Recently in Economics Category

I got some snorkel gear last month at Costco. I didn't necessarily expect much..thought "cheap costco gear", though they weren't exactly inexpensive and as I used them I did actually think to myself, "wow this is actually really nice gear."

Except I had a fin break the first time I used them (looked like manufacturing defect in the plastic upon closer inspection by my lay person eyes). Monday I exchanged some email with the US Divers parent company Aqualung. Today I received replacement fins in the mail.

I'd about forgotten such great customer service exists. Certainly not what I expected originally and quite a pleasant warranty replacement surprise! Definitely the type of thing that makes you recommend a company and their product to others.

After coaching a First Lego League team last year and attending a solar power expo or two I've had my curiosity about solar electric piqued. As of today I've actually signed a contract with Gen-Con, Inc. and expect to have a 2.4kW system on my roof within about a month!

I need to pull cat5 to the garage, but apparently should be able to suck the inverter's stat's off onto the web even.

It's been on the back of my mind for ages to check if the Peer to Patent project has an RSS feed for new patents added to the system. Today I actually noticed I'd written it on a TODO list at some point and since it would only take a second and my mind was already on it...I checked.

Not too suprisingly there is a feed. Given the ease of adding feeds to a feed reader, the huge value in having a massive, distributed pool of eyeballs helping patent offices and that from what I've heard the biggest weakness of Peer to Patent currently is the lack of reviewers...I thought I'd do my small part by throwing a suggestion out into the blogosphere that people subscribe to this feed.

...or mention of his Pattern Recognition anyway, today in the form of a recommended summer/beach reading. Especially after going to OSCON last week and seeing that practically everybody is using MacBook's these days and also at the same time hearing a lot of wailing about vendor lock-in and the need for openness, I'm surprised there aren't more Cayce's walking the streets. For the record there were a few Apple laptops with their glowing clam-shell logo covered with some non-corporate-brand logo.

Boingboing's linked an LATimes article on the subject of Guerrilla Gardening. Individual property rights are always bumping up against the good of the collective society. There usually aren't many people standing up for the latter and those that do aren't usually empowered to make a change. There's something very libertarianly socialist about this guerrilla gardening concept though and it seems like it's generally a positive thing, besides maybe police hassles.

There are definitely some areas in my metro region (Portland), city (Tigard), neighborhood (Bull Mountain) and my neighbor's yard (I'll leave him be) which could use guerrilla gardening. I might just have to try to tackle one occasionally!

Last I knew Verizon was still a fan of a tiered-internet. On the other hand they're now saying at least when it comes to blocking copyrighted materials they wont tier things.

Their VP of PR specifically has said, “We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content."

I'm not sure how they can say that and at the same time be for a tiered internet. Unless they envision that as discriminating against traffic by source and destination only and not content? But some of the other quotes in the NYT article make it seem like Verizon may be moving more towards accepting that they're in the business of selling pipes and the more and fatter pipes customers want because of a thriving internet means more business for them.

In my last entry I didn't really describe what all the kids had to do this year and I should have.

Each year the FIRST LEGO League competition has a theme. Last year the theme was nanotechnology which was a real challenge for fifth graders. But this year's theme was much easier because issues of power consumption, reduction and alternative energy production are all around us day to day. The kids started out somewhat familiar with the concepts already and it was much easier for them to research and comprehend the problem space.

In addition to move visible aspect of building LEGO robots which compete on a table to manipulate challenges in a proscribed way, the teams also get points in the competition based on judging of the technical merits of their robot mechanism and software designs, judging of an interview on their teamwork skills and judging of a presentation.

The presentation this year had three components: go out in the community and perform an energy audit, analyse the audit data to find ways to reduce energy consumption and adopt alternative energy sources, and finally return to the community building to present the findings and proposals. LEGOtricity audited the headquarters of Medical Teams International here in Tigard. Their primary observations were that the heating of the office space was poorly balanced, the windows and concrete walls and were not sufficiently insulating, their water heating seemed inefficient (old boiler far from usage) and there was a substantial amount of electricity being used for lighting and appliances. MTI in particular was interested in their suggestions for tank-less water heaters and removing one of three tubes in the flourescent light installations throughout their cubicles. The team also researched solar power, but found MTI would need something like a $4million installation of panels (which they did calculate could fit on MTI's roof). The bummer is that MTI is a non-profit so they don't pay taxes and can't take advantage of the massive solar incentives available today.

