As noted earlier, Librarything is a handy place to post books and an example of new media working together with, rather than competing with, old media. Which is why I am rather frustrated that wordpress is doing some kind of censoring of Librarything widgets in the borders of blogs hosted on wordpress.com. Why do they do that?
It seems that the sub-prime mess will have even more fallout than I’d thought back in this post in April. I’d thought about the global connections but there are a few things happening that could make this a really sticky wicket, and the fallout could well be much larger than anyone’s allowing right now.
It has come out that one of the largest mortgage lenders had pressured the appraisal firm to use appraisers who had a track record of over-valuing houses. The next logical step is an accusation of fraud from those who securitised these mortgages, and then from those who bought the securities backed by these mortgages. It is a small step from that point for consumers to begin to repudiate these loans, saying they were fraudulently duped into taking out a larger loan, and therefore seek damages. And they would simply be: right, if the lender put pressure on the appraiser. And it seems they did.
And there is as a special bonus, one of those great quotes from a judge who actually upholds the law, and didn’t get (or didn’t read) the memo that the American legal system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mega Corp, Inc.
Now we know the Mall owners are scared, really scared, of new competition (revised 15 November 2007)
Here’s an interesting and important legal decision that will have some very real urban design/architectural implications. It’s yet another example of small, local and very particularized developments eclipsing centralized, consolidated, and homogenized ones.
It’s also interesting from another point of view: what information we get from this lawsuit. Lawsuits are actually very efficient ways of distributing information, as each lawsuit reveals things through the adversarial process that wouldn’t always come out. In this case the information is clear: Caruso’s development model is such a threat that his competition thought the legal risk they placed themselves in was worth it. That gives an insight as to how dangerous they thought this competition is, and what means they have to counter it. They think this competition is dangerous, and they don’t have a clear way of adapting to this threat.
And we see the theme of competition between things of different scales that was discussed here. The quote from Schumpeter that I just love also talks about changing scales. (I hadn’t noticed that before! How could I miss that?)
Ok, another new theme, another chance lost.
All that I would like is a theme that is:
1. NOT fixed width
2. Can have light letters on a dark backround
3. Not be really weird or unusual.
It would be really nice, but not necessary, for the theme to have a customizable header.
There are so many, many ways to make small tweaks to existing themes that I almost think they are deliberately not making a good theme! When it would be this easy, it almost HAS to be purposeful.
There are ten or twelve themes that are almost good, but, at the last minute, they do something wrong that prevents them from being that really great dark theme!
For example, all that has to be done is:
1. Allow users to customize the BACKGROUND color of the GARLAND theme, or
2. Take BLACK LETTERHEAD theme and make it not fixed width, (and text color/font customizable would be cool, too), or
3. Take CHAOTIC SOUL theme and make it not fixed width (also, fix bug when long (that is longer than a single line) headlines overlap), or
4. Get rid of the weird quotes, mandatory lower case headlines and overbearing header of the theme REDOABLE LITE
5. Modify HEMINGWAY theme so that it would not be fixed width, and put widgets on the side, not bottom, or
6. Modify NEOSAPIEN theme so it would not be fixed width, and change the header so it wouldn’t be so overbearing. (HINT: in a BLOG it is the CONTENT that I create–if your theme interferes with the content, you’ve done something wrong.), or
7 & 8 Take either: Silver is the New Black or Shocking Blue Green and allow the colors to be fully (i.e., including the background) customizable, or
9, 10, & 11 Take any of the following three themes WordPress Classic, White as Milk, Twenty-eight Thirteen, and make them flexible width, and allow the colors to be light text on dark background, or
12. In the themes Andreas09 or Andreas04, fix the formating bugs (text that doesn’t align nicely) and allow a dark background with light text, or
13. Take the theme ChaosTheory and allow side widget arrangement, and give users the ability to customize the text color; to make IT really super, allow interlaced text when it is link text (that effect is way way beyond cool, and depending on the colors chosen can be very subtle, or shocking…)
Now, they have all the recipes… Let’s see what happens…
Responding to my comments, Chris Castle wants to make three points:
First, I’d probably pay more attention to you, whoever you are, if you would sign a real name to just one of your various posts.
Second, you take the point out of context–the parasitic behavior is the trading of illegal copies. I’ve never had a problem with the technology, just the behavior. If what you’re doing is legal, then you can explain yourself to your ISP and you should be able to continue using your account although you may have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth. If you don’t like paying for your bandwidth usage, I’m sure there will be some ISPs in the short run who will cater to those being shut off. In the long run, if you don’t like paying for bandwidth, thank the millions of people who are ripping off the creative community. I–for one–will not shed a single tear for you. Fortunately for you, our society is taking a very long time to impose the negative externalities of illegal file bartering in the places they belong.
Third, I don’t debate with cowards, just those who stand behind their own names and take responsibility for what they say.
First, you may or may pay attention to me, after all I have generally ignored you–except for a couple of times when IP Central has published links to your rants. As of yet, I will decide when or not to post anonymously. But I am in pretty good company with everyone else who has chosen to use a pen name, e.g. Mark Twain and George Orwell.
Second, I am not taking any point out of context–it is you who are trying to conflate illegal file sharing with using P2P technology. Someone can use IM infrastructure to trade illegal copies, or just a plain old website, too. Comcast broke a protocol, not illegal file sharing. They also committed fraud, because they told their companies that they could use bit torrent. And exactly why should I have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth, rather than the same rate everyone else pays?
Third, see my response to your First comment.
