Daily Archives: March 4, 2009

Wrecking America

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If you’re wondering what motivates the Republicans in Congress who have opposed the Obama stimulus plan tooth and nail, then you aren’t alone. Mark Anderson is not only baffled; he’s furious.

The first inkling that, having literally destroyed America’s domestic and international well-being, the remaining GOP crowd were going to get even worse, came with the stimulus vote. It seems to have started with Rush Limbaugh, an embarrassing dinosaur on AM radio who seems now to be running the party, in lieu of anyone else raising their hand. “I hope he fails!” he shouted to his listeners the day of Obama’s inaguration.

Let’s look at that for a moment. Since then, Rush, a convicted drug addict and no sane person’s idea of a role model, has tried to back off of his statement, whining away that it was a defensive comment after all those bad things other people said about his boy, George Bush. Another lie, in a long series of lies. Why does he even bother? He said it, and he should be a man: stand by your word.

Today’s headline in the WSJ:

GOP Attacks Climate Plan as Too Costly

Let me say this clearly: since Reagan, by uniting the Christian Coalition with old-line Eisenhower Republicans in order to win the election, laid the seeds for the destruction of his own party, nothing really has changed. Bush Jr. forced the Christians to shut up during his opening convention, in return for getting lots of power later, and they went along: the convention did not mention abortion, there was no rancor on the floor, and the nation was split along abortion lines from then on.

Thanks, George.

What do Republicans stand for today? Well, in truth, they don’t have a clue. But some evil mind in their ranks is telling them that, in the midst of the greatest crisis perhaps ever faced by the nation, they should simply oppose whatever Obama and his party suggests.

Really?

Is that all you’ve got?

If that is all you’ve got, then what you are doing should be deemed illegal. You aren’t even trying to offer us a new path; you are just doing what you did for the last eight years: wrecking America.

Google is subsidising print publications!

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From today’s NYTimes.

As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.

But first they must be found.

Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.

So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.

Why TV Lost

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To nobody’s surprise except its own, ITV is in deep, deep trouble. Paul Graham has been musing about how broadcast TV lost the war. “About twenty years ago”, he writes, “people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word ‘convergence’ we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call “TV shows”, but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.”

Graham identifies four factors which cooked broadcast’s goose.

1. The Internet as an open platform. “Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.”

2. Moore’s Law, “which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth”.

3. Piracy. “Users prefer it not just because it’s free, but because it’s more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen.”

4. Social applications. “The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.”

This last, Graham argues, “was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that’s what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.”

“After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience”, TV people thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.

So, in a nutshell, “Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.”

Networked science

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Caroline Wagner has published an interesting book entitled The New Invisible College: Science for Development.

According to the blurb it

offers new tools for governing science in the twenty-first century. Based on exciting advances in complexity and network theories, this book reveals the dynamics and structure of knowledge creation in science. Dr. Wagner urges policymakers to move beyond national policy models and towards networked models of science. This will expand opportunities to translate science into useful technology and social welfare, especially for poor countries.

The coming thing: Google-subsidised Linuxbooks

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From The Register.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hinted that his company – or at least its partners – will one day subsidize the purchase of extra-low-cost Linux netbooks in an effort to promote the use of its myriad cloud online services.

“What’s particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point,” Google’s Willy Wonka told a room full of financial types this afternoon at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in downtown San Francisco. “Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That’s another new model that’s coming.”

Schmidt called netbooks the “next generation” of the low-cost machines produced by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “Products today are not completely done. Things are missing. It’s perfectly possible that operating systems that are Linux-based will become a significant player in that space, whereas they have historically not been a significant player in the PC space.”

In other words, Schmidt believes the US is going back to the future. The subsidized-PC model famously failed in the late 90s and early aughts, with outfits like PeoplePC and emachines. In the UK, mobile operators are already offering free laptops with wireless contracts.

It’s obvious, really. The only thing that current Netbooks lack is inbuilt 3G. Retrofitting them with dongles is, in my experience, a pain.

UPDATE: I should have known — Vodafone is already offering such a product. Thanks to Keren for alerting me.