Godel Metric

Awesome.

2008-11-05T12:39:00.001-08:00

"I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."
--Barack Obama

Hope.

2008-11-04T11:06:00.001-08:00

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

This is Bizarre

2008-09-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

I'm John McCain, and I forget what this message was about.

OK Then.

2008-09-12T18:18:00.001-07:00

Hang in there, fellow Texans. My thoughts are with the people on the Gulf tonight.

I Think I Know How This Ends.

2008-09-12T13:58:00.001-07:00

"A regrettable situation! but is it one that requires a burnt offering or that demands the swinging of human forms from the gibbet to gratify the rancor of intimate observers? The instant action is a new demonstration of a familiar social phenomenon: when a tragic loss occurs, find a victim to throw to the lions. The perspicacity of the trial court was not overtaxed to discern the weakness of plaintiff's position."
-- Justice Moore, George Pepperdine Foundation v. Pepperdine, 126 Cal.App.2d 154, 1954

Wow.

2008-08-28T20:04:00.001-07:00

Wow.

McCain, Georgia, NATO, and Defense Lobbyists

2008-08-12T16:16:00.003-07:00

This is kind of unreal.

An interesting fact about NATO is that all member nations are required to deploy equipment that can be used by other NATO countries -- meaning manufactured in NATO member nations -- which means that NATO expansion since the Soviet breakup has focused on Eastern Bloc countries using (mostly legacy) Soviet military technology. The point is that NATO suppliers have a guaranteed captive market, but also that new NATO members are a boon for defense contractors.

Consequently the NATO expansion lobby is a tool of the arms export industry. NATO expansion targets former Soviet states are the best possible new markets. Lots of old technology that can be "updated" to the NATO standard, using fresh new Western-manufactured parts and support and tossing out all the old Soviet/Russia units (the competition). Of course, this means that current NATO members are not a favorable market for Russia, now or ever, which is one of many reasons why Russia dislikes NATO expansion. If you ever wonder why certain countries are not NATO invitees, or why certain countries like Georgia might be invited to join, it is worth looking first at where those countries procure from in the first place. For example, Libya. See also here and here.

So, what does this have to do with John McCain? Well. You may have read (NYT) about that Randy Scheunemann fellow who was apparently a lobbyist for Georgia and now works for McCain? (He got McCain to nominate Georgia's President Saakashvili for the Nobel Peace Prize!) Oh, you don't even know the half of it. He's connected to PNAC and Chalabi, but for present purposes this is the amazing bit:

Much of Scheunemann’s work, in both the public and private spheres, has been oriented toward Europe, promoting democratic programs and expanding NATO to former Soviet-bloc countries. A board member (along with McCain) of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a key institutional vehicle through which the National Endowment for Democracy carries out its work, Scheunemann has worked closely with Bruce Jackson [remember this name], a fellow former PNAC director, on NATO expansion issues, serving as a board member of Jackson's U.S. Committee on NATO and as a registered lobbyist and/or consultant for Georgia [tried to join NATO], Latvia [joined NATO], Macedonia [almost joined], and Romania [joined].

Wait! It gets better!

Scheunemann has served as senior foreign policy and national security advisor to McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign since 2007. In May 2008 the New York Times reported that Scheunemann had been working as a lobbyist for foreign governments as a “registered foreign agent” at the same time he was advising McCain. “Over the past several years, Mr. Scheunemann met several times with Mr. McCain to discuss his clients’ interests. He introduced the senator to the foreign ministers of Albania [joining NATO now], Croatia [joining NATO now], and Macedonia as they tried to win admission to NATO [...] Mr. Scheunemann also accompanied Mr. McCain to Latvia in 2001 [before Latvia's NATO membership] and Georgia in 2006,”

So we've established that Scheunemann's role wasn't just about Georgia -- NATO expansion was his pet project, so Eastern Europe was his special sphere. Wonder what other work he did in that area?

According to the Lobbying Registration office of the U.S. House of Representatives and the watchdog group OpenSecrets.org, Scheunemann's lobbying firm, Scheunemann & Associates, has for several years represented the National Rifle Association. In 2005, the firm also represented the Caspian Alliance, a consortium of oil- and gas-producing nations from the Caspian region.

"Caspian Alliance" sounds relevant -- wonder who that is? Oh, one of three of Stephen Payne's firms that paid Scheunemann -- you may remember Payne as that guy who was caught on tape offering Cheney/Rice access to a Kazakh offical in exchange for a couple hundred thousand dollars. He has some interesting connections. The Caspian Alliance, of course is a subsidiary of Payne's company that calls itself the "'Sole U.S. Representative' for Kazakhstan’s State-Owned Oil & Gas Company, KMG" -- oil is clearly an interesting lead here, but I'm more concerned about NATO and arms markets.

Thankfully, that topic does not stop there. As mentioned above, NATO defense contracts are money blessings for Western arms manufacturers, and McCain's connections to said manufacturers are not insignificant. Some (like EADS) are major NATO suppliers and McCain has gone to bat for them, lost a lobbyist as a result, but gained clients some handsome profit. OK.

But of particular interest to me is McCain's connection to Lockheed, which seems to dominate the rest. There's a lot here. It would be interesting to see how much Albania, Croatia, Georgia, et al., would have to pay to upgrade to NATO equipment if they were to gain entry. And it certainly adds a dimension to the issue I hadn't previously considered.

Scheunemann and Black are connected to Lockheed as lobbyists, but the key figure here is Bruce Jackson, who was actually a VP at Lockheed while Black and Scheunemann were just lobbyists for the company. Jackson was a bizdev guy, so: what bizness did he develop?

U.S. Committee on NATO: Founder, Former President
Project for the New American Century: Board of Directors
Center for Security Policy: Former Adviser
American Enterprise Institute: Former Member of International Advisory Board of the New Atlantic Initiative
Council on Foreign Relations: Member
International Institute for Strategic Studies, London: Member
Center for Strategic and International Studies: Board of Advisers
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq: Founder, Chairman of the Board, 2002-2003
Republican National Convention: Chair of Platform Subcommittee on Foreign Policy, 2000 Presidential Campaign
Dole for President: National Co-Chairman of Finance Committee, 1995-1996
American Committee for Peace in Chechnya: Former Member

Office of the Secretary of Defense: Various Positions, 1986-1990
U.S. Army: Military Intelligence Officer, 1979-1990

Lockheed Martin: Vice President for Strategy and Planning, 1999-2002; Director of Global Development, 1997-1999; Director of Defense Planning and Analysis, 1995-1997
Martin Marietta Corp.: Former Director of Strategic Planning; Former Director for Corporate Development Projects, 1993-1995
Lehman Brothers (Investment Bank): 1990-1993

Worked with Scheunemann. Also worked under Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.

So -- now it should all be coming together. Bruce Jackson and Randy Scheunemann both worked for the Project for Transitional Democracies, the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, and other pro-NATO-expansion organizations. (That's also another connection to Payne and Rice -- through Stephen Hadley, who also worked on NATO with them.) Jackson was a former VP for Lockheed Martin, and Scheunemann and McCain's top advisor Charlie Black both lobbied for Lockheed (and other defense firms). Since Lockheed stands to benefit so heavily from NATO expansion, this connection is worth scrutinizing, and the back-and-forth is astounding once you look into it.

Some of this may just be GOP incest, but Lockheed and EADS have more McCain lobbyists than any of the other major defense contractors, they both make money hand-over-fist from NATO, and it was a convenient sidechannel to Georgia after the Bucharest conference this year that started the whole firestorm with Russia in the first place. That's yet another interesting connection.

To see how this same little cabal is connected to the Iraq war, read 'Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels':

This was months before Secretary of State Colin Powell would go to the United Nations to make the administration's case for the invasion of Iraq, touting the subsequently discredited evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But according to Jackson, Hadley told him that "they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale" to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were "still working out" a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, "set up something like the Committee on NATO" to come up with a rationale. [...]

When it came to organizing the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Jackson, by his own admission, "knew nothing about Iraq." So while he agreed to serve as its chairman, he turned day-to-day operations over to Republican operative Randy Scheunemann, who took the position of executive director. Scheunemann was a member of the board of directors of PNAC. Scheunemann also served as treasurer of Jackson's Project on Transitional Democracies, and had been a consultant on Iraq to Donald Rumsfeld. He had also been a staffer for Mississippi Senator Trent Lott when Lott was the senate majority leader -- Scheunemann had in fact authored the Iraq Liberation Act. The act authorized the $97 million in Pentagon aid that would fund the Iraq National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, who subsequently got close to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, explaining to her where Saddam Hussein's WMDs were supposedly located.

[Heavily edited into one long post.]

Sausage making.

2008-08-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

Clinton campaign postmortem.

Wow.

