Month: March 2006

Happy Birthday Federal Register

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Yesterday, the Federal Register turned 70. While unknown to most normal folks, the Federal Register (or “fed reg” as we admin lawyers like to call it) is the official publication for the U.S. Administrative state. Just about all major administrative undertaking such as rulemakings, inquiries, and consent decrees become official and/or final when published in fed reg. Many a young associate or paralegal has the unenviable task (albeit made easier by electronic databases and online access) to keep a watch on fed reg for publication of any documents of potential relevants or to track administrative deadlines.

So happy birthday Fed Reg!

Why your wetmachine page hasn't finished loading

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It’s because the server that hosts the little “linkbox” that normally sits on the right-hand side of the page is down.

I’ve been meaning to convert that app to a stand-alone “SOLO” app for some months now but I never seem to get around to it. I’ll take this as one more strong nudge in that direction. No time to do so this morning, however and alas, as I’m off to the airport soon with a ton of things to do first (including putting up the link to Part Three of our Cory Doctorow interview. . .).

But if you happen to be the Wetmachine webmaster and you’re reading this, feel free to comment out the linkblox. The server that hosted it got rooted on a php exploit and it may be down for a while.

Footnote to Bishop Berkeley

In the spring of 1997 I spent a week as a parent chaperon with my son’s 7th grade class at an ecology-themed camp in Sharon, Massachusetts. There I met this guy, who was a 7th grade math teacher, but more interestingly, the illustrator of the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

Now, as you may know, Auster writes austere post-modern metafictional stories about the nature of reality and our inability to use language to apprehend or transmit it.

Anyway, I got along really well with Karasik and we spent a lot of time walking in the woods together, talking philosophy and deep bullshit, when the students were in class. On the last afternoon that we were to spend together, we found ourselves silently sitting side by side on a fallen tree in the woods. Neither of us spoke for a long while. It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky and not the least bit of wind. Then, somewhere nearby, a tree fell over, crashing to the ground with an incongruous roar. Soon afterwards all was again silent.

Karasik and I looked at each other.

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Shout Out to our Spammer Friends

Just a quick thank you to all those spammers out there who tried to use Wetmachine’s trackback feature to pump up the ratings of your worthless “hold ’em poker” web sites in search engines. While not a single one of your trackbacks were allowed through (thanks to the space-age technology of regular expression pattern matching), your rejected trackback submissions, all 16 thousand of them, take up space in our database.

So, thanks to you all, I’ve had to disable the trackback feature. I don’t think this hugely cripples the site, since we had only 5 legit trackbacks out of the 16,000+ in the database (leading to what has got to be one of the worst signal-to-noise rations I’ve ever seen).

It’s just bottom feeder greed, as usual, dumping shit in our communal water supply.

Every Republican is a Bush Republican

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A short political announcement, and then we can get back to the usual Wetmachine technophilc-phobic goodness. (Warning: Extreme Metaphor Mashup Alert!)

Now that Preznit Bush’s poll numbers are permanently pegged in the Nixonian range, and with White House scandals, travesties, abominations and shotgun blasts to the face dominating the news, we see the predictable yet despicable and revolting spectacle of Republicans slithering off the good ship George W. Bush — or trying to, at least.

The Great Republican “Oh Shit!” (GROS) kind of crystallized with the Dubai Ports fiasco, when the warm waters heated up by years of Arab-bashing xenophobia met the cool air of Cheney-Rice Boogeymanophobia and gave rise to perfect storm Hell No. So much potential energy was bound up in Hell No — the equivalent of 30 MegaLou Dobbs — that the very levies of Washington DC were imperiled– and remain so. Iraq teeters on the edge of the abyss, and signs abound that the mythical people of the heartland are starting to wake up and ask what the fuck that’s all about. And so Republicans with hearts full of dread must face the harsh reality that Bush himself has become their New Orleans, and their Dunkirk.

And so they try to make their escape.

Well, let’s just watch them, shall we?

But remember: Every Republican is a Bush Republican. Every Republican is an Abu Grahib Republican, a Katrina Republican, a trillion-dollar-deficit Republican, a Haliburton Republican, a Yellow Cake Republican, a Claude Allen Republican, a Plame-outing Republican, a stonewall-the-911-commission Republican, a Bill O’Reilly sexual predator Republican, an Ann Coulter murder-the-judges Republican, a Jack Abramoff hitman-in-Miami Republican, an 8.8 billion missing dollars in the Green Zone Republican, a twenty-five-hundred dead soldiers Republican.

Mitt Romney is a Bush Republican. John McCain is a Bush Republican. Bill Frist is a Bush Republican. Newt Gingrich is a Bush Republican. Colin Powell is a Bush Republican, and Michael Powell is a Bush Republican. Olympia Snowe is a Bush Republican and Chuck Hagel and Lincoln Chafee too. They’re all complicit in this, the imperial reign of our delusional Nero: any one of them who has run for office in the last five years with an (R) behind his or her name. Now just watch them sing!

