While I have no reason to believe that the Administration is backing away from its current hardline position against PIPA/SOPA

Two comments:

1) The Administration statement on PIPA/SOPA was of a piece with about half of the Congressional opposition; not a hardline position against, but a “we cannot support this flawed bill at this time.” A good comparison is the Administration statements on NDAA (where a seemingly strict veto threat was really more about not wanting Congress to take away Executive branch privileges). It still bears watching.

2) Regardless of whether you parse the Administration statement strictly or not, the NDAA experience is useful. Administration threats and complaints about the contents of bills have not, in general, led to vetos, not from this Administration.

After a day the petition is over half way to the self-imposed level where the White House has to post an answer.

Since the ??AA wants the Justice Department to lawyer up and boost copyright income by $Billlllions, copyright owners (yes, including me) should start paying a fair share. I have a modest rate schedule suggestion:

Years Price
0-14 Free You’re automatically protected per the Berne Convention
15-28 $10 Just enough to make you show you care a bit about your (C)
29-42 $1,000
43-56 $100,000
57-70 $10,000,000 (about 6 cruise missiles)
71-84 $1,000,000,000 (about 1/4 war)
85-98 $100,000,000,000 (price to keep ‘Steamboat Willie’ in (C) to 2026)
…and so on…

If you don’t pay to keep your work in (C) it becomes public domain. As a bonus anyone trying to find the owner of an orphan work should be able to find a registered owner sometime in the previous 14 years.

Hey, I’d settle for members of Congress who actually read the bills.

Anyway, although I am deeply concerned — and depressed — about the state of the world, I am not convinced that it is necessary to do something about it. Not right now. I’m not convinced that the Civil War would have been softened had the parties hashed it out earlier. Conversely, I am deeply convinced that the world would NOT have been better if things had been brought to a decisive resolution earlier in the Cold War.

In school I learned that it often pays to procrastinate. Problem sets often had errors that were caught by the people who attacked them first, and the rest of us benefited by waiting a day or two before starting, in case of corrections. On the other hand, the people who struggled were the ones who really learned the material and got “A”s, while it took me and my “B” average 20 years or so to absorb the material. Procrastination indeed.

Here’s my best guess as to a heuristic for The Right And Proper Way To Conduct One’s Affairs: If something is IMPORTANT, by all means get outraged. Discuss it. I’m up for it! Enlist others in the discussion. Or not. But in no case should you ACT until you have The Answer. If you believe you have the right answer, you MUST act, you must tell people about it, and you must enlist others in the fight right away. But if you don’t have the answer, give it some time. Surely what I say is not the path to wealth nor poverty, but I think maybe that just a bit of our world culture is weakened by this artificial state of 1984-style perpetual terror.

Well that is certainly good to know. However, I fear that the methane plumes under the arctic seas may have misunderstood the calendar. In any event, any comment that includes words like Alautun and Bak’tun is welcome indeed. Thanks!

The answer to Harold’s question is that Gingrich might – but if he does, his chances of nomination will go from whatever level they now are to zero. He’s already being mocked for lunar mines. Expecting a Republican to turn down a cash cow in favor of a policy goal – especially when that policy goal requires technological literacy and involves creating actually competitive markets – is unrealistic.

* First of all the largest incubator of technology is still Silicon Valley. Need I point out that SV started out as an apple orchard in a rural setting? And that even today SV is considered a suburban community NOT a urban center by CA stds.

* Globalization is rapidly approaching a crash scenario. Read Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Even with the great oil/gas finds here in the US, the dollar devaluation may force $10/gal gas on us. That ripple effect will impact everything. It forms a trade barrier that will shift production local and away from remote with its consequent transport costs.

* Given the technology that is currently available, FIOS for example, that buttresses the suburbs not the cities. If you don’t have to commute to the city core using telecommuting and your suburban location places you closer to food resources that combination favors suburban not cities.

* Cities are inherently energy intensive by nature. They are also resource fragile. Have the sewage or water pumps stop for lack of fuel/funding and the cities have to empty out in short order.

Where Freidman is correct is that we should be laying telecom infrastructure not converting a 6 lane highway into a 12 lane one. Telecom has the magic number in that by providing even a meager 100mb duplex signal into every home it obligates the need for road projects and reduces fuel usage in the aggregate. That’s a twofer for a single expenditure. Alas Freidman does not go there. He merely props up his Singapore model of American life in big cities and that has never been embraced here.

Bottom line. Freidman yet again touches on a critical question then launches off incorrectly into conclusions that will bear little fruit.