Miscellaneous

At an Apple Store a few weeks ago a clerk had to take down info from my driver’s license so that I could qualify for the education discount that previously only required that I flash my school ID. “Sorry, Sarbanes-Oxley,” she said. Really? “Yeah. Also, if you buy a custom Mac now, you have to have it shipped to your home; you can’t pick it up at the store anymore.” Whah?

Well, if you need one more reason to believe that the unintended consequences of SOX really suck (especially for Mac people, it seems), today comes word that SOX may force Apple to charge Mac users for a feature that would otherwise be free. See, Wi-Fi comes in three flavors: 802.11b, g, and n, each respectively faster. The “n” standard is still a draft, but it’s almost complete. Apple has been shipping computers with unadvertised “n” capability that they have left dormant. That is, you buy a notebook with what you think is just a “g” Wi-Fi card and three months later, when the standard gets ratified, Apple sends you a software update that unlocks it into an “n”. Voila, surprise instant upgrade and a happy customer.

Unfortunately, the word is that Apple will charge $4.99 for the upgrade, which is a suspiciously un-Apple thing to do. iLounge editor Jeremy Horwitz offers an explanation: “Because of the [SOX] Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn’t finished delivering the product at that point. Ridiculous.”

Update: Houman Shadab took this story and ran with it. He posts a great explanation (via iLounge) of how SOX accounting rules could result in the $5 charge. I’m posting it in full after the jump.

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I spent this morning reading and listening to King’s speeches, and it got me a thinkin’…what if King had the power of the Internet to help spread his message? King was a gifted orator, and his impassioned yet precisely measured delivery hits at the most visceral of levels. Just think of the YouTube possibilities….

One doesn’t have to have been alive in 1963 to understand King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s about fundamental human dignity. King was dreaming back to 1776, when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of certain unalienable rights – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. King was also dreaming back to 1863, when Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address proclaimed that our country would have a second chance at freedom, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

It’s enough to make a technology liberator think that compared to King’s fight for basic human dignity, squabbling over “technology freedoms” – copyright and patent reform, restrictive FCC rules, and even King’s estate’s copyright suit against CBS, etc. – pales by comparison. And it would be ridiculous to say otherwise. But technology can help disseminate information more quickly – information about race-related police beatings, government abuse of civil liberties, and other violations of peoples’ rights.

And as is often the case for those of us here at the Tech Liberation Front fighting for technology freedom, King was mainly dreaming of the future:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Freedom would have been ringing from Stone Mountain of Georgia and Lookout Mountain of Tennessee more quickly, I think, if the Web of today existed in the 1950s and 60s. But today’s Internet is helping to bring the fight for freedom globally, and technology has the possibility to spread King’s message in new ways to people in China and other authoritarian regimes.

Here’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

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This afternoon at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin spent an hour talking about his public policy priorities with Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association.

The only real news from the discussion was Martin’s disappointing announcement that the Commission would not be granting the cable industry’s request for relief from the set-top box “integration ban,” which prevents cable and telco video providers from providing set-top boxes with integrated security features. (My PFF colleague Tom Lenard penned an excellent essay on this silly regulatory industrial policy if you need more background). These rules just retard sensible market innovation and drive up consumer costs.

Chairman Martin also used the opportunity to put in another plug for a la carte regulation. “It would be positive for consumers” and “a good thing” he said. He cited the FCC’s second report on the matter which he commissioned and ignored the agency’s earlier report which came to opposite conclusion. (Details here).

On other issues, Chairman Martin waffled back-and-forth and didn’t seem to come to any definitive conclusions. For example:

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An excellent point from Joe at Techdirt:

We’ve argued, along with many others, that it’s a clear benefit to the overall economy and the tech industry in particular to have skilled and educated immigrant workers come over from abroad. Still, it’s always nice to have some data to back this assertion up, just to ward off accusations of being a wild idealist. A new study published by Duke University finds that a full quarter of all tech startups between the years 1995-2005 had a immigrant either as a founder or key executive. These companies, it’s estimated, employed a total of 450,000 workers, and had revenues of $52 billion. The mistake made by those who oppose immigration for economic reasons is that they think of the overall economic picture as being fixed. In other words, they look, say, at the number of jobs in existence today, and simply assume that if more people compete for them, then domestic workers will increasingly go unemployed, while overall wages will be depressed. But as studies like this show, there’s nothing fixed about the economy. There’s always room for new startups, while existing companies will hire more people, assuming that they’re talented and can add value. As the researchers note, the process of immigration is inherently ambitious, and going through it is a sign of one’s inclination to take risks. As more data like this becomes available, it’s going to be an increasingly difficult argument to make that an intelligent and skilled immigrant workers somehow drag down the economy.

I think it’s just nuts that we place so many restrictions on immigration by highly-skilled workers. One can make a plausible argument (one I don’t agree with, but plausible) that current limits on immigration of low-skilled workers are necessary to avoid placing undue burdens on taxpayers, given that low-skiled immigrants might collect more in social services than they pay in taxes. But this argument simply doesn’t apply to a guy with 20 years of experience as a computer programmer or a master’s degree in economics. Such workers are all but guaranteed to have well-paying jobs and contribute to the tax base in the short run. And in the long run, some of them will go on to create successful businesses that will employ Americans and create new wealth.

So I don’t know why we don’t let every single person who has an advanced degree or can demonstrate significant technical skills into the country. It’s good for the immigrants, it’s good for the companies that employ them, and in the long run it’s good for everyone.

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