aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, January 19, 2007
Rudy & Hillary
Neither should run. I like Hillary too much and Rudy too little.
Trapper John’s GOP Cattle Call has Giuliani at the top of the top tier. Zogby in Iowa and New Hampshire has him up there too. Stuart Rothenberg says no way:
Giuliani’s strong showing in GOP polling reflects his celebrity status and the reputation he earned after the terrorist attacks. But if and when he becomes a candidate, that will change. He will be evaluated on the basis of different things, including his past and current positions and behavior, and he’ll be attacked by critics and opponents. A Giuliani nomination would also generate a conservative third-party candidate in the general election and tear the GOP apart, thereby undercutting Giuliani’s electability argument.
Via TPM, “The idea of Giuliani as the GOP nominee generating a third-party challenge from the right is an intriguing one, and does seem like it would be awfully likely, now that Rothenberg brings it up.”
On Hillary, I think she’d be great, she’s earned it, and she can win. But it would be so hard and ugly and the presidency is ultimately a short-term gig. She can accomplish more as majority leader and I’d like to see her on the Supreme Court. Anyway, Kos says Hillary’s sliding. Already. Jerome Armstrong agrees she’s trending down:
Looking back, do you remember when Hillary Clinton was in the 40’s nationally in 2005? Or when she was in the high 30’s in 2006? Not anymore, as she continues to trend lower. Welcome to 2007 and Clinton in the 20’s:
Rasmussen Zogby SV-Georgia Gallup Hillary Clinton 22 29 27 29
But Chris Bowers says the slide is an illusion:
The first thing I noticed during this exercise is that most of Hillary Clinton’s supposed slide is actually an illusion. Most of the polls showing her over 40% in 2005 and early 2006 did not include Al Gore in the question and / or only polled Democrats. Since Gore typically gets around 12% in these polls, it stands to reason that Clinton would poll higher with Gore out of the question. Further, since Hillary Clinton also polls better among Democrats than she does among Democratic leaners, it stands to reason that she would do better when only Democrats were included in the sample. Overall, Clinton’s poll mean is only down 5.8% since Obama entered the polling picture, and her polling median is only down 2.0%. Not only is that not a major drop-off, it might actually be less than many would expect given that Obama regularly polls in the high teens. In other words, Obama is either eating into Clinton’s lead at the level one would expect, or less than one would expect. [...]
I expect the Clinton-Edwards-Obama competition will be quite competitive for a long time.
A long time.
Google may be coming to your town too
Google announced today that it will build a $600 million data center in North Carolina. Robert X. Cringely won’t be surprised:
I live in South Carolina, a state that I can argue qualifies as a technology backwater despite being the shrimp and grits capital of the world. Why, then, are the local business pages filled with stories about Google preparing to build massive data centers here? Google is apparently negotiating to build data centers in Goose Creek, a town not far from Charleston, where I live, in Columbia, the state capital, and a third location across the border in Georgia. To read the papers, Google might choose one or another of these locations, but according to people I have spoken with who are fairly close to the action, Google actually seems intent on building in all three locations… Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity.
Here’s where it gets interesting; Cringely answers why:
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television. [...]
It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY—a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.
Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won’t know if we’re accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won’t matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won’t be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined—about $1 trillion in all—which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low.
It’s a grand plan, but can Google pull it off? Yes they can.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Robert’s predicting this. Just two weeks ago he posted his 2007 predictions. I highlighted his #10: “Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.”
Lots more in the whole post.
Don’t be a snitch
WBAI’s Jay Smooth looks at Atlanta’s Fox 5 coverage of the SWAT team arrest of DJ Drama and Don Cannon for piracy. He concludes with this challenge:
“All of y’all artists who been tellin’ us on all your records that you don’t associate with snitches, if you keep working with the big 5 record labels right now - if you don’t stand up against them and what they’re doing to DJ Drama right now - we’re going to know that you were lying on all of those records”
The Fox 5 story illustrates everything that’s wrong with local news. Sensationalist. Breathless. Unsourced. All statements, interviews and research comes from “authorities.” Completely uncritical. Parroting what they are told. The single other source, “neighbors” quoted as saying “that DJ Drama and DJ Cannon are DJs at a local radio station on weekends.” Clueless.
Via New TeeVee.
The RIAA’s seeing red
soulxtc at Zeropaid has been reading the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s 2007 Digital Music Report. Look at what he found:
...actions against individual uploaders are onerous and expensive and we shouldn’t have to be taking them. That job should not be ours - it should be done by the gatekeepers of the web, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who unquestionably have the technical means to deal with copyright infringement, if only they would take responsibility for doing so.
At one time you were considered a new media philistine if you wanted to regulate the internet. But then Google promised the Chinese government that censorship was possible. Then Google blacklisted BMW in the internet world for anti-social behaviour. It seems policing is acceptable for all sorts of things but not intellectual property!
With cooperation from ISPs, we could make huge strides in tackling content piracy globally. Disconnection of service for serious infringers should become the speeding fine or the parking ticket of ISP networks. We need government help to make it clear that ISPs must face up to their responsibilities and cut off copyright infringing users. To be fair, at the end of 2006 the UK government signalled that it may be prepared to play a facilitating role in this and set a deadline of December 2007 for tangible progress.
Emphasis mine. Comments soulxtc:
I wonder how they will go about selling that one to the public.
Even further, it wants to invade our privacy as customers of a service by having our own ISPs keep an eye us. A corporate interest wants the privacy protections of individuals undone on a global scale merely because their business model is at stake. Rather than change their own distorted and antiquated method of doing business they’d rather have people give up their personal rights and freedoms. It’s no wonder they cite a page from China’s playbook to try and justify this action. Is it really incumbent upon the consumer to give up their right to privacy everytime a business cries foul?
Via Boing Boing.
“They signed releases”
We’ve got to do something to get our legal system in synch with the reality of how people actually behave in relation to agreements they unwittingly enter into.
I don’t like “End User license Agreements” - better known as “clickthrough agreements” - and don’t believe they should be legally binding. I believe the Borat releases intentionally obscured what was going on and as a consequence they should not be legally binding. And I think the cocky shock jocks hosting a water drinking contest that killed a woman last Friday illustrate the attitude of most of those in the media industry.
Listener: “I want to say that those people drinking all that water can get sick and die from water intoxication.”
DJ: “Yeah, we’re aware of that.”
DJ: “Yeah, they signed releases so, we’re not responsible, it’s OK. (laughter) If they get to the point where they have to throw up, then they’re going to throw up and then they’re out of the contest before they die, so that’s good, right?”
Obviously not. ABC News:
“This is nothing new,” said fellow disc jockey Bruce Maiman from KFBK-FM, another station in Sacramento. “I can empathize with what they did…because it’s been done hundreds of times.”
Obviously true. I expect those DJs will be prosecuted. But all of us must learn what we’re giving up when we sign a release, negotiate the terms, and hold those accountable responsible for the abuse of their media power.
