In a Cato@Liberty post, “Cell Phones and Ingratitude,” David Boaz reproaches the New America Foundation for today’s complaint-fest, “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible”:
This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain. I was reading some of Deirdre McCloskey’s forthcoming book Bourgeois Dignity this week. She points out that the average person lived on the equivalent of $3 a day in 1800. Today there are six and a half times as many people, but the average person earns and consumes 10 times as much, far more than that in the most capitalist countries. And yet some people, most leftist intellectuals, continue to ignore what McCloskey calls “the gigantic gains from bourgeois dignity and liberty” and to denounce the markets, economic liberalization, and globalization that have liberated billions of people from eons of back-breaking labor.
This is an event I’m not going to attend. I mean, like, they’re not even serving food!
Mobile broadband speeds (at the “core” of wireless networks) are about to skyrocket—and revolutionize what we can do on-the-go online (at the “edge”). Consider four recent stories:
Networks: MobileCrunchnotes that Verizon will begin offering 4G mobile broadband service (using Long Term Evolution or LTE) “in up to 60 markets by mid-2012″—at an estimated 5-12 Mbps down and 2-5 Mbps up, LTE would be faster than most wired broadband service.
Devices: Sprint plans to launch its first 4G phone (using WiMax, a competing standard to LTE) this summer.
Applications: Google has finally released Google Earth for the Nexus One smartphone on T-Mobile, the first to run Google’s Android 2.1 operating system.
Content: In November, Google announced that YouTube would begin offering high-definition 1080p video, including on mobile devices.
While the Nexus One may be the first Android phone with a processor powerful enough to crunch the visual awesomeness that is Google Earth, such applications will still chug along on even the best of today’s 3G wireless networks. But combine the ongoing increases in mobile device processing power made possible by Moore’s Law with similar innovation in broadband infrastructure, and everything changes: You can run hugely data-intensive apps that require real-time streaming, from driving directions with all the rich imagery of Google Earth to mobile videoconferencing to virtual world experiences that rival today’s desktop versions to streaming 1080p high-definition video (3.7+ Mbps) to… well, if I knew, I’d be in Silicon Valley launching a next-gen mobile start-up!
This interconnection of infrastructure, devices and applications should remind us that broadband isn’t just about “big dumb pipes”—especially in the mobile environment, where bandwidth is far more scarce (even in 4G) due to spectrum constraints. Network congestion can spoil even the best devices on the best networks. Just ask users in New York City, where AT&T has apparently just stopped selling the iPhone online in order to try to relieve AT&T’s over-taxed network under the staggering bandwidth demands of Williamsburg hipsters, Latter-Day Beatniks from the Village, Chelsea boys, and Upper West Side Charlotte Yorks all streaming an infinite plethora of YouTube videos and so on. Continue reading →
The conclusions always secure an open-ended role for political bodies to govern private endeavors, and since the business parties are so dependent on political funding, they have to go along with it, cut off from envisioning an alternative approach.
The reports say–brace for it–that governments should fund nanotechnology and study nanotechnology’s risks; and that they should then regulate the technology’s undefined and unknown risks besides. This approach, so different from, say, the way software is produced and marketed, assures that there will never be a “Bill Gates of nanotechnology” (or in another sector, a Bill Gates of biotechnology, as CEI’s Fred Smith often puts it). If every single new advance requires FDA medical-device-style approvals, this is an industry that cannot begin to reach its potential. Continue reading →
I’ve written before about my dislike of “the cloud.”
The term implies that there aren’t specific actors doing specific things with data, which will tend to weaken people’s impression that they have rights and obligations when using or providing cloud services. We’re talking privacy problems.
When “cloud” services fail, the results can be widespread and significant. Think of cloud computing as a sibling of security monoculture.
TechDirt’s indefatigable Mike Masnick reminds us of this with a tweet today about hiccups in Google Calendar that may have prevented him getting on a conference call. He’s written once or twice about the cloud in terms of legal/discovery issues, privacy issues, and business/regulatory hurdles.
Remote computing is not going away, but it’s a fad that should fade over time. I think I hit the right notes in an earlier post where I said:
There will always be a place for remote storage and services—indeed, they will remain an important part of the mix—but I think that everyone should ultimately have their own storage and servers. (Hey, we did it with PCs! Why not?) Our thoroughly distributed computing, storage, and processing infrastructure should be backed up to—well, not the cloud—to specific, identifiable, legally liable and responsible service providers.
Over at Convergences I ponder a version of Mark Lemley’s argument to the effect that confusing patents tied up in administrative disputes are in effect the same as no patents. I write:
I recently read “Patenting Nanotechnology” by law prof Mark Lemley. Excitement about (and fear of) nanotechnology seems to be waning rather than waxing. The article nonetheless includes a curiously paradoxical line of argument about intellectual property that I think is worth setting out in detail.
Presently there is some concern that there are already too many overlapping nanotechnology patents, and/or too many nanotechnology patents that cover basic research concepts as opposed to actual useful products. A number of observers have warned that these patents could interfere with ongoing nanotechnology research. This is a familiar theme over the past couple decades of patent scholarship.
