A couple of years ago I read an article in which Huey Lewis was described as "Bruce Springsteen for retarded people." Apparently, he has a following among the developmentally disabled. The article is kind of sweet, actually, and Mr. Lewis comes across as a gentleman. But I'm sure the person who wrote this got a call from Lewis's manager:-)
I think one likely reason that the RIAA/MPAA are avoiding Harvard is because of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society which is an outgrowth of the Harvard Law school. You may be familar with Berkman through the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, OpenNet Initiative (mapping government repression of the Internet worldwide), and the Stop Badware projects.
Surely they're going to take an interest in this case regardless of whether it is Harvard being sued, though.
"Open Source" is so 1995. Good lord, he even makes reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Could this article be more hackneyed? Time to update the buzzwords at least. This is Warfare 3.0! (Or is that too 2002?)
The insurgency has an advantage in that all they really need to do to win is continue to create a lot of chaos. That's a somewhat more modest objective than invading and occupying another country on the other side of the globe, which no number of PS3s and radio shack components will enable any guerilla army to do any time soon. They aren't particularly high tech, unless you were naive enough to think Iraqis didn't have cell phones and the Internet prior to the war. So technology isn't really leveling the playing field at all; it's just the nature of counter insurgency warfare.
It's a shame we lost a $100,000 robot to disarm a much less expensive IED, but that's why we built the robots. Ideally they'd come back from every mission, but if they don't it's quite an improvement over losing a solider, as we might have done in Vietnam.
I'd have to go with Ewoks, but other than that, the Directors' Cuts with the new CGI footage. The bar scene on Tatooine was more interesting because it was populated by all these fantastic creatures played by human actors and puppeteers. None of the new CGI creatures had anywhere near as much charm. What was up with Jabba the Hutt meeting Han Solo *before* he fled Tatooine? Aside from destroying Han's motivation to flee, the CGI Jabba--who could walk (?!), was nowhere near as interesting as the giant muppet Jabba.
As Pixar shows, it's possible to have interesting CGI characters, but Lucas didn't succeed at it.
I love the way that, especially in the US, if people suggest even marginal regulatory improvements to the minimum fuel standards of vehicles (as happens every year in the US, and is hugely lobbied against), they get called "eco nazis who want to live in mud huts". Here in Europe, we have much more fuel efficient cars, yet amazingly do not live in mud huts.
Here in San Francisco I don't even need a car. I have a 10-minute commute to work on natural gas and electric powered buses. Because the climate is mild, I don't need an air conditioner and I rarely need to heat my home. I grew up in a suburb where me, my sister, and my parents each had a car and needed it. Compared to that, riding the bus isn't so bad. I wouldn't go back to the suburbs for anything. My carbon footprint is about a tenth of the average American's, but I don't feel like I've sacrificed a thing. So yeah, it pisses me off that for the past 60 years government policy has heavily tilted toward suburbs. It's an article of religious fait: Suburbs are just morally superior. Cities are a dumping ground for single people, the poor, ethnic minorities, and other undesirables that respectable families don't want messing up their neighborhoods. It becomes a vicious circle: Middle class voters flee the cities because government lets the infrastructure go to hell; government lets the infrastructure go to hell because middle class voters live in the suburbs. If we spent anywhere near as much per capita on cities as we do on suburbs, it would be more environmentally sustainable and most people would be much happier.
PS, Despite admitting alcohol abuse and an affair with a subordinate, Gavin Newsom is a shoe-in to win the next election. He doesn't really need to suck up to the corporate money. I think it's just instinctive for him to do so.
Do you really want mayors and governors loyal to the Bush administration to have significant say in who has access to look inside your internet connection?
You're right. It's much safer to have your Internet connection controlled by an amoral multinational corporation. You realize, of course, that the telecoms are lobbying to have themselves granted immunity for illegal wiretaps they facilitated on behalf of the Bush administration?
Mayors and governors, in a functioning democracy at least, are accountable to their constituents. AT&T is accountable to its shareholders.
