Once people have property rights to distribute speech, they get grabby. They never give up their franchise or their licenses. These non-human economic entities (corporations) claim the same free speech rights as human beings, and their free speech trumps the public's speech.

This is how corporations are supposed to act -- they're supposed to maximise their profits.

Individuals could form collectives to bid on spectrum (but they'd go bankrupt and sell them to someone else. There are a small number of voices that get to speak on the airwaves. The essence here is the right for people to speak.

Early in the 20th Century, Congress recognized the importance of electronic voices. Electronic voices drown out individual voices. Politicians get elected with TV ads, not handshaking.

There are 400 owners of major TV outlets and fewer than 40,00 radio owners. For most commodities, those would be wonderful numbers, but for speech, this is utterly inadequate [applause].

Privatizing the spectrum won't fix this, but commons allocation will let millions speak -- which beats the heck out of 400 or 4,000. The FCC should be compelled by the First Amendment to take up the commons approach.

The people's First Amendment rights should not be auctioned off to media barons. Discuss

Brewster: I live in an underserved area: San Francisco, CA. We create huge libraries that we can't get to anybody. We have terrible bandwidth times. I've built a library larger than the LoC. I've built a video library bigger than NBC's. But without bandwidth, it's all stuck. I've been trying to solve this for six years.

This kit -- like the kit PCs that preceded the Apple ][ -- is going up on a tower on the Presidio tomorrow. I will be able to move 3Mbs over that link -- DVD quality video.

It's Moore's Law: we're gonna pay the same amount next year and get twice as much. It's something we'll never get out of the telco dudes -- they're raising costs on our sucky 500k lines.

2.4GHz isn't good enough. We built the Internet on protocols, not property regulation. Spectrum reform can be done without ownership.

The San Francisco council wouldn't let us put free WiFi on the poles -- nobody in the Parks Service ever got fired for not doing anything.

We're offering free 100Mbs in San Francisco to seed the network.

Tim Pozar: Intro to community wireless nets.

We want to leverage a low-cost last-mile, and not have to pay $40 a month to a crappy telco for a crappy DSL link -- networks don't even have to connect to the Internet! They can connect to each other, to join neighborhoods together.

The city and public benefit because it helps people get involved in their neighborhoods and get to know each other. It addresses digital divide issues -- far beyond the stupid crappy terminals in your library. It extends service to neighborhoods that are too far from the CO and to homes that can't afford $50/month.

It provides data for public safety workers -- 57,000 percent faster than what the cops and firemen use for data today, and provides parallel infrastructure in the event of the collapse of a central point of failure (i.e. the WTC, which hosted the repeater for the NYPD).

The FCC have abdicated its responsibility to regulate the last copper mile, leaving the Bells with no competitive pressure -- this is a non-monopolized last-mile that will keep them honest.

It's an experimental testbed for public and commercial use. Provides for community access to news reporting -- for example, the BBC's Day of Protest photoblog.

(Ed: Missed a bunch -- bathroom break)

LARIAT is a community ISP in Laramie, WY, running since 1993, started with 900MHz wireless. access. Not a Freenet, but a Cheapnet, for sustainability. The dialup is $5.15/month (one hour's work at minimum wage). High-tech biz stays in Laramie because it's got Internet infrastructure.

Masts are made out of galvanized pipe and guy-wires.

We use wire-line from Qwest, who hate us, but had to provide us because of FCC regs, which have gone away. We're screwed.

When lariat was four years old, the Laramie PUC acquired a Ricochet franchise, and announced that it would put up Ricochet access-points that were engineered to stomp on competing radio signals, and only ran at one percent of LARIAT's speed.

The PUC execs wouldn't even talk with LARIAT. LARIAT wrote to city council, went to the papers, etc. It worked. But without regulated etiquette, this is a potential disaster. Discuss

The reps from Brown Eyed Communications, an org that provides WiFi on Indian reservations, are Canadian. David Joyce is the COO and Gary Anaquod is CTO.

(Ed: On several occasions today, we've heard that the big problem with a commons approach to spectrum allocation is that we don't have any experimental data on the success of the commons; commons advocates reply that the regulatory framework makes it impossible to try an experiment -- but Indian land is sovereign and potentially not subject to radio regulation from the CRTC or the FCC).

David: We don't call ourselves "Indians" -- we say "First Nations." That will be important later. Nine days ago, we were installing a 20 mi. shot wireless link from a small town in rural Saskatachewan. We installed it for Health Canada, which will bring telemedecine services into a remote community.

That's the goal: to spread WiFi to rural communities in Canada and get to the unserved/underserved regions. It's out last (twenty) mile answer.

