A Day in Paradise

Some deep words from Nobel Prize winning economist

The most important thing that Barack Obama brings to the presidency is his willingness to reason. He won his presidency not as a black American but as a reasoning American who happens to be black. America needs a change from the reign of "obtruding false rules pranked in reason’s garb" — to use John Milton’s words. Attacking Iraq for an imagined link with 9/11 was daft. Having unaffordable health care is not a reasonable way to run a rich society. Destroying the environment is not smart. Spreading the wealth a bit in a deeply unequal society is not as offensive to reason as it appeared to Joe the noncertified Plumber.

it’s great to see that Joe the Plumber has gathered a fan club as far away as India.

Reasoning also demands re-examination. Obama has to reassess whether he has got the right balance in policies on trade. On Afghanistan, he must examine how to balance his military toughness with the building of social infrastructure there and finding ways and means of getting Pakistan’s energetic — and largely secular — civil society on his side, not against him. Obama may have to reassess some of his campaign rhetoric while firmly retaining his largehearted reasonableness.

Josef Joffe is not as gracious & a bit skeptical.

Up to 8 out of 10 West Europeans would have voted for Obama, which points to a religious rather than political phenomenon. The way they see it, George W. Bush is a one-man axis of evil, and Obama the redeemer: "Deliver us, for thine is the kingdom . . ." Europeans want to love America again, and they imagine that a simple act of exorcism (called "elections") will rid them of the curse. But politics is not about redemption. Obama is not what West Europeans dream he is: polite, social-democratic and pacific. In other words, more European than American. Will the Euroswooners still love Obama when he presses them for more troops in Afghanistan and real sanctions on Iran?

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

It’s hard to believe that it’s PFP day again, seemed like we celebrated Poop for Peace 2006 last week.

Anyway, this email landed in my inbox announcing Pfp 07 on April 13th which will coincide with the publishing of a new book.

This April, just like every April, the world will come together to poop for peace. On April 13, with a grunt and a prayer, we will once again spread the gospel of fundamental oneness by embracing our universal number twoness.

This year’s Poop For Peace Day comes at an exciting time in PoopReport history: the long-awaited release of my first book. Entitled “Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product,” my book explores how humanity’s psychology and sociology is impacted by poop. It’s a funny book, of course, but it’s the product of three years of serious research and deep thought. It explores the influence of poop on the environment and its manifestations in art, commerce, and the media, all the while underscoring the basic themes of PoopReport and Poop For Peace Day: that we are all brothers and sisters struggling uniformly under the
tyranny of the bowel.

To help you not forget this important occasion, I’m posting a banner in the sidebar!

As you may know, it’s a sin for a Taliban male to see a woman other than his wife, naked. He must commit suicide if he does. So this Saturday at 4 P.M. eastern time, all American women are asked to walk out of their houses, completely naked, to weed out any terrorists in your neighborhood. Circling the block for one hour is suggested for this anti-terrorist effort.All men to position themselves in lawn chairs in front of their homes to prove they are not Taliban, and to show support for American women. Since the Taliban also does not approve of alcohol, a cold six pack beside your seat is further proof of your anti-Taliban sentiment.

The U S government appreciates your participation in this anti-terrorist activity.

God bless America!

seen here

… on this one.

I certainly don’t know all the facts, but 40 years sounds like the country throwing the book at the serviceman because they don’t like the fact that he was in the country to begin with. But then again, there are 968 people who were sentanced to death for rape, so maybe he got off easy…

Russian former spy dies

I love the hypocricy which surrounds the glorification/demonization of spies.

This disturbs me on many levels.

Police brutality is nothing new, but what was most shocking about this video was how little the 100 or more students standing around did to stop it.

The question that needs to be answered is “if not you, then who?” what is the point in having a free country with the constitutional right to bear arms (to form malitias which keep government tryanny in check) if you’re just going to stand around and ask for the cops badge number after he’s needlessly tasered some kid five times? Or are we so scared of our government that we’re powerless to do anything in the face of tyranny.

I’m not going to get involved with what the kid did and what the police did, and whether or not he was an asshole. It really doesn’t matter. Regardless of what the kid did, the police handled it brutally, and the students (and anyone who watches the video) realize that.

Civil uprisings which have overthrown governments have been triggered by less than this. I guess the bright side is that it was captured and now that has seen it maybe next time someone will do something to stop it.

</rant>

Somehow, between all the anti pasta and PHP revelry in Italy, OSS Blog managed to get an interview with Tobias Schlitt. The interview covers PHP, Open Source, Ajax and surrounding technologies.

I don’t think I need to say this, but I LOVE Free Software. Companies like eZsystems, MySQL, RedHat and many more, show there is business model which can be both profitable and open.

In the interview with OSSBlog Toby states:

I think, that all software should be open nowadays. That sounds a bit radical at a first glance, but I have some valid reasons: Most software today does not invent any really new technique or concept. Software development mostly consists of taking parts from other software, putting those together and code a little bit around it. This concept aligns very well with the concept of open source. Another reason is, that the software market is changing (maybe because of open source or maybe the other way around). It is not the software itself, where the money comes from, but the services provided for it. The last reason is my personal geekness. I love to learn from other peoples code and I love to just change the code, when I need a different feature or fix a bug.

While I agree with the general concept, I disagree that totally free software is right for every business model.

Case in Point: As part of my code portfolio, I have a quantitative statistics engine which I developed for a client. This is a fairly specific peice of software designed for fund managers most of whom have around $100 million of assets under their management. The software package is written in PHP and is being used in over 30 client sites. It is also the core of a service which will be launching in the near future.

The entire package is written by me (although if I would have discovered PEAR::Math_Finance) I would have certainly used and contributed to that package. After the basic financial calculation class, I implement several hundred algorithms to create the core of the package. Some of the algorithms are freely available online, others needed a lot of offline (often maddening) research. Needless to say the implementation was a fair amount of work, and the intellectual property value of the final product is substantial.

My question is, why should I push for opening up the source? What financial gains would the company that invested in the development get? What benefit would it be to the open source community?

I can understand that if this were a conventional software application distributed using the GPL. I would then have legal means to ensure that the GPL is maintained, or I could use a dual licensing model to license the technology for commercial application. But none of these benefits come through in this case?

Should I just blindly push for the open sourcing of this library? Or is the non-distributed nature of web services where the GPL breaks down?

We created this multi-lingual version of the Star-Spangled Banner to raise awareness of Senate Resolution 458 and House Resolution 793, which state that English is the only language in which our National Anthem should be sung or recited. This resolution was unanimously passed by the Senate and is currently before the House Judiciary Committee.

We find the proposed resolutions inconsistent with a fundamental American right, free speech. It can also be seen as depreciating the rich and diverse cultural heritage of immigrants, the ancestors of many Americans, who founded, developed, and defended this nation. The resolutions fail to recognize that one of the country’s greatest strengths is the diversity of the populace.

Download the music here