April, 25, 2001 archives

the baby bells want to provide long-distance data traffic, and not have to open up their local networks. hopefully rep. markey, whose been at this whole telecommunications legislation thing for a very long time, will prevail in not letting the baby bells run rampant over consumers. (can anyone explain to me why caller id costs over $6 a month?)

if oleo is short for oleomargarine, how come most people call it margarine? oleo just sounds so much cooler. it is referred to as the very formal oleomargarine in the us code. oh well, as long as you don't call it butter.

while everyone is kvetching about a very bright princeton researcher being silenced by being threatened with the dmca, this covers another huge problem -- the consumer electronics manufacturers joining up to support video watermarking. so-called "big media" would love it if i had to buy my music all over again, instead of being able to convert my already-purchased cds into mp3s that i can play on a computer or on my camera/mp3-player. (and meanwhile, copyright law is used to protect a dead writer. i'd love to know how that isn't directly contrary to the goals of "intellectual property" law laid out in the constitution.)

clay shirky once again proves why he is a very smart guy by trying to school some sun engineers on the mistakes being made by the jxta project. (why should we be hopeful about jxta? because it has decentralized authentication at its core. microsoft's hailstorm has exactly the opposite. but there's no way sun is going to save us from microsoft. it will take someone like yahoo, aol, or amazon. my bet is that we lose, though.)