Hat Tip: Distrowatch
Well SuSE has joined the band wagon, and has issued Live CD’s with a click to install option. This is great because you can test out if SuSE works with your hardware, and if you are happy, just install. There is a Gnome and a KDE version available here:
ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.3/iso/cd
Chris Castle has a long rant about Comcast’s blocking the Bit Torrent protocol, or to be more precise he has a long rant about the many who are criticizing Comcast; it seems he is a little upset that many have objections to Comcast’s actions, and that a consensus exists that committing fraud in the name of some secret agenda might actually be *wrong.* Corporate misbehavior is doing much to further the cause of net neutrality; one prominent commentator has changed his mind and come out in favor of some form of net neutrality, as pointed out over at Freedom to Tinker.
Chris never mentions that Comcast lied to its own customers in its FAQS and thereby committed fraud. They also interfered with their subscriber’s freedom of association. Those are minor sins, or perhaps even virtues, in Chris’s book. First, he starts out with some generalizations, and is so mad he gets his words all mixed up, which was my clue that this was really some kind of hate speech, not rational argument:
My general thesis there is that at a high level of abstraction (a) there are two essentially classes of traffic on the Internet, one legal and one illegal, and (b) if an ISP is not going to have the spine to shut off illegal file bartering on its network, the least they could do is make it very, very unpleasant for the illegal file bartering and substantially illegal social networking systems to operate.
Here we have an insatiable demand for simplicity: there can apparently be only two categories of anything, and the idea of a nuance like ‘legal file sharing’ or ‘immoral disruption of networking protocols’ can’t even begin to enter into the debate.
The use of an adverb as a adjective is unique, though: “there are two essentially classes” beats even some of W’s hilarious mis-speaks.
Then, there is the sweeping accusation that social networking systems are “substantially illegal” which he never explains. But he doesn’t have to: this is anti-net neutrality hate speech, and he gets his thoughts as right as his grammar, and his logic as twisted as his emotions.
But this speech has plenty of antecedents, particularly over at IP Central, which seems to be about the only place that actually likes Chris Castle’s writing. He goes on:
Here we have Comcast’s own statement regarding Bit Torrent:
And here we have observation by Ernesto over at Torrentfreak:
Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2007
Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.
Now there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this all over the place. Some think that what Comcast did was wrong, but don’t think that the solution is to legislate net neutrality. Others, and I would say this seems to be the majority opinion, seem to think net neutrality case has been strengthened here. (I am pretty much in that camp) Ed Felten seems to agree, to a point, but because he thinks actually enacting net neutrality into would be very difficult, he doesn’t advocate that.
There are even a few folks who think what Comcast is doing is perfectly OK, although those people don’t explain why Comcast lied about it, or try to justify their continued evasiveness on this issue. Market forces seem to me to be part of the answer, but due to the very limited choices, many can not vote with their pocket books. The market is not functioning, as there are just one or two suppliers almost everywhere. And Comcast is doing what it can to prevent markets from working: concealing information, information that it’s customers would use to make informed decisions about their purchase of internet services.
I am not a big fan of knee jerk government intervention, so I wonder if there isn’t a middle ground, between enacting net neutrality, as difficult as that is, and doing nothing, as distasteful as that is.
The headline says it all, I think. Comcast did what they did in secret, denied it when confronted, and furthermore tried to cover it up when it was exposed. Why did they do it in secret, and deny it when they were confronted? Because they knew it was wrong. It really is that simple.
But we can’t ignore those, who, like Ed Felten uncovered the truth about what Comcast was doing, and further publicized it so quickly. Another data point in how wrong folks like Andrew Keen are, perhaps?
Once again, someone at TLF has defined a market success so narrowly, that by his very definition, it is impossible ever to discuss an example of a market failure. Here we have Jim Harper, discussing the recent supression by Comcast of Bit torrent traffic:
But I expect that we’ll soon learn more about the situation, and the conclusions to be drawn from it will be less obvious. There might be legitimate security reasons for what Comcast has done. We’ll see. We should expect full disclosure from Comcast.
My take: If Comcast is “shaping” traffic inconsistent with their terms of service, for non-network-security reasons such as copyright protection or surreptitious usage control, they shouldn’t be doing that.More important is the meta-point: Independent testers found what they believe to be an impropriety in Comcast’s provision of broadband. They called it out, and interested parties among advocacy organizations and the media swarmed all over it. Comcast has to answer the charge, whether meritorious or not.
These are market processes working their will, and the outcome will be reached in short order-
By this very low standard, it is impossible for there ever to be anything disclosed that is an example of a market failure and that would therefore require government intervention because if it is discovered and therefore discussed, Jim would just say something like:
“My meta-point remains: Independent testing revealed alleged wrongful behavior by Comcast and an array of forces are requiring them to account for it. This is being done through operation of the market, without government intervention.”
However, realize that this is just yet another example of a large corporation stifling public discussion to further its business plan. The internet is the new town square, and to permit toll booths and road blocks and secret protocols to intervene is unacceptable. Comcast has, despite the gnashing of teeth of the libertarians, convincingly made the argument for network neutrality legislation that no one else had as yet made so eloquently.
The secret throttling of bandwidth is restraint of freedom of speech; many use Bit torrent to disseminate minority political speech that would otherwise be less accessible. Further, it cannot be ignored that the distribution of linux and FOSS to dismantle the centralized power structures of large corporations is itself an act with a political dimension. So, any attempt to dismantle or disrupt Bit torrent traffic is a de facto act of political repression.
-
Recent Comments