As a San Francisco resident and Earthlink subscriber, I'm delighted the Wifi proposal flopped. First, as an Earthlink subscriber I knew they wouldn't deliver. Second, it was just another of these public/private partnerships that have been all the rage for the past 30 years or so, and which almost invariable promise the moon and the stars on a shoestring budget and then vanishes from everyone's consciousness. Building a public wifi network is really not that ambitious an undertaking. The Earthlink proposal was to cost how much? $20 million? That's a pittance for the city of San Francisco, which has an annual budget of more than a billion dollars. And that's to build the network, not for annual maintenance, which presumably would cost much less. It was absolutely pitiful that Gavin Newsom gave away such an important piece of infrastructure to a private company for such a puny sum. And it's because he's the sort of New Democrat that emerged in the '90s, beholden to corporate interests and afraid to be associated with anything that might smack of the Old Democrats--ie, the New Deal and the Great Society Democrats. Well, I wish he'd lose that fear. The New Deal produced the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. At the height of the Great Depression. Not bad, hm? If we'd had New Democrats running things back then, we'd probably all still be paying dearly to commute on private ferry services, because God forbid government try to do anything to make peoples' lives better when there is potential for private companies to make a profit.
Municipal wifi is so cheap that there really is no reason we couldn't do that *and* build a fiber-optic network; I mean, it's an order of magnitude cheaper so why not do both. Fast networks are already crucial infrastructure, and will be even more so, particularly in a city that considers itself a capital of high tech. Private industry isn't going to get it done. So just step up and *lead* already. I can't believe I live in a rich, densely populated, supposed high-tech capital and the best broadband I can get for less than $100 a month is this shitty 1.5Mbps/384Kbps DSL!
I couldn't help but notice that Bayscribe's (the submitter) e-mail handle is VentureBeat. So I'm assuming he wrote the article that the writeup links to? If so, that needs to be more clear in the writeup. It's not enough that the e-mail address is a tell. He isn't submitting this article as a disinterested third party who finds it interesting; he most likely wants to drive traffic to his site.
I can agree that he was resisting arrest, but in this case there was no need for the arrest in the first place.
Did you watch the long version of the video? First, he grabbed the mic when it wasn't his turn to speak. Then he went on this long rant which was a statement, not a question. Then he wouldn't let Kerry answer and started into a second and third question. He wouldn't leave when his mic was cut off. He was clearly disturbing the peace. Then when they tried to arrest him he resisted arrest. This dude is clearly deranged. A bipolar narcissist, probably.
I just calculated that an 8Mbps connection could download 100GB in a little more than a day. That sounds like an unbelievable amount to me since a) I never need to download that much, despite nearly constant bittorrent use and b) downloading that much would be impossible, or at the very least not a very nice thing to do to any server I have access to. Still, if people are getting booted off Comcast for downloading at the advertised top speed for only one day a month, I can understand why they're pissed. It would just never occur to me to place that heavy a demand on a consumer broadband connection.
That said, the Comcast technician in the article you linked said that people were being sent letters for anywhere from 100GB to 1 terabyte per month. Jesus! That is a lot to ask of a consumer broadband product. Still, if Comcast advertises their product at 8Mbps you ought to be able to use it for more than 1-10 continuous days without violating their terms of service, even if it seems ludicrous to me that very many people would expect to be able to do so. Ah well.
At any rate, the truly ludicrous thing is that they still offer only 784Kbps upload. That should be a tipoff that this isn't a business-class offering. But you shouldn't have to read between those lines. Agreed, they are wankers, but then I already thought they were wankers anyway.
Of course, stating caps would destroy the myth that Comcast's service is unlimited, and probably do damage to its advertising that its service is good for bandwidth-intensive applications.
This is just a Web site and of course it changes all the time, but I defy you to show me where Comcast advertises their service as "unlimited" without any clearly visible disclaimer.
And its service *is* good for bandwith-intensive applications. It's the best you can get for the price you're willing to pay, or I presume you would go somewhere else.
Sigh. I know. There is nowhere else, except maybe the phone company, and they're even worse. That's why I think government needs to get involved. That's how they do it in countries with good high-speed access.
Obviously they aren't going to set a hard limit. If they say everyone can download 90GB a month and everyone does that, their network will screech to a halt. But if they limit everyone to 1GB a month that's even more unreasonable, since the network has the capacity for the small percentage of customers who want to use more than that to use more if they like. The amount is bound to fluctuate. In the days when Napster was the biggest consumer of bandwith, the limit was probably higher. But now, more people want to download 8GB dvds so there is less bandwith to go around and the limit has to change. Jesus Christ, on a site as IT-oriented as Slashdot I would think people would understand that.
