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The Politics of Technology
airrage writes "An interesting Washington
Post article today, concerning technology's voice on Capital Hill, talks about how the high-tech sector is no longer the belle of the congressional ball. Apparently, circa 2000, politicos were simply tripping over themselves to be seen as pro-technology. Currently, it's much harder to get congressional leaders to embrace pro-technology initiatives. Seems like technology in general is trending towards more regulation as the industry is seen as staid as railroads, coal, or shipping."
The pols don't want to be burned again like they were burned when the dot com bubble burst. A lot of people lost a lot of money and politicians don't want to be linked to that.
Pigs will fly, or I will be a politician. If I were a politician, then there would be at least one person who knows how to avoid infecting their computer with a virus, or that there should be legislation against SPAM mail. Too many Computer Science geeks are too meek to run for office where they could further the nerd agenda.
;-)
Gates for President!
[I'd say Linus, but he wasn't born States side.]
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It has always bugged me how lobbyists and campaign contributors just have to spread money around to get the votes. Frankly I'm surprised the general public accepts it as much as they do.
Some things are long overdue. Like applying standard contract law to EULAs and declaring them unenforceable. Or using existing product liability laws to hold software vendors accountable for their defective products.
Legislators treating technology like a special case is exactly what gives us crap like the DMCA and UCITA.
If you are one of the companies that can line their pockets with cash.
Some things never change.
A lot of people had to learn that not everything that glitters is gold the hard way - they probably would not trust someone who promises a second dot-com boom.
Politics is not so much doing the best for the country's future as trying to please voters and supporters.
where's all that Karma?
I suppose you are also going to tell me that congress allows 181 Fortune 500 companies loopholes so they don't pay any federal taxes just because these corporations fill up their war chests.
Nothing is new under the sun.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
I don't think it's about the dot com bubble, at least not completely. There are a lot of conflicting viewpoints, and lobbying dollars at the moment. The entertainment industry wants to castrate some technologies, so they can't be used for piracy. The manufacturors want fewer restrictions, because restrictions will lower demand, and restrict possible international exports. The open source communities, the ACLU, etc, want fewer restrictions on principal. And so on like that. In an environment like that, strong support for any given position is likely to get a politician in trouble from someone, so they probably think it's better to be seen as indifferent or neutral.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Technology lobbies and companies must focus their energies and resources on candidates who have stuck their neck out for the high-tech industry, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), noting that the industry's campaign "piggy bank is less fat than it was last time around." "Rather than dropping a little bit of money here, dropping a little bit of money there," ITAA is looking to help established "friends" on Capitol Hill, especially those locked in tight races, Miller said.
Aren't you glad to hear the tech industry has upright, honourable people like this to help them in times of need?
Why do comments like this still get modded as "funny," or indeed anything but the trolls they are? The "Gore claimed he invented the internet" thing was bullshit propaganda two years ago; now it's just a dead horse. Give it up, people.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One thing that we all hated about the .com period, poser geeks.
.com whatever the fuck.
.com sectors out there. Military is growing steadily which is sort of scary.
During that time, geek was shiek. Everyone and their sister was trying to be geek, people that had absolutely no idea of what underlying technology was powering their company would run around touting it as something grand, like upper upper class l33t society, gods gift to geekdom society.
So we had a lot of people with money hopping on the technology bandwagon, the politicians want their money (simple so far right?) Just like the CEO's that ran around swindling the savings out of unsuspecting retiree's for their latest
So basically we have a food chain like this..
Politicians swindle money from CEO's
CEO's swindle money from retiree's
Retiree's are plankton, they just kind of float around.
Now all this money floating around for technology, well it created a need for an IT infrastructure and support personal. People like myself were able to get their foot in the door and get their carreers started because of this. It was awesome because people like me who are sort of antisocial and enjoy solitude with a computer were finally able to fit into the scheme of society to be brought out of our darken CRT lit caves and into the cookie cutter cleanroom of cubicles and flourescent lighting.
Well, at least a few of the companies I worked for, the plankton started asking questions like...
"Is it ready yet?"
After a while, they got sick of being food for the CEO's, and like a food chain, everyone went elsewhere to look for food.
So now it seems everyone from the president on down are sort of being anti technology. I see construction workers still have jobs. Construction hasn't seen nearly the hit technology has. Nor has most of the other pre
Sad thing to see it all go. For once in my life I had found something that people liked about me that just came naturally. But back to the politics.