2008-08-08T12:37:00.001-07:00

Edwards Admits to Sexual Affair. Those faked National Enquirer pictures confused me since there didn't seem to be any threats litigation, which there would have been if it was a direct untruth, so I had a suspicion along these lines -- but I wasn't expecting it to come out like this.

Every Time.

2008-07-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

I get worried about Obama not hitting back and every time it turns out that he's just got a better sense of timing than I do.

WIN.

2008-07-29T11:14:00.001-07:00

Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, "FAIL." —Merlin Mann

Predictive Blacklists.

2008-07-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

Oh lord this is a bad idea. We can't even make reactive blacklists work properly. Here's my predictive blacklist: many attacks will come from China, Russia, and zombied home computers with persistent connections. Therefore, block the overseas IPs and tarpit anything coming from the large ISPs. Oh, wait, everyone does that already.

Dark Knight.

2008-07-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

Wow.

I actually like "walk back."

2008-07-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

That's been one of the few phrases that I've heard in the last year of U.S. politics that I kinda like. If I hear anything else about throwing people under buses, there's gonna be violence. "Walk back" is a good phrase because it signifies that someone made a huge mistake and now has to back away from it slowly even though everyone knows they screwed up.

For example, the Iraqi Prime Minister basically gives McCain the finger and endorses Obama's Iraq plan (wonder how long before Der Spiegel releases the raw interview tapes?) but the retraction is made through... CENTCOM? (Warning: Great Orange Satan link.) Oops.

Oh, how nice, what perfect timing.

2008-07-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

Kucinich's impeachment resolution passes with 10 Republican votes. I was just thinking that we might want to look into that stuff.

Well, that's that.

2008-07-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

Hans Reiser leads police to wife's body. But... but I thought he wasn't guilty because he... wrote a Linux filesystem...

Where's my violin?

2008-07-05T19:32:00.001-07:00

John McCain: ‘I hate the bloggers’

Lawrence Lessig is WRONG

2008-07-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

The Internet is not a fancy cable television system; the Internet is the high-
way system, or the system of public roads, carrying bits rather than trucks, but carrying them in ways no one can predict. (The Future of Ideas, p. 174)

Series of tubes

Also,

2008-06-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

I am on vacation, so posting will probably be ~~less~~ more frequent.

I Heart Wikipedia.

2008-06-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

I was reading about RAND Corp. and happened upon the article on V-1 bombs. This is insane:

When V-1 attacks began in mid-June of 1944, there were fewer than 30 Tempests, the only aircraft with the low-altitude speed needed to be effective against the V-1; they were assigned to No. 150 Wing RAF. Early attempts to intercept and destroy V-1s often failed, but improved techniques soon emerged. These included using the airflow over an interceptor's wing to raise one wing of the V-1, by sliding the wingtip to within six inches (15 cm) of the lower surface of the V-1's wing. If properly executed, this manoeuvre would tip the V-1's wing up, overriding the gyros and sending the V-1 into an out-of-control dive. At least three V-1s were destroyed this way.

Here's a picture.

The Horror of Pre-Trial Discovery.

2008-06-23T21:14:00.001-07:00

Look on, ye young associates, and despair.

Double Damnit.

2008-06-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Obama releases a statement supporting the FISA bill, though he did say he opposed the amnesty provision, which is the real issue at hand. Still, it was a tepid response. This is only the first round, and there are ways to win the fight, but this is not an encouraging start. But he's surprised me before, so we'll see.

Damnit.

2008-06-20T09:54:00.001-07:00

The new, not-exactly-improved FISA bill passes the House.

But No Lukewarm Beverages

2008-06-19T19:44:00.001-07:00

Ice found on Mars.

Metallurgy, Yahoo!

2008-06-18T19:57:00.001-07:00

Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr, recently resigned from Yahoo!. This is his resignation letter. It is awesome.

Meet the Sniper.

2008-06-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

Valve is the #1 reason I sometimes regret owning a Mac.

"I'm not a crazed gunman, dad, I'm an assassin! ...Well, the difference being that one is a job and the other's mental sickness!"

(See also: Demoman, Engineer, Heavy, Scout, Soldier.)

Pure Speculation.

2008-06-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

I posted a pretty lengthy discussion on net neutrality at ObWi today, and I figured that in fairness, I should put a bet down on where I expect things to go politically. I don't imagine that my predictions will shape the course of history, so this is more or less for my own edification.

Part I: Selling the "Capacity Crisis"

1. Verizon and AT&T will implement usage-based pricing schemes for their internet service. They're all ready to go.

2. VZ/ATT will continue to push out their fiber infrastructure, subsidizing it as a loss leader. This will be the olive branch -- "we will build FiOS out to you if you get the customers." This offer is already being rolled out nationwide.

3. VZ/ATT will continue to take a hard line against obvious traffic shaping of the sort that Comcast was caught doing. But they'll also argue that this is a symptom of our "national bandwidth capacity crisis"

4. Their solution: use our huge fiber pipes, and with per-byte pricing, pay for what you get!

Reasons:

[Caveat: "Comcast" is a standin here for "last-gen broadband providers," and especially "internet over cable providers"]

1. Comcast is not a Tier 1 ISP, so they pay a premium for their transport that VZ/ATT don't (since they collectively own most of the internet).

2. VZ, and to a lesser extent ATT, are leading the fiber deployment game.

3. Consequently, VZ/ATT's per-byte transport costs are significantly lower than Comcast's (or anyone's, really), so competing on per-byte costs gives them a competitive advantage.

4. Hence, usage-based pricing creates a competitive advantage for VZ/ATT.

5. Usage-based pricing can also be positioned as a "fair" or even net-neutral alternative to traffic shaping (you pay for what you get; traffic-shaping would just reduce bytes exchanged and users would simply pay less).

6. Of course, VZ/ATT don't care about net neutrality in the least. But they can afford to provide per-byte because they have the capacity, and Comcast and everyone else don't.

7. VZ/ATT's DSL and fiber networks are also far more symmetric than Comcast and the other cable providers, and hence much more amenable to swarming protocols like Bittorrent that bottleneck at the local loop in cable networks.

8. So, ultimately this is about putting Comcast in an impossible situation: to provide even minimally acceptable Internet, they can either (a) traffic-shape and become the pariah of the telecom industry, and/or (b) go broke trying to come up with some way to bootstrap their already-repurposed technology into something that will be obsolete the moment VZ lays a fiber line down the block.

9. One of the effects of the new arrangement will be to put VZ/ATT in a position to end-run or even restructure "sender keeps" peering arrangements between the Tier 1 ISPs.

10. The trigger for all of this is that VZ' net-neutrality commitment from their MCI merger expires next month. That's when the gloves come off. More about that when I'm less tired.

NB: As if on cue, VZ announces across-the-board increases in available bandwidth.

Tired of the commute?

2008-06-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Weirdest 404 spam ever (slightly cleaned up for legibility):

Train Rail Scraps For Sale

We wish to confirm you with full corporate responsibility that we are end seller ready, willing and able to transact and sell the commodities, with the following specifications, terms and conditions. Sales and purchases will be based on the following procedures:

The Product is Used Train Rail Scraps with the Specification of R50 & R 65 as conformed to the ISRI Codes. Manufactured in Russia & Ukraine. The Origin is South Africa.
Quantity: 360,000 MT (Three hundred and Sixty Thousand Metric Tons)
Contract Period: Twelve Months.
Price: USD$125 per Metric Ton FOB.
Payment Terms: with only POF we will deliver the goods and there will be no up-front payment of any sort until delivery to your port. The POF will come as Pre-advise to our bank which Seller will present to Buyer as his nominated bank account.

If you confirm willing, ready, we will send you the Verbiage of POF. Please confirm if you are willing to close down the contract as to enable us schedule and arrange for your urgent trip to South Africa for inspections of the materials and signing of the contract with us.

Too bad it's not a la carte -- I could sell my guitar amp and get 3 metric tons of train rail. I could build a badass fort with that.

There Goes The Weekend

2008-06-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

On Friday, August 21st, 1998, global financial markets were thrown into chaos by a series of upheavals -- Russia's default on a massive debt, for example -- and U.S. swap spreads, which even on their active days usually never moved by more than a basis point or two, were "wildly oscillating over a range of 20 points." This was bad news for Long-Term Capital Management, the now-infamous investment fund:

"One of the [LTCM] analysts called a trader at home and asked, 'Would you like to guess where swap spreads are?' When the analyst told him, the trader snapped, 'Fuck you—don't ever call me at home again!'"
—Roger Lowenstein, "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management"

Design Alchemy

2008-06-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

This is not the greatest thing I've ever drawn, but it is interesting since it's actually a composite of five different sketches. I tried to match up the line strength as much as possible, but it's not perfect. Still, fun exercise.

NB: For completeness' sake, here are the sketches I composited to make this one. (Warning: 674K JPEG)

NB2: Yes, the masking is a little off in one spot. I can see it on my laptop but not on my cinema displays. :( They're getting old.

Kind of a Big Deal.