They shouldn't just terminate accounts without warning, though. I'm not defending the customer service of Comcast. We really need to upgrade infrastructure so that everyone can stream hdtv to their homes 24/7 without it causing a problem. And actually I don't think any of the current ISPs in the US are going to do that without government taking the lead. So, boo hoo. If you want a large amount of guaranteed bandwith you'll have to pay for it.
You mean like the iPhone? What is it, now, $399? Do you know how much it will cost consumers if manufacturing moves to Mexico? $399. The only difference is less profit for Apple. Which I can live with if that's what it takes to ensure that our trading partners aren't running sweatshops.
And what if the Chinese say, "No" to your standards?
Then we negotiate, and we don't give in until we reach something better than the status quo. Why not? What have we got to lose except a massive trade deficit? We've survived several decades of trade sanctions against Iran, and they have *oil*, which is something we actually need quite a bit more than we need yet another source of cheap labor. They really, really need us to buy their stuff, but they're mostly still too poor to buy anything from us in return. This deal only really benefits a small number of wealthy capitalists. The average American won't lose 2 seconds of sleep if Phil Knight pockets 5 percent less on each pair of Nikes because he had to move his factory to Mexico. We still have some leverage, in other words, Your all-or-nothing fatalism about the inevitability of absolutely unrestricted international trade is comical.
I really wish that Liberals would pick up and read their economics textbooks before making such silly assertions and suggestions concerning wages, prices, globalization, etc. Are there problems? Yes, but offering solutions which every econ 101 student knows to be flawed doesn't really help either.
And I really wish that Conservatives would take some of the economics classes that come *after* Econ 101. There is no reason we should not set some minimal standards for wages, environment, worker protection, etc,, in our trade agreements. If China wants to sell to the USA then it has to offer something other than slave wages and a willingness to wreck the environment beyond what anyone in a democratic country would tolerate. We don't have to eliminate all of China's competetive advantage, but let's set some standards below which no one is allowed to sink. For starters, how about some real regulation of industry so they don't ship toys with lead paint on them?
During the Cold War, many people bought into this propaganda that Capitalism == Goodness and Light and any interference with the market == Stalinism. But now we're seeing how that really isn't the case.
Son Volt, Wilco, the Rentals... What year is this, 1996? I don't mean to snark but that is exactly what I was listening to in 1996 in Chicago. Except Son Volt and Wilco had only recently risen from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo. I'm glad to see Farrar and Tweedy reunited, if only on the same home page leading separate bands. Uncle Tupelo was the best band ever. Saw them at Lounge Ax, Chicago.
On a semirelated note, I'm struck by how much easier kids today have it when it comes to discovering new music. I had an appallingly limited selection when I was growing up in the suburbs in the '80s. Bands that we now think of as seminal--early REM, the Pixies, Husker Du--weren't played on commercial radio, and there was no college radio in my town. A lot of these bands were actually rather obscure at the height of their careers. Maybe in Los Angeles there was a station that played them. Not in my town. My parents wouldn't subscribe to MTV. There were mail order clubs like BMG (what Ben Stiller referred to as "Baby's first scam,") but selection was worse than what you might find at even a crappy record store. Basically the only way to hear something new was to make friends with other music geeks and trade mix tapes. Which I guess encourages social interaction which is a good thing, but it's a very laborious process if all you want is to check out the latest from the Pixies. Oh and I guess you could purchase music from a store. If you had a car, which I didn't until I was 16, and anyway purchasing tapes without hearing any of the music on them first is a prohibitively expensive way to discover new music, particularly when you are on a (stingy!) allowance or working 12 hours a week at a pizza place and also have to pay for your own car and clothing.
This actually influenced my life choices. My desire to live in a large city largely stems from the fact that they had decent radio stations, clubs, and record stores. (Yes, I still call them record stores even though I bought mostly tapes when I was a kid, and later CDs.) Nowadays, the big city radio stations have mostly come down to the craptastic level of the small city stations. (I don't blame technology entirely--telecommunications reform and consolidation hastened its demise.) There are a few record stores that are better than ever, but a lot of the smaller ones have closed. Clubs survive. My little hayseed cousin in Outer Bumfeckistan can download the same stuff that I moved to the city to get.
The downside, I guess, is that the used record stores are in trouble along with the rest of the record industry, although I think things are actually better for the more obscure artists who have access to a vastly larger audience due to the Internet. I wish radio didn't suck, although I don't think technology is entirely to blame there. I don't know what my teen / college years would have been like without mix tapes. I imagine the kids will adapt. I just hope they learn to socialize somewhere other than in front of a computer screen.
