False Alarms:
Chris Matera's vision of Massachusetts being clearcut at an ever-accelerating pace (Letters, Dec. 10, 2009) is simply false. Endless repetition of the claim does not make it any more true.
Matera's photographic sleights-of-hand, fanciful rhetoric and willingness to play fast and loose with facts and terminology paint a false picture of the present and an unconvincing doomsday vision of a Massachusetts future where all the trees are tiny because "they" have cut all the big ones down. A careful look at the dynamics of forests, forestry and people in Massachusetts yields a far more complex picture than Matera would have us believe.
Charles Thompson
Pelham
…and Comcast
Your Dec. 17th article on the Amherst wireless network incorrectly attributes the effort and funding for the downtown network to the UMass Office of Information Technology. In fact, the project was funded by grants my colleague Brian Levine and I obtained from DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and NSF [the National Science Foundation] as part of the UMass Computer Science Department. Thank you for featuring our work.
Unfortunately, as the article and Kris Pacunas rightly pointed out, it simply isn't possible or wise for governments to become full-fledged Internet service providers—it is wildly expensive and distracting. Building networks requires billions of dollars in risky capital investment on the parts of corporations, such as Comcast. The core and future of their business is not as a cable provider, but as a partner to content providers.
Comcast has always been in a partnership with the networks, and must now enter into partnerships with Internet content providers to make continued infrastructure investment worthwhile and to stay ahead of the imminent threat of wireless ISPs.
The article is just the latest in a series from the Valley press with more doomsday quotes from Josh Silver promulgating Comcast as the new boogie man. To say that they are "buying up all of the water supply" is simply insane: Comcast cannot buy the Internet. When Comcast starts censoring something other than kids stealing movies and music using BitTorrent, I will be the first to find a new provider, but I don't see it happening.
Mark Corner
Associate Professor, UMass Computer Science Dept.
