Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Since ads for Ben Stein’s “Intelligent Design” movie is on heavy rotation over on the right-hand side of the page, now seems like a good time to reiterate that most of the ads on this site are automatically placed by Google, and shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement by TLF or any of its contributors. Ron Bailey’s take on Expelled seems pretty spot-on to me.
Pawlenty has threatened to veto a major transportation bill because it includes language that would hamper Minnesota’s ability to comply with the [REAL ID Act].
Threat Level has been providing gavel-to-gavel coverage of the murder trial of Linux developer Hans Reiser, who is accused of killing his wife. His defense attorney’s argument is that Reiser is an jerk, but being an jerk doesn’t make you a murderer:
Hans and Nina met in 1998, in Russia, when he was overseas hiring programmers. He picked her out of a mail-order bride catalog, where she was advertised as “5279 Nina.” They married the following year after she became pregnant with their first of two children.
DuBois, as he displayed for jurors Nina Reiser’s bride advertisement, said she moved to divorce him five years later, just as she became a U.S. citizen.
“She had an ulterior motive to marry Hans,” DuBois said.
“It couldn’t have been out of love that she married Hans Reiser,” DuBois said. “I can’t see anybody loving Hans Reiser.”
“He has to be one of the least attractive people you can imagine,” DuBois continued. “And she’s a doll.”
Sounds like a charming guy. I feel really sorry for his two kids.
What a great letter Kurt Denke, president of Blue Jeans Cable, has written in response to a cease and desist from Monster Cable.
I don’t know anything about the merits, but Denke seems to, and some lawyer for Monster surely feels like an ass right now as the PR department, and perhaps even people from parts of the business actually producing product and revenue, are asking what the hell is going on.
I, for one, have purchased my last Monster product (I have indeed bought Monster stuff in the past), and will now buy from Blue Jeans Cable. I recommend the same to you.
I foolishly neglected to do my homework, and unfortunately, the 18th St. Lounge is closed on Monday afternoons. So ALF 5 will be at Science Club instead. Still April 21, still 5:30 to 7:30. Hope to see you there.
IPI’s Third Annual World Intellectual Property Day Event will feature panels on the latest content-conduit problem-solving (Digital Technologies: Emerging Challenges, Evolving Strategies with Mitch Bainwol of the RIAA, Dan Glickman of the MPAA, and Steve Largent of the Wireless Association).
The next considers the benefits and costs of IP (Social and Economic Benefits of IP: Who Wins? Who Loses? with Lien Verbauwhede Koglin of WIPO, Michael A. Gollin of Venable LLP and Public Interest Intellectual Property Advocates (PIIPA) and Mohit Mehrotra of Excel Life Sciences).
We move on to cover the valuation and trade of intellectual capital (The Intellectual Property Marketplace: The Role of IP Valuation & Tech Transfer with Usha Balakrishnan of Collaborative Social Responsibility Solutions, Abha Divine of Techquity, and Robert Cresanti of Ocean Tomo).
The last panel before lunch covers counterfeiting and enforcement (Combating (Dangerous) Counterfeits: How Countries are Policing their Borders) with Michael M. DuBose of the U.S. Department of Justice, Nicholas J. Smith of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and
Charles Williams of Cisco).
Then, lunch!
EVENT DETAILS:
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Reserve Officers Association (ROA) Headquarters Minuteman Memorial Building
Minuteman Ballroom, 5th Floor
One Constitution Ave NE, Washington DC 20002
To register, kindly contact Erin Humiston at erin@ipi.org
Julian has a good write-up of this weekend’s dust-up between the DC libertarian crowd and the DC Park Police. My friend Brooke got arrested because she had the nerve to ask a police officer to explain himself, which makes her guilty of “interfering with an agency function.”
The park police have yet to drop the charges, and seem undeterred by the impending PR fiasco. We’ll all be doing our best to make them look at stupid as possible in the meantime.
Mike is completely right. It’s absurd that we let so few highly skilled workers into the US. I don’t really have anything to add to his excellent points, but I was amused by some of the comments in that post. First a good example of the kinds of problems the low H1-B cap creates:
My wife and I are highly skilled British workers (me in IT and my Wife in Microbiology). We chose to emigrate to Australia over the US because of this short-sighted, protectionist attitude. Australia has a points system that allows anyone in if they meet the point’s target, dependant on their profession. The points awarded to each industry and profession is varied according to the economic demand. Trying to plan a move to the States wasn’t worth the hassle of waiting for a ‘lottery’ visa application.