Two Senators in their 80s find the Internet kind of scary. What a surprise. I wonder if either of them has ever used a computer or even knows how to type.
An acre in Arizona can cost the same as a square foot in SF, so how come all these places are in SF and not the middle of the desert?
The Financial District is a major hub of finance for the entire Pacific Rim. A lot of data center stuff is shipped out to remote locations, but there is still enough left over to support some data centers in close proximity to downtown. Sometimes you need to have physical access to your equipment. Besides, South of Market is traditionally an industrial zone. It boomed and gentrified during the dotcom era, but there are still a lot of light industrial type businesses around. Commercial space was overbuilt in the '90s, which led to a surplus which caused prices to come down to Earth. It's not as crazily expensive as residential real estate, which never really came down in price even after the dotcom implosion. The real estate in SoMa isn't that much pricier than in many other parts of the Bay Area, particularly down on the Peninsula. And anyway the cost of real estate is less significant given the number of servers one data center accommodates. The real estate cost is easily outweighed by the benefit of being close to so many well-heeled clients who require your services.
I don't think kids younger than, say, 13, should have unrestricted access to the Internet any more than they should have unrestricted access to the rest of the world. Someone needs to keep an eye on them, provide guidance, and keep them from getting into too much trouble. So I'm not so concerned at the fact that OLPC computers can be used to access porn--that's just a side effect of having a real computer and real Internet access. I'm more concerned that there may be a lack of adult guidance. I know that the societies targeted by OLPC skew very young demographically, but is enough being done to support the adults, or are we simply providing laptops to children and expecting them to figure things out for themselves?
Slashdot Mirror
None of these points is really arguable.
Of course not. It's hard to argue with "statistically verifiable trends" you've pulled straight out of your ass.
I've had that song going through my head all day, before I watched the video. I think it's because
a) More classical guitar is broadcast during Christmas season than for the rest of the year combined.
b) My dad always puts that record on for the Christmas party. I'm surprised he hasn't worn it out. It's older than I am.
A couple of years ago I read an article in which Huey Lewis was described as "Bruce Springsteen for retarded people." Apparently, he has a following among the developmentally disabled. The article is kind of sweet, actually, and Mr. Lewis comes across as a gentleman. But I'm sure the person who wrote this got a call from Lewis's manager :-)
http://www.sfweekly.com/2005-08-03/news/a-very-special-concert/
I think one likely reason that the RIAA/MPAA are avoiding Harvard is because of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society which is an outgrowth of the Harvard Law school. You may be familar with Berkman through the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, OpenNet Initiative (mapping government repression of the Internet worldwide), and the Stop Badware projects.
Surely they're going to take an interest in this case regardless of whether it is Harvard being sued, though.
Harvard is the lawyer breeding ground.
And the other Ivy League schools aren't?
"Open Source" is so 1995. Good lord, he even makes reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Could this article be more hackneyed? Time to update the buzzwords at least. This is Warfare 3.0! (Or is that too 2002?)
The insurgency has an advantage in that all they really need to do to win is continue to create a lot of chaos. That's a somewhat more modest objective than invading and occupying another country on the other side of the globe, which no number of PS3s and radio shack components will enable any guerilla army to do any time soon. They aren't particularly high tech, unless you were naive enough to think Iraqis didn't have cell phones and the Internet prior to the war. So technology isn't really leveling the playing field at all; it's just the nature of counter insurgency warfare.
It's a shame we lost a $100,000 robot to disarm a much less expensive IED, but that's why we built the robots. Ideally they'd come back from every mission, but if they don't it's quite an improvement over losing a solider, as we might have done in Vietnam.
I'd have to go with Ewoks, but other than that, the Directors' Cuts with the new CGI footage. The bar scene on Tatooine was more interesting because it was populated by all these fantastic creatures played by human actors and puppeteers. None of the new CGI creatures had anywhere near as much charm. What was up with Jabba the Hutt meeting Han Solo *before* he fled Tatooine? Aside from destroying Han's motivation to flee, the CGI Jabba--who could walk (?!), was nowhere near as interesting as the giant muppet Jabba.
As Pixar shows, it's possible to have interesting CGI characters, but Lucas didn't succeed at it.
I love the way that, especially in the US, if people suggest even marginal regulatory improvements to the minimum fuel standards of vehicles (as happens every year in the US, and is hugely lobbied against), they get called "eco nazis who want to live in mud huts". Here in Europe, we have much more fuel efficient cars, yet amazingly do not live in mud huts.
