John Kerry wakes up

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Wow! I thought John Kerry was dead. But he lives and breathes! Here’s what he had so say about the Senate Commerce Committee’s decision not to endorse the principle of Net Neutrality.

Yesterday in the Senate Commerce Committee I warned that those of us who believe in net neutrality will block legislation that doesn’t get the job done.

It looks like that’s the fight we’re going to have.

The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer. It will not stand.

I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.

Everyone says they don’t want the new world we’re living in to be marked by the digital divide — the term is so cliched it’s turned to mush — but yesterday was a test of who is willing to ask corporate America to do anything to fix it, and the Commerce Committee failed miserably. Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?

Free and open access to the internet is something all Americans should enjoy, regardless of what financial means they’re born into or where they live. It is profoundly disappointing that the Senate is going let a handful of companies hold internet access hostage by legalizing the cherry-picking of cable service providers and new entrants. That is a dynamic that would leave some communities with inferior service, higher cable rates, and even the loss of service. Not to mention inadequate internet service — in the age of the information.

This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.

Great stuff! But it’s like Al Gore Mk II. Why do these guys not realise that if they were passionate about causes then they might win elections

[Link]

England’s coming home

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Er, surprise, surprise. Rob Smyth (whose live Blog I have enjoyed) signs off.

The pantomime villain Ronaldo wins it with an excellent penalty, to Robinson’s left, and it’s the same, same old story for England. Gerrard and Lampard took awful penalties, but there was big controvery over Jamie Carragher’s miss. Lampard and Gerrard are motionless, broken, it’s horrible and a little poignant. Rio is crying violently; fate has merked him, and it’s harsh because, quietly, he had an excellent tournament. Ultimately, however, England found their level – the quarter-finals – and all the bluster and blame and bull****, particularly over Rooney’s sending off, we will get over the next few days can’t disguise it: that dullard idiot Eriksson has trousered £4m a year to do something that you or I could have done. I’m off to drown sorrows I didn’t realise I’d have at this result. Thanks for your emails – Rob.

Now for the next act in the pantomime — the tabloids which fuelled the preposterous fantasy that England could win the Cup, turn inwards — on Eriksson, the robotic manager; on the players; on the referees; on the Portuguese manager with his absurd Evelyn Waugh moustache; and on anybody else even remotely responsible for the defeat. Except, of course themselves.

Later… I’m not terribly interested in football, and am conscious of the fact that I’m pretty ignorant about it. So when I first saw England play and thought they looked terribly pedestrian I kept my views to myself. After all, what do I know about it? But having watched the France-Brazil game tonight it really does seem extraordinary that large numbers of apparently sensible people believed that the England squad was in the same league as France or Brazil. Now that England is out, I guess we can expect lots of people coming out of the woodwork saying that they had known all along that Eriksson & Co weren’t up to scratch. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And of course, Eriksson had a contract ensuring that, whatever happened, he would cry all the way to the bank.

The Somme, 90 years on

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Today is the 90th anniversary of the battle of the Somme, on the first day of which the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead — the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

Max Hastings has a thoughtful piece about it in the Guardian. It begins:

Captain WP Nevill of the 8th East Surreys was a complete ass. In the line in France, he liked to stand on a firestep of an evening, shouting insults at the Germans. Knowing that his men were about to participate in their first battle and keen to inspire, he had a wizard idea.

On leave in England, he bought footballs for each of his four platoons. One was inscribed: “The Great European Cup. The Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick-off at Zero.” Nevill offered a prize to whoever first put a ball into a German trench when the “big push” came.

Sure enough, when the whistles blew on July 1 1916, and 150,000 English, Scots, Welsh and Scottish soldiers climbed ladders to offer themselves to the German machine-guns, Nevill’s footballers kicked off.

One of the few eye-witnesses to survive described watching a ball arch high into the sky over no-man’s-land, on its way to the German trenches near Montauban. No winner collected Nevill’s prize, however. Within minutes the captain was dead, as were most of his men…

Later… James M emailed:

Every time I read about the Somme and other battles, in which the trials of the British and allies are described; when I visit Duxford or Bletchley or Madingley American Cemetery – my mind is always drawn to how it must have felt to have been on the other side. It’s almost never discussed. Does Germany have Somme-fests every modulo-10 years? So I was pleased to see this.

Net Neutrality: Rules vs. Principles

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I found this post from Tim O’Reilly very helpful in thinking about the Net Neutrality debate.

Tim focusses on a helpful distinction made by Chris Savage — between rules and principles. The gist is:

A lot of confusion in the Net Neutrality debate has do with the hoary distinction in jurisprudence between “rules” and “principles.”

A first approximation for the non-lawyers here: the tax code is full of RULES: Take this number, divide it by that number, place the result on line 17 if it’s greater than $57,206 and on line 19 if it’s less. Etc. RULES are intended to direct or forbid very specific behaviors.

PRINCIPLES, on the other hand, are more general. When driving you are required to use “reasonable care.” If you don’t, then you are negligent and can be held liable, in a tort case, for the damages you cause. And though there are plenty of rules about driving, tort liability is based on the PRINCIPLE of reasonable care, and is assessed on a case-by-case basis.

