That is the Sound of Inevitability

Two big names called it quits today. Fidel Castro threw in the towel as President of Cuba, while Toshiba announced that it is dropping HD DVD. I know these two topic are unrelated, but Castro was Cuba's head of state for 49 years while HD DVD has been in a format war for 2 years. You'll find plenty of people ready to argue that both went on for too long.

Another battle looms: sides are being drawn in the net neutrality debate. Those in favour of treating all data the same: Sony, Vonage, and numerous consumer advocacy groups. Those in favour of not letting you have the bandwidth you paid for and intrusive packet inspection: Comcast, most large phone carriers, and everybody's favourite pack of weasels, the RIAA. Yeah, keep blaming Big Content's problems on Bittorrent. Saying that something is true over and over doesn't make it so. I think you can infer my opinion from the above, even though I suspect that my ISP already throttles me. Grrr.

Still on the topic of networks, the undersea data lines that cut off swaths of the middle east and India from most of their internet bandwidth earlier this month remain a mystery. One break was determined to be an accident, the other four are still under investigation and sabotage has not been ruled out.

Finally, Apple has trotted out a refreshed iPod Shuffle lineup. We have the usual aluminum casings and selection of colours, including a (PRODUCT) RED version (Wow! Misuse of capitals and parentheses!). Notably, there is now a 2 GB version at $79 US and the price of the 1GB model is now a paltry $49 US. Now give the MacBook lineup a boost and I'll be impressed.