2008-06-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

This is the key line from the SC's holding today: "questions of extraterritoriality turn on objective factors and practical concerns, not formalism."

And just like that, the Insular Cases and Eisentrager disappeared. Took long enough.

That Means Guilty.

2008-06-07T20:23:00.001-07:00

I don't know how many people were following the circus that was the Hans Reiser trial. I'm confused how Reiser can offer to lead police to the body as part of a plea deal after the year-long trial which he lost. I understand the need for closure for the victim's family, etc., but this seems like the sort of thing you set up as a plea deal beforehand, behind closed doors.

If the defendant knows where the body is, his right against self-incrimination clearly means he can't be forced to reveal anything, but he's still not permitted to commit perjury. Reiser not only voluntarily testified in his own defense (against the advice of his defense attorney), he claimed that his wife escaped to Russia in order to frame him. If he knew where her body was, he was lying to the court, period. Reiser even turned down this exact plea deal before trial.

That's not how it works -- i.e. gambling on the jury decision and then waiving your 5th Amendment rights in order to get a sentence reduction after the conviction. In particular, you shouldn't be able to game the sentencing phase by revealing material facts that bear directly on the class of the offense charged, as is the case here. The lack of a body was nearly fatal to the prosecution's case. Whether or not there's evidence of premeditated murder was supposed to be a jury question, and now it won't be.

Of course, I admit that criminal law isn't my area of expertise -- and I tend to be unsympathetic about "sand in the umpire's face" issues, so I'm probably wrong on the merits. It's still ridiculous. At least I won't have to listen to any more people whining about how Reiser was only convicted because he's a computer geek.

Counter-FUD

2008-06-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was thinking it would be appropriate if Democrats started a whisper campaign about some non-existent tape of John McCain saying some vaguely-specified but apparently ridiculous bullshit. Then I remembered that there are a bunch of tapes like that already. Once again, reality wins over hyperbole in a shutout.

Functional Languages.

2008-06-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know about this. If they'd taught Lisp instead of Haskell in my first CS class, I might have stuck with that rather than becoming an English major. For better or for worse.

I was just thinking that I actually figured out how to deal with sockets and encoding much more quickly in Lisp than I did in C, though C was the second or third language I learned, and Lisp the... ninth or so? (Not that I learned many of them very well.) But it's harder to do anything with Lisp since the underlying functionality of pretty much everything is written in C. It makes a difference, sadly.

Finally

2008-06-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

I was just starting to feel like the primary was starting to drag on a little bit.

Plotting A Way Out.

2008-05-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

Get to know the traffic patterns as you come across the lights
The way the red is turned to green when you choose your course of flight
—Soccer Team, "Traffic Patterns" (via 3hive)

The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bullshit.
–Lars-Erik Nelson

Too Slow.

2008-05-22T17:53:00.000-07:00

It's both a vindicating and deflating experience when you get behind an argument or a practice only to have your move pretty much mooted by society at large shortly thereafter. On one hand, there's the feeling that you were right, which is encouraging; and yet on the other hand, it can be a bit of a letdown when the battle's over almost at more or less the moment you join.

I've had this happen to me a few times over the last month, but the most recent time around probably takes the cake. I'd written a seminar paper for one of my classes about software licensing -- in particular, the legal distinction between sales and licenses -- arguing that software developers and retailers should be wary of overreaching licenses for various reasons, but most of all because the judicial landscape is unsettled. There have been cases (all involving Adobe, strangely) finding both that software sold under a EULA is and isn't "sold," which in turn triggers various protections under the Copyright Act.

(I wrote about this a while back, but I'm going to revisit it, both because I'm now done with the paper and because of a recent judicial development which I'll get to at the end.)

Sounds a bit dry, but it's an interesting topic, once you dig in to it, because the implications are wide-ranging. The practice of "shrinkwrap" and "clickwrap" licenses has been spreading in recent years: for example, many commentators constantly repeat this joke about how this sort of thing should in theory just let traditional publishers wrap their books in shrinkwrap, slip in a license, and -- ta-da! -- now you can't resell the book to a bookstore, copy it, lend it, etc. That's supposed to be an illustration of why all this is total nonsense of course, harumph. And that's all very humorous, except that recently the Maryland Bar Association started doing exactly that with their official directories of lawyers and judges. Oops. Oh, and Monsanto has also made millions doing the same thing with their Roundup seeds. In other words, the old joke is currently more of a description of reality, which in my experience generally indicates some sort of problem.

There have been a lot of live issues here recently, too, for example:

- There's a suit about to be filed wherein some legal publishers are trying to get rights to publish Oregon's legal code using their organization, which the state is claiming is protected by a license agreement (as with the Maryland Bar directory, this is especially weird since the Supreme Court's holding in Feist that compilations aren't protectable would seem to flatly prohibit this sort of thing).

- There's an ancillary issue of whether many of these rights can be protected under contract rather than copyright and to what extent, as well as how they're allowed to overlap or be disclaimed. The federal statutes clearly preempt state applications of copyright law, but that doesn't, in reality, solve much. First, it's still not clear which rules are mandatory and which can be contracted out of (warranties, first sale, fair use, etc.). Second, in order to reach most of these issues you have to decide whether a transaction is a "license" or a "sale," which is inherently a contract law issue and generally covered by state laws. But, if the question of which body of law applies is by nature a state-law issue, then the notion of absolute federal preemption would seem to be somewhat problematic.

- MSN Music recently announced that they were going to end support for all music purchased on their online store, meaning that consumers have to decide which devices(s) they want to validate their music on now, and which they can never change (i.e., if you want to upgrade your system later, tough luck). That's pretty clearly not the deal those buyers thought they were getting from Microsoft at first, but since the DMCA prohibits circumventing MSN Music's DRM scheme, those consumers are pretty much out of luck. (This is especially weak in that there's no real reason that Microsoft can't support revalidation except that it would compete with their new online music store.) Major League Baseball did something similar last year and Congress rejected a legislative loophole for it in the DMCA.

- But there have been a number of recent cases where the courts have applied a "copyright misuse" doctrine (supposedly an old rule, but not the way it's been used in these cases) to invalidate anticompetitive licenses that employ DRM/DMCA protections. You might remember that Lexmark got smacked down for trying to use some DRM tech to control the market for their printer cartridges. This is kind of a weird development, because while some courts have been really aggressive about applying this rule, it's practically a 180 degree shift from the previous judicial policy of validating aggressive EULAs under freedom-to-contract principles, and it's also been done without touching any of the prior license-friendly rules. The courts just came up with a new doctrine and started going nuts with it. (It's also not clear whether the rule only applies where certain combinations of DRM/license/hardware/software restrictions are used; there has been some implication that pure software controls are fair game, which really doesn't make a lot of analytic sense.)

So, at any rate, my paper generally focused on the first sale doctrine, state/federal preemption, and copyright misuse, essentially arguing that in addition to being a doctrinal mess, there were cases and practices coming down on both sides of the law and that a lot of people were going to end up getting burned when things finally shook themselves out.

So, of course, within a month, things decided to shake themselves out. The U.S. District Court in Seattle just ruled in a case involving Autodesk trying to restrict the resale of its CAD software on eBay, and the Court did not pull any punches:

The US District Court in Seattle has rejected Autodesk's myriad arguments regarding its software licenses and found in favor of eBay seller Timothy S. Vernor. The ruling started by ruling that Vernor was within his rights to resell copies of AutoCAD Release 14 he got in an auction. Once the court settled the legitimacy of reselling, it used that ruling as a lens to dismiss all of Autodesk's various claims. More than once the court described Autodesk's arguments as 'specious' and 'conflicted.'

Ouch. Makes me feel obsolete -- I'd made fun of this specific practice in my paper, pointing out that though you shouldn't be able to resell a copy of Photoshop under a EULA (since you don't "own" it) under the "license not sale" theory, the reality is that there's dozens of individuals and retailers doing exactly that on Amazon right now with no consequences. And really, what's Adobe going to do about it?

Well, turns out I was right. The judge had no mercy for Autodesk when they argued precisely that. (Here's a blog post from Google's Senior Copyright Counsel on the subject that does a good job explaining the decision and which comes down the same way I did.) The court even went a few steps beyond what I'd have predicted: there are some shots taken at preemptive DMCA takedown notices as a prima facie cause of harm, which is really significant; there's a definitive integration of the redundant parts of §109 and §117 of the Copyright Act; there's a declaration that the pace of technological change doesn't change the doctrine, which is something that's really needed to be said for a while; and most importantly, the Court held that there could be no contributory infringement since the right to copy is essential to effective use and thus immunized. That last conclusion in particular is huge.

The court also took time to discuss the issue that I ended up wrestling with the most in the end, which was whether contract law would still apply even in the case of a "sale." This is a big concern here, since the problem -- as I see it -- is the drafting of highly restrictive licenses in the first place; there's a perverse incentive to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and think hey, if the court doesn't buy the copyright claims, at least we'll win on the contract claims. That "fallback" strategy puts licensees in a tough legal position.