There's more value here than economic value -- there's social value, too. We're a for-profit org, we want to make money, but we want to do it through accomplishing social value (something that wasn't mentioned much here today).

There are 72 First Nations communities in SK, and 600 in Canada -- it's a big job to get links to all those communities. Many of these communities live in third-world conditions.

I walk around the streets in Silicon Valley and I see prosperity all around me -- I want to see that back home.

We understand that there is a technology that can address some of these issues. We believe that broadband is a potential equalizer. Introducing a phone to a rural town can double the income of each farmer by making them an active participant in the local economy. Many settlements in rural SK didn't have basic phone service until three years ago. Unemployment on the rez is at 80 percent.

Good communications can change life on the rez. Forget basic phone-service, we want VoIP. The monopolistic telco is a formidable opponent. We consider ourselves young Jedi.

The telco needs to contend with more than our little company -- they have to contend with their own inertia. The bust has affected them considerably. There's a lot of dead weight in that company, highly paid people who shouldn't be.

We visited the CTO of the Provincial telco and it was quite a shock to us, for in front of the VP of Marketing, the CTO said, "WiFi -- we've met with them." This is the kind of technologist who rises to the top of a Crown Corporation.

We offered to build the last mile and share ownership, but they weren't interested. They want to muscle us out -- they're like a dinosaur, a T-Rex. Unlike them, we have not inherited the cost of supporting a crumbling legacy communications system.

Now onto the question of spectrum, sovereignty and jurisdiction: wireless comms is not new to First Nations -- you've heard of smoke-signals? It wasn't the smoke, it was EM radiation -- free-space optics -- firelight. The bandwidth requirements weren't quite as high then.

And just like a WiFi AP, they needed to be up high and line-of-sight.

Jurisdiction isn't a new issue either -- we've been negotiating rights (fishing, hunting, minerals, etc) forever, and scrapping with the Feds over resources is bred into us.

When the first gaming casino was established on a reserve, a SWAT team took the chief away in chains. A decade later, gaming is an accepted way of bringing prosperity to the reservation. That's how you get things done in Indian Country.

The New Zealand Maori won 25 percent of the spectrum away from the 3G licensors, within the Commonwealth.

We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation.

It's about capacity building, R&D, self-determination, access and choice. We've made accomplishments in this area, and we will make a difference.

The Constitutional status of First Nations communities in Canada means that we'll have some time in the ring. We're reaching out to other indigenous people around the world -- we want to see this replicated abroad.

We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation.

With these technologies deployed successfully, other communities will look like cave-dwellers by comparison. That's kind of ironic.

Gary: We already own our homes and mineral rights and so forth in commons. We have traditional mechanisms for resolving issues of scarcity in the commons. Discuss

Michael "Chairman of the FCC" Powell couldn't make it this today. The judges are a Ninth Circuit Judge, a Nobel prize winner in economics, and a prof of Business Economics.

Lessig and Benkler are on the pro side, and Hazlett and Faulhaber are on the con.

Lessig: (I have chills -- feels like being back at the Supreme Court!) Coase wrote a remarkable article, written in a time when the government actually chose which speakers could speak and how. He called it a clash of the doctrine of the freedom of the press. The allocation of spectrum is just like the allocation of any other rivalrous resource -- it should therefore be allocated according to a property system like any other market.

Kozinski: Property system, not a commons?

Lessig: That's right.

Kozinski: You're sure you're not arguing the wrong side.

Lessig: I'm sure. Coase's arguments reflected the state of the art at the time. Property was the best way to allocate spectrum in 1959. But it's the wrong answer today. Not because property does no good -- in fact, it does a great deal of good. This should not be taken to imply that administrative allocations are inevitably worse -- a market has costs, and if those costs exceed the value, then markets result in misallocation. Coase's insight -- most prescient -- is that spectrum is not in its nature rivalrous. It's not a thing at all. Colors, sounds correspond to frequency.

Demsetz: Why does that make it not a thing?

Lessig: Because it wouldn't make sense to allocate property rights in colors or notes. There are two kinds of costs which property creates here.

Demsetz: Why are we led to a better understanding of the problem by saying that spectrum is not a thing?

Lessig: You can talk about it as though spectrum was a thing, but by talking about it like a thing, you naturally move to the conclusion that it should be governed in a property model, but that's contingent if the value of property rights exceeds their cost.

Kozinksi: In common law we were deemed to own property above and below, but that no longer held once airplanes came about -- you can't stop a 747 from flying over your house at 35,000'. Is your house any more of a thing than spectrum? A house is nothing at all -- a property right in a house defines my rights in respect of other people. It's the right to stop people from entering my house, destroying my house.

