Month: January 2003

The Wisdom of Al Sharpton

Al Sharpton says: “Democratic leadership is treating minority voters like their mistresses. We are good enough to have a little fun with around election time, but we are not good enough to meet mama and daddy.” That’s pretty bad, but the truth is even worse. Remember when Al Gore and Bill Bradley had that little … Continue reading “The Wisdom of Al Sharpton”

Al Sharpton says:

“Democratic leadership is treating minority voters like their mistresses. We are good enough to have a little fun with around election time, but we are not good enough to meet mama and daddy.”

That’s pretty bad, but the truth is even worse. Remember when Al Gore and Bill Bradley had that little debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem during the last election, when they tried to outbid each other with social program spending to the exclusion of all other issues?

[Gore’s] hypocrisy on the subject of poverty is amazing in that he has repeatedly promised to help those left behind by our so-called ?booming economy? while, at the same time, praising the horrors that welfare reform brought to the children in the denial of health insurance for the poor and the elimination of any hope for further education or training for their single mothers who suddenly were forced to become workfare participants.

Treating blacks like mistresses instead of welfare whores would be a step up for Democrats.

Software-defined radio

Intel made a presentation of reconfigurable radio architecture to a forum in the Valley: The processors are not bused, but rather are connected through a mesh that emphasizes nearest-neighbor relationships. This both offers a natural implementation for data flow organizations and reduces the power and signal integrity issues that come with long interconnect lines. The … Continue reading “Software-defined radio”

Intel made a presentation of reconfigurable radio architecture to a forum in the Valley:

The processors are not bused, but rather are connected through a mesh that emphasizes nearest-neighbor relationships. This both offers a natural implementation for data flow organizations and reduces the power and signal integrity issues that come with long interconnect lines.

The mesh of processors is terminated on two sides by an array of I/O engines, with one array serving as an input device and the other serving as output. In front of the input processors resides a switchable array of analog front-ends — and, presumably, antennas — allowing the entire system to hop gracefully between frequency bands. Different analog front-ends provide different pre-filtering and signal capture/conversion. Behind the output array lives a collection of various media-access controller (MAC) devices.

Very cool. Expensive and complicated, but cool.

End of the Bloggies

Michele, editor of a small victory, has withdrawn from the rigged and tainted Bloggie Awards: There’s significant evidence that the voting is rigged. Judges themselves have stepped forward to say they got together with other judges to decide on who in their circle should win. One judge said that she didn’t bother to read the … Continue reading “End of the Bloggies”

Michele, editor of a small victory, has withdrawn from the rigged and tainted Bloggie Awards:

There’s significant evidence that the voting is rigged. Judges themselves have stepped forward to say they got together with other judges to decide on who in their circle should win. One judge said that she didn’t bother to read the blogs she didn’t know and just voted for the ones she read regularly.

…

I am withdrawing my name from the ballots. They can give my place to someone else, or just leave it blank. I don’t care.

I’m totally impressed, and feel like she qualifies for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Integrity. If the others who were nominated who weren’t part of the circle jerk will kindly follow Michele’s lead, we can uncover the bad guys from who’s left.

The most glaring example of the unsavory nature of this competition can be seen by looking at the Lifetime Achievement Award. In the entire history of the blog, there have been exactly two people who qualify for this kind of recognition, Evan Williams (the Blogger guy) and Dave Winer, the longest running blogger, the original quality blogware producer, and the architect of the XML/RPC standard. Evan was awarded his sometime in the past, but Dave (whose contribution is actually greater than Evan’s) didn’t even make the finals, against such do-nothings as Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. Give me a break.

And any blog award that can’t find a nomination for Instapundit is ridiculous on its face.

I don’t say this because either of these guys is my buddy; I’ve never met them, and I trash both of them on a regular basis. But facts are facts.

Out-of-Berkeley Experience

Mean Mr. Mustard says: I had what I suppose amounts to an “out-of-Berkeley” experience today. He found a course that equates Marxism with Fascism, which is common sense in the real world, but this one is taught at Berkeley. Long but worth reading.

Mean Mr. Mustard says:

I had what I suppose amounts to an “out-of-Berkeley” experience today.

He found a course that equates Marxism with Fascism, which is common sense in the real world, but this one is taught at Berkeley. Long but worth reading.