Here in San Francisco I don't even need a car. I have a 10-minute commute to work on natural gas and electric powered buses. Because the climate is mild, I don't need an air conditioner and I rarely need to heat my home. I grew up in a suburb where me, my sister, and my parents each had a car and needed it. Compared to that, riding the bus isn't so bad. I wouldn't go back to the suburbs for anything. My carbon footprint is about a tenth of the average American's, but I don't feel like I've sacrificed a thing. So yeah, it pisses me off that for the past 60 years government policy has heavily tilted toward suburbs. It's an article of religious fait: Suburbs are just morally superior. Cities are a dumping ground for single people, the poor, ethnic minorities, and other undesirables that respectable families don't want messing up their neighborhoods. It becomes a vicious circle: Middle class voters flee the cities because government lets the infrastructure go to hell; government lets the infrastructure go to hell because middle class voters live in the suburbs. If we spent anywhere near as much per capita on cities as we do on suburbs, it would be more environmentally sustainable and most people would be much happier.
PS,
Despite admitting alcohol abuse and an affair with a subordinate, Gavin Newsom is a shoe-in to win the next election. He doesn't really need to suck up to the corporate money. I think it's just instinctive for him to do so.
Do you really want mayors and governors loyal to the Bush administration to have significant say in who has access to look inside your internet connection?
You're right. It's much safer to have your Internet connection controlled by an amoral multinational corporation. You realize, of course, that the telecoms are lobbying to have themselves granted immunity for illegal wiretaps they facilitated on behalf of the Bush administration?
Mayors and governors, in a functioning democracy at least, are accountable to their constituents. AT&T is accountable to its shareholders.
As a San Francisco resident and Earthlink subscriber, I'm delighted the Wifi proposal flopped. First, as an Earthlink subscriber I knew they wouldn't deliver. Second, it was just another of these public/private partnerships that have been all the rage for the past 30 years or so, and which almost invariable promise the moon and the stars on a shoestring budget and then vanishes from everyone's consciousness. Building a public wifi network is really not that ambitious an undertaking. The Earthlink proposal was to cost how much? $20 million? That's a pittance for the city of San Francisco, which has an annual budget of more than a billion dollars. And that's to build the network, not for annual maintenance, which presumably would cost much less. It was absolutely pitiful that Gavin Newsom gave away such an important piece of infrastructure to a private company for such a puny sum. And it's because he's the sort of New Democrat that emerged in the '90s, beholden to corporate interests and afraid to be associated with anything that might smack of the Old Democrats--ie, the New Deal and the Great Society Democrats. Well, I wish he'd lose that fear. The New Deal produced the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. At the height of the Great Depression. Not bad, hm? If we'd had New Democrats running things back then, we'd probably all still be paying dearly to commute on private ferry services, because God forbid government try to do anything to make peoples' lives better when there is potential for private companies to make a profit.
Municipal wifi is so cheap that there really is no reason we couldn't do that *and* build a fiber-optic network; I mean, it's an order of magnitude cheaper so why not do both. Fast networks are already crucial infrastructure, and will be even more so, particularly in a city that considers itself a capital of high tech. Private industry isn't going to get it done. So just step up and *lead* already. I can't believe I live in a rich, densely populated, supposed high-tech capital and the best broadband I can get for less than $100 a month is this shitty 1.5Mbps/384Kbps DSL!
I couldn't help but notice that Bayscribe's (the submitter) e-mail handle is VentureBeat. So I'm assuming he wrote the article that the writeup links to? If so, that needs to be more clear in the writeup. It's not enough that the e-mail address is a tell. He isn't submitting this article as a disinterested third party who finds it interesting; he most likely wants to drive traffic to his site.
Kind of explains a lot, actually.
How very Web 2.0 Bubble...
Well, there goes 5 minutes I'll never get back.
I can agree that he was resisting arrest, but in this case there was no need for the arrest in the first place.
Did you watch the long version of the video? First, he grabbed the mic when it wasn't his turn to speak. Then he went on this long rant which was a statement, not a question. Then he wouldn't let Kerry answer and started into a second and third question. He wouldn't leave when his mic was cut off. He was clearly disturbing the peace. Then when they tried to arrest him he resisted arrest. This dude is clearly deranged. A bipolar narcissist, probably.
