Disqus - Latest Comments for Luis

Re: Patent Damages and Defensive Patents

Luis — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:43:33 -0000

I think most reasonable people understand that defensive patents are a necessity, but given MS's track record, you can understand why no one will trust MS further than you can be thrown :) If MS truly is interested only in defensive uses, you could resolve the PR problem by disclaiming offensive uses of your patents, as Red Hat has done. You'll understand why no one holds their breath for that, of course :)

[One might add that Apple, Sun, Novell, and others who have licensed the use of your patents must have had some reason to do so- clearly they thought that there was some threat of offensive usage of your patents? Or is there some other explanation there?]

Re: Glossdeck, A New Presentation Theme for S5

Luis — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:25:25 -0000

demo link busted?

Re: Joe the Plumber 2008

Luis — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:23:18 -0000

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.)

Re: Equal Chances for Equal Talent

Luis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:28:23 -0000

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.

Re: If America Was a Rational Technocracy

Luis — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:22:53 -0000

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

Re: The War of the Economists

Luis — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:11:20 -0000

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.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Remote Control Multi Color LED Light Bulb

Luis — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:46:51 -0000

Lauren, if you're seriously building a hotel, you should look at someone like Color Kinetics- they do large-scale installs of lighted LEDs with very sophisticated controls, color matching (they can match your pantone colors), etc. Very neat stuff.

Re: ‘I Know It When I See It’ Isn’t Enough?

Luis — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:53:09 -0000

Broken PDF link- can you fix?

Re: Thierer v. Von Lohmann

Luis — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:33:22 -0000

Tim, you should read Terry Fisher's 'Promises To Keep', which goes into something like this model (and all the alternatives) in quite some detail, including an analysis of the economics of the current system (I don't have the exact number offhand, but his analysis would suggest that the number is a lot smaller than $10B once you scrape away distribution, most marketing, payola, etc.) I'd love to see a review/analysis of the book from the techliberation crowd- the argumentation is generally very sound, as far as I can see, but the conclusion goes even further than Fred does, arguing for a compulsory license and a government-collected fee system, which I figure would probably raise a lot of hackles around here, and certainly makes me uncomfortable, even though his logic generally seems sound.

Re: The Other Hopeless War Started in 2003

Luis — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:34:10 -0000

Tim, to add another recommendation to the pile, you might pick up Jessica Litman's 'Digital Copyright', which I think has some pretty good points on the disconnect between what fair use is to lawyers and copyright cognoscenti (four-fold test, etc.) and what fair use is to everyone else on earth ('am I profiting from it? am I sharing with people I know?'), backed by some fairly in-depth analysis of the history that got us to that dichotomy between what people think the law is/should be and what it really is.

While I think you're right that moving to that definition of fair use (or something like it) would have a fair amount of impact on the music industry, it isn't clear that the impact would be as devastating as you'd like to claim, particularly for artists who don't suck live. And even the non-artist parts of the industry (which I think you give altogether too much value to) would likely survive in some form- as the movie industry is finding out, there is a lot of value in ancillary bits that aren't the core of the good. As the Grateful Dead, Phish, and others have been proving forever, you can make a ton of money off touring, t-shirts, all kinds of stuff, if you're actually good live- lots more than you can make in the studio, and completely without the benefit of copyright protection even on the live performances.

Re: Solveig Singleton is Making Sense

Luis — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 20:41:34 -0000

The examples given in the argument are bogus, conflating 'easily removed by anyone' with 'easily removed by the administrator-owner of the machine'. Security software or content filters installed by parents or libraries are on machines owned and controlled by the parents or libraries, not by the children or users, so whether or not the children can remove the software is irrelevant. I'm almost willing to go out on a limb and say that there is no way you can come up with a legitimate example whereby an administrator/owner of a machine should be prevented from removing software from a machine they own. I suppose one could argue that one should be able to contract away that property right, but it isn't like any of the offending programs actually offer up such a contract in any meaningful way- none of them says at install or purchase time 'this will install stuff that might break your computer and will be impossible to remove' in any way that can be considered a morally binding contract.

Re: More on NTP’s Ridiculous Patents

Luis — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 22:16:01 -0000

Tim, it is my understanding that recent ('90s?) patent court rulings have held out that combination is basically always non-obvious- which is why we have so many silly patents for e-commerce. I'm sure one of your co-authors can give you a lesson on this :)

Re: The DMCA versus Computer Hobbyists

Luis — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 15:26:06 -0000

See also these notes on a MS VP's talk in London, where apparently the MS rep said that DRM will be licensed only to major players: "We don't want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle." It is clear that DRM (both from MS and Apple) is an anti-competitive device for hardware and software makers as much or more so than it is an anti-competitive move on the part of the entertainment industry.

Re: DRM vs. Fair Use

Luis — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 13:48:44 -0000

Profs teaching film courses are similarly hosed by DVD copy protection. Basically completely hosed, in fact- DMCA makes it fairly clearly illegal to bypass all the crap that the studios put at the front of the movie, which makes it totally impractical to do the core action of a film class- show film clips.

Re: Microsoft-only Government

Luis — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:41:10 -0000

Where does one draw the line, exactly? Should Open Office be required so that Linux users (of which I'm one) can access government services? Is Flash acceptable? I lean towards 'all open, all the time', but that is probably because I lean a lot more towards the big government side of things than the average TLF reader, and certainly not with any particular philosophical justification except outrage that my government can dictate my operating system.

Re: Microsoft-only Government

Luis — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 06:57:24 -0000

It won't be a non-issue for Linux users :)

Re: Alcohol Liberation Front

Luis — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 12:54:46 -0000

Ah, to live in DC. Have a beer for me :)

Re: Antitrust Rent-Seeking

Luis — Thu, 04 May 2006 19:20:30 -0000

So your conclusion from 'the legal process is broken' is...? We should just stop trying to prosecute altogether?

Re: Just What Consumers Need

Luis — Wed, 10 May 2006 22:06:22 -0000

DReaM is slightly better, in that it is an open standard and so in theory could have multiple competing implementations (unlike FairPlay) and implementations on multiple platforms (unlike PlaysForSure.) Otherwise, no, it isn't any better- certainly isn't meaningfully open source, and like you say, is Yet Another Non-Interoperable Platform, which only continues thwarting actual competition like we've grown to expect in CD players, DVDs, etc.

Re: Lichtman on Patent Holdouts and Safety in Numbers

Luis — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:53:49 -0000

The contention that no judge would stop the sales of all DVD players seems overly optimistic to me, given that it was exactly the threat of an injunction to stop operation that forced Blackberry to kowtow, despite the federal government saying that a blackberry outage would threaten the ability of the government to function- something they'd never say about DVD player sales.

Otherwise, mostly a very solid-looking analysis.

Re: Competition Works: An Analysis of Competing Cable-Telco “Triple-Play” Packages

Luis — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 13:01:37 -0000

When did the plural of anecdote become analysis? C'mon, guys, I expect better than this of tlf.

Re: Adobe vs. Microsoft II: Users Lose

Luis — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 06:35:25 -0000

Question, which I've seemed to get conflicting answers to: does adobe give away a plugin to generate PDF from existing versions of office? I know such a plugin exists, but some pieces of coverage of this story have implied that the plugin is free, while others have implied that the plugin is not available stand-alone and hence is expensive.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » And Now for Something Really Important…

Luis — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:04:31 -0000

And you did look at the URL, right? :)

Re: Markets Don’t Need Money

Luis — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:10:08 -0000

If I participate only in the good old fashioned dollar market, I can live. If I participate only in the bit market, or the eyeball market, or the GPL'd code market, I'm unlikely to survive long- I need some sideline (ads, support services, parents, inheritances, college scholarships) to supplement it. This does seem like a fundamental difference somehow.

Re: Rent Seeking on Wall Street

Luis — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 09:27:29 -0000

Perhaps some, but I'm not sure who they are.
Take your pick. Every significant software company has a rewards program for engineers who file patents- and they make it very clear to those engineers internally that it doesn't matter how negligible or insignificant the 'discovery' is, as long as there is even the smallest option the lawyers can twist the wording into something patentable. The goal is very explicitly quantity and not quality. The cheap companies give you a t-shirt ('I filed a patent!') and a gift certificate; more generous companies add extra options. Again, this is all just for contacting the lawyers- if the patent application is actually successful, most companies then add more incentives.

(I'm sort of surprised that the Times didn't point out how these sorts of things, in an industry like Wall Street, almost inevitably turn out- the large players come to a standstill, cross-license, and then sue everyone small or up and coming.)

Re: Ubuntu

Luis — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:06:06 -0000

Elf: Speaking as a member of the GNOME board, GNOME has been strongly anti-customizability (well, anti-option, which is subtly different) since c. 2000, and a modern default GNOME install has far, far fewer preferences than a modern KDE install. (Your second paragrpah would have been very accurate, c. 1999) For more information on why GNOME has changed, read the section 'The Question Of Preferences' in Havoc Pennington's "Free Software UI" article.

Tim: to answer your question more generally, you should think of GNOME or KDE as roughly equivalent to the graphical programming layer of Apple or Windows (only masochists program directly to the X server anymore) and the core applications that come with each OS. So Elf's summary (the first paragraph :) is pretty solid, but incomplete- each group provides not just the programming layer Elf discussed, but also the core applications- like the file browser, a simple text editor, etc., and is typically responsible for design, quality assurance, and translation of those pieces of software. So if you've got GNOME bugs, blame me- I ran the GNOME QA team for a long time :)

Finally, almost all Linux apps (GNOME, KDE or otherwise) can use the standard ctl+c/ctl+v/ctl+x combinations as well as the middle-click for copy and paste. At least in GNOME's case, if the app does not support ctl+c/ctl+v then that is a bug and should be fixed. I can't speak for KDE, but I assume it is the same for them.

Re: Ubuntu

Luis — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:25:58 -0000

Oh, right, and re: ipod, I currently suggest Banshee- apt-get install banshee should get you the beast. It won't get you itunes store support- the title of the page where you can get ITMS support for linux is 'so sue me'.

Tim, DRM lock-in issues aside, I'd be interested in hearing your take on the incestous relationship between iTunes/ITMS/iPod, and how comfortable/uncomfortable you'd be with those relationships if the DRM issue went away.

Re: Framing the Copyright Debate

Luis — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:06:36 -0000

Didn't much of the current IP regime arise under Clinton?

The Bono Act (extending copyright) and DMCA passed under Clinton, but by a Republican Senate and House. Inasmuch as this is a political problem, neither party is doing the right thing. But it has mostly been a judicial/PTO problem, not executive-level. Strongly recommend reading the excellent Digital Copyright for a good history of the problem in the copyright space, and Innovation and its Discontents for a similar background on the patent side.

Re: Neighborhood Wide Web

Luis — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:14:02 -0000

Tim: for what it is worth, Mozilla is working on some geolocation stuff, so that your browser can report to websites where you are if you're on a mobile device that has GPS. Unfortunately, I can't find any links off the top of my head, but it should open a whole new round of competition around services.

