Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Dave Sez: “It's raining, and I can't watch Charlie Brown in HD.”

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Some of you may remember my friend “Dave” who tried to get the $10 DSL deal from AT&T in ’07 when he moved to Sacremento. As I noted at the time, Dave does not get cable TV “on the grounds that 99% of the programming ‘sucks.’” Being a smart and technologically savvy fellow, as well as keeping up on all things media and telecom by reading this blog, Dave went and got his NTIA coupon and bought a converter box and did everything like a technologically savvy consumer should.

Did this bring Dave the wonders of digital television? Sadly, no. But let him tell you in his own words below . . . .

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Inventing the Future:
What I did with Tea Time

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Guy Steele is a sweet guy who doesn’t give folks a hard time. But I have heard him several times lament that many computer science conferences are filled with variations on the same paper, which he lampoons as, “How I cataloged my CD collection with Lisp.” (I think he started saying this back when they were called record collections. I haven’t seen him in years and I suppose the routine now refers to MP3s.)

I’ve just been wrestling with a problem, and I’m so charmed with the Tea Time solution that I’m willing to sound like a college student that just learned how to do something mundane with his new profound toy. Call me a hack.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Update: Apology to Craig Settles

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I owe Craig Settles an apology for my snarky aside in my piece on what the broadband stimulus does. Craig has written his own rebuttal to the NY Times piece, in which he explains that the reporter lifted a single quote from a 30 minute interview out of context. In private correspondence (as well as in a comment on the original post), he has shown himself an advocate for rural broadband and certainly not a tool of industry. He also gets high ratings from Jim Baller, one of the real heroes of munibroadband and broadband policy generally.

I’ve amended the original post to take out any reference to Craig and the out-of-context quote.

Stay tuned . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Public Service Announcement for Public Knowledge

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The great public interest advocacy group Public Knowledge (about which Harold might tell us more, if he feels like it), has issued an alert about efforts by lobbyists of the Hollywood and corporate-state varieties to insert nasty, scary language about “copyright filtering” into the stimulus bill.

I used the Public Knowledge website to register my objection. Here’s the version of the letter I sent to Senator Reid and Congressman Waxman:

Dear Representative/Senator,

It is my understanding that during the conference committee on the stimulus bill, your office may be asked to change the provision that deals with public grants to spur broadband deployment to allow for copyright filtering. This may be proposed as a “noncontroversial” change that would allow Internet Service Providers to inspect its subscribers’ Internet connections to filter out copyright infringement, under the guise of “network management.” Copyright filtering is outside of the capabilities of network management, would be a massive invasion of privacy and would prohibit my lawful use of copyrighted works — for purposes of education, criticism, and commentary.

Copyright filtering is very controversial and I urge you to oppose such changes to the stimulus.

As someone who depends on free downloads of my own copyrighted works for marketing and publicity, I consider copyright filtering not only unconstitutional, unAmerican, but also a threat to my livelihood. Please resist the temptation to go down this corporate-statist road. Nothing good will come of it.

Sincerely,

John Sundman

Please click on the link above and do the right thing.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Understanding What The Broadband Stimulus Does, and What It Doesn't Try To do.

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Not unsurprisingly, we have considerable debate on the merits of the broadband stimulus package, even leaving aside the network neutrality provisions. They range from this NYT article suggesting that building out in rural is a waste and won’t create jobs to Yochai Benkler’s more optimistic piece to my own previous enthusiastic support (here and here). Along the way, we find plenty of folks with a “yes, but –” because it does not address urban builds or competition or network neutrality or other issues in a way they consider satisfactory, and this weakness, from their perspective, makes the whole bill a worthless boondoggle and a multi-billion gift to the incumbents to boot.

I find the claims of those pushing tax credits or opposing the network neutrality conditions that grants will not create any jobs or result in any new broadband uptake, and that conditions on grants will prevent anyone from building these systems, simply not credible. I can only conclude those pushing this line either don’t get outside Washington DC and New York City much or have their own agendas. Otherwise, they should check out my friend Wally Bowen at MAIN and how he and projects like him are creating jobs for network operators and bringing economic opportunity for their communities. But even setting aside such extremes, it should come as no surprise that we see a variety of opinions on what the broadband stimulus does or should do because:

1) We have a set of complex problems;

2) Everyone has a different perspective on the nature of the problem(s).

