Year: 2004

TotSF: The Wireless Circle Jerk

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Sascha Meinrath has this blog posting on how Motorola’s acquisition of MeshNetworks is a prime example of corporate welfare gone wild. Of course, in D.C., we call this “the circle of life”. Taxpayers, however, may see it as the Circle of Jerk.

It is unclear to me if Motorola, one of the fiercest foes of expanding unlicensed access, is simply trying to take out a competitor or hedge a bet. I do not expect their filings to change — in fact,I expect them to leverage MeshNetworks as a means of undermining manufacturing comments from folks like Tropos. OTOH, FCC staff are not stupid, and understand how industry filings work.

Stay tuned . . .

TotSF: I agree with the American Conservative Union

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Well, on one thing anyway. ACU — one of the backbones of the conservative movement, is opposing attempts by Congress to pass yet another stupid bill on copyright enforcement. Details in this Wired article. The quote that caught my eye was:

“’It’s just plain wrong to make the Department of Justice Hollywood’s law firm,’ said Stacie Rumenap, ACU’s deputy director.”

Couldn’t agree with them more.

Stay tuned . . .

TotSF: Speaking in Philly

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I will be speaking tomorrow night (Wed. Nov. 17) at a community forum organized by Media Tank on the Phildelphia proposed municple wifi project and why it is cool. Not surprisingly, Comcast and other local incumbents are mobilizing to pounce upon the proposal like my cat Quantum on a lame sparrow — but with much less respect for the sanctity of life than Quantum usually shows. At least Comcast is unlikely to stuff the corpse in the vents between the walls of my house, so that when I try to sell it the inspector discovers a grave yard of bloated, dead municple infrastructure projects. Hmm… I think that analogy went on a bit too long. (Becky, please provide a link in the comments to a suitable picture of Quantum, preferably pouncing on a municiple wifi project in our computer room).

Stay tuned …

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our computer is gross

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Our home desktop Windows machine is used only by my wife and two pre-teen girls. We’ve been infected by some crapware lately and I tried to clean it up. In addition to the stuff visible on the hard disk, there’s this thing called the Windows registry. This is is used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, such as boot-time start-up of programs that you never heard of and don’t want running on your machine. I couldn’t believe what I found in there.

I did this:

start->run

(and then type)

regedit

(In the regedit menus do:)

edit->find

(and type)

fuck

(or erotic, or anything else you’d be surprised to find on your computer).

I feel so violated.

Cyber-Farmer Boy

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In a prior lifetime I expected that my carreer would revolve around agricultural economics and/’or farm management in developing countries. I did a master’s degree in Agricultural Economics at Purdue in the late 1970’s. For my master’s thesis I went to west Africa, where I had been in Peace Corps, and gathered data on an irrigated farm built by the World Bank and managed by the Food and Agricultural Organization of United Nations — and used the data to build a linear programming model, and an integer programming model of the farm.

The guts of the model (which I did not write) was 4,000 lines of FORTRAN IV. All my data was manually transferred onto punch cards. In summer/fall 1979 I spent about 18 hours a day refining that model. Each iteration took about 20 minutes to run on a Control Data Corporation Cyber 6000, and the results came in the form of a bunch of numbers on a 180-column form-fed print-out. I would read the numbers and imagine the farm in my head.

I thought building a farm simulator was the coolest, most fun thing — not to mention important — that one could possibly do in this world. Life takes its twists and turns, and I ended up doing other things. But I have often daydreamed that if I won the lottery I would go back to school in Agricultural Economics & try to pick up where I left off.

So it is with a certain degree of wistfulness that I include this

link.

Check out the John Deere game.

TotSF: Fling These at the Democratic National Committee

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Below is Adam Werbach’s of Common Assets call to arms for those not at the center of the Democratic Party structure. It is the first salvo for those who dream a different vision of this country than the Republicans and want a party that can deliver.

No surprise that I agree with Adam’s Theses. Also no surprise that I beleive we must not wait on the leadership to define our vision. We must speak for ourselves and define our own voice. I plan to be at DNC HQ on Monday Morning, Nov. 15, 430 S Capitol St, SE in Washington, DC, at 7:30 a.m. Provided I can find someone to get Aaron on the school bus.

Now, more than ever,

stay tuned . . .

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TotSF: Theses on the Democratic Church Door

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I am posting here a call to arms from Adam Werebach of Common Assets. I agree with the gist of Adam’s Theses (no surprise). And, as I have also long said, it is worth than useless to let others define your rights for you.

All of us who do not share the vision put forward by the Republican Party have an obligation to help craft a new vision. We must not remain mourners at our own funeral, waiting for a majority of the nation to “share our worldview.” Nor should we cling to the delusion that some surface, cosmetic change can make it all better.

I intend to be at DNC Headquarters at 430 S Capitol St, SE at 7:30 a.m. on November 15, if I can find someone to get Aaron to school. For anyone else interested, David Steuer has set up a new website for this.

Now, more than ever,

Stay tuned . . . .

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