The court didn't spend a great deal of time here since Autodesk didn't really advance the issue properly, but the judge did take time to point out that the governing precedent generally turns on first-sale issues, not contract. In the end, this part of the opinion is really just judicial ribbing, since it avoids the real issue mentioned above: that the question of whether a transfer is a "sale" or a "license" actually raises a threshold issue of state contract law that's inextricable from the rest of the analysis. But the Court does at least highlight the distinction.

The Court does also hold regarding the copyright issue that the initial question is whether the license is binding on retailers in the first place, and that if so there would be additional questions of whether the license constitutes copyright misuse, is unconscionable, etc. That reads to me like a warning to Autodesk -- and it was also one of my arguments, namely that every step the EULA draftee takes toward making a license airtight increases the very real risk of judicial invalidation under Lexmark and related cases.

The court ends up relying solely on 9th Circuit precedent, but does point out -- correctly -- that the authority on the first-sale question is in total disarray. That's also very important, in that it's made clear in one spot just how contradictory the precedent is. (It's also kind of entertaining to see the court cite to the two Adobe cases I discussed at length in my paper, Softman and One-Stop Micro, one after the other, noting as I did that they reach absolutely contrary and incompatible results in the same California state circuit and within a year of one another. It's a great example of how little sense the caselaw makes.)

Regardless, this is mostly for my own edification, but since my paper is basically moot now if this opinion gets any traction -- and I expect that it will -- it felt important to write. Perhaps some companies out there will be looking for someone that can redraft their EULAs...

Glad I wasn't out in this.

2008-05-15T15:24:00.001-07:00

So, that's that.

2008-05-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

Everything's done.

Frist!

2008-05-14T12:28:00.001-07:00

Comments on Taylor Marsh's blog entry about the big endorsement Obama picked up today:

First? What is NARAL
jangles | 05.14.2008 - 2:42 pm

first? yay!
nzanh | 05.14.2008 - 2:42 pm

Ah, congrats jangles. Second today.
nzanh | 05.14.2008 - 2:42 pm

NARAL?
nzanh | 05.14.2008 - 2:44 pm

NB: Er, make that the first big endorsement.

Home Stretch.

2008-05-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Per kottke, 1001 books I should have read.

My list:

Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Contact – Carl Sagan
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Plague – Albert Camus
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Native Son – Richard Wright
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

86 is not too bad I guess. Embarrassing how many are on the long list that I should have read -- a lot of good Russian lit especially.

The Perfect EULA.

2008-05-03T14:18:00.001-07:00

By breaking this seal, the user hereinafter agrees to abide by all the terms and conditions of the following agreement that nobody ever reads, as well as the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Charter and the Secret Membership Oath of the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks[,] and such other terms and conditions, real and imaginary, as the Software Company shall deem necessary and appropriate, including the right to come to the user's home and examine the user's hard drive, as well as the user's underwear drawer if we feel like it, take it or leave it, until death do us part, one nation indivisible, by the dawn's early light, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, finders keepers, losers weepers, thanks you've been a great crowd, and don't forget to tip your servers.
— Dave Barry

Just So You'll Be Knowin'.

2008-05-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

Bluegrass hip-hop.

Only The Sonambulent Survive.

2008-04-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

After this exam is over, I plan to spend the remainder of the week and the weekend re-enacting my Top 5 Best Sleeps. The winner gets chosen to sleep in next week.

The World is Run By Idiots

2008-04-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Sadr Gives Maliki Last Warning On Ceasefire. What in the world does Maliki think he's doing? Either he's actually trying to start a civil war or he's malignly incompetent.

WHAT?!

2008-04-18T19:20:00.001-07:00

OK, I lied when I said I would stop posting about politics: Seriously, WHAT!?

Obama Endorsement

2008-04-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

In a bold move, Barack Obama pays homage to the most august political figure in New York.

The Legal Employment Market.

2008-04-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

Typical:

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

I'm probably going to get bad karma for laughing about this, but the schadenfreude is worth it.

This is wrong.

2008-04-09T19:32:00.000-07:00

It's a sign of just how messed up this Administration is that John Ashcroft will end up going down in history as the voice of reason. I mean, that's the "How High The Eagle Soars" dude who lost an election to a dead guy. Talk about setting the bar low.

OK, No More Politics.

2008-04-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

I've had enough and I'm sure everyone else has, too. Instead, I give you YouTube videos of kittens.

Um, Releasing the Tax Returns?

2008-04-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

Once again the logic totally escapes me. The Clinton tax returns seem OK so far -- I have to imagine that if there were any major problems, we would have heard about them by now. I guess ~$110M is a lot, but so what? Good for them.

So why wait? This would have been a non-issue if they'd done it a month ago. I don't get it.

So Obama's Pastor is Crazy?

2008-04-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Kottke links to this article from VQR on Pat Robertson:

In order to prepare for the imminent Second Coming—which Robertson believes will occur on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem according to biblical prophecy—he acquired METV (Middle East Television), a station then based in southern Lebanon that could broadcast into Israel. Straub was given marching orders to be ready to televise Christ’s return. CBN executives drew up a detailed plan to broadcast the event to every nation and in all languages. Straub wrote: “We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’”

Yes, you did read that right. Go ahead, read it again. Take just a few moments to consider how completely, totally lunatic that notion is. Good thing people like that never get close to the Presidency. That would be a, whatchacallit, double standard.

NB: I've been trying to think of what this reminded me of, and I finally got it. It's this line from Seven -- "I've been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you're insane? [...] do you just stop and go, 'Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!'? Yeah. Do you guys do that?"

The Deficient Capital Market Hypothesis

2008-03-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

This is an insightful comment from Information Processing:

I'd like to hear a believer in efficient markets try to tell the story of Bear Stearns' demise. One week it was OK for them to be levered 30 to 1, the next week it wasn't? When the stock was at 65 people were comfortable with their exposure to mortgages, but then suddenly they weren't? Come on. When the stock was at 65, what was the implied probability of a total collapse, based on out of the money puts? Zero.

Markets are complex dynamical systems that undergo phase transitions. Even sophisticated institutional investors are mostly just following the herd. Prices can disconnect wildly from real value for long periods of time, until suddenly they jump, often overshooting in the other direction. Huge risks, which in hindsight are obvious, build up in plain view while escaping notice from all but a few Cassandras. Robert Rubin, the Chairman of Citigroup, former co-head of Goldman, former Treasury Secretary, doesn't know what a SIV is until after the crisis has hit. Tens of trillions of dollars in off the books credit default swaps are traded (often recorded on scraps of paper!) before Wall St. CEOs, central bankers and regulators realize the instabilities involved.

Bingo.

The Access of Evil

2008-03-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

From McClatchy, "Iranian general played key role in brokering Iraq cease-fire:

Iraqi lawmakers traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom over the weekend to win the support of the commander of Iran's Qods brigades in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop military operations, members of the Iraqi parliament said.

"Mercy is the mark of a great man. [stab] Guess I'm just a good man. [stab] Well... I'm all right."

NB: Hey, I simultaneously reached the same conclusion that Juan Cole did. His version sounds a little more well-thought-out than mine, though.

I don't get it.

2008-03-29T23:09:00.000-07:00

Clinton told the WaPo that she plans on staying in the race until the Convention on August 25th to seat the MI and FL delegates (get the situation "resolved"). But according to Slate's delegate calculator, even after giving her the benefit of the doubt in PA, WV, and all the other states based on old polls which inevitably gave her big leads, and even including FL and MI with their stated vote totals, I still have Obama taking the final pledged delegate count by 1835-1716, a margin of about 120 delegates. Even if you give him no delegates from Michigan at all he's still ahead. I don't understand what the Clinton strategy is supposed to be. It makes no sense.

Long Week, Now Basketball.

2008-03-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

What an exhausting week. Beating Stanford would be a nice way to end it. C'mon Texas.

NB.1: Man, we're shooting poorly, but Stanford is shooting horribly.

NB.2: I think Barnes recruits based on initials. Most of our players that get court time, plus Durant for fun: GJ, DJ, DP, AJA, CA, CC, DJA, JDL, JM, AW, KD. (That's 6 Js, 5 Ds, 5 As, 3 Cs, 5 other letters.)

NB.3: 43-34 at the half. Me likey.

NB.4: Aaand we're back. 45-37. Good, good.

NB.5: Goods is going to lose this game for Stanford. 0 for 10? Only 3 Texas players have even taken that many shots. *Stanford's only taken 53 shots.

NB.6: Too many fouls. Calm down, guys.

NB.7: Meanwhile, Lopez Prime has scored fully half of Stanford's 44 points.

NB.8: 3 fouls on Mason. Not cool. We need that perimeter threat. However, 3 on Lopez Mark I = good.