Lessig: Correct. The proper legal structure for regulation shouldn't turn on the physical nature of the thing you're regulating. Coase believed that considering spectrum as a property caused a short-circuit in thinking.

Kozinski: Aren't we just debating the scope of property right? Not property rights themselves?

Lessig: We're asking first whether there should be a property or commons right or some mix in spectrum, and second, what the scope of those rights should be. Two technical facts have radically changed the analysis. These two additional technical facts should be considered to determine whether Coase would still advocate a property right in their light.

Demsetz: Something has changed the cost-benefit calculus of property rights in spectrum. Coase's views on whether spectrum is a thing isn't furthering your argument.

Smith: What are the actions that people can take with this thing or non-thing?

Lessig: The question is first: what are we trying to achieve. It's not to minimize interference, it's to maximize the output. There are two factors that have changed in respect of that maximum. There's a presumption that carving up spectrum doesn't reduce its value. But the opportunity to have a wide bandwidth of spectrum creates value that is destroyed when it is carved up -- just like a racehorse is only value so long as you don't carve it into 35 piece, so too spectrum ahs value that is only present when the spectrum is intact. If carving spectrum into property has an externality into the value as a whole, then the property system could not be as valuable as its cost.

There is the reduction in value in the carving up of the thing and a transaction cost that is insurmountable in reassembling it.

The burdens of property are twofold: On the Internet you have facilitated coordination, but not facilitated allocation -- QoS mechanisms are complex, burdensome and cumbersome and not worth using because their costs outweigh their benefits. Secondly, spectrum as a resource was a good analogy in 1959, but today, there are a number of dimension that get traded off dynamically, as protocols, frequencies and so on change. When you introduce property, the frequency allocation from moment-to-moment is burdened by a transaction that may or may not be important in respect of the technically optimal allocation.

Demsetz: Change is costly. Coase would have told the FCC that if he'd asked me. Would he have still argued for the superiority of taking away the power to handle change away from the FCC>

Lessig: Absolutely. Everyone agrees that the FCC is the wrong group to manage change.

Kozinski: Someone needs to enforce limits. Who? And what limits?

Lessig: Think of a highway. It functions in this sense as a commons. In many highways, this is not a problem. The regulation that governs it regulates the type of devices you can bring onto the highway. No tanks, no go-carts, and no going over 80mph. The rules need to be as minimal as possible, but no regulation about where you're going or what route you take.

Kozinski: But you have to widen highways from time to time. How do you widen the spectrum highway. Is there really no limit to the width of this highway?

Lessig: No -- but given the uncertain state of the future of spectrum (Ed: lost it). Coase in 1959 concluded that the problem was that signals interfere. This problem can be solved by delimiting rights. He's right that experience should guide whether one model triumphs over another. But the insight is that the delimiting of the rights can be accomplished by the market or by tech, each of which tries to allow maximum communication. The failure to examine the tech leads people to a simple analysis that is unfaithful to Coase.

Faulhaber: Coase saw a problem and proposed a solution. In its simplest components, the problems were: a bureaucratic and political allocation process and exclusive use licenses. This was hugely inefficient. It substituted the judgement of bureaucrats for the judgement of the markets.

Demsetz: Do we use regulators elsewhere?

Faulhaber: But rarely to allocate resources.

Kozinksi: Big chunks of commons (sidewalks) make private property valuable.

Faulhaber: The central planning model made the FCC the US Spectral GOSPLAN. He proposed a market allocation, but with exclusive use licenses.

Demsetz: Would Coase have felt this way if someone could conclusively demonstrate that there was a way to use spectrum without crowding?

Faulhaber: If you could wave a wand and make it nonscarce, then markets lose their power.

Demsetz: If you get the FCC out of the picture would there still be scarcity?

Kozinski: How about the Internet? Or cable? The less the FCC was involved, the more channels we got. I had channels coming out of the wazoo.

Faulhaber: Many commons advocates use the Internet to bolster their case -- a voluntary org, the IETF that sets standards and we abide by them.

Kozinski: It's more than that. It started as a commons. If we'd been present at the net's birthing, we probably would have believed that in a decade, it would be clogged beyond use. But as far as I can tell, it's getting bigger faster! Sometimes capacity creates demand which creates capacity.

Faulhaber: Re. capacity. Capacity increased to overcome the World Wide Wait. Capacity is a priced item -- it's not free. Every connection to the net costs, by the month or what have you (Ed: what about interchanges?).

