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I’ve always thought this (along with the notion that long distance charges are a holdover from analogue days, and also are for the most part bogus), but I always had lingering doubts, since no one else seemed to pipe up about it. Now the NYT confirms:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

And why have I always thought this? Because if you know half a thing or two about how information moves from place to place, it just makes sense. The telcos take advantage of the fact that most people won’t be bothered to work this stuff out for themselves, which makes us all suckers. If I had my druthers, we’d all be using VoIP on community ad-hoc WiFi networks.

What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting [NYT]
via
The New York Times: Text messages cost carriers virtually nothing [Boing Boing Gadgets]

Featuring Jack Black as Jesus, a cast of lots, and the ever awesome Dr. Horrible himself, Neil Patrick Harris:

Pure win.

Charlie Stross has a good, solid list of do-able things for President-elect Barack Obama (damn, I just don’t get tired of writing that) to concentrate on during his first 100 days. I don’t know if it’s really feasible for all these things to happen, but I sure hope they are—I agree 100% with Stross, which happens quite a bit, actually.
1. Shut down Gitmo
2. Reboot torture
3. Dismantle the DHS (hell yeah)
4. Ratify the Kyoto Treaty (double hell yeah)
5. Start a Congressional inquiry into political appointees
6. Find some young, fresh, liberal faces for the Supreme Court
7. Start a Congressional inquiry into election practices
8. Start a public inquiry into the misuse of intelligence (heh) in the run-up to 9/11
9. Talk to the Russians about (a) gas and oil security, and (b) Ballistic Missle Defense
10. Start talking to all of the G11 (inc’l Spain) about rebooting the global economy

Check out the list, along with deeper commentary, here.

In a move that surprises absolutely no one, the U.S. Government has found a way to escalate one of its ongoing military conflicts right before the election. Funny how I’ve been reading about this since yesterday morning in the international press, but it’s not until today that the American media picks it up. From the NYT:

An explosion on Sunday killed nine construction workers and wounded 19 others near the border of Iraq and Syria, the police in Anbar Province said.

The BBC is a bit less, eh, accommodating to U.S. spin, shall we say:

US military helicopters have carried out a raid inside Syria along the Iraqi border, killing eight people including four children, Syrian officials say.

I’m on record as saying that it’s quite plausible that military action this close to an election could be the excuse Bush (or his minders, rather; Dubya is probably running around the White House with a huge case of Senioritis) needs to call off the election and declare martial law. Let’s hope I’m dead wrong, or that if I’m not, the public won’t stand for it (hoping for the former, because, frankly, the American public is like a brachiosaurus: it takes way too long for the impulse to reach the brain, and for the animal to then process and react).

To top things off, Jon Taplin has another take on the October surprise, this one by way of Al-Qaeda.

Based off of an offhand Tweet during last night’s presidential debate, I wrote up a quick post on Tor.com:

During the presidential debate last night, John McCain came out, to the surprise of absolutely no one (but to the chagrin of many), in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision which gave women the right to abort a fetus, up until the point when the fetus becomes “viable” (insert your own value for “viable”, and, er, have fun with that one around the water cooler). In the course of defending his position, he uttered the phrase “I support the rights of the unborn.” Fair enough, Senator, but this begs the question: what about the rights of the undead?

Go check it out, there are some good and funny comments on there, including a link to this image, which may well be on its way to becoming a new meme.

This is pretty hilarious:

The senate passed that bloody FISA bill. Sonovabitch. Not unexpected, but still damn depressing. Of note, McCain was MIA (again), Obama voted ‘Yes’ (grrrrr.), Hillary voted ‘No’ (meh), after voting against a filibuster (huh?).

As an aside, please direct your attention to the stock image of the cellphone on the CNN.com news item I linked to (there’s a reason why I linked to a MSM site instead of to something like Talking Points Memo.). It’s a terrorist phone! It’s a terrorist phone! Way to be bigots, CNN.

Today the U.S. Senate votes on the amendment to the FISA bill, which, in essence, guts the fourth amendment to the Constitution, thus enabling the U.S. Government to eavesdrop on regular citizens without a warrant from a judge. Additionally, the bill grants retroactive immunity to telecom companies who have been aiding the Bush administration in their illegal wiretapping program. Let’s hope the Senate has a little more spine than the House, which passed the bill not too long ago.

Check out this interview by Tim Ferriss with Daniel Ellesberg, who released the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s. In it, Ellesberg explains why the proposed legislation is so dangerous, and why it’s so important that the Senate votes this bill down.

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Wed., July 9th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.
EDIT: The Senate has decided to postpone the vote until tomorrow, because they want to honor some old, southern racist who croaked.

This morning on DailyKos, I ran across this short article about a woman whose $100 campaign contribution was returned by the Obama campaign because she’s a registered lobbyist. Here’s a snippet, typoes and all:

It’s not often you get told that you are persona non grata and end up praising the person who exiled you. But that [sic] what I am doing. Obama actions are living up to his words. Through the actions of his campaign he is demonstrating that his values are real and his commitment is certain.

Another aspect that is quite impressive to me is that the Obama campaign has a mechnism [sic] set up to check each donation, even one as small as mine, against the lobbyist database, and then return it.

What I find most telling in this story isn’t that Obama is true to his word (this much I’m -surprisingly- already convinced of), it’s that he’s truly leveraging technology in order to make his operation more efficient and transparent, as can be seen by the fact that even a contribution as small as $100 doesn’t get past the screeners he’s had set in place. This lends real weight to his platform proposals for more transparency in government via the judicious and efficient use of technology, particularly the internet.

Lawrence Lessig –founder of the Creative Commons, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all around kickass dude, and one of my heroes–has just climbed like fifteen hundred notches on my scale of awesome by turning his attentions from fighting for copyright reform, to fighting for government reform. From Wired.com:

“The problem we face is … the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government,” he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. “The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can’t be done, that process always win over substance.”  

As such, he and Joe Trippi have founded The Change Congress Project, which aims to bring an unprecedented degree of transparency to politics. A short piece by Lessig himself, outlining his intentions with this project, can be found here. This is a perfect example of how technology, properly wielded in the hands of many, can and will bring transparency and accountability to the opaque back-room-deal-type of politics that we’re unfortunately used to, and which so many of us abhor. I think one of the biggest trends of the coming decade or so is going to be the disruptive effect of technology and communications on politics in the US and worldwide, an analogous situation to how technology has disrupted the entertainment industry over the past ten years or so. We’re going to start seeing a lot more politicians being on the up-and-up, because they won’t have a choice, they will be under too much scrutiny.