To that end I really want to thank Dan Crowell (Excalibur Solar, LLC) for answering the kids questions about solar electric. After going to the NW Solar Expo earlier this year, I've been thinking seriously of trying to get a photovoltaic installation on my roof and need to give him a call so see about spec'ing something out. I greatly appreciate his willingness to interact with some kids in his local (Tigard/Portland/Oregon) community to help them learn.

It's coming to light that Comcast appears to be interfering with Lotus Notes traffic, in addition to other packet types. This isn't surprising and is perfectly in line with a company that wants a tiered internet so people "don't get things for free". But what if they actually were to put packet transfer rates on the open market and let Microsoft (creator of IBM's primary groupware competitor) and IBM duke it out. Instead getting people to pay twice for service, they could actually extort many multiples of that.

Sure it's a conspiracy nut accusation to seriously think Microsoft would be behind this, but the what-if is the interesting part. It's a much better business model. Why as the consumer and producer to pay a rate on the service they want, when you could inflate that price by allowing the competition to pay for anti-service?

I love to bash EMI because they were at the forefront of corporate attempts at stifling the interactions and subsequent creative possibilities in a networked world when they forced OLGA off the net in 1996. There's no coincidence between Radiohead's contract with EMI expiring, Radiohead shocking the music industry by offering it's upcoming album direct to listeners at whatever price they're willing to pay (or 40 pounds if you want it on physical media including all sorts of fancy extras), and EMI's new private equity owner saying they must embrace digital music or die. But with that guy being rumoured to be planning to sell EMI to Warner and EMI's long history with fighting modernisation, I'm not expecting much here beyond words and further attempts at mildly warping their business into something internet related...no fundamental shift in how they do business.

A couple weeks ago I went to the NW Solar Expo in Portland. I was really struck by how solar is a commercial reality today. The expo was all about how to get solar electric or water heating today. It still takes governmental assistance to make it financially reasonable, but that's a smart investment in the future in a number of ways.

This weekend we were in Bend and they were having a tour of local homes that demonstrate solar and other green building options. Unfortunately we weren't able to do the tour because we didn't have time and it looks like we missed the similar local tours here last month.

This winter I'm going to try to spec out a solar electric system for my home usage, get quotes to figure out the up front price and estimate the cost in the end after all the incentives have rolled in. And presumably I'll then need to figure out whether I can get one of the state's energy investment loans to cover the up front investment. After a few years and all the incentives it doesn't sound like it has to amount to an unreasonable cost, but there is a substantial up front cost before the incentives.

IEEE's Spectrum magazine has an article on this topic. It highlights California's push, but at the end mentions that Oregon has just started some major funding as well. For our state it really makes sense as investment in fostering local high-tech industry and energy independence, not to mention the environmental positives.

This weekend the geek press is all over new terms of service AT&T has rolled out which basically say they will cancel your connectivity if you use it to do anything on the net which they deem disparages their company. This is a brilliant example of why we need net-neutrality. It's like a free-speech protection against companies who would censor us.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar were in other carriers' terms of service...Did I mention how much I really love my Verizon FIOS internet service? Seriously it is actually good. It'd be really even more super if Verizon were a fan of network neutrality instead of a tiered internet.

AT&T's basically given a sweet demonstration of what the lower tiers of a tiered internet will look like. Presumably if you pay enough (eg: corporate customer) and you are disparaging them, they'd prefer to keep your business and thus try to right the problems. But the little guy just looses.

It still sticks out in my head that I had a professor in the mid-90s who was talking about programming and threading and asserted that practically nobody in the world knew how to write multithreaded code. At the time I didn't figure it mattered so much. But with in a couple years I was writing linux kernel code and dealing with concurrency and reentrance issues and realised that it's not exactly trivial to write good parallel code. It's slowly become clear over the years that most software engineers just haven't bumped up against this in their day to day work.

With the push to multicore chips and increasing parallelism in hardware even in commodity hardware, the ability for code to exploit that parallelism becomes very important if computers are to effectively get faster year to year. Given that average coders don't know how to do this...

