Yesterday, Bolivians voted wether to keep Evo and the provincial governors in power. I haven't read up on all the issues surrounding Bolivia at the moment, but the following articles provide some insight. The election confirms his mandate and shows that, at the least, his party gets (forces?) his supporters to show up at polling stations. You think the US is polarized between blue and red states, Bolivia is even more divided than before. They're going to keep debating wether there can still be a unified Bolivia as we know it.\ \

Blog from Bolivia: The Evo Landslide: How He Won It

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None of this gets to the trickier issues of how Morales needs to deal with regional leaders, and a third of the population that does stand squarely against him. That analysis I'll leave to later. But these statistics do make it clear that Morales has a huge national majority at his side, and one that stretches across a far wider map than many critics would care to admit.

Rival camps in Bolivia both see victory - Los Angeles Times

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But his chief antagonists in the rebellious, resource-rich crescent of lowland states known as the "half moon" also savored their triumph. All four opposition governors in the region easily survived the plebiscite in an explicit endorsement of their march toward regional autonomy -- a move that Morales decries as a treasonous splitting of the nation.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 08/11/2008 | Bolivia's mandate for Morales unlikely to provoke compromise with opponents

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At issue is who will control the country's huge natural gas reserves in the east _ the reserves are the second largest in Latin America _ and who will decide the fate of large tracts of farmland in the east that Morales wants to seize and give to indigenous supporters.

The St. Petersburg Times - World - Bolivia Result Highlights Social, Class Divisions

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Morales had proposed Sunday's recall in a bold gamble to topple governors who have frustrated his bid to redress historical inequities in favor of Bolivia's long-suppressed indigenous majority and extend his time in office.

My city peeps might soon have the option of getting Internet + TV through Verizon's fiber optic service. I recently wrote about my switch to FiOS. Here's a mini followup.

Things I like - the cost

I Received our first full month's bill for Fios service, total was \$115 dollars for phone, internet, and TV service. This includes a \$10 bundle discount, and about \$14 dollars in taxes, fees, and other charges not usually disclosed. My last DSL+Phone service bill from Verizon was \$98 alone. Coupled with a Dish bill that used to run close to \$89, I'll now be saving \$72 per month for the next 2 years.

The savings will pay for my TivoHD (Hardware + Lifetime service) in just over 8.3 months, not taking into account the time-value of money which won't make a huge difference when we're talking about less than a year time-frame. For comparison, I could put the \$72 monthly savings into an account bearing a paltry 3.5% and at the end of 12 months, I'll have accrued \$880.

Things I don't like

1. The Actiontec router - its serviceable enough, but its clearly not meant to be easy to tinker with and it has an annoying way of obfuscating the pasword as you type it in. After being on for just over 2 months, DNS started failing, which was "fixed" by rebooting the router. This is what lead me to switch to OpenDNS below.
2. Verizon's habit of routing failed DNS queries to their "helpful" did-you-mean page, which has ads they run. I switched to OpenDNS but they do the same thing.
3. The on-screen guide on the non-tivo HD STB is a big FAIL. There's no way to remove channels that you do not receive, the layout is hard to navigate, and the program descriptions are often out of date, or just generic descriptions of the show in question. Tivo's guide is markedly better and this is the one thing that annoys Staci the most.

The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » FiOS coming soon to DC?

Adding FiOS to the mix will bring the benefits of greater competition to D.C. subscribers. In northern Virginia, a fierce rivalry between Verizon and Comcast has pushed prices downward, even for consumers whose residences have yet to be “lit.�

I was a big fan of Satellite TV going back to grad school. Back then, you could get a decent channel package for around \$30/month, easily beating the price of cable. Even factoring in buying the Dish and Receiver, the savings at the time paid for themselves in under two years (at least in Blacksburg in the late 90s). I even used to brag how we didn't lose signal during the last hurricane to rumble through Northern Virginia.

But over the last year, I became greatly disatisfied with Dish Network, my former provider. Although we had the high-def package, the DVR they wanted to rent me would cost an additional 15-20 a month, iirc, which was more than the montly price of a TiVo. The high-def channels were great for ESPN2 MLS telecasts, but we didn't watch a whole lot if high def channel. Finally, to get Fox Soccer Channel, which invariably has a handful of away DC United games each season, I had to subscribe to the most expensive channel bundle.

Early this spring, Verizon came through our neighborhood and hooked us all up to their Fiber optic Internet service. I already had Verizon DSL (part of that cable company phobia that drove me to Dish Network in the first place), and when I noticed that FSC was on the basic programming tier for Fios TV.\

The more I mulled it over, the more sense it made. I haven't gotten a first full months bill, but while I don't expect our monthly savings to be huge, maybe on the order of \$20-30/month, we're getting better services than before. We have faster Internet, cheaper TV, and since FiosTV supports CableCARDS, I finagled an upgrade to a TivoHD box. The improvement in picture quality alone over Dish + Tivo, which underwent a painful Digital-Analog-Digital converstion, is worth the pain of switching alone.

The only downside manifested itself last week, when the Actiontec router Verizon supplies started having DNS issues. Rebooting the router "solved" them, which is annoying since I'll have to remember to reboot it every few weeks.\

If Dish Network and DirectTV have to merge to compete, so be it. There are more options today than a decade ago, and that's not counting Netflix or watching TV Shows on the Internet.\

The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Dish Network ponders merger with DirecTV

Just as the 505-day XM Sirius antitrust saga comes to a bittersweet end, reports have resurfaced that a new satellite merger may be in the works. Dish Network is floating the idea of merging with competitor DirecTV. Dish Network and DirecTV, the two largest satellite television providers in the U.S.

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P.S. First person to post about how their life is super-great without TV gets a unicorn.