I just gassed up my little Saturn. Over $20 to fill its tiny tank, which leaves me wondering how all my pickup or SUV driving buddies are feeling these days.
Time to invest in whoever is building the most/best hybrids these days. Anyone have a tip?
Anybody watch the congressional testimony of the roidboys, I mean "baseball-players-who-couldn’t-hold-Hank-Aaron’s-Jock"?
How funny is it that we have congressmen, those paragons of propriety, calling baseball players on the carpet for setting a bad example to America’s yutes? How bizarre is this country we call the US of A?
The committee that is putting on this fiasco is the "House Government Reform Committee." Huh? What does this have to do with government reform?
So I decide to check out this House Government Reform Committee. A quick Google search and I’m on their website. I look at their oversight plan, and I find that this is one ambitious group of legislators.
Here’s a partial list of what they are supposed to oversee: Homeland Security, National Guard, US Postal Service, Management Reform, Diploma Mills (huh?), Electronic Voting, Regulatory Affairs, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Unfunded Mandate Reform Act, New Dietary Guidelines (huh?), US Visitor & Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, Transportation Security Administration, Oversight of District of Columbia (great job guys!), 21st Century Healthcare yada, yada, yada.
Okay let’s state the obvious: these guys are 1. jock sniffers and 2. looking for a little network camera time. I know that major league baseball as well as the other major sports leagues in the U.S. enjoy a special business status (I’m of the opinion that should end), but there’s no need for congress to be involved.
Steroids are illegal. Let law enforcement take care of it. Put a few players and their suppliers behind bars and you’ll start to see some action.
As for congress, start working on real problems like 21st century healthcare, medicare, homeland security and real government reform.
In his blog Jeff Jarvis blasts Sen. Ted Stevens about the Senator’s desire to regulate cable TV the same way that broadcast television is regulated. He then points out that the Senator lumped VOIP into the discussion and rightly argues that the "V" in VOIP stands for voice, which means the Senator is proposing to regulate phone service too.
In making his argument Jarvis writes, "But in all honesty, it’s hard to tell whether he’s targeting the
internet… or whether he’s just an ignorant, confused, old fool." Harsh.
That got me to thinking, though, about how often I have to explain the new media landscape to relatives and friends, both yound and old. All of them are very smart, none of them are addled, and I guarantee you that very few of them could tell you what "VOIP", "Blog", of "Wiki" means.
New media is indeed confusing and complex.
Then I thought, "What would my grandparents make of all this?" My paternal grandmother is still alive, but my maternal grandparents both passed away in the ’80s. They would be blown away by all this.
Think about it. They were born in 1909 and 1913 respectively. In their lifetimes they experienced the birth and mainstreaming of the radio, telephone, television and even cable. (Not to mention, automobiles, commercial aircraft and man walking on the moon).
Yet with all of that change they still had time to adjust and acclimate themselves. They also had limited choice. There was one option for phone service, one machine to hear radio, two choices for TV and no such thing as the web.
If they were alive today they would be pretty much stuck with one local phone service provider, but of course if they had broadband they could replace it with VOIP. But their choice of cable or satellite directly impacts the availability of broadband that can support their VOIP needs. Oh, and they’d have to figure out how to get it to work with one of those WiFi things that their great-grandkids have at home. Then when they go out to get that new Buick they’d have to choose between standard radio or one of two satellite radio providers.
That’s just for starters. The great-grandkids keep asking about something called TiVo, or maybe an alternative DVR. (What is it with these whipper-snappers and their acronyms?)
And what of this web thing? Is it the same thing as AOL, or Earthlink or that other thing the Internet?
I’m no fan of Sen. Stevens, but I can definitely understand his confusion. Unfortunately he’s a very powerful man and as such we need guys like Jarvis keeping tabs on him.
It seems that 42 of the 65 schools with teams in the NCAA basketball tournament starting tomorrow graduated LESS than 50% of their players who entered the schools between 1994 and 1997.
Another interesting tidbit from this article on FoxSports is that if those numbers hold true for the 04-05 academic year then all those schools with under 50% graduation rates will face penalties like a loss of scholarships and exclusion from the tournament.
