Next week the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is expected to vote in favor of allowing Transit Wireless to build an underground cellphone network. The plan, which would place a cellphone network in 277 subway stations, involves Transit Wireless paying New York City Transit $46.8 million over 10 years, in addition to the $150-$200 million in network installation fees.

If the MTA approves the plan next week, six downtown Manhattan stations will be built in the first two years, and the remaining during a subsequent four-year period.

Don’t get too excited yet, however, because even though it appears Transit Wireless will be building an underground network, the major cellphone companies (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon) have yet to sign on. Carriers will have to pay Transit Wireless to use their underground service, in which case whoever belonged to participating carriers would be able to use their cellphone in the subway system.

At the time of this writing carriers are awaiting the MTA decision next week, and at that point will consider negotiating options and rates with Transit Wireless. I’m sure if the carriers declined there could still be some sort of service options directly from Transit Wireless to consumers. They’re not going to spend $200 million and let it sit there. Perhaps a monthly/annual service fee for unlimited use in the subway network. It could be valuable for daily commuters.

On “The Word” segment of his September 19, 2007 “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert criticized the youth generation of today for doing nothing about the problems in society. It all started with the University of Florida student who was tasered during a John Kerry speech. The inaction of the student’s peers caused Colbert to make the following remarks:

“Look at these guys in the back,” Colbert said, pointing out one frame from the video of the event. “You don’t need a Fox body language expert to tell you that kid in orange is bored. He’s probably thinking something like, ‘I wish they’d stop tasering this guy so I could go home and watch this guy getting tasered on YouTube.’”

“One thing you can’t argue is that his cause was joined by hordes of no one. … Students used to be a rebellious bunch. … Today’s kids are so different.”

“The kids in that auditorium who sat idly by as their fellow student was seized, thrown to the ground, and tasered didn’t lack the courage to help,” Colbert added. “They’re just so used to watching videos like ‘Crazy guys thrown out of lecture hall’ that they didn’t know how to help other than to link to it. I’m sure that guy in the orange is going to spring into action as soon as he gets home and fires up his blog.”

“And that’s what’s so great about this new kind of activism,” Colbert remarked. “It’s convenient. Just like masturbation. It’s better than sex because it’s on your own time. So … make me proud, young people. Continue waging your protests from the polite distance of your home computers. Make ‘the Man’ wish he’d never visited your site. And if a fellow-student is denied the right to speak, remember, the best way to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him is by sitting alone in your seat.”

Here is the video in its entirety:

It’s sad to say but Colbert is absolutely 100% on point with these statements. Sure it’s an entirely different generation with an entirely different lifestyle, but the fact remains that the general public does not gather collectively to demand a particular action of the government. How many people complain online about the expanding of Bush’s spy program, or about the unending Iraq war? Thousands if not millions. But how many of them march on Washington to show their opposition? None. If millions of people were to converge on Washington demanding an end to the Iraq war and would not leave you can bet the troops would start coming home by Christmas.

While it is good that at least people are speaking out in some sort of fashion, writing about problems doesn’t go far enough. Your support and time needs to be given to those causes that you hold dear to your heart. So if you haven’t done anything to support something you believe in lately, I encourage you to go out and make a small gesture. Acting alone behind our computers won’t do anything except consume bandwidth, but acting together we have the ability to change the world.

Remember, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, that our government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Verizon and Vodafone have announced that their 4th generation (4G) data networks will run on LTE (Long Term Evolution), which is the GSM Association’s 4G protocol. Verizon is currently on a CDMA network, along with Sprint; while AT&T and T-Mobile are on GSM networks.

Don’t get too excited though, as this is still in the early stages of planning, and the actual time before any roll-out is likely to be years. That said, the idea of being able to pop AT&T or T-Mobile SIM cards into Verizon phones is pretty exciting. Additionally, this move will make Verizon phones much more “global-friendly,” as customers would be able to take their phones overseas and pop in local SIM cards.

This is a great sign from Verizon and I hope Sprint will consider following their lead.

This has got to be one of the most amazing pictures I’ve ever come across. It was taken by the Columbia shuttle crew during their last space mission and shows a sunset cutting through Africa and Europe. Notice the bright lights in certain countries where the sun has already set — Paris, Berlin, etc.

A big thanks to the Columbia crew and the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for this picture:

I would have never thought I’d see the day but alas it has happened, the Canadian dollar carries the same value as the U.S. dollar. According to Yahoo Finance — at the time of this writing — the USD is at 1.00 and the CAD at 1.00.