Kozinski: So, you have an unregulated resource that is capable of overuse that solves the problem by charging users for its use. This cuts the other way. The other side proposes to turn spectrum into a wireless Ethernet, as we did with 2.4GHz, and the very availability of free space will give people the incentive to come in and create.

Faulhaber: I'm not arguing against any commons. There's a place for commons, within an overarching property rights regime. But there is a problem that's solved in the Internet -- interference -- that's not solved in spectrum. Likewise protocols; if my protocols are noncompliant, they don't interfere, they are ignored. But in spectrum it may be advantageous to step on my competitors with noncompliant protocols.

Kozinski: Couldn't you have noninterference regulation with everything else being free?

Faulhaber: So is it more efficient to solve interference through property or regulators?

Demsetz: That question must be faced in two contexts: one, if there is no scarcity, no congestion, and the other, in which there is congestion. I'm not sure that the two sides in this dispute have focused their arguments on these two contexts.

Faulhaber: If there is congestion, if spectrum can fill up (at least in the long run), or if you're spending a lot of money to avoid congestion (then there's an opportunity cost in the use of the spectrum), even then there's room for a commons. The noninterfering easement will permit the commons to operate in a way that elides some of the transaction costs that Lessig referred to.

If it turns out that there's more spectrum than we can ever use, then the marginal cost in a property world would fall near to zero.

Smith: I'm not sure I've heard anyone say anything yet that would indicate that they know what they're talking about. In 1959, Coase wrote about an interference problem. Has there been a change in the technology that impacts that, and how do these two sides differ on that?

Faulhaber: UWB, agile radio and other dynamic allocation technologies that bounce across the exclusive use boundary can make use of fallow spectrum.

Smith: How does that differ from having n long lines and a switching system that can put calls on lines depending on which one is free. You still have property rights in that system -- a right to act. Property rights are not separable from an action. What actions are effected by technology and property rights?

Faulhaber: If we have agile phones, I can do things that I couldn't do in 1959 -- when I would have needed a single channel for my sole use. But today, we have (illegal) technology that can use others' spectrum in an opportunistic way without interfering with them. Some uses still (and will continue) to require exclusive use. The noninterference easement allows you to use my spectrum so long as you don't interfere with me.

Demsetz: The issue seems to be that if you auction off spectrum rights, that this will raise the cost of noninterfering uses. Do you believe that if there was no congestion, that auctioning off frequencies would hamper the ability to apply the commons technique.

Faulhaber: No -- because in that situation the value would fall to zero, so the cost of enforcement would exceed the benefit you'd get from the enforcement, so you'd get a commons anyway.

Benkler: The property right created by the commons is the property right to use my equipment in ways that allow me to communicate. In order to implement a property regime defined by frequencies, then most radios have to be prohibited. A series of parameters about what can and can't be done, who can radiate with what equipment, etc needs to be transacted. In 1959, it was too costly to employ techniques for differentiating between signals other than used division based on code, but today, we can do many other kinds of division. Frequency is no longer the thing that prevents 2 or 3 or 1MM people from communicating with each other without interfering with each other.

Smith: This is like a system where lines are so plentiful that any call can be completed.

Benkler: Even more than that. Many techniques are possible if you use small parts of a million lines that each used to have to be a circuit. There are many dimensions other than frequency on which we can (Ed: lost it).

Kozinski: Is spectrum unlimited?

Benkler: We don't know, but there's only one good model for scaling capacity with demand without diminishing capacity, and that only applies to latency insensitive applications. The claim isn't that there's no limit, but that capacity scales better if the devices aren't encumbered in how they can reconfigure to adapt to their environment -- i.e., UWB.

Demsetz: Are there advantages to exclusive use at high power?

Benkler: Yes, but that's an inefficient method for communicating. This isn't a freebie, but there's a market in the devices that drives investment in them.

Demsetz: Wouldn't the market forces drive spectrum property owners to merge their spectrum to accomplish this?

Benkler: Would a system based on rights to use devices subject to some etiquette improve welfare? In that case, we need to ask about transaction costs. You need to discover a lot about your neighbors and transact a lot of business with them. The question is, are these transactions easier in a property or a commons regime.

There is a market system in devices and services.

Demsetz: How would the commons respond to the need to have exclusive, high-powered use of a band?

Kozinski: What happens when someone wants to drive an ambulance down your freeway?

Benkler: We can build protocols that recognize and respond to emergencies. In the case of enstating a permanent property right, it would have to be accomplished through regulation, but it would be possible.

Demsetz: Would the converse be possible? Could a property model allow for a commons?

Benkler: Easements would help. But if UWB required 10GHz for perfect efficiency, you'd have to negotiate with 10,000 individuals to acquire the spectral rights you require -- some of whom would have businesses that were threatened by UWB.

