I’m a big fan of Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin’s blog. He’s begun an incredible series of posts analyzing how comic books have dealt with war and conflict in the past and how comic books are dealing with 9/11 and current events.
Some of you might know that I’m a big Green Lantern fan. I’ve fallen behind over the summer, but the DC Universe is really coming to grips with the ethical issues when super powers set themselves up as supra-national police. With the Green Latern Corp, we have a group of extremely powerful agents enforcing the policy agenda of an immortal and alien race on a galactic scale. In sci-fi, galactic scale civilizations seem to be either a) totally alien and disconnected from “human” scale events, i.e. another plane of existance; b) bound by a moral code of non-interference, like the prime directive; c) galactic super-police, or, of course, d) hegemonic empires.
In sci-fi, though, it’s usually clear whether the civilization is a C or a D. I think comic books are struggling now with the realization that reasonable people can disagree on the boundary between the two.
Technorati Tags: comics, 9-11, superhero, culture
Posted by M as Interesting Link at 1:23 PM EDT
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Professor Volokh has publicized Lawtopic.com and asked people to blog about it and spread info around the law student community. It’s a pretty interesting idea. Professors and other legal scholars contribute ideas for legal essays that might be appropriate for students. In theory, people will post interesting and novel topics.
It’s a place I think I’ll be looking at more as I try to come up with a topic for the NYU Law A paper.
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Law school, Information Law at 10:05 PM EDT
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I’ll be more serious later, but I had to share today’s Sheldon.
I now know that what to call the feeling when you’ve been literatured.
Posted by M as Rambling, Funny Link at 11:01 AM EDT
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Ed Felten has posted a really great technical overview on the Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. The paper isn’t long, so hopefully lots of non-technical people will read it. The connection between technical router policy and larger network neutrality policy is very valuable.
I’m unclear on one point, though. Prof. Felten argues that the importance of quality of service guarantees, often a retort to proposals for network neutrality mandates, can be overemphasized. He suggests that QoS is inapplicable when the speed needed by the application is either greater than, or significantly less than, the speed of the network. Speed, in this context, seems to be both latency and bandwidth. Prof. Felten suggests that voice applications don’t really need QoS, because the speed of the network is great enough in comparison that the “valleys” of speed are never too severe.
The reality, though, is that we’ve never had an Internet with end-to-end QoS guarantees. While voice might not need QoS, other high-bandwidth interactive services might benefit highly from regularized speed. This kind intelligence just seems to make sense to further additional innovation.
Prof. Felten concludes that we need more time to determine what regulation would be appropriate. I think that’s right. The bills we’ve seen ignore the subtle technical points that he covers in today’s paper.
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Interesting Link at 2:34 PM EDT
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I see that Public Knowledge is blogging about moral rights and the CleanFlicks decision today. Tim Schneider asked in a question to my first post on this whether stricter European copyright laws are justified out of moral rights. I’m not sure if that’s historically true, but a system that derives copyright from some moral or intrinsic right of the creator is bound to be far stricter than one that derives copyright as a type of monopoly subsidy in support of a social policy.
The language of copyright issues in the U.S. today sounds more like the a moral rights approach than the laws read. When politicians and content producers talk about Infringement as theft, they’ve transformed copyright infringement into a kind of malum in se, rather than a kind of malum prohibitum.
Thoughts?
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Copyright, Fair Use at 1:55 PM EDT
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Wow, this (via Volokh comment) didn’t take long. Now we can all simulate what it’s like to throw a career away in front of a billion people. Live video remixed into a strange game.
I might be a bad person, but when I saw this Sunday, I couldn’t help feeling that using his head to hit him was a perverse commitment to the game.
Posted by M as Rambling, Funny Link at 8:25 PM EDT
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The Southern Poverty Law Center has an absolutely shocking piece on the neo-nazi infiltration of the U.S. military. The problem is so bad that American neo-nazi graffiti has appeared in Baghdad.
“Special Forces soldiers who double as extremist operatives present a special danger, since they have commando skills gained at huge taxpayer expense — often including urban warfare, long-range reconnaissance, and combat demolitions.”
I’m quite sure that service members even loosely associated with radical Islamic groups would get the n-th degree. Domestic terrorist organizations, though, apparently get a free pass.
The article doesn’t talk about it, but I wonder to what extent the infiltrating supremacists of the 80’s or 90’s have risen to positions of real leadership or power. Are they covering for, or recruiting, new members?
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Politics at 12:29 PM EDT
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I thought I’d talk a bit more about
Tim Schneider’s recent
post at
Public Knowledge.
Tim links to an incident where Verizon terminated an EVDO customer’s account. Verizon claimed that the “extraordinarily high usage” of the account was proof positive that the customer had violated the terms of service by streaming or downloading music or video.
But what if we had some form of net neutrality? It would seem that Verizon could still be free to terminate accounts at their discretion. It might make good business sense to do so. If bandwidth costs Verizon money, even over DSL, then excluding the tiny fraction of their customer base who consume a vast majority of their bandwidth would make sense. They might not even need to raise the bogeyman of “terms of service” and face the non-neutral net problem that Tim describes. They might simply have the right to terminate for unusually high usage, or for nothing at all. Or, less controversially, to move you from a flat-rate plan to a metered plan.
The problem with flat-fee Internet might be that less skilled, less demanding users (mom and pop checking email) may be subsidizing highly skill, high consumption users. If $29.95 has a reasonable profit margin for the 300Mb a month downloader, can it still cover the cost of the 30Gb a month downloader?
There’s a very excellent article (via Techdirt) by Tom Evslin, founder of AT&T Worldnet, that questions whether bandwidth usage like this actually costs the ISP at all. It certainly has questioned some of my assumptions. But for services like cable Internet, the local loop can be saturated by heavy use, and certainly EVDO and wireless will have similar issues.
Now, granted, the Snowe/Dorgan amendment might have limited this with Section 12(a)(1): “not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet;”
But this goes well beyond, I think, most peoples’ concept of net neutrality. Here, in an effort to block preferential and discriminatory treatment of content over the Internet, we suggest that there’s a limitation on when and how an ISP can deny service to users.
Net neutrality might be sound, but doesn’t this kind of regulation seem a bit too much?
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Internet Policy, Interesting Link, Recommended Media at 11:10 AM EDT
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Tim Schneider at Public Knowledge has written a very excellent post on the usage restrictions that Verizon places on the their EVDO usage. Tim suggests, I think rightly, that this is a future we might see without network neutrality guarantees.
Some commentators have raised the specter of cable companies turning the Internet into cable TV, with top-down bundled content relegating individual and non-corporate content to an Internet version of the fuzzy local access channel. It seems far more plausible to me, though, that phone companies will seek to transform the Internet into the cell phone / cell network model.
If technology progresses to the point that computers can be effectively, if not completely, locked down, we might have Bells distribute free computers that could only connect to their network. Their network might have a complicated per-email free structure, with premium zones and bundled content.
Granted, the tide seems to be turning against this. AOL apparently plans to open up their walled garden. If AOL, with the content pockets of Time Warner, doesn’t see a future in this type of access/content bundling, maybe we should be less concerned and more optimistic.
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Interesting Link, Recommended Media at 10:42 AM EDT
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When I first saw the title of Vernor Vinge’s new book, Rainbows End, I though it was missing an apostrophe. But no, it’s not.
The book is excellent. I enjoyed the space opera style fiction of A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, but I think I liked the topics of Rainbows End even better. Extremely mild spoiler after the break.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by M as Recommended Media, Future of books, Book, Libraries at 6:06 PM EDT
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