At OSCON last month I was interested to learn about Intel's Threading Building Blockslibrary to help people write threaded code.

And today I noticed there is similarly an IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for Multicore Acceleration, which is Cell specific.

I understand chip manufacturers' business inclination to emphasise optimisations on their own hardware. But this sure seems like an area where a standardised set of hardware agnostics abstractions would be very beneficial.

Arguably from the Department of You Can Fund A Study To Prove Whatever You Want, but there is now a study claiming that fair use not just adds economic value, but actually adds more to the economy than copyright!

Maybe someday there will be acceptance of the reasoned arguments that holding IP too tightly hurts us, especially in the digital age.

I realised today that I forgot to pay for my house this month. Oops! I hadn't set up a direct debit when I refinanced earlier this year because my bank had said they were changing their online payment and mortgage systems this year and it appeared I'd shortly just have to reconfigure the direct debit. Well, I haven't seen the changes come and now that I've managed to forget I guess I should've just done the debit in the first place. Imagine how freaked out banks would be if all their customers forgot and payed a week late all on the same month, especially in the context of with this current mortgage default thing?

Listening to Marketplace today there was yet another article on the mortgage stuff. Everyday there's one.

That and the above gaff have me thinking: Imagine how freaked out counties, individuals and investors would be if all the banks "forgot" to pay the property taxes they "hold" in escrow? The company that did my first mortgage was very sketchy and didn't pay my taxes on time. I wonder how many companies are like that. If they're so lax with respect to lending, why would they be any more rigourous when it comes to truly holding money in escrow such that they're able to pay it out when it is due?

If the press release were dated a day earlier I'd have been sure it was a joke. But it appears the anti-market EMI corporation may be the first major to start getting with the digital future. It might still be cheaper to just buy the physical media though...depends on whether they do $9.99 albums DRM free too.

And it is a bit odd that they'd have the DRM versions at all. Is $0.30/track enough to discourage somebody who wants to pirate music? No. Are people wanting to save a few cents a track seen as implicitly pirate-prone? Must be. The majors sure relate to their customers in strange ways.

I was surprised to stumble on this today. The actual write-up is a good read...thoughtful and written in a way I'd expect a large portion of Apple's critics (eg: esp. the techno-illiterate politicians) as well as their customers to be able to fully understand. And Jobs squarely plants the problem in the court of the big labels (for those who didn't already clearly get the bloc power they hypocritically wield)!

This is exactly the type of message that you'd expect to deflect the European political pressure on Apple around its DRM. And exactly the thing to increase pressure on the majors to catch up with reality. Or the thing to increase political pressure in a more appropriate place (eg: how about these ideas for a start) towards helping the majors get a clue.

Maybe I was on the leading edge in witnessing EMI's attack on OLGA (over a decade ago already?!), but I think the rest of Apple's billion downloaders are starting to get the situation and are beginning to see the anti-market, anti-competitive, anti-creative state of copyright this DRM facade masks.

I can't wait to watch how this plays out! It made the tail end of Marketplace today and I'd expect it prominently in the press tomorrow.

I got a Sears Craftsman router a while back and have been quite happy with it. And I've bought a Porter Cable dovetail jig. It turns out though that there is no open standard for router bushing guides. So my Craftsman router wont work with the Porter Cable jig. Craftsman happens to sell bushings, but they're worthless junk plastic pieces and aren't actually sizes that are functional with the Porter Cable jig. It's really sad that people try so hard to lock their customers into proprietary mechanisms (ie: Sears sells jigs that are optimised for their routers).

But my router story gets better.

I did some googling and my Sears router is actually an OEM'd router built by Bosch. And I found that there are little inexpensive router sub-bases that can match various routers up with the Porter Cable bushing format. Woodcraft and Rockler both had these so I went first to my friendly helpful Woodcraft store. That morning they'd just sold there last one in stock. So I went by Rockler as I was really hoping to do some routing that day.

The Rockler staff tried to convince me that my Router was crap and that I should buy a new one instead. They actually spent a fair amount of time trying to sell me the very same Bosch router that I already have (albeit with Craftsman logos on it and a different Sears proprietary sub-base)!

