How sad...
You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
— Alan Watts (via notentirely)
The NYT Paywall and Comcast
If the Internet were truly something other than a non-competitive utility, why wouldn't we see Comcast negotiating to bring the content of the New York Times to all its subscribers at no additional cost to them?
Time Warner Cable and the NFL Network are embroiled in a battle over carriage of the station based on cost and cable tier, but that is only made possible by the fact that there are lots of cable companies that compete to bring the best programming, whether HBO, ShowTime, or the NFL Network.
If Comcast truly wanted both to differentiate and prove the merits of a non-neutral Internet, they would seek to make deal with content publishers like the Times. But they are not. It is as if they themselves are relegated to the facts that they are a unconcerned middleman in the way of publishers and subscribers and that the industry itself is non-competitive. After all, what point is differentiation when Comcast is the only provider to my apartment?
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly ... who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt
God gave us eyes so that we might see; He gave us ears that we might hear; He gave us wills that we might choose, and He gave us hearts that we might live.
— John Eldredge, Wild at Heart
Cheaters Believe They're That Good, Even When They're Not →
We all would like to think we're great, but this desire can get us into trouble. In fact, the brain is extremely good at convincing us, despite all the evidence, that we have lots of positive attributes. A new study in PNAS finds that people who have cheated on a test predict that they will do equally well on a future test in which know they cannot cheat, even if this prediction is costly.
So Real You Can't Afford It →
For centuries information was scarce, and the heavy demand for news, culture, art, and other "idea-laden" goods made them expensive. We now live in a topsy-turvy world of information abundance, where a glut of ideas is chasing an increasingly limited supply of demand, in the form of time or attention.
But when everyone is so busy creating, who has time to consume any of it? In an economy where what is scarce is attention, the spoils will go to the artist who is best able to command it.
IPTV Primer: An Overview of the Fusion of TV and the Internet →
Profound as it may be, the Internet revolution still pales in comparison to that earlier revolution that first brought screens in millions of homes: the TV revolution. Americans still spend more of their non-sleep, non-work time on watching TV than on any other activity. And now the immovable object (the couch potato) and the irresistible force (the business-model destroying Internet) are colliding.
Bing Travel just saved me $100 on plane tickets by telling me to wait 2 days. We totally wrote a winner there...