I now earn more than many Australians because they have jobs that need done and not enough people to do them. This is partly to a fast growing economy (no recession here) and an aging population where people are retiring.
And this guy gets the award for the biggest non-sequitur of the discussion:
Why is the tech industry so special? In every other industry, a lack of skilled workers results in companies paying HIGHER SALARIES to draw those skilled workers in. That causes people to flood schools seeking education for those areas so that they can graduate and fill the industry needs, eventually resulting in a somewhat lower salary overall, because the demand and supply are more even. THAT is capitalism. THAT is how it has always been.
But somehow when it comes to the tech industry, the answer isn’t related to supply and demand. When it comes to the tech industry, they artificially bend supply and demand to the corporate side’s favor by importing extra supply.
The guy above who says that he moved to AUS instead of the US because of our “protectionism” (what the hell are you talking about? the problem is a LACK of protectionism) has some deeply flawed logic. If he moved to the US, he wouldn’t keep that fantastic salary he’s getting in AUS right now, because he would be competing with the flood of imported labor.
I hope I don’t have to point out the numerous illogical aspects of this argument. But one of the things I find striking about this is the implicit xenophobia on display. Because of course, the British guy is probably white and speaks impeccable English, so he’s obviously not part of the problem. It’s those other people, that menacing “flood of imported labor” that we need to be worried about. It’s apparently lost on him that Indian, Chinese, and Korean workers are human beings who need to support their families just as much as British people do.
A final point to be made is that the tech sector isn’t special. For decades, we’ve been dealing with job losses in the manufacturing sector. Wages have been depressed somewhat by both free trade agreements and high levels of immigration, legal and otherwise. Economists have pointed out, correctly, that these changes benefit consumers by allowing companies to produce better products at lower prices. Precisely the same argument applies to the tech sector, and it’s disappointing to see my fellow geeks stoop to demagoguery and thinly disguised xenophobia when it comes to facing competition in their own industry.
This essay by Josh Chasin over at the MediaPost’s Metrics Insider Blog is the best piece I’ve read on behavioral marketing & privacy in a long time. I like this analogy, in particular:
Let’s say you are a tall, dashing, smartly dressed Chief Research Officer at a major Internet audience measurement company, and you walk into Nordstrom’s. A sales clerk you recognize comes up to you and says, “Hey, your wife’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and we just got in those sweaters she likes. Should I put a couple of them away for you in her size and color?” Now let me ask you. Does this hypothetical Chief Research Officer perceive this to be: (a) an egregious violation of his privacy, causing him to immediately rush home and write his state assemblyman; or (b) another example of Nordstrom’s world-class customer service? If you answered (b), then you’re tracking with me so far.
So how come if this exact same thing happens on the other side of the screen, it stops being outstanding customer service and turns into a violation of privacy?
Great question! And yet some over-zealous privacy advocates make this stuff out to be the coming endtimes and call for comprehensive regulation using scare tactics and twisted logic, as Chasin notes:
If Big Brother barges into your home at midnight and takes you away because someone doesn’t like the books you’ve been reading, that’s an invasion of your privacy (and way worse.) But if the ads you see on Yahoo are increasingly relevant to your life, that’s not an invasion of privacy. That’s just the digital version of that nice lady at Nordstrom’s. Let’s not confuse the two.
Exactly.
I have generally agreed with Clay Shirky (and Tim) that micropayments either don’t work very well or just aren’t needed given other pricing options / business models. But my eBay activity over the past few years has made me reconsider. I was going back through some of my past eBay purchases tonight and leaving feedback and I realized that I have made dozens of micropayments in recent months for all sorts of nonsense (stickers, posters, small car parts, Legos for my kids, magazines, and much more). Most of these items are just a few bucks, and many don’t even break the 99-cent threshold. I think that qualifies as micropayment material. And certainly I am not the only one engaged in such micro-transactions because there are countless items on eBay for a couple of bucks or less.
Of course, just because micropayments and PayPal work marvelously in the context of the used junk and trinkets we find on eBay, that does not necessarily mean they will work as effectively for many forms of media content. Advertising or flat user fees are probably still preferable since consumers don’t like the hassles associated with micropayments. Still, they seem to be working fine on eBay, so it would be wrong to claim that they never work online.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
