Recently in Politics Category

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.

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.

This summer I went to a Tigard city council meeting to voice some concern about how the city was annexing properties in my area. It was interesting to get a little glimpse into our local government and also a little disappointing. I've grown to have the opinion that the city doesn't have the vision or desire to guide development in a sustainable way.

Our city's major problems are related to growing pains (eg: traffic problems and clean water sources). The city council seems to prefer to react to these when they become so troublesome that the voting public's sentiment forces them to. In the particular context of annexation and residential development, they don't have rules that would require the developers to invest in infrastructure to support their developments. Instead they allow developers to quickly build, sell and then when residents move in they begin to find the problems, complain to the city and eventually (maybe) something boils over and the city either can't afford to address the problem, says residents should do something themselves or has to pass a tax to fund a solution. The problems that I see in the city are largely caused by lack of sustainable planning on the city's part. Either they don't see the problems or they're choosing not to solve them now (when they're cheapest) versus in the future. Neither possibility is a sign of strong leadership.

Having noted that Nick Wilson is up for election this year, I was particularly surprised to see him talking about fairly sustainable ideas in the press. Of the people on the city council with whom I interacted, Nick Wilson struck me as particularly short sighted and lacking in spine. So much so that his is actually the only name I consistently remember on the council! The others didn't inspire me, but he actively uninspired me. If he is elected it will be interesting to see if he actually pursues and drives the things he's now talking about. In the meantime I can't vote for him.

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?

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.

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 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.

Oregon governor candidate Ron Saxton held a short "session" today at my site of employment. I guess for reasons related to that it wasn't an implicit campaign stop, but I'm not sure what else it really would have been. He spoke about his vision for the state (mostly derived from the need to improve K-12 education), the need for individuals to become more involved in finding and implementing solutions, and fielded questions from the audience. Mostly straight forward stuff as on his campaign web site.

Despite party affiliation (Republican) there was no typical party retoric. In fact he quotes Bill Clinton, talks about virtuous and vicious cycles ala Robert Reich, and is openly against No Child Left Behind and federal impositions on the state. After the meeting I wanted to find more about his stance on broader topics and interestingly the web search turned up mostly dialogue about whether he's a liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. It's sad that this is what rules the political conversation in the US.

He seems to have a pragmatic approach to solving local problems locally. It is interesting to see somebody in politics with a long-term vision of how we can prosper which is rooted in improving public education and who's come up into politics out of public school involvement.

My main worry is that his belief that the economy will continue to grow, generating more tax revenue and making decisions about where to find money for things in the budget a non-issue, could be wrong. He previously supported tax maintenance and growth while now is for tax reduction, but again that seems to have been a practical response to the current economic trends more than rigid party ideology. Assuming he's wrong about goverment revenue growth under his assumed term, would that mean lots of new/expensive state bonds or cuts in service? Who knows.

Either way, he emphasises we have people and systemic problems which take leadership and open dialogue to change, not money or traditional politics. That view seems lost on most of the web though, if all the dialogue is around whether he's "really" a Republican or Democrat. For me, I've not seen first hand most of the problems he talks about and compared to California it seems like we get a lot for or (tax) money here.

It'll be interesting to watch him and the incumbent duke it out over the next few months.

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.

The technologist in me feels that good simply must flow from a political party whose basic platform consists of truly reforming intellectual property law. The implications are huge. I may have to update my voter registration to actually have a party affiliation for the first time ever.

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?

I heard an interview (link worth following for her rapping on SNL) of Natalie Portman on NPR a week or two ago and it made the movie sound somewhat interesting although I didn't have a clue about what the movie was really about. Being completely out of the loop on what Hollywood is pushing for movies these days I didn't even know the movie had been out a couple weeks and was making good money. In short I liked the movie. Seeing the credits I wasn't surprised to see it was done by the Wachowski brothers. They seem to be into dystopian future underdog antihero action flicks.

