DISQUS

Great essay, Phil.

It's sad and wrong that real conservatism has been marginalized by the Republican party. When I look at how many good solid conservatives favor Obama in this election -- simply because they don't know a better way to repudiate the wrongward drift of ther party -- I can't help but feel that conservatism has been cast out rather than corrupted. Yet I'm not sure. Christopher Buckley, George Will, David Brooks and many others on the right seem to comprise a faction in exile from a party that was taken over, as if by a junta. They await.

I am certain that we (the country) need to wrest the Republican party from Hannity, Limbaugh, Savage and other AM radio loudmouths who have conflated partisanship for its own sake and mockery of Democrats with conservatism. The former is not the latter. But I don't know if it will be easy, or even possible, to do that.

Meanwhile, as an Independent (and a former Republican *and* Democrat), I wish the best for a sane and strong GOP. Perhaps we'll see that emerge under the new administration. But I'm not making bets.

Great album. My fave was "Easy Money."

Lowell was *so* good. Yow.

I doubt Pelosi wanted this outcome. I don't think Bush, Obama or McCain wanted it, either. I think a lot of house members who thought they might not get re-elected caved in to local pressures -- more than any of the leaders expected. Hard to say exactly what happened when both Yay and Nay were bi-partisan.

As for getting Obama elected, I'd say the McCain folks are doing a great job of that lately.

But hey, what do I know? I'm the guy who thought this would be an election where both candidates would take the high road. Oh well. Truth isn't just the first casualty. It's a dead horse both sides have beaten to a pulp.

All analogies are flawed. Same with all metaphors. That's how they work, actually.

The song I like to sing (as Dave puts it below) is that the software industry will become *like* (not the same as) the construction industry. I'm talking about the industry here -- a broad group of people, professionals and amateurs, working on stuff. Not just about what their tools and materials are made of, and what those do.

Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part to want to see religion go away fort what Dave calls the OS theorists. (And hell, maybe I have my own.. is my "song" a hymn?) In any case, Dave is right to flag religion as an issue. It gets in the way.

Good topic. My 2¢...

The practical values that matter are modularity and freedom for builders from lock-in. That's the way it works in the construction industry, and that's the way it's going to work in the software industry. But we aren't there yet.

The construction industry is basically open-source. Nobody owns or controls the code in the basic tools and building materials, all of which come from nature (starting with trees and rocks), and are built from the periodic table. And, if a crew figures a better way to hang a door or put up shingle, they don't keep it secret or patent it; they share it with others and the skilled practice spreads.

Construction involves lots of different tools and building materials. Some are proprietary and thick with patents, other are not. They all get along, however, because construction is modular. You can mix one kind of building material with another. For example, you can use a plain wood 2x10s for your floor joists, or you can use patented laminate beams. Either way, you're not building your house on the Weherhaeuser or the Georgia Pacific "platform". A company like Weherhaeuser can encourage the purchase of their products through something like iLevel ... http://www.ilevel.com/ ... but even there you're free to substitute building materials from any lumber yard.

What makes the GPL difficult for software builders is that is says something about the nature of software. It says this stuff is free -- but in specific ways that require explanation that goes far beyond "free as in freedom" vs. "free as in beer". And those explanations tend to be conditional, long-winded and hard to understand. Even the clearest explanations of the GPL, such as this one here ... http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200312... ... leave a lot of people, myself included (and I've been covering this stuff for many years), scratching their heads. "I can't do ... what?" they say. The result is dialogs like the one you point to on FriendFeed. Contrast the head-scratching in that thread with the kind of plain-talk dialog you'll hear among builders at a construction site, debating which materials to use and how they might work together.

The latter is where we're headed. Talking respectfully among ourselves will help shorten that distance.

In my experience, you need to do three things: 1) Write quotable posts; 2) Link a lot; and 3) do both over a long time.

Cheers,

Doc

Dave, have you noticed a difference in the HD video quality? Comcast (like all cable systems) has to compress video much more than required by satellite. Results: lots of compression artifacts. That big screen of yours is probably looking a lot better on the HD stuff now.