Net Neutrality As Campaign Finance Reform

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It is quite possible that the most important piece of campaign finance reform to pass in 2006 will be Senator Wyden’s “Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006.” Until now the internet did not require candidates to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the ability to reach voters. Without Net Neutrality, all that changes. The internet will increasingly come to resemble radio, television and cable, where the well-funded buy their way onto your screen and the rest get crowded out. Not because of any evil corporate conspiracy or antidemocracy cabal, but because of the iron rules of economics.

If companies can make money charging political speakers for premium access, they will. If that’s bad for democracy and free speech, too bad. Companies aren’t in business to promote democracy, but to maximize value for shareholders. If that means that well-funded candidates and talk radio hosts can buy “premium” access while independent bloggers and pod casters can’t, that’s what will happen. Too bad about that democracy and free speech thing. Nothing against it you understand but, y’know, it’s just business.

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FCC Bidding Credits and Digital Inclusion

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For the forseeable future, we’re stuck with spectrum auctions, so we may as well try to get them to work as well as possible. Contrary to what some folks argue, I don’t think that means just jacking up one-time revenue to the government. It means trying to get licenses to folks who don’t usually get ’em (like women-owned businesses, minority-owned businesses, and small businesses generally), trying to get services deployed to underserved communities, and trying to foster real competition.

So last week, MAP submitted a lengthy set of comments (including a 30-page econ analysis from my economist friend Greg Rose) on reforming the FCC’s designated entity “bidding credit” for the upcomming AWS auction.

What does all this mean, and why should the guy who says “spectrum auctions are the crack cocaine of public policy” care? See below . . .

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OpenLaszlo == Ajax

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OpenLaszlo, for which I am the documentation guy, now compiles to DHTML as well as to Macromedia Flash (swf). That means that you can take the same LZX source and compile it to either swf or DHTML, and it will just work. So there is now a completely OpenSource stack for doing web apps.

OpenLaszlo is much more robust and full featured than any other Ajax toolkit. And, the architecture includes a client abstraction layer, which means that we worry about browser inconsistencies so you don’t have to. The upshot of all this is that if you want to build a real web application, you should use OpenLaszlo instead of some Ajax toolkit. Of course if you just want to spruce up a web page, Dojo or Rico or something like that might be appropriate. But I think you would have to be nuts to use them for building a real application.

We’re not yet shipping a “production” version — that’s scheduled for “sometime in 2006”– but the prototype version is getting more robust by the day, and there is a very credible demo up on the website.

Quick Reaction to AT&T-BellSouth Merger

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Not really a surprise. The government has made clear it will accept the vicious cycle of “the previous merger you approved means I now have to merge.”

Sadly, because the regulators till think of these primarily as monopoly voice markets, and long ago gave up hope the Bells will compete with each other, they don’t worry about the increased size of the national footprint as an indicator of market power in any of the relevant service markets. If anything, it’s regarded as a plus because under the logic of “convergence,” this makes AT&T a better video competitior to Comcast, TW and other incumbent cable companies, while doing no “damage” in voice markets.

The complexity of interelated markets, the nature of market power on “upstream” internet content and service providers, and question of what the mature market looks like aludes them.

Oddly, I am at a conference on municipal broadband right now. Soon, cities may be the only competitors. I hope they will realize that they need interconnection and net neutrality to make a real go of it. Or so I will try to persuade them tomorrow.

The Realpolitic of Bits — More of Cory Doctorow’s conversation with Wetmachine

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As mentioned here, Cory Doctorow (“world’s most wired human” etc), recently spent an hour talking with me and wetmechanic Gary Gray. In part two of our talk you’ll hear Cory say, “what the mafia likes is high-margin goods” and “there is no more thankless job in the world than being the Pecksniff who tells people that what they want is bad.” He also waxes eloquent on: cathedrals after the Reformation: the collapse and possible restoration of the serendipitous market for books: the making of films suited to the economics of the internet, and more.

You’ll also get to hear me mumbling, muttering, interrupting myself, and being generally inaudible but nevertheless somehow compelling. As a bonus, Wetmachine fanboys and -girls (I know you’re out there!) who play close attention will even hear the legendary Gary making an observation about movies and symphonic music!

The book that I recommended to Cory was Illicit by Moises Naim. When I was referring to my own books, which you can find by looking to the left side of this entry, Acts of the Apostles is the first, more accessible book, and Cheap Complex Devices is the less accessible one that I wrote special just for you smart people. The book I have under development is called The Pains, and you’ll be hearing more about it soon.

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