While I don't follow Hollywood too closely I'm surprised after having seen it that this movie isn't causing more of a stir in places that I do pay attention. Maybe it's that the conservatives and Bush-lovers think it's just more of the typical liberal/Hollywood propoganda? The parallels and implicit condemnation of the direction America is being led are so blatent I'd think it would be annoying more people...

I saw this on BoingBoing following up on their reference the other day to this story. Is Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt planning to run for president or something? He seems to be working on outpacing President Bush at trouncing civil liberties.

This is one choice quote: "I know a lot of people are concerned about big brother, but my response to that is if you aren't doing anything wrong why worry about it."

The best part is there's now a bounty up for any video of Chief Hurtt breaking a law!

This should be fun to watch unfold...

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

It amazes me how politics works. I sure wish I lived in a free country...led by honest, intelligent, caring citizens.

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.

Pardon me, but this is an outrage! A nicely tucked away on page 11 of the newspaper outrage!

Doesn't Mssr. Bush have anything better to do right now than check out the ancient crimes of 14 people and grant them pardons? He even stooped so low as to pardon a terrorist.

One person who asked for a pardon was visited and interviewed by an FBI agent. Doesn't the FBI have better things to do? Oh yeah I guess not...the war on terror has obviously been won.

And one for conspiracy to deliver LSD? Guess the war on drugs is won too.

Seeing as that's the case, why doesn't Bush pardon Osama and Saddam and Iraq. If these fourteen fools (including somebody involved with bombing his employer during a labour dispute...hello...isn't this terrorism!?...hello...isn't this hypocrisy!?) deserve a second chance, why not? Then we can bring the troops home and rebuild New Orleans.

Surely our president has more presidential things to do (golf games, vacations, running a couple wars, overseeing emergency management, nominating supreme court justices) than pardon somebody who once sent a threatening letter and got a year of probation. These people need to stop whining, grow up and live with their mistakes, not petition the President of the United States of America for help.

Given the nature of the crimes of those he did pardon it kind of makes me wonder why he didn't pardon Leonard Peltier. Guess somebody might have accidentally gotten the impression that he cared about coloured folk.

Blogging meets podcasting meets TV is what I've been thinking since stumbling onto Current a week or so ago. Somehow I must've missed all the press and commentary (this guy's done very good PBS stuff) around the premiere of "Al Gore's new network" earlier this summer. It seems like a very hip/cool and also meanful/powerful medium.

From the bits that I've watched I can agree with the criticism in the above links. But I do have to say the Katrina coverage has been very insightful. It's as close as I've seen on TV to the type of detail that BoingBoing has been publishing. I kind of see it as an extension of the change in perception to blogs that has started to happen the last few weeks also thanks to Katrina. When the mainstream press is failing, alternative sources will become popular. It's the market at work.

One definite negative though is that I haven't watched much and have seen lots of repeat content. Some of which was actually mentioned in the above links from earlier this summer. Hopefully they start getting more people submitting so they can have more fresh content. But then that starts to beg the question...who exactly is holding the editorial control? Are submitted pods censored or recut? And since it's Al Gore's network, presumably there will be considerable bias in what is and isn't aired?

How long until there's a conservative channel seeking to balance current.tv's content?

I just love the Onion. Who better to remix the current news and put a smile on one's face in a hard time? The media and our leaders certainly make it easy for the Onion folks though.

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.

NPR affiliate WBUR Boston's "The Connection" aired yesterday a lengthy interview with Phil Torrone and Dale Dougherty of Make and Rosalind Williams from MIT.

It's interesting to hear that beyond encouraging people to get into DIY tinkering in the digital age, the creators are disturbed by consumption and the throw away culture. I hadn't thought of that angle. They definitely provide a forum that will encourage some serious innovation and interesting advances if legislation and the producers (and the negative connotation that the public tends to hear in "hacking") don't manage to squash it.

