The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn't Telling It: Based upon what I've been reading lately, Robert Reich seems to be on the right track here:

"If Obama and the Democrats were serious about story B they’d at least mention it. They’d tell the nation that income and wealth haven’t been this concentrated at the top since 1928, the year before the Great Crash."

Uh-oh. (via Marco Arment)

Mac of the future: the connections: Another great, completely agreeable, article in this series, from Glenn Fleishman.

Comcast: We bent over backwards to help Level 3! (those bastards): Okay, this is finally starting to make some more sense:

"But the Netflix deal alone is so massive that Level 3 has suddenly become a major CDN player. Comcast says that it was approached by Level 3 two weeks ago, just after Level 3 signed the Netflix deal, and was asked for 27 to 30 new interconnection ports using the two companies' existing interconnection agreement (that is, Level 3 would pay nothing more for adding up to 30 direct 10GigE connections to Comcast's network)."

10GigE ports aren't cheap, so I can see why Comcast might be balking.

Customer Care: Bob Lefsetz is a Mac convert, and draws interesting parallels between the support that Apple supplies and what the music industry needs to do:

"You see it worked.  On paper, it looks like Apple’s losing money.  Having its tech support in America, spending all this time on the phone, sending me free software.  But now I’m evangelizing.  I’m just telling you, you want to be a member of the cult.  You want people to take care of you, you want them to care about you.  Owning a Mac is like following the Grateful Dead.  Jerry took care of you.  Steve might not be as benevolent a character, but deep inside we believe he’s taking care of us too."

Inside Kevin Smith's Booming Podcast Business: Fast Company on an interesting way that Kevin Smith is monetizing his free podcasts.

Tablets: Paul Graham presents a novel take on what's going on in the mobile space (think iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad).

Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners: Explosive, must-read piece on the housing crisis from Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone. In short: the banks are committing major fraud, and getting rubber-stamps from the Government to do so.

New iPhone OS supports our network technology to boost smartphone performance: Interesting:

"Tests by Nokia Siemens Networks have shown that iPhone iOs 4.2  supports a technology called Network Controlled Fast Dormancy... the technology makes the network and the handset work together to create the best conditions for smartphones to work quickly, yet have a long battery life and minimize network congestion."

Mac of the future: the CPU: Great, even-handed look at the current state of CPUs on the Mac, and where Apple is probably headed.

Level 3 takes spat with Comcast public: This is a much better article than what I linked to previously. This dispute is still fairly confusing, however. Comcast is trying to cast it as a simple peering dispute, but I'm having a hard time totally understanding that. It seems like Comcast is trying to double dip — they charge a monthly fee to their users, so that they can watch Netflix movies (amongst other things), and then they want to charge the network providers that deliver Netflix content into Comcast's network. That doesn't seem right.