So I've done some looking, ordered the part from Woodcraft and it works great. I am also planning to mail-order some Bosch accessories. Since my Rockler store isn't good for much else, I've at least been able to take my router in and verify that it is exactly what I have and accessories are interchangeable.

In the process Sears and Rockler have done a very good job of loosing my future business.

I think that I've gotten so used to open source and linux and open standards that I don't even realise there's still rampant vendor lock-in happening all around us still. Very annoying.

I was inclined to think Oracle's support of RedHat linux was just Larry being bent out of shape about loosing Jboss. Comments from an aquaintance at Oracle didn't do much to disprove that. They're not likely to make any money off of this and providing better support than RedHat should be difficult. Putting out a distribution isn't easy in the first place. Beyond that, replacing the distro's packages with your "updated" packages is liable to wreak all sorts of problems, especially in the enterprise space where there are for instance closed source storage drivers built against very specific distro packages. Or where all the vendors certify their own support on various specific configurations that aren't likely to include Oracle's linux version(s). So neither the business or technical ends of this one have much up side.

And Novell in bed with Microsoft? On the surface partnering on selling licenses could be simply the logical conclusion to Microsoft approaching the linux community this past summer on better virtualisation interoperability.

What makes all of this wierd though is the indemnification, patent protection, cross licensing stuff. I am not a lawyer, but I've seen enough to understand that IP law and business is very complicated. Throw curve balls into the mix like the GNU General Public License and a huge number of copyright holders and it's only going to be more complex. Not to mention the possibilities around GPL v.3.

There must be hoardes of lawyer people trying to sort all this out. Given the complexity it's hard to see things resolving cleanly though. Complex problems, giant corporations and lawyers aren't liable to lead pretty, clean solutions. Even if they're smart lawyers like Eben Moglen.

Ugh.

Slashdot's got two good links on the DRM fromt today.

First, Yahoo's actually taking a stand against DRM "protected" music! This is a great quote:

"As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!"

The second article on /. gives a deeper dive into just that. An analysis of DRM and how it has been circumvented.

Last week Cringely had an interesting column on the issue of network neutrality.  Personally I believe network neutrality is critical to innovation in much the same ways open APIs and interfaces and the openness of open source and the commons are.

The telcos seem to be bent on returning us to a simple central controlled broadcast-information society instead of that which the internet has evolved into.  The reality is that decentralisation and participation (peer to peer in its broadest sense) is what the internet is all about today.  And it's reasonable to see that changing substantially without net neutrality.

I really like Cringely's use of the phrase "billable event."  It really summarises what the telcos want and need in order to drive growth and increases in profit.  They aren't content to be the conduits that they are.

The interesting twist I see in this is that while the opponents of opensource and the commons like to dismiss these as socialist or communist pipe dreams, a concept like community funded infrastruture allows the infrastructure to sustain a proper marketplace instead of the infrastructure sustaining a centralised, command economy which is what the telcos have had and want to consolidate.

Wired has an interview with some people from the party. Cool to see them continuing to generate press.

This extremely high gas mileage is interesting in as much as everybody in the US is complaining about gas prices but it seems completely bogus. They don't appear to be doing anything meaningful beyond reducing speed, weight, friction, air drag. So sure they produce a high number, but it's not like we're learning anything new or there's real innovation here that will make any real difference. Most consumers still tend to prefer larger, fast, strong looking cars and have bad driving habits, all of which run counter to fuel efficiency. That's what needs changed and it's going to take more pain in the wallet to do that.

After getting beat up for quite some time allofmp3.com have issued a rebuttal to the US political/economic pressure. It's really a shame that this blatant abuse of the US political system by Hollywood is spreading around the world.

When I first was told about allofmp3.com I was a little dubious given the state of the rule of law in Russia. But they appear to be quite on the up and up. I think I might need to start contributing financially to their cause.

I'd be really interested to know how much they in turn contribute to royalty collection agencies. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they contribute more than other "major" players. But presumably the royalty collection people or Hollywood companies are holding that money in escrow pending litigation, and therefore the major labels are in fact the ones not paying the artists.

I forget where I saw this essay/speech linked, but I finally got around to finishing reading it during lunch today. Definitely a thought provoking read.

