Geeked About VoIP

I’m a geek, I just can’t help it. Sometimes I see a product so cool I just have to talk about it and since I work solo quite a bit of the time you get to be my outlet.

This is so cool.

Vonage is expected to unveil a new device as early as Wednesday that would allow the user to turn any computer into a phone by attaching a USB memory drive preloaded with voice over IP software.

There is so much promise in VoIP technology to revolutionize communication but the government keeps trying to throw up barriers that I am afraid will slow down or completely stop innovation from moving forward.

The FCC recently announced that all VoIP providers need to comply with CALEA. Nevermind the civil liberty concerns. Nevermind the jurisdiction concerns. Nevermind the ambiguity of what comply means. Trying to forklift the mountain of regulations that currently apply to landline phone service is going to cripple the VoIP promise.

VoIP is cool because it is flexible, mobile, cheap and decentralized. As soon as the government gets their paws on it all of those advantages will disappear.

Seperate But Equal Congressmen

The Supreme Court ruled on the Texas redistricting case this week.  I don’t have much to say about the case beyond noting that the current process is screwed up and this case didn’t make it any better (or worse for that matter).  There is a decent summary of the decision at SCOTUSBlog.

One comment from the decision jumped out at me though.  Chief Justice Roberts stated “It is sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

To which I emphatically agree.  If segregating schools and businesses is bad, why is segregating voters good?  

Which group of minorities has more power?  The black citizens that make up 90% of a single congressional district or the black citizens that make up 30% of three congressional districts?

I think that the answer is clearly the second scenario.  The result may end up being less black representatives, but why are black representatives required to represent a black constituency?  Having more Congressmen aware of minority interests and concerns will serve minorities better than simply moving the minority from the voter to the legislature.

I’m not sure that there is a legal remedy to the current problems with districting, but my ideal solution would be to move the process out of the hands of legislatures and into a non-partisan computer of some kind.

A Lesson Not Quite Learned

Illinois was attempting to woo Honda into placing their new manufacturing fascility in Illinois. Honda wasn’t convinced that Illinois was the right place, instead choosing Indiana.

The choice of the site near Greensburg, Ind., some 50 miles southeast of Indianapolis, ended the Illlinois bid that included a letter-writing campaign by Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama to Koichi Kondo, president and chief executive of American Honda Motor Co. They urged him to bring the facility to Illinois.

As late as Tuesday morning, U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Chicago) said lawmakers “acknowledged we’ll do what we need to do to sweeten the deal.”

“Everybody agreed, consensus-wise, we’ll do whatever we need to do to make Illinois the more attractive state,” Emanuel said.

Its reprehensible that politicians will cut sweetheart deals for large corporations yet the average Joe Business Owner has to deal with burdensome taxes and regulations. The obvious lesson is that taxes and regulations are bad for business, bad for workers and bad for consumers.

Why do politicians realize this in specific instances, yet fail to apply that knowledge to the economy as a whole?

HatTip: IlliniPundit

Morality in Justice

In the recent decision, Kansas v. Marsh, Justice Souter says:

We cannot face up to these facts and still hold that the guarantee of morally justifiable sentencing is hollow enough to allow maximizing death sentences, by requiring them when juries fail to find the worst degree of culpability.

My skin starts to crawl when a politician justifies their policies based on morality, that holds doubly true for judges. Government has no business deciding what is moral and what is not.

Whose morality should hold sway? Christian morality? Jewish Morality? Anarchist morality? Justice Souter, stick with the law and leave morality to the priests.

Television Blogs

Does anyone know of any great TV blogs. One that talks about new shows, cancelations, etc?

A Poor Player That Struts and Frets His Hour Upon the Stage

The man that built a career on defamation and name-calling wants to sue TNR for libel.

But I do admit being surprised by the sheer creativity of their invented attacks, such as my supposed "pay for play" scheme. Let me be crystal clear. I deny that charge completely. I have stated the sources of my income and they do not include money from people asking me to shill for anyone or anything. Problem for these writers, is that the law doesn't protect such defamation. The truth is an absolute defense to libel cases. If they have evidence for those smears, then they have nothing to fear. But if they, say, recklessly invented all manners of illegal or unethical activities by me without bothering to see if they bore any basis in truth, then they'll have plenty to worry about.

