FCC Chairman Michael Powell had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, challenging all parts of the TV industry step off the curb and do their part to adopt digital television. He suggested, quite rightly, that all piece of the industry — programming, transmission, and receivers — have been unwilling to commit unless someone else goes first. Powell’s suggestion: “for all the industries to link arms and take one step forward — together.”

How sweet. But what he left considerably less than explicit is what he plans to do to should the industry not be cajoled. After all, the broadcasters got public spectrum to broadcast DTV for free, and set manufacturers and transmission equipment builders stand to profit hugely from digital retrofits. Given all the merger-and-acquisition activity in the media industry over the last five years, maybe this is one more place where Wall Street is paying more attention to The Deal than The Product.

 

From the New York Times:

Dazed by a Technical Knockout. The BMW 745i is a remarkable car with so many genuine technical advancements that it is surely the world’s most advanced sedan.

I’m quite certain that I’ve never seen Niklaus Wirth quoted in a car review before. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quoted in a computer review.

The underlying point of the review is also sound. Why in God’s name would you design a car so complex that you need a cheat sheet to give a parking valet? When you’re hurtling down the freeway at 65 mph or better, you really don’t want to have to think about how to tune the radio, do you?

From Reuters:

A Canadian family had to flee for safety after their pet Siamese cat went on a rampage, tearing at clothes and skin and driving them out of the house… Another police officer said Cocoa was “a Siamese cat with an attitude problem.”

Sears to Buy Lands’ End for $1.9 Billion. Sears, Roebuck & Company, the nation’s largest department store company, agreed to buy Lands’ End the biggest specialty catalog and Internet retailer, for $1.9 billion in cash.

OK, let me get this straight. Sears has a catalog for 100 years. It pretty much invents direct marketing and mail order. It kills the catalog in 1993. Then, 10 years later, it spends $1.9 billion to buy a casual clothing company that pretty recently had revenues that didn’t even amount to rounding error for Sears.

And if you’re going to give me the hard goods/soft good argument about Sears stores and the catalog, you probably need to remember that Lands’ End started by selling sailing equipment and attire.

I can’t help but wonder how much it would have cost Sears to stick with the catalog for the intervening years. And I’d love to hear how Sears’s management has been/will be punished for the expensive reversal of course.

I just hope Sears doesn’t screw up Lands’ End…

Here in the Northeast, we can use something called E-ZPass to pay bridge and road tolls on most major highways. You set up and account with the E-ZPass folks, they send you a box that you attach to your car’s windshield (or behind the grille), and roll slowly through toll barriers. It’s really quite wonderful. The proper tolls are deducted automatically from your account. Or, at least, that’s the theory.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that, convenience aside, there could be some privacy concerns. All your toll transactions are tracked, and you’re sent a statement every month or so. I can see from my latest statement that I crossed the Bronx Whitestone Bridge once in each direction on February 23rd, northbound in lane 22 at 5:40pm, southbound in lane 17 at 11:20pm. Also listed is the number of the tag that was scanned. Someone with access to the database could presumably see the same thing.

So the latest statement came, and I found a transaction at Exit 10 of the Massachusetts Turnpike dated 7:45am on April 3. Ummm, no. I’d swapped my tag a few days before that (at E-ZPass’s request), and mailed in the old tag, which is the one that hit in Massachusetts.

I called the service center, explained the situation, and the customer service rep said that within a few days, they would send me an inquiry form. This form would include a photo of the license plate of the car bearing the E-ZPass linked to my account, snapped as the car pulled away from the toll barrier. If it’s not my car, they’ll reverse the charge?

Say what?

It seems that E-ZPass photographs the license plates of all vehicles that pass through one of their toll barriers. Since I can’t find any reference to that practice in their Terms and Conditions, I don’t know how long they keep them. I also don’t know what other use they’re put to, and that worries me a bit. And the part about their not ‘fessing up to the practice in any easy-to-find place actually worries me quite a lot.

An acquaintance on one of my mailing lists sends this link along.

I’m not sure, but didn’t Bogart try this move in The African Queen?

“It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.” — Caron de Beaumarchais.

You probably know about Car Talk, the public radio talk show about cars and car repair. The hosts, Click and Clack (a/k/a Tom and Ray Magliozzi) once had a spirited conversation about whether two people who don’t know anything about a subject know more or less the one person who doesn’t know anything about that subject.

The answer, of course, is that two people know less. Two people arguing about something that neither knows anything about are capable of building an entire towering construct of ignorance and supposition, each particle of non- or mis-information building on the one previous.

 

A 5-year-old is awarded a patent (6,368,227, if you’re counting) on a technique for swinging on a swing. More evidence of a system out of control.

 

Susan Kitchens outpoints an L.A. Times story about an artist who altered a freeway roadsign so that people won’t actually get lost following it. The job was so good that Caltrans didn’t notice for nine months — until the story hit the paper. And they may well leave things as they are.

Any chance we can get this guy to come to New York City? The road signs here are atrocious. Some of it is that the roads here are old and not up to contemporary spec. Some of it is that signs were designed to be driven at 40 mph.

Anyway, I have two fairly trivial examples. On an overpass where the New England Thruway crosses the Hutchinson River Parkway, a sign read New England Thurway and stayed that way for some years. Two signs across the street from each other near here call it alternately “Schermerhorn St.” and “Schemerhorn St.” (missing the first “r”). What’s even worse is that they’re both right outside the NYC Board of Education’s personnel building.