama. According to the bloggers, the Obama supporters had clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs alerting Google that they were spam.

If so, that would be an embarrassment for Google. On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.” (New York Times)

This 3 panel cartoon more than all the words spilt over Net Neutrality, IP law and Copyright encapsulates all that is wrong with the law giving in this area. They know not what they are doing and should have left well enough alone years ago.

iProvo, once touted as a proof of concept for government run networks has gone private. The technically excellent FTTP never managed to grow and was hemorrhaging customers at the end.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that one of Utah’s two struggling municipal fiber networks, iProvo, is going to be sold to Broadweave Networks for $40.6 million. Broadweave will lease the existing network operations center from the city to service residential and business fiber, while the city continues to use the network for municipal functions. Last December I mentioned the city brought in consultants to find out why the project was losing customers, and discovered it was thanks to incumbents undercutting prices, and poor customer service.iProvo now becomes a private enterprise, which should thrill regional incumbents like Qwest and critics like the Libertarian Reason Foundation, which had consistently targeted the project as an example of government dysfunction. According to the Provo press release, the FTTH network reached some 36,000 residences. However, only 10,300 actually subscribed, and 120 were leaving per month. (Broadband Reports)

While the usual cast of government network advocates are busy formulating reasons for failure, I can tell you the real reason is government itself. I can also predict the gov net advocates will conclude that the problem was not enough money was spent. While there’s no denying a government entity can build anything given a blank check, they are not accustomed to competing for customers. In the end that’s the underlying problem that no amount of taxpayer dollars can fix. Our incumbent duopoly of private access providers isn’t accustomed to competing much either, but they do have shareholders to please. It’s also important to remember that the existence of the duopoly is due to governmental meddling on a colossal scale. Assuming any government entity can improve things by an attempted end run around a beast of government’s own creation is pretty naive.

We here at ThirdPipe usually write of the tech side of the transport biz. But it is useful from time to time to understand what is flowing thru those pipes — ie. the content and those providing it. Well this time its CBS, the stalwart legacy content provider.

The network of Edward R. Murrow has decided to outsource its reporting, according to the New York Times. CBS, which has never recovered from its insistence on airing phony documents regarding George Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, has opened talks with Time Warner to have CNN provide most of its actual reporting. The deal would leave Katie Couric fronting the third-place CBS Evening News, but essentially presenting a CNN feed:

CBS, , the home of the most celebrated news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.

Over the last decade, CNN has held intermittent talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures. But during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who asked for anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews.

CBS in the heyday of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s was the gold standard of which other network content providers were measured. For a 30 year period they were ranked #1 by whatever measure could be pulled together - best staff, best production, best editorial content, etc. By the 80’s however the competition had caught up with them. When the Internet and blogging took hold they stayed with their stalwart format and did not adapt. The Document Fraud situation was just the unclothing of the emperor at that point.

The discussion of CBS ditching its own news gathering infrastructure is a reaction to fiscal stress of reduced revenues. There are no indications that CBS recognizes they dirtied their own nest and are reaping the whirlwind for it. But it does indicate that the structure of news origination is going to change over the next 5-10 years. Networks cannot continue to operate in the same way in the face of organizations like Briebart TV. Which in itself is a trap. CBS by looking for an outsourcing partner for the feed is preparing to do the samething that Briebart TV does. The problem for CBS is that they pay more for Katie Couric’s salary by more than 8x Briebart’s entire company which is a 2-3 person operation.

There will be some in certain blogging circles that will want to gloat. Personally that is a short sighted view. It also means that in order to stay relevant bloggers themselves are going to have to step up to the plate and fill in some of the gap that the receding network news types used to cover. A great deal of blogging is first person or political commentary. These people work in the physical world and have little time for data gathering. Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit a consistently rated blog, is a full time professor. Other than an occasional jaunt he lacks the time to do news gathering. So before we say ‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’ we best reflect as to where and who will do news gathering? Ponder this as well — politicians would salivate if they did not have to deal with news organizations and keep the populace in the dark as to their various mechanizations.

My suggestion for CBS — buy Briebart, rebrand it and fire everyone else.

Linky.

