Adelphia Communications, the cable television company that disclosed last week that it had $2.3 billion in debts that it might have to pay but had not put on its balance sheet, said yesterday that it was delaying the filing of its annual report while it and its auditor considered the proper accounting.

Adelphia Delays Annual Report to Consider Accounting for Debt

If the copyright lobby continues this arrogant pursuit of security at all costs, Valenti and his ilk are going to find out how true that statement is.

In contrast to an article logged earlier, this Washington Post article takes a decidedly anti-CBDTA stance, encouraging consumers to write Congreess and boycott the crippled hardware.

As Copyright Gets a Starring Role, We're Cast as the Villains

Communications technologies continue to improve despite the telecom recession. As the gap widens between what is possible and what is deployed, the threat to established business models grows accordingly. The ILECs and their allies in the publishing/entertainment industry and other sectors must fight harder and harder to preserve the technological underpinnings of their old business. The Tauzin-Dingell DSL non-competition bill is an example of such a hold-back-the-future battle. Fortunately, it is likely to die in the U.S. Senate. Senator Hollings, chairman of the Senate's Commerce Committee, vividly described the bill's purpose in a Senate speech on February 25, 2002: "Hailed as a way to enhance competition, it eliminates it. Touted as a way to enhance broadband communications, it merely allows the Bell companies to extend their local monopoly into broadband." Despite the anticipated death of Tauzin-Dingell, the network of the future has few friends in government. Hollings is no gigabit guru; he is opposed to Tauzin- Dingell because he is a friend of AT&T (the *cable* non- competition company) and to the konstipated kontent krowd. Meanwhile, the ILEC teleban is regrouping in regulatory and legislative caves of several state governments. Having killed off the Competitive Local Exchange (CLEC) business, it is going after the next threat -- forward looking public entities, such as municipal utility districts and publicly owned power companies, that see how important an advanced communications infrastructure is to their local economies.

It seems that legal issues may prevent the US from repeating Canada's success with customer-owned networks. And if you are still under the impression that the telecom collapse has nothing to do with intellectual property, just ask David Isenberg.

Nine States Have Barriers to Publicly Owned Telecom | Isen.com

The purpose of the Long Bets Foundation is to improve long-term thinking. Long Bets is a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake. The foundation furnishes the continuity to see even the longest bets through to public resolution. This website provides a forum for discussion about what may be learned from the bets and their eventual outcomes.

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The Long Bets Foundation was started in 02001 as a 501(c)(3) public education nonprofit foundation, based in California. It is a partial spin-off from The Long Now Foundation, which is building a 10,000-year Clock and tools for a 10,000-year Library. Long Bets is one of the Library tools.

Long Bets

We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that -- to think human beings are fine the way they are -- is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology.

Online in full text, from a recent edition of Edge. Also available in streaming audio/video; lasts ~ 9 minutes.

The Singularity: A Talk With Ray Kurzweil | Edge.org

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that the greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy. To reorient contemporary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution -- intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants -- will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children. In Our Posthuman Future, our greatest social philosopher begins to describe the potential effects of our exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.

_Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution_ by Francis Fukuyama

Software companies run on Internet time. Speed is everything, and if the product that is shipped doesn't quite work, it can always be fixed in the next release. Then there's the wireless-carrier industry, which works on telephone time. The goal from the get-go is 99.999% reliability, so the rule for both hardware and software is test and test some more, to make sure that products work properly and don't interfere with the operation of the network. Telephone time is the toughest standard of all.

This "telephone time" idea is at the core of the industry's collapse. What's the point of having expensive "5 nines" gear in the core of the network, when handsets are forever warning users about dying batteries; when coverage is spotty at best in rural/suburban areas and often congested in urban areas; when random, abrupt, unexplainable hangups are commonplace; when many customers are locked into long-term contracts anyway; and more.

A retail model in which carriers are expected to subsidize the cost of phones and handhelds means the network operators are in control of what gets sold.

This is where Europe got it right with GSM: control access through simple, interoperable tokens, and let the customers buy their own equipment.

"[Carriers] run the risk of being reduced to dumb pipes," says Richard Siber, a partner in Accenture.

Ah, so it's back to the old debate between the stupid network and the intelligent network. Didn't we already finish that one?

The Techno-Culture Clash in Telecom

With shares below $1, NTL is in danger of losing its listing on the New York Stock Exchange ...

British Cable Giant Says Debt Is Depleting Its Cash

Layoffs at Ciena continue industry's downward spiral; "Worst depression ever"; Some call revival years away as sector lags U.S. economy

Although the nation's wobbly economy is showing signs of strengthening, the telecommunications industry is mired in a deep slump with no end in sight, according to industry experts. ... Layoffs at Ciena have reduced the work force by 38 percent. ...

One analyst: "This industry now is in the worst depression ever. I think depression is not too strong a word."

[Another analyst] sees the downturn gripping the industry into 2004.

... The cuts have been deep. Verizon: 16,000; SBC: 7,500; Qwest: 7,000; BellSouth: 3,000.

At the current pace, the number of layoffs would shatter last year's total of 317,777 telecommunications workers who lost jobs.

"Telecom is still experiencing just a tremendous glut in capacity and falling demand. I do think there are more [cuts] coming. Coming back to some kind of equilibrium is not complete yet. We are still seeing cuts every day." ... "What really happened is the demand for equipment ... collapsed for the last year and a half."

... more than a dozen telecommunications companies have filed for bankruptcy and others are on the brink of failure. "There has been a rash of bankruptcies. ... It is a mess."

No recovery on horizon for telecoms

BellSouth is seeking to renegotiate a $1.7 billion loan it got from a group of banks in 1998. ... [while] Verizon's unit in Argentina is seeking to renegotiate debt of about $1 billion ...

Defaults Seem Near for Latin Units of BellSouth and Verizon