Mr. Graham makes some interesting points about where innovations are happening. I'm sure big companies would argue they're generating plenty of innovation, but his points about company internal secrecy and the principles of openness vs. secrecy mesh with my experiences at large and small companies regarding IP as well as my personal views on openness being goodness. It combines to make me think he's on to something. Time to buy more small cap stocks?

That just leaves the patent trolls. He seems confident that'll be solved quickly...Here's hoping. In the meantime I guess we're mostly stuck waiting on legislatures?

Last week an interesting note came through a thread on the linux-kernel mailing list. Basically Ingo Molnar's calculated, given the size of the code in debian, that linux and the surrounding open source software have passed half a billion lines of code. "That makes Linux and OSS the largest man-made science project in history. It also means that the cost of redeveloping the Debian codebase using commerical methods could exceed 100 billion US dollars." Pretty impressive stuff.

And of course there's the obligatory jab embedded at Microsoft.

As if this wasn't bad enough looking a month ago...now it's just sounding like total science fiction is coming out of Congress. And from my own Senator now!

Granted Boing Boing's got a sci-fi writer posting, but the EFF's info isn't exactly heart warming by comparison either.

Time to start making phone calls.

Of course the devil is in the details, but there is some very promising news out today on the issue of intellectual property reform. The current system is being severely abused and is very much in need of change.

Various sources are reporting on the topic. The key points are:

• an open patent review process
• Open Source Software as prior art
• a unified, numeric patent quality index

In the flurry of legislative action yesterday was a hidden gem from the House for the content industry in the form of HR-4569. Not too surprisingly with a huge amount of last minute legislation yesterday Thomas is way behind today so it's hard to get much detail beyond the above mirrored text of the legislation and the public outcry and the MPAA chair calling it "very important piece of legislation."

I had to write my Representative the Honorable David Wu a note in response.

The tail end of Bloomberg's early coverage on the federal air marshall shooting of a passenger is interesting in a way unrelated to the rest of the sensationalism around the story.

American Airlines says the plane and passengers are still in Miami. Then they say none of the other (non-dead) passengers were affected or in danger. What!?!

To me this says they have a huge misunderstanding of when their customers feel affected by something. First of all if I'm on a plane and there are bullets flying around on or near the plane I feel that I'm in danger. And if I'm stuck in Miami afterwards while myself, my fellow passengers, our plane and our luggage are searched for bombs...then I'm affected.

This is so much like their bogus on-time departure data. Everybody knows they'll push back from the gate so their statistics aren't affected rather than allow additional passengers on a plane or let passengers off to use other options when the airline knows the plane will not take off at all or for a very long time.

What ever happened to "the customer comes first" and "the customer is always right"? It's no surprise JetBlue and others are making the money. Why not just be straight forward and honest about a situation?

My Grandpa Pepper followed his wife out of this world late last week. Earlier in the year I was able to fly to her funeral in Redding on short notice with relative ease and at a reasonable price. But this time around I'm not sure what to do.

I can drive 8hrs each way and pay about $80 in gas. I could spend 10hrs each way on a bus for $110. Or 12hrs each way on the train for $150. I don't trust the latter two to actually be very on time and departures/arrivals in the wee-est hours of the morning aren't very convenient. But neither is spending 8hrs each way driving the car to spend one day somewhere very appealing.

Unlike last time (about $250 for a 1-stop flight from Portland via Arcata), the cheapest option this time is more than that and comes with a number of hours drive from Sacramento to Redding. There is now a direct flight that would be about 3.5hrs travel time including getting to the airport on time and through security, but even with a bereavement fare it's over $400.

Apparently most airlines have nixed bereavement fares and instead don't charge outrageously high prices for last minute travel anymore. But compared to a $139 round trip web special on Alaska into SFO, I'm thinking last minute travel or bereavement actually does come at a significant premium over other options. And that's not an option as given flight/transit time this would end up taking just as long as just driving probably since SFO's further and I'd probably have bad traffic leaving town on a Friday afternoon.

Since their pricing schemes are anything but transparent I think I'll wait a day or three and see what prices they quote me and decide then if I fly or drive. You'd think there'd be some well established curves that dictate how to optimise filling planes up to the last minute without the airlines loosing money, by having too many non-last-minute travelers book last minute to save money.