Mr. Malone of the WSJ lays out aspects of societal and business change that the US faces in say the next 50 years. He throws terms out like ‘fat pipe’, ‘process patents’, ‘free internet’, etc. Our loyal Thridpipe readers already know all this because we have this electronic pulpit on high. We have been laying this prescription down since this blog was created. —

- Build up Brand America. Government agencies, including the USAID and United States Commercial Service, need to promote American brands, via the Web, hardware and software, to everywhere in the world where they are currently unknown or disliked. Voice of America needs to become a massive Internet portal to the American economy and media.

The U.S. International Trade Commission must actively pursue illegal international threats to our e-economy from hackers to scammers — such as bringing serious economic sanctions against nations that look the other way (or even support) these activities. We need to capture the dominant share of the minds of the next two billion, enforce an honest Web, and make America again synonymous with the best.

- Create a Fat Pipe. Many of the great fiber optic lines entering and leaving the U.S. were almost dark a decade ago, and that abundance created an opportunity that helped propel the creation of companies like Google. But Google’s recent announcement that it was going to install its own cable across the Pacific to Japan suggests that the age of cheap bandwidth is almost over. Late last year, a report by Nemertes Research predicted a bandwidth shortage by 2011.

The U.S. needs to have the fastest, cheapest and most reliable Internet access on the planet, both inside our borders and in our connections to the rest of the world. Like the railroads and the interstate highway system before it, we need a program of direct investment, subsidies and tax breaks to assure that Americans always have the world’s best Web access – and the rest of the world has the best access to us.

- Revamp Nafta. While the Democratic candidates are calling for the abolition, or crippling of the North American Free Trade Agreement, what we should be discussing is how to revamp it and other trade accords to reflect the newly emerging world of people-to-people, not just business-to-business, trade. We need to be prepared for a world where knowledge workers around the world are hired online by the minute – in other words, radically simplified employee contracts, payroll tax documentation and W-2s, and improved tax laws on home offices, part-time work, and self-employment.

But most of all, we must not impede this inevitable transformation by doing anything to limit free trade – even if that means reaching individual trade accords with countries regarding buying and selling on eBay, MySpace, Facebook and the like.

- Promote a Free Internet. The lights of intellectual freedom that have been created by the Internet are slowly going out all over the world – look at China’s recent blackout of Web videos of events in Tibet. We need to fight to keep the Internet open and accessible to everyone on the planet, and keep tyrants from censoring their people.

Short of that, we need to keep the U.S. an island of Web freedom, open to anyone who can reach our servers and sites. A good start would be to require U.S.-based companies to maintain free speech in all their international subsidiaries – no more Yahoos helping foreign governments locate dissidents.

- Reform patent laws. In an era characterized by “free” downloads as well as the proliferation of pirate content sites, the overly broad U.S. patent and copyright laws need to be reformed to reflect these new sensibilities. Today they stifle innovation. A good place to start would be a revamping, if the not the elimination, of “business method” patents, which even Justice Anthony Kennedy has suggested can suffer from “potential vagueness and suspect validity.” Meanwhile, patent approvals need to be made faster, tougher and cheaper.

- Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Now we are not Malone clones. There have been articles we have vehemently disagreed with. But for once he is firing all the cylinders. Most definitely get rid of the ‘business process’ patents. They are a scourge. But we ought to go further. First roll back patent use to 17 years as was originally fostered. If you can’t turn a profit in that period of time you don’t deserve to keep the patent anyway. Patents and copyrights should also have innovation and sunset provisions. If a patent holder does not utilize the patent or license it for deployment within the first 4 years then the patent is invalidated. As well if a copyright is not longer a published work available for first release purchase or the death of the author then it becomes public domain. I love Elvis Presley recordings, but something is wrong when the estate is still in force collecting royalties.

There is also one that Malone missed. ‘Promote the Everyman’. Foster an environment that anyone who wants to compete can do so. The function of government should be to build that stadium of equal opportunity. The place to start is in revamping small claims court to include all the provisions of superior court as to court directed remedies. Today most small claims are only available for remedy of monetary damages. The problem is in many cases the damage stems from systemic abuse by corporations. The little guy has to be able to have their day in court. Abolish one way contracts and forced arbitration as a manner to receiving products & services. Eliminate legal extortion by making it a penalty of disbarment for a lawyer to blindly issue legal threats without ascertaing that there has been actual damages to his client.

Mr. Malone is to be commended for this piece.

Read the whole article here.