Re: Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

Luis — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 19:08:17 -0000

The competition in the telecom space, for the vast majority of users, is roughly equivalent to the entire transportation market being a vast range of bicycles (modem), a Volkswagen Bug (DSL), or a single model of BMW sedan (cable). Some lucky few also get to pick a Mercedes sedan as well. Insert calculator, single Dell 486, and single Apple P4 if you want to compare it to the PC market instead. We'd consider that situation appalling when compared to the current vibrancy of the car or PC market. It isn't really competition in any meaningful sense of the word- it doesn't drive feature differentiation, it doesn't drive price competition, it doesn't drive quality differentiation*. So... what exactly makes it like real vibrant competition again? I'm with you guys in spirit- real competition would be vastly preferable to regulation. But to pretend that there is actual competition right now, or that there are any trends** which point towards increased competition in the foreseeable future, is to live in a very potent reality distortion field, no?

* which is why I think this blog's dominant opinion on net neutrality is charmingly naive.

** save potentially WiMax

Re: Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

Luis — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 23:01:42 -0000

I think I'm with Enigma here: I've lived in two of the highest-density cities in the country, and my parents live in some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, and despite that, I'm not seeing the speed increases you're seeing- I'm stuck on ~2Mb, as are the 'rents, and have been for several moves now. (My father can't even get DSL.) Let me know where this capitalist paradise is you're living so I can move there and get some of the fat bandwidth competition has brought you.

As far as the Lessigian vision of net neutrality goes... I'm not a fan of regulation either. But this country has two major data networks. One of them (the cellular network) is reasonably competitive, lower capital, and unregulated, and yet getting content through it is incredibly complex and costly, and the network completely devoid of interesting new uses. The other one (the IP network, inc. phone and cable) is much less competitive, requires higher capital investment, and is heavily regulated, and yet getting content through it is cheap, and the network is teeming with interesting new uses. Again, I'm sympathetic to your argument here, but you have to really twist the facts on the ground to make them support your position in this particular case.

Re: Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

Luis — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 23:21:10 -0000

(Tangentially, a friend of a friend of a friend tells me that his company, which delivers services to cell phones, has staff whose job it is purely to test the networks of the cell providers, to see what they do and don't allow, and modify their software appropriately. Maddeningly inefficient and wasteful, and of course wildly inconsistent between providers. But hey, I'm sure competition will fix that right up.)

Re: Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

Luis — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:17:27 -0000

The issues are more subtle than that and we'll do a better job if we keep that in mind.
Absolutely. I think in general TLF does a good job of dealing with subtlety, which is why the typical position on net neutrality here drives me bonkers :)

Tim: of course only the last mile is regulated, which is why I'm optimistic about WiMax. That said, the last mile is how the vast, vast majority of internet users get their content these days, and has been since the early 90s. If the oligopoly that controls the last mile decides to follow the strategic route of the cell providers , and charge per-service instead of per-bit (which they clearly want to do), it won't matter that the core of the 'net is unregulated, because most people won't ever see that 'net except perhaps while they are in college, if they live on campus.

Re: ATI: Open Source Not Welcome

Luis — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:02:01 -0000

It might be worth noting that there is a persistent rumor in the open source community that NVidia and ATI rampantly infringe each other's patents in ways that would be obvious if the source code to their drivers were available, leading them to keep their drivers closed. Just another aspect of this, if true.

Re: Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

Luis — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:27:36 -0000

Tim: the T1 is going to be just as traffic-shaped as the home connection- it is, after all, coming from a telco. And many libraries, schools, and 'open' wireless networks are already non-neutral- almost all universities do substantial shaping and blocking of traffic, and I'd be shocked if Starbucks doesn't.

But even if I grant that all those will be neutral and open for innovation... yoiks. That's just such a depressing vision for the network. Go read up on Metcalfe's Law- a network that excludes everyone at home at the mercy of a telco would be much less valuable, and much harder to innovate in. Do you really want the telcos to be able to even threaten to veto the next Skype, or the next AIM, or whatever next innovation it is that is not dead-standard http-over-port-80 and needs network effects to take off? Switching from a default admit to a default deny policy (which is what the cell networks have and what the telcos undoubtedly want), even if it is for only 1/2 the network, would most certainly kill the fount of innovation we've seen the past 10 years.

Re: Why Not Regulation

Luis — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:39:09 -0000

This is a great explanation of why regulation, in general, is quite bad, Jim; I'll be certain to point people to it in the future.

But... (you knew that was coming ;) you write this as if in this particular case this is not already a heavily regulated and deeply flawed competitive space. Were network access a wonderful competitive utopia, of course this would be a terrible idea. But the lobbyists already control competition in this space. Special interests already threaten internet content (*cough*COPA*cough*).

I guess in the end I find it very hard to believe that one additional layer of regulation would make the problem of government control significantly worse than it already is. I weigh that against a particularly onerous threat that I find quite plausible- a default-deny, cell-phone like network instead of a default-accept, current-gen internet network- and in this particular case I have to come down on the side of regulation.

(And to follow up on the last post in the other thread, Jim, I've been at Columbia for... a week and a half. :) So, no, I haven't taken admin law, though I also have a polisci degree, so I know at least a little bit about how deeply fucked our system is. My plan is to focus in corporate and IP law so as to do more bottom-up innovation (i.e., start a company), so I'm not sure if an admin law course will fit in, but I'll definitely keep it in mind- thanks for the suggestion.)

(Also, your search is slightly busted- I ran a search and got results... for draftnewt.org :)

Re: Why Not Regulation

Luis — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:11:56 -0000

More on the rest later, but literally, I searched for something (don't remember what) using the search bar on the main TLF page, and the results page was titled 'draftnewt.org' :) Works today, though. (I guess pjdoland.com co-hosts draftnewt as well as you guys and some wires got crossed somewhere?)

Re: Competition In Broadband Is Thriving

Luis — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 10:25:28 -0000

Mike: using the FCC's logic, you can probably claim that 60% of all Americans have access to rolls royces- I mean, hey, if there is one in your zip code somewhere, you've got access!

Re: Welcome Hance Haney!

Luis — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 17:33:24 -0000

The phrase 'right-thinking people' gives me chills, and it should to anyone with a decent grasp of history. Maybe the less loaded formulation is 'people who dislike those who advance political causes by actively distorting the truth.' Or to be more straightfoward, 'people who don't like liars.'

Mr. Hayne may be a fine thinker, but anyone who willingly associates themselves with DI, and hence with DI's strategy of willful manipulation of facts in pursuit of political goals, starts off with several black marks in my book. (His second post, and the misrepresentations that Mike pointed out in it/a>, doesn't give me much faith that he's going to somehow change my mind about DI or their intellectually dishonest tactics.)

Re: Piracy Theater

Luis — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:21:43 -0000

Tim: love the coinage of Piracy Theater.

Re: Welcome Hance Haney!

Luis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:17:18 -0000

Jim: Whatever else I think of Cato (and I'm not a huge fan) Cato seems to believe that if it argues from a position of logic and truth, their arguments will win out eventually. DI (at least their ID group) seems to believe that logic and truth are insufficient- that they must grotesquely abuse facts or even make them up in order to win. That to me seems like a fundamental difference between the two organizations. One I can respect even when I disagree with it, the other I cannot. I have typically held TLF to the same standard I believe applies to Cato; I'd hate to have to revise my opinion.

Re: Welcome Hance Haney!

Luis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:20:56 -0000

I might add that while I tar with a very broad brush here, I find the threat posed to civilized political discussion by those who would abuse fact so gratuitously to be incredibly pernicious. Those of us who feel strongly that political and policy arguments should be settled based on facts and logic should fight very hard to exclude those who believe that distortion and lies are legitimate tools of political debate. (This applies across the political spectrum, of course.)

Re: Note to TLF Readers: This Blog Has Nothing to Do With the Intelligent Design Debate

Luis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:01:48 -0000

Read the argument, Mike. Richard is not bemoaning the loss of pluralism. He's bemoaning the loss of rational inquiry as the basis for political and policy discussion- as he says, the core of post-Enlightenment Western values. I realize it suits your purposes to conflate those two radically different arguments, but that deliberate mis-construance of your opponent's position to suit your is exactly what Richard is talking about and exactly what bothers most of the commenters in the previous thread about DI.

Re: Cato Unbound - Migrating Toward National ID?

Luis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:45:14 -0000

A quick question for the serious libertarian scholars on the board: some of America's traditional anti-government fears (and their relevant expressions in the Bill of Rights) can be clearly traced back to specific colonial/revolutionary experiences, and the consensus forged as a result. So two things:

(1) Has anyone given serious thought to what conditions would be required in order to forge consensus on new government-limiting Constitutional protections? I'm really hoping we don't need to live through 1984 + a new Revolution before we realize, for example, that abuses of a national ID database would be nearly inevitable and terrible. What conditions short of Revolution would forge the necessary consensus to make this a Constitutional-level mandate?

(2) If there were a serious push for new Constitutional protections and limitations on government, has anyone of a libertarian leaning given serious thought to what 'Bill of Rights, Pt. 2' should contain? What it might contain that would be broadly politically palatable?

Re: Note to TLF Readers: This Blog Has Nothing to Do With the Intelligent Design Debate

Luis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:37:37 -0000

And now having read Adam's post :) Adam, I don't think the problem is ID; the problem is the tactics DI has used to advance ID, and as Richard put it, the implicit attack those tactics make on core Enlightenment political and philosophical values.

To put it another way: I don't care what TLF posters (or DI) believe; I care about what methods they use to advance those beliefs. One of the reasons I like TLF is that I find that by the standards of our current political environment TLF does an admirable job of advancing its point of view without resorting to methods that I find insidious with regards to our rational democratic norms. Even when I don't agree with TLF, I come back, because I find myself edified and challenged when I come here. I have no faith that anyone who can tolerate assocation with DI's methods will uphold (generally) those same democratic Western norms of conduct or (specifically) the high quality of discourse I expect to find at TLF.

I of course welcome Mr. Haney to prove me wrong. If he actually is an honest, well-meaning discussant*, I look forward to engaging him on telecom policy, as well as persuading him how insidious DI's methods are to the common goals we all share, and how he should really look for work elsewhere :)

* as I said earlier, I don't find his second post persuasive on that count.

Re: Cato Unbound - Migrating Toward National ID?

Luis — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:35:55 -0000

Jim: my sense is that Bill of Rights I requires a very loose construction to cover some of the things that really must be addressed, and that loose construction is both (1) problematic in and of itself and (2) a poor foundation to build your government restraints on (as the pro-choice camp has been discovering for forty years.)

The alternative is to strictly construe the interstate commerce clause in Constitution I so as to restrict the reach of the Federal government, but then (1) the states would almost certainly overreach themselves, so the problem would not really be solved, and (2) lots of parts of the modern state fall apart. Because of (2), we're never going to see strict construction of the interstate clause unless other Constitutional provisions are added to explicitly allow some of those modern functions.

Re: Cato Unbound - Migrating Toward National ID?