NB.9: Yawwwwn. Both teams have decided that scoring points is soooo played.

NB.10: Internet died. Heh. 72-54. Texas bringing back the "scoring points" concept with a 22-8 run.

NB.11: Bad ass. Oh, and Davidson annihilates Wisconsin? WTF?

NB.12: 79-59 with under a minute to play.

NB.13: Aaaaand that's game. 82-62. Wow.

Zerg Rush Kekeke?

2008-03-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

What a real RTS war sim would look like.

Zeitgeist.

2008-03-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

When Taylor Marsh says "Hillary Clinton trying to prove her importance during her husband's presidency overreached massively and got caught in a whopper on Bosnia that includes tape," that's probably not a good sign.

It's a pretty valiant defense, all told, but "Hillary's life proves different opportunities from a man that needs to apologies and padding" is ultimately kind of confusing to me. I just don't know what to make of that one. I blame the cult indoctrination from to my brain. Braaaaains.

For Geeks With Too Much Money:

2008-03-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Periodic Table Rings. No Titanium, though. Oh, well.

Obama Just Made History.

2008-03-18T20:30:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to think of something appropriate to say about the speech Obama gave today, and I don't know where to start. I've read dozens of reactions, pro and con, but I feel like no one's managed yet to grasp the meaning of what he just did. There are a lot of people who've effused about oh what a wonderful speech it was, as well as a sizable contingent who've been nitpicking about it, but I haven't seen anyone yet who really seems to have grasped just what it meant. Even the people who've said that Obama "elevated the discourse" in some way don't seem to be able to explain how.

The "how" is that it was a speech that my grandmother, who, like Obama's, is a saint of a woman who nevertheless harbors some racial prejudices that are so very, very hard for me to reconcile with my image of her as one of the sweetest, most wonderful people in my life -- and Obama's speech is the first time I heard anything that I think -- I know -- she would really understand. The first.

I don't know if the speech will make a difference in the primary, and I don't know how the press will ultimately spin it. Elections are complex things, and I don't think the most important effects of this speech are ultimately about the election. I'd like to put the election aside for a moment and just talk about what Obama just did, which by all rights shouldn't have been possible.

What I honestly believe is this: that speech was a singular intellectual achievement, a contribution to the race debate in this country that will reshape everything that came before it and that comes after. I want to be crystal clear that I am not saying this in support of Obama's Presidential bid. Some of the most brilliant, eloquent, educated, dedicated people I've ever met have spent years trying to grapple with the problem of race relations in the United States -- affirmative action in particular -- and none of them has ever come up with a response or a take on the issue that hit home. Not even close.

I'd wager that I've spent more time pondering these issues that most people ever have or will, and it's never been anything but draining and frustrating. Texas Law is, after all, the unfortunate home for Painter, and more recently Hopwood, making it in many respects ground zero regarding affirmative action. There are still people on the faculty here who were directly involved in the case on both sides, and the issue is not far from the surface -- you can feel it. After nine years here, it's become almost palpable to me. And it grinds you down, because the tension never goes away -- every time I hear anyone say anything about race issues, no matter what their angle, no matter how radical or how conciliatory, I cringe inside, because I've heard all the reactions -- far too many times -- and I just know that there's no way anyone on the other side of the issue would react any way but negatively. It's a Möbius Strip of good intentions come to horrible ends. (And some not-so-good intentions as well, of course.)

Much of the commentary on Obama's speech hasn't yet appreciated just how intractable a political problem this has been for so long -- nor how much effort has been expended here to such negligible effect -- and the almost surreal ease with which Obama just shattered a seemingly-impregnable political barrier. As a long-time supporter of affirmative action, I've been almost despondent at times trying to think of some way, any way, to move the issue forward. Greater minds than mine have tried and failed -- endless volumes of books, treatises, essays, and court decisions have done next to nothing to unravel the Gordian Knot; every statement that's made, you can just feel that it doesn't quite cut through.

And yet, somehow, in one moment, Obama just... did it. That shouldn't even have been possible. I have been waiting for the better part of my adult life for someone to hit that perfect pitch, and Obama finally did it. That speech was the first time I've felt that I could say yes -- that is something I could say to my Midwestern relatives that they would actually understand. He connected their frustrations -- the frustrations that fueled the Southern Strategy, in many ways -- with the frustrations of African-Americans. That's a profound, profound thing.

And it wasn't just Obama's take on the situation or his life experiences, and it wasn't just a pretty speech; he actually connected the intellectual dots in a unique and original way -- in a way that even great scholars haven't yet been able to -- and he did it more than once. All the strands came together -- his pastor, the media circus, his church, his grandmother: those were universal chords. They will resonate.

I doubt that it'll become clear just how amazing this moment was for some time to come, but that was an intellectual and political tour de force on an absolutely unprecedented level. That was a stake through the heart of racism in this country, the Prejudice That Dare Not Speak Its Name, the "I'm not a racist, but..." sentiments that have fueled racial divisions between Americans since the end of the Civil War. That was really something special.

Florida gives up.

2008-03-17T16:33:00.001-07:00

No revote.

Sweet.

2008-03-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

NCAA Bracket. Really couldn't have asked for much better than that for Texas.

Blackmail. That's a good plan.

2008-03-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

The NYT says that some major Hillary supporters in Michigan and Florida are threatening to ask for some $160,000+ in DNC contributions back if it is "not settled satisfactorily." One guess what that means. (Of course, these are just two of the supporters mentioned in the article; there could well be more.) Way to endear yourself to the party and promote unity, guys. Pretty appropriate timing too, seeing as this has been on the table since at least late 2007 and the primaries were over a month and a half ago.

Terry McAuliffe denies all knowledge:

About 250 top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton met Wednesday in Washington. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton campaign’s chairman and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, encouraged the donors to pick up the phone and call party leaders, as did Mrs. Clinton.

But Mr. McAuliffe said in an interview Friday that he did not approve of donors’ holding back their contributions to the D.N.C. [Ed: Dude, then what the fuck did you mean?]

Excellent move. And by "excellent move," I do mean, of course, completely fucking ridiculous.

I enjoyed the cheesy retro ambience.

2008-03-13T20:28:00.003-07:00

I just found the original Sam & Max Hit the Road theme song. My soul is once again complete.

NB: Weird. Looking through this list of quotes I realized that I subconsciously adopted one of my favorite insults from Sam and Max. That's awesome!

Licenses and Sales.

2008-03-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

Hmm. I feel like I haven't actually posted anything about any legal issues for a while. (Really, this isn't a blog for legal commentary, though -- I get enough of that elsewhere.) I've certainly written plenty, but this just never strikes me as the place for it.

However, I'm writing a paper right now on the characterization of software sales as "licenses," and while it's a familiar subject, even my initial research has turned up some absolutely mind-boggling stuff. (Though there are interesting issues in all the major areas of IP law, I'll concentrate on copyright issues here.) Much of it I already knew, but I really didn't know that it had spread as far as it has. I'll explain.

Brief primer: when you buy a piece of software, you generally do not "own" the software in the usual sense. Instead, you are purchasing a "license," a right to use that software, from the authors. This practice arose -- more or less -- because software used to exist in a very murky, ill-defined part of IP law, so covering programs with private contract instead of the statutory rules made a lot of sense. However, the practice has persisted even though software is now very highly regulated under, e.g., the DMCA and the Rental Amendment to the Copyright Act.

This has led to some interesting (and arguably very problematic) results. For example:

(1) The practice has spread far beyond software. As you might know, the songs that you buy off iTunes (and indeed most music, when ripped to digital form) is governed by a license; you don't actually own it.

What you might not know is that the license-rather-than-sale trick is also being used in areas that are not digital at all.

For example, Monsanto actually "licenses" the use of some of its seeds now. (That's right, you buy a license to plant crops. You don't actually own them.) (And yes, they have defended this -- to the tune of over 100 lawsuits and over $15M in damages so far.) Remember those glow-in-the-dark, genetically-engineered fish? Also licensed. In fact, the terms of the fish license require you to avoid breeding them, so you can technically get sued for keeping them in the same tank.

(2) Putting aside whether this makes sense, one of the results of "licensing" a good rather than purchasing it in a "sale" is that you can contract around the "right of first sale" that generally accompanies copyrighted goods. This is the doctrine that allows you to sell a book after you've purchased it without violating the author's copyright -- the initial sale "exhausts" their right to capture further profits in the book and allows you to transfer the book to someone else without paying the author.

(2a) Under a license, however, you forego this right. You can't sell something you've licensed if the license forbids it, because you don't actually own the good, just the right to use it. Now, this (sort of) makes sense in the digital context, simply because it's so easy to copy goods. But it also means that even if you sell your copy of Photoshop to someone else and delete all original copies, your manual, etc., you might have violated your license, and both you and the buyer might be liable.

