I was bummed for a moment when I saw “Goodbye HDMI” because I love HDMI cables. They are such an improvement from coax, s-video, or component video. HDMI is just so simple.

But HDBaseT will be even better than HDMI because you don’t need any special cables—just plain old “ethernet cables.” How great is that?

Tonight Tim O’Reilly wrote an interesting retweet, “Britain halts airport expansion plans to stop "binge flying." Go UK!!! http://nyti.ms/bBmmik.” Britain’s coalition government has refused to build new runways around London to curb “binge flying.” This is a strange thing for Tim O’Reilly to cheer for, after all one of the things he does for a living is organize conferences.

Still to come this year, he has OSCON 2010 in Portland, OR, Gov 2.0 Summit in DC, Web 2.0 Expo in NYC, and Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

If O’Reilly has the strength of his convictions, he would cancel these conferences so it does not lead to the “binge flying” he apparently disagrees with. Of does he not have the strength of his convictions?

Air travel at hypersonic speeds would be pretty amazing: 

Since the 1960s, the Air Force has been flirting with hypersonic technology, which can propel vehicles at a velocity that cannot be achieved from traditional turbine-powered jet engines.

But the technology has been exceedingly difficult to perfect. Previous attempts produced very limited results including flights that lasted only a few seconds, said Peter Wilson, senior defense analyst with Rand Corp.

It has held great promise, however. A passenger aircraft powered by hypersonic engines could fly from Los Angeles to New York in 30 minutes. It also could travel faster than existing cruise missiles.

With the technology, the military could strike anywhere on planet within an hour or less, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a website for military policy research.

I thought the title of the article was interesting, Learning from Iran’s Twitter Revolution, until I read the subtitle, “China, Iran, and France are all teaching lessons about broadband access that we in the U.S. need to hear.” Huh?  Twitter is the ultimate narrow-band internet application. You can only send messages of 140 characters. Iranians using Twitter doesn’t exactly make the case of the U.S. to get more broadband internet. 

So how does the author argue that ultimate narrowband internet application show us that we need more broadband?  Beats me, he never bothered to make the connection other than to write of Iran’s “Internet empowerment.” That doesn’t exactly provide the U.S. with an example. Instead he writes:

The Internet has heavily affected democracy in the U.S., too; Barack Obama’s campaign used YouTube, social networking, and e-mail to excellent effect. But the Iranian protests show a fissure in their society that we could do well to learn from. The vast majority of Tweeting and FriendFeeding going on in Iran comes from opposition supporters, who are more urban and wealthier than the Iranian population as a whole. What we’re seeing online may not be a properly balanced debate, because of different levels of access.

The lesson: a digital divide in a society directly impacts how democracy is conducted. The people who are online get more of a voice than the people who aren’t. If we’re serious about true democracy, we need to ask how we can get the Internet out to the 27% of Americans (according to the Pew Internet & American Life project) who don’t yet have it.

Obama used the internet well as a candidate, but he hasn’t as President. As a candidate he promised to post bills online for a five days before he signed them. But, as President he ignored this inconvenient promise, in part because he didn’t want people to see all of the crap in the stimulus bill.

By why does broadband matter? I don’t know. Mr. Segan continues:

  I’d love to say that dialup is just as effective as broadband. But just as the iPod popularized MP3 players by making digital music easy, broadband makes the Internet easy enough for many people to use. That means digital democracy has to be about broadband, not just about the Internet.

Broadband is nice and makes using the internet easier, but the thesis of this article is supposed to be how we are to learn from Iran’s Twitter revolution. Iran didn’t need broadband, according to the author, they needed Twitter—the ultimate narrowband application.

Broadband is great and the Iranian’s use of Twitter is great. But how much has Twitter use in Iran really mattered? How much does our perspective matter? He aren’t getting a lot of video from Iran, but we are getting a lot of Tweets. How does that affect our view of the importance of Twitter use inside Iran?