Author: RB

Funniest advocacy ever

Jay Sulzberger is a loopy open-source advocate from New York and essentially a Marxist. His contribution about net neutrality to the FTC is about the funniest attempt at advocacy I’ve ever read. Here’s a little:

Now cable TV is not the Internet, but most speakers at the FTC’s workshop spoke of the Net in ways that treated it as if it were just a form of interactive TV, with some extra special services bundled with interactive TV, “web viewing”, email, and doubtfully, voice over IP.

Questions around building another, perhaps several other, cable TV networks, are not part of the issue of Network Neutrality, because the Net is not TV of any kind.

Use of the word “broadband” to mean both the Net and cable TV helps perpetuate the fundamental confusion.

He goes on to throw a lot of dirt at a “duopoly” and tout the wonders of the Quote of the Day port. How this guy manages to feed himself on a regular basis is a complete mystery to me, but David Weinberger calls his rant “lucid.” Clearly, that’s a relative term.

Sulzberger is confused about the scope of net neutrality in particular and broadband regulation generally. When AT&T said Google wasn’t going to be allowed to use its pipes for free, the issue under discussion was IPTV, a broadband service that is perhaps easily confused with Internet subscriber service, but not actually identical. IPTV runs alongside voice and Internet subscriber services on residential broadband networks, but not through the Internet service. AT&T couldn’t care less about messing with QOTD, but they’re very serious about making money from IPTV.

Misguided and nonsensical ravings of this type aren’t really helping anybody, but they’re never going to stop. The Jay Sulzbergers and David Weinbergers of this world need to believe that an evil conspiracy is out to shut down QOTD, and no amount of rational argument will persuade them otherwise.

Fixing gay babies in the womb

Southern Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler has accomplished a great feat of trolling on his blog, exploring the question of detecting and correcting homosexuality in pre-born fetuses:

Tyler Gray addresses these issues in the current issue of Radar magazine. In “Is Your Baby Gay?,” Gray sets out a fascinating scenario. A woman is told that her unborn baby boy is gay. This woman and her husband consider themselves to be liberal and tolerant of homosexuality. But this is not about homosexuality now; it is about their baby boy. The woman is then told that a hormone patch on her abdomen will “reverse the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes.” The Sunday Times [London] predicts that such a patch should be available for use on humans within the decade. Will she use it?

This question stands at the intersection of so many competing interests. Feminists and political liberals have argued for decades now that a woman should have an unrestricted right to an abortion, for any cause or for no stated cause at all. How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual? This question involves both abortion and gay rights — the perfect moral storm of our times.

Homosexual activists have claimed that sexual orientation cannot be changed. What if a hormone patch during pregnancy will do the job?

He’s got both gay activists and hardcore fundamentalists upset at him and sparked an article in the Associated Press.

Our hat’s off to the preacher.

Fortney’s hatred of the Baby Jesus

Fortney “Pete” Stark, Congressman from Fremont, shocked the Jesus freaks by admitting he’s not real keen on the invisible. Fortney has now inspired this riff by Sam Harris:

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin’s Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren’t sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

If you go to church, you’re helping the terrorists. Now that’s all the more reason to devote your Sundays to baseball.

Spreading money

Viacom sues Google over YouTube for a cool billion bucks and Jeff Jarvis is predictably upset:

I’ve been reading Viacom’s boneheaded $1 billion complaint against YouTube. Viacom complains about YouTube but, in truth, they’re complaining about their own viewers. They whine about theft but, in fact, they’re whining about recommendation, about their audience finding them more audience. Viacom is trying, singlehandedly, to turn the TV industry into the music industry. They are trying to spread stupid.

Let me suggest another point of view. I believe Viacom is upset over the fact that the TV programming they produce has been appropriated by another company for the purpose of substituting the other company’s ads for Viacom’s. Viacom depends on ad sales to cover the costs of production and delivery of their programming, and when their shows end up on YouTube, Google makes all the money for the ads they sell alongside Viacom’s programming. Presumably, if Google were willing to equitably share their ad revenues with Viacom this case would never have done to court.

So who’s entitled to this ad revenue, Google or Viacom? And who’s “spreading stupid” here?

Internet over TV, maybe

There seems to be a huge disconnect on the nature of the magic box proposed to the FCC by the Usual Suspects to reclaim whitespace abandoned by analog TV:

A coalition of big technology companies wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way: over television airwaves. Key to the project is whether a device scheduled to be delivered to federal labs today lives up to its promise.

The coalition, which includes Microsoft and Google, wants regulators to allow idle TV channels, known as white space, to be used to beam the Internet into homes and offices. But the Federal Communications Commission first must be convinced that such traffic would not bleed outside its designated channels and interfere with existing broadcasts.

The six partners — Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips — say they can meet that challenge. Today, they plan to give FCC officials a prototype device, built by Microsoft, that will undergo months of testing.

Is it a low-power, in-home system comparable to WiFi and UWB, or is it a high-power, long-distance service comparable to WiMax? Nobody seems to know, yet that’s critical to evaluating its usefulness. Anybody who knows, please clue me in.

Net Neutrality in broken English and bad logic

The new net neutrality paper from Florida U. is absolutely hilarious:

Whether to legislate to maintain “net neutrality”, the current status quo of prohibiting broadband service providers from charging online websites for preferential access to their residential and commercial customers, has become a subject under fierce debate. We develop a stylized game-theoretic model to address two critical issues of the net neutrality: (1) who are gainers and losers of abandoning net neutrality, and (2) will broadband service providers have greater incentive to expand their capacity without net neutrality.