And have you tried adding local channels? That's where your best picture will come from, because local stations don't have to share bandwidth with other data streams over coax or satellite wireless. Your DirecTV receiver has a local channel receiver built in. Required by law, I believe.

Since your house has line-of-sight to Mt. Sutro and Mt. San Bruno (meaning there are no landforms in the way), you should get all the over-the-air HD signals from your local channels. There should be a choice in your setup or installation menu for it. Hitting "scan local channels" to "add" them will usually do the trick. But bear in mind that none of the stations are on their "branded" channels. Here's your line-up:

KTVU/2 (Fox) is on 56
KRON/4 is on 57
KPIX/5 (CBS) is on 29
KGO/7 (ABC) is on 24
KQED/9 is on 30
KNTV/11 (NBC) is on 12
KBWB/20 is on 19
KCSM/60 is on 43
KBCW/44 (CW) is on 45

Some (most?) of these are not carried on DirecTV by satellite. And most have two or more "stations", since they are digital and can do that. DirecTV probably doesn't include those, either.

For an antenna, all you need is a 5" length of stiff wire to stick out the center of your coax antenna connector. A twist-tie, stripped at one end (to shove in the hole), will do in a pinch. Start with that, and if it doesn't work, get an indoor "HD" antenna from Radio Shack. "HD", by the way, just means UHF, because that's the band used for digital transmission. The right length of antenna for receiving UHF is about 5", give or take.

And if you need any help, gimme a call. :-) I'm your friendly (not-very-local) over-the-air tech support guy.

Oh, and your Sony screen also has an HD tuner. You can practice on that one, using the same little wire as an antenna. My Sony screen is pretty similar to yours, as I recall, and the Sony UI is horrible; but it does work if you can figure it out.

Just to clarify, VRM is user-driven rather than user-centric. This may seem a fine distinction, but it's an important one. "User-driven" comes from the user. "User-centric" is centered on the user, but implies an outside perspective.

We need to grow markets by equipping the demand side, and not just the supply side. We need to make customers more capable of engaging with and relating to sellers -- and not just in ways that the sellers alone provide.

At ProjectVRM we're not trying to do everything. We're one ingredient in a new recipe for relationship. An essential one, I believe; but just one.

Great find, Dave! Thanks!

I'm there: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/07/02/fre...

Specifically, http://identi.ca/dsearls

For what it's worth, I've been ignored plenty.

I'm also not sure what the "Top 1%" is.

FWIW, my readership has been running from a few hundred to a (very) few thousand a day since 2000. There were that many when I was #16 at Technorati, and again when I dropped to #600, and then when my URL changed and I had no "authority" at all and had to start all over again.

I just checked my stats, and the blog had about 3700 visits today (a lot for me), and just under 37000 for the whole month. I believe Scoble gets as many in a few hours.

But I don't care and I never did. I blog mostly to share ideas that might or might not catch, and to lend some original thought to ideas others bring up. I don't do it for the money, or the strokes, or for the highly conditional and narrow recognition it brings.

Even the writing I do at Linux Journal, which is for money, is done without *any* mindfulness about whether or not it's commercial. In fact I think most of my writing there is about the least commercial stuff we run.

As for what's on my radar, it's mostly topics. The feeds that matter to me are topical ones. And they change all the time.

Not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that the "%" caste system, at least in blogging, is silly and wrong and more a matter of perception than reality.

It's also still early. We're about 5 nanoseconds into the Net's Big Bang and mostly have hot gas and light elements. No galaxies yet. Long way to go.

Cheers,

Doc

Wish I could be there, and sorry I missed your hospitality last week. Let's talk today or tomorrow and catch up.

I was there. It was original and very effective. So I'm surprised it hasn't become more the norm. Or at least a major brach of conference types.

Actually, I think it will. We just need more of them. And maybe a new name for them, perhaps. Maybe something based on "discuss" or "discussion".

Thanks, Dave.

