November 20. That’s the day the Obama administration has chosen to regulate the Internet after what even The Hill calls “a partisan vote” at the FCC to pass the Net Neutrality regulations. I’m hoping Verizon and/or MetroPCS will sue and win a stay before that date, though I don’t know how likely that is for a court to act that strongly. I’ve said much about the House and its strong opposition to Barack Obama’s regulatory overreach, but Senators are unhappy as well . Kay Bailey Hutchison is ready to fight. It looks like she will push to get the Senate to go forward with using the Congressional Review Act, as the House already did, to repeal Net Neutrality. In AT&T/T-Mobile news, Sprint Nextel has stopped pretending its antitrust lawsuit is even about competition. Sprint wants the deal stopped, yes, but only because Sprint wants to merge with T-Mobile. And that’s not me saying that. See this quote of Sprint CEO Dan Hesse from the Wall Street Journal : “I don’t believe that what the DOJ said in any way, not even a little bit, should be viewed as we want to keep four [major telecom carriers]” Hesse said at an investor conference today, according to Deal Journal colleague Shara Tibken . “My view is [the DOJ] would look at other consolidation very differently.” Yup. The Justice Department’s own lawsuit AT&T is just the government choosing to prop up Sprint Nextel and protect them from lower prices. They’ll never admit it as Sprint does, though. This isn’t about protecting the public from oligopoly-created high prices at all. Good on AT&T for calling out Sprint as well. Sprint truly is having trouble, too. Their big marketing campaign, hoping to swipe customers from Verizon and AT&T, has been promoting their unlimited, unthrottled data… but now they’re announcing plans to cap some data . Oops. They just can’t compete. It’s been a bad week for Anonymous, heh. Just after they announce a “Day of Vengence [sic]” for Saturday the 24th, the FBI pounces and rolls up some of the members . Frogmarch! Frogmarch! Free State Foundation says cable set top box regulations should die . I have to agree, because I know they are ineffective. Providers have already worked around CableCARD regulations by using new technologies to increase channel bandwidth, which happen not to work with CableCARD. So just give up already and try something new. Quick hits: Moonbeam signed the Amazon tax bill , keeping California on its path to enforce an unconstitutional Internet sales tax. Samsung is trying to get iPhones and iPads banned in Europe over patent issues, in retaliation for Apple’s legal successes against Samsung, as well as Apple announcing plans to drop Samsung as a supplier of even more iPhone and iPad parts. If patents get all gadgets banned, can we just repeal them? Thanks. A note to regulators and legislators: People don’t actually care about privacy . We know this because they’re not actually doing anything about it. People talk about it because the teevee says to talk about it, but talk is cheap.
Read the rest here:
Tech at Night: Net Neutrality scheduled, Sprint admits the truth, Hutchison fights, Anonymous loses
So I finally took the leap and bought a Mac laptop. Everyone I have talked to who has one likes it. They don’t get viruses and continue to work well 2, 3, 4 years later. Just one problem. I moved over my iTunes library from the PC and iTunes seems to work fine on the Mac. But if I try to sync up the iPad to the Macbook, it tells me that it can only sync with one library, and that it will wipe my iPad. I de-authorized the PC, so what gives? This is not a request for people to criticize my decision to get a Mac. I’m just wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue before. You would think it would be the simplest thing in the world, but every solution I see online is ridiculously complicated — download this third-party software, or get a MobileMe subscription, or use a migration utility that doesn’t work with a PC or an external hard drive, etc. Absolutely nothing simple in the way of a solution — for what ought to be the easiest thing in the world. Ideas?
View post:
Bleg: Syncing an iPad (or iPod or iPhone) to a new Mac
Filed under: Media , Polls , Poll Watch Local newspapers have a long way to go when it comes to attracting users of mobile devices to their digital content. Nearly 4 in 10 Americans say the loss of their paper would have no impact on their ability to keep up with the news.
Good evening, I wrote in my best Alfred Hitchcock impression. Top story as we go into the weekend: our friendly neighborhood House Republicans are pressing on with their oversight of the FCC and Net Neutrality in particular. The resolution disapproving of Net Neutrality is postponed, but instead we’re getting pressure on the FCC to justify its actions economically. Good on Greg Walden, Fred Upton, and Lee Terry! Meanwhile, up in Vermont, we’ve got a case study going on demonstrating why we don’t want industrial policy in the volatile, constantly innovating telecommunications world. Government grants to favored firms tend to favor those firms and their investors , not the people intended to get the help. Vermont is trying to pump government money into Universal Access, and failing. Let’s not repeat that nationally, please. And of course, besides all of the legal, Constitutional, and rights-based arguments against Net Neutrality, there’s always been one fundamental practical issue with it: the Internet is too complicated for the government to deal with effectively. I’ve been linking to Seton Motley in Tech at Night for a while now, and he found a great map of the Internet to illustrate this , with the perfect post title to go with it: “Ok, Apply Net Neutralty to THIS.” Indeed. Going more generally, I just love Jim Harper at Tech Liberation Front’s story of the cough drops to refute the vastly overused socialist concept of Market Failure. And back to some specifics: The California Board of Equalization may be one of the most socialist (but accurate) agency names ever, but it’s still not covering for the Democrats’ lies about the unconstitutional Internet Sales Tax or if you prefer, Amazon Tax. So there’s a Nintendo 64 emulator for sale in Google’s Android Market . I think it’s perfectly fair to say that Google has a history of benefiting from or even facilitating copyright infringement. Where would YouTube be without mass copyright infringement, for example? Has the firm ever shown any interest in property rights for anyone but itself, though? And now to close the night with some plain old personal opinion about a new product. The iPad 2 is going to be a success , as people without iPads will continue to buy them, but I don’t think the new model gives most users much reason to upgrade. Some will love the new cameras for FaceTime, but my own observations suggest it’s a niche application with little broad popularity. Others will get excited about having more memory and CPU power, but I think most users won’t notice the dual core processor once they finish reading the Tech Specs web page on the Apple site. There’s nothing exciting to see in the iPad 2 if you already have an iPad. So if you don’t yet have an iPad then sure, pick up an iPad 2. The iPad is a great toy and traveling tool for email, webpages, and other tasks. The vast array of apps on the App Store will help you get many things done. But if you already have an iPad, I suggest waiting for Apple to improve something exciting like the screen. I personally will wait for a “Retina” display to come to the iPad. The original and new iPad models both have the same 1024
Two U.S. Airmen shot in Germany, terrorist link probed ” I’ve Sheen Enough ” — or have you ?
View original post here:
Happy Hour: Sheen Enough?
