“Phat” is a great word, you can use it in so many fun ways, even little kids can say it (that’s actually really cute when it happens). Many fine things are Phat: blunts, cars, clothes, people’s backsides. But what comes to your mind when I say heavy?

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance goddess don’t you just want to barf? when have they ever ’improved’ service? by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
Dudley said he did not know what the pricing tiers would be nor the download limits. He said the heavy users were likely using the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.

I was just looking at some photos of two people that we talk about here all the time. And I thought, “no, those are too good.” But perhaps I was wrong, and they really did suggest what I thought they were suggesting. Time will tell. Either way, “hi res” and “heavy” downloading serve more purposes than just getting instant copies of “The Green Door.”

“Heavy” is one of those evil corporate terms and we should squash it now.  Read more 

This comment, to which I responded, inspires me to request that readers chime in on this question: how do you use Wikipedia? This is an important question to me because I’ve watched Wiki become a constant source of information around the blogosphere, and I’m not totally happy about it.

For those who don’t know, Wiki is a website in which one can find information about an incredibly large number of topics, ranging from theories about the gold standard to ancient religion to growing zucchini. What is fun about it: anyone can write, edit, or reedit a post.  Read more 

I think the political benefit of such an arrangement is that in the future, most “libraries” will be corporate for profit access havens. Information there will be organized to meet certain interests, and that methodology won’t calculate ours. But for now, it looks interesting. A fun project would be for someone to go over Google’s material, while comparing it with old school microfiche of the same material.

Web giant Google is further expanding its online empire with the launch of the Google News Archive Search.
The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years.  Read more