2006 July | OpenMarket.org

Archives for July, 2006

Wasting Time at the Farm Bill Hearing

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Two hours and 12 minutes of subsidy-sucking. Those people wanted money for everything. Old programs and new programs and more money for all of them, and full federal funding for every possible “conservation” program.

The worst was Pheasants Forever, which is supposedly a “private” conservation group. They are supposed to be doing this stuff privately. That’s their mission. Now, they act like they’re just another arm of the Federal government.

The guy from the OK Conservation Districts was the best. His line, essentially, was “We got lots of programs and lots of
money in 2002 Farm Bill; let’s make those work first We don’t need a whole flood of new stuff. There’s such a plethora of confusing and possibly conflicting programs out there that lots of folks don’t even know what’s there.”

Most interesting theme was that ring-necked Pheasants ran through the whole program. The importance of pheasants to farmers and economy and states. Came from the Congressmen and at least two, perhaps three, of the witnesses. They fell all over themselves talking about how great CRP is for pheasants. SD went from harvest of 2 million a year to 15 million. They debate on what cover crops are best for pheasants, and whether subsidizing switch grass for ethanol will harm pheasants.

Hello people. Ring-necked Pheasants are non-native invasive species. What are the agricultural conservation programs doing supporting and promoting this invasive species?

07/28/2006 @ 9:51 am | Environment | Comments Off

Splinternets

Posted by Wayne Crews

Contrary to the network neutrality agenda presented in this Newsforge
article by some anonymous individual going by the name of James Glass,
there is no such thing as one network that is suitable for all the disparate
functions that are increasingly being demanded today (porn, national defense,
financial transactions, massive uploaded video, kid-friendly environments,
secure video-conferencing, etc.) Future, wealthier, generations will
“surf” networks–not sites on a network. Think of them as “Splinternets”
rather than just the “capital-I” Internet.

There are good reasons for wireless phone networks to
exclude all the services noted below by Glass-not-his-real-name; the cell
network couldn’t function otherwise; it’d be as polluted as Kazaa and
unsuitable for its purpose of making reliable calls. Better to accord to
networks the same respect as property that we grant to the services hawked over
them; of the range of networks that exist in the future, some will assume a
proprietary stance, others more open, driven by the profit motive. (And there
will be wireline and wireless options, so the idea of neutrality on one network
already can’t apply; there are at least two realms already.)

Also, as bandwidth becomes cheaper (which is less likely to
happen in a “neutral” world where those costs can’t be recovered by
premium services) and as the apps prove themselves not to harm the ability of
the network owner to operate a secure or profitable business, it would become
easier to simply “copy and paste” functionality and even content from
one network to the other—to, let’s say, copy the non-owned Internet’s
functions and content over to the more proprietary networks like cell.

Ultimately, rather than raising costs for third party
developers, the existence of a proliferation of duplicative, redundant networks
creates massive new wealth, as well as subsequent new profit opportunities for
them to tailor services to needs which are demonstrably not harmonious if
lumped on one network, as neutrality as a concept fails to acknowledge. It is
not good to be connected to everybody in all instances; only when we want to
be. Neutrality precludes that; property rights will foster it. Net neutrality
proponents can’t credibly claim that it’s ok for them to sell their proprietary
services while at the same time denying that right to the infrastructure owners
that they, and we, depend on.

–Wayne Crews

07/25/2006 @ 1:40 pm | Tech & Telecom | Comments Off