Multiple readers have asked that I show support for a democratically elected government in Egypt, and to say that the alternative is not between Hosni Mubarak and Iran II: Radical Islamic Boogaloo. Which is obbviously the case. So here is a pretty decent Youtube making the rounds that sums up a lot of imagery from the Egyptian revolution (does it have a color-coded name yet? Get on that, Egyptians).
Personally, I tend to think that “new Egypt” will probably end up politically resembling Turkey more than anything else, and that would be entirely okay.
Also, the recent CRTC decision to meter internet usage in Canada is bullshit, moneygrubbing of the worst kind. Here is a second Youtube. Featuring George Strombopoulos, who, and I say this as someone who has poked fun at Strombo on a regular basis in the past, is really becoming a national media treasure. The petition of which he speaks is here; if you’re Canadian you should go sign it right now if you have not already.
And if you sat through all that, here is a reward.
(Well, it made me laugh.)
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I wanted to watch the second video but I went over my cap. Sorry.
Have seen analysis which suggests that new government will be another military government, probably more along the lines of Nasser than of Mubarak though (which, as you point out, is entirely acceptable)
It’s not insane, though, to think that an Islamic fundamentalist government could be the result of these protests – the Muslim Brotherhood has real power, and they will retain that power whatever happens. It’s not the most likely turn of events, and it’s certainly absurd to think of that as a reason to support Mubarak – but it’s not impossible.
Actually, revolutions are traditionally named after fruits or flowers, it’s just that most people have only heard of the rose and orange revolutions, and mistakenly assumed that they were referring to the colours “rose” and “orange” rather than the fruit and flowering cultivar respectively.
However, while at first this might seem to open up the possible range of names possible, in actual fact the fall of communism and rise of far right dictatorships in eastern europe and the balkans has led to the unfortunate situation where so many revolutions have taken place over the past decade that the International Council for Naming Revolutions (ICNR) ended up having to call the revolution that followed dodgy elections in serbia in 2000 “the bulldozer revolution”, as no actual plants or fruits were left unassociated with a prior revolution and so construction equipment were having to be used instead.
This is the situation that lead to the 2001 “jackhammer revolution” in Gykistan, the 2002 “wrecking ball revolution” in East Nunkil, and West Jagrykistan’s 2003 “towable diesel generator revolution”.
The fig revolution?
Also, the internet petition is now suspiciously unavailable.
Is it wrong that I think it’d be awesome if someone cut off the internet here? I would press the fuck right out of that shiny red button.
So while there’s plenty fucked up about Canada’s Internet clusterfuck, can somebody (and I mean this perfectly honestly) please explain to me how metered Internet is a bad thing?
Yes, it’s pennies to supply bandwidth once the infrastructure is in place, but you could say nearly the same thing about electricity. The fact is that the “power users” who download ass tons of content put a major strain on networks compared to a lot of users who surf the net and e-mail.
I realize this is changing as more and more people stream through netflix, but it seems to me that a system where you pay something like $10 for access, and then like 25c per Gigabyte seems pretty reasonable. I realize Canada’s situation is not much like what I just described, and I realize that a major concern is telecoms saying “Well, you have to pay out the ass for bandwidth, unless you’re using bandwidth for OUR services!” but (and this is coming from someone who frequently flirts with bandwidth quotas) is metered service really that terrible of an idea? Why shouldn’t those who tax the system the most pay the most?
I feel for those facing a massive rate increase, but I also know that a large group of people who barely use their high speed aren’t going to care.
As far as names go, the Egyptian protest movement seems to be calling itself the “April 6 movement” for reasons that are unclear to me.
Considering the number of government services that have been cut back or even removed, or moved to entirely inconvenient locations because “everyone can use the internet”? Yes it’s a bad thing.
It’s bad because it puts another obstacle in the way of people needing to be in touch with things, and it’s bad because it’s not necessary.
The companies clamoring for it are making bucketloads of profits already. This is gouging, plain and simple.
From what I’ve read the actual cost for per-GB usage is about 1 cent a GB, *or less* (a study on this would be nice). And if they really wanted to address the congestion problem (which is a bullshit excuse of course) they would introduce that 1 cent rate at peak hours, and have something like .1 cents at off-peak hours. Because unlike power, which needs to be generated by expensive aging nuclear reactors, they are merely sending the very weak electrical signals we are asking for, which are assembled by other people in meaningful order.
There are people in the US paying $50 for 65Mbps (not a typo) internet, unlimited. The most people are getting here is 10 or 15, maybe 25 Mbps, but usually it’s 5-7Mbps for typical plans. Don’t even look at what the Danes or Japanese are getting.
Luckily, innovation can come from outside (Netflix) to show just what a sham the system is/was/will become if things aren’t changed.
As for the Muslim Brotherhood, yeah, there’s always a risk, if they get out of hand and/or hijack the revolution a la Iran, assuming they’re even as bad as the religious revolutionaries in Iran were or that the religious demographic in Egypt would even allow the same thing to happen. Here’s hoping it works out OK, and it seems to be going OK so far.
The incremental cost of any one gigabyte may be pennies once the network is in place, but it’s intuitively obvious that you need beefier infrastructure to serve a user base expecting 5 megabit/second speeds than one that’s happy with 50 kilobits/second. It’s only complicated by the fact that a subset of your users are expecting on-line games and Skype to work well, which means they want low latency, while another subset want to saturate their links all day every day with torrents, which means there’s congestion. Oh, and nobody wants to pay more than about $30 a month for any of it.
The caps and prices set by the CRTC ruling are ridiculous, however. The existing network can obviously cope pretty well with the volume of traffic that’s moving through it today; this is just Bell’s latest attempt to run the resellers, whom they resent terribly, out of business. This is particularly obvious because Bell was pushing for resellers to pay the same $2/GB overage charge as retail customers, forcing them to collect money for Bell entirely at their own expense (or to mark it up, chasing customers to Sympatico). The exposure for resellers, who are on the hook for the overage charges even if their customers default on their bills, must be pretty worrying, even with the CRTC-mandated 15% discount.
Quite why Bell and Rogers want retail Internet business to begin with is something of a mystery — surely they could make good money with very little hassle by going the wholesale route and leaving the resellers to deal with the user support issues, billing disputes, and mail server maintenance. But one look at a cellular phone bill from these pirates, with the “system access fee” here and the 20-cent text message there, shows that arbitrary, nickel-and-dime B.S. is their Happy Place.
Victory already?
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/932571–ottawa-to-reverse-crtc-decision-on-internet-billing