You would think that a man with a law degree would know that the burden is on him to prove malicious intent to win a libel suit, and for public figures (of which, I think Kos would qualify) the hurdle inches up just a bit.

Extra: Bonus points for the person that can complete the title phrase without Google.

Dixon v US

Orin Kerr has an interesting summary of the case Dixon v. United States.  You will forgive me if I don’t try to summarize the case since Kerr does a much better job than I could imagine of doing.

While, based on Orin’s summary, the case probably was correctly decided, I’m disappointed that the default burden of proof does not lie with the government.  It seems to me that an individual’s rights are protected to the greatest extent by limiting government power.

However, Alito’s concurrence makes a lot of sense to me.  Common law dating from before the Constitution states that if a defendant is going to use duress as a defense they must provide the burden of proof.  Since Congress has never addressed duress as a defense courts should assume that common law applies.

I also agree with Alito that attempting to determine where the burden of proof lies by trying to discern what common practice was at the time that a statute was passed by Congress is overly burdensome.

Let The Games Begin

I blogged earlier of complaints that Microsoft wasn’t giving its security products away.

What is entertaining about the ensuing debate is the complaint that Microsoft decided to release this data to coincide of its announcement of OneCare products. Complainers are arguing that Microsoft should be providing these tools for free to users of Microsoft products. That it should be part of the basic OS. But isn’t this the exact approach that these same critics have used to levy anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft?

Predictably, security providers that will be competing with Microsoft’s new offering are starting to complain.

"It’s bad enough that Microsoft is getting in to all aspects of security. But now they are going to kill their competition through predatory pricing," explained Sunbelt Software CEO Alex Eckelberry in a blog posting on Tuesday.

I thought it was fairly typical for new products to offer low prices in a competitive market. That is how you gain a foot hold. After all, why would you ever try an unknown product if it cost the same as everything else?

I’m beginning to see why so many people hate Microsoft, everything that they do is illegal. Selling products too cheaply, selling products instead of giving them away – you just can’t win.

HatTip: BetaNews

All Politicians Are Liars

The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas, has submitted a compromise bill on estate tax reform that attempts to appease some Democratic opposition. Democrats have long opposed such reform on the grounds that it is just a tax cut for the rich.

So what is the proposal that will sway their opinion?

Mr. Thomas included incentives for the timber industry. The legislation includes a new 60% deduction for qualified timber capital gains.

Hmm, don’t like tax cuts for the rich but tax cuts for powerful special interests are OK. Way to fight for the little guy.

HatTip: Greg Mankiw

Broadband Prices Falling

A year-and-a-half ago, pricing of DSL and cable modem service was roughly the same. But over the past year, the phone companies have launched an aggressive assault by dropping prices. At the end of 2005, the average price of DSL service was about $32 per month, roughly $9 less than cable, according to research firm IDC. AT&T has twice lowered the price of its DSL service and now offers its 1.5Mbps service for $12.99 for the first year.

Kinda calls into question the oligopoly theory of broadband services that proponents of “net neutrality” have been pitching doesn’t it?

Competition does not have to be perfect or abundant for consumers to benefit.

The first comment at Slashdot is priceless:

These low prices are only to gain market share

Well, duh.  Isn’t that how all pricing works?

Agreeing With Krugman

I don’t agree with Krugman all that often, but this is one such time.

Over the last few weeks monetary officials have sounded increasingly worried about rising prices. On Wednesday, Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, declared that inflation ''is running at a rate that is just too corrosive to be accepted by a virtuous central banker.'' I'm worried too -- but not about recent price increases. What worries me, instead, is the Fed's overreaction to those increases....

Much of the recent rise in core inflation probably represents the delayed effect of the big run-up in fuel prices a few months ago. And unless something else happens to drive up oil prices -- like, to give a wild example, a military strike on Iran -- inflation will probably subside in the months ahead.

