Shane Harris of National Journal has a good article out on the telecom immunity question.
The “Blog Readability Test,” which claims to be able to determine “what level of education is necessary to understand your blog,” says that our Tech Liberation Front blog is just at the “High School” reading level.
I guess the engine behind this thing uses a Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. That test judges “readability” by examining word length and sentence length. Longer words and sentences decrease “readability.”
I’ve always thought those Flesch-Kincaid tests were silly, but then I would think than since I am the king of the run-on sentence. My TLF blogging colleague Jim Harper is constantly getting on me about that fact since, by contrast, he is the master of brevity. Harper sometimes uses fewer words per sentence than Dr. Suess or EE Cummings.
But I now feel vindicated in some strange way, Jim, because all my run-on sentences may be the only thing keeping our score up at the “High School’ level! Dammit man, start using really big words–like honorificabilitudinitatibus and floccinaucinihilipilification–and make your sentences unnecessarily long like this one, which I am deliberately typing without end in order to shamelessly boost our Blog Readability Test score to the “Genius level” and save us the collective shame of being as easy to read as the Huffington Post!
For those TLF readers living in the Washington, DC area and interested in copyright policy, there’s a symposium this upcoming Monday at GWU on the relationship between universities and copyright law. Entitled “Copyright and the University: An Academic Symposium” and sponsored by the Copyright Alliance, the cast of speakers include Marybeth Peters, Director, U.S Copyright Office, Peter Jaszi, Professor, Washington College of Law, American University, and economist Michael Einhorn, among others. Could be interesting, and it’s free.
The front page of the Wall Street Journal Marketplace section today gave me some hope that my work and the work of many other libertarian geeks has had an impact. The WSJ concluded that while there are dominant forces like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in the online advertising field, that the dynamism of the market allows for upstart companies to grab their share of the $16.9 billion online ad industry.
Pointing out that markets are dynamic and that dominance is at best temporary and always under threat from competitors or future competitors seems like economics 101, but the job nonetheless needs to be done. Our collective memory seems to resemble that of a goldfish as many in the media believe that Google is, always has been, and always will be the dominant force in online advertising.
Of course, if market dominance really perpetuated itself, MITS would dominate the PC market. After all, in 1975 the MITS Altair 8800 outsold its closest competitor, the IBM 5100, two to one. This despite the 5100’s advanced cassette tape drive!
One would expect that after 30 years, having started in such a dominant position, MITS would control the entire high-technology world. Yet, somehow MITS lost this market dominance. Even the blue monolith of IBM lost to an outside player, an upstart named Apple.
More on the WSJ piece by my colleague Ryan Radia at CEI’s OpenMarket.org.
Privacy is a dimension of goods and services just like any other – price, quality, customer service, “green” values, etc. As rarely as the consuming public demands privacy (alas), it’s worth pointing out when it does. I think the Facebook “beacon” brouhaha is a good example.
As I have yet to believe in the ‘phenomenon’ of social networking, I haven’t followed it carefully, but Facebook rolled out an ‘ingenious’ advertising program that – incidentally – was very privacy-invasive. After a week or two of unceasing derision from a number of quarters, the company has admitted error and backed away.
Now, I believe that this is the market functioning. The most persistent (and obnoxious!) critic of Facebook in my field of vision was ValleyWag. But MoveOn.org also petitioned the company, another iteration of market pressure – any such communication from the public implicitly threatens direct action against a company’s bottom line.
Others may believe that threatened complaints to the FTC prompted Facebook to see the error in its ways. These folks would accordingly credit government regulation and the threat of regulation.
It would be worth studying as an empirical matter what inputs Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was exposed to, and what most influenced him and his team. I bet the derision of commentators and his local, tech-industry peers was strongest. That’s the market working.
But I’d be happy to consider better surmise – or even actual evidence!
Two commentators tried to <a href= argue”>http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGQ4NGJjYjMwMTgzMzgwMmIxYjkyMTNkNWYxNjU2MzA=>argue that FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin has held true to conservative principles nowithstanding recent attempts to re-regulate the cable industry. Cesar V. Conda and Lawrence J. Spiwak posited that a “pro-entry/pro-consumer-welfare mandate” is the very “hallmark of economic conservatism.” This is a bizarre statement.
“Pro-entry” is a euphemism for competitor welfare, the antithesis of consumer welfare. Competitor welfare used to be the guiding principle of antitrust law – a legacy of the populist movement. The idea was that more competitors equaled stronger competition. It’s intuitively appealing, but it confuses quantity with quality and is wrong if the competitors are inefficient. Protection of inefficient competitors is a form of subsidy.