Looks like hot job titles next year will include "Professor of Underwater Basket Weaving" and "Doctor of the J".
There’s a new organization dedicated to "open government", or Freedom of Information if you like. The two major newspapers here in the NC Piedmont Triad are participating in the movement (The Greensboro News & Record, The Winston-Salem Journal), as I’m sure are most of the major newspapers in the U.S.
But while the newspapers bring much needed exposure and "oomph" for the effort, they are not the main benefactors or the primary impetus for the movement.
As one editorialist pointed out most people don’t understand that public information is open to them. Rather, they abdicated the role of government overseer to the journalists, the "Fourth Estate."
That is changing. The creation of the world’s cheapest printing press (the Web) a little over ten years ago initiated an era when average people began to see themselves as grass roots media. And when blogs (websites for dummies) hit the online mainstream we had a cadre of Benjamin Franklins born overnight.
Now, with RSS, our cadre of Franklins has grown to a small army of Pulitzers (Hearsts?), and they will be the true benefactors and impetus of the open government movement. And if I was anyone of influence or power they would scare the bejesus out of me.
I just read this very good piece by Peggy Noonan that I picked up from Rex Hammock’s blog.
The article is divided into three segments. The first two sections compare our modern lives with the lives of our parents, and focuses on the irony that all of our time saving devices have led to a serious lack of free time. The third, and last section, predicts that we in America are ripe for a big change. She points out that to much of the world the US is the Great Satan and consequently we have a huge target on our chest. She predicts that those people will target our greatest city to try and puncture our aura of supposed invincibility. She thinks that it will most likely be New York, but maybe Washington. Oh, and she wrote this in 1998.
In the end she looks at how such an event might change us. In many ways she was right, especially immediately after 9/11. She says:
We must take the time to do some things. We must press government
officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen
tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon
constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence
and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to
become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.The other thing we must do is the most important…
I once talked to a man who had a friend who’d done something that took
his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and
wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South
America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and
emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard,
and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the
kind of person who could and did help others…“These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know
what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from
letting us kill us all.So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary
makes her visitations—she’s never made so many in all of recorded
history as she has in this century—she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!
My fear is that now we are once again forgetting to pray.
I just read this article, How to Silence a Racket: The Justice Department’s tobacco lawsuit threatens freedom of speech , in Reason about how the recent DC circuit court’s decision against the government in its racketeering case against the tobacco companies was also about freedom of speech.
As you can imagine the decision was big news here in Winston-Salem, home of Reynolds America the purveyor of such brands as Winston, Salem, Kool and Camel cigarettes. Still, I never saw anything that looked beyond the decision’s immediate impact on the tobacco companies.
The author, Jacob Sullum, explains it best here:
The "racketeering acts" listed
by the Justice Department consist largely of advertisements, press
releases, and televised statements, which it considers instances
of mail or wire fraud. The fraudulent aspect of this speech is often
obscure. One "racketeering act," for instance, involved placing a
magazine ad that "depicted
Joe Camel wearing sunglasses, a tee shirt, and blue jeans, with a pack
of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve and a lit cigarette hanging from
his mouth, and casually
leaning against a convertible automobile."Even the messages closer to the heart of the Justice Department’s
case are not clear-cut examples of fraud. When the cigarette
manufacturers criticized early
studies linking smoking to lung cancer, for example, were they
deliberately misleading the public, or were they doing what any company
does when its product is
impugned—i.e., pointing out weaknesses in the evidence against it?
The question is of more than historical interest. Given the logic of
the Justice Department’s case, oil companies that question global
warming projections,
automakers that defend the safety of their SUVs, fast food chains that
say they’re not responsible for increases in obesity, pharmaceutical
companies that criticize
research indicating possible side effects from their drugs, and any
other business that stands up for itself in the face of attack could be
the target of a future RICO
lawsuit.
Just read this article from the New Yorker about the young army majors, captains and lieutenants in Iraq and how they are using the internet to collaborate in real-time. Very worthwhile read.
