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Once I shut down the network, we’ll be offline, and that means that I won’t be able to post to this site during the workday, as is my usual practice. Hey, don’t kid yourself…something like 75% of all Internet traffic emanating from the United States occurs during normal business hours. Indeed, I don’t know how I would be able to put up with the mindless tedium of working in a Big Corporation without the ability to spend time at work online. But I am about to find out, at least for a few days.

Between the lack of connectivity during the day, and our brutally busy extra-curricular schedule in the evenings, I’m not likely to post much, if at all, next week. Just so you don’t think I’ve died from bird flu or something.

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Personalized bobbleheads are sooooooo 2001. If you really want to be hip, you’ll want to order your own personalized doll.

Well, it’s more like a personalized figurine, I guess. They’re made out of PVC clay and don’t seem to have articulated limbs in the photos, so they’re going to be hard and immovable like a figurine. They come in three types: a “cute” type, a “vivid” type and a “fixed” type. The difference seems to be on how customized you want the figure. The “fixed” figure is just your head on a stock body, while the “vivid” figure is 100% custom based on a full-figure photo you provide.

Of course, if you had different ideas about just what a “personal doll” should be, you might need to look elsewhere.

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Noted sex authority, Pope Benedict XVI, seen here at a recent art show in Milan, continued to insist that despite the planet’s population surpassing the 6,666,666,666 mark last week, contraception is a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church.

He must have been really happy to hear that the Duggar Family announced last week that they have conceived Child #20. Or, probably not, come to think of it, because the Duggars are not Catholic, and what Papa Ratzi really means is that the world needs more Catholics, not any of those “not-quite-Christian” religions (not to mention Muslims or Jews). About all *I* can say about the Duggars is to quote Grouch Marx: “I like my cigar, lady, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

This article in The American Prospect by Dana Goldstein took the American media to task for not asking the Pope any tough questions on his recent American visit about the Church’s policies on contraception and its role in the spread of AIDS in the developing world. Goldstein quotes a doctor who treats AIDS patients in Southern Africa:

This is the reality: A married woman living in Southern Africa is at higher risk of becoming infected with HIV than an unmarried woman. Extolling abstinence and fidelity, as the Catholic Church does, will not protect her; in all likelihood she is already monogamous. It is her husband who is likely to have HIV. Yet refusing a husband’s sexual overtures risks ostracism, violence, and destitution for herself and her children.

This Pope occasionally gets referred to as the “Pope of Reason” because many of his appeals rely on the context of reason, but as Morgan Meis wrote around the time of the papal visit, it’s a carefully constructed misdirection. Benedict is using the pretext of reason to argue against modernity itself in favor of a decidedly less friendly and understanding authority in Rome that is more committed to its own power base than any real effort at promoting global harmony. Another American Prospect piece, this one by Adele Stan, points out that his pointed remarks at the Muslims make it clear that he’s offering a “my-way-or-the-highway” route for anyone who is not Catholic.

It’s no wonder Dick Cheney likes this guy so much.

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Actual promo image from the online version of one of the New York tabloids yesterday. Frankly, considering the story includes Tom Brady, I’m a little surprised that this wasn’t the lead story on Channel 7’s 11:00 newscast last night as well.

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In practical terms, 250 gigabytes is:

- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)

- A LOT of World of Warcraft. Downloading game patches uses a bunch of bandwidth once in a while, but normal game play tops out around 30-60 kilobytes/second, or maybe a 100-200 megabytes an hour run rate, according to one blog. Another user says normal usage is closer to 1-5 megabytes per hour. Continue to play until your eyes bleed.

- 2500-4000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs. Depending on quality/length, an MP3 album is somewhere between 60 and 100 megabytes. Amazon says its 3-minute MP3s are about 5 megabytes. There are only 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, or enough time to listen to 14,400 3-minute songs. So you’ll be ok.

- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.

- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day. Do you know any of those folks?

So: If you download one HD movie a week, six standard-def movies a week, 5 albums a week, play a ton of WoW, and surf a lot of YouTube and Hulu, you’ll still struggle to use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. We think you’ll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It’s nice outside! Go for a walk.

In other words, 250GB/month is A LOT for your average user, and still pretty generous for all but the most hardcore downloader. Ars Technica suggests that Comcast is trying to get the FCC off its back about a variety of complaints by offering a much more transparent way of determining “bandwidth hogs”, since there have been many customer complaints about being abruptly shut off by Comcast without prior warning or disclosure of how much is “too much”.

Meanwhile, today at DSL Reports, “Karl”, the writer who broke the story on Tuesday, has a lengthy list of criticisms and concerns about the implications of this plan, including the eventual moving to billing customers for their Internet usage on a “per-byte” basis.

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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name given to all those unpopular and generally ineffective technologies used to try to prevent people from doing whatever they want with their digital content (movies, games, music, etc.). Security guru Bruce Schneier wrote this piece all the way back in 2001 entitled “The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention”, which pointed out that all DRM schemes can and will be broken, and the only thing imposing DRM on customers does is to treat them like criminals. Nevertheless, DRM technologies continued to be a way of life with digital content until last year, when Apple went out on a limb and offered DRM-free music downloads from a major record label (EMI). Shortly thereafter, Wal-Mart demanded DRM-free music from their suppliers, and before you could say “Metallica Sucks” DRM was virtually gone from every record label.

