André Brocatus was here...

twin peaks via laura9

jenbee:

Which @20x200 size is just right for you?

NICE

It could have just said “people”… The daily irrelevant » Cartoons

Great understated design via pootee

dailymeh:

The above is a very snappy graphic floating around the web that supposedly illustrates why net neutrality is a big deal. It delivers its message effectively. It will leave people properly horrified. It’s also a boogey man that doesn’t reflect the real dangers of a world without net neutrality.

Yes, in the extreme, without net neutrality, ISPs could offer internet access modeled on cable tv: you pay for the “channels” (websites) you want to see. But this isn’t going to happen. People are too used to how the web works. No one would buy the above plan. ISPs aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to make a move that separates them from ninety nine percent of their customers. The above will never be the norm, for perfectly obvious commercial reasons.

The real danger with the lack of network neutrality is the idea that packets aren’t created equal. ISPs will never blatantly censor every website except for a few hundred that you paid for — that would simply make no business sense at all. But what they might do is a lot sneakier: they might subtly change the internet under us. By prioritizing packets from certain servers or to certain places, the openness and competetiveness that we all know and love on the internet could be destroyed. If YouTube videos suddenly load twice as fast as videos from every other video site, everyone else is at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. Suddenly it isn’t enough to create a superior service to eat market share from one of the big players; suddenly you need to bribe the ISPs to get your packets equal priority, because there’s no way anyone is going to use your web service when the big players are loading twice as fast or half your packets are lost. The low barrier to entry on the internet would be gone. The openness of the internet would vanish. Competition between websites would be reduced. And yes, it might very well be that your ISP decides that packets containing criticism aimed at them should be downprioritized and ones that praise them should be given the deluxe treatment.

A better analogy than the “channel plan” above might be a bunch of mobsters who demand protection money. If the internet is a street, then the mob will hamper those stores (websites) that don’t pay, while favorizing the big players who can afford to pay huge sums in protection money. A small mom-and-pop store isn’t going to have much of a chance at competition, despite better pricing or superior products, if the store keeps getting break-ins, fires, muscle types skulking at customers, or if customers who shop at the store keep getting mugged so that on average, only half of what is bought there ever make it to the customer’s home. Those chain stores are going to look mighty tempting in that scenario. Internet packets are the same way.

Or perhaps someone invents an entirely new use of the internet, but the ISPs put the technology at such a disadvantage that it never sees widespread adoption. Google, which is championing net neutrality — though China continues to be a blemish on their reputation for opennness — thinks that prioritizing the type of data contained in a packet is ok. While this is less severe than the mob-like system above — video might get priority over text, but not YouTube over Hulu — it does mean that entirely novel uses of the internet that we can’t even imagine at the moment could be at a disadvantage.

These, I think, are the things that could realistically happen in the near future. They might not happen, but so long as there’s no legislation that prevents it, they could, and whatever is potentially profitable will probably come to pass at one point or another.

I had a spare half hour so I created a design for a T-shirt for the Threadless / POP Life competition. It;s as close as I will come to visiting the exhibition, I’m afraid.

I was afraid this design would be rejected as I designed it ‘over the shoulder’, but it got accepted, so everyone VOTE for this design POP goes your head over on threadless.

(BTW this is not me; this picture is one of the presentation pictures Threadless sends in the submission kit. Mmh, Ok.)

nevver: Less is More

via nevver: DesignBoom