(2b) However, this strange result is now also being applied in the market to tangible goods -- while the anti-piracy rationale makes some sense for software or even digital music, it's pretty difficult to make a case for it with regards to, e.g., the printed Maryland Bar Association rules, which are distributed under a "license" rather than sold -- selling a book is essentially the paradigm example of when the first sale doctrine is supposed to apply.

(3) OK, so that's odd. But one way of solving this problem would be to say that as long as the consumer chooses to go with the contract, that private transaction should take precedence. After all, that's one of the fundamental maxims of contract law -- deference to the will of the parties. (We'll put aside for the moment whether or not the fiction of assent applies here.) If the parties want to forego the public ordering and use privately-negotiated rules instead, that's their choice.

Well, that's not how it works. Under the current precedent, the licensor can get damages under contract and under copyright law. The standard set of protections (first sale, etc.) all disappear, but all the standard copyright remedies remain. So you can still be sued for infringement even though you have, in theory, opted out of the public ordering. Needless to say, this is not a common result in contract or IP law.

(4) But wait! It gets better! You also may be familiar with the much-touted "fair use" doctrine in copyright, which is essentially the notion that publicly-beneficial uses of copyrighted material that don't injure copyright owners financially should be allowed as a matter of public policy. Though there is some dispute over just how far the doctrine should be extended, one relatively uncontroversial element of the rule (which is statutory -- i.e., it's in the Copyright Act) is that it's meant to protect "criticism." That is, since copyright owners have a strong incentive to prevent negative criticism of their own works (like, e.g., a bad book review), "fair use" is carved out as a safe harbor protecting against litigation that might chill free speech.

However, in order for "fair use" to apply, the courts have held almost universally that the critic must own a legitimate copy of the work. There's many rationales for this, but the important point is that if you license a work, you don't actually own it, so fair use doesn't apply.

Better yet, there are now many licenses that specifically forbid the users from using the product to produce criticisms. (Microsoft, for example, uses this sort of term in some licenses, but they're not the only ones.) There are also licenses that attempt to carve out one of the very few safe harbors that exist in the DMCA, which allows reverse engineering in limited circumstances. Chances are that if you use software under a license, you're not allowed to reverse engineer it for any reason. Since the DMCA's not exactly friendly about circumvention in the first place, this might not be much worse than the current state of affairs in the software world -- but it's surely a big deal if, for example, Monsanto's license terms forbid you from sequencing the genes of their seeds.

(5) Is that all? Nope. Most first year law students are also familiar with some of the "automatic" rights conferred under the Uniform Commercial Code for the sale of goods -- most notably, the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose and the implied warranty of merchantability. These are, more or less, anti-fraud measures that are supposed to guarantee consumers some sort of recourse against lemons. They're also intentionally difficult to contract around (generally there has to be a large, up-front disclaimer -- and even that won't be enough if the product is truly useless).

Surprise! Licenses for intellectual property aren't sales of goods, so the standard implied warranties don't apply. Yep, that's right -- technically, if you buy a piece of software under a license and it doesn't work, you don't have a right of action under standard contract law. (And, of course, the same result should apply to the Monsanto seeds and the Maryland Bar Association rules -- the latter may be a scary thought for Maryland attorneys.)

(6) There's also a bunch of other doctrinal rights that are under threat based on the license/sale trick. (These might not make sense for non-legal types, but trust me, they're important.) For example: liquidating assets in bankruptcy or on behalf of an estate, temporal limitation of rights, termination of transfer rights, and the on-sale bar for patents. Some have been tested more than others, but none have really come out looking good (the on-sale bar in particular -- the Federal Circuit has already ruled unfavorably there).

This is all, to put it bluntly, really screwed up. These rights are, for the most part, things that consumers take for granted when purchasing goods (especially physical goods), and many of them are being taken away with no sort of price-correction at all. It's surprising that it's even happening, and one tends to hope that something will happen to stop it, but the fact of the matter is that IP law, and copyright law in particular, really hasn't been trending in that direction in recent years.

The fact that the trend isn't slowing down, but is actually spreading from software to other areas of IP and even to physical goods, is really disturbing. The best explanation I can come up with is that it simply hasn't been well-tested yet -- however, the precedent is already being laid down, and contractual agreements are pretty hard to fight. It seems to me that in a few years, a whole lot of people are going to find out that they actually owned a whole lot less than they thought they did.

We Are So Screwed.

2008-03-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

Reuters reports that JPMorgan is predicting a $325 billion "systemic" margin call due to the continued credit crunch and the worst monthly job losses in 5 years. "Systemic" is the key word here -- code for "endemic," "across the board," or perhaps "really really bad."

Screwed.

Ooh, Stock Photos.

2008-03-08T14:05:00.001-08:00

Not something I would usually post, but PhotoShelter has an ad on kottke (guess they do work sometimes), and they're actually not bad. The few times I've had to go dig up stock photos for design work it's always been a pretty painful process (seriously, fuck Corbis), but there's some neat stuff here. (I didn't check their pricing, so your mileage may vary. But they are pretty pictures.)

NB: This isn't a pitch -- I'd never seen this site before. But I do hate Corbis with a passion, so I'm willing to toss in my two cents on this one.

The Reverse Midas Touch of Cory Doctorow.

2008-03-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

What in the hell is the attraction of "remixed" subway maps? That's got to be one of the most annoying aesthetic conceits on the planet. They're kind of neat when they represent, you know, subways. But remaking every goddamn thing you can think of into a subway map is not cool or interesting. Why not "remix" all your favorite artwork onto Mercatur projections or something? It'd still be nerdy, pretentious, and boring, but at least it'd be original.

Dean to Clinton Campaign:

2008-03-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

You lose, Kenobi!

Howard Dean will not bend the party rules to grandfather in the disputed delegates from Michigan and Florida, the Democratic party chairman said in a statement today.

Instead, he put the state parties on notice: either they can wait and allow the credentials committee to decide whether to seat their delegates, or submit to a re-vote sanctioned under DNC rules. "We look forward to receiving their proposals should they decide to submit new delegate selection plans and will review those plans at that time," he said in the statement.

"Everyone seems to be asking what the DNC will do," a Democrat close to Dean said. "But the question is: what will the state parties do."

Dean's statement implies that he has no intention of changing the rules to accommodate any solution proposed by the candidates or the state parties. There has been some suggestion that the two remaining presidential candidates might try to broker a deal among themselves. His line in the sand narrows the options for Hillary Clinton's campaign because it is unlikely that a credentials committee would endorse a delegation congenial to her mathematical interests.

Ooh, ouch, didn't see this:

The Democratic Nominee will be determined in accordance with party rules, and out of respect for the presidential campaigns and the states that did not violate party rules, we are not going to change the rules in the middle of the game.

That's a pretty resounding smackdown.

NB: A commenter over on MyDD -- of all places -- pointed out on a related thread that Clinton seems to pretty clearly be running for the VP slot right now. That'd crossed my mind earlier but I hadn't given much thought to it, but it seems pretty self-evidently clear now that I think about it.

Huh? WOO! Wow.

2008-03-04T17:24:00.001-08:00

AP and CNN have Obama up 440K-300K in TX with 0% reporting. If true, that's huge. Are those early votes? Wow.

NB: TEXAS FTW -- saving the world from Ohio!

NB.2: Ohio is not looking good. Gap in TX is closing. C'mon, don't let the Yankees win.

NB.3: Nevermind -- the urban counties that are going Obama are lagging way behind the rural areas. Ohio will tighten up a lot. Texas is looking like an airball, though.

NB.4: Ugh. Based on the reports of the chaos all over Texas, which came after both campaigns had already started threatening lawsuits, I don't think this is going to end well. This primary did not need any more screwups on top of Florida and Michigan, but now it's got 'em anyway.

I'm Sure Scared Now

2008-02-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

The Politico on Clinton's "red phone" commercial criticizing Obama's national security credentials because he didn't vote for enough pointless wars:

"It's a love tap compared to the Wu-Tang fist of fury that's coming at this guy in the fall," said Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant.

The word on the street is that they are not to be fucked with, and apparently dumber than a bag of hammers.

Secret Level!

2008-02-29T01:01:00.000-08:00

Leap years are life's bonus stages.

Reject or Denounce?

2008-02-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

Aside from the fact that Hillary's interjection in the debates of her "pro-Israel" bonafides was nonsense -- a New York politician rejecting a fringe anti-Semitic group who hadn't even endorsed her doesn't sound like it should have been a hard decision -- it wasn't a very honest claim, either. The Observer says that's not at all what happened:

The two candidates for United States Senate sought the endorsement of the fractious Independence Party here today, but Hillary Rodham Clinton used her speech to attack the group for what she said was the ''anti-Semitism, extremism, prejudice and intolerance of a few shrill voices on both the right and the left.''

