Archives for the 'Miscellaneous' Category
Fear “the MEGA”!
You must fear the MEGA! FEAR THE MEGA AND SUPPORT IT!
Trademarks as Symbolic Links
As I said in my last post, Lindberg uses a number of computer metaphors to explain legal concepts. Here’s one I thought was particularly clever:
The shortcut in Figure 5-1 [a screenshot of the Firefox shortcut on a Windows desktop] is not the Firefox web browser itself. Rather, this icon is associated with a shortcut, or link. It points to the real executable file, which is located somewhere else on the disk. Without the linked application, the shortcut has no purpose. In fact, in Windows, a shortcut without a properly linked application reverts to a generic icon. It is the linked aplication that gives the shortcut both its appearance and its meaning.
Like the shortcut icon, a trademark is a symbol that is linked in the mind of consumers with a real company or with real products and services. WIthout the association of the symbol with the real product, service, or company, the symbols that we currently recognize as trademarks would be nothing but small, unrelated bits of art. The purpose of the trademark is to be a pointer to the larger “real” entity that the trademark represents. It is the larger entity that defines the trademark and gives it form and meaning.
Almost makes me want to buy an iPhone…
I was a HUGE fan of Mattel handheld games back in the late 70s, and I played “Football I” and “Football II” for countless hours with friends. And now you can get it on the iPhone!
Sure it’s probably still primitive as hell — you could only run the ball in Football I ! — but I bet it’s still a lot of fun.
I still have the old Football II handheld at my house and have been trying to teach my kids how to play it. (Colleco’s handheld Football game was actually better but I don’t have that one anymore). My kids don’t quite get the fun in frantically mashing buttons to move little red LED hashes across the screen. They are spoiled I tell you!
The Battlestar Galactica game was just awesome too. Video games have come a long, long way since then, but these old handheld games were addictive in their own right.
And the “Luddite of the Year” Award Goes to…
… environmental attorney Dusty Horwitt, who recently published this outlandishly stupid and highly offensive editorial in the Washington Post calling for an information tax to reduce the supply of information in society. “[I]n our information-overloaded society,” he argues, “the concept of [too much information] is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience.” His repressive solution?
It’s possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.
Mike Masnick of TechDirt and Richard Kaplar of the Media Institute do a fine job of ripping Mr. Horwitt’s absurd proposal to shreds. As Kaplar argues, it is “sheer lunacy” to “tax the technologies of freedom.” Unlike gasoline, there are no good reasons — not one — for government to ever take steps to reduce the supply of information. Mr. Horwitt is calling for public officials to use their taxing powers to destroy or limit opportunities for human communications and the free exchange of speech and expression. It is completely antithetical to a free society.
Moreover, if Mr. Horwitt really thinks there is too much information in this world, then perhaps he should lead by example and take his own site offline first! The rest of us will take a world of information abundance over a world of information scarcity any day of the week.
TLF Ads
Just to chime on Berin’s post two other things that readers ought to know: the ad revenue we generate is trivial—on the order of dozens of dollars per month—and none of us get a dime of it as individuals. Rather, the money gets plowed into shared expenses for the site, such as advertising and promotional materials, hosting costs, etc. Sonia won’t get a dime of the advertising revenue generated by the McCain ads on this site, so whatever her reasons for praising his tech agenda, the lure of dozens of dollars of McCain payola from this site wasn’t among them.
Getting Back From Aspen
The more I hear about people’s experiences getting back from Aspen, the more I want to brag about my double-top-unsecret, non-patented method of accessing the rarified air of that mountain hideaway. Fly to Denver and drive up and back.
This:
Will get you this (click for the whole thing):
And get you this:
A New “Federal Cultural and Social Regulatory Agency”?
Soren Dayton has some interesting commentary at NextRight on the candidates’ technology policies and criticisms thereof.
A representative critic on the left engages in “unserious technology fetishism,” says Dayton. His foil is Joho the Blog, who takes after Senator McCain’s technology policy thusly:
There is nothing — nothing — in his policy statement that acknowledges that maybe the Net is also a new way we citizens are connecting with one another. The phrase “free speech” does not show up in it. The term “democracy” does not show up in it. What’s the opposite of visionary?
Joho wants government technology rhapsody, and Dayton has had enough:
Does he really want government policy to regulate the “cultural, social, and democratic” aspects of anything? Should these be the subject of tax policy? Which government agency? Should we make a new “Federal Cultural and Social Regulatory Agency?”
There’s something to this criticism. Too many folks see technology as the story, and they think government policy will write the next chapter.
No. People are the story: the people who invent, build, experiment with, and use technology to do interesting things, have fun, and make their lives better.
A policy that gets the government out of the way is a policy that’s true to technology and its role.
Julian Joins Ars Technica
I’m thrilled that Julian Sanchez will be joining Ars full-time, where he’ll be their Washington editor. It’s a real coup for Ars and will beef up their already-superb tech policy coverage.
You can check out his freelance output over the last year here. And really, if you’re a TLF reader, there’s no excuse for you not to be subscribed to Ars already.
The Wrong Way to Make Local Broadcasting Relevant Again
White women rapping. White women rapping traffic reports.
The horror. The horror.
More on the super awesome commenting system
As Berin noted in the last post, we have installed Disqus on the TLF as our new commenting system. There are a couple of things I’d like to highlight about the new system.
First, I want to underscore what Berin said: claim your comments! Why is this so important? First, this lets you and other users see a page with every other comment you’ve posted on the TLF. Second, people can choose to “follow” your comments and be notified when you post something. Finally, over at the TLF community page on Disqus there’s a “Top Commenters” leaderboard, and I know you want to be at the top. So don’t start from zero, claim all your existing comments.
