My Thoughts Exactly:
Ted Williams' Frozen Head and me: A love story. Or, life imitates art, gruesome desecration of human remains department.

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The creepy-cool illustration by Cheeseburger Brown that appears below is from my novella The Pains. It’s starting to appear here and there about the web as news spreads about the alleged abuse of the frozen head of Ted Williams.

I have to admit that the saga of Ted Williams’ head was much in the news when I was writing The Pains, and part of my intent was to mock the silly Transhumanists who were touting Alcor Life Extension as a sure route to some kind of Star Trekian afterlife.

I don’t have a care what happens to my body after I die, and I’m not much for grave veneration. But I do think that a decent respect for the remains of dead persons is kind of central to any claim to civilization. (How I Destroyed the New Economy, an essay I wrote for Salon a few years ago, tells how my taking part in the desecration of sacred ground on Martha’s Vineyard caused the dot com bubble to burst.)

So I don’t think it’s especially funny that Ted Williams’s head was evidently batted around with a monkey wrench. On the other hand I do think it’s kind of funny (Ted Williams being dead, after all), that Alcor has been revealed to be the kind of grotesque charade that I lampooned in The Pains. I hope this story makes radical Transhumanists out to look like a bunch of fools, and that the Ted Williams story brings overdue attention to Cheeseburger’s amazing illustrations and causes me to sell a bunch of books. It’s already brought me a bunch of visitors from baseball fan sites. New visitors to Wetmachine, welcome! Please check out my books. Better still, buy a few. They’re good, I promise.

Below the fold: The Gruesome Details, according to a former Alcor executive.

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Inventing the Future:
летающий фаллос and the New Wild West

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In December, 2006, flying phalli disrupted a Second Life press conference at a CNET event reflectively dedicated to making money in SL.

Two months later, US Presidential candidate John Edwards had his SL headquarters vandalized in a roughly similar way.

It took just over a year for the world to take the next step, when Russian chess champion cum opposition politician Garry Kasporov had a real world open meeting disrupted by a remote controlled dildo helicopter.

I find it interesting that it didn’t happen here in the US. Of course, five years earlier, cybersage William Gibson had published Pattern Recognition(1), in which Russia is depicted as a tech-hip wild west.

I don’t think the New Wild West is Russia or grassroots politics or astro-turf. It’s cyberspace. For better or worse, what happens there isn’t staying there. And, anyway, how real was the Buffalo West?

1. The netspeak prose didn’t really work for me, and I didn’t think Gibson’s rendering of a female protagonist felt authentic. But it’s easy to forgive these because they don’t really interfere with the spot-on, absolutely compelling ideas. Terrific, thought-provoking read.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Speakeasy now blocks calls — this is getting serious.

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In the wake of reports that Google Voice is blocking calls to “traffic stimulator” sites (like free conference calling and free porn sites), Speakeasy has now changed its terms of service to explicitly block calls to these sites with its VOIP product. To its credit, Speakeasy directly informed its users (a friend forwarded me the email reproduced below). But this now elevates the question of VOIP providers and calls to a new level.

The FCC has danced around the regulatory status of “interconnected VOIP providers” (meaning VOIP providers that connect to the regular public switched voice network (or PSTN)). It has required regular phone companies to interconnect with VOIP providers in the famous Madison River case, and subjected VOIP providers to Enhanced 911 rules and CALEA, but has shied away from calling them telecommunications services. So the ability of VOIP providers to engage in the kind of “self-help” the FCC said was off-limits when the traditional Title II phone companies tried it. (Actual Order here for us legal buffs).

I’m not making a specific recommendation here because I’m still trying to gather info. As a general rule, I despise regulatory chameleons who shift regulatory treatment based on what their best interest. If you want to be a Title I information service and be able to refuse to connect calls, don’t complain when you get blocked because you are not eligible for mandatory interconnection under Title II. But I’m also well aware that reality matters and its intrinsic messiness means that these inclinations need to be guides rather than hard and fast rules. I am aware of my ignorance of the factual situation enough to know that I’d like to have a lot more information about the nature of the services and the regulatory environment (about which I know only enough to make my usual uninformed guesses).

But the one thing I can say definitively is that the longer this goes on without any FCC response, the more VOIP providers are going to look to save themselves money by blocking these “free conference call” sites.

Stay tuned . . . .

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Inventing the Future:
Where We've Been

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The Teleplace release is a mature application for getting work done in realtime collaboration with others. This makes a good occasion to look at some direct progenitors. The first two are the 1994 Interactive Collaboration Environment prototype by David Smith. The third is a 2007 Julian Lombardi demo of Croquet.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
A Brief Response To Richard Bennett's New Paper

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I salute Richard Bennett’s new paper Designed for Change, in which he traces the engineering history of the end-to-end principle. It is a serious paper and deserving of serious response. Unfortunately, it being right before Yom Kippur and various deadlines, that more serious response will need to come from elsewhere. I can give only a brief, surface response — reality is messy.

OK, too brief. A bit more elaboration. Richard Bennett is eminently qualified to write the technical history and draw engineering conclusions. As are a large number of other folks who take very different views on the issue of net neutrality and the virtues of end-to-end (Vint Cerf, David Reed and kc claffy to name a few folk of my acquaintance). The history described by Richard is layered onto an equally rich history of political and economic events which all interweave, and continue to interweave, to create a complex and messy reality in which public policy tries (in my opinion) to set rules to create the strongest likelihood of the best possible outcome.

More below . . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
AT&T Falls Back on “It's All About Google” Strategy

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For some years now, the opponents of Network Neutrality have had the same basic fallback strategy: When all else fails, make it about Google. So no surprise that AT&T, in a letter supposedly about the rather technical issue of “traffic pumping” opens with an attack on Google and Net Neutrality. Because if we have learned anything from our national healthcare debate, it is that it is more important to make this about how awful the other side is rather than debate the merits.

More below . . . .

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Net Neutrality Nearer? Maybe

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Some promising noises out of the FCC and Congress lately–even from President Obama– about preserving Net Neutrality. However, the Telco & other retrograde forces out there have lots of money, lobbyists, and influence. Free Press’s “Save the Internet” campaign has some good things going on, including an astonishing $100,000 matching contribution fundraiser sponsored by an anonymous donor. Chip in what you can. And contact your congresspeople today.

Inventing the Future:
The Treachery of Names

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Would any other smell as sweet?

We changed the name of the company today. The geeks formerly known as Qwaq are now Teleplace.

I like it. Qwaq was a kind of goofy Google/Twitter/Yahoo sort of thing into which you could project whatever you wanted. At first it was (theoretically) just as plausible that something would be made for kids as for companies. But the Qwaq named didn’t really play well. It was too empty a vessel — not suggestive of anything we did. Even our friends spelled it wrong. I often told people it was the corner letters of their keyboard, but they tended to just tilt their head at me like a confused dog. We have a great set of photos in the office of David, Andreas, and the gang discussing potential names with Alan Kay. “Oink? No. Too obvious.” Anyway, now we’re respectable, and the name suggests something about what we do.

Oh, and the new client is out, too.

And the new server.

Off to sleep.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Update on Program Access — looks like FCC rolls lucky 7 at DC Cir. Casino.

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Wall St. J. reports the court was fairly deferential to the FCC’s predictive judgment. That’s good. But it would be nice if the D.C. Circuit were less of a crap shoot. What makes the FCC’s “predictive judgment” better on program access and on inside wiring than on cable ownership or telco forbearance? Makes it rather Hell to do policy one way or the other.

Stay tuned….