If nothing else they've encouraged me to fiddle with some things I wouldn't have otherwise.

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.

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...

I have to admit I didn't quite get Gilmore's issue with presenting photo ID to travel until fairly recently when I saw a "social hack" described on boingboing (see also Bruce Schneier on the same). But then I don't necessarily have a problem with a national ID (I guess like Gilmore accepting a passport)...it's useful. But as the above hacks and reading Code has convinced me, it all depends on when and where they are required and how their use and user is tracked. If the law is mandating something, yet there is no transparency in how the laws are set plus no way for the public to address concerns we're sliding down a slippery slope. We're no longer much of a democracy!

Anyway, this article provides an interesting look inside Gilmore's head.

I really like my Tivo and it seems like the things possible mythtv are huge...I can imagine a really rich client/server media center in my home that allows viewing and listening from multiple locations in the home (or maybe even outside if I'm on the road and am missing "my shows"). Not that this is anything new. I remember ten years ago reading about Bill Gates fancy new house in Seattle that had technology heading in this direction.

The only hitch is that the recording and motion picture industry heavyweights don't want this to happen and have convinced the government to mandate it doesn't happen via "the broadcast flag". I haven't really had the time to build a mythtv setup in my house, but would like to be able to do something like this in the future. If the media industry has its way though, come July of this year it would be illegal for me to do that (ie: we have to imagine the broadcast flag would nearly always be on and thus recording be prohibited).

Hopefully the courts though are finding legal reason to allow a rich ecosystem of products for home media to develop. Comparing mythtv to Tivo and taking into account the industry's efforts to block online music distribution, I have to believe that open garage-style development is going to create better featured home media products faster than the industry. And that wont be allowed to happen with the broadcast flag.

I don't think this is exactly news, but Linus has been quoted saying patents are a problem. The article says thought that copyright would be a better way to protect software innovations. That seems wrong. In the US copyright is eternal and implicit, so everything written is copyrighted and the copyright lasts forever. Patents have to be applied for (even if most are granted) and expire. Seems like copyright is a worse problem today in America.

And here I thought it was bad that some dumb people write web pages that don't work with non-MSIE web browsers. But who could have known it would get you arrested?

Is this the post-9-11 world we live in thanks to George Bush and John Ashcroft?

As seen on BoingBoing (which has more details than the BBC link above).

I got an email about this thing and then noticed it on an urban legends web site. On the surface it's a nice feeling idea. And out of coincidence mostly it happens that I didn't actually spend any money on the day of the inauguration. But that's not really all that different than many days and doesn't amount to anything.

BoingBoing's got linked some good commentary on it.

News reports are out saying so.

I hope his replacement isn't such a tool. But it's hard to imagine anything else with Bush setting up his agenda for the next four years.

Today's news on the US and Iran shouldn't come as a surprise. The administration's been making it's Iran case a little more subtly than it did on Iraq, but the wheels have clearly been in motion for some time. Having troops en masse in Iraq and lacking confidence in the CIA, wouldn't it make sense to try to get it right this time before invading? Although, finding and presenting a better WMD story might not be necessary, considering Bush's re-election and his still ok approval ratings.

Still, even if it's been the clear intent and direction just like Iraq, you have to wonder what the broader reprocussions will be. Consider the spin muslim nation's press is giving to these revelations...the press takes the story and presents in the form their audience wants to hear.

Are we making ourselves safer in the long run or just pissing off a huge population and making more people who will try creative things to piss back on us?

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'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.

I'm glad to hear this (and this). These "left-right shout-fest" shows are just as trashy these days as the stuff that gets the real complaints. I'm glad John Stewart ripped them up.

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.

I've never understood how opiates were fair game for medicine, but studies aren't really being done to look at if there's truth to claims about medicinal pot uses. It's even more baffling that the government allows studies of ecstacy. The US drug policy is really confusing.