Right now there is more investment than ever in anything that does not equal technology. America is gearing up for war according to our president. In fact he mentioned something about a draft last thursday. The only thing that comes to my mind when I hear that is my younger brother or cousins. At 29, constant smoker, married and house ownin, they wouldn't want me. 24?? 23? 25? These are the ages of the youngest males in my family.
Politicians don't want to touch technology because it's left a bad taste in our mouths. A lot, and I mean a lot of really hard working people that put their money into these dot coms that dot bombed just would never vote for someone techno related because of it.
Bah, it's saturday, this comment is boring me, Hey post a michael story ok?
--toq
Last questions first (in reverse order):
1) Laws don't Prevent anything. They assign penalties for certain actions. As such, they serve as stimulus to modify behavior. You shoudn't be looking to prevent someone from doing something using the law. That's the trap we're in now - the only way to prevent a potential "bad-guy" from doing something is to lock up everyone, good and bad. If they're copying your program without buying the appropriate number, they've broken the law, and you're entitled to damages.
2) Quality laws do fine now for both the small guy and big guy. Both have to adhere to the same level for making suring that the quality is there. I'm not going to cut my local store more slack for selling me shoddy merchandise than I would WallMart, simply because the local store is "smaller". Obviously there has to be a certain amount of leeway for QA in software (i.e. it can't be perfect, but...). There has to be a minimal barrier-to-entry for producing software, and QA is it. Everyone is held to the same standard, and if the standard is written correctly, then it won't be too burdensome. However, you might need product-liability insurance, like many traditional manufacturing busineses...
3) This goes back to the original statement: you need to be able to provide them with a method for returning the merchandise, but you generally don't have a guaranteed method of locking out cheaters. As a rough analogy: what prevents me from buying a 42" TV, using it for a party that weekend, then returning it on Monday? I'm cheating the retailer, but that's not really detectible. The vast majority of people will pay for a properly priced product, rather than cheat. And if you do it correctly, someone with an "illegal" copy isn't going to be able to get upgrades, support, documentation, et al. And yes, part of your company will have to deal with maintaining serial number collections. That's part of the business. TANSTAAFL.
Right now, being a software company (both big and small) allows the company to sidestep a huge number of obligations that non-software companies take for granted as a cost-of-business. I see no reason for this, and in fact there is a considerable social cost to absolving the software companies of these responsibilities. If this reduces the number of potential small software companies starting up, then so be it. We have to get out of the mind-set that a software company can just spew random crap at the EU. There has to be some responsibilities with producing a product, and these responsibilities cost money.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
He did not say he invented the Internet, but he did say "I took the initiative in creating the Internet". From snopes.com:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
Now sure the "urban legend" uses the word invent instead of create, but the point is the same. Al Gore seemed to be taking credit for something that was *MUCH* larger that he was---even as Vice President. Especially for a project that had been going on since the late 60's. What about Vint Cerf the developer of TCP/IP? Or Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web. Or Ray Tomlinson founder of e-mail? Heck, if we are going to talk about politicans what about LBJ since the DARPA project that became the Internet was started during his administration?
There are a thousand people more deserving to proclaim they "took the initiative in creating the Internet". Sure Al may take credit in helping to promote it, but his statement was way too broad and arrogant. He didn't even acknowledge anyone else. It is everything I dislike about a powerful person taking credit for the work of the "little guy".
Brian Ellenberger
You mean China? I didn't know we were on the virge of war with China. Ohhh, you mean Iraq. The very same country that took a week to devastate in Desert Storm?
You mean the Civil War was last year?
Mmmm. That's why everyone on Slashdot is buying Pentium IV 3GHz PCs, SUVs, and 50" digital televisions.
Right, that's why the dockworkers in California have guaranteed job security lined up. Not to mention all those people recruiters in California who are desperately trying to find (here's the big one, folks) QUALIFIED tech workers. Sorry, if you were part of the dot-com boom, your services are no longer required. Unfortunately, that does, in a round-about way, mean I lost my job, too. But I can get a new one easily enough... I'm just choosy.
Same thing as any other year. More money to build the war machine, less money for science and education.
Good troll.
>any government regulation of industry is bad and damages free markets
Nonsense, Mr Gates. All sorts of things fall into the category of regulation like anti-trust laws, environmental laws, labor laws, etc. It would behoove the pie-in-the-sky libertarians and other lassiez faire types to acknowledge that free markets do a poor job of remaining free and also consolidate power in a way which defeats the purpose of a market to begin with. Regulation should be judged individually, not generalized as being bad because it counters what your conservative professor told you in Economics 101.