Hazlett: The case is overwhelming that property rights are much more important today than they were in 1959.

Kozinski: Aren't property rights really grabby? Property owners are litigious and intolerant of uses that don't really impact them or their use of their property.

Hazlett: Nobody is talking about an actual commons -- free entry without government regulation. People are talking about power limits and other policing because there's a congestion problem today just as there was in 1959.

(...bathroom break...)

The property system allows flexible use in all blocks -- high AND low powered.

Kozinski: But Stanford has no property right in WiFi and yet here we have a perfectly good network, even without that right.

Hazlett: Yes, they do have a property right.

Kozinski: If you call that a property right, then you've joined the other side.

Demsetz: Stanford can't sell access to the spectrum, it can't prosecute people who radiate over its property line. It's not a property right.

Demsetz: Does this have to be accomplished by auction?

Hazlett: Not at all. Coase thought that was simplest, but he was wrong. Priority of use would've been simpler.

Smith: You want to allow anyone to do anything that doesn't cause uncompensated interference.

Hazlett: That's right. Discuss

John "alt. heirarchy" Gilmore: We're talking about carving up the spectrum into little pieces of private property without fences and no one knows where they are. In the physical world, you can tell the difference between private property and commons, just by looking at it. In the RF world, we have no such indicator (Ed: You can tell commons from propretized spectrum by watching the band over time -- if it's being used, all the time, it's commons; if it's sitting fallow, it's property) Also, what about the 9/10s of the world who won't agree with the US's decision to propretize or commonize the spectrum? Will Americans who bring their devices abroad interfere or interoperate? Discuss

Commons spectrum isn't like a park. You do stuff in the park that you don't do in private spaces. But you use WiFi to compete with licensed spectrum users.

Property advocates view scarcity in a static way: spectrum is either not being used or being used in a low-value way. The value depends on the technical architecture of the system -- a function of the architectural system and the choice of regime influences the architecture. We might have unlimited bandwidth in a commons. Property regimes do not create the same incentives to interoperate and recover from interference that a commons use does (Ed: Hallelujah!).

Why doesn't the Internet collapse? Because we all have an incentive not to go to court when someone's packets interfere with ours -- it interprets it as damage and routes around it (Quick glance around by John "I coined that phrase and disagree with you" Gilmore, who is grinning wryly). Discuss

Licenses themselves are easements against the public's ownership of the airwaves and speech rights. Flexibility can be accomplished through licenses from limited, short periods. Spectrum scarcity isn't inevitable -- exclusive licenses are scarce, not spectrum. Cognitive radio can ease scarcity, property rights foreclose their possibility.

Regarding the Big Bang -- auctioning as much spectrum as possible -- a better Big Bang could be achieved now by moving to spectrum leasing with limited terms. Rather than giving away the public's property, the FCC could offer incumbents flexible, property-like rights in exchange for modest lease payments. Discuss

We've given away all the spectrum, granting licenses that we can't take back. We've auctioned off a little cellular spectrum, but not really, since license-holders can't flexibly use their spectrum.

Most spectrum is now not in use (except for the WiFi band).

New tech promises more efficient use of the spectrum, by breaking with exclusivity -- mesh/UWB and cognitive radio don't interfere with each other, but require the end of exclusivity.

This is enabled best by spectrum commons, but how will it be managed and who will manage it?

Fact is, it need not be either/or. You could market property rights in spectrum that were subject to a "noninterfering easement" -- anyone can use my spectrum as long as they do not interfere with my use of it. Cognitive radios can opportunisitically use the parts of my spectrum that I'm not using, providing you vacate within 2ms of my attempt to use the signal.

This creates a commons across the entire spectrum to accommodate the new tech, as well as protecting incumbents, like FM radio and airport radar.

Ownership is subject only to technical limitations, and this encourages "private commons." Motorola could buy spectrum in all the major cities and produce a meshing phone that is free to use -- they'd capitalize the cost of the spectrum into the cost of the handset. (Ed: Does this mean that Nokia would have to buy another lump of spectrum to run its meshnet?)

This gets rid of bureaucratic/political allocation and gets rid of total reliance on exclusive use.

We don't have the experimental results or the market info that would tell us who likes what and whether any of this stuff works. The new regime has to be adaptive.

How do you keep monopolies from driving out the commons? Monopolies only thrive on government controls and scarcity. Abundance and deregulation are the cure for monopolies. The easement commons creates abundance.