Luis — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:44:18 -0000

(Tangentially, I do think that the best way to make the costs and benefits of immigration clear to the whole country is to have a relatively foolproof and strictly enforced means of denying work to illegals. The current debate, where no one really knows how many illegals are in the country, anti-immigration forces pretend that our economy would get along just fine without the illegals, and pro-immigration forces tend to pretend that no 'American' jobs are lost to illegals, is sadly distanced from actual reality. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to do this without the mentioned national ID card.)

Re: Net neutrality regulation wouldn’t solve this problem

Luis — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 19:56:17 -0000

Drivers: 'There is too much highway traffic. Getting to work is slow.'
TLF: 'The clear answer is to let the highway authority choose when you leave for the office.'

Or, you know, they could be encouraged to build more highway :)

Re: Heads or Tails

Luis — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:20:11 -0000

Tim: I'm fairly sure that if I registered 'koswithoutadvertising.com' and republished all of Kos's stuff, he might get a little miffed- probably less miffed than madonna might be at 'madonnawithoutfifteendollars.com', but still miffed. Bloggers may start from a generally more lenient copyright perspective, but once revenue gets involved, they are still likely to get itchy if the revenue is threatened. And quite a few blogs these days are popping up with very traditional 'all rights reserved, no republication without request' copyright notices from day one- even when no revenue is involved.

Greg: sounds like a fascinating paper, thanks for the link.

Re: Apple and Disney

Luis — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:04:00 -0000

Presumably you can watch on the computer itself, no?

Re: Democracy Shouldn’t Require a Ph.D.

Luis — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:40:39 -0000

The push for electronic voting isn't going away, unfortunately- perceived efficiencies and the (very real) problem of paper ballot stuffing will make it inevitable. Might as well push for it to be open source- I think Red Hat ought to take the project on.

Re: More on the Non-Hacking Non-Scandal

Luis — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:42:31 -0000

Tim: for fun, you could try 'not for distribution site:ca.gov' on google :)

Re: Guess the State and Win a Subsidy: Senate Plays Geography Games in Telecom Bill

Luis — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:46:52 -0000

Wow. Spectacular.

Re: Democracy Shouldn’t Require a Ph.D.

Luis — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:48:21 -0000

Brian: banks and Vegas. Hire a bunch of slot machine guys and they could do this in their spare time :)

Re: Vote for Red Hat!

Luis — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 18:39:19 -0000

Tim: I think you're discounting how corruptible the current system is, and focusing only on what the current generation of e-voting machines do or don't do, security-wise. Well done e-voting (particularly including the printing of a reliable paper trail) could be much more reliable than the current mishmash of paper technologies, which as any resident of Florida, Ohio, or Chicago will tell you is deeply insecure already.

Re: Vote for Red Hat!

Luis — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:59:42 -0000

Enigma: go read Felten's repeated writings on this subject. As he mentioned virtually every time he writes about e-voting, if every e-vote machine has an associated printer, which allows voters to validate their vote, you *can* do recounts the old-fashioned way. It is simple, it is straightforward, and it is reliable.

Re: Played You for Sure

Luis — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 15:03:55 -0000

It strikes me, Tim, that Zune's 'three plays, three days' sharing must have been approved by the RIAA- it is clearly a looser standard for sharing than what the RIAA has permitted Apple to do. So I'd guess that Apple is losing some sleep over this- not the Zune per se, but over the indications that the RIAA is willing to grant non-iTunes vendors greater latitude in an effort to keep Apple in check.

Re: Vote for Red Hat!

Luis — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 08:07:00 -0000

Two databases (one on the computer, one on paper) are better than one (either paper or digital)- more difficult to attack and manipulate. Pretty much end of story there.

Tangentially, I'm really shocked at how foolproof you guys seem to think that paper ballots are.

Re: How Does Government Lose So Many Laptops?

Luis — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:37:26 -0000

Presumably because everyone loses laptops, and the government are the only people who talk about it in public. I've never seen any research on the issue, but I know that we lost them regularly at some of my old places of employment (I certainly lost one myself with fairly confidential company information on it), and I once attended an internet law conference at Harvard where Charlie Nesson practically caused a heart attack by asking corporate counsel who were present what would happen if their CEO's laptop were lost. I got the sense it was not merely hypothetical for some people.

Re: Spontaneous Order Is Counter-Intuitive

Luis — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:02:27 -0000

Tim: eeeenteresting. Darwin definitely should have come to mind; I admit I've never read any Hayek. (Anyone care to recommend a good intro to Hayek and/or Hayekian thought as it is currently recieved?) You're right, of course, and your analysis is dead on.

I might note that perhaps this is coming more to the fore at the moment because evolution and economies work at very large scales that not only are difficult to grasp, but which have relatively low impact on individual decision making. I have faith that evolution works, but it really doesn't matter, because no matter what I think about evolution, it isn't going to change my day-to-day decision making. In contrast, whether I have faith in the reliability of wikipedia does change my day-to-day behaviors. So that makes coming to grips with these kinds of systems more relevant than they had been in the past.

Re: Spontaneous Order Is Counter-Intuitive

Luis — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:21:37 -0000

Thanks for the pointer, Tim. I'll add Constitution of Liberty to the pile of 'things to read when I have spare time'. I tell myself the comforting lie that 'spare time' may occur before 2010.

Re: Skype as a Bandwidth Hog?

Luis — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:56:01 -0000

I think the key claim (via Paul Kedrosky) is that Skype users within the university are giving away university bandwidth to outsiders, which is against the university's Terms of Service.

But- and this is an honest, serious question- why is this troubling? Isn't this kind of monitoring and traffic shaping exactly the kind of thing that poo-pooers of net neutrality say is perfectly legitimate for pipe-owners to do?

Re: Skype as a Bandwidth Hog?

Luis — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:01:03 -0000

Or to put the question as a hypo: if, say, AT&T; had banned Skype on their network, the net neutrality crowd would be up in arms, and this blog would (I presume) support fully AT&T;'s right to do it. So why is this variant of the hypo bothersome to you, Tim?

Re: Skype as a Bandwidth Hog?

Luis — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:23:28 -0000

Fair. You do realize that the pressure to economize on scarce-ish bandwidth will lead to a lot of stupid decisions, right? :)

Re: Lost Laptop Legislation Introduced

Luis — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:47:18 -0000

As I asked the first time you discussed this, Adam, why the focus on government? Private industry has lost plenty of laptops full of sensitive private information of citizens, like credit reports and social security numbers, and puts that kind of data on laptops all the time. [I know of at least one circumstance where an excel file with customer data of every customer the company had was put on the public, searchable internet- forget a laptop.]

I agree strongly with you that this is a problem, but I wonder if your anti-government point of view isn't giving you blinders as to the nature of the problem and solutions. I'd rephrase 'fire any government employee who loses private data on a laptop' as 'imprison anyone who loses private data on a laptop', perhaps with some tie between length of sentence and number of citizens impacted. Clearly the current fines and prospective tort losses are not sufficient disincentive.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » The Limewire Strikes Back

Luis — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:09:00 -0000

More relevantly to the google example, why should the RIAA get to dictate an expensive, high-hardware cost business model when a low-cost business model is available?

Does anyone have a decent description of how LimeWire works? I'm curious (with regards to the infringement question) and have never used it.

It'll be very interesting when, say, Facebook incorporates IM and allows you to search/share files within your network of friends- that is probably the most legitimate argument for a distributed search/share function I can think of.

Re: Lost Laptop Legislation Introduced

Luis — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:15:53 -0000

Information collected by a business, though, is given up voluntarily.

Hahahahhaa. I want to live on your planet, where you opted into credit reports, and you can live without regularly giving up your social security number, credit card number, phone number, etc. It sounds pretty nice. Imaginary (or perhaps you are neighbors with the Unabomber) but nice.

Re: Skype as a Bandwidth Hog?

Luis — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:54:33 -0000

The post office regulates the size and weight of packages without regulating the content of packages*; we don't consider the regulations on size and weight to be speech burdens. Similarly, I'd suggest that it should be possible (though I admit I haven't thought the details through in great detail) to construct common carrier rules which allow bandwidth providers to moderate the volume of bandwidth used without passing judgment on the legality of the programs using the bandwidth or the speech contained in the bandwidth.

* there are of course exceptions to this, but they don't really impact the analogy.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » The Limewire Strikes Back

Luis — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:56:27 -0000

Limewire and Bittorrent are pretty fundamentally different; Limewire is a service and a protocol, while Bittorrent is just a protocol. (Unless I'm missing something.)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Texas-Size Sophistry

Luis — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 07:53:44 -0000

Tim: you know you've made the big time when the people you deconstruct resort to ad hominem attacks before they actually attack your logic. Congrats!

Re: David Friedman on the Gift Economy

Luis — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 21:16:12 -0000

Just blogged a bit about this; admittedly not my finest writing- my brain is a bit fried.

The most relevant comment in there to this discussion, Jim, is that the two economies- money and reputation- aren't on par. Sure, I can indirectly turn my blog into money, but that is indirect. If I blog today, does that help feed me tonight? Almost definitely not. That means that blogging is unstable and subject to vagaries that the other economy is not. Is that a killer? No, especially not for people who have other reasons to feel secure financially. (Professors, students, etc.) But it does on the whole mean that more people are likely to see it as an occupation on the same level as whatever gives them their cash.

Re: The Reluctant Libertarian

Luis — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 23:13:01 -0000

Tim: while I do agree that Lessig is fairly lefty, his upbraiding of Declan was not for being a libertarian per se, but for believing in the delusion that the net was ungoverned/ungovernable. The whole point of Code, after all, is that even if governments stay out of the space, architecture still governs. Hell, Lessig's central thesis on net neutrality is essentially libertarian, if you look at it the right way- in his mind the telcos would like to govern the nature of traffic on the net, and he opposes any governance on internet traffic.

[And Tim, I'm not running away from your voting posts, I'm just swamped and don't have time to do Serious Thinking right now, nor respond to same. Sorry about that.]

Re: Verizon’s Hoewing: Why Rome Isn’t Burning over Broadband

Luis — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:22:07 -0000

That post would be a lot more convincing with actual 'research' or 'data' from 'an organization that appeared to be something other than a lobbying group'.

Re: Verizon’s Hoewing: Why Rome Isn’t Burning over Broadband

Luis — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:23:14 -0000

Hell, even the data from the lobbying group is pretty piss poor. But I expect that from a lobbying group.

Re: Microsoft’s New Security Problem: McAfee

Luis — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:05:37 -0000

I'm not familiar with the substance of McAfee's complaint (since you don't give any ;) but it strikes me that any security professional, not to mention anyone who claims to believe in markets, should agree that more competition in the security tools space will make us more secure; likewise, less competition (or high barriers to competition) will make us less secure. I'm not familiar with the substance of McAfee's complaint, but if Vista truly locks out competition (and not merely competes by providing a better, cheaper product) then yes, this will of course make us less secure.

Re: Civil Disobedience in France

Luis — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:06:58 -0000

Note that I believe, Tim, that this is a criminal offense, not a civil one, so the choice of whether to prosecute or not is not up to Big Content in this particular case.

Re: Alas, a Sleazy Decision

Luis — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 09:27:11 -0000

We would all condemn a professor who gave his best reference to the student who gave him the biggest check.