This makes assessing the cost/benefit difficult, and makes getting the prospect of any consensus of opinion phenomenally unlikely. What constitutes proof for me that this bill (even after the Senate changes) looks to do a lot of good and is therefore worth the cost won’t persuade others who disagree with me on the fundamental nature of what we need to fix.

In the hope of persuading folks, however, I lay out my arguments below on why I think the broadband stimulus is well designed to handle one piece of the very difficult puzzle of deploying a ubiquitous nationwide broadband system that all citizens will use so they can partake of the rich opportunity for civic engagement, economic development, educational opportunities, and new services such as telemedicine (even if they don’t realize they need this yet). Along the way, the stimulus bill gives another nudge (but hardly solves) the question of how to keep the internet open to innovation and “as diverse as human thought.”

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Inventing the Future:
Negative Interest Loans?

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Hey, suppose we had a rational way to evaluate business and home loan risk. I don’t think we can truly solve our financial/social crisis without fixing the underlying risk-valuation issue.1

However it’s done, let’s imagine for moment that we had such a thing. Furthermore, let’s imagine that we had some way of assessing that risk relative to benefit for those doing the loaning. If the government is loaning, that means public benefit (under some political process).

If we did have such a thing, wouldn’t the most efficient way of stimulating the economy be to provide business and public loans at an interest rate based on that assessment? In particular, worthy projects might get zero or even negative interest, depending on how much we turned up the dial on desired stimulus. It’s not a blind hand-out, as borrowers have to justify their projects and make regular payments. The loan can be called in the usual way if payments aren’t made. The stimulus is in adjusting the balance-point of go/no-go.

Would Republicans support such a plan? Would Democrats? If labeled as a banking system, then I suppose neither. But what about defining it as a rational way of conducting the stimulus? With a side-benefit of kick-starting a more efficient and maybe less corruptible system of risk evaluation?

1.. Maybe something involving public peer review ala all that yummy mesh, P2P, and social network stuff?

Inventing the Future:
We lost our house yesterday.

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It never was our house. We’re renting it, because the people who are supposedly buying our house haven’t sold theirs, and so are renting ours. So we had rented this house with the intention of buying it when we could. It was terrific.

But the owner has just decided that she’s going to move back into it, and we will have to leave. I can see why she loves it – we do. But I’m certain that she’s never really going to move back in, and in the mean time, we’re screwed.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
What's wrong with this fracking blog

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One of the many things wrong with this fracking blog is that I don’t ever write anything interesting on it.

I do, however, have a plan to change that. I’m going to write something interesting real soon now, perhaps this weekend, if I get done putting away the Christmas stuff all over the living room (whatever Christmas stuff the dog has not yet destroyed, that is).

Also, there are many technology upgrades to the site that could be done to jazz it up all web 2.0 style, which upgrades Gary and Harold and I earnestly discussed in a hip coffee shop in Davis Square, Somerville, MA, on January 1 or 2 this year, when it was cold and slushy/icy outside and crowded inside with tattooed people. Although nothing has yet come of that earnest discussion, I did enjoy it very much, and it was fun to be the facilitator of the first in-the-meatspace encounter between longtime wetmachiners Gary and Harold. Perhaps something will come of that someday.

But on the the good news side of the ledger, my earnest entreaties have gotten Gary posting again about random shit (notice how I take credit for Gary’s contributions?), thereby helping to restore the proper Wetmachine balance between earnest stuff from Greg and Harold and random bullshit from other parties (with Stearns’s stuff being both earnest and random bullshit, a remarkable achievement).

But as for you, reader, you don’t help this fracking blog any by never leaving any comments & getting a discussion going. What the frack is up with that?

OK, I go now. But as a wise man said, stay tuned.

Neutrino:
Toe-tappingly depressing

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So, how can you spice up really bleak statistics like recent stock market performances of major companies and the death toll of soldiers in Iraq? Make them into music, using that new darling of blog posts, Microsoft Songsmith (obligatory holy crap moment as I realize I’m linking to a Microsoft product I’m not hating on). See and listen to the results at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.