Michael Powell believes strongly that he's not confused and his FCC decisions are consistent, but his words continue to lack consistency. What exactly is the underlying belief or values system which governs him? It's just not clear.

Microbroadcasting is an interesting jumping off point. They wont allow unlicensed broadcasting because of the fear of interference, ignoring that modern tech means legitimate low power users don't have to interfere anymore than licensed, high power ones and that the law does nothing to prevent malicious users. Even if you're a skilled engineer and radio operator and can insure your little home station is safe, the FCC will not issue a FM broadcast license to you if you're low power, because of the potential impact to existing broadcasters! But then Powell goes on to extoll the game changing entrance to markets by unknown players, like WiFI and other uses of (unlicensed!) spectrum and the foundation of MCI and Dish Network to compete with existing near-monopoly businesses. And at the same time he says that unknown players shouldn't be guaranteed access to markets and that they're not likely to be any better at innovating than the controlling parties.

This article is the same sort of talking in circles that I saw Powell doing on CNBC a month ago and was trying to find a transcript for. If he's not inconsistent, what is?

I've been following linux kernel development for many years and Jeff V. Merkey's name has occasionally been at the head of the list of annoying people on the linux-kernel mailing list. Recently he popped up offering money for the linux kernel and people flamed away.

He's back and it turns out he was working on behalf of the Cherokee Nation!

Software patents are arguably bad in as much as the currently bad USPTO implementation. And the DMCA brings a bad twist on copyright along with Disney's securing non-expiring copyrights. But software copyright as the enemy? If copyright protects expression and is itself valuable (I'd say it is so, despite Disney and DMCA corruption of the system) and code is expressive not purely functional, then software copyrights should be beneficial. This guy's suit is trouble for the GPL and comes at an interesting time.

Karsten's bugged the hell out of me in the past (used to work together :), but it's interesting to see him pop up on /. this week quoting this same guy three years ago and ripping up his arguments against software copyright.

I'm still waffling on whether patents and software patents are inherently bad, not entirely convinced they are.

A thorough analysis of what's wrong with the patent system, how it got there and three comments on how to make a more rational system. I like the idea of having incentives for people to challenge patents (beyond the desire of intelligent people to not have crappy patents spawning like rabbits). LINK

(I need to figure out of MovableType allows me to specify multiple categories...or else make an "intellectual property" category...it's politics and culture and economics and technology all in one ball.)

I called 'em names earlier this month, and after watching some CSI's lately that I've Tivo'd...I think it's that much clearer. They refuse agenda adverts, yet their shows clearly have agendas. For instance the CSI episode "Ch-Ch-Changes" is about transgendered people, negative societal reactions to them and how they're really just normal and need accepted. Pretty ironic message compared to the advert the network refused. CSI Miami regularly discourages nationalism/protectionism with ethnic-inclusive themes and casting. I'm sure this happens on all sorts of shows. The networks have agendas and pander to their desired market segments all the time.

Today brought an interesting new twist to the election in the form of a sworn affidavit claiming that a prototype vote rigging program was commissioned before the 2000 election by Tom Feeney, a republican member of the House Judiciary Committee from Florida with ties to Jeb Bush. It's a long and complicated story, but supposedly the code wasn't used (back then at least?)...

CBS and NBC are hypocrits. They say they do not accept advertising "on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance." Didn't we just go through a huge national eletion campaign which culminated a month ago? And wasn't it full of advertising that was squarely on one side of current controversial issues of public importance?

I take it as a promising sign that the press is increasingly discussing the issues around intellectual property and the abuse of the monopolies goverments grant individuals and companies around their IP claims. It's a subject I first started becoming aware of in the early/mid-90's thanks partly to coverage in WiReD magazine (which was a much better rag back then) and EMI's threats to the On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA).

Copyright is familiar enough now thanks to mp3's, but this is a progression. Guitar tablature and transcription sharing is nothing compared to music sharing. And the media industry knows that's nothing compared to digital video sharing. So instead of reacting as in those cases, they're pushing hard to make sure the legal framework is in place before high definition digital video becomes mainstream.