I think that the Fed, in general, under-estimates the time it takes for monetary policy to effect the economy. I think that if it continues on its current path by raising rates nearly every month it will push us in a recession.

I think recent history supports my opinion. The Fed lowered rates too much in response to the recession which caused a huge reaction in the housing market (creating the so-called housing bubble). But that was a reaction to the previous recession which was caused by increasing rates too fast during the dot com boom which led to a hard fall. Prior to that rates were too low which caused lots of speculative investments.

In essence, if the Fed allowed more time in between rate changes they probably wouldn’t raise them so high or lower them so low making the highs and lows for less dramatic.

HatTip: Greg Mankiw

Responding to the Fanatics

Once again I have been shown how religious the debate about climate change has become.  I got quite a bit of traffic from my previous post and many of the comments are true to the form of climate change fanatics.

And you read an article published by a right-wing website and you believe it's the Gospel.

Perhaps the commenter didn’t notice the parts where I claimed that I had no understanding one way or the other of what is going on with the climate – yet this translates to my taking the article as gospel?  (notice the religious imagery)

Show me one paper that any of these so-called skeptics wrote and had become accepted science?

I believe I linked to one in the article – perhaps he missed it, if so – it’s here.

Of course anyone that does disagree is on the dole.

And what happens if you ask climate scientists who are not getting money from the fossil-fuel industry?

A common fallacy, but one that seems to hold great weight – you simply cannot counter someone’s argument by doubting their motives.  If the science was bad you can’t refute it by accusations of bias – you have to actually counter the science.

In other words those few guys who are quoted in this dishonest article are losers and they just can't take it.
…
But these industry funded shills are too coward to "refute" anthroponegic climate change in peer-reviewed journals.

Ah, liberal logic.  People that disagree with me are stupid and dishonest – simply brilliant.  I take it there aren’t any literature in the journals that question the “consensus” on climate change.  And, of course, the politics surrounding the subject couldn’t have anything to do with scientists being hesitant to subjecting themselves to personal attacks on their intelligence and character.

Particularly funny is this:

Tech Central Station is primarily funded by sponsors that include AT&T, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and PhRMA.

I guess the NYT, WaPo and others don’t sell advertisements…

Only a fool takes these jerks seriously. They will deny anthroponegic climate change until the hell freezes over no matter what the facts are.

And the environmental-religious fanatics will continue to call anyone that disagrees with them fools, ignorant and immoral regardless of the facts are.

A Rose By Any Other Name

I must be feeling particularly irritable today, because this really got to me.

"Doug MacEachern, CTO of Hyperic and creator of mod_perl, responds to criticism by Tarus Balog, a maintainer of OpenNMS, that his company's recent open source announcement is nothing but a marketing ploy. It is starting the debate on whether or not just releasing some code qualifies an application as 'open source.'"

What difference does it make whether or not what Hyperic did was OpenSource or not?  This is just as absurd about the hoopla over whether or not Wal-Mart should sell “organic” food or whether wine made from grapes that weren’t grown within sight of a castle can be called Chateau or whether cheese not made in Greece can be called feta.

Seriously, it’s just a word – if it doesn’t meet your criteria try this novel approach – don’t buy it.

Inconvenient Tidbits

I have no idea whether or not the climate is warming or not. Given that scientists were absolutely convinced that it was cooling only twenty years ago I’m pretty sure that they don’t really know either. What I do know is that government is very unlikely to actually do anything positive to fix the problem. I also know that the proposals that are currently on the table to “fix” global warming would do substantial harm to those that are least capable to cope with economic downturns – the miserably poor in 3rd world and developing countries.

That being said, I think that the press, in general, does an atrocious job of presenting a balanced presentation of what is known and unknown. So here are some tidbits of news that, for some reason, don’t make it to the front pages of the USA Today.

Only the truly faithful should actually take Gore’s Inconvenient Truth at its word. But then again religious fanatics are not known for their fact checking. Either way here [HatTip: Slashdot] are some scientists (real ones that actually, you know, study the climate as opposed to biology or linguistics) that tackle some of Gore’s assertions directly.

