When I buy data for my iPhone, though, I pay $30.00 for access to 6 gigabytes of data per month. Although I generally use only a third of that, Rogers Canada denies me the use of the remaining 4GB, despite the fact that I’ve paid them for access to it. When the next month begins, I’m billed again for 6GB. This is not Rogers’ only iPhone data plan, but it was, regrettably, the best option for me.

Then I bought a 3G iPad.

I signed up for the less expensive of Rogers’ two iPad data plans: $15 for 250MB. This, incidentally, is 1/24th the amount of data that comes with my iPhone plan for half the price. I used all 250MB in a day or two.

Rogers has only one other option for iPad data access advertised on their web site: $35 a month for 5GB.

Seeing this iPad data price of five dollars more for 1GB less data than my iPhone plan got me thinking. I realized that not only was their iPad data pricing higher for access to the same data, they also appeared, in my case, to be selling access to that data twice, just because I owned two devices that could access it.

I navigated to their customer support page and wrote a quick email:

“I have a 6GB data plan for my iPhone. I recently purchased a 3G iPad and added your $15 data package for a month. Using the iPad less than my phone I ran that out in a few days. I have not used any 3G data on my iPad since.

I usually use no more than 2GB of data on my phone, despite the fact that I pay for 6GB. I think it’s usurious of Rogers to not allow me to access the data that I’m already paying for on a second device – and instead insist that I pay AGAIN for that data.

Think about this. I’m somewhere with my iPad and my iPhone. If I need to access the web I have to go from my iPad to my phone to use the data I pay for. What’s the difference?? It’s *my account* logging in to use the product I purchased from you. It’s like an electric company saying I can plug in a toaster, but if I want to plug in a microwave I have to pay them again for access to the electricity I buy from them.

Please pass this complaint on to the appropriate department.”

Rogers’ customer service responded. After assuring me they take my concerns very seriously and appreciate the feedback, they informed me that for an additional sum (less than the advertised $35/5GB), my iPhone and iPad could share the 6GB of data on my account. The offer they made me is not advertised anywhere on their web site (and in fact, they state here (2nd page) that “Currently, there are no sharing plans for iPad available to Rogers customers”). The specific details of their offer might be covered under the “any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail or any of its content is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful” boilerplate included at the bottom of their email, so I can’t include them here.

Since this plan offered me the ability to share data between two devices through my single account, they had confirmed that there is no technical or administrative problem with doing so. Nonetheless, for simply turning on that ability, they wanted me to pay hundreds of dollars per year. I wrote back:

“Thanks for your response,

Could you ask someone closer to the issue to please break down for me what exactly that additional [amount] is purchasing? I can see how there might be an initial set-up charge to acknowledge the existence of a second device using the account, but after that point it’s the same 6GB of data and the same account.

Although the [amount] you mention is less than the $35 you charge for iPad access without a smartphone, it seems to me you’re still charging your smartphone data customers twice to access, on their iPad, *the same 6 GB of data* they have already purchased from you.

Please pass this on to someone who can address the concerns expressed in this, and my original, email …”

Sometimes I get this picture of myself as a small dog that has bit into someone’s pant leg and will not let go. Sometimes that small dog is rabid.

On the one hand … in our not too distant future, digital data could become as important as gasoline and electricity. The companies that currently control that data are now testing the waters to see what the market can bear. Unfortunately, we are their real-time test-market, and our responses to the policies and pricing they propose today will shape those of the future.

On the other, I’m just curious to see if someone has a justification for this policy – other than the fact that they seem to be getting away with it.

My Rogers story gets a little silly from this point. I’ll try to encapsulate the subsequent email runaround in an upcoming post. In the meantime I am still waiting for a response that confirms that someone at Rogers takes my concerns seriously.

I researched carefully, in order to accurately present both sides of conflicting arguments championed by intelligent and convincing spokespersons. I sweated the details so that my dilemma would be clear. Both sides can not be right, and finding the truth of a thing seems to be growing harder and harder as more and more information becomes available.

I wrote the post using a beautiful and innovative new word processor that fills the computer screen with a peaceful white snowscape, eliminating all distractions. It truly seemed to help me focus exclusively on the writing. The essay grew long, but I was happy with the way it was coming along.

On New Years day, I opened the file to finish it up.

The serene white winter scene filled the screen, the program’s pleasantly unobtrusive music began to play quietly and my story appeared before me. In Chinese.

Or Mandarin. Or Chinese (Simplified) or Chinese (Traditional) – other options I learned about from Google Translator where I later vainly attempted to return my writing to my mother tongue.

The software’s website did have a reference to this problem. “If you get gibberish (oops)” they offered glibly, you could “try” their “workaround”. It didn’t work. I’ve contacted tech support but I am not hopeful.

As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup.

I’ve explained Trooper’s relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company to many people, and now would like to explain it to you. We don’t have a relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company. They don’t send crackers for our dressing room rider and we played no part in the choice of soup used in their commercial. The entire deal was done not only without our involvement, but also, without our knowledge.

Here’s how it works.

Universal Music owns the recording of ‘Raise a Little Hell’. Sony Music Publishing administers the use of the song. In both cases we are supposed to see royalties from the deal that’s struck, but we have no involvement in or control over it. No one even asked.

My share of the royalties won’t be a lot of money considering the song I co-wrote will be repeatedly played on TV – in a cracker commercial – until next March, but not bad considering it just fell out of the sky onto me.

Thing is though, I’d prefer the song be covered by a kick-ass rock band and become a huge international hit. Hopefully said rock band will not see the cracker commercial.

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

UPDATE: FactCheck.org article: “Inoculation Misinformation - Claims that the “swine flu” vaccine is dangerous range from seriously overblown to flat-out false.”

I urge you all to take the time to read this story in the current Wired Magazine called “ An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”

It’s a well-reasoned and heavily researched story about vaccines in general and the H1N1 vaccine in particular. Usually I’d say that folks should make their own choices and not care what those choices are  -  but this story has convinced me that in this case it really can’t work that way. If enough people refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine – it will put everyone else in their community at risk.

Here’s one of many key quotes from the Wired article:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

By contrast, here’s the Wiki page on Russell Blaylock, who wrote the H1N1 email that was forwarded to me. And here’s an excerpt from that page:

Blaylock has asserted, among other things, that behind the US drug problem was a “nefarious program created in the former Soviet Union that exceeds even the far-reaching imaginations of Hollywood writers”. The drug problem, he writes, would weaken the resistance of Western Society to Soviet invasion, undermine religion (which he calls ‘the foundation of Western stability and morality’), target schools, harm the work force and work ethic, make the youth “unable to resist collectivism”, and create a “totalitarian mindset within the United States government”. He implicates Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, organized crime syndicates, and their American “leftist accomplices” in the formation of US drug culture.

Blaylock implies that the Soviet program was linked to crack-cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and methamphetamine, and that it was responsible for “an epidemic of hepatitis, AIDS, venereal diseases and highly resistant tuberculosis”. He accuses the US media and the US government of knowing about the Soviet plot, but failing to expose it. As part of his evidence, he quotes from the “Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare”, purportedly by Lavrenti Beria. However, many people have doubted the authenticity and authorship of the work, including the FBI.

The Wired story is not as short and exciting as the anti-vaccine email that I received tonight, but it should be required reading for us all.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”

~ Marcello Truzzi