The NYT and others are reporting on a Harvard plan that's being presented to the World Bank. They're pretty short on details. Somehow the cynic in my can't imagine the World Bank is truly interested in shaking up the established business world in order to help out developing nations. Not that it wouldn't help the developed nations as well. It's just that it's hard challenging successful incumbents. Anyway, I wish them luck.

It's going to be an interesting few years as inniatives like this and the new GPL update push the conversation about openness forward.

I've been in the bay area for a few days and now that I've lived in Portland for a year I can't help shaking the feeling that I'm just in a suburb of LA. I used to really like it here. Strange. Oh well...at least it all it does is rain in Portland so most Californians couldn't stand it.

Seriously though I think I almost dislike it here. I definitely don't miss it, which I really expected would be the case.

The EFF is reporting that the broadcast flag is back from the possibly dead. Word on the street is it will be sneaked into an appropriations bill today. I sent a message to my old California senator. Hopefully since this was on Slashdot the appropriations committee senators will be slashdotted.

This is mostly a redux of similar writing by Lessig lately, but it's cool to see it in the Tech Review which probably hits a different set of eyeballs than Slashdot and Groklaw.

There's a rebuttal and a rebuttal to the rebuttal. Epstein maybe does a better job than some market apologists, but really just props up the status quo for no clear reason, especially with his section on buying Microsoft Office for $500 and that being such a compelling benefit to productivity to more than offset the cost.

Personally that is a huge issue to me (and the tangential issue of why people supposedly can't yet productively use OpenOffice, which the press consistently portrays as seriously defficient). I know how to use a word processor. I started on AppleWorks on an Apple ][, moved on over time through WordPerfect on Netware and DOS, various Microsoft, Lotus and now open productivity applications. Aside from embedded images, AppleWorks was capable everything twenty years ago for which I use office apps today. Maybe I had to stick in a separate floppy to launch the spell checker and turn over that floppy for the actual spell check, but still. It worked and well considering the option of writing things by hand or on a typewriter...that difference was the primary difference in productivity.

I'm not sure what that old AppleWorks version would cost today given inflation and maybe in constant currency Microsoft Office is cheaper. But it sure seems like the 99% of features that most users rely on should now be commodity. Is that extra 1% worth the $500? And are those features truly ones that significantly matter to productivity? I say no.

Following up my post a couple days ago on their new Longhorn advertising comes more insanity. I saw this on Slashdot the other day, but didn't really think about it too much. It's the same old Microsoft, right? But then today I stumbled across this treatment of the issue which mentioned that the rules require submissions be the "sole work and creation of the person submitting the film."

So Microsoft is running advertising that encourages customers' mixing and mashing, but at the same time is running contests which discourage it. Okay...

The other day I was watching TV and saw a new Microsoft commercial. At first I didn't know what the ad was for, but was curious because it was clearly pushing some sort of technology and they were talking about ripping and mixing and mashing music, among other types of creative production. I was thinking it was strange that a prime time TV ad slot would promote such contentious [sic :)] practices. After a little while the ad turned out to be from Microsoft of all places, touting the features of their three year old Windows XP. They've got a new big ad campaign apparently since Longhorn's so delayed. I wish I could find an online copy of the commercial as I'd like to hear their spiel again and pay closer attention as it seemed so disingenuous in light of all the IP control that Microsoft and other big media companies are pushing (yes I consider Microsoft a content/media company not an irrelevant technology/software company).

Anyway, this BoingBoing post today reminded me of the ad because of it's mix/mash/collage focus.

I've been doing my taxes in TurboTax for the web (using linux and mozilla) for years, but this year I had two states to file and it wont do that. That's an unbelievably lame feature (not to mention that their site didn't work well with firefox on linux). At any rate I did my more complicated Federal and Oregon state taxes in the program and used their numbers to do my California part year by hand. I ended up owing about $100. But last night I had a refund check in my mailbox! Somehow I did some math wrong and should've been getting back almost
$200.

This is the sort of thing I've been expecting for years since I really started getting involved with and using open source software and linux.