I'm not sure how courageous I'm being. I mean, it doesn't *feel* courageous. Just determined to get through an ordeal which -- for the first few days -- had no apparent end. Getting through required documenting it, seemed to me. I was doing something beyond keeping readers (especially friends and relatives) up to date. I was shaking the long tail. It worked. As a result of many comments and emails I am learning much more about pancreatitis and related matters. Some of those learnings may save my life. For awhile, anyway.

Medicine is a collection of silo'd specialties and feifdoms that often don't communicate well, even when they're on a "team" or part of a single system (such as the one here at this hospital). Much of what they do is pro forma, routinized, and for good reasons. But remarkably little of it takes into account the individual characteristics of the patient, especially if those are highly idiosyncratic. As it turned out, my chance of getting pancreatitis was not the 1-in-20 that the doctor said, but 1-in-1. Why? Could we have known that in advance? Maybe not, but I think so. I first faced the possibility of pancreatitis when a consent form on a clipboard was pushed under my face as I lay on the table about to undergo the procedure. In fact, it was just while writing this paragraph, a few minutes ago, that I finally had the conversation I wanted with my gastrointerologist (the one who did the procedure): convincing her that perhaps my blood disorder, and the iron accumulation it tends to cause, might be involved. She'll meet later with my hematologist. That's a good thing, but it's also late for this game. (Though perhaps not for the next.)

You're right about eventually losing the battle. Life is a journey that has an end. The path is uphill, and it only gets steeper. The older you get, the more hazards appear, as the body wears out.

But I'm getting past this one. The pain is gone today. I'm able to chew ice chips now, even as I dream of pizza and Mexican food. I can sleep without drugs. But my energy is very low. My blood count is at the severe anemIa level, and I'm woozy much of the time. I have had no food in more than a week, living on a diet of IV drips from bags on a rolling pole.

But tonight the GI doctor said I should be out on Sunday, and moving to a low-fat diet and a somewhat normal life again. Can't wait.

So thanks again for the good wishes and healing vibes. I feel them, and they help a lot.

Cliff,

Thanks for understanding VRM so well — and for adding to that understanding.

A couple thoughts.

First, you are right that VRM is an Archimedean challenge. I prefer that metaphor to ocean-boiling. If we borrow the ocean metaphor, it's to look at the sea (half million and counting) of open source code bases out there for the right combination of small wheels we don't need to re-invent. I believe this is exactly what Adriana, Alec and friends are doing with the work she points to in her comments. It's also what we're doing with the relbutton. The nice thing there is that we have a handy symbol behind which all kinds of code can be placed.

Second, the "Searlsian" adjective makes me cringe. I'd prefer something descriptive. "The relationship decade" or "The live Web decade" perhaps? I like 'live" because I think the most important and meaningful interactions will happen in close to real time. Too much of demand works that way already in any case, and the site-based static web can't cut it. Not alone, anyway.

I also think it needs to be mobile. A whole 'nuther topic I don't have time to go into, but let's stick a reminder there.

And thanks again.

Thanks for your kind and thoughtful words.

To clarify things a bit, I'm not thinking of stepping away from the blogosphere, even as I look forward to progress along technological paths toward better tools for writing and sharing than blogging tools currently provide.

We can do better than Moveable Type and Wordpress. In fact, we *did* do better, in some important and overlooked ways, with Dave Winer's Manila and Radio Userland. It's going on two decades since MORE came along, and there has never been a better writing tool since. I still miss it every day.

If those tools are as radically different as blogging tools were, we'll have something new. Otherwise, we'll still have blogging, which will still have plenty of good stuff, even if it's a shrinking percentage of the whole.

To Carleton Benjamin: "The blogosphere" is not one thing, nor did more than a small part of it react with "sore and raging petulance". Also, the Times piece was not an "examination" except by a large stretch. It also mistook the few for the whole, and damned the whole by association. As Dave Winer said somewhere else, the Times was talking to itself on that one. Or worse, trolling.

Deaths and heart attacks happen to people of all ages, bloggers included.

For what it's worth, I'm 60, and I would say that blogging on the whole is a positive part of my lifestyle. (And a negative one, to the extent it increases my tendency to be a desk potato.) If I croak next week, though, please don't blame it on blogging. I have more than enough true vices to blame.