Serious, honest question: from a free-market perspective, why is this problematic? I'm having a hard time justifying my revulsion to this in any terms that come close to sounding rational, though intuitively I strongly agree with the criticism.

Re: Hazlett on Google and The Myth of An Open Net

Luis — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:08:25 -0000

I think you and the author are missing the point, James. AOL, Google, and YouTube are endpoints; every net-neutrality proponent would favor their right to do as they please, because you can always choose another endpoint. What you can't choose are your pipes*, and that's what net neutrality advocates are worried about. So hey, more power to competition and collaboration on the endpoints. Just let me choose between them neutrally.

*please spare me the BS about the existence of meaningful choice in the consumer broadband market, thanks. :)

Re: Hazlett on Google and The Myth of An Open Net

Luis — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:07:17 -0000

If you're going to talk about it in net neutrality terms, then they are just a website/content provider, not an ISP. Sure, they favored a specific advertiser for content they produced and delivered, but they didn't block or slow down the delivery of the content of others. It is true that they could have, but to the best of my knowledge, and the article does not allege otherwise, they did not manipulate their control of the pipes to favor their advertisers.

Tangentially, I don't see what google buying Youtube has anything to do with network neutrality; the linked article just seems to assert a link without actually explaining why, and YouTube seems to do just fine without traffic shaping, unlike those who argue that the sky is falling and we'll never get streaming audio and video without traffic shaping.

Re: Faulhaber and Farber on Mesh Networks

Luis — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:10:01 -0000

PLN: I believe the word you're looking for is kleptocracy.

Re: Hazlett on Google and The Myth of An Open Net

Luis — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 11:44:12 -0000

Right. Better put than me, as usual ;)

I might additionally note that one of the things that probably kept AOL (the ISP) honest was that it had legitimate competition- since the telcos could not block ISPs from providing modem-based dialup services, a system which discriminated based on the source of content would have been suicidal. There is no equivalent competition in the broadband space.

Re: Norwegian ISP Discriminates, Backs Down after Customer Outcry

Luis — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:28:09 -0000

Isn't it plausible that the ISP backed down in part because in Norway, there is a very credible threat to regulate that isn't credible here?

Re: YouTube and Collective Licensing

Luis — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:47:06 -0000

Charles:
(1) traditionally music licensing has not been sensitive to that distinction; the labels have sued over sampling practically since the idea was invented.
(2) Only google knows for sure, but the vast majority of content that I've seen on youtube has not been altered in any way- only redistributed. But I may be looking at a skewed sample- mostly sports content.

Re: Blogs in the Balance?

Luis — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:46:05 -0000

Fairly simple, no? As just one way, blogs that use our affiliated advertising network get priority routing; others do not. Or blogs who use their advertising revenue to pay for priority routing get priority routing; otherwise no. Or blogs who are on Kos's blogroll (or instapundit's) get priority routing, and others do not.

All of these would be fairly simple to implement; all would empower a specific agenda.

[Note that in practice, as I believe Ed Felten has pointed out, what this would mean is slowing down the 'others' instead of speeding up the privileged sites. But basically the same difference.]

Re: Software Patent of the Week: IBM, Patent Troll

Luis — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:38:29 -0000

Tim: thanks for the link ;) To be completely fair to IBM, I think it is useful to link to hrm... well, someone, who I now can't find (I thought it was Mike Dolan) who pointed out that the dates on these patents are quite old, which makes them a little less obvious. This raises an interesting question for me- if 50% of the people with a web browser would have found these obvious, but at the time they were filed, only 25 people had a web browser, is it still obvious? I'm really not sure, and I think it bears some contemplation, more than either of us have given in our primary posts.

[Tangentially, if anyone wants to write a greasemonkey plugin that just removes Noel's comments, I'd be perfectly OK with that.]

Re: Alcohol Liberation Front 2

Luis — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:39:41 -0000

You have all gone Washington on us. What poor form for libertarians. You need to do one of these in the true home of the economic bachannalia- NYC.

Re: Software Patent of the Week: IBM, Patent Troll

Luis — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:31:15 -0000

I think the question is less the obviousness of the method (which I agree is obvious given the goal), and probably more the obviousness of the goal- would it have been obvious that ordering items over an electronic network was at all interesting in 1990? I mean, that's what phones were for, right? Why would you do that over a slow crappy modem through a text-heavy UI?

Re: Lost Laptop Follies, Part 3

Luis — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 14:30:50 -0000

So Adam, where is the post when private industry loses ten times that many names and socials? I'm not trying to minimize the problem when government does this, but your framing makes it sound as if this is merely a government problem- which is manifestly untrue, and has policy implications.

Re: Arguing with the Inevitable

Luis — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 10:50:04 -0000

I hate it when Apple's propaganda convinces people that they are 'increasingly open'. Apple hates openness; perhaps even more so than Microsoft does. They encrypt their binaries so you can't study them; their iPod/iTunes combo is the most restricted hardware/software combo in decades; you can't choose what hardware to run OSX on; they wrote most of a new office suite without using open standards for documents; they chose BSD over Linux for a kernel because they could have more control; I could go on and on. They're certainly using more open technology, but that's not the same as being open.

Fascism where the trains run on time is still fascism- this blog of all folks should know that.

Re: Arguing with the Inevitable

Luis — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:41:28 -0000

their web browser is an open source project

Because otherwise they would have had to start from scratch. Had there been a BSD-licensed browser they could have forked, like their kernel, they would have. (If they'd wanted to actually work with a community, instead of dominate one, they would have worked with Mozilla instead of KHTML.)

From what I've read, they've wholeheartedly adopted GCC.

Only after the FSF nearly took them to court over their fork of it. (Well, it was NeXT who they nearly took to court, but same difference.)

But maybe that's the point: even a guy as reflexively anti-openness as Steve Jobs is being forced by economic necessity in the direction of increasing engagement and integration with the open source community.

Now that is a fair point :) I'm troubled, though, when open is chosen because of the pseudo-network-effects of 'free' and the GPL- it smells coercive, which is not the best way to build a robust and healthy ecosystem.

Re: Arguing with the Inevitable

Luis — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:17:36 -0000

Are genuine network effects and market coercion mutually exclusive?

No, of course not; I meant merely that 'free' has sticky, anti-competitive effects that are similar to the anti-competitive effects of broad market penetration (i.e., real network effects).

Re: Plays for Sure, Some Exceptions Apply

Luis — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:19:43 -0000

In the long and illustrious history of MS screwing their partners, this one probably has to take the cake, if only for the baldness of the screwing.

Re: Plays for Sure, Some Exceptions Apply

Luis — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:12:14 -0000

Did Microsoft consider ... how it could catch up with other companies.

Going by their advertising, it seems like they honestly believe that their sharing stuff is cool enough that kids will pick it up. This isn't completely unreasonable; the iPod has always been fundamentally uninnovative on the functionality front, gaining market share by integrating existing functionality really, really well. It isn't surprising that they haven't innovated; like in the early 80s with the Mac, their control over the hardware and lockdown of competition means that they face reduced competitive pressures and hence have less incentive to innovate.

Unlike the 80s, though, Apple has control over people's personal data (music purchases) now, which may allow them to beat MS this time around, as MS uses Office data lockin to beat Apple and Linux like a drum. In fact, DRM will be really critical for both sides. do current iPod owners have enough iTMS-bought music to prevent them from switching over? If the reports that the average iPod owner has bought only 30 songs from iTMS are true, and the Zune sharing feature isn't too crippled by DRM, then we might see a lot of switching; if the average number of iTMS purchases has grown over the past couple years, or if the sharing feature's DRM cripples the sharing so much as to make it uninteresting, then Zune will be DOA.

Re: Plays for Sure, Some Exceptions Apply

Luis — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:23:38 -0000

Interesting tech cruch article on MS's media plans today, by the way. I'd missed the Xbox tie-in- that may help lure people across from iPod/iTunes more quickly/easily than I'd assumed.

Re: IP Chairman Boucher?

Luis — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 13:35:40 -0000

Nice to dream about, but I can't imagine Hollywood allowing it- they'll push Berman hard to sign up, no?

Re: Pogue on Zune

Luis — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 09:06:04 -0000

Hope Walt Mossberg reams it too.

Re: Spam Wars: A New Hope

Luis — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 09:08:34 -0000

FWIW, I'm regularly getting told that my comments are being held for moderation as a 'first time poster'. Now it would be nice if I hadn't spent so much time posting here, but... :)

Re: Real Problems for REAL ID in NH

Luis — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:57:29 -0000

No, no, the Republicans are the party of National Security, aka Big Brother. Federalism is for wimps, minority parties, and terrorists. Didn't you get the memo, Tim?

Luis (still wondering when Arnie, McCain, Giuliani and some of the Blue Dogs will break away and form a sane centrist party, funded by Bloomberg)

Re: Novell and MS–the market brings a new beginning

Luis — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:33:40 -0000

It isn't competition if you have to grovel at the other guy's feet to have permission to participate in their market. Most of the time we call that having a lapdog, not a competitor.

Re: Novell and MS–the market brings a new beginning

Luis — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:10:51 -0000

Microsoft's payment to Novell represents about one day's worth of profits for MS; Novell's payment to MS was more than Novell has made in profit in the past year. This isn't competition.

Re: Why I Don’t Say “Intellectual Property” (and You Shouldn’t Either)

Luis — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 20:04:20 -0000

C'mon, Tim, take the final step- call it a limited, government-granted monopoly. You know you want to. ;)

Re: Linux, Commercialism, and Community Norms

Luis — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 20:12:37 -0000

What I meant was simply that within the community, success and prestige are not measured in monetary terms.
Interestingly, Tim, in many open source communities one of the highest honors you can get is to be offered a position at a commercial vendor. I'm not sure that this honor is caused by the monetary terms employment implies, but it is strongly correlated. How this co-exists with other forms of motivation is something I've written about a bit, and which I hope more serious sociologist/psychologist/organization studies folks research more on in the future.

Re: Linux, Commercialism, and Community Norms

Luis — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 01:07:51 -0000

(At a commercial vendor who uses the community's code, to be specific.)

Re: New DMCA exemptions (plus iPhone rumors)

Luis — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 07:57:28 -0000

Additionally, Lewis, I believe the exemption is only for people who would use software to unlock the phones- actually creating tools to unlock the phones is still prohibited under the reverse engineering clause.

That said, I'm very excited about the iPhone rumor- I have a strict no-Apple rule, but might break it if that means I can give an even bigger finger to the cell companies.

Re: Is Venezuela Ahead of Us on E-Voting?

Luis — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:07:34 -0000

It is also worth noting that the same corrupt, no checks-and-balances Venezuelan government owns the voting machine company (which is now selling their wares in the US!). If that isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.

Re: More Governments Choosing ODF

Luis — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:10:35 -0000

I have no idea what other governments are doing, but what is happening in Massachusetts is that the standard is 'we must store our data in open formats', and then gives a definition of what an open format is, which ODF (and I believe PDF) meet, and which Microsoft's format (no surprise) doesn't. MS could fix this by meeting the customer's legitimate requirements, but instead has chosen to lobby against them altogether, since actually opening the file format would (gasp) allow people to compete on a fair footing with Office.