I've never understood the people claiming that OSS is anti-capitalistic or anti-jobs, because it just stands to reason that with scarce resources cooperation allows you to do thing you couldn't otherwise. And the above article is evidence of that. Aren't the ideas of cooperation and specialisation ones that are taught in ECON 101 as being things that allow advance? It's possible to get places we want faster and speed up the market by working together at it. Personally, I think this is more likely to be the case than the doom and gloom future Microsoft pushes. I see OOS as playing into Ray Kurzweil's belief that technological advance is accelerating and mirroring (from a development perspective) the ideas that IBM and other high end tech vendors are pushing with their "on demand" initiatives.

It's interesting to read that Lessig's thoughts are increasingly about free culture and how non-free technology is hurting the advance of culture. But at just the same old technology and economics level where Bill Gates and his like are arguing freedom is bad, the article has a great quote regarding why Brazil has so gotten into free software and the creative commons...

Today I was pointed to this academic report on the music downloads hurting the recording industry meme. It has the best charts I've seen in a single place on the actual numbers. I only wish it included data from the last two years. And it would be interesting if some of the charts were overlaid with the relative movements of some indexes like real expendable income and the S&P500...

I haven't bought any CD's in a number of months, but this week renewed my support of KCRW and got a five pack of CD's from featured artists on Morning Becomes Eclectic. I continue to believe the music industry is not offering the type/quality product at the price the market wants (and that the desired price isn't zero).

The CIA's updated its period forecast (published every 5 years) on the world 15 years in the future. Their thoughts on the year 2020 are interesting. It's a mixed bag. Some really interesting and positive things happening and some scary.

Reading about all the upheaval and change they expect it's fairly amazing that they say they don't expect major conflict (ie: world war), but cite the US's opportunity to guide things for the better. I've worried since Sept. 11, 2001 that the country's foreign policies could end up on a slippery slope dragging the world toward a broad war and Bush has continued to scare me.

I like to listen to Marketplace but often miss it in the afternoon as I'm not always sitting at my desk when my local OPB NPR/PRI/public radio station plays it. I sometimes will manage to catch it on KCRW or KQED, but catching the stream at the right start time and having a half hour to listen is hit or miss.

Today I found this site which has huge matrices of public radio shows and times and links to various stations' internet streams!

I'm still trying to understand what my own personal thoughts on IP are (the laws are obviously seriously skewed, but is proprietary inherently ok, not-ok, somewhere in between?). Today's announcement by IBM that they'd open a bunch of patented software was picked apart by Information Week as running counter to IBM's presumed need to have strong IP protection, as evidenced by their trying to influence European legislation in that area. I'm not sure there's really a contradiction there. It's a big company so who knows how linked events are.

But as an "outside" observer, IBM is talking a lot about services built on open infrastructure. Even Richard Stallman recently said that software can be proprietary without being antisocial:

Custom software is meant to be used by one client. There's no ethical problem with custom software as long as you're respecting your client's freedom.

So for IBM to talk about open infrastructure and custom solution services and then apparently back that with actions, but still want IP controls for that custom slice of software doesn't seem that surprising or out of line to me.

CD sales keep going up, despite years now of claims from the RIAA, MPAA and misguided artists (ie: LLCoolJ) that the sky is falling. The article notes it's the first increase in sales in four years, but at the same time each year music sales are driving record profits.

Personally I think that says album price increases are a bigger threat to sales than technology.

The labels need to learn to embrace technology instead of concentrating on milking the status quo.

This week American Airlines sent me a really annoying email. They must be desparate to make some money because they wanted me to opt into recieving third party spam in order to get a few hundred extra miles. I sent an unhappy email back to them. That's just the depths of low depths to which they've stooped to make money via affiliates.

I've appended their copyrighted mail within, as I think it is fair use.

The US goverment says they're for a strong dollar but their actions don't back it. Bush has already increased the deficit by massively increasing spending and also cutting taxes. Now they admit it will be more of the same in order to save social security. The eurozone's not able to convince the US to prop up the dollar.

The Economist has said the dollar could drop by as much as another 40%. Their current front page is "The disappearing dollar." They make is sound like there's a big bubble ready to burst. I'm thinking I need to start shoping for a fixed rate mortgage refinancement...sounds like Bush has spent four years setting us on course headed squarely for very high interest rates and a recession. The main culprit is the deficit.

I'd like to understand better what this implies for securities prices...