“Net Neutrality” is a principle, not a rule…

It seems to me that this distinction is useful in all kinds of areas. For example, in relation to IP legislation, an important principle is that monopolies are at best a necessary evil and should be avoided or limited wherever possible. This means that any proposal to extend an IP right (which is, remember, a legislative grant of monopoly rights) should always be viewed with extreme scepticism.

Toll booths on the Net

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Believers in the Internet as a free flowing, end-to-end service were talking about the end of it all today, after a Net neutrality amendment to telecom legislation was voted down in a Senate committee yesterday on an 11-11 tie. We’ve been over this ground before (see “That’s a mighty fine looking stream of data you’ve got there … shame if anything happened to it.”), so this time we’ll let ZDNet’s Mitch Ratcliffe say it: “The Senate Commerce Committee, splitting 11 to 11 and therefore rejecting compromise language, set the stage for a carrier-controlled Internet. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by the President, you can kiss the Net you know ‘goodbye.’ Farewell, open networks and open standards. Soon every packet will be subject to inspection and surcharges based on what it carries and who sent it or where it is going. The compromise language would have guaranteed that all traffic sent over carrier backbones would be treated equally, regardless of its source or destination. Carriers will be free to target especially profitable traffic for surcharges.” Those who frame this as a fight to keep the government’s sticky fingers out of the “natural” workings of the market were pleased. “For those of you who think this is a bad thing — recall the FCC’s actions after the Super Bowl ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ If you think the U.S. government is going to lay down neutrality rules and then keep a hands off attitude beyond that, you probably also think you’ll find a pony under every large pile of manure,” writes James Robertson. Both sides agree, however, that there is fighting that remains to be done, with Net neutralists taking heart from managing the tie in committee and momentum for a Senate floor fight growing.

txts R going thrU roof

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According to BBC NEWS…

Mobile phone users in the UK sent a record 3.3 billion text messages in May, figures show.

The Big Brother TV show, the FA Cup and Champions League finals all helped boost numbers, according to the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

Person-to-person texts sent across all mobile phone networks averaged 106 million per day last month.

This figure was up 26% on May 2005 and beat the previous UK record of 3.2 billion texts sent in March.

That figure could rise higher this month due to a surge in World Cup-related messages.

[…]

More than 120 million text messages were sent on FA Cup final day, rising to 124 million texts on Champions League final day.

A predicted 36.5 billion texts will be sent by UK mobile phone users this year – up from 32 billion in 2005, according to the MDA.

A 100 megapixel chip!

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Technology Review has the story.

San Juan Capistrano, CA-based Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA) has designed the world’s highest-resolution digital camera chip, capable of holding an image composed of more than 111 million pixels. By comparison, the best consumer cameras take shots of 12 to 16 million pixels, and an average computer monitor offers about one million pixels.

The imaging chip, which is a charge-coupled device (CCD), was designed for use in telescope cameras that map stars and ever-moving objects in the solar system, says Richard Bredthauer, STA’s president. But this large-scale chip — it measures four inches square — could be useful in more fields than just astronomy, he says, including high-resolution microscopic images of proteins, military surveillance applications, and even civilian mapping projects that require detailed aerial photography.

It’s four inches square. Too big for my Hasselblad. Bah!

Larry withdraws his offer to Harvard

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Well, well. According to the New York Times,

Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive of the Oracle Corporation and one of the world’s wealthiest people, has decided not to donate $115 million to Harvard as he announced he would last year, the company confirmed yesterday.

Harvard had planned to use the donation, which would have been the largest single philanthropic donation the university had ever received, to establish the Ellison Institute for World Health, a research organization devoted to examining the efficiency of global health projects.

Mr. Ellison decided to cancel his plans for the donation after the resignation in February of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, amid a storm of controversy.

Mr. Summers’s five-year tenure at Harvard was characterized by attempts to change the university’s culture and by a personal style that alienated some professors. He also had missteps, like his remarks suggesting that “intrinsic aptitude” could help explain why fewer women than men reached the highest ranks of science and math in universities.

“Larry Summers was the brainchild of this project,” Bob Wynne, a spokesman for Oracle, said yesterday. “His departure is what caused Larry Ellison to decide against making the donation.”

The Princeton-Microsoft IP Conference

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Ed Felten blogged the conference. Here’s his summary of what Yochai Benkler said:

He has two themes: decentralization of creation, and emergence of a political movement around that creation. Possibility of altering the politics in three ways. First, the changing relationship between creators and users and growth in the number of creators changes how people relate to the rules. Second, we see existence proofs of the possible success of decentralized production: Linux, Skype, Flickr, Wikipedia. Third, a shift away from centralized, mass, broadcast media. He talks about political movements like free culture, Internet freedom, etc. He says these movements are coalescing and allying with each other and with other powers such as companies or nations. He is skeptical of the direct value of public reason/persuasion. He thinks instead that changing social practices will have a bigger impact in the long run.