Next I want to draw your attention to the two little arrows to the left of commenters’ avatars (photos). Most folks know what this means, but I’ll explain anyway for those who may not. This lets you vote on each comment to let the system know whether the comment is especially smart and interesting or boneheaded and unhelpful. Good comments (up arrow) move up to the top of the thread, and comments that receive negative votes (down arrow) move toward the bottom and eventually disappear if they get enough downgrades. If you’d like to sort comments by the order they were posted, and not by votes, you can click the “Options” button below and choose your sorting preference.
Last, I want to just mention a couple other cool features. If you post a comment and someone posts a reply to you, you’ll get an email notifying you of the fact. Pretty cool, but it gets better. To post a comment in reply to that reply you don’t have to visit the blog, you can just hit “reply” and write an email in response. Your email will get posted to the TLF blog as a reply comment. Also, Disqus makes a bunch of RSS feeds available. There’s a feed for all TLF comments, feeds for comments posted to a specific blog post, feeds for specific commenters, etc.
Anyhow, hope you folks like it. Now go claim your comments!
Alcohol Liberation 6: Denver or Bust
As we’re wont to do this time of year, many of your humble Technology Liberation Front contributors will be attending PFF’s annual Aspen Summit next week and we think many of you will too. So, we’ve decided to hold the sixth in our series of Alcohol Liberation Front get-togethers on Tuesday, 8/19, at 9 p.m. at the Sky Bar located at the base of the Aspen Mountain. Like we did last time, we’ll also be recording our contributors (and hopefully some of you) pontificating for our podcast, Tech Policy Weekly. So drop on by and have a drink with your favorite TLF bloggers.
Enough anti-iPhone rants… just get another phone!
Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”
Hmmm, let’s see… Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you’d think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.
OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.
And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I’ve got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone!
Continue reading this post »
I would send my kids to this summer camp…
… if I lived in the San Fran area. Gever Tulley’s “Tinkering School” encourages kids to play with pocket knives, power tools, and fire. It also requires that kids take apart various household appliances just to figure out how they work. And, my personal favorite — kids get to drive cars. (Our own Tim Lee will be tickled by the portion of the camp where the kids are encouraged to break the DMCA by learning how to rip and repackage music, although I can’t imagine they really need much encouragement from adults to do that!)
The reason I found this idea for a summer camp so refreshing when I heard about it on NPR this week is because I have spent the better part of the last few months signing endless liability waiver forms for my daughter’s summer camps, including the tennis camp she’s in right now. After all, don’t you know how dangerous flying tennis balls can be!! And my kids like to swim at a local pool that not only has endless waiver forms and rules, but also no high diving boards for fear of liability from scumbag trial lawyers.
We have become a nation of over-protective wusses. As Tulley points out in his great little lecture below on “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do,” we practically wrap our kids in bubble wrap before we send them out the door to play these days — assuming we let them out the door at all. It’s crazy. Our kids need to be experiencing life, the elements, and yes, a little danger. I have already started teaching my kids how to use power tools and they are both under the age of 8. One of my wussy yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails and saws and he thought I was nuts. But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest to God manual labor when they get older).
Anyway, enjoy this video. If this guy starts a camp on the East Coast, I am putting my kids on the waiting list.
Regulatory Models that Promote and Prevent Business Models (Or, Don’t *Only* Believe the Public Interest Hype!)
“Don’t Believe the Hype” — Chuck D, Public Enemy
De Tocqueville is famous for discussing the American way of enlightened self-interest, in which there are mixed elements of private and public goods involved. But when it comes to self-interested lobbying by the tech industry, it’s the words of an American rapper, not a French rapporteur, that I’d like to discuss.
“Innovation!” - “openness” - “jobs” - “choice.” There’s a lot of buzzword hype thrown out by IT companies. Policymakers hear these buzzwords all the time, which are usually connected to how certain regulatory polices can benefit the public interest the most.
So, what does it all mean? Well, a recently released paper of mine tells you absolutely nothing about which IT polices are better than others. That’s right, nada. Zilch. Zippo.
Instead, the paper — Understanding the IT Lobby: An Insider’s Guide — is an explanatory of business models in the Information Technology industry, and the public policies that can help or harm companies over their competitors. It’s not a Scott McClellan tell-all - rather it connects the dots between public policy rhetoric and licensing, service, and ad-based business models.
The gist: the pursuit of one public policy can disadvantage not just one company, but an entire business model. Continue reading this post »
Radio Propagation and Frequency
I’m finally reading Cato’s 2006 Policy Analysis on spectrum property rights. It’s got a lot of good information, but this sentence made me do a double-take:
In free space, radio waves steadily weaken in a very uniform, predictable way and at a rate that depends on frequency. In particular, the higher the frequency, the faster the waves weaken. In the real world—on the earth and in its environs—the situation is much more complicated, and radio links are affected by the earth itself, the atmosphere, and the intervening topography and natural and manmade objects such as foliage and buildings.
It’s been a while since I took physics, but I seem to recall (and Wikipedia seems to agree) that the strength of an electromagnetic wave falls with the square of the distance from the source. Indeed, this result seems to be compelled by the geometry of the situation and the conservation of energy. What am I missing?
Assuming I’m not just confused, one possibility is that they’re talking about propagation in the atmosphere rather than free space. It appears to be true that lower-frequency radio waves travel further along the surface of the Earth because they are affected more by the Earth’s atmosphere.
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