I just calculated that an 8Mbps connection could download 100GB in a little more than a day. That sounds like an unbelievable amount to me since a) I never need to download that much, despite nearly constant bittorrent use and b) downloading that much would be impossible, or at the very least not a very nice thing to do to any server I have access to. Still, if people are getting booted off Comcast for downloading at the advertised top speed for only one day a month, I can understand why they're pissed. It would just never occur to me to place that heavy a demand on a consumer broadband connection.
That said, the Comcast technician in the article you linked said that people were being sent letters for anywhere from 100GB to 1 terabyte per month. Jesus! That is a lot to ask of a consumer broadband product. Still, if Comcast advertises their product at 8Mbps you ought to be able to use it for more than 1-10 continuous days without violating their terms of service, even if it seems ludicrous to me that very many people would expect to be able to do so. Ah well.
At any rate, the truly ludicrous thing is that they still offer only 784Kbps upload. That should be a tipoff that this isn't a business-class offering. But you shouldn't have to read between those lines. Agreed, they are wankers, but then I already thought they were wankers anyway.
Of course, stating caps would destroy the myth that Comcast's service is unlimited, and probably do damage to its advertising that its service is good for bandwidth-intensive applications.
This is just a Web site and of course it changes all the time, but I defy you to show me where Comcast advertises their service as "unlimited" without any clearly visible disclaimer.
http://www.comcast.com/8mbps/?CMP=ILC-fcomcastnetdcable2
And its service *is* good for bandwith-intensive applications. It's the best you can get for the price you're willing to pay, or I presume you would go somewhere else.
Sigh. I know. There is nowhere else, except maybe the phone company, and they're even worse. That's why I think government needs to get involved. That's how they do it in countries with good high-speed access.
Jesus Christ, on a site as IT-oriented as Slashdot I would think people would understand that.
Oops. I didn't notice this was posted in the *games* section of Slashdot.
Hi kiddies! No, you can't have infinity bandwith. Not yours.
Obviously they aren't going to set a hard limit. If they say everyone can download 90GB a month and everyone does that, their network will screech to a halt. But if they limit everyone to 1GB a month that's even more unreasonable, since the network has the capacity for the small percentage of customers who want to use more than that to use more if they like. The amount is bound to fluctuate. In the days when Napster was the biggest consumer of bandwith, the limit was probably higher. But now, more people want to download 8GB dvds so there is less bandwith to go around and the limit has to change. Jesus Christ, on a site as IT-oriented as Slashdot I would think people would understand that.
They shouldn't just terminate accounts without warning, though. I'm not defending the customer service of Comcast. We really need to upgrade infrastructure so that everyone can stream hdtv to their homes 24/7 without it causing a problem. And actually I don't think any of the current ISPs in the US are going to do that without government taking the lead. So, boo hoo. If you want a large amount of guaranteed bandwith you'll have to pay for it.
How about less goods and services from China?
You mean like the iPhone? What is it, now, $399? Do you know how much it will cost consumers if manufacturing moves to Mexico? $399. The only difference is less profit for Apple. Which I can live with if that's what it takes to ensure that our trading partners aren't running sweatshops.
And what if the Chinese say, "No" to your standards?
Then we negotiate, and we don't give in until we reach something better than the status quo. Why not? What have we got to lose except a massive trade deficit? We've survived several decades of trade sanctions against Iran, and they have *oil*, which is something we actually need quite a bit more than we need yet another source of cheap labor. They really, really need us to buy their stuff, but they're mostly still too poor to buy anything from us in return. This deal only really benefits a small number of wealthy capitalists. The average American won't lose 2 seconds of sleep if Phil Knight pockets 5 percent less on each pair of Nikes because he had to move his factory to Mexico. We still have some leverage, in other words, Your all-or-nothing fatalism about the inevitability of absolutely unrestricted international trade is comical.
I really wish that Liberals would pick up and read their economics textbooks before making such silly assertions and suggestions concerning wages, prices, globalization, etc. Are there problems? Yes, but offering solutions which every econ 101 student knows to be flawed doesn't really help either.
And I really wish that Conservatives would take some of the economics classes that come *after* Econ 101. There is no reason we should not set some minimal standards for wages, environment, worker protection, etc,, in our trade agreements. If China wants to sell to the USA then it has to offer something other than slave wages and a willingness to wreck the environment beyond what anyone in a democratic country would tolerate. We don't have to eliminate all of China's competetive advantage, but let's set some standards below which no one is allowed to sink. For starters, how about some real regulation of industry so they don't ship toys with lead paint on them?