And of course there's the obscene patent land-grab that's been going on since the dot-com bubble started.

This week brought news of:

• A senate bill being rammed through by Hollywood.
• the FCC's increased desire to control everything (ie: not just on-air broadcasts). FCC head Micheal Powell was interviewed on CNBC this week talking in circles. I really wish I had a transcript to link here.
• Articles (1, 2) in the Economist on the broken patent system.

Tonight on the ABC World News there was a segment about the conspiracy theories abounding around the election results. It's unfortunate to see so many people simply dismissing this as conspiracy theory.

Computer scientists know the system is vulnerable. And vendors balk at solutions.

As Avi Rubin notes it's the unnoticable problems that are the worry. The press has explainations for the noticed problems and with the parties involved conceeding the defeat this time around was clear, the chase for unnoticed problems is not getting attention. Which makes it less likely that the know problem will find its known solution (eg: things like proper engineering, best practices and peer review).

Update: I barely post this including links to Bruce Schneier's essays and he's gone and weighed in with more thoughts on the matter.

Bush's new term will at least bring a new Attorney General. It remains to be seen whether this will signal a new direction at the Department of Justice. While the AP quotes Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, as saying, "We need to do more than just replace John Ashcroft; we need a wholesale re-examination of Justice Department policies that trample on civil liberties and human rights," there is little reason to expect a drastic departure from existing policies. Ashcroft is cut from the same cloth as Bush and, again quoting Romero, leaves behind a "...legacy [of] open hostility to protecting civil liberties and an outright disdain for those who dare to question his policies."

Ashcroft's his resignation letter to Bush says, "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." This begs the question of what we're doing in Iraq.

PBS's Frontline has a new show airing this week called "The Persuaders" which should make for good viewing. The teaser I caught was talking about how marketing and public relations aim to create "loyalty beyond reason." Marketing techniques have moved out of the board room and into the realm of politics, shaping out public discourse.

The Republicans have mastered this.

I like his fiction, but I'm not convinced his Nov. 4, 2004 blog entry (doesn't blogger give easy permanlinks?) will prove correct in the short term.

Sure absolute power corrupts, and that ultimately undermines things the goverment might like to do. But I doubt it's going to happen in the next year. The mandate given this fall will enable them to do what they want next year. The way those actions pan out might erode their mandate. And they've come to power specifically on a long established and tightly controlled toe-the-line power structure.

There's been a lot of discussion of the poorly implemented electronic voting systems on the market todya. I can't imagine how it would impact the current election, but a nonpartisan, nonprofit group has launched a huge freedom of information act quest to analyse whether the current election was hacked.

George Bush re-relected? I don't know if I just run in a strange crowd but I just don't know much of anybody for whom Bush resonates. But there obviously are a lot of them. I was hoping more people would be scared by what he stands for around "morals", the economy, foreign policy and the environment than four years ago.

It was bad enough that the Republican congress was just an arm of the white house these last three or four years, even though the split country four years ago presumably didn't give them a mandate for anything radical. But with a incumbent re-elected and the Republicans gaining seats in Congress, they'll view this as an affirmation of their clear mandate.

It seems increasingly likely that:

• The conservatives "moral" agenda will be pushed into state constitutions, if not the US constitution, especially if the Supreme Court gets a number of Bush appointees.
  
• The war in Iraq will be compelled to be brought to neighbouring countries. Just like we have to invade Iraq to keep the US safe, we'll have to invade Jordan, Syria and especially Iran to keep Iraq (and the US) safe.
  
• A draft will be needed to support the above, especially as the rest of the world increasingly lines up against the US.
  
• Oil prices will remain propped up.
  
• Drilling in ANWR will finally be deemed a neccessity.
  
• What else?
  

Four years ago people saying this stuff were called paranoid. This time around we know what to expect.