Boycotting the Bloggies

Amish Tech Support isn’t pleased with this year’s Bloggies, and neither am I, so let’s Boycott the Bloggies: So, what do I think? Well, first off, I think I should have just taken my nomination form, greased it with Vaseline, and shoved it up my ass for all the good it did. In a way, … Continue reading “Boycotting the Bloggies”

Amish Tech Support isn’t pleased with this year’s Bloggies, and neither am I, so let’s Boycott the Bloggies:

So, what do I think? Well, first off, I think I should have just taken my nomination form, greased it with Vaseline, and shoved it up my ass for all the good it did. In a way, this looks like a grassroots groundswell reaction against the big folks: Vodka, InstaPundit, Steven Den Beste, James Lileks. Little Green Footballs managed a political, but if mainstream even brushed against you, kiss accolades goodbye.

Yup. Awards for blogs are silly in concept, but if somebody is going to hold himself out as running an awards competition, he really has to do a better job than the bloggie people do. Their categories are silly (“Best GLBT Blog”), their nominations don’t fit their categories (Fark is a political blog? News to me), and most of the blogs that are recognized leaders, like Lawrence says, are omitted.

I really wish that somebody with the time and energy to make a go of it would run a blog awards competition with a rational nomination process, and that the people who deserve to be considered for a genuine award competition would kindly boycott the Bloggies and go for this new award instead. Call it BlogStars, since the name Bloggie is already taken by these amateurs, and set up some categories that make sense, such as best political content, best news content, best regional blog, graphic design, style (not limited to graphics), humor, insight and analysis of current events, technology, arts and literature, movies, weirdest personal diary, Mondo Bizarro, Knee-Jerk Liberal, Legal content, Academic content, that sort of thing: categories that don’t cubbyhole a writer into one and only one area, and categories that people care about instead of Best Latin American blog.

In the meanwhile, I’m boycotting the Bloggies.

UPDATE: Brian the 646 Guy was one of the randomly-selected 50 nominators who whittled the nominees’ list down to the final 4 in each category, and he’s pissed too. Here’s the list of nominees they were given, and it’s short several blogs I know were nominated.

UPDATE: Anonoblogger Centrs explained how the contest was rigged by block voting, but now doesn’t want to be quoted and has deleted her post, as a good caring person should when they’ve said too much. Here are the salient portions, posted before centrs got the call:

“the main problem? it’s rigged. the numbers are grossly skewed. i like nikolai as a person and i know that his intentions are good, but there is just no objective, scientific way for ballots to be cast. this is not even nikolai’s fault. he’s a nice enough person to trust other people to be nice too. unfortunately, they just aren’t…

…i also know that the email padding and nomination committee conspiracy is absolutely true.

for those of you with great weblogs and awesome designs that thought you might be nominated, you didn’t have a chance. you really didn’t, so don’t take it personally…

…i think we need to clarify that nikolai asked people to help him and only a handful responded. of that handful, 75% are of a group that agreed together in advance on how they would vote, actual ballots be damned. they were proud of it, bragged about it and had a good laugh at the fact that they figured out how to beat the system. a system designed by a teenager who was just trying to have some fun. it is misleading to say you only voted once when that vote carried so much weight.”

Oddly, centrs pulled the post out of concern that it was linked by “homophobic” sites, but one of the chief complainers is a gay community webzine, East West, who noticed that one of the finalists for GLBT blog is, you guessed it, straight:

A special note on this category: One of the nominees is not like the others, Min Jung Kim, put forward by some ignorant and misguided Texans as well as herself is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, but that didn’t stop her, according to Nikolai, from pointing out a “loophole”, whatever that means, that allowed for her inclusion. By this very logic East West should be nominated for best Canadian because we eat maple syrup, love Canada, and have friends who live there. Wouldn’t that have been funny? No, not really.

You find your bigotry where you want, because East-West has some unkind things to say about Andrew Sullivan’s sexual orientation (“That Gay Jackass”, to be precise).

Meanwhile, I’ve received, from Mr. Nolan, a list of the e-mail addresses of the 50 who made the final picks, and was not surprised to see that a third were free accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape.

The ultimate issue here is that a group of people, [apparently from Dallas], decided to rig the contest, and the procedures set up by young Nickolai made it real easy for them to pull it off. You have to wonder about people willing to go to that much trouble to win a Wil Wheaton award.

ANOTHER UPDATE: centrs clarifies in the comments that she’s not an anonoblogger, identifies herself, and on her blog posts a detailed run-down on the cheating and the reactions to its disclosure.

She answers the question of why people would be willing to expend so much energy on this particularly lame award competition: they’re Texans. Living out there under that ferocious sun, cut off from civilization, and surrounded by ignorance, Texans are known to go loco from time to time. I know, I used to be one.

My advice to Texans who can read: get out while you still have a chance.