Of course, patents (with all their warts) were around during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, too, when a lot of important advances were made in technology. All kinds of things from sewing machines to radios were developed, and it all worked out okay in spite of much patent nonsense being involved.
Now, here is where Mark comes up with a twist on the familiar arguments. To help make his paper about nanotechnology more interesting, he seems to want to build up the case that nanotechnology is different from earlier technologies, so that the patent system might cause problems for nano that they did not cause for earlier technologies. So he goes through each earlier technology in some detail, and argues that in each case, in effect, for each of these key earlier technologies, patent protection was in effect non-existent. In the case of sewing machines, for example, the patents were tied up in litigation; in the case of radio, WWI intervened and the patents were taken over by the government.
Therefore, he argues, nanotechnology will be the first important technology that is in effect actually protected by patents. He goes on to conclude that there is no reason to worry about this yet. This conclusion seems sensible enough. So… what?
With his argument that previous key technologies were in effect devoid of patent protection as a practical measure, even though they were patented, well, he’s created a mythical monster, the worm who eats his own tail. I don’t think he fully realizes this, so I will play with the idea a little bit.
For the results of my exploration, kindly visit Convergences.
Originally published in Space News on January 11, 2010
In December, Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, only the third sitting U.S. president to win—and the fourth ever. The award was announced before Obama had finished eight months in office. Indeed, the February Feb. 1, 2009, nomination deadline passed just 13 days after his inauguration.
Was there something we missed in that brief span that could match Woodrow Wilson’s presiding over the settlement of World War I, or the founding of the League of Nations? Or Teddy Roosevelt’s opening of the International Court of Arbitration and ending Japan’s bloody 1905 war with Russia? Or Jimmy Carter’s three decades of peace-making and development work? Has Obama already done more to abolish nuclear weapons than President Ronald Reagan, whose anti-nuclear crusade and actual warhead reductions were never celebrated with a Peace Prize?
There is another president who should have received the Prize long ago for stabilizing a world teetering on the brink of nuclear war. After leading Allied forces to victory over Nazi Germany, Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated a cease-fire to Harry Truman’s war in Korea, resisted calls for American intervention in Vietnam, and single-handedly defused the 1956 Suez Crisis. His warnings about the “military-industrial complex” did more to check the growth of the national security state than all past or future peace marches combined.
But only recently has Eisenhower’s greatest achievement become clear: ensuring the right to peaceful uses of outer space.
Just as maritime commerce has thrived on “freedom of the high seas” for centuries, “freedom of space” has allowed the development of a $200 billion satellite industry that has interconnected the globe in a web of voice, video and data, and provided critical weather and climate monitoring. By ensuring that nations cannot block access to space with territorial claims, international law has prevented governments from stifling the birth of a truly spacefaring civilization. Continue reading →
If this robotic girlfriend—unveiled last weekend at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and costing $7-9k—actually goes mainstream, I’ll bet it’s only a matter of time before we see some state lawmaker somewhere propose to ban the toys. The FCC well, no doubt, follow suit, by demanding the incorporation of parental control tools into the devices so Junior doesn’t have his way with Ms. Roxxxy (or her soon-to-be-released male counterpart, Rocky) while Mom and Dad are out at NASCAR the opera.
Laugh if you will, but if Moore’s Law holds true, such robots will become smarter, cheaper, and probably sexier as microchips continue to plummet in price and meaningful artificial intelligence becomes marketplace reality. Move over, Roomba, Roxxxy has arrived—and she ain’t no Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons! Telegraph reports that there’s a whole book about this:
In a 2007 book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” British chess player and artificial intelligence expert David Levy argues that robots will become significant sexual partners for humans, answering needs that other people are unable or unwilling to satisfy.
But the most interesting part of the telegraph article is creator Douglas Hines’s motivation:
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever.
This sounds an awful lot like the plot of Caprica, the new SyFi television series, a prequel set 58 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, the cult phenomenon that even seduced hardened TV-refusenik like me. Continue reading →
I was on CNBC today live from the floor of the CES show in Vegas debating the question of whether allowing Internet access in cars and other in-vehicle digital technologies was a good idea. I was up against Nicholas Ashford, an MIT technology & law professor. In-vehicle communications and entertainment technologies are a major theme of this year’s show, especially with Ford’s announcement of some very cool new technologies.
I argued that education, not regulation, was the answer. We should educate drivers about safe and sensible use of in-vehicle technologies. We should also encourage the technology providers to continue to give us more voice-activated tools so we can interact with these technologies safely. Ford’s new systems, for example, have some very impressive voice-activated features. Finally, our law enforcement officials should continue to enforce “distracted driver” laws that penalize drivers who are a threat to others for any reason. That is the better approach compared to trying to ban these technologies.
This ChangeWave consumer survey doesn’t include market share numbers, but does convey just how fierce competition has become between the five leading mobile operating systems and among top device manufacturers. The best chart is this one, which shows just how rapidly Google’s android operating system is “disrupting” the market:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.