…

Speaking of the Inconvenient Truth, I guess it would have been really inconvenient to mention that, despite the movies assertions to the contrary, that Greenland’s icecaps are actually increasing. Or that the temperatures measured in Greenland are better over the last several years than they were in the early 1900’s.

…

Moreover [HatTip: Catallarchy], the conclusion that alarmed the team was that compared to its importance for air traffic (25%), the night flights accounted between 60% and 80% of the negative effects for climate. Winter flights were reported to have contributed with more than half to the annual warming, despite of the fact that their proportion is estimated at 22%.

So let me get this straight – the weatherman can’t accurately predict what the weather is going to be like next week, but some scientist thinks that he can accurately predict the impact of contrails on the climate? If that doesn’t strain credulity, I’m not sure what does.

I would be surprised if humans have not impacted the climate over the last 100 years, whether its warming it up or cooling or merely moving it from point A to point B I don’t really care. What’s the alternative? Horse & Buggies and a nation of farmers? No thanks. I would rather live in a world of modern conveniences where we will have to adopt to a changing climate than a world that looks like 1885 or 1985 for that matter.

So Tired Of Rove

Let me preface this post by stating that I am no fan of Bush. If I were to rank the Presidents, I am fairly certain that he would end up in the bottom five (for comparison, Clinton would likely be somewhere in the middle). However, I loathe the vitriol and vile rhetoric that he inspires in many on the left.

Continuing on, I think that it is becoming increasingly clear by comments like this:

And for Rove, long a suspect whenever political skullduggery breaks out, it was another bullet dodged, as it was for the Bush White House.

And this:

"If Karl Rove would have been indicted, it would have been for perjury," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said on NBC's Today show. "That does not excuse his real sin, which is leaking the name of an intelligence operative during a time of war. He doesn't belong in the White House."

And this:

Whether or not Patrick Fitzgerald ultimately decides to indict Rove for some aspect of his treasonous behavior, and the technical reasons behind all of that, is not within anyone's control outside of the Special Counsel's orbit.

- that many Democrats simply don’t understand that being a piece of crap isn’t illegal and that it is actually possible that perhaps, just maybe, Rove simply didn’t break any laws.

Unfortunately, in today’s political world, the truth just isn’t important anymore; it’s all about winning the next election at the expense of everything else.

Quick Update: Interestingly enough, I think getting rid of Rove would be the smartest thing that Bush could do. As a political operative he has simply been awful, politicians are supposed to be smooth and ease vitriol, not create it. In this Rove has utterly failed, so oddly enough Rove is probably the best thing that Democrats have going for them right now and they are actively trying to achieve his demise - talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Shocking News

The government doled out as much as $1.4 billion in bogus assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, getting hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and even a divorce lawyer, congressional investigators have found.
…
The GAO concluded that as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in FEMA help to individuals after the two hurricanes was unwarranted.

I’m shocked, simply shocked that people would mismanage funds that they have no plausible reason to care about.

Asking an organization that is several times removed from the impact of a disaster to efficiently handle aid.

Mal-Ware Stats

Microsoft recently published statistics from its free Malicious Software Removal tool.  62% of those computers contained malicious Trojans or bots, much ado is being made of this fact – yet it ignores the fundamental flaw in the statistics.

The users of this tool are self-selected, users – especially those that know enough to run tools like this – won’t run them unless they suspect something is wrong.  This doesn’t prove that the statistics are too high, it merely says that they numbers aren’t a reliable measurement of what is really going on.

What is entertaining about the ensuing debate is the complaint that Microsoft decided to release this data to coincide of its announcement of OneCare products.  Complainers are arguing that Microsoft should be providing these tools for free to users of Microsoft products.  That it should be part of the basic OS.  But isn’t this the exact approach that these same critics have used to levy anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft?

So, offering free add-ons to Windows is anti-competitive unless it is a feature that I want – then its anti-competitive to not include it.  You just can’t win when the basic assumption is that everything you do is evil.

Shooting Fish In a Barrell

In October of last year I said:

I’m going to predict that Karl Rove does not get indicted and that the liberal base is going to claim that the game was fixed.

I was right about the first part.