Re: Are Cell Phone Carriers Stuck With Google Maps?

Luis — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:39:55 -0000

The problem is not whether Google can protect itself once it is established (obviously it has many means to do that, including buying off Verizon), but whether the next Google/YouTube/etc. can get a foothold without paying off the incumbents. If this rumor is a sign of anything (I'm not sure that it is), I'd say it is not a healthy one- if the mobile providers are stupid enough (arrogant enough?) to take on a juggernaut Google, then obviously they'll feel perfectly comfortable trying to strangle a less established competitor in the crib.

Re: CDT & PFF File Joint Amicus Briefs in Federal Indecency Cases

Luis — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:56:19 -0000

Well done, Adam. Congrats and good luck with the rest of the case.

Re: Is Venezuela Ahead of Us on E-Voting?

Luis — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 08:01:28 -0000

A little more on the firm that provides Venezuela's machines. Being investigated for bribery and tax fraud.

Re: The Journal Fails to Do Its Homework

Luis — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 11:35:08 -0000

Say it with me: 'limited, government-granted monopoly'.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Conservative Justices for Patent Reform

Luis — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 08:56:16 -0000

garbage bag pumpkin case. Basic idea of the patent was an orange garbage bag that, when filled with leaves or whatever, would look like a jack-o-lantern. Really not clear how obvious or not it is; tends to be used in patent textbooks to demonstrate that obviousness isn't what it used to be.

Re: Declaration of Independence for Virtual Worlds?

Luis — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:56:10 -0000

Why not use Barlow's? It still seems pretty appropriate; perhaps more so for something like SL than it ever was for email and the web.

Re: Software Patent of the Week: Patents as if Abstraction Mattered

Luis — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:52:33 -0000

In the last quarter, Forgent had $9.1M in revenues, $8.1M of which was IP licensing. In the previous quarter, $4.4M in revenues, $3.5M of which was IP licensing. So, yeah, they are in the patent business, no matter what their homepage says about being in the software business.

Re: eBay for Black Hats?

Luis — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:39:42 -0000

I've heard of such things for earlier versions of Windows before, including some reputable/documented stories of auctions of botnets. Their existence shouldn't be too surprising- get that zero day exploit, and you can get yourself a very profitable botnet. Given the reputed cash flow for some of the spam kings, $50K doesn't sound implausible. And of course they are already in deep legal trouble if caught, so an additional charge wouldn't scare them very much.

The only part of this that sounds implausible is that it is for Vista- there is no commercial value in hacking into undeployed systems. But maybe they'll just stockpile it.

Re: eBay for Black Hats?

Luis — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:08:05 -0000

Who says auction system? There are ways of doing auctions without software, you know :) Anonymized chat room (which they are already very good at doing anonymously/untraceably, to control the botnets) + chatters saying 'I'll bid X' 'Do I hear X+1?' 'X+1!' You know, the old fashioned way :)

Re: Uploading vs. Downloading - A Future Issue for Net Neutrality?

Luis — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 12:02:28 -0000

The bottom line is that the typical human doesn't have the skills or the inclination to manage a web server in his home

You're arguing that because there are no chickens, no one needs eggs.

That is because there is no market for home servers, so no one is writing servers that are usable for home users.

And why is there no market for home servers? There are many reasons, but certainly lack of reliable addressing and crappy upstream bandwidth is a big part of the reason why.

So don't use 'no one runs servers at home' as an argument against improving the to-the-home network.

Re: HD-DVD Copy Protection Cracked

Luis — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 21:09:57 -0000

Without a published key (or at least a publicly described method of getting a key) this is less a crack and more a poor-man's player- not a bad thing to have, but not a crack in and of itself. That said, the comments in the original discussion thread suggest that there is a known but unpublished cracking method for the keys- which again suggests that this DRM method, like all others, is again preventing legal fair uses while not stopping criminals.

Re: HD-DVD Copy Protection Cracked

Luis — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 11:01:54 -0000

Good followup post here- suggests that there are still a lot of open questions about the crack that have to be answered before we really understand the ramifications.

Re: HD-DVD Copy Protection Cracked

Luis — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:15:43 -0000

Yes, DRM was not effective in stopping criminals here. Sounds like time for the DMCA to step in.
This makes it sound like the DMCA is the only tool available to attack large-scale criminally motivated piracy, which is of course not true. The existence of an underground key source implies large-scale, profitable copyright violation, which would be criminal copyright violation, whether or not DRM and the DMCA were involved.

Additionally, the choice of law isn't really relevant here- whether or not the law used to punish criminals is the DMCA or 'just' traditional copyright law, the DRM has punished law abiding citizens (who can't do things like make backup copies of their movie collections) while failing to prevent the substantive economic damage caused by organized copying rings.

Re: iPatents?

Luis — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:35:43 -0000

To be fair, Tim, until Apple v. Microsoft, the industry mostly assumed that copyright was sufficient to protect investment. So it isn't like the industry went from no protection to patent protection- it went from (assumed) copyright protection to patent protection.

That said, it is clear that while Apple thought they were protected legally, they sat on their asses and failed to improve their product. It was only after their government-granted monopoly expired that competition forced them to became the creative dynamo they are today. The most creative companies (see Apple, Nintendo in particular) are those that think that if they don't stay aggressively, constantly creative, they'll go under. When you get a monopoly (government-granted, or network-effects granted (MS, or apple in the ipod case- ipod hasn't really innovated in years) you get lazy and stop delivering superior benefits to consumers.

Re: I Need This to be a Tattoo

Luis — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:50:28 -0000

I need to get it tatooed on my forehead. Thanks for the pointer, Solveig.

Re: Telcos are Not Suicidal

Luis — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:03:43 -0000

What is scary is not what they'd do to entrenched sources of information like blogs but what happens to the Next Youtube or Next BitTorrent or next Jabber- something that most people don't yet know that they love (and hence won't protest when it goes AWOL), but which catches the attention of the telcos because they are bandwidth hungry or run on non-standard ports and protocols. They'd happily put an innovation tax on new services that way, and the telcos are about the last people I want deciding what new services get implemented.

Re: Telcos are Not Suicidal

Luis — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 10:50:06 -0000

Would they block everything except for an approved list of standard applications?

Why not? That is what they do on the cell network, and what many businesses do on their internal networks.

And how would the billing work?

Same way first-class works- airlines don't find customers and ask 'would you like to be in first class?' You go to them and say 'I'd like to pay for first class tickets- how much are they?'

What happens when they "accidentally" block an application that's more popular than they expect, or that happens to be used by someone influential?

Nothing, just like when it happens on the cell network. Customers bitch and moan, and have no meaningful alternative service provider, and so nothing happens. (We should probably drop this one, though, since we already know we disagree on whether or not there is meaningful competition in the data space.)

[I]f AT&T; started blocking everything it didn't recognize, they'd immediately get a serious evasion problem.

There is a big DRM evasion problem too, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to apply DRM, nor has it helped businesses to innovate in the space (re: your 'no innovation in DVD storage' post.) If AT&T; blocked bittorrent, people would certainly try to get around the blocks, and some might even succeed, but you can bet bittorrent.com would never have gotten a dime of VC. That is damaging to innovation- tons of non-commercial innovation would go into working around the new restrictions, instead of actual constructive work, and no commercial innovation would occur.

You can't chop off a long tail without dramatically reducing the value of the service

Even in a long tail situation, the vast bulk of the value is still in the head- voice in the cell network; email/nytimes.com/espn.com in the data network. As long as that head is untouched, long-tail services (by their nature splintered and with small constituencies) don't have enough of a voice to actually protest and effect change. Again, bittorrent- if AT&T; sniffs and blocks that when it has its first serious public demo (http://www.ntk.net/2002/07/26/ ), who will protest it? AT&T; really has this level of granularity in their traffic monitoring; it is quite impressive. They've implemented it in the name of network security, but it could trivially be used to sniff and slow new protocols/services. The readership of ntk will never be an effective protest group.

it would be prohibitively expensive to individually inspect, bill, and filter each of the millions of different activities people are using their Internet access for

Again, the cell network already does a rough form of this (try putting Skype on your phone), and AT&T; already inspects every single packet that crosses their IP network- you seem to underestimate how much of the infrastructure is already in place, and overestimate how fine-grained it would need to be to be effective from AT&T;'s POV.

Re: Telcos are Not Suicidal

Luis — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 11:14:35 -0000

(I should note that I agree with Prof. Felten that crafting non-sucky net neutrality legislation would be difficult-to-impossible, but pretending that there is no potential problem, and hence removing the threat of legislation- the biggest factor in keeping the telcos honest- altogether, is insane.)

Re: DRM on 9/11 Commission Report

Luis — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:32:38 -0000

Of course, no Linux pdf readers (except the official Acrobat reader) actually implements this protection. This is an odd DMCA edge case- the DMCA only prohibits circumventing access controls, which are technically distinct in this case from the copy controls. For example, all the linux pdf readers implement access to this document- perfectly legal- and then are too lazy/incompetent/(ethical?) to prevent the copying. I'm sure, of course, that no court would interpret 'access' strictly here, so all the Linux pdf viewers would be found to be in violation of the DMCA here, but it is definitely not as clear-cut as, say, all Linux DVD players.

Odd.

[Sadly, google appears to have closed the loophole where they allowed one to 'view as HTML' copy-protected pdfs. Oops.]

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Wireless Oligopoly?

Luis — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 17:09:53 -0000

the average consumer has between 5 and 8 choices for wireless service.

The existence of 5-8 wireless providers in the country does not mean that the average consumer has 5-8 wireless providers to choose from, any more than the existence of 5-8 rolls royces in a given county means that everyone has 5-8 rolls royces, or that 5-8 good restaurants in a city means that everyone has access to healthy food. (You've made this same mistake in defending the landline oligopoly, by the way, arguing that since a large number of counties are served by more than one broadband provider, a large number of people in those counties are served by more than one broadband provider. Again, fallacy.)

To put it another way, both I and my parents are blessed to live in wealthy, high-density neighborhoods (which one would presume would be best served by wireless). And yet all three of us have at least one major carrier that I'm aware of that doesn't get usable reception in our homes (Cingular doesn't work in my apartment building; T-mobile in either of theirs). Those are of the major carriers. Alltel doesn't even pretend to serve California, New York, New England or vast swathes of Texas or Florida- to claim that they serve the 'average' consumer, when they don't even claim to serve the 1st and 3rd most populous states, and only barely serve the 2nd and 4th most populous or the entire region of New England, is disingenuous. I can only imagine that the situation for the 6th-8th is even worse. If these dense, wealthy neighborhoods can only meaningfully get coverage from three providers, I have to imagine that most of the country gets at best good coverage from three providers, and likely two.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Lost Laptop Follies, Part 4

Luis — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:07:33 -0000

Sigh. I'm going to have to say this every time you bring this up:

(1) most corporate data collection is not voluntary; people are regularly horrified when they realize how much data corporations have on them. C'mon- the US government goes to credit agencies now to find out about us, not the other way around.