For example, the Clinton FCC tried to jumpstart competition in telecom with a “pro-entry” policy which allowed startups to lease facilities and services below cost from incumbent providers like AT&T and Verizon. You might think that’s no big deal, AT&T and Verizon can probably afford it. But the truth is they don’t absorb such losses, they pass them on to their remaining customers.
Though I haven’t studied the company’s involvement in REAL ID promotion, my sense is that identification technology provider Digimarc has staked a lot on the national ID law. So it is with some pleasure that I note the announcement by their Chairman and CEO, Bruce Davis, that the company will fail to turn a profit this year.
Davis said the 2008 outlook is also clouded by the uncertainty over federal regulations for an identification system known as Real ID. The CEO said the revenue effects from the completion of regulations may not occur until late 2008 or 2009.Actually, Bruce, the revenue affects from the completion of the regulations may not occur at all.
When I talk about identification issues, I often go to my wallet and show the “fake” ID that I carry with me. Several people have asked me over time where to get one.
I use this card whenever I get “bogus” ID requests – requests at hotels, office buildings, and such where they have no business seeing my ID and they don’t get anything from doing so.
The card has only been refused twice – once at the Sears Tower in Chicago, and once when I tried to use it at airport security. (Regulations there specify government-issued ID. I went through secondary search because I told them I didn’t have one.) Everywhere else, they are just checking to see that you are carrying a card. I haven’t tried to use the card for proof of age – most jursidictions require government-issued ID for this purpose.
The card I use has accurate information on it (except for my weight . . .), but it reflects my own assertions about myself, rather than any government’s or other card issuer’s. It’s very exciting to use this card the first few times. You really feel like you’re getting away with something. In fact, you’re just proving to yourself that “identity checks” are empty ritual.
More people should do this, so why don’t you join in the fun?
YouFinishIt.com is where I got mine. They have a nice array of cards that appear quite fancy and official looking. I got the “Standard Identification” card.
To my knowledge, none of their cards are knock-offs of any other issuers’ cards, and I don’t recommend using cards like this for any fraudulent purpose. I don’t think presenting an ID with inaccurate identifiers is fraudulent when the recipient does not rely on that information. It’s like tipping your hat to someone whom you don’t really mean to wish well. So, go for it!
Dear Reader,
Hello from 2027! The future has been going great. I really enjoy it, and I think you’ll like it here, too.
Things have improved a lot since 2007. We’ve generally grown more healthy, wealthy, free, and (I daresay) happy. There remain rough spots, of course: Climate regulation, zombie flu, the still-unfinished meteorite prevention belt . . . and the future didn’t work out too well for everyone. Some wonderful people didn’t make it, sad to say, while others remain in suspension. As they say in aircar ads, “your mileage may vary. ” All in all, though, the future remains very bright.
I remember back when I lived in 2007. I looked forward to the future, and foresaw pretty good stuff. That prediction turned out ok, but I have to admit that I missed a lot of details! Who would have guessed the 2015 Constitutional Convention? That one really caught me by surprise.
I don’t know the ins and outs of Wikipedian politics, but according to The Register, trouble is brewing at Jimmy Wales’s social knowledge project. The controversy surrounds the recently exposed mailing list of high-level wikipedians–the uber-editors of the encyclopedia–who have supposedly exercised their powers for the dark side.
To quell the outcry of any critics, I want to specify that I’m not one of the many wikipedia skeptics out there, but that may only be because I use Wikipedia in a very limited way. Typically, I use the wiki as a resource to refresh my knowledge of esoteric scientific terms when I run across them in articles. Just recently I looked up Apsis and Sidereal time when reading something about the recent downgrade of Pluto. But these entries are precisely the kind of thing that Wikipedia is best at. Most folks realize this and understand that the the more controversial the topic, the less reliable the Wikipedia entry.
But should we be concerned about the over-lords of wikipedia? In the short-term maybe, but in the long-term the mercurial market for web readership will render the ultimate verdict. Larry Sanger, a co-founder turned critic of wikipedia has founded Citizendium, a site that openly admits to expert editing of entries, in hopes to compete with the Wiki-wonder. Other wiki-challengers have cropped up including Helium, which also uses editors and uses an un-anonymous author model. Of course there’s the obviously conservative Conservapedia, for those who like their knowledge pre-biased. And we can’t forget about the old main-stays of the knowledge market like Britannica.com and Encarta.com, which serve up expert-written entries for free.
Competition will keep Wales’s Wiki honest, or it will fail to attract traffic and donations–left to slowly fade away in prominence and PageRank. But, since Wikipedia has only gained popularity in recent years, it’s safe to say that the public still finds wiki-wonderland useful, even if it’s not the democratic knowledge-workers paradise it was once made out to be.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
