Recommended:
Cyber Law, Tech and Policy
Comcast and Us — Jean-Louis Gassee at MondayNote.com:
“We need a set of rules that would allow Microsoft, Google, Roku, Samsung, Amazon, Apple — and companies that are yet to be founded — to provide true alternatives to Comcast’s set-top boxes. Today, you have a cable modem that’s so dumb it forces you to restart everything in a particular sequence after a power outage. You have a WiFi base station stashed in among the wires. Your set-top box looks like it was made in the former Soviet Union . . . . You have to find your TV’s remote in order to switch between broadcast TV, your game console, and your Roku/AppleTV/Chromecast…and you have to reach into your basket of remotes just to change channels. Imagine what would happen if a real tech company were allowed to compete on equal terms with the cable providers.”
The Real Problem with the Comcast Merger — Tim Wu at The New Yorker
Comcast’s Time Warner Deal Is Bad for America — Susan Crawford at Bloomberg Opinion
How Slow, Expensive Internet Is Holding Back Our Economy — Alexis Caffrey at The American Interest
Fast Internet Is Chattanooga’s New Locomotive — Edward Wyatt at The New York Times
U.S. Takes Steps to Bolster Patent System, Cut Frivolous Lawsuits at Reuters.
<General Interest
Why People Work For Rewards They’ll Never Get to Enjoy – a/k/a Why Do Rich People Work So Much? — Nicholas Hune-Brown at Hazlitt:
“The researchers call this behaviour ‘mindless accumulation’—the tendency for people to forgo leisure to work towards rewards they’ll never be able to use. They argue that it’s a distinctly modern problem. For much of human history, earning rates were low and people needed to work as much as possible just to survive. The idea that you could ‘overearn’ simply wasn’t realistic. If you’re one of today’s highly paid office workers, however, earning comes comparatively easily, yet the drive to hoard as much as possible remains.”
Moving South and West? Metropolitan America in 2042 — Wendell Cox at NewGeography.com