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Is Anti-Municipal Broadband Report Astroturf?
Glenn Fleishman writes "A report issued today by the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC) and The Heartland Institute says that municipalities shouldn't build wireless networks because it's anti-competitive and will waste taxypayer dollars. The report has some interesting points (mostly about building fiber networks), but eWeek (second page) uncovered that NMRC is a subsidiary of Issue Dynamics, which is a lobbying firm that represents most US telcos and cable operators. It's astroturf. The Heartland Institute won't reveal its funders. I wrote a long account trying to track down the connections between the sock puppets involved in publicizing the report."
Beat ya all here
Looks like gmail is now out of beta; or very close to it. I had 6 invites for several months, and yesterday, I finally managed to get rid of 1. So I was rather shocked to see today that one of my gmail accounts now has _50_ invites (the other is stuck at 10 invites). Seems I am not the only one.
As for invites. Bah. 50 is going to take 1 metric forever to send all of them out. Nevertheless, if you have been living under a deep, dark rock, and you don't yet, somehow, have a gmail account, leave first name, last name, and email address to send the invite to, and I will send invites to as many people as I can be bothered to.
(Note: first name and last name can be anything. You can change it after you sign up. Secondly, in the past hotmail and yahoo email have placed invites in the spam folder. Check there if your expected invite does not appear.)