Pull Over Harley, Looks like Honda’s on Your Tail

Michael Taylor:

n fact, police in the United States have been using motorcycles since about 1912 when the nascent Harley-Davidson Co. started outfitting a few departments with them. The cycles turned out to be a godsend for traffic enforcement — they could chase speeders through traffic, and they could get to the scene of an accident far faster than a patrol car. This basic principle still holds true.

For nearly 100 years, Harley has dominated the U.S. market — the company said last year that its motorcycles “are presently in service with some 2,800 law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

Now, however, Honda, the world’s most successful maker of motorcycles, is testing the law enforcement waters here. Honda has the largest share of the U.S. civilian motorcycle market, with 26.9 percent of all new bikes sold in the United States, followed by Harley with 23.7 percent and then a handful of other manufacturers, according to figures for 2004 provided by the Motorcycle Industry Council.

WiFi at Madison’s Airport

Waiting for a flight recently at MSN, I popped open my laptop and, for the first time (for me) ever, a WiFi signal was available. Unfortunately, Madison is years behind other airports in offering wireless internet access. Worse, many flyers now have other types of high speed access, such as Verizon’s EVDO, which means given a choice between paid WiFi access (which Madison’s airport offers – $6.95/day) or a service that can be used in many places, the pool of paying users is likely not all that large. In my case, I fired up my EVDO access and avoided the 6.95 fee.

Albuquerque’s enlightened Sunport, along with many others, offers free WiFi. Madison would do well to simply make it free, perhaps supported by an advertising based splash screen when users logon.

Economic Impacts of Liquid Fuel Mitigation

Roger Bezdek & Robert Wendling:

Our objective was to better elucidate the implications of the mitigation programs, e.g., the time required to save and produce significant quantities of liquid fuel, related costs, and economic, fiscal, and jobs impacts. We studied crash program implementation of all options simultaneously because the results provide an upper limit on what might be accomplished under the best of circumstances. No one knows if and when such a program might be undertaken, so our calculations were based on an unspecified starting date, designated as t0

Lake Geneva Update

Leslie Levine:

THE casual atmosphere and laid-back state of mind are what Mike Moses finds most appealing about Lake Geneva, a popular weekend destination in southeastern Wisconsin, about 80 miles from Chicago.

Sitting in Chuck’s, a popular gathering place in nearby Fontana, Mr. Moses, a Chicago accountant, noticed a $200,000 Lamborghini parked next to a beat-up old Jeep. “The beauty of Lake Geneva is that no one could’ve guessed the driver of the more expensive car,” said Mr. Moses, who bought a two-bedroom 1937 Cape Cod cottage in Lake Geneva two years ago. “Everyone’s wearing jeans and sweatshirts. No one is flashing their wealth.”

Vail at the Crossroads

Nancy and I skied Vail years ago. It is a great mountain, but the term “village” really doesn’t apply any longer. Jared Jacang Maher asks if they must tear down a local landmark to save it. There’s been no shortage of controversy, including the defeat of two council members:

Crossroads not only stands at one of the town’s most prominent intersections, it’s a convergence point for wealth, power and mountain-sized egos, for small-town politics with big-city politicking. The official arguments may focus on topics like height and zoning, but citizens on both sides of the debate see the struggle as more epic, as a fight between Vail’s old-time founders and its younger newcomers for what the town is and what it should become. Emotions are high, and the stakes are huge. Because despite its theme-park attributes, Vail is a real place, with real residents who live and work here, who are born and die here, and who love and hate each others’ guts — all within town limits.

Like the facades of many of Vail’s early buildings, Crossroads is faded and cracked after decades of exposure to sunlight and snow. Built in 1969 on the East Meadow Drive corridor, the 60,000-square-foot, horseshoe-shaped complex wraps around a parking lot with three stories of condos sitting above a ground floor of retail. The two biggest tenants — Clark’s Market and the Crossroads Cinema — both pulled out last month, citing slow business and deteriorating facilities.

Reminds me a bit of the local Whole Foods / Hilldale / Sentry Foods battle.

Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality

Tim Wu:

The Internet is largely meritocratic in its design. If people like instapundit.com better than cnn.com, that’s where they’ll go. If they like the search engine A9 better than Google, they vote with their clicks. Is it a problem, then, if the gatekeepers of the Internet (in most places, a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favored and disfavored uses of the Internet? To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?

Welcome to the fight over “network neutrality,” Washington’s current obsession. The debate centers on whether it is more “neutral” to let consumers reach all Internet content equally or to let providers discriminate if they think they’ll make more money that way.

TBL on Net Neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee:

This is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.

Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.

Water Worries

Ron Seely digs deep into Madison’s water woes:

Students at East High School were among the roughly 9,000 people who, for a short time at least, were drinking city water contaminated with high levels of an industrial pollutant that can cause liver, kidney or lung damage.

Nobody would have known that by reading the Madison Water Utility’s consumer confidence report data for that year.

The federal health standard for the chemical, carbon tetrachloride, is 5 parts per billion. In October 2000, the level in the city’s well No. 3 tested at 8.3 parts per billion.

But the utility’s annual drinking water quality report listed the maximum level found at only 2.9 parts per billion. Utility officials say it was a typo.

More:

Modern Joint Operating Agreements

Dan Gillmor looks at Hearst’s deal with MediaNews Group to acquire four newspapers. Madison has had one of these for years – a $120M annual arrangement that has kept the Cap Times going despite its very small circulation. Joint operating agreements were protected by congress years ago, as a way to “preserve daily newspapers”. The time has long since arrived to eliminate this relic.

Dave Zweifel passes along his experience at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention recently.