What does this mean for Americans and Canadians? Basically, the short of it is that it’s going to be a lot cheaper for Canadians visiting America, and a lot more expensive for Americans visiting Canada.

This is such a bizarre concept for me and I’m sure many others, having long been under the notion that the Canadian dollar was much weaker and therefore we as Americans had a much stronger purchasing power. It just goes to show how badly the Bush administration has and continues to destroy the U.S. economy.

Countries around the world have been slowly abandoning the USD standard and more are adopting the Euro. Additionally, many economists have been forecasting a U.S. recession for some time. This US-Canada currency equality provides further evidence to support the recession predictions.

Consider this 5-year graph of USD vs. CAD:

The economic downturn is staggering. I wonder how far off we are from Americans putting their savings in other currencies like the Euro. Lord knows the wealthiest U.S. elite are already doing it.

Another day, another European country to get the iPhone. Although Apple has not issued any formal announcement yet, the rumors circulating that Orange would be the iPhone carrier in France have seemed to come to fruition. Today, CEO Didier Lombard of France Telecom — parent company of Orange — announced that Orange has exclusive rights to be the French iPhone distributor.

Lombard didn’t offer any details as far as price is concerned, but he did mention that the iPhone would not be subsidized by Orange. What he did say, though, is that the iPhone will be in France “before Christmas, probably November.” I wouldn’t be too surprised if that date turned out to be November 9th, in order to coincide with the UK and German iPhone launches.

That’s all the details out at this time, whenever Apple issues a formal statement I will update this post with any relevant new information.

This is turning out to be a good week for European Apple fans. Yesterday Apple announced that the iPhone will be available in the United Kingdom on O2 beginning November 9th, and today Apple has announced that the iPhone will be available in Germany on T-Mobile beginning November 9th as well.

It makes sense that Apple went with T-Mobile as its German iPhone carrier. For one, by the end of this year T-Mobile will be the only carrier in Germany to offer EDGE throughout its entire GSM network (recall that there is still no 3G version). Additionally, T-Mobile is the biggest Wi-Fi provider in the world with 20,000 hotspots — 8,600 in Germany alone.

The German iPhone will require a 2-year T-Mobile tariff and will be an 8GB model going for €399 including V.A.T.

I wonder if German T-Mobile iPhones will be easily configurable to T-Mobile USA, hmmm…

We’re still waiting for an official word on who will be the French carrier for the iPhone, but speculation continues to be that Orange will get the nod.

Pope Benedict XVI refused a meeting request from Condoleezza Rice to meet this past August and discuss issues pertaining to Iraq and the Middle East in general. While the Vatican has said the Pope typically doesn’t receive visitors during the August holidays, one major Italian newspaper declared the meeting denial a snub against the Bush administration for two reasons.

The first reason is that back in March 2003 — just before the Iraq war began — Rice met with a special papal envoy from Rome and told them that the Bush administration didn’t care about the views of the late Pope John Paul II on the immorality of its planned military actions in Iraq.

The second reason is that the US has responded to a Vatican matter regarding the protection of Iraqi Christians under the new Iraqi constitution in an “unacceptable” fashion.

I for one think this is just awesome. Whether intentional or not, Pope Benedict has illustrated that the Bush administration cannot get whatever it wants and that there are individuals out there with the ability to keep the Bush administration in check, since the current lackluster U.S. Congress is unable to do so. I hope the Pope keeps a firm stand on this, and makes the Bush administration show some accountability for its actions for giving it the privilege of his presence.

A Turkish court ruled yesterday that telecom authorities must block access to video-sharing site YouTube, due to videos that allegedly insulted Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This same incident happened in March, when Turk Telecom blocked access to YouTube for two days until a petition to the court ultimately removed the ban.

It seems the world of Internet censorship in Turkey hasn’t evolved much in the past few months. Let’s hope another issue like this will get them to consider the topic and draft some legislation to keep it uncensored.

Here’s a clip from I believe September 14th of Bill Maher’s show on HBO in which he rips on the iPhone early adopters, whom he likes to refer to as “dip$h*ts who stand in line for six hours.”

Sorry Bill, but my *real* girlfriend actually stood in line and waited for mine. Further, the ones who went out and bought the iPhone were the ones who could afford it, the business folk not the “nerds.” So please, work on your material. It wasn’t funny to begin with, now it’s just getting downright lame.