If a commons can deliver value to customers, then there will be a way to make money from it, and it will survive in direct relation to its ability to deliver customer value. Discuss

Wireless Internet is not the only use for spectrum (Ed: Except that mostly it is -- most spectrum applications -- voice, video, etc -- are subsets of the kinds of applications that can run in an IP network; of course, there's radar and radio astronomy and such, but we're usually not talking about this.).

Commons model doesn't provide coverage (Ed: Except in Manhattan, where my laptop can find a WiFi signal more easily than my phone can find a signal) or mobility.

The fact that you can accomodate many users doesn't mean you can accomodate them well -- meshes of increased depth are slow and high latency (Ed: The Internet is a mesh of high depth).

Markets are useful for managing scarcity -- that's basic economics. Prices efficiently ration use, exclusivity provides appropriate incentives to invest in costly infrastructure to reduce scarcity.

The FCC will have to provide a smooth transition from central planning to property rights and commons model.

We propose that any spectrum holder who wants property-like rights in spectrum (the ride to subdivide and resell) would have to put their spectrum on the auction block and buy it. They don't have to bid to buy their own spectrum, but if they don't put it up for sale, they won't get the property-like right. In this model ("The Big Bang Auction"), incumbents would be protected from interference.

Incumbents who buy back their licenses would get to keep the amount they bid for auction. (Ed: This must be why economists get the big bucks, because this seems completely bizarre to me -- partake in this empty ritual and you can gain additional flexibility in the spectrum you got for free from the US public and have all accountability to the public removed).

This will quickly and efficiently transition to a property rights model -- putting 438MHz of spectrum between 322 MHz and 3.1GHz into private hands to be used flexibly. Discuss

Radio will be free. We've got plenty of processing power. The next pentium will have 450MM transistors. The die-size for a radio is about 1/8th a Pentium. WiFi is down to $15 -- and headed down to single digits.

WiFi will kick cellphones' asses. Intel will ship 10s of millions of WiFi radios next year, and the industry will ship 100s of millions in the next year. Cellphone manufacturers want WiFi in their handsets. WiFi is growing faster than cellphones did in the early 90s. Manitoba is a new product -- a cellphone on a chip the size of your thumb with 1GHz processor.

We're going to the FCC. WiFi makes sense: when you lay fiber in the south, you have to pay $2K/house to replace the roses. Korea is way ahead in broadband, WiFi and cellular. We want the FCC to free up 5GHz spectrum and we want to build in radar-sensing (so that devices can shut themselves down rather than compete with radar). We want to build agile radios. Discuss

Patrick Leary is chief evangelist of Alvarion, an agressively gentile title that's problematic for the HQ in Tel Aviv (he's presenting on Saturday, which makes him Alvarion's Shabbos Goy, I suppose).

Alvarion has 50% of the global market share for fixed wireless broadband services. Here are three of its customers:

Widwest Wireless (commercial business). 300,000 cellular subscribers in a "property model" -- they bought a license to spectrum. They've setup a subsidiary, ClearWave to handle the wireless. Covers 54 communities in 137 townships in Minnesota. 50 wireless broadband sites using 2.4GHz, usie 5GHz for backhaul. 1,200 customers in first month. Serving towns with as few as 270 people. It costs about $700 to connect a new customer, and the monthly cost for wireline and wireless backhaul runs about $14,500. Installing a new cel costs $2-$6K -- each tower runs about 180 customers. Towers run atop water-towers or piggyback on their cellular towers. Towers are profitable about 18 months after going up.

Owensboro Municipal Utility (publicly owned nonprofit). Serve a market with cable, DSL, and fixed-wireless competition. For rural communities to remain economically viable, they must have broadband. Hence a nonprofit with very low rates. Largest municipal utility in Kentucky. Operating in heavily forested, hill country. Installation is free, residential serivce is $25/month (512k down/128k up).

City of Pratt, Kansas Police Dept (civil public safety operator). Intention is to connect to departmental LANs from vehicles (how do you update the virus definitions in a cop car's PC?) and to replace cellphone with VoIP. 60 sqmi coverage. Gaining 2h productivity/officer/day -- saving $21k/month. Discuss

Gregory "Deputy Director, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research" Rosston: companies should be allowed to bid to operate "private commons," just as Disney World (!) is a private park.

Ed: Er, sure. So all of the rights that we have in public (speech, search and seizure, etc), will exist only at the sufferance of the market and private contract law?

Stuart "Yale Law" Benjamin: If the transaction cost for private entities is too high, that could be an artifact of the fact that we make small allocations to private entities -- maybe we should allocate large chunks of spectrum to private entities. We should wait a decade to see what shakes out. Corporations may attempt to create anticompetitive/anti-interop technology. But what about the private power: one company could control everything? My answer: If we auction off enough spectrum, we'll get hundreds of competing companies. We can limit predatory powers with spectrum caps and band managers who control the spectrum without providing the service.

