Here’s something cool.
My Web site, WashingtonWatch.com, now has a widget that will allow you to display the voting of site visitors on particular bills.
For example, here’s the tally on H.R. 2821, The Television Freedom Act of 2007:
And here’s one of our favorite bills, H.R. 3773, The RESTORE Act of 2007, which amends the FISA law, possibly giving immunity to telecom companies that broke the law:
As I write this, it has more votes in favor than against. What’s up with you, America?
Get yourself and your neighbors involved, people.
I felt like I was reading a story from the future when I read this lead from a news article about a Microsoft exec. pleading why desktop software is still relevant:
A top Microsoft executive defended desktop application software, the
source of the company’s revenue for three decades, arguing on Tuesday
that even services-based companies such as Google still need it.
But then I just realized that I’m old, and time and the competitive software marketplace has moved quickly the past few years.
Nevertheless, I’m so intrigued by all the new business models that are vying for both the business customer and consumers like you and me that I’m currently writing a paper on it. My public policy bent is nuanced, but relevant: do new business models (not a single technology, not a specific technology, but a particular way of doing business like licensing, services, ad-based) need a regulatory helping hand to compete? I’m talking about interoperability mandates, spectrum auction rules, standards…you get the drift. Of course, I’m going to have to say that even if you can think of a reason for antitrust regulation, FCC intervention, etc., there are countervailing reasons against government regulation that are likely more compelling. Back to paper writing….
I’d like to invite TLF readers to a lunch panel discussion next Tuesday at noon on copyright law and space shifting – and for the geek in you, live demonstrations of the Slingbox, Apple TV, and a Windows Media Center tied to the XBox 360.
Space shifting
includes such activities as copying music from a CD to an MP3 file for use on a
portable player or watching your local television broadcast on a computer
located outside your home. Essentially it’s using digital content on a device other than
the one for which it was originally intended. We’ll discuss space
shifting, its legal implications (including how/if litigation between wary parties can be avoided) and suggestions for continued success in
bringing consumers cool stuff.
The
lunch discussion will feature Morgan Reed and Debbie Rose of ACT (Debbie was on last week’s TLF podcast about file sharing), Gigi
Sohn of Public Knowledge, and Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance.
Details: 12:00 noon, Tuesday, October 23,
2007, B340 House Rayburn. email or RSVP to
mmoskal at actonline dot org
PJ Doland, the serial entrepreneur who’s graciously hosted this site for the last three years, recently launched his latest effort, Shouting Match. It’s an aggregator designed to capture the trends in the tech blogosphere. Unlike TechMeme, which gives you an undifferentiated blizzard of links, Shouting Mat.ch uses on a carefully selected list of the best tech blogs, and includes a handy Ajaxy excerpt widget so you can see what you’re getting before you click through to view the link.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I’ve found it a useful way to keep tabs on the conversation in the tech blogosphere. I think you will too. It includes three channels: tech, politics, and lifehack. I think that last one is for the sort of people who obsess over what kind of containers to buy for their paper clips.
You thought the center of high tech was the computer industry. Think again:
I ask him about why five blades were better than one or four, and he clicks on a short animated film that shows that the key area in close and comfortable shaving was the elasticity of our skin. If one accepts that two blades in a razor are better than one – another film shows that after the first blade, the hair tries to retract back into the skin, but the second blade catches it before it does – then the critical factor is skin bulge between the blades. Five blades will give you a closer shave (ie cut deeper and deeper into the skin), but only if the cutting surfaces have precisely the correct spacing between them. And after spacing, there is the tricky issue of clogging. ‘Some of my friends and family do really think that I came to work one day and just added a blade,’ Powell says. ‘But walk around and I challenge you to find the Department of More Blades. It’s just not here.’
Of course, like every important development, The Onion was there first.
Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, had an excellent editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal commenting on the silly lawsuit that a New York woman has filed against Apple for supposedly violating price discrimination laws when the price of the iPhone dropped by $200 bucks. Apparently, this woman believes she is the victim of some sort of grave cosmic injustice because she shelled out $600 clams to be an early adopter, only to see the lesser mortals among us get their iPhones for $400 just a few months later.
Karlgaard points out that this is just the way a world governed by Moore’s Law works:
What’s going on here? Did Mr. Jobs gouge early technology adopters just for a couple extra (billion) bucks? I don’t think so. After a long streak of successes, Mr. Jobs and Apple — whose stock is up more than 20-fold since 2002 — have collided with two forces stronger than they are: One is the cheap revolution; the other is the global economy. Together they forced Apple to drop the price of the iPhone and offend its geeky customer base.
To illustrate the power of “the cheap revolution” in action within our new digital economy, Karlgaard provides this wonderful example:
Continue reading →
It’s hard to believe that Slashdot is turning 10 this month. Slashdot has been a fixture of the tech blogosphere since I started reading tech news online in 1998. I just barely missed getting a 4-digit Slashdot ID, and I wasted enough time reading Slashdot during college that I was one of the approximately 400 people selected to be a moderator during the site’s first experiment with mass comment moderation.
The site is now far larger and more influential in absolute terms, but I feel like it’s grown steadily less influential in relative terms, as the rest of the tech blogosphere has grown even faster. I also think it’s aged quite well, probably because Rob Malda has been at the helm since the beginning. (You’ve got to be a pretty devoted to a website to propose to your girlfriend on it.) Probably the biggest improvement to the site was when they stopped running Jon Katz’s clueless long-winded screeds. Since he left, Slashdot seems to have realized that political commentary isn’t really their strong suit and stuck to their core competence of tech news.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Slashdot was the first tech news blog, which makes this the 10-year anniversary of the tech blogosphere.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.