The lowly Mountain West is killing the mighty Pac 10.

• BYU (#16) pounds Oregon State (#15) 44 to 20.
• Utah (#23) downs Cal 37 to 27.

The top 3 teams in the Mountain West (TCU, BYU, and Utah), along with Boise State in the WAC, are probably better than the top 3 teams in the Pac 10, Big 10, Big East, ACC, and maybe even the Big 12, with the exception of Texas. Alabama and Florida in the SEC would probably fair well too, but we’ll never know for sure thanks to the fraudulent pairing of TCU against Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl.

TCU and Boise State, both unbeaten, are going to BCS bowl games. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? The system must be working.

Well, it’s not so great when they have to play each other. It turns out that both teams are headed to the Fiesta Bowl. Now neither team has a chance to prove how they stack up against the major conferences. I don’t think Georgia Tech, Iowa, or Cincinnati could beat either of these two teams. But now we’ll never know.

This was a brilliant and disingenuous move on the part of the BCS. They can claim the system works because both TCU and Boise State got in while making sure that the supposed power conferences don’t get beaten by non-BCS schools. This game is a sham.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to watch it and I think it will be a great game. But it is meaningless and proves nothing. These schools deserve better.

I call BS on this. I worked for the other evil empire – Verizon – for 7 years. We used to get e-mails from our government affairs group every so often presenting the company’s position on various issues and encouraging us to write our representatives in support of these views. These e-mails were from “corporate”, not from our business unit. Never once did anyone from our business unit nor in our chain of command ever bring up one of these e-mails. No one cared. There was no pressure. I find it very hard to believe that it would be much different at a very similar AT&T.

…Nielsen management, after years of research, has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: control-deleting the reply-to-all button from the messaging software…

…In a memo, republished by Folio, Andrew Cawood, Chief Information Officer for Nielsen Company, writes that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”…

But is this really the reason for the change?

…About half a year ago Mitchell Habib, Executive Vice President at Nielsen, managed to accidentally cc all Nielsen employees in a reportedly arrogant note to another employee, ending his e-mail with the now famous-in-certain-circles punch line “Who do you work for, and why do you think copying me on this is appropriate?”.

I suspect that particular blunder led to this strange situation.

Perhaps an e-mail etiquette class and paying more attention to what you’re doing would have been a more graceful solution. Though as was stated in some of the comments, I’ve seen the “Reply to All” button bring corporate mail servers to their knees on more than one occassional even leading to a termination in one case.

If this is true, it goes a long way towards explaining why my service has degraded so much. I have a 1st gen iPhone on AT&T. I’m in the Bay Area. Here’s the story:

…Open for Business has learned that AT&T has been quietly sacrificing 2G signal strength in an effort to speed up the build out of its next generation 3G network…

…While previously the company had been primarily relying on the 850 MHz band that offers a more robust signal, including superior indoor reception, company technicians confirmed to OFB that transmitters for the 2G signal used by the original iPhone and most other handsets, including most AT&T offered BlackBerry and RAZR models, have been shifted to the weaker 1900 MHz band in some areas.

If this is true, AT&T really sucks.

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