But while the labels acquiesced on DRM, the RIAA has not stopped their witch hunt for “pirates”, and this Ars Technica post quotes the technical chief at the RIAA as saying that DRM will rear its ugly head yet again, especially as people stop buying single track downloads and/or CDs and move to subscription services. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow didn’t mince words about this:

The RIAA believes in “intellectual property,” which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don’t do bad things with their bits. In the information age, “property” is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.

Meanwhile, on the software-and-games front, BioWare, the producers of the game Mass Effect said that the PC version of the game will use a DRM technology called SecuROM (which is well-known and despised by gamers everywhere for causing their games not to run) AND an activation system that will require the computer to validate itself online every ten days. But what really has people shooting steam out of their ears is that the guy who said this also claims that the very highly-anticipated game Spore will feature the same activation/validation scheme.. Les, who blogs as “Stupid Evil Bastard”, is so pissed off that he says he might not even buy Spore as a result, and my friend Solonor isn’t pleased that if he goes on a long business trip and shuts off his PC, his game won’t work anymore.

My online friend Art Wells said it best over at The Site Which Must Not Be Named:

You don’t buy software. You rent the right not to be sued or prosecuted for using it.

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Poor Beauty the Bald Eagle…the top of her beak was severely damaged by a shotgun blast from a hunter, leaving her unable to eat prey. She was found in 2005 and turned over to a bird recovery center in Anchorage, Alaska, then eventually to a center in Idaho called Birds Of Prey Northwest that specializes in raptor birds. Without a beak to tear her food with, Beauty must be hand-fed strips of meat and has difficulty drinking and preening. The linked article says that the director of the center met a mechanical engineer, who, moved by the bird’s plight, has offered to design a prosthetic beak made out of nylon composite material. The prosthetic, which will be glued onto the remnants of her upper beak, would allow her to eat more normally, but would not restore her to a point where she could be released to fend for herself in the wild. More pictures of Beauty and other raptors being cared for by the center here.

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If you read nothing else I’ve linked here today, go and read this post at The Progressive Review by its editor, Sam Smith.

Smith details how the “arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs” have managed to spread the pernicious nothingness of mass capitalism into every avenue of American life over the past quarter-century.

The tragedy is that each of the infected cultures, organizations and individuals once had their own culture that often was infinitely more appealing, intelligent, inspiriting and honest than that which has sullied it. Why is the corporate and business school tradition preferable to that of the church, the artist, the non-profit, the political movement or education? Is politics just branding, is art just a product, is education just a learning process, would Martin Luther King have done better if he had gone to business rather than theological school? Each of these traditions have centuries of wisdom and experience behind them, but all that is increasingly put aside to fit the corporate model.

We pay for this in numerous ways. Some are obvious such as political candidates and public officials carefully avoiding real issues in favor of creating artificial images of themselves, backed by such words as “hope” and “change.” And if you don’t join with the change huckster, you are accused of “fear of change.”

A few years back I put it this way: “A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.” And this was all before the rise of the killer hedge fund.

It is tempting just to copy-paste the whole post right here, but I will limit myself to those two pull quotes. This is not a “things were better in the good old days” rant by a jaded ex-hippie; this, my friends, is the straight and unvarnished truth. Our fascination with “red vs blue”, “black vs white”, “Coke vs Pepsi”, whatever is strictly for show, keeping us distracted while the legions of lawyers and regiments of MBAs systematically gut everything we cherish, reduce it to “product”, then discard it when the product is no longer sufficiently profitable. The very world itself is now reduced to an item of consumption which has been overexploited so badly that we may cause our own extinction.

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…or Clinton, or Obama…

• Five Mistakes HIllary Clinton Has Made
• Hillary Plays The Crazy Card
• Why Hillary Can’t Win
• When Will The Clintons Realize It?

• Joseph Wilson (Valerie Plame’s husband) slams Obama’s qualifications
• Obama’s Top Ten Weaknesses
• Obama “Vulnerable” To Republican Smear Tactics
• Rush Limbaugh changes his mind and tells “Dittoheads” to vote Obama

• Voter confronts McCain about his short temper
• John McCain’s Top Ten Out-Of-Touch Moments
• John McCain and John Hagee
• McCain is a “Flip-Flopper”

That carrot is looking better and better by the second.

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On Tuesday, AMPTP (the group that represents the producers) abruptly broke off talks with the Screen Actors’ Guild. SAG hasn’t made any rumblings about a strike just yet, and the conventional wisdom says that this is just a negotiating tactic on the part of AMPTP. On Wednesday, AMPTP began identical contract discussions with AFTRA, the union for television and radio performers. No walk-out there as of yet, but since the sticking points and demands are so similar, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it.

Mark Evanier, who is a long-time Hollywood insider, opined that AFTRA would probably agree to a lesser deal, leaving AMPTP in the catbird’s seat to tell SAG to take it or leave it. Nobody in Hollywood wants a second strike so soon after the WGA strike. Ratings for network television series have declined precipitously this spring, even for top-rated shows. AdAge talks about “series fatigue” in this article as one explanation for the drop in viewers for long-running shows, but has to admit that the strike gave fence-sitting viewers the excuse they needed to give up on watching their favorite shows. New audience research indicates that adults (the 25-54 demographic) still spend a little more than half of the time they spend consuming media watching television, but that’s a decline from past surveys and is only likely to continue to decrease. A second strike shutting down production of television shows and movies would be devastating.

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