Mrs. Clinton added that she welcomed the endorsement of the party, but said emphatically that she would not accept it if the party supported Patrick J. Buchanan for president. ''I cannot and will not as the price for any endorsement embrace or excuse those who use hateful rhetoric that separates and divides,'' she said. ''So let me be just very clear: I will not run on a line with Pat Buchanan on the top of the ticket.''

[EDIT: Sorry, this should have been a link to this NYT article. Don't know what happened.]

So Clinton was willing to accept the endorsement of a Party that she acknowledged in that same speech expressed "anti-Semitism, extremism, prejudice, and intolerance" ... on the condition that they dump Pat Buchanan. The rest was apparently OK.

Anyway. It gets better:

At a news conference afterward, Mrs. Clinton did praise the Independence Party for its ''important and constructive role in political dialogue,'' particularly with its support of campaign finance reform, but she said pointedly later that her criticism of anti-Semitism in the party was meant to include Ms. Fulani. [ed: !?]

''In recent months, internal battles have cast a troubling shadow over this party, raising questions about whether it will be hijacked and led in a wholly different and dangerous direction,'' Mrs. Clinton said.

There had been disagreement among Mrs. Clinton's advisers about whether she should speak to the party at all, but they said she decided that she might appear aloof or politically timid if she avoided the gathering. She and her advisers also decided that an attack on the party could promote her as a principled candidate in contrast to the mayor.

This is exactly what Clinton was accusing Obama of doing -- worse, in fact. Seriously, this makes no sense. This was the issue she brought in the debate as an example of a time she "had to make a tough choice," when she did no such thing at all -- she actively sought that endorsement. At the time, her only concern was with whether she could spin it as presentable.

UPDATE: This is the relevant statement from the debate:

CLINTON: I just want to add something here, because I faced a similar situation when I ran for the Senate in 2000 in New York. And in New York, there are more than the two parties, Democratic and Republican. And one of the parties at that time, the Independence Patty, was under the control of people who were anti-Semitic, anti- Israel. And I made it very clear that I did not want their support. I rejected it. I said that it would not be anything I would be comfortable with. And it looked as though I might pay a price for that. But I would not be associated with people who said such inflammatory and untrue charges against either Israel or Jewish people in our country.

And, you know, I was willing to take that stand, and, you know, fortunately the people of New York supported me and I won. But at the time, I thought it was more important to stand on principle and to reject the kind of conditions that went with support like that.

That strikes me as pretty slimy. It sounds like what she's saying is that she rejected the support of the Independence Party after the offered. What actually happened is that she sought the endorsement of the Independence Party but asked them to reject "the control of people who were anti-Semitic." That's sneaky parsing.

Maybe Mark Penn and Harold Ickes are Busy

2008-02-26T14:20:00.000-08:00

That might explain why they apparently couldn't be bothered to sign the Clinton campaign's response to a recent NYT article, though 503 other staffers -- including Grunwald, Singer, Solis Doyle, Williams, and Wolfson -- seem to have been able to make the time.

Dr. A!

2008-02-25T20:18:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't usually post about Texas basketball, but tonight's win against KSU was huge, and they deserve congrats. Connor Atchley didn't miss a shot all night. That said, shooting 50% from downtown and 45% from the line = something is not right.

Still, a win is a win. Yet another impressive season for Texas hoops so far.

Hmm. Sound familiar?

2008-02-25T11:26:00.000-08:00

"Inside, in a mews with a carriage house converted to a laboratory, they found an elfin figure, whom Plug introduced as Dr. Zoot, in workingman's fatigues, carpet-slippers, smoked goggles, and a peculiar helmet punctuated over its surface by not entirely familiar electrical fittings." —Against the Day, p.402

Small World.

2008-02-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

The Democratic debate is going to take place about six or seven blocks from where I am right now. Everything looks pretty normal right now, though.

NB: Heh. I'm such a sucker. (You're supposed to go the other way, though.)

NB2: Oh, wow, Obama just knocked it out of the park. Then: "That's not change you can believe in, that's change you can Xerox." Not a good move. Or maybe it was product placement.

NB3: I really can't believe this is happening about 15 minutes' walk from here.

NB4: Speaking of small worlds -- I just followed a link on MeFi to this photo. Man, that's a nice photo of Obama in a cowboy hat. I think whatever sickness I'm coming down with is making me hallucinate.

They Know Our Play.

2008-02-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Can a native Houstonian tell me if Obama's doing the accent right?

Gravity Loses in Overtime.

2008-02-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

Dwight Howard laughs at your so-called 'physics.'

The Stupid, It Hurts

2008-02-14T00:27:00.000-08:00

TPMEC:

...Hillary spokesperson Howard Wolfson made it clear that he thinks the campaign has something of a winning message in the demand that Obama agree to more head-to-head debates, something the campaign desperately wants in order to blunt the impact of Obama's superior oratory on the stump.

Wolfson, in what perhaps signals recognition of the more than a dozen debates we've already had, pointed out that the two have only had a single head to head debate. "Is Senator Obama hiding from the direct comparison that voters deserve?" Wolfson asked, adding: "He will have a difficult time explaining that."

Yeah, an experienced candidate should be doing things that have at least four or five obvious downsides and no upside for him, and at his opponent's bidding.

Because, you see, it takes many years in politics before you can achieve this level of transcendent idiocy. All hail Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn. All hail the All-knowing Gurus of The Fucking Moronic.

You know, Hillary Clinton's by all accounts a very nice person and a pretty decent politician, if not the world's greatest manager. She really, really deserves better than these douchebags.

Electability Redux.

2008-02-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

Here, I'm going to boil down the entire Democratic primary to one simple question that should determine how everyone yet to vote should decide:

Do you prefer Clinton's chances against McCain in Florida, or do you prefer Obama's chances against McCain in Ohio?

That's it. That's the only decision you need to make. You're welcome.

NB: Oh, hell with it, I'll make it even easier -- just friggin' vote for Obama.

NB.2: Wow. 68% in Washington, 68% in Nebraska, 57% in Louisiana. That's a crush, and in three states with very, very different voting profiles. Huge.

NB.3: Maine?! 20 points? Are you kidding me?

Et tu, NYT Patriots?

2008-02-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

New York Times, "A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired The Giant Is," Feb 2, 2008:

Yet in technology, 27 years is a lifetime, and there is a powerful sense that while it has spent enormous effort over the years protecting its monopoly, the world has passed it by.

[ . . . ]

Meanwhile, with every new Internet fad, like the current frenzy over social networking, Microsoft is invariably caught flat-footed and has to race to just get a foot in the game. But that’s always the way it is when companies get big — and it is why real innovation always comes from small companies that don’t have a predetermined mind-set, or monopoly profits to protect.

In unrelated news, it is now February 2, ~~2007~~ 2008, and the New York Times still requires compulsory online registration.

NB: New York ~~Times~~ Giants, Feb 3, 2008:

~~Microsoft~~ Tom Brady is invariably caught flat-footed and has to race to just get a foot in the game. But that’s always the way it is when ~~companies~~ dynasties get big — and it is why real innovation always comes from small ~~companies~~ teams that don’t have a predetermined mind-set, or monopoly profits to protect.

Hey, that worked pretty well.

Real Endorsements for Obama.

2008-02-03T19:22:00.001-08:00

I'm not crazy about the Grateful Dead, but if Stevie Wonder's on board, I'm sold.

Uphill Both Ways

2008-01-31T17:58:00.000-08:00

From the thread on the WSJ's token "young associates dress like slobs because they have no respect" article:

i can barely see my computer with my underwear over my head
Comment by maybe they are right this time - January 31, 2008

Girls only like guys with great skills.

2008-01-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

I feel like such a cultist for actually reading the text of Obama's speeches, but damn is he good. I'm a sucker for good oratory -- American Rhetoric is a site that I'll admit to reading for years now. I think that the first speech that really hit me in the gut was Mario Cuomo's address to the '84 Democratic Convention -- and Obama manages to hit that note or close to it almost every time, in situations that are far less conducive to inspiring rhetoric. It's fun to watch.

Oh, yeah, and lest we forget: Scoreboard.

Macbook Air.

2008-01-25T23:49:00.000-08:00

I haven't been filling my Apple disciple quota here recently (what can I say -- I like my new MacBook and Leopard still kicks ass), so I thought I'd catch up by saying a few things about the MacBook Air.

First of all, I want one. I like my MacBook, but the last model of the 12" G4 was laptop nirvana as far as I'm concerned, and the Air captures everything about that computer that I loved, and more. One of the main concerns about the Air seems to be that it's not a desktop replacement, but I've never looked for that in a laptop anyway. I use my laptop for pretty low-key work; taking notes, writing, coding, email, and surfing on the internet. With the fixes in threading Leopard implemented, I've yet to really come close to taxing the 2.0 Core2Duo in my MacBook. If I need to do anything heavy-duty -- Photoshop, music composition, etc. -- my PowerMac is still way more than I need.

