It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

The Austin City Council is poised to take action tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 22) that will make our city the laughing stock of the interwebs.

The issue is agenda item 28 at tomorrow's City Council meeting:

http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/council_meetings/item_attachments.cfm?meeting...

The action is to pass an ordinance that they are calling a "texting while driving" ban. Except that's not what it is.

The Council is considering a total ban on any use of cellular data while driving, no matter how innocuous or harmless. Rather than ban dangerous behavior (say, typing on a keyboard while driving), this ordinance simply bans anything to do with cellular data.

If you download driving instructions to your phone before leaving home and glance at them while the car is in motion, you've broken this law. Under this law, the address that you'd scrawl on a piece of paper somehow becomes a driving hazard if it's on your phone.

If you look at the time on your phone and have a wallpaper that you downloaded across the mobile internet, you've broken this law. Under this law, information becomes a driving hazard merely because its transmitted by cellular network.

If you use voice-to-text functions to dictate an SMS, you've broken this law. You've created an electronic message and that will be prohibited.

Even if you keep both hands on the wheel and attention on the road at all times, if you interact with mobile cellular data in almost any fashion, then you've broken this law. How stupid is that?

The ordinance is poorly written, overly broad, and just doesn't have the facts behind it.

Yes, the ordinance is bad, but the way it's being done is even worse. Council is trying to ram this through without public review. The language was finished only a week ago. It was released to the press with misleading headlines that downplay the scope of the ban. Council is refusing to allow this to come before citizen boards and commissions for review and input.

This thing is on a fast track to be done before anybody realizes what's happened.

Can you please take 3 minutes right now and ask them to postpone action on the cellular device ban?

Do it here: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/council/groupemail.htm

We're counting down the final days to the June 12 transition to digital broadcast television. There has been added urgency to the effort because Nielsen reports that Austin is one of the worst prepared cities in the nation.

The May 24 DTV report reports that 4.81% of Austin-area households are unprepared, as compared to 2.66% nationwide. That means approximately 30,000 central Texas households could lose television reception when the transition occurs.

This isn't just about watching American Idol and Conan O'Brien. It's a serious public safety matter. Television remains the most widely used resource for important news and information, such as current weather conditions. In the event of emergency, necessary information may not reach households cut off in the transition.

Six months ago the media was full of stories about DTV. Now, not so much. I talked to a major media reporter yesterday, and he told me his readers are pretty sick of hearing about it.

Time-Warner Austin has announced that later this year, it will implement a tiered set of bandwidth caps for its broadband customers. That's been a controversial and hotly debated proposal. I see some things frequently mentioned in the debate that I think are distracting, not helpful.

First, I see people frequently trying to draw a parallel between broadband tiers and cell phone usage plans. This makes sense only on a superficial level. Yes, in both cases you buy a certain amount and pay extra when you go over.

This analog does not hold up under scrutiny. The usage patterns of cell phones are pretty stable. There continues to be some migration away from landline service and towards online (VOIP) services, but for most of us our cell phone usage a year from now won't be that much different from what we do today.

This is completely untrue for broadband usage. New, innovative services are being created as we speak. Our broadband usage patterns may be radically different a year from now than they are today. Broadband caps lock in current usage patterns, which is detrimental to innovation.

One of the biggest problems with Twitter is that a single blathering user can monopolize the discussion. This week, Facebook rolled out a new home page design. In this change, they introduced this Twitter misfeature to Facebook.

Conventional Twitter presentation (such as your personal landing page) is a zero-sum game. (That's a mathematical term that says for every winner there is a loser.) Each "tweet" update you post on Twitter pushes somebody else's update off the page. Each time you win a space on the page, somebody else loses theirs. This means that a single blathering user can displace numerous other people.

The problem is compounded by the realization that the value of a person's updates often are inversely proportional to the frequency of their updates. Now I'm in the hall; Now I'm in the room; Speaker A said, 'this'; Speaker B said, 'that'. Thus not only do blatherers displace a proportionate number of other people's messages, they often do so with low value messages.