The telecom companies want to change that. They want to be able to charge different customers different prices. Think of Internet service as an apple. They want to sell that apple for one price to Bob and another to Sam, and yet a third to Betty.

But the Internet isn’t an apple, it’s a lot more important. The Internet has become one of the most important technological achievements in human history, up there with the invention of language, the printing press, and the computer itself. The Internet isn’t simply a commodity, it’s a communications medium.

When I say I favor Net Neutrality, I’m saying that I believe we should all have the same access to the Internet. I’m saying that the First Amendment doesn’t just give you freedom of speech, it also gives you the right to expect that you will have access to common communication channels so your speech can be heard.

The Internet has become the new public commons. If we do not defend net neutrality, then we have abandoned the idea that all voices should be equal and that everyone has a right not only to speak, but to be heard.

I’m going to try developing some apps for the Android. So I’ll be writing more once I’ve had a chance to try it out. The charging light just turned green, which means I can play!

—

Well, I mostly love my Nexus One and Android, but with any open system, there are some issues. The most annoying of which is the infamous FC or Force Close, which happens when there is an unrecoverable error in an application or when the system runs out of resources. Your phone can be working fine, then you load a few new applications and all of a sudden you can’t do a thing because of the constant Force Close messages.

I’m not as frustrated as I might be with another phone. For one thing, I can hook up a debugger and see what’s going on, making it a bit easier to figure stuff out.

Since Android runs on lots of different phones, it has to deal with a lot of different configurations. Android developers don’t have the luxury of knowing the exact hardware configuration their software is expected to run on.

Another contributing factor to some of the problems people have been having is the comparative ease with which you can develop Android apps. That might sound contradictory, but the ease with which you can develop and publish an application is deceptively easy. There seem to be a lot of first-time developers who are writing applications for the first time.

– more later –