Howard "Berkeley Public Policy Group" Shelanski: Yochai's right: spectrum isn't property, it's the right to speak. (Ed: Amen!) The only thing that matters is displacement costs. Both sides want to do the same thing: maximize the value of speech. They use different yard-sticks, though. What is the value of different speech? In a perfect market, there would be no divergence between the audience value of the speech and the speaker's value of the speech. Those who bid the most would be those who had the most burning need to speak or the hungriest audience. In a commons approach, you still need regulation -- the distinction between commons and property rights is who is doing the regulations. In a commons model, if a and b's communication displaces x and y's communication, you'd want to know whether a and b were having a more valuable conversation. If you rely on parties to reveal the amount of interference they experience and the capacity they need, they will report this strategically, and you need someone to monitor their truthfulness.

Dave "Former CTO of the FCC" Farber: I have a half-assed knowledge of policy and law, so I can only speak as a technologist. There's more in common between the commons and property rights than differences. We should experiment with the two models -- but there's almost no research capability left in this country, all the field labs are gone. The only labs we have left are at universities, which can help, but can't do it all. We could always have MSFT buy the whole thing, and then I could tesitfy again against them. We need REAL experiments, not experiments on paper, and then more discussion. Without knowing what works in the field, there's no basis for dialog. When we designed the Internet, we didn't design security, so it's impossible to control things like DoS attacks -- it's dangerous to ignore security in open wireless nets.

Yochai Benkler: The Internet functions on a commons model in exactly the way that detractors of the commons have criticized. In that framework, over a decade, more capacity has been added -- we're being asked to adopt a property model that the market has already rejected. Property can't exist without a commons: propertizing the roads and the sidewalks would make owning houses untenable.

You may need to regulate to have a commons network, but the same is true of a property network. Investment will come from the machine makers -- it's credible that they will make investments as large as those who would make networks.

We can get investement in experimentation by creating a commons that's credible for a long period (a decade is forever for a machine-maker) -- that's all the stability an investor needs.

Farber: Yes, but we need research before we plunge in -- this isn't simple stuff.

Q&A:

Audience member: In a property model, why would I invest in a technology without some guarantee that I'll have access to the spectrum to use it in? What if the pricing of the spectrum turns out to be in excess of what I can afford.

Ed "Chief Engineer of the FCC" Thomas: The FCC has already sold off all the good spectrum. We put out a notice of inquiry offering to dedicate a huge swatch of high-frequency spectrum to the commons, and no one came forward to advocate for that.

Benkler: I don't want a command-and-control system: the commons model doesn't entail command-and-control. Spectrum-as-commons only requires a minimal set of etiquette and no more. I'm the only one here who really believes in technology -- how did we choose Ethernet over token ring? Let people build the technology and see what happens!

Bob "VisiCalc" "Connectivity" Frankston: How do we allow experminention in low-value applications that can grow up? We can connect local experiments with wire networks, and these are very low-value and low-risk! Individual efforts make a difference. How do you give individuals the power to make a difference in a property model? You don't create a horseless carriage by mechanizing the horse.

Harold Dempsest: A member of the commons has a private right to control his equipment -- in a property model, you have the private right to control some spectrum. We could start off with a 100% property system or a 100% commons system: which of these two is more likely to move expeditiously toowards the correct mix of commons and non-commons. There's a fundamental problem in moving from 100% commons, since you've got all these free-rider problems. A 100% property system will move towards a commons as people buy swaths of spectrum to use as a commons. So, how do we start the ball rolling to get to the right place.

Ed Thomas: 802.11 works -- it wasn't dictated, it wasn't a policy, it grew because it works. There's a ton of spectrum available for low-powered experimentation (<1 Watt), on the same rules as the 2.4GHz WiFi band -- you can't interfere with others and you must accept all interference.

Audience member: We need a 21st Century definition of the public interest. Spectrum policy today undermines speech and the market. The 21st Century definition should define how spectrum serves the public.

Dave "Radio Userland" Winer: Technology is a constant process of building on things that drive adoption: SGML, HTML, XML. 802.11b is on fire -- I want it in every device I own.

Audience member: We know how to get from private property to commons -- every all-you-can-eat restaurant is a private commons; when Disneyland switched from ticket-books to all-you-can-ride, they created a commons. I don't know how to convert a commons to private property.

Lessig: Couldn't the FCC convert a commons to property?