The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove.

I’m guessing that a quick search of the blogosphere will prove I’m right on the second as well.

Update: Well, that didn't take long, though most of it is wishful thinking that it was a deal to save Rove (in exchange for Cheney! LOL). In my opinion, this has been a colossal waste of tax payer money. Researching whether or not someone outed a not-so-covert agent? Puh-lease, there are much better uses for federal dollars than political maneuvering.

Why I Can't Be A Democrat

There has been much ado in the blogosphere about Kos’s attempt to woo libertarian voters.  So what do the Kos crowd actually believe?

High prices are bad, unless you are Wal-Mart then you are ruining America.

Government should be doing something about these high prices, unless that means doing something to find more oil.

Corporate give-aways are bad, unless you are a car company.

So spending government dollars to pay for health benefits at Fortune 500s is good.  But wait, when those government dollars are actually Medicaid its bad.

Immigrants are bad, unless they are asking for government assistance.

Using American force without UN authorization is bad, unless it’s something that you really want to do.

Discrimination is bad, unless you discriminating against white men.

Expanded Presidential power is bad, unless that President is a Democrat.

Being a Republican toady is bad, being a Democratic toady is required.

Money corrupts politics, unless they are large donors to the Democratic Party.

Gambling is bad, unless states are the suppliers.

Vouchers are good, unless they challenge an important constituency.

Americans should have unfettered ability to do anything they want with their bodies, unless it’s smoking.

Government shouldn’t listen to phone calls, but it is OK to watch everything that we do.

I can’t be a liberal because I’m just not agile enough to do the intellectual gymnastics required to follow the party line.  If there is an overriding philosophy that justifies all of these positions, I’m just not able to find it.

On Net Nuetrality

The House rejected, I think, the very first regulation of the Internet. I have opposed the regulation and you can read some of my views by reading the comments to Kip’s posts here and here.

My opposition was based primarily on two grounds. First, it is much easier to implement regulation after harm has actually been done than it is to remove regulation later on. The principle proponents of “net neutrality” seemed to base their entire argument on the fact that “very bad things might happen.” I share Greg Mankiw’s skepticism of people that use alarmism as a defense of policy views.

The second reason for my opposition is that I just don’t think it makes any sense. The Internet is, essentially, just a delivery mechanism. I think the phrase “Internet Super-Highway” is an apt description and provides the best analogy to the internet. Retailers depend on roads and highways for their ability to sell us goods and services, and retailers that have easy access have a clear advantage over retailers that are out of the way.

What anyone complain that a shopping mall paid to have a 4-lane highway built so that shoppers would have an easier time getting to their location? What would happen if government decided that access to all stores had to be “neutral?” Does anyone honestly think that we would have 4-lane highways to every store? Of course not, we would have inadequate access to everywhere.

In fact, the system that drives highway expansion is worse than what Internet carriers are proposing. Highway access is decided by government bureaucrats, government decides where they think we want to go – a process that has long been the realm of rent-seekers and corruption.

What the internet allows is the market to decide where we want to go. Companies that think they can profit from faster highways are given an opportunity to pay for them, those that do not think they can benefit take the standard service.

I, for one, would rather live in a world with some super-highways than a world of two-lane roads and I am glad that Congress has, for now, allowed it to happen.

More smart people weigh in here and here to oppose net nuetrality.

Civil What?

I’m not sure whether the categorization on this post is supposed to funny or insulting.  While the next of the post itself is rather innocuous, I don’t understand how collecting signatures to exclude a group of people can be considered “Civil Liberties.”

Victory for Terrorism

Even if you set aside the direct consequences of the War on Terror like unconstitutional searches of subway riders, millions of dollars to supplying rural townships with Haz-Mat suits and NSA eavesdropping of American phone conversations, I think you can plausibly argue that the costs have far outweighed the benefits.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Circuit Court Judge Lynn Egan agreed with the city that posting such information posed a threat to homeland security. Egan also turned down attorney Daniel Biederman's request for more 911 phone logs.

