DISQUS

Yup. File privacy away with other pernicious modern amorphous 'rights' like universal suffrage and the 40 hour work week. Wouldn't want progress to sneak in anywhere ;)

HAhahhahaha. 'privacy policy describes clearly'. hahahhahahahahahha. You do know how laughable that is, right?. Like any good privacy policy, the G1 privacy policy commits Google to absolutely zero measurable restraints.

Blank check #1: "Using some applications or features may send information to Google that is stored with your Google Account. " That language is completely unrestricted; basically this sentence means 'as soon as you use any of our software, we can choose to upload any data we want and tie it to your account.'

Blank check #2: "We use your information to process your requests and deliver Google services to you, provide customer service functions, and provide you with a better user experience." Magic words here are 'better user experience'- anything we deem to be good for you, we get to use this for, including things you probably would find vaguely creepy if we told you about them.

Blank check #3: "We may share your information with third parties we use to perform some functions, such as billing related tasks. These third parties will be required to treat your information in accordance with the applicable Google privacy policies." Of course, we already know that the applicable Google policies are blank checks- which the third parties inherit as well.

Look, this is hardly unique to Google- law school electronic commerce textbooks quite literally say 'you should never write a privacy policy that actually binds your client in any way.' But to pretend that Google is somehow bound by this policy indicates either mind-boggling naivete, mind-boggling ignorance, or willful deception.

That said, I think you can make a plausible argument (1) that Google has a pretty good ethic about this stuff and (2) that market forces may have at least some regulatory value here. But c'mon, don't insult anyone's intelligence by arguing that the privacy policy means a damn thing.

to elaborate on that education example, because I think it matters: at the time, the argument was that 'everyone who needs/wants education can get it privately, so why should we give provision to everyone?' It turns out that all kinds of things are possible when everyone is literate- for example, universal literacy creates economies of scale in the printing and magazine markets that were previously unattainable, allowing all kinds of growth and experimentation in that area in the mid-to-late 1800s. I think broadband is similar; there are things that are hypothetically possible now for anyone who happens to get FiOS that won't be commercialized and popularized until *everyone* has FiOS-like speeds- and that commercialization and popularization is what we really want/need for rapid progress and innovation.

Sorry, Tim, but you've missed the boat here. I'm sure lots of rural Americans in the 30s weren't too upset that Germany had autobahns while they were perfectly satisfied with just getting roads paved. But that investment in real, serious highways had massive impact on economic growth- albeit impact that was hard to foresee or quantify in the 20s and 30s. Ditto mandatory public education- in the 1800s, people were pleased enough when kids went to Sunday School; they couldn't foresee the benefit of a massively educated populace, and lots of them tried to stop full-time education for children on a variety of grounds- clearly those kids were better off working. I see no reason to think that bandwidth is any different- that 10x difference will have obvious positive impacts on things like telecommuting but we should also expect- and see as a benefit- the lots of other things it will enable that we can't even think of right now.

That does largely explain why NPOV is so important to wikipedia; that is a lot easier to verify/make reasonable than opinion.

(tangent: ESR's wikipedia article history is fairly amusing.)

If their internal development processes were competent, they'd be writing that documentation as part of their internal processes. When you look seriously at the record of the SMB/samba negotiations and documentation, much of it is the government saying things like 'well, we need a test suite' and MS saying 'we don't have a test suite.' Any competent engineer writing something that large would, of course, write the test suite first, not when the government demands it.

Unfortunately, Feedburner provides a lot of functionality that I've found shockingly difficult to find elsewhere- good statistics on the number of readers, for example, or very easy email subscriptions. You'd think things that important and relatively easy to do would be built into virtually every piece of blogging software. Instead they virtually all just rely on Feedburner instead.

In principle, I do basically agree with Berin that the concern here is a little overblown, but of all things Feedburner may be closer to a 'sole provider' of some functionality than virtually any other Google service that I'm aware of, and because readers tend to subscribe directly to it it is also harder to move away from than most Google services- it isn't quite rip and replace without risking potentially losing many of your subscribers.

If you want to start a blog about all the words now used inconsistently with their original Greek and Latin roots, feel free. Once you finish the entry on 'monopoly', you can move on to the tons of other words no longer used consistently with their roots- philosophy, democracy, republic all come to mind. I'm sure Latin teachers the country over will be thrilled by it. The rest of us will mostly be bored to tears ;)

(Yes, I took two years of Latin, two semesters of antitrust, and lots in between...)

The word “monopoly” is now commonly used to mean ”control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.”

