My Thoughts Exactly:
Ass over teakettle and a farewell to free ebooks

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About three weeks ago I had freak accident on my bicycle. My chain froze as I was pedalling up a hill. I went ass over teakettle and performed a lovely three-point faceplant in the weeds (2 hands + 1 face = 3 ), spraining eight fingers & two thumbs and bloodying up my left cheek, which led to two visits to the emergency room and one to my doctor who told me that much of the symptoms in my hand were coming from my neck, where CT scans revealed “moderate to severe arthritis.”

As I picked myself up off the ground, in shock at the gross betrayal of me by my insubordinate bicycle and angry at gravity, and with my hands hurting ferociously and tingling in equal measure, and later, after calling my daughter, who was off in our family’s only working car, to ask her to come drive me to the hospital, I realized that I was not Cory Doctorow. Even after my daughter had picked up my wife who took me to the emergency room at Martha’s Vineyard hospital & I had heavenly dilaudid pumping into my vein I still was not Cory.

I’m mostly all better now. I even rode my bike a lot yesterday, despite the heat, right down to the Tisbury Street Fair, where I served strawberry shortcake with the guys in the Firefighters Association. It’s been three weeks since my bike mishap & I’m still not Cory. Consequently, I’ve stopped giving my books away for free.
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Neutrino:
Pepsi & Me

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Sometimes Pepsi lurks where you least suspect it.

Certainly, one can expect a modicum of Pepsi to find its way into convenience store coolers and the bellies of vending robots. To be sure, it is no surprise to have it offered as an apologetic substitution after having ordered Coca-Cola in a restaurant. Pepsi’s blue banners can be seen ballyhooing their sponsorship of everything from cricket matches to university dining halls.

But in my life I have also seen Pepsi positioned as pay, as payola, and even as a possible font of propaganda and dubious dietary science in its latest attempt to reach the new generation — this time by hijacking a trusted corner of the blogging world.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
What Do WiMax, WiFi, Bluetooth and VOIP All Have In Common? A Very Active “Afterlife.”

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With the rise of LTE, we find great woe and tearing of hair among the supporters of WiMax. Intel, long a WiMAX booster, closed it’s Taiwan WiMax office and it seems you can’t swing a dead iPad these days without hitting another story about WiMax’s woes and its upcoming demise in the face of LTE.

Mind you, I can remember back in 2004 when the WiMax posse (as I liked to call them) swore that WiMAX had slain wifi and all those folks investing in wide-area mesh networks using sad little unlicensed wifi had wasted their money because WiFi was dead! dead! dead! This, of course, will come as news to both Cablevision and AT&T, both of whom announced major wifi network builds in the last few months.  And, of course, Wifi itself previously “killed” bluetooth, which is why it is so hard to find bluetooth enabled devices anymore.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Tweaking the Wetmachine Shop

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With help of master wetmechanic Gary, I’ve moved to a “shopping cart” thingy for selling my books here on Wetmachine. In related news, about which I’ll be blogging soon, is that I’ve decided to stop giving away PDF versions of my books. I’m selling them for $3 apiece now.

The shopping cart seems to choke on (physical) mailing addresses outside the USA, I’m unhappy to report. We’re working on getting that fixed, but in the meantime if you live outside the USA and would like to purchase any of the physical things in the shop, use the “Contact Us” form and we’ll figure out a way to do business.

In the simpler world of the “old style” Wetmachine, there was a hand-coded HTML form you could print out to buy books by check-in-the mail, and a hand-coded page for using paypal. Downloads of electronic copies were free. That approach was, frankly, a lot easier for me to deal with than this new shopping cart has been. Getting the shopping cart up and running has been a bit of a pain in the ass, frankly — and it’s not even fully functional yet.

But the world is changing. I now have four books for sale (one of them a pre-order) in several different formats of ebook. The combinatorics were already starting to get unmanageable. I certainly hope to have more and more things for sale in various formats soon (a fifth book, a sixth book, sweatshirts! coffee mugs! personalized Cadillac SUVs!–which would quickly make the combinatorics even worse– so a move to some kind of shopping cart approach was inevitable.

I’m not happy with the appearance of the shop nor with my own dilly-dallying: this should have been done months ago, and it ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.

My books Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices and The Pains are still under Creative Commons License and you can find them elsewhere on the net. But on Wetmachine itself I’m going back to give away only sample chapters.

I’ll be blogging about my reasons for this “close the barn door after the cows are out” action in an upcoming post.

Meanwhile if you experience any problems with the wetmachineshop, please use the Contact Us form to let me know.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Deficit Cutting Fever Threatens Broadband Stimulus Payouts

Politicians, news reporters, and now voters have become obsessed with deficit reduction. Not surprisingly, I find myself in agreement with Paul Krugman and other economists who have argued that we failed to spend enough to restart the financial engines of our economy and now appear ready to compound the error by repeating the error of 1937 when Roosevelt cut back on deficit spending and sent the nation back into the Depression. Unfortunately, this “deficit cutting fever” now threatens the money previously allocated for the broadband stimulus programs.

A proposal by Senator Baucus would cut approx $300 million from BTOP and $300 million from RUS to help fund extensions of unemployment benefits and other more popular stimulus measures such as — surprise! — extensions of various tax credits. (Rep. Obey would cut the same amount, but as part of the and supplemental funding for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.) While I certainly don’t begrudge extending unemployment benefits (I do think tax credits are rather worthless for motivating corporate behavior in light of how few corporations end up paying corporate income tax), I absolutely question the wisdom of pulling funding from stimulus programs that are not only creating jobs now, but helping to transform our future.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Action Alert on ACTA and My Latest Video Explaining How To get ACTA Passed.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding an oversight hearing today on the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC, aka the “IP Czar”). Yesterday, IPEC issued its first ever Report on U.S. intellectual property enforcement.  Despite much trepidation that it would come out as the usual one-sided “we must do whatever Hollywood says, treat our customers as potential criminals, and generally act like clumsy arrogant idiots,” it turned out pretty reasonable (even given our standards started abysmally low). You can see my employer PK’s press release here. Critically, the report contained language reflecting the need for balance between mechanisms that ensure that creators get paid while ensuring that people can keep building on previous work (that whole ‘seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants‘ thing). Here’s the money quote from the report:

One of the reasons that the U S is a global leader in innovation and creativity is our early establishment of strong legal mechanisms to provide necessary economic incentives required to innovate.  By the same token, fair use of intellectual property can support innovation and artistry Strong intellectual property enforcement efforts should be focused on stopping those stealing the work of others, not those who are appropriately building upon it.

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Inventing the Future:
Tech Changes Our Understanding of Ourselves

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While genetics mapping changes how we define ourselves, common everyday technology is changing how we recognize what we are thinking. Change the tech, change the results. Telephone polls are now (recognized as) invalid. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127937110&sc=ipad&f=1019

I imagine that with web polling being so much cheaper, and more expensive options not valid anyway, we’re going to see a lot more completely meaningless American-idol polling. At what point does that become micro-elections? Will polling evolve from something that influences democracy, into a new structurally changed form of democracy?

Sent from my iPad