Audience member: Packets in the air aren't like packets in a wire. On an oversusbscribed T1 that accepted by packet, someone else's packet wouldn't get through. I've seen no evidence that in a wireless world, packets will behave this way.

Duncan "Sky Pilot" Davidson: We're using WiFi and multihop mesh nets as well as spatial diversity. I raised $30MM in venture money. What's the FCC doing to help or hurt this phenomenon? We're trying to compete with DSL -- at high frequency we can't get through trees, so it's no use to us. Give us access to the unused TV spectrum!

(Ed: I just got an Interesting People mailing list post that Farber very unobtrusively sent from his pager down on the stage) Discuss

Right now, we have an incumbent regulatory system of command-and-control regulation. Both property and commons models are radical in comparison.

Spectrum is not "used up" -- so you can't optimize "spectrum use." You're optimizing communications. We're optimizing the capacity of users to communicate information without wires.

There's no reason for policy to aim at a false target (how we use spectrum best) imperfectly correlated to the actual target (how we communicate best).

The three paramaters for analysis:

1. Equipment cost (total cost of the system)
2. Displacement cost (how many communications, and of what value)
3. Transaction/administrative cost

Property models make equipment optimized by pricing usage, but you get more investment in the network.

Displacement: in the old model, every communication displaced another communication. Destabilized by the declining cost of processors and the theoretical changes to Shannon's Law and multiuser information channel.

Instead of adding infrastructure to gain capacity, you add users. The question is how to design equipment such that users add capacity -- (Ed: It's the sheep that shits grass!)

Processing gain and cooperation gain mean that there is no fixed "amount of spectrum" necessary for communication. You can't define the displacementeffect independent of the configuration of the actual devices invilved, theiir geography and the actual devices potentially displaced.

In a commons model, there is value in investing in very good receivers, but in a property network, there is no such incentive, since you can command users of your property -- your spectrum -- to silence themselves while you speak and listen.

Will the smaller number of communications cleared by a property system be worth the added reliability of those comms?

Transaction costs: You've got to figure out all the variable in every communication (i.e., where to trasnmit it, on what frequency, etc) -- in a property model, you've got to send out bids to all the possible paths and calculate the optimal price/quality tradeoff. A single communication will require dozens of transactions in multiple places with multiple people. Given how dynamic the spot market for spectrum will be, the tranaction cost will be too high to be practical. To the extent that property models use statistics to generate average pricing, you will sacrifice any of the efficiencies you gain from actual markets.

This is a market in infrastructure versus market in equipment, not market versus nonmarket.

The long-term solution is mostly commons with some property for Qualilty of Service mechanisms. We're not far along enough to determine now what we need -- we should try both for ten years and then revise it all. Discuss

Does spectrum have a "capacity?" This is the key question. If spectrum is limited, then there's a reason for apportioning it carefully. If it doesn't, then making spectrum scarce is scary First Amendment country.

The radio tradition developed from 1900-1950. In the beginning, all radios received all frequencies. Resonant systems allowed users to divide spectrum for different apps. Different frequencies had different properties -- low-frequency would go around the world, high frequency would bounce off the ionosphere. Increasing power lets you go farther.

Shannon invented information theory in the 50s, and invented the bit -- a measurement of info regardless of the form it takes.

C = W log (1+(P/N0W)), where C = Capacity in bits/sec; W = bandwidth in Hz, P = power in Watts and N0 = Noise power in Watts/Hz.

Channel capacity is roughly porportional to bandwidth and log of power. Capacity is analogous to bandwidth, but bandwidth is not the same as capacity.

This is only part of the story, though. The original theorem is a simple model consisting of a sender, a receiver and noise, with no consideration of geography and other transmitters (we treat other transmitters as noise).

Interference: this is the other key question. If interference exists, we need strong regulation to limit it. If it is an artifact of technology, then we're doing it all wrong. Regulators describe interference as damage or rivalry. From a physicist's perspective, radio interference is superposition -- two radio waves floating through space don't harm each other, but they do add to each other.

He's showing a beatuful physics model of a wave tank, showing how transposition works. The simulation is strangely violent, like the proverbial storm-toss'd sea crossed with a 1980s VR snakeoil conception of "cyberspace." WELCOM TO CYBER SPACE.

A distant and strong transmitter can be received, even if there is a closer, but low-powered transmitter on the same channel -- the low-powered signal doesn't stomp on the high-powered signal. Directional receivers make it even easier to disambiguoate overlapping signals.

The point: no information was lost, even though there was superposition. Receivers may be confused, but that's a systems-design/architectural issue, not a physical inevitability.

The big policy question: Where does "interference" occur, and