We find that if the principle of net neutrality is abandoned, the broadband service provider definitely stands to gain from the arrangement, as a result of extracting the preferential access fees from the content providers. The content providers are thus left worse off, mirroring the stances of the two sides in the debate. Depending on parameter values in our framework, consumer surplus either does not change or is higher, and in the latter case, while a majority of consumers are better off, a minority of them is left worse off with larger wait times to access their preferred content. The social welfare increases when compared to the baseline case under net neutrality when one content provider pays for preferential treatment, but remains unchanged when both content providers pay. We also find that the incentive for the broadband service provider to expand under net neutrality is unambiguously higher than under the no net neutrality regime. This goes against the assertion of the broadband service providers that under net neutrality, they have limited incentive to expand.

Aside from their use of pidgin English (“the current status quo of prohibiting…from charging”, “critical issues of the net neutrality,” “has become a subject under fierce debate,” “a majority are better off, a minority is worse off”) the authors embarrass themselves with a wholly nonsensical definition of the terms of the debate. As Scott Cleland points out, if net neutrality really were the status quo, legislation would not be needed simply to preserve it.

In fact, net neutrality legislation seeks to create a new status quo where light users of Internet subscription services are required to subsidize heavy users, and where telecommunications companies would be prohibited from offering non-Internet-based IPTV services unless competitors could access their private IPTV facilities for free (where “free” means for no additional charge beyond what they pay for Internet service today.)

Verizon and AT&T offer IPTV services today, so this is clearly not a question of preserving the status quo.

The professors jump through hoops in order to “prove” that light users should be required to subsidize heavy users, and then baldly assert that the only difference between 10 Megabit Ethernet on fiber (10Base-FL [sic]) and Gigabit Ethernet is at the transceiver level. No dudes, not even close: system interfaces, buses, and MAC controllers have to be re-engineered to run faster, and distances suffer.

Enlightenment fundamentalist

The latest criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that she’s an “enlightenment fundamentalist:”

Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: “As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive.” This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let’s not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the “unbelieving fundamentalist.”

Christopher Hitchens disputes this charge:

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?

I would embrace the “enlightenment fundamentalist” label. There’s no shame in being a fanatic for tolerance, secular democracy, science, and reason, and these are the fundamental values of Western civilization. Or were, once upon a time.

BONUS FEATURE: For no extra charge, see today’s Opinion Journal on Ms. Ali:

This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. “I have my ideas and my views,” she says, “and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically.” As to the charges that she is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.

Amen.

Objects in blogs smaller than they appear

Bjørn Stærk was one of the classic, anti-idiotarian warbloggers, like me a cheerleader for the invasion (we used to say “liberation”) of Iraq. He’s done some re-thinking and abandoned the main principles of war-bloggerdom, and I endorse his message:

Who were these people? They were us. “Us”? This seemed a lot clearer at the time. Us were the people who acknowledged the threat of Islamist terrorism, who had the common sense to see through the multicultural fog of words, and the moral courage to want to change the world by force. It included politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it included the new European right, it included brave and honest pundits, straight-talking intellectuals in the enlightenment tradition.

And then there were people like me, who labelled ourselves “warbloggers”, and called our friends “anti-idiotarians”. Phew, all those labels! Now, anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been drifting away from where I started for years. They’re going to laugh if I pretend that I’ve ever been an Islamophobe, or that I was among the most eager of the Bush supporters, and use that to claim special insights into these people. Some of the ideas I criticize I believed for a long time, some for a short time, and some I never liked at all.

And by “us” I don’t mean that everyone thought alike, I mean that there was an identity based on an unspoken agreement about who were “ok” and who weren’t. And – God help me – I was ok. I haven’t been for a while now, but it’s only recently I’ve realized just how little there’s left of what I believed five years ago. Our worldview had three major focus points – Iraq, terrorism and Islam – and we were wrong about all of them.

When you’ve been attacked, it’s easy to get swept up in emotion, and that’s what happened back in 2001. I believe the lust for war would have subsided sooner in many of us if the blogs weren’t simply an echo chamber for un-critical reinforcement of existing biases, but that’s essentially all they are.

Read me first

Writing in The Guardian, the esteemed technologist Seth Finkelstein offers a clear and concise picture of Wikipedia’s delusional alternate reality:

One of Wikipedia’s major public relations successes has been in misdirecting observers into a narrative of technological miracles, diverting attention from analysing its old-fashioned cult appeal. While I don’t mean to imply that everyone involved in Wikipedia is wrapped up in delusion, that process is a key factor. A charismatic leader, who peddles a type of spiritual transcendence through selfless service to an ideal, finding a cadre of acolytes willing to devote their lives (without payment) to the organisation’s projects – that’s a story worth telling. But not abetting.

This is particularly interesting to me at the moment, because one of the faithful is trying to get me banned from editing the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality, simply to silence a point of view.

Wikipedia is the place to go when reality doesn’t live up to your expectations. Wiki-reality is so much better than real reality that once you go there, you’ll never come back. Kudos to Seth, information entropy’s biggest enemy.

David Isenberg, who should be basking in the afterglow of his successful Freedom to Connect conference, is very upset with The Guardian for publishing Seth’s opinion. The poor dude should join the debate rather than try to silence other points of view. Oops.

UPDATE: The ultimate Wikipedia bogey-man is Daniel Brandt.

UPDATE: See The Register for a cute satire If Surgery Was Like Wikipedia.

Trivia at risk?

A new development in the Wikipedia fake credentials scandal:

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

Wikipedia depends on the kindness of strangers, and if their support stops, it will have to shut down. And then where would we find the life stories of the participants in American Idol season 2? Oh, the humanity.