Blessed by the Potato

Bell has announced that it’s changing its UBB strategy in light of the fierce opposition (thanks to those of you that wrote your MP and/or the CRTC!). This is clearly not a case where Bell has seen the error of its ways and recanted, but just trying a less bad strategy to game the system to fleece the customers of its competitors. They’re still trying to push through a UBB scheme, but one that allows independents to aggregate their users, which gives them some flexibility on creating their own offering (rather than “white label” Bell retail). Still, it’s a cash grab, with the Globe reporting that fees would be 30 cents/GB — still gouging by about an order of magnitude. It’s not clear if this would replace the tariffs in place, or be an additional charge. As an additional charge, it’s still way too much (though given that the independents pay for their throughput, any UBB charge is too much). As a replacement for the existing tariff, I can’t really say, we’d have to see what the independents have to say on the matter. There’s speculation that Bell did this so that UBB wouldn’t become an election issue, though I have to wonder how it could: all the parties are already against it, which makes for a bit of a boring debate.

Also, Michael Geist had a series of posts on UBB this week, including one where he had some students put together a research report on UBB around the world. He also mentions the lack of linkage between congestion and charges designed to relieve congestion.

What’s the cost per GB? We’ve thrown around figures for the 1-3 cents/GB range, but that involves a fair bit of reverse engineering and some (pretty fair, IMHO) comparisons to US networks. Michael Geist digs up a report from Bell on the cost of bringing broadband to the boonies, and finds that with Bell’s own worst-case numbers for building a rural network from scratch are still less than 8 cents/GB. For the existing, largely urban/suburban network, the 1-3 cents/GB figures floating around are very likely correct.

I know that Word can be a downright malicious program sometimes, especially when formatting decides to take on a life of its own, animated by the unholy force of autocorrect/autoformat. I’m usually the wizard called in to correct the bad behaviour. But right now I’m dealing with a very strange case of possession.

I have a line that keeps bolding itself. I’ve unbolded it 20 times already, and yet whenever I go off and work on other parts of the document, poof, it’s bolded itself again.

WTF?

Update: And before I could even publish, it stopped. I had another issue with paragraphs taking on formatting style labels that weren’t theirs. It looks like that one was when I had an outline with point #1 as heading1 and point #2 as heading1 and then tried to go in and start writing bodytext between them, even though the new text looked like bodytext was supposed to, it was still registering as heading1, which matters when you have a ToC generated by the heading1 lines in the text… Anyhow, to get rid of the formatting/tags on the intervening text, I had to unformat everything from point#1 right through to point#2 and then reapply the formatting. Sigh.

And one final weird issue I’ll let you in on: I’m also something of a tax wizard, and I was getting my stuff together to start preparing my return this year, including a folder with all my tax slips, receipts, trading summary, capital gains schedule, etc. I also grab the previous year’s tax return and quicktax (now turbotax) file, which can help greatly with the process. I had 08 and 09 in the usual directory and made a copy to use, and then spent like 15 minutes searching and searching for my 2010 tax files. I looked on my desktop, I fired up my laptop, my old laptop… finally, it dawned on me that even though it’s 2011 now, it’s the 2010 tax year I’ll be filing this week. Sometimes the little things trip you up (related: how many PhDs does it take to turn on a projector? This week’s answer: 3).

Update 2: Oh, one more Word demon I forgot about: some time ago I utilized the feature that let you search not just for a word, but also for a word with a particular formatting. Ever since, any time I’ve hit CTRL+F and searched for something, I get no results, then scratch my head, and finally realize that “underline” is still active. I can turn it off and make my search work, but I have no idea how to make it stop defaulting to that. Any ideas, oh great hivemind?

It’s been a tumultuous year so far, and the snow hasn’t even melted yet! The big news story has been the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which has killed thousands of people and caused billions in dollars of damage. Oh, it also put some nuclear reactors into partial meltdown which added salt to the wounds by possibly making a few hundred more people sick, and releasing radiation into an area around the plants. But since it’s the ongoing story which will take weeks to fully play out, since people are afraid of the very word nuclear, and since fear-mongering sells papers, it’s been the headline story all week. Not that I am free of blame — I’ve re-read my radiation safety training materials and spent a lot of time brushing up on nuclear power generation this week, and have been soaking up the Fukushima stories.

While I do want to help everyone who’s going out of their minds keep perspective, I also don’t want to minimize the tragedy: the workers are being very brave while facing a terrifying situation, and are making personal sacrifices to try to minimize the damage to the rest of Japan. There have been fires, explosions, and meltdowns, leading to some radiation release (though whether the panicked mobs in Tokyo have anything to fear is an open question)…

Oh yeah, and there’s a civil war in Libya, demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, and crackdowns in Bahrain.

Joe Kelly over at Nerd Boys has a few posts on UBB up. He even tabulates the UBB fees by various ISPs.

Michael James reports that AT&T in the US has introduced UBB, which has sparked some outrage… at 1/10th the price of Canadian UBB.

Something I haven’t really drawn enough attention to is the very framework the CRTC laid out for making its decisions. They state that when congestion occurs, it should be corrected first by network infrastructure upgrades, then by economic incentives (i.e.: UBB), then by throttling and other traffic control measures. The thing is, there’s no structure to those guiding principles, leading to perverse incentives with UBB: an ISP can make more money by encouraging congestion, then charging UBB than it can by upgrading the network to stay ahead of traffic growth. Anyway, it was back in my 5-page submission if you read that, and if not, you probably want to focus on other things now.

