A Wall Street Journal Video: An interesting look at Foxconn.
Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content
TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.
One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.
Ooma VOIP Box On Sale
Looks like an interesting way to make phone calls for a one time fee. www.ooma.com
Q & A With William Gibson
Science fiction novelist William Gibson has been exploring the relationship between technology and society ever since he burst on to the literary scene with his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer in 1984. He invented the word ‘cyberspace’ and his influential works predicted many of the changes technology has brought about. silicon.com’s Steve Ranger caught up with him in the run up to the launch of his latest novel, Spook Country.
silicon.com: You’ve written much about the way people react to technology. What’s your own attitude towards technology?
Gibson: I’m not an early adopter at all. I’m always quite behind the curve but I think that’s actually necessary – by not taking that role as a consumer I can be a little more dispassionate about it.
Most societal change now is technologically driven, so there’s no way to look at where the human universe is going without looking at the effect of emergent technology. There’s not really anything else driving change in the world, I believe.
Waiting for My Air Taxi
One powerful force that’s dispersing economic opportunity is of course the Interent. A decade ago there were a few lucky souls who could pull an income through a modem. Today there are lots more, and we’ve yet to see what may happen once high-bandwidth telepresence finally gets going.
But a second force for dispersion has yet to kick in at all. It is the Internetization of transportation — and specifically, of air travel. That’s where Esther Dyson comes in. She’s investing in several of the companies that are aiming to reinvent air travel in the ways described by James Fallows in his seminal book on this topic, Free Flight. In that vision of a possible future, a fleet of air taxis takes small groups of passengers directly from point to point, bypassing the dozen or so congested hubs and reactivating the thousands of small airports — some near big cities, many elsewhere.
There are two key technological enablers. First a new fleet of small planes that are lighter, faster, smarter, safer, and more fuel-efficient than the current fleet of general aviation craft with their decades-old designs.
The second enabler is the Internet’s ability to make demand visible, and to aggregate that demand. So, for example, I’m traveling today from Keene, NH to Aspen, CO. If there are a handful of fellow travelers wanting to go between those two endpoints — or between, say, 40-mile-radius circles surrounding them, which circles might contain several small airports — we’d use the Internet to rendezvous with one another and with an air taxi.
On Earmark Reform
Maybe not:
Eight months after Democrats vowed to shine light on the dark art of “earmarking” money for pet projects, many lawmakers say the new visibility has only intensified the competition for projects by letting each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving…
The earmark frenzy hit fever pitch in recent days, even as the Senate passed new rules that allow more public scrutiny of them.
Far from causing embarrassment, the new transparency has raised the value of earmarks as a measure of members’ clout. Indeed, lawmakers have often competed to have their names attached to individual earmarks and rushed to put out press releases claiming credit for the money they bring home.
Turkeys in the City
Trotting around Madison’s West Side earlier today.
Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband
A bill introduced into the House of Representatives this week will attempt to spur broadband development in the US by overturning existing state bans on municipal broadband deployments. Titled the Community Broadband Act of 2007, the bill (PDF) is cosponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).
Currently, laws in Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Texas, and a handful of other states prevent cities and towns from installing and operating their own broadband networks. Most of those laws were enacted in the wake of heavy lobbying from the telecommunications industry, which doesn’t want to see competition coming from local governments.
Last year’s attempted rewrite of the Telecommunications Act contained a similar provision but never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote. With the state of broadband in the US a hot topic of discussion lately, both on Capitol Hill and around the country, Reps. Boucher and Upton may be able to find allies in Congress a bit more easily this time around. The congressmen are hopeful that, should it be passed, the Act would lead to more—and better—broadband options for US citizens.
Wisconsin Congressional Earmarks: Spending our Children’s Money via a Bloated Defense Bill
Taxpayers for Common Sense posted a very useful and in some ways surprising look at $3,000,000,000 in Congressional Earmarks attached to a $459,600,000,000 defense appropriation bill (not the entire defense budget). This amount is $40,000,000,000 more than last year’s authorization (nice). Wisconsin congressional earmarks are lead by long time incumbent David Obey with $42,000,000, who also conveniently serves as Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. Obey’s earmark methods have been criticized recently: John Solomon & Jeffrey Birnbaum writing in the Washington Post:
Democrats had complained bitterly in recent years that Republicans routinely slipped multimillion-dollar pet projects into spending bills at the end of the legislative process, preventing any chance for serious public scrutiny. Now Democrats are poised to do the same.
“I don’t give a damn if people criticize me or not,” Obey said.
Obey’s spokeswoman, Kirstin Brost, said his intention is not to keep the projects secret. Rather, she said, so many requests for spending were made to the appropriations panel — more than 30,000 this year — that its staff has been unable to study them and decide their validity.
Here’s a list of all earmarks (.xls file) attached to this defense bill. Wisconsin delegation earmarks:
- David Obey 42,000,000 (Unique ID Column 837, 854, 874, 921, 947, 1053, 1093, 1165)
- Tammy Baldwin $7,500,000 (Unique Id Column 56, 740, 1334)
- Steve Kagen $5,000,000 (Unique ID 496, 561, 562)
- Ron Kind $4,000,000 (Unique Id 1033 and 1083)
- Tom Petri $4,000,000 (Unique Id 782)
- Gwen Moore $2,000,000 (Unique Id 575, 898, 978 and 1151)
- Paul Ryan $0.00
- Jim Sensenbrenner $0.00 (shocking)
HouseDefenseEarmarks.xls. Congress’s approval ratings (3%) are far below the President’s (24%), which isn’t saying much (Zogby Poll)
Much more on local earmarks, here [RSS Feed on earmarks]