(2) the reaction of most businesses to this problem has not been head-rolling, but coverups, or firing of the little guys who lost the laptop and not the CTOs who made the bad decisions about data security. It is nice to assert that such things happen more reliably than in government, but it is just an assertion.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:12:34 -0000

Wikipedia explicitly says 'I'm not trustworthy', but I think lots of people assume that the end goal of wikipedia is still trustworthiness, and that the mechanism for reaching that end goal is by a process which (among other things) eliminates blatant liars. Here, the process is demonstrably failing to eliminate a blatant liar; that reduces my faith in the process, not just the end result.

[I'm still not sure how I feel about this overall, but my gut sense is that the reaction to this by Jimbo and other wikipedia regulars suggests a very troubling relativism, and that the hegelian process behind the output is not nearly as robust as most of us would like to think.]

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:45:31 -0000

Or to put it another way: I accept that frauds and liars are a tolerable part of economic free markets, because I tend to believe that there are other mechanisms which correct the situation when there are frauds and liars. I have held the same belief about wikipedia- that there are certainly trolls, frauds, and liars, but that other processes exist which keep them in check, making the overall output of tolerable quality. This situation makes me doubt those processes work. The gap between 'there are serious, congenital liars who edit wikipedia' (duh) and 'there are serious, congenital liars who are at the highest level of wikipedia's management' feels like (is?) a big one in terms of both the process and the outcome of the process.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:42:39 -0000

So I'm supposed to believe that wikipedia editors who are apparently completely comfortable with lies made to the media are somehow going to be staunchly anti-lies when those lies are made in wikipedia? I guess I just don't really buy that.

I'm not much of a moral absolutist, but you're either OK with publicly told lies, or you're not OK with publicly told lies. It seems like Wikipedia is choosing to be OK with publicly told lies. Whether that takes the form of condoning lies, or merely condoning the liars who told them, feels like semantic quibbling to me.

[It is worth noting that as a general principle, Wikipedia doesn't just revert false edits (lies); they ban those who make repeated false edits (liars). They institutionally acknowledge that people are bad, not just facts, so your lie/liar distinction, Tim, while rhetorically and abstractly useful, isn't one that wikipedia generally seems to make.]

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:47:45 -0000

(And to be clear, after the mini-exchange above that took place while writing my last comment: I don't think much could have been/should have been done prior to the exposure of the lie by third parties. But once exposed, it seems almost self-evident that keeping him as an editor is a bad idea. The current position of wikipedia on this is hard to understand as anything other than an implicit statement that volume of editorial contribution is more important than truth-seeking.)

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:02:27 -0000

By the way, the train wreck that is his user page is an interesting read; there appear to be a fair number of wikipedians who are concerned about the issue and the impact on trust between wikipedians.

[It also points out that the lies weren't just isolated statements that existed only on his user page, Tim; it appears that he used the false information to gain leverage over others and encourage them to change or not change information in Wikipedia itself.]

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:08:26 -0000

Particularly worth reading is this comment, which details how he used his supposed status as a scholar and academic to influence content.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:57:26 -0000

Seth, I might add that you do yourself a disservice by not mentioning that many Wikipedians appear to share your view. Your blog posts make it sound as if Wikipedian is monolithically in support of Essjay remaining as an admin, which appears to not be the case at all (despite Jimbo's position.)

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:40:21 -0000

You may well be right- I'm certainly not an expert on internal wikipedia power dynamics- but I stand by the basic assertion that your writing would be more credible if you distinguished Jimbo, Wikipedia, and the mass of Wikipedians, and explained what you feel the relationship between them is, instead of treating them monolithically and giving your readers the impression that all Wikipedians were lining up behind the Dear Leader. I certainly feel like I was mislead by the tone and content of your posts yesterday, and I'm glad I went to the source and read the actual discussion taking place rather than just relying on your description of it.

[Tangentially, the link I made earlier should now point here for the quickie straw-poll version of how some wikipedians feel about the issue.]

Richard: Good to know there are still fans of central planning out there. You keep life interesting. :)

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Luis — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:31:35 -0000

Ah, yes, because large numbers of uncoordinated people have never demonstrated intelligence. Thanks for correcting me on that- I'll be sure to pass it along to Smith and Hayek next time I see them. :)

Re: Cisco’s Bob Pepper on Net Neutrality

Luis — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:35:05 -0000

And kudos to him for disclosing that his company stands to garner immense financial benefits through the sale of new, more complex hardware if bandwidth providers are allowed to discriminate.

Oh, wait, what, he didn't disclose that? I'm just shocked that someone so 'brilliant and thoughtful' would overlook that little detail.

Re: Microsoft joins the 21st Century

Luis — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:05:48 -0000

You mean 'which Apple doesn't care about doing', because it has no appreciable impact on their target users. But yes, Apple doesn't do it.

Re: The Other America

Luis — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:31:30 -0000

Would kill to see this data correlated with literacy/age/etc. Really don't think you can draw many serious conclusions from it until then.

Re: Is the Patent System Working Well?

Luis — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 19:08:11 -0000

Hey, now, be fair- it was a patent for swinging a swing sideways. What could be more original? And be careful, or the six year old who patented it might get angry.

Re: Loopholes

Luis — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:17:27 -0000

You're of course correct in your conclusion that "the GPL specifically and deliberately permits distributors to 'ship proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software.'" There is no ambiguity on this point. Distributions have been shipping proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software almost since Linux distributions were invented (early 90s), and the v3 makes no attempt to stop that, nor has the FSF ever attempted to stop it by other means.

Given that this history is now creeping up on 20 years, I think maybe you forgot option (c), 'Blafkin is deliberately misinterpreting the position taken by FSF over a nearly 20 year period in order to score cheap political points.'

Re: Vonage: We Ain’t Got No Work-arounds

Luis — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:51:38 -0000

Note that per the court's recent decision in eBay, this may work in Vonage's favor in defeating the proposed injunction in this case. If the option is 'no injunction' or 'make Vonage implement a workaround', then the court is supposed to favor making Vonage implement the work around. If the option is 'no injunction' or 'completely screw Vonage's several million users', the court is supposed to at least take that into consideration when discussing the injunction (though it may not be decisive.)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Fair Use by Permission is an Oxymoron

Luis — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:53:00 -0000

Someone needs to do this.

Ah.... much better now.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Fair Use by Permission is an Oxymoron

Luis — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:53:27 -0000

Hrm, or not. Weird.

Re: Vonage: We Ain’t Got No Work-arounds

Luis — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:41:15 -0000

Of course, this doesn't address the point that granting a broad patent on the very concept of interfacing between two types of network - especially networks as broadly used as the phone network and the Internet - is anti-competitive, anti-capitalist, and anti-consumer.
Of course- this does not help the big picture; if anything, eBay (by taking away a pain point) makes real solutions less likely. But in the small picture, it seems worth noting that this is not necessarily the bad sign for Vonage so many people seem to think it is.

Re: Balance of Patent Terror

Luis — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:21:01 -0000

No need to give credit on the idea; the analogy to mutually assured destruction is at least as old as this 2000 wired article and I'm sure much older than that.

Re: Vonage Dodges a Bullet

Luis — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:12:59 -0000

This law school thing may yet pay off ;)

By the way, if anyone can find the actual ruling, I'd love to take a look at it; I don't see it offhand and am too busy studying for exams next week to spend much time searching for it.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Tabbed Windows: Patented!

Luis — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:32:47 -0000

On the plus side, this should invalidate the later Adobe patent on basically the same thing ;)

Re: Tony Healy on GPL3 and ASP Platforms

Luis — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:27:13 -0000

Wait, MS funds Noel? Linkage on that?

Re: Jack Valenti: Hollywood’s Star in Washington

Luis — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:04:39 -0000

His job was to represent the interests of the motion picture industry, at the industry understood them.

Ah yes, he was 'just following orders.'

But less snarkily... you're of course right that the industry has the right to have their position heard, and he did a good job of that. The primary shame here is that Congress listened to his theatrics and to the industry for so long, even after they were spectacularly wrong so often. ('our ratings system will protect free speech!' 'rentals and sales of home movies will destroy our industry!' 'We have always been at war with Eastasia!')

Re: A Copyright Issue Everyone Can Agree On

Luis — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:00:33 -0000

There are a fairly large number of those, Don; this is instead a massively high profile way to get CC licenses (presumably) slapped on something.

As a bonus, it is guaranteed that the content would get remixed and reused, not just copied and distributed. Really smart move by Lessig.

Re: A Copyright Issue Everyone Can Agree On

Luis — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:00:35 -0000

And I forgot to mention that you'll never get actual precedent out of a fair use violation like this one; it'll never get to court because the case will settle or be dropped. So, again, what Lessig is doing is very smart (even if it doesn't work in this cycle.)

Re: DRM Grieving Process Continues

Luis — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:09:38 -0000

DRM and fair use are inherently incompatible, because fair use is an inherently open-ended concept.

Or to put it another way (in only mild lawyer-speak), fair use is a standard, and computers can't implement standards, they can only implement rules.

Re: Just a Number

Luis — Thu, 03 May 2007 20:11:42 -0000

Do they really, though? If that's your criteria, they'll just make the key longer. The issue really ought to turn on the deeper question of what the information signifies (control over the output of an entire industry, and control of the things owned and paid for by individuals) rather than the length or arbitrariness or number-ness of the number. But it seems neither side is going to get to the more important issues any time soon.

Re: Just a Number

Luis — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:18:56 -0000

all else being equal
But this is exactly the exception that proves the rule. Look up Harper and Row v. The Nation :)

I think this civil disobedience is in the same vein as MLK Jr's.

I think MLK is rolling in his grave at the mere thought of that.

Re: Just a Number

Luis — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:49:21 -0000

But the whole point of Harper, Tim, is that it isn't the length that matters, it is the substance of it. Harper, in essence, says '300 words or 30,000 words or 3 words, if it guts the commercial value of the work, it has legal significance which the court must attend to.'[1] Here we're 10 times less raw information than Harper, but the economic and political significance of the number is vastly larger. To pretend otherwise- really, to pretend that the length has any relevance at all- is to be in denial about what we're really talking about.

Again, this is not to say that I approve, but again, the length and the fact that this is a number, and not 'open sesame' or whatever other passphrase one wants to use, is really irrelevant in anything other than an emotional/irrational sense. (Wars have been fought and millions have died over the emotional and irrational, so that is fine do discuss too -- in fact I think that is mostly what Ed is talking about -- but again, lets not get things confused.)

[1] Seth, I use 'legal significance' and not infringement for your benefit :)

Re: A Brief Note on Ad Hominem Attacks on the TLF

Luis — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:38:21 -0000

If a certain righty poster who does ad hominem all the time were included, this would carry a lot more moral weight.

