“Like one of the 100 cars and trucks a day taking the ferry to Gravina Island, which justifies building a $300 million Bridge to Nowhere. Therefore I propose building a $300 million Internet Pipe to Nowhere in Alaska.”

Hey! So are my balls! No seriously. “Seminiferous tubules” — look it up. There’s also an (occasionally) associated reaction quite similar to the “‘Blutarsky Effect” in the article’s visual.

I have no doubts at all that the telsatcos will try their best to suppress any efforts to bypass them; they are in a fight for their lives since they are bordering on extinction as a business model (at least telcos are) and they have no choice but to throw everything at this fight that they can.

But as I’ve linked in threads here before, there are folks in IT who’ve been talking about the “last mile” and how to bypass the telcos (and the larger telsatco alliance); we need to get more folks up to speed on this effort as well as encourage more pervasive WiFi development.

Ultimately, the telcos have a challenge they must solve: what does a successful business model look like when they are no longer the only game in town? Every technology business will have to deal with that question at some point or at many points in their existence; it’s only fitting that telcos finally get pushed to examine their business model if they are truly technology companies.

Prior to Nixon the Coca Cola company prided itself on its contacts within the Whitehouse regardless of whether the prez was a Republican or Democrat.

Ike was famous for hoisting a Coke when photographers were around, in part because of the effort made by Coke in the war to supply soldiers with Coke at the same price and the same quality as they were used to at home, namely 6 oz for a nickel.

It genuinely was one of those things that soldiers appreciated and special dispensation was made to not only ship syrup, but also refrigration units etc to provide ice cold ones.

But the agents for Coke also exhibited considerable bravery and ingenuity in getting the product to the various theaters of war.

As an aside, my mother growing up in England in the war,got to taste this mysterious Coca Cola that the Yanks all loved. The one she tasted was not cold and she thought it tasted like medicine. So I never drank it when young, because of that and only started to drink Diet Coke when I was 23.

It was Nixon who turned his back on the traditional relationship the company enjoyed when he got Pepsi into Russia, which in turn lead to the Pepsi = Republicans and Coke = Democrats of the Nixon/Carter times.

In virtually all its history, Coke has advertised extensively and in the process created some of the iconic images of the 20th century, including most people’s conception of Santa really looks like. We just forget he has a bottle of Coke in his hand.

When Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace prize in 1964, the city planned a special dinner to honor him. When word reached Robert Woodruff, the president of Coca Cola, that the white business establishment would probably boycott the dinner he set the wheels in motion to change that.

Woodruff at the time was recovering from a riding accident and didn’t attend himself, but without his efforts the many whites who did attend probably would not have.

I don’t own any Coca Cola stock, though given the amount of Diet Coke I consume (I don’t like coffee, what can I say) I probably should.

http://www.mobiletracker.net/a…..-earthlink

As for Google & Vint Cerf(ex MCI player, hmmm… ;) ): If you cant beat them, join them…hehe

http://gigaom.com/2006/07/05/google-time-to-fight/

I’m going to point to something else that may or may not be related to all the other machinations of the players in the Net Neutrality discussions. Make of it what you will, your mileage may vary.

Did you know that there are more cell phone internet users in Japan than there are PC-based internet users?

What would need to happen here in the U.S. for the same statistic to be true?

Guess not…

::grin::

wow, this one flew right under my radar – but I think you guys are on to something, Google has hedged itself to create new “lifestyle” apps that will most likely run exclusively on this (Free WiFi ;) )backbone, as some like Om Malik have surmised – with funding hopefully being garnered through ads.
I find this new concept of a shadow net intriguing now that Google has not only set its sights on everything MS, but also on eBay and its huge $$ niche. If this is true, I couldnt be happier…