I think where you said 'now commonly used' you meant 'now used by anyone who wants to be taken seriously.' Talking about single providers tips off anyone who is even vaguely serious that you're just fighting a straw man.

No offense will, but what took so long? At the first mention of Homo Economicus it should have been obvious that this particular emperor had no useful clothes.

Yeah, because that wouldn't be gamed to hell and back.

Bingo. There are lots of issues with Rawls, but Rawls isn't saying here 'for any given desirable position, everyone on earth must have the same exact opportunity to obtain that one given desirable position'; he's saying 'everyone should have similar opportunities to reach similarly desirable ends.' Both Robert and Sudeep have had the ability to achieve desirable ends and have done so; Rawls (in that example) would seemingly be satisfied.

Now, you've still got a point that this is unattainable in practice (Anne and Betty will always have some differentiation as a result of network and just plain luck) but it doesn't seem like a bad goal to be striven for within reasonable constraints.

Also: Does market volatility debunk personal accounts? No.
Care to elaborate? From where I sit, Social Security is effectively supposed to be insurance, and you don't get insurance from a market. (If you do treat a market as insurance, you then get market entities that are 'too big to fail'- which gets you right back into the government expenses, inefficiency, and interference that you presumably want to get away from by privatizing it in the first place.)

Glad someone here has the sense to see that this was sarcasm...

demo link busted?

I'll be interested to hear the TLF take on stopbadware. I was on the original stopbadware team, and while there is a sort of vigilante-justice aspect to it, I think the team is doing the right thing given the nature of the problem.

whawhawha?
First, I think that many supporters of Net neutrality (NN) regulation have been crafting this sort of false choice between openness and bandwidth.

Don't you mean opponents? Going back through this blog alone it'd be easy to find dozens of posts and comments discussing how a NN regime would destroy the god-given capitalist incentives to invest in better bandwidth, so we'd never get fatter pipes. That is who is setting up the dichotomy, not NN advocates.

I've yet to see a wiki that allows for collaboration on facts and then functional/useful disagreement on interpretation of the facts. If someone could whip such a thing up (perhaps working off git or other recent advances in distributed development tools) it'd be very useful.

Organized religion isn't volunteer-based, it is based on the work of people who think they need to do things, or else their deity will punish them for it. If I could convince people that their deity will hate them unless they contributed to my software project, I'd be rolling in 'volunteers'.

SpeedTest's methodology is 'we test whoever visits the site.' It is about as unscientific and invalid a polling methodology as you can get.

"Some guy" clearly didn't have enough fun as a child, through video games or any other form of entertainment.

Every generation since the Romans (or Victorians, depending on how you want to count) has grown up with porn, and we still hear how that warps our minds and needs to be regulated by the state. (Ditto dildos, and gay people, and booze, and... well, at least they stopped openly complaining about women's rights.) So... at least the Americans reading this shouldn't get too excited while there is still a viable theocratic political party.

(To be clear, I'm not against capital and capitalism, but I'm more interested in- as Richard put it- creating the future. Capital/capitalism (and law) are primarily tools for that larger goal.)

Manhattan is so 20th century, Luis. Silicon Valley is where you go to create the future.

Oh, completely agreed. That's why I said Manhattan is my current home, but my job interviews are in Silicon Valley :) But that just emphasizes my point that SV has something besides raw capitalism and access to capital. If that was what I was interested in, I'd be staying here with my classmates, spending a few years downtown, and then trying to move out to Greenwich. But capital and capitalism are secondary interests to me, so I'll be going to SV. (Or as a partner at a large law firm - certainly making seven figures - told me: "I'm not in this for the money; if I were in this for the money, I'd be in i-banking.")

Silicon Valley is a place for people who are obsessed with making money; it’s not just a place where capitalism is practiced, it’s the very Mecca of Venture Capital.
Revealing my biases up front: my current home (Manhattan) tends to laugh excessively at the notion that anywhere else is the Mecca of anything capital-related, so I'm perhaps a bit jaundiced.

I talk with a lot of people in the valley who aren't business people (engineers, lawyers) and never have I heard one of them say 'I came to Silicon Valley because of the venture capital.' Almost all of them (moreso amongst the engineers, obviously) say they came because 'this is where the cool stuff happens.' Obviously, the venture capital helps drive that cool stuff, but VC isn't the sole driver- NYC has plenty of capital available, and that hasn't stopped Silicon Alley from being a running joke for a decade now. SV isn't historically about VC, either. The VC came because of Stanford and the engineers who were already there, not the other way around. And as the cost of innovation decreases (thank you, GPL/Linux), people are still flocking to the Valley to found their basement startups, despite no longer needing nearly as much capital (if any.)