Day: November 2, 2006

Continental and FCC 1, Massport 0

Boston Globe: FCC rules against Logan’s WiFi ban. And about time, too. For a few years Massport has trotted out every lame excuse in the book, including Homeland Security, to keep its tenants and vendors from dipping into its lucrative airport-wide WiFi service monopoly. While some frequent travelers, like me, have taken the plunge and gotten a monthly subscription to Boingo to remove the sting, there are probably still plenty of schmoes paying $8.95 for a “day pass” that will probably only be useful to you for a half hour.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link, who also point to perennial WiFi pundit Glenn Fleishman’s analysis. I will summarize his summary of the decision:

Restrictions prohibited by the … rules include lease restrictions… Massport misreads … misconstrues … the safety exception is … inapplicable… no arguments that Massport has made give us reason to change our earlier conclusions that the Commission has statutory authority in these circumstances.

Heh.

RIP, William Styron

New York Times: William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81. While others will remember him for Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, I will of necessity remember this writer from my hometown of Newport News for Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which he wrote in 1990 about his struggles with depression and which proved (aside from a short story collection) to be his last published work.

When I read Darkness Visible in the early 90s, there were few writers who had addressed the sufferings of depression in a public, accessible, direct way—and virtually no successful ones. Styron’s writing gave me pause as I reflected on its parallels with my own experiences. In retrospect, it has given me hope that depression need not always marginalize the sufferer.

Other encomia to Styron via Technorati.