Re: Abstraction in Action

Luis — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:51:49 -0000

It is worth noting, for the non-programmers out there, that programmers don't seek abstraction primarily out of some sort of perverse puzzle-solving, or to create more work for ourselves (though it does tend to do both those things). We've learned that the process of abstraction makes those generic solutions more robust, and it makes them more 'future-proof'- allowing for innovative uses the original author didn't intend for. Because hey, you might someday need DestroyCity(Tehran), or more positively, that network you wrote to pass around very simple chunks of data amongst 2 computers might some day get used to pass around a substantial portion of the world's economy. If you design abstractly, that kind of thing can happen without having to ask Washington, or Ma Bell, for their permission.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Dude, You’re Getting Ubuntu

Luis — Mon, 28 May 2007 09:11:13 -0000

Might want to take a look at System76.com, Tim; they have some nicely priced stuff, and are Ubuntu-only. No idea if they are doing anything to position themselves better against Dell or not, but worth looking at.

Re: Microsoft Wants to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too

Luis — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:47:07 -0000

Well said, Tim. I might add that this is a big business opportunity for Microsoft, if it actually wanted to compete. Sales of Exchange on a Linux server backend, or Office on a Linux client, would easily exceed their meager licensing revenue. They have the choice to do that sort of thing- we're not forcing them to isolate themselves.

Re: Microsoft Wants to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too

Luis — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 01:32:30 -0000

GPL apps cannot link against the Fluendo plugins; they have to be GPL + a special exception which allows the linking to the binary plugins (which are binary because of the patents.)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » 2nd Circuit rules in FCC indecency case

Luis — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 07:30:00 -0000

Congrats to CDT and PFF.

Re: Free Software as Professional Development

Luis — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:10:15 -0000

Braden: those teach you how to be a real coder roughly like writing comments on this blog teaches you to be a practicing litigator, like playing Monopoly teaches you to be a landlord, or like playing with tinkertoys teaches you how to be a managing partner at an architectural firm. There are technical, social/managerial, and pragmatic skills that can't be learned except by doing it in the real world, with real users, with real co-workers, and with real problems.

Given a 21 year old who can show you the open source projects he has worked on and the features he has contributed to them, and a 21 year old who has done any of the things you've listed, a hiring manager who hires the one who has done the things you've listed should be fired summarily for gross incompetence. Given a 21 year old with no formal background, and who can show you the open source projects he has worked on and the features he has contributed to them, and a MIT CS grad, the call is closer, but most managers would still prefer the one with real world experience, unless the project is mind-numbingly stupid and the manager prefers someone with no imagination.

(I have been known to exaggerate to prove my point, and to someone who has not hired or managed programmers it may sound like exaggeration, but as someone who was both a practicing programmer and a manager responsible for hiring programmers I'm not joking in the slightest here.)

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Luis — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:19:47 -0000

I think you may be jumping to conclusions in suggesting that he sees the core of the solution as more regulation, Tim. I'm sure regulation may be part of the solution (he hasn't exactly shied from it in the past), but more generally I'd guess that the thrust of his focus will be in the direction he has been working in for years- free-er manipulation of core information, better forms of feedback, more competitive media, etc. The examples here would be the freeing of the debates and his incessant speaking and blogging rather than the suggestion that the FCC regulate network neutrality.

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Luis — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:16:52 -0000

I think deliberately vague. Keep in mind that this isn't completely selfless sacrifice on his part- being a professed amateur in a new field means that he can spend several years staying at home and raising his children, and his absence will allow his movements to grow a new generation of much-needed leadership in the resulting vacuum. If he explicitly linked the two right now, he'd still be chained to the old responsibilities and take up air from the new leaders who will replace him. Furthermore, if he said from day one 'free culture is the solution to corruption' he'd be stigmatized from day one as 'the free culture guy', rather than being 'just' a skilled public intellectual with a neutral approach to methods. Much more likely to get cooperation from entrenched interests that way. If he does anything well, it is shucking off the rhetorical shackles of those who have proceeded him (e.g., Stallman) and using the perceived clean slate to bring the same ideas to a broader audience. Here, ironically, the person who he is competing with (potentially) is himself- all the more reason for him to publicly disclaim his past and start fresh, even if in the long term he plans to return to the same roots as part of the solution.

Of course, this could all just be denial; check my blog in the morning for a deeply personal and emotional post on his announcement- I wouldn't be who I am without Lessig, so the announcement

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Luis — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:18:57 -0000

Doh. 'so the announcement...' has really been in the forefront of my mind all night, especially as I've occasionally of late questioned my own decision to focus my career on social production. If only I had a tenured position at Stanford to fall back on while I changed my focus, it might be easier to do ;)

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Luis — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 23:51:49 -0000

(That personal post is now up.)

Re: Yet more on privacy concerns in the context of IP

Luis — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:54:08 -0000

Good point. Since email and http are used to spread corrupted files and accidentally share confidential data, I look forward to the TLF editorial suggesting we should shut those down too.

Re: Is Apple Rewarding the Tip CUPS or Taking from the Penny Tray?

Luis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:06:48 -0000

Have no fear, as CUPS will continue to be an open-source project under a GPL2/LGPL2 license.

It is staying v2, but only at Apple's sufferance. Had the other contributors to the project kept their copyright, instead of assigning it to Sweet, this would not be at Apple's sufferance- instead, they would have maintained their rights and Apple would have had to either compensate them directly or otherwise persuade them if it decided to change the license. But instead (for whatever reason) they assigned their copyright, and so Sweet, and only Sweet, has been compensated.

This is of course legally correct- they did, after all, assign their copyright to Sweet/CUPS, and presumably failed to get some sort of legal guarantee that he would not change/re-assign the copyright, so no laws are being violated or anything. But despite the legal correctness of it, it seems to me that anyone who respects a Lockean labor theory of IP (as opposed to what one might call a 'corporations are always right' theory of IP, ahem) would at least be sympathetic to the notion that uncompensated labor was done by parties other than Sweet/CUPS, and that those parties, as a result of their labor, deserve some say in the licensing of their own copyrighted work.

Re: Is Apple Rewarding the Tip CUPS or Taking from the Penny Tray?

Luis — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:28:56 -0000

They pay them so that they can use it under a different, non-GPL license; i.e., without respecting the restrictions GPL places on them.

Re: Is Apple Rewarding the Tip CUPS or Taking from the Penny Tray?

Luis — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:41:29 -0000

(This is not to say that there aren't some very stupid things being said on /. and elsewhere, just that I'd expect TLF contributors to have more understanding and respect for the impulse which underpins the comments, even if the ultimate conclusions are wrong.)

Re: iPhone: Innovation to Slavery in 13 Days

Luis — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:08:19 -0000

I don't see why it can't be both. The phone is obviously brilliant and innovative, and also obviously crippled by AT&T; and AT&T;'s oligopolist business model, where all the participants have clearly agreed that they can compete on intangibles like call quality but conveniently refuse to compete on tangibles like contract length and free SMSs. As only one example, iPhone doesn't have iChat, when even the simplest child can see that that would be a desirable. There isn't any good reason why the phone can't do it, except that it would threaten the business model of the phone carriers.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Libertarianism and Open Networks

Luis — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 19:16:00 -0000

Nozick. And networks. In the same post. My mind is officially blown.

Re: A Rant

Luis — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:04:34 -0000

Surely you can just move to one of the many other competitive broadband providers in your area, Tim? :)

Re: Eric Schmidt was Tooling Down the Road Looking for a Burger When . . .

Luis — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:06:07 -0000

But I thought the market would take care of that? (I'm being slightly snarky, but I'm also being slightly serious in asking that. I'm not sure why this would bother the serious libertarian, I guess.)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » IP: An Odd Monopoly

Luis — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:28:45 -0000

The story of modern IP, of course, is the story of attempts by the monopolists to eliminate the gaps between the two (DRM, other attacks on fair use, etc.)

Re: The WSJ on Beer Pong

Luis — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:45:58 -0000

They also had an excellent article on lolcats, which roughly blew my mind.

Re: The Standard Economic Model of IP

Luis — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:00:59 -0000

First link busted, FWIW.

Re: Transformative Use vs. Fair Use?

Luis — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:05:56 -0000

Tim: definitely go ahead and read the paper; I think it is pretty readable and explains things more clearly than Joe can in blog-length comments.

Re: Happy Birthday Slashdot!

Luis — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:53:57 -0000

You have a five-digit /. ID? loser. ;)

[4808, would be lower except at first there was no benefit to getting an account.]

Re: Democrats Relinquish Spine

Luis — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:04:30 -0000

Mostly I think that Nader is full of it when he does his 'one party state' shtick, but some days...

Re: George Ou on Comcast traffic management and NN

Luis — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:09:23 -0000

Of course, this wasn't throttling, it was active breaking of the protocol. But don't let those little details spoil a good story. :)

Re: A Note to Ron Paul Activists

Luis — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:15:03 -0000

Congratulations, Tim, you've been promoted to the MSM. I never knew you were pro-North American Union, though.

Re: Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement

Luis — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:00:29 -0000

It makes sense if you think of it as the sign of an inbred bureaucracy that needs to feel important itself. Otherwise, no, not so much sense.

Note that there is no good way to figure out what pages have been deleted and rescue them for an 'inclusivist-pedia', either. That irritates me to no end.

Re: Musical Adventures in Webland

Luis — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:09:58 -0000

You might want to yank or at least qualify the radiohead comments, since the band has pointed out that (at best) those numbers are unrepresentative and (at worst) completely fictional, since no one outside the band has access to the real numbers. Some links here.

Also, most of us actually 'like other people', so live music is a model that works for us. :) (Though I would agree that as we get more and more used to time-shifting, live music will still lose some popularity for that reason. Certainly it stops me from going to as many shows as I'd like.)

Re: Musical Adventures in Webland

Luis — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:57:32 -0000

Tim: 38% of $6 is a little over 2 bucks per downloader. How does that compare to the royalties an artist gets per CD? I would not be at all surprised if the numbers are comparable.

I assume you saw my post on that, but just in case, check it out. Nutshell: almost exactly $2, assuming a $14 CD price.

Re: Which Law Firm Practice Wins - Government Contracts or Privacy?

Luis — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:00:13 -0000

"command of privacy issues" does not mean "supports privacy" :)

Re: Here Comes Another Bubble

Luis — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:57:24 -0000

Of course, legality aside, using the picture without giving credit is just plain rude.

Re: Here Comes Another Bubble

Luis — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:43:07 -0000

Doug: that's what credits at the end (or on a webpage somewhere) are for. If you went to the trouble of searching for thousands of clips, and then spent many hours editing them together, then surely the additional minor trouble of documenting what you did is not a big deal?

(I can't believe I'm arguing in favor of attribution here, but there you go.)

Re: Nerd Porn

Luis — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:49:16 -0000

I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me what Paul is doing with his tremendous sacks of money.

(I'd ask about campaign finance laws too, but realistically, the Paul camp's response on that would be '1st amendment! 1st amendment!' and the pro-regulation camp has made such a cluster-fuck of actually implementing the regulations that no violation will be caught until it is way too late anyway.)

Re: Well Meaning, But Without Understanding

Luis — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:24:52 -0000

Ah, wah? Seriously? The other guy is coming to the fight with a gun, and piles of money, and you'd like the average citizen to just pretend that doesn't happen, and so they shouldn't talk to anyone except their congressman?

Re: Well Meaning, But Without Understanding

Luis — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:28:56 -0000

(Or, frankly, to follow the logic at the end of the post, they shouldn't talk to any congresspeople, even their own?)