As far as I'm concerned, desktops are for power and laptops are for portability. "Desktop replacements" never are. I've been doing some version of the biggest-possible-desktop/smallest-possible-laptop setup for about 8 years now, and I highly recommend it. It can be done on a decent budget, surprisingly: e.g., you can reuse lots of old components on desktops like monitors and keyboards, you can swap out upgrades pretty easily, and the bang-for-the-buck is much better -- the things that distinguish the desktop's uses from the laptop's, like graphics cards and RAM, are just way cheaper and more upgradeable in their desktop versions.

All that said, I'm kind of relieved that I ended up buying the MacBook rather than holding out even longer for the Air. (And I certainly tried.) It would have been tough to justify the price difference. I mean, the Air is perfect in many ways, but the 12" G4 was always a no-brainer since it was cheaper than the other Powerbooks (and the iBooks sucked back then). At the end of the day, the MacBook is the laptop that I really should have -- if I'm being sensible -- so it's nice that I didn't have to make the decision.

It still really is a beautiful computer, though. I hope it's successful, so that it's still around the next time I decide to trade up.

You have got to be kidding me.

2008-01-25T16:32:00.000-08:00

No. You do not get to seat the Michigan or the Florida delegates now. Also, your campaign does not have the first clue about how to handle PR. This is a mind-numbingly stupid move.

NB: Oh, and what the hell happened to the complaint about Obama running ads in Florida (as part of a national ad buy, naturally) that was being made just a few days ago? Regardless of whether that objection had merit (friendly tip: it didn't), you don't get to say "respect the DNC's policy by not campaigning in Florida" and then turn right around and say "oh, but count their delegates for me anyway."

I thought that the Clinton campaign was supposed to be this well-oiled political machine, weren't they? They certainly haven't been acting like it -- they got smoked on the race issue, the caucus lawsuit, the stupid Reagan flap, Obama's war record, and now this. Even if Senator Clinton ends up being the nominee, this kind of amateur-hour crap will get them destroyed in the general.

Shorter NYT:

2008-01-24T20:47:00.000-08:00

We are endorsing Hillary Clinton, apparently based on this list of things we think she's wrong about.

A simple question:

2008-01-21T15:58:00.001-08:00

When the hell did the primaries become a referendum on the Clinton Administration rather than the Bush Administration? I care a lot less about a "return to the Clinton years" than I do about fixing the damage caused by the Bush years and making sure it never, ever happens again.

A Little Perspective on the Primaries.

2008-01-19T22:17:00.000-08:00

We've gone through 111 pledged delegates so far, with only 74 to Clinton and Obama combined. South Carolina will add 45 more.

The threshold number to win is 2,025.

There's 1,688 delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday; 447 throughout the rest of February; 415 in March; 512 more after that.

That's a long, long way to go.

NB: This CNN map of fundraising by-state is very interesting. I imagine that you could extrapolate some of these numbers to make some guesstimates about how the upcoming primaries will shake out.

Cloverfield Ftagn.

2008-01-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

So apparently Cloverfield didn't go the HP Lovecraft route, which is both good and bad. Bad because it could have been awesome, but good because the option is still open. Considering how well Mike Mignola does the neo-Lovecraft thing, it was disappointing that the Hellboy movie sold it short. I could do with some more Elder God tentacled world-eater beasties in my movies. Oh, and more Kroenen, please. Freaky Clockwork Nazi Occult Assassin Awesomeness, thankyouyesplease.

Obama is not pro-Reagan.

2008-01-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

There's been a bit of a flap about a comment Obama made in an interview that is being spun as praise for Reagan. It's not. I took the liberty of transcribing the remark -- in context, he actually turns right around and repudiates Reaganite policies:

I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. Part of what's different are the times. I do think, for example, that the 1980 election was different. I think that Ronald Reagan changed the 'trajectory' of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not -- and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.

He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think that they felt like, with all the excesses of the 60s and 70s [he's referring to financial, not cultural, excesses -- this is part of the next clause], government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating -- people tapped into -- he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, 'we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.'

I think Kennedy, twenty years earlier, [also] moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we're in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going aren't working, that we're bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having, and they're not useful.

And the Republican approach has, I think, played itself out. I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the 'party of ideas' for a pretty long chunk of time there, for the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now [as in 'nowadays'], you've heard it all before -- you look at the economic policies that are being debated among the [Republican] Presidential candidates, it's all... tax cuts. You know, we've done that. We've tried it. That's not really gonna solve, you know, our energy problem, for example.

The false outrage over this is ridiculous.

Yes.

2008-01-14T17:47:00.000-08:00

Perfect. Obama this afternoon:

You have seen a tone on the Democrat[ic] side of the campaign that has been unfortunate. I want to stipulate a couple of things. I may disagree with Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards on how to get there, but we share the same goals. We all believe in civil rights. We all believe in equal rights. They are good people. They are patriots....
I don't want the campaign at this stage to degenerate to so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, that we lose sight of why we are doing this.

Obama said he wants to send "a strong signal to my own supporters that let’s try to focus on the work that needs to get done. If I hear my own supporters engaging in talk that I think is ungenerous or misleading or unfair, I will speak out forcefully against it....

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have historically been on the right side of civil rights issues. They care about the African American community.… That is something I am convinced of. I want Americans to know that is my assessment.

Screw it. I'm going to go sign up to work for him. Maybe I can phonebank or something.

I got it, I got it! --

2008-01-13T20:48:00.000-08:00

--Shit, I lost it.

The Clinton campaign is fucking tone-deaf. After New Hampshire, I was all happy thinking they might have finally gotten a clue -- that their tactics are clumsy and transparent. I don't care if the tears are real, I care whether you realize that people want to see you be a President and not another political robot like the ones we keep nominating.

Well, I was wrong. No lesson learned. You could almost hear Mark Penn yell, "Yes! The Inevitability Coefficient has tipped positive! Cue expendable subordinates making vaguely race-baiting remarks! Attack! Attack!" It's like they're reading this shit out of a 2-point conversion table or something. You guys are fucking jerks, and it's really obvious.

Obama is a natural leader because he acts the part. He creates his own mandate. He doesn't demand, patronize, or pander. He takes politics seriously and doesn't treat it like a game. And people can tell.

And you know what? It's not that hard to do. All you need is a bit of tact. And I'm sick of voting for people who don't seem to understand that as long as you act like a minority party, you'll be a minority party, and we'll continue to lose, and things will continue to get worse. Show some fucking pride.

Slow Torture

2008-01-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

Man, I hate waiting for grades. If I was just slightly more OCD, online grades would probably give me a mental breakdown. What a miserable system.

Ridiculous.

2008-01-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

OSU should be banned from the MNC for a few years. And no more bowl games at all for OU. Stoops and Tressel obviously can't be bothered with this silly ol' post-season.

Uhh, what?

2008-01-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

In an interview with Fox News Political Correspondent Major Garrett — the second in as many days — Clinton also took issue with Barack Obama’s dismissal of her claim that he represents “false hope;” Obama says that argument is like Martin Luther King standing at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and saying “sorry guys, false hope. The dream will die.”

Clinton said “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the civil rights act of 1964… That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said ‘we’re going to do it,’ and actually got it done.”

LBJ > MLK, WTF?

NB: This is also not a wise response:

"I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business," Edwards told reporters Laconia, New Hampshire.

Not cool. At this point, I might as well just vote for Obama because he's apparently the only one of the three Dems who's not politically tone-deaf. Ick.

Woo

2008-01-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

I just now stepped out of the euphoric haze that I've been in since Obama won Iowa. Life is good.

Democrats: Iowa and NH

2008-01-03T00:59:00.000-08:00

Iowa: I'm sticking by my call that Edwards is going to take Iowa: because he has the best infrastructure by a long shot, and his 2nd-choice numbers keep skyrocketing (62% in the last poll I caught, 30-some point margin). Hillary's campaign is already playing the expectations game for a third-place finish. Obama has Kucinich's endorsement and is already looking to swing ahead of Hillary in the polls anyway, so I'm calling Iowa at about 40-30-20 for Edwards-Obama-Clinton, respectively.

New Hampshire: Obama and Hillary are about tied, but according to Pollster, the trend lines strongly favor Obama. Edwards has a lot of ground to make up, but he's been expanding his NH organization, and I think he'll have the momentum coming out of Iowa without Edwards, I'd pick Obama over Clinton at about 35-25. With Edwards off a strong Iowa finish, it becomes a question of who he draws from. He and Obama's bases have more in common, but Clinton's downstroke in the polls suggests that those voters are vulnerable. I could see Edward either dragging NH back into a photo finish, or dealing a serious blow to the Clinton campaign.

Amazing.

2008-01-01T20:14:00.001-08:00

Once again MeTa rears its head. Aggressive corporate behavior is one thing; astroturfing comment threads to self-promote a charity by trashing other charitable organizations is a whole new world of wince-inducing.