The most interesting thing to me though is the part of the story that tells how in 2000 two company commanders started a website on their own time, with their own money, that allows company commanders to collaborate with each other.
In March of 2000, with the help of a Web-savvy West Point classmate
and their own savings, they put up a site on the civilian Internet
called Companycommand.com. It didn’t occur to them to ask the Army for
permission or support. Companycommand was an affront to protocol. The
Army way was to monitor and vet every posting to prevent secrets from
being revealed, but Allen and Burgess figured that captains were smart
enough to police themselves and not compromise security. Soon after the
site went up, a lieutenant colonel phoned one of the Web site’s
operators and advised them to get a lawyer, because he didn’t want to
see “good officers crash and burn.” A year later, Allen and Burgess
started a second Web site, for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org.The sites, which are accessible to captains and lieutenants with a
password, are windows onto the job of commanding soldiers and onto the
unfathomable complexities of fighting urban guerrillas.
Here’s the amazing thing: The sites became the go-to resource for officers in Iraq, yet the Army didn’t shut it down. In fact the it took over hosting the site, put it on West Point’s servers and even launched it’s first homegrown effort, Cavnet on it’s secure net (SIPRNET). Oh, it is also sending the officers that launched the site to get their PhD. so that they can teach at West Point.
Really, you should read this if you have any interest in subjects like knowledge sharing, distributed learning or management in the "knowledge era." Also, there’s some really interesting background on the Army’s efforts over the years to create systems for distributing information throughout the command.
Link: Activists Dominate Content Complaints.
The main point of this article, Activists Dominate Content Complaints,
is that 99.8% of all the complaints received by the FCC were generated
by one advocacy group. My favorite part, however, is that the FCC
commissioners claim that the number of complaints received has no
impact on their decision making. Really it’s a matter of law.
Right.
That’s why Michael Powell highlights the dramatic year-to-year
increase in number of complaints, from 14,000 in 2002 to 240,000 in
2003 when testifying before the Senate. (There were fewer than 350 in
2001 or 2000). But really the number of complaints is irrelevant.
How can it have an impact when they only use the complaints to
decide what to investigate. After all if the FCC monitored the airwaves
for violations on their own then they might be accused of censorship.
But, really, it’s not the volume it’s the quality of the complaint that matters.
BTW, this article is a follow up that MediaWeek did after Jeff Jarvis revealed this little beauty.
I was reading my favorite tech resource, Langa List, when I came across these paragraphs in a response to a question about email security:
Email almost never goes directly from sender to recipient. Instead, it’s usually stored, albeit briefly, on at least two mail servers along the way, and maybe more; and will also pass through a large number (10-30 is common) of other computers, routers, and similar hardware along the way. US courts have recently ruled that email stored on a mail server (and that includes email passing through one mail server on its way to
another, "stored" on the intermediate server for only a fraction of a second) is not protected by wiretap laws originally designed with telephone conversations in mind. This is a brand-new ruling (about a month ago), so the ripple effects are still being sorted out, but in essence, it looks as though an email communication may be legally about the same as a conversation you have on a busy street corner: You can have
no reasonable expectation of privacy, so anyone who overhears the conversation— or reads the email— isn’t breaking any law.The original intent of this legal change was for law enforcement: Along with the provisions of the Patriot Act, the idea was to make it easier for police and government bureaucrats to look freely in places that used to require a warrant.
Regardless of how you feel about that, the unintended consequence of this may be enormous. One example: If your email no longer has any legal privacy protection, what’s to prevent an ISP from, say, selling his mail server’s backup tapes to a spammer, who could then mine the addresses *and content* for likely spam targets and topics? If your email is now no more legally protected than a conversation on a public sidewalk, I don’t know what recourse you’d have at all."
Realistically I’m less worried about the "expectation of privacy" and much more worried about "selling mail server’s backup tapes to a spammer." Someone with a mail server looking to make some quick cash selling lists to a spammer seems much more likely, and just one more straw ready to break the back of one of the great communication tools of the modern communication tools.
Befuddled 