I'm old enough to remember how JFK's religion -- Roman Catholic -- was a Big Issue. Not as big an issue as race still is today, but still: an issue. Would his policies be independent of The Vatican? Would he answer to the Pope? Much ink was spilled on these questions.

What mattered in the long run was not that JFK was elected "in spite" of his religion, but that his election put to rest the whole issue. His religion, it turned out, didn't matter.

Barack Obama is plenty qualified for the presidency -- neither despite nor because of his race. If he is elected, I look forward to race being as much a non-factor is his presidency as religion was in Kennedy's.

For race to not matter, at all, does not need to be a cause. But it is an effect that is long overdue.

I am feeling remarkably sanguine about the economy, even though I know we're in an economic downturn. Perhaps that's because I have almost nothing invested in the stock market. Perhaps that's also because i know, as you said, this is cyclical.

But I think there is something different this time around. The American Empire, the worldwide Pax Americana that defined the First World following WWII, is ending. We are as far in denial of this as Wiley Coyote is of gravity after he's run off the edge of a cliff, but has yet to fall.

Yet all the great colonial powers, including our own Mother Country of England, came out of their Ages of Empire to enjoy prosperous times. Eventually.

My main long-term concern is with The Environment. But not in the usual way. i see the human species as inherently pestilential. We not only have explosive population growth, but a parasitic attitude toward every non-replaceable resource we can use.

The time scale I see is geological. And in the geological context, what humans are doing to both the earth and its plant and animal life is destructive and in the long term catastrophic. The Earth right now is being attacked by humans on a grand scale, and is being changed by it.

At the same time the Earth is going through natural cycles that will raise the seas and shrink the footprint of land on which humans and other land-based species live. Global Warming has been a fact since the last Ice Age began to end twenty thousand years ago. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atmospheric_...

The ice cap that dumped Long Island and Cape Cod where they are only began to retreat in what is nearly the geologic present. The Great Lakes as we know them are puddles left by a glacier that still covered Canada only a few thousand years ago. Lake Superior is barely older than the pyramids. More northerly lakes are younger. Canada is still thawing out, and if you fly over its northern regions you can see fresh roads and pipes leading out to land made exploitable by the retreat of permafrost. Another illustration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GreatLakeFor...

As the ice caps finish melting back, perhaps including Greenland and Antarctica, the seas will rise. Coastlines will move inland, as they've been doing since, only several thousand years ago, you could walk from San Francisco to what's now the Farallon Islands. Much of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Finland, Bangladesh, Brooklyn and other lowlands will be under water. If we're lucky they'll be tidelands capable of sustaining life. if we're not, well...

I don't think there's much we can do to prevent it, or even slow it down. I am sure it will happen, however.

That's why I like the Internet Identity Workshops. They're about doing stuff.

But then they're workshops, not conferences.

First, my questions to Kneuer were meant to help illuminate the differences between both auctioned and open spectrum, and between the bands involved. I was careful to be direct and respectful, in hope that we might not continue talking past each other. In that respect, I failed.

Second, I was not making a case for opening 700MHz sepctrum (though I may have given that impression), but rather hoping to draw out Kevin Werbach, the moderator and conference host, on the subject of open spectrum in general, about which he has been an advocate in the past.

Third, if there was a belief in the crowd that relatively high-power 700MHz spectrum is technically equivalent to the much higher frequencies employed by wi-fi and other short-range low power technologies, it was not widespread.

Fourth, I would not interpret the applause (say, for my question) and occasional interruptive shout from the audience as representing the entire "crowd." The audience was not single-minded about this or any other subject.

There is no doubt, however, that there are crowds involved, and that they are talking past each other. Which is too bad.

I said more about noncommuunication in an email that Gordon Cook published here. I've thought more about it since then, and will be writing something up, hopefully soon, looking for *some* common ground here.

Uncle.

As I said here ...

http://doc.weblogs.com/2007/05/25#theyreRight

... you're right. Locking up the current stuff is a bad idea. Mea bozo.