Underlying issues in Eldred

Writing on the American Open Technology Consortium blog, Doc Seals analyzes the Eldred case in terms of legal, political, and metaphorical impact: The third is metaphorical. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. … Continue reading “Underlying issues in Eldred”

Writing on the American Open Technology Consortium blog, Doc Seals analyzes the Eldred case in terms of legal, political, and metaphorical impact:

The third is metaphorical. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court. Here’s how Richard Bennett puts it:

The issue here isn’t enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the conservative justices who sided with the majority is more likely the protection of property rights. In order to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright.

Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

While it’s always nice to see yourself quoted, I think this analysis is overly complex. Copyright law is simply a Congressional prerogative, according to the clear language of the Constitution. It’s an area of law in which there has been very little litigation, so case law must defer to the black-letter law emanating from Washington unless or until there’s a gross overstepping of authority in the part of Congress, and simply extending the term from n years to n + 20 doesn’t hit that mark.

The proper venue for modification of copyright law is Congress, not the courts, and it’s more than a little interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the effort spent on the Eldred case had been instead directed to lobbying Congress for the last four years.

In some sense, Hollywood benefits from a robust public domain at least as much – and probably more – than the public, as has been noted in many of the denunciations of the apparent hypocrisy of Disney building its empire largely on the backs of public domain stories.

A compromise that keeps the public domain growing by the absorption of works of little commercial value while protecting Mickey Mouse for the Disney Corp. isn’t a hard thing to work out politically, and that’s the direction that public domain advocates should be headed, according to the dissenting opinions in Eldred in particular.

The irony of this case is that the public domain advocates, to a man strong believers in democracy, chose to press the issue before the least democratic branch of government when the path to success leads through the most democratic branch, the legislative. But lobbying is a messy business, and lawsuits are crisp, clear, and final.

The Weekly Dick

Matt Welch has the 411 on his newspaper deal with Dick Riordan; it’s a weekly, not a daily as we’d previously thought. The cast of writers, and the ad fare, will be upscale from the coffee-house weeklies. Sounds like a noble venture, a likely success, and a welcome addition to the southland media scene.

Matt Welch has the 411 on his newspaper deal with Dick Riordan; it’s a weekly, not a daily as we’d previously thought. The cast of writers, and the ad fare, will be upscale from the coffee-house weeklies. Sounds like a noble venture, a likely success, and a welcome addition to the southland media scene.

Hannibal Lichter eats Iain Murray’s liver

The Corner on National Review Online has all the details on the cannibalism at STATS, the devils who fired Iain Murray for blogging. I won’t be subscribing to the STATS newsletter for $25/yr, and I hope no one else does either.

The Corner on National Review Online has all the details on the cannibalism at STATS, the devils who fired Iain Murray for blogging.

I won’t be subscribing to the STATS newsletter for $25/yr, and I hope no one else does either.

Open Spectrum

David Weinberger, David Reed, and others are on a kick to deregulate the airwaves in order to achieve greater democracy, invite the audience into the conversation, and save the world. One of the ideas in Framing Open Spectrum is on the border of rationality, although it’s awfully hard to tease it out of the rat’s … Continue reading “Open Spectrum”

David Weinberger, David Reed, and others are on a kick to deregulate the airwaves in order to achieve greater democracy, invite the audience into the conversation, and save the world. One of the ideas in Framing Open Spectrum is on the border of rationality, although it’s awfully hard to tease it out of the rat’s nest of 60s idealism in which it’s housed: frequency-agile digital radios are capable of selecting clean portions of local spectrum, and don’t need quite all of the old-fashioned single use management that’s been the FCC’s business for lo these many years. There are still practical limits to frequency-hunting, however, and most of them have to do with the time it takes to discover clean spectrum, the responsiveness of agile radios to occasional interference, and the different needs of infrastructure devices (access points) and mobile devices.

I wouldn’t shut down the FCC just yet, but there is an argument to be made for more flexible spectrum policies, and the FCC is already on to it.

But at the same time, the ability of smart radios to recognize sources of interference and route around them to different frequencies isn’t as robust in contemporary systems such as WiFi as it needs to be in order for self-managed spectrum to work, with or without the FCC. Here’s a trivial example: A WiFi mobile system can only use the frequency selected by its Access Point. But it may find itself in a position where it can see two Access Points operating at the same frequency who can’t see each other because they’re too far apart (but the mobile node is in the middle, where the signals overlap). WiFi doesn’t provide a hook for the mobile node to tell its Access Point to shift to a different channel because of the interference it sees. So the system has a problem.

It’s a solvable problem, but not by the control procedures invented to deal with the environment assumed by WiFi’s designers when the standards were created. And if WiFi needs enhancement to work in a smart radio environment, what do you suppose has to be done to all the other RF protocols that are even more rudimentary than WiFi?

Right, we’re not there yet.

Link via Dan Gillmor.