Michael Geist, who has been debating Dan McTeague about proposed copyright reform, points out that despite calling for severe penalties for copyright infringers, Dan McTeague himself appears to fit the criteria for a repeat infringer. Zing!

Laser pulse pistol. Yes. The future is here.

On the profiteering side of the Japanese tragedy, Financial Uproar discusses investing in Tepco, which I was actually just talking about today with Netbug. I saw a lot of parallels with the BP situation there. Though there is an ADR, it trades on the pink sheets and is quite illiquid: TD Waterhouse wouldn’t let me put in a bid online, I had to call. I decided to sleep on it, but it’s now up ~20% in Tokyo tonight, so I may have missed my chance.

National Post: Language used to describe Japan’s atomic crisis borders on reckless hyperbole.

An old Scientific American article about how the emissions from coal plants are more radioactive than those from nuclear power plants. However, the mercury, particulate, and greenhouse gas emissions of the coal plants are far bigger concerns, not to mention mining issues.

And finally, I think my favourite link in the round-up: A post showing the deaths per TWh for different power generation methods. There’s lots of room to quibble about an order of magnitude here or there, but the end result is that coal is several orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear. And coal never provided us with medical advances like radiotherapy or diagnostic nuclear medicine.

Haven’t had one of these for a while.

The bar for the diet goals, as you may recall, was significantly lowered for the thesis writing here, because it’s just too hard to sit and try to write all day and not “fuel up” — and there is a limited supply of willpower. The goal was simply to not gain weight. Sadly, I’ve failed even that, as this last week I’ve jumped up nearly 5 pounds (I blame the 1 kg jar of cashews I just couldn’t resist buying). I got called in to spare a bunch for curling though, so I’ve been doing that about 3 times a week, and the snow keeps coming, leading to lots of shovelling-related “workouts”.

A Toronto statistician found a flaw on some Ontario lottery tickets. Interestingly, the end of the article suggests that Bingo tickets are still exploitable. I’m not sure how useful that is though — in the article, the fellow says he brought the flaw to the OLG not because he was necessarily moral, but because it wasn’t worth his time to try to scam the system. And that was for the tic-tac-toe tickets: the Bingo tickets are much “busier”, and the hit rate isn’t as high according to him, so it would be even less worthwhile trying to exploit. Nonetheless, my curiosity is piqued. If anyone wants to bankroll buying a few dozen tickets to try to find the exploit (might even get a paper published out of it!) I’d be interested in trying to analyze them.

Lenny sent me to a new webcomics site, Abtruse Goose. Lots of geek love there.

For those that like to watch rather than read, TVO has a decent video on the UBB issue, summarizing it in 3 min. And Michael Geist also caught Bell’s admission in the Industry committee hearings: there is no congestion on the last mile (and if there was, they’d have to be fair and charge UBB to their IPTV service).

The Torontoist reports on the CRTC’s cavalcade of failure, this time highlighting their decision to not allow a TV station to air more (Canadian) music videos.

“This is literally a decision that benefits absolutely nobody, which is why it’s so amazing: usually when the CRTC makes a horrendously bad decision, it at least has the appearance of being because Rogers or Bell whispered in their ear that they wanted to make more money.

“But this? This is so witless that we are forced to wonder if maybe we’ve misunderstood the CRTC all along. Maybe they aren’t a shell of a government agency beholden to corporate media giants to the point of uselessness. Maybe they’re simply so stupid that uselessness is their natural state, and all along we’ve been blaming Bell and Rogers for influencing the acts of lunatics. It’s possible. After all, the CRTC honestly thinks MuchMusic airs music videos.”

Via Reddit, an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether the goal of science (and science funding) should be to improve life. I have to disagree with Neil on the first part of the interview: not everyone would choose the video over the transcript given the option. And not just Canadians with our backwards limited-usage internet. I skip over a lot of video/audio content on the internet because I can read a transcript much faster than an effective audio podcast can convey information, because a transcript is searchable and quotable, and because I just can’t stand listening to some people talk (even more so when they amateurishly try to film from the side of a busy street), even if I wouldn’t mind “hearing” their thoughts. Yes, some content is lost without facial expressions, gestures, cadence, and tone of voice. But you know what? We’ve been communicating effectively for centuries in a textual fashion — on a hot summer’s night, there’s little I like better than curling up with a book at the cottage — so I don’t see how he can call into question the worthiness of producing transcripts.

As Canadians, I think it’s sad that we don’t get to appreciate just how awesome the US version of Amazon is. At the lab today the very real question was asked*: where do we go to buy a superconducting coil? We’re still looking for a supplier to meet our needs, but lo and behold, frakin Amazon! * – PS: science is awesome some days.

The CRTC is now seeking commentary on reviewing the 2011-44 UBB decision. Here’s the commentary I submitted.

CPAC has the committee meetings on the issue up. Video for the first one with the CRTC, and audio only for the second meeting with the independent ISPs.

The testimony by von Finckenstein was a travesty: he clearly doesn’t understand the issues at hand, the mechanics of the industry in play, and repeats verbatim Bell talking points. It was very tough to watch: the MPs didn’t even seem to know what questions to ask to get down to the core of the issue.

The independent ISPs provided much better testimony, but the technical presentation fell down (if you’re bilingual, then try that stream, as the English translation kept falling behind and dropping out). Fortunately, most of the meeting was in English.

Ellen Roseman reports that yes, Bell has some issues with its usage tracker.

An article in the Globe raises a very interesting point: “Imagine being asked to guess how much electric power you need every month, with a penalty for mistakes.” Because UBB is not a straight usage based fee. You pay out the nose if you go over your cap, but you have to, in part, choose your cap to begin with.