Biederman represents the families who lost a total of four children in a 2004 house fire. He sought a year's worth of records intending to demonstrate failures in the city's 911 system, such as understaffing and unanswered calls. Biederman then posted pieces of the information on his Web site, www.911failure.com.

You can come up with a justification for how anything that the government does effects homeland security. Now American citizens aren’t even allowed to find out how (in)effective the services they pay for are because some nutjob might be able to exploit it.

We have chosen to allocate our hard-earned salaries to provide for the common good, if we aren’t allowed to criticize those programs or, indeed, even discover how well those programs are functioning then we have no choice but to trust the self-serviing bureaucrats are telling us. Trust us. Everything is fine, but we need more money and you need less privacy.

If this is what we are forced to settle for the terrorists have surely succeeded in destroying the American way of life.

Newsflash! Drug Bust Maintains Status Quo

A drug bust on the Northwest Side Saturday yielded more than 4.5 kilograms of heroin from the home and vehicle of a suspected drug dealer.The drugs had a street value of more than $500,000.

And no good was accomplished.  There are no less drug users.  Drug users have no additional difficulty in obtaining drugs.  No drug dealers  are scared away from selling drugs, it has merely become more profitable for the ones that didn’t get caught.

Yet another success for the War on Drugs.

Open For All Except Microsoft Users

Adobe’s move to prevent Microsoft from include PDF functionality suite simply shows how hypocritical software makers are these days as far as Microsoft is concerned.

The changes follow a breakdown of talks between the two technology giants after Microsoft announced last year it would include native PDF publishing with the release of Office 2007. The feature has long been a top request from customers, the company said at the time, and other office suites have the capability.

But Adobe was unhappy with the move and a dispute has been brewing for four months, Microsoft's lead counsel Brad Smith said Friday. Although PDF claims to be an open format and is integrated into OpenOffice and Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Adobe apparently sees Office 2007 as a real threat to its business.
…
Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the feature, which the Redmond company has refused to do. Smith said Adobe threatened to file an antitrust suit in Europe, and his company was preparing for that eventuality.

The threat to move immediately to European anti-trust courts was particularly under-handed given Europe’s obvious distain for success Microsoft.

Either the PDF format is open or it is not, Adobe’s abuse of the legal system to make it open for everyone but Microsoft shouldn’t be tolerated. However, given the anti-Microsoft bias, well, just about everywhere, I don’t see any resolution that will be a win for consumers.

Election Stolen!! (Yawn)

It seems that Democrats just can’t seem to let the 2000 elections go, they are simply obsessed by it.  So obsessed that they see the hobgoblins of electoral fraud everywhere they look.  The latest incarnation is written by Robert Kennedy, Jr. claiming that Bush stole the 2004 election.  Let me start off by saying that if Mother Jones is skeptical then you have a tough row to hoe.  There is, of course, nothing new in this “report.”  It requires that every questionable vote to fall in Kerry’s favor, it requires that ever voter “purged” would have voted, didn’t already vote, and would have voted for Kerry.

Additionally, it is monumentally one sided.  It doesn’t address any of the tactics perpetrated by Democrats in states that went narrowly to Kerry.  And as Hertsgaard rightly points out, even assuming that all of the “contested” votes went to Kerry, Bush still won the popular vote and in 2000 every Democrat with a voice was calling for an elimination of the electoral college because it “wasn’t fair” that the man that got more votes didn’t win.  Of course we all knew that such complaints were inherently partisan, they only cared about the electoral college when it cut against them.

I have no desire to see Democrats gain widespread power in the US, but a divided government would likely meet my personal agenda so I’ll give some helpful advice.  Quit the conspiracy theories.  They make you sound crazy and distract you from what would actually be helpful – finding candidates that can actually win elections without resorting to moonbat theories about Republican conspiracies.

What Is Sustainable?

Chicago is the fifth most "sustainable" city in the nation, finishing behind three West Coast cities -- Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle in that order -- and Philadelphia.


Just a quick question:  How hard is it to be sustainable when your population is decreasing?

Another quick question:  How can San Francisco, a city with the highest housing prices in the country, be considered “sustainable?”  I guess it must be just another meaningless report put together by people that think they know better than the rest of us.