Still, bear in mind that newspapers remain a many-billion-dollar business. They aren't going away soon, even if they are closer to 78s than mp3s (playing with the metaphor above). They need to engage, but not to abandon something that has long-standing and persistent value. Daily print is still that — for many folks, even if not for you, Kent and other young'uns.

Rock on,

Doc

This is an awful story. It also isn't new. It's been part of Journalism as Usual for the duration.

The best piece ever written about this was "Toward a Journalism of Consciousness" by D. Patrick Miller, in The Sun, a quarter century ago. I'm sure it's never made it online, though it should.

The best movie on the same subject is Absence of Malice, with Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban and Wilford Brimley at his rusty crusty best. That one, at least, is available for renting.

George is a friend and a mentor. I've learned a lot from him and respect him a great deal. If that amounts to practically worshiping him, I'll cop.

Doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, however.

I think George has some excellent and useufl insights into what makes liberals and conservatives tick the ways they do, and I think he's right about many of the concepts that anchor political differences and the vocabularies with which those are expressed . I also think he's wrong about libertarians, for what that's worth. And you're right that his ideas have limited relevance when the deciding factors are corruption and competence.

As with all tools, George's are good for some things, not for others.

Also, for what it's worth, George may have been a protege of Chomsky somewhere back in the Jurassic, but since then the two have parted ways by enormous distances. At least as linguists, anyway.

Oh, and the strict father/nurturant parent distinction wasn't meant to be symmetrical. But your mommy/daddy observation (which I agree with) is consistent with two others.

One is by Andrew Morton, the head Linux kernel maintainer and a very insightful guy. Upon hearing me compress George's left/right characterizations, Andrew said "That's why the left thinks the right is evil, and the right thinks the left is stupid." The winners in the long run will be those on both sides who do not pander to either of those characterizations, temping though they might be. (Actually, Bush the Younger won with that strategy, early on.)

The other is by my old buisness partner, who said republicans were "the party of wealth produciton" while the democrats were "the party of wealth redistribution." This to some degree explains my troubles with the left and my sympathies with the right, even though I've voted more often with the former than with the latter (though, quite often, with None of the Above).

A big Amen to everything you just said. Lots of good new ideas in there too. Excellent.

Some individual developers are already interested. Can you get in touch personally so we can follow up?

Meanwhile, I want to add that it's important to think outside the box of advertising, but not outside the box of the marketplace. That's why I building VRM -- Vendor Relationship Management -- as a reciprocal of CRM, is a good frame to start with.

Thanks again,

Doc

There was nothing called ADHD when I was a kid, but I knew my father self-medicated by smoking. That's one reason I never took it up.

He died at 70 of his 5th heart attack. His first came when he 59 -- a year younger than I am now.

His mother lived to 107 and never smoked. His sister is 94 and never smoked.

My mother lived to 90 and never smoked, but had severe macular degeneration, possibly caused or exacerbated by passive smoking.

You know what to do. We're cheering the effort from the sidelines.

Best,

Doc

Like Daniel says, you seem to be making an ad hominem argument here.

"Attachment parenting", as I understand it, and as we practiced it when our son was young, is little more than a return to sensible and affectionate contact between parents and infants. Take away the extremist stuff (breastfeeding to age six, for example), and you've got a rational and justified pendulum swing back from the "separation parenting" my generation grew up with. (For example, separating babies from mothers immediately after birth, discouraging breastfeeding, and letting babies "cry it out" when all they want is to be held.)

Carrying (I hate the term "wearing") babies in a sling is a huge advantage, for a variety of purposes, over strollers, Baby Bjorns and other contraptions. It's a marsupial approach that works rather well for humans, up to the point when the kid breaks out on his or her own, which they always do.

Letting infants sleep with parents works for some, not for others. But it's worth considering, since it worked just fine, and for good reasons, for most of human history.

It does bother me a bit that "Attachment Parenting" has become something of a lefty cause. But at its base are some simple and useful ideas prospective parents would do well to consider. Even if it's with some grains of salt.