Re: What if a Googlebomb is a Googledud?

Luis — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:19:17 -0000

Just FWIW, the googlebombing 'fix' that google performed only stops some types of googlebombs- those that use a phrase that doesn't appear in the page, like 'abysmal failure' pointing at a Bush biography. For pages like a critique of Liberal Fascism (which presumably would contain the phrase 'Liberal Fascism') it could work, presuming that more people linked to the critique page than to the real book.

Re: Savage Fury

Luis — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:40:01 -0000

Fascinating quote, Tim. Thanks for posting it.

Re: Free Culture and Libertarianism, Again

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:53:44 -0000

The emotional imbalance, the stridency, the dishonesty, the projection, the paranoia and the inconsistency is what makes Lessig Lessig, in other words.

Strong words coming from... well, a ranting, raving paranoiac. :)

Tim: a well written, balanced piece, as usual. Well done.

By the way, you should definitely get around to reading Fisher's piece. I was really, really troubled by his conclusion- but at the same time, I found his deconstruction of the other options very persuasive as well. That left me in an unsatisfying place, I admit, but it certainly made me more appreciative of his proposal than I might have been had I only come to it in isolation (like you do in Free Culture.)

Re: Selective Quotation in the Sydnor Paper

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:09:01 -0000

Just go ahead and call a spade a spade, Tim. The word you're looking for is 'dishonest' :)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Is the Patriot Act the Harbinger of a Police State?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:18:53 -0000

“If this process continues unchecked, we will reach a point where the NSA has the technological capability to track a breathtaking amount of information about every American.”

This has already happened, Tim. Breathtaking amounts of data are already collected, processed, and organized in the name of marketing and security, and post-9/11, private industry eagerly started to sell that data to government (at a very profitable markup, of course.) I highly recommend Robert O'Harrow's 'No Place To Hide' as required reading in this area. It is already out of date, of course, and glosses over non-commercial aspects of the police state like security cameras, license-plate tracking, mandatory always-on cell-phone tracking, etc., but still... mighty scary.

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:10:13 -0000

"It only makes us look foolish to pretend he’s Michael Moore with tenure."

Don't say 'us' there, Tim. There are people who look foolish here, but you're not one of them.

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:42:16 -0000

My point is not on Lessig's behalf, Richard; it is actually mainly on Tim's. He's trying to argue a serious, scholarly point; you and Tom are using the techniques of demagogues to advance your political agendas. I'm just trying to point that out. I'm glad I'm irritating you; I merely regret that I haven't spent more time over the past eight years irritating those who are intellectually dishonest and willing to sacrifice their integrity for gains in power.

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:08:04 -0000

Just find a single serious law review article, and then we can see if it makes any novel arguments.

Leaving aside the gross assumption that there are no novel arguments in Lessig's popular works (Code in particular is one of those books that is so novel that everyone takes it for granted now), finding his serious law review articles is pretty easy. If you were actually serious about it (you're not, but I'll play along) you might start at... I dunno, maybe his list of published articles? Or perhaps the Stanford publication search tool, which lists 70 journal articles published before 2000 (the date of his first book)?

There you'd find such significant articles as Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace and The Law Of The Horse, which are only two of the most frequently cited papers in recent legal literature. (I'm told his purely Constitutional work is also excellent, but I haven't read any of it.)

I'll certainly grant that you have to start at the bottom of his own page, with the older stuff, but it was on the strength of that work, and not his books, that he was granted tenure at Harvard and Stanford, two institutions which may well tenure demagogues, but only if they are also serious scholars.

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:37:07 -0000

He didn’t make his career out of calling people names: he made it by clerking for notorious communists Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, and by arguing originalism and orthodox economics to the Supreme Court in Eldred.

And by being one of the most-cited legal scholars in the country over the past seven years (that would be the period after he left Berkman and became a "street theater loony.")

(I look forward to the creative way in which that is dismissed as well, as it inevitably will be.)

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:44:01 -0000

Richard: I expected a much more entertaining rebuttal to that point; I'm disappointed. But you can't seriously expect to get away with saying 'he's not a serious academic' and then ignoring the obvious, quantitatively measurable fact that academics think he's extremely important by... insulting academia. Take your pick; either academia matters (in which case calling him a failure as an academic is important, but measurably wrong) or academia doesn't matter since they'll cite anybody (in which case why are you spending so much time and energy asserting that he's a failed academic? Shouldn't he then be measured by his success as a popular author and publicizer of ideas instead?)

I'm amused too by the dismissal of his writing as 'being all over the place', when, if you've actually read it, it is only in two areas (constitutional structure and IP/cyberlaw), and that most modern academics think excellence in multiple fields of study is a sign of a first-class mind.

Also, I'm still waiting for the debunking of the quality of the actual articles, the ones he got tenure for, and the ones you claimed to be looking for, since, you know, I pointed them out.

This is not to say that Lessig is not a publicity hound; he obviously is. But that is not mutually exclusive of being an excellent scholar (which he also obviously is), nor is it necessarily a bad thing to seek publicity when you're trying to get important ideas out to the public. Unless, of course, they are ideas you disagree with, apparently.

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:00:12 -0000

And obviously he lost Eldred; we know that. I'm not seeing how that makes him a demagogue, or a failure as an academic, or a bad person. At most it makes him someone who you wouldn't want to have arguing your case at the Supreme Court, which puts him in good company with a long list of good people who've lost Supreme Court cases (often in part by taking them to the court before contemporary social norms caught up with them.)

Re: Yale / CFP’s “9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration”

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:48:28 -0000

I guess I'm failing to see the significant speech problems in the modern internet, Adam- care to elaborate? Do you mean the kinds of problems Open Net Initiative has been working on, or something else? I strongly agree with you that free speech should be a core value for the internet, but at least inside the US, the internet seems to be clearly the most vibrant and free platform for speech that there is, with no significant threats to it that I'm aware of, which maybe is why it fell off this particular list.

[I'll grant for the moment that network neutrality is not a speech issue; I'm sort of skeptical about comparisons between NN and the Fairness Doctrine but it isn't an interesting discussion to have for the nth time right now.]

Re: Larry Lessig, Demagogue?

Luis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:58:04 -0000

Ah, yes, you're right. Clearly I (and most constitutional scholars) were suckered in by the 'bite size' 44 pages of dense academic prose of Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace, not to mention the 103 page histrionic sound bite that is Fidelity in Translation. I'll be more careful next time before I give someone the patina of academic credibility.

Re: Are the threats to online free speech real?

Luis — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:11:09 -0000

Adam: interesting; I missed that list earlier. It seems to be a fair point- you should reach out to the Yale folks about it.

Re: Insulting Our Intelligence

Luis — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:13:33 -0000

m: god, I wish you'd posted that last night, so that I could have gone to sleep earlier...

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:41:15 -0000

Almost? I'd say 'collaboration' is the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley, with communication and openness as valued tools by which the ideology is implemented. But the lines are obviously very blurred.

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:43:59 -0000

Adam: partially, I oversimplified, since I assumed Tim was looking for a one-word response :) You're obviously correct to point out that there are many shades of gray and different approaches. Note that I think Tim is asking about the dominant ideology, and while Apple is (in the area of openness) a counter-example, that's a little like saying that there is one Muslim in Congress, and hence Christianity is not the dominant religion in Congress. (Not quite as extreme- there are plenty of other secretive companies in the Valley. But most of their employees very actively chafe at that bit, which I think suggests there is a lot of truth to what Tim says.)

Speaking specifically about collaboration, there are a lot of different facets. First, Valley collaboration is cross-company in a way that most places I've observed are not. At both the formal corporate level and the informal social level, information and knowledge sharing amongest employees of different companies is pervasive in ways that it is not in most industries. Second, Valley collaboration is generally very egalitarian- to oversimplify, in Hollywood, the Director Is God, and in New York, the CEO is God, and that is all there is too it. People underneath that structure obviously collaborate with each other or even occasionally with the Godhead. In the average Valley corporation, you obviously have leading lights (Larry and Sergey come to mind) but most leaders actively encourage collaboration and innovation to come up from below. With the notable exception of Jobs, there is a dearth of egomaniacal, heirarchical leaders in the valley. There are others... but Corporations is beckoning so that will have to do for the moment.

Note that my current occupation is law student, which is actively anti-collaborative. This quite possibly makes me hypersensitive to the collaboration I see when I'm elsewhere (e.g., in the Valley.)

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:07:52 -0000

Richard: I think you're probably right, but I'd also point out that that is a pretty broad-spread American obsession. Silicon Valley is certainly very good at it, but just as Adam said 'well, Hollywood collaborates too' I'll say 'all of America is pretty capitalist,' so saying that silicon valley is capitalist isn't terribly interesting to me, though I think definitely correct. Perhaps Tim should have asked about 'distinguishing ideology' rather than dominant?

For what it is worth as a data point on GPL and 'open' in the valley, every law firm I interviewed with this summer in the valley (extremely capitalist, extremely conservative people) saw my experience with the GPL as a huuuuuge selling point because of strong interest from their clients. To paraphrase one lawyer I interviewed with, 'everyone in silicon valley is either using or thinking about using GPL code, and they keep asking us about it.' Richard certainly has a point about people being nervous about it (which is why they are talking to the lawyers) and may have some point that all other things being equal people would much prefer BSD code, but all other things are rarely equal- there is a reason that despite the GPL people are running Linux servers and not BSD servers.

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:37:22 -0000

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.)

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:24:41 -0000

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.")

Re: Ideology

Luis — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:22:24 -0000

(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.)

Re: When gamers go mainstream

Luis — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:50:19 -0000

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.

Re: When gamers go mainstream

Luis — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:29:29 -0000

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

Re: OECD vs. SpeedTest

Luis — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:23:32 -0000

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

Re: Intrinsic Motivation and Free Software

Luis — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:33:10 -0000

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'.

Re: Wiki-gov, special interests, and wiki-regs

Luis — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:52:44 -0000

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.

Re: Is There an Openness-Bandwidth Trade-off?

Luis — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:55:54 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » PFF Database Cleared by StopBadware.org & Put Back Online

Luis — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:30:45 -0000

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.

Re: NYT Live-Blogging Bailout Debate - Barney Frank Warns of Socialism!

Luis — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:59:42 -0000

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

Re: Feedsqueezer: Another Competitor for Google

Luis — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:22:02 -0000

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.

Re: Feedsqueezer: Another Competitor for Google

Luis — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:03:05 -0000

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...)

Re: Feedsqueezer: Another Competitor for Google

Luis — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:09:59 -0000

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.

Re: Microsloth Explained, in Part

Luis — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:21:02 -0000

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.

Re: Great ESR EconTalk Podcast

Luis — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:58:11 -0000

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.)

Re: Look Ma, Faster Broadband!

Luis — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:10:26 -0000

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.

Re: Look Ma, Faster Broadband!

Luis — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:18:00 -0000

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.

Re: Privacy as ‘a Modern Invention’

Luis — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:27:42 -0000

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 ;)

Re: USA TODAY on Android’s Privacy Implications

Luis — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:28:37 -0000

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.