Technology Futures

The usually excellent Stop the Cap! has a report on the truly awful anti-broadband bill making its way through the North Carolina legislature, but they lost me when they started blaming "free markets" as the problem. Uh, no, the problem is crony capitalism, where the incumbents spread campaign donations liberally to representatives of both parties, to obtain the best laws money can buy. That's not free markets.

When Stop the Cap! indicts "free markets" as the problem, the incumbents win, because that's the line the incumbents use to confuse the issue. Most incumbent telecom providers are, in fact, utterly opposed to free markets, because they lose their de facto monopoly status in a free market.

This distinction is absolutely critical to winning the debate. Community broadband efforts are going to lose every time if the community broadband pitch is "we don't like free markets." Community broadband is all about free markets and competition, real competition, of the kind we see in open access projects like Utopia with seventeen (17) providers on the network--that's an open market, and that's what communities want and need.

The proper response to "It's important to let the free market prevail..." in a discussion about telecom is to agree. "Yes, we agree completely. We fully support free markets. We want buyers of telecom services to be able to buy from a wide variety of telecom providers, not just one or two acting as a local cartel."

The "free markets" argument is a red herring. Community broadband advocates need to vigorously applaud free markets, then point out where they don't exist.

Google, Intel, the Fiber to the Home Council, the Telecommunications Industry Association, the American Public Power Association, and the Utilities Telecom Council have all jointly signed a letter addressed to the North Carolina Speaker of the House and the North Carolina Senate President. The letter strongly protests the anti-community broadband bill currently being considered by the legislature. Like several other groups protesting this dog of a bill, the signatories indicate the jobs-killing nature of the legislation.

"...it will harm both the public and private sectors, stifle economic growth, prevent the creation or retention of thousands of jobs, hamper work force development and diminish the quality of life in North Carolina."

When an FCC Commissioner takes the time to tell your state that what your legislators are doing is foolish, your state has a problem.

FCC Commissioner Clyburn had this to say yesterday:

“Not long after the National Broadband Plan was issued, I had the privilege to visit North Carolina and speak about the goals in the Plan, and the importance of our nation using every available tool to address the broadband divide. I believe now, as I did then, that no American citizen or community should be left behind in the digital age. However, I remain concerned that when cities and local governments are prohibited from investing directly in their own broadband networks, citizens may be denied the opportunity to connect with their nation and improve their lives. Local economies will suffer as a result, and the communities’ ability to effectively address education, health, public safety, and other social issues will be severely hampered. Regrettably, North Carolina isn’t the only state considering such legislation. My home state of South Carolina has similar legislation pending, and the state of Arkansas is contemplating a complete ban on publicly-owned broadband facilities. I fear that preventing local governments from investing in broadband is counter-productive and will impede the nation from accomplishing the Plan’s goal of providing broadband access to every American and community anchor institution.”

The only good thing about this flurry of anti-jobs legislation is that economic developers in the states adjacent to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Arkansas must be dancing a jig.

Via Ed Dreistadt, who always keeps up with car stuff when he's not busy helping companies with their marketing, comes this hilarious story on Ford's "2nd generation" SYNC(tm) software.

The software was developed by Microsoft, which begs the question, "What could go wrong?"

From the article:

"If the pulse of one of these applications goes haywire, in order maintain system stability, we reset that application by resetting the entire software to come back to a 'known good state,' similar to how you reset your phone or computer," said Mounir Hider, a Ford product development engineer.

In other words, "haywire" is code for the Blue Screen of Death....

The display and hardware in this new "Gen 2" system attempts to manage a variety of functions at once. And while Ford builds in redundancy to handle many of the core functions – climate and audio being two – navigation tends to find itself limited to a single point of failure.

In other words, Microsoft does not know how to write real time operating systems.....something that was worked out decades ago by other companies....

"We don't use this reboot strategy loosely," said Hider. "There are certain events that will trigger these reboots. Mainly it's when things get out of sync with each other."

....in other words, the system named SYNC can't stay in sync....

Hider did tell us one little known fact: The SYNC system actually restarts every 24 hours of usage. After a day's worth of use, the system will automatically reset on its own after the ignition is turned off. This is mostly invisible to the driver, assuming they don't go back into the car and turn on the ignition during the restart procedure.

...in other words, the system is so unreliable that it has to be rebooted every single day....

There is much more at the link, including an official Ford response at the end of the article. Disclaimer: I'm a lifelong Ford owner, and am extremely happy with my highly reliable Ford Fusion--which thankfully, is not equipped with SYNC(tm).