Broadband Politics

Having completely struck-out in their attempts to undermine copyrights and to weaken America’s national security by attacking the PATRIOT Act, the mischievous little elves at the EFF want to attack one of the major foundations of the technology business, the patent system. They claim widespread abuse of the patent system has had a “chilling effect” [...]

Lessig wags his finger and puts me in my place on his blog comments today. It’s such a fine example of argument by personal attack and obfuscation that I have to capture it here for posterity. As you read this, remember Lessig’s sneer at “Free Culture” critic Stephen Manes: “I love it when non-lawyers [...]

The Sacramento Bee has an interesting article today on the outsourcing/insourcing controversy, prompted by some grand-standing legislation:

The Golden State ranks first nationally for the most jobs – 713,500 – supported by the U.S. operations of foreign-based companies, according to the Organization for International Investment in Washington, D.C…
On average, U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies pay their [...]

I got this fake e-mail today:

The Ebay has an email address for reporting fake emails: spoof@ebay.com.
(I knew it was fake because: a) it’s a gif and not a regular text message; and b) Ebay doesn’t cut off your buying privileges out of the blue.)
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Nick Denton’s a little tweaked by my comments on Kinja, to wit:

Hey, Richard — just promise me one thing. That, when Kinja is the largest single referrer in your blog logs, you’ll eat your words.
Regards
Nick
My biggest single referrer today is Google, so the only way I can see this happening is for Kinja to get [...]

Here’s a nice statement of a fact that every critic of out-sourcing should be told:

While reliable figures aren’t available for the last two years, the Commerce Department estimated on March 18 that the number of Americans employed by U.S. affiliates of majority non-U.S. companies grew by 4.7 million from 1997 through 2001. In the same [...]

A couple of years ago, I had a feature on this blog called “Robopundit” that went out and aggregated RSS feeds from some of my favorite blogs into a cute little sidebar so you could see summaries of recent entries. I also engaged in a lot of speculation about what it would take to automate [...]