During the Cold War, many people bought into this propaganda that Capitalism == Goodness and Light and any interference with the market == Stalinism. But now we're seeing how that really isn't the case.
On the 89.3 front page right now:
Son Volt, Wilco, the Rentals... What year is this, 1996? I don't mean to snark but that is exactly what I was listening to in 1996 in Chicago. Except Son Volt and Wilco had only recently risen from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo. I'm glad to see Farrar and Tweedy reunited, if only on the same home page leading separate bands. Uncle Tupelo was the best band ever. Saw them at Lounge Ax, Chicago.
On a semirelated note, I'm struck by how much easier kids today have it when it comes to discovering new music. I had an appallingly limited selection when I was growing up in the suburbs in the '80s. Bands that we now think of as seminal--early REM, the Pixies, Husker Du--weren't played on commercial radio, and there was no college radio in my town. A lot of these bands were actually rather obscure at the height of their careers. Maybe in Los Angeles there was a station that played them. Not in my town. My parents wouldn't subscribe to MTV. There were mail order clubs like BMG (what Ben Stiller referred to as "Baby's first scam,") but selection was worse than what you might find at even a crappy record store. Basically the only way to hear something new was to make friends with other music geeks and trade mix tapes. Which I guess encourages social interaction which is a good thing, but it's a very laborious process if all you want is to check out the latest from the Pixies. Oh and I guess you could purchase music from a store. If you had a car, which I didn't until I was 16, and anyway purchasing tapes without hearing any of the music on them first is a prohibitively expensive way to discover new music, particularly when you are on a (stingy!) allowance or working 12 hours a week at a pizza place and also have to pay for your own car and clothing.
This actually influenced my life choices. My desire to live in a large city largely stems from the fact that they had decent radio stations, clubs, and record stores. (Yes, I still call them record stores even though I bought mostly tapes when I was a kid, and later CDs.) Nowadays, the big city radio stations have mostly come down to the craptastic level of the small city stations. (I don't blame technology entirely--telecommunications reform and consolidation hastened its demise.) There are a few record stores that are better than ever, but a lot of the smaller ones have closed. Clubs survive. My little hayseed cousin in Outer Bumfeckistan can download the same stuff that I moved to the city to get.
The downside, I guess, is that the used record stores are in trouble along with the rest of the record industry, although I think things are actually better for the more obscure artists who have access to a vastly larger audience due to the Internet. I wish radio didn't suck, although I don't think technology is entirely to blame there. I don't know what my teen / college years would have been like without mix tapes. I imagine the kids will adapt. I just hope they learn to socialize somewhere other than in front of a computer screen.
Two Senators in their 80s find the Internet kind of scary. What a surprise. I wonder if either of them has ever used a computer or even knows how to type.
An acre in Arizona can cost the same as a square foot in SF, so how come all these places are in SF and not the middle of the desert?
The Financial District is a major hub of finance for the entire Pacific Rim. A lot of data center stuff is shipped out to remote locations, but there is still enough left over to support some data centers in close proximity to downtown. Sometimes you need to have physical access to your equipment. Besides, South of Market is traditionally an industrial zone. It boomed and gentrified during the dotcom era, but there are still a lot of light industrial type businesses around. Commercial space was overbuilt in the '90s, which led to a surplus which caused prices to come down to Earth. It's not as crazily expensive as residential real estate, which never really came down in price even after the dotcom implosion. The real estate in SoMa isn't that much pricier than in many other parts of the Bay Area, particularly down on the Peninsula. And anyway the cost of real estate is less significant given the number of servers one data center accommodates. The real estate cost is easily outweighed by the benefit of being close to so many well-heeled clients who require your services.
I live in San Francisco and the fastest DSL AT&T sells in my neighborhood is 1.5Mbps. Is San Francisco not densely populated enough?
I don't think kids younger than, say, 13, should have unrestricted access to the Internet any more than they should have unrestricted access to the rest of the world. Someone needs to keep an eye on them, provide guidance, and keep them from getting into too much trouble. So I'm not so concerned at the fact that OLPC computers can be used to access porn--that's just a side effect of having a real computer and real Internet access. I'm more concerned that there may be a lack of adult guidance. I know that the societies targeted by OLPC skew very young demographically, but is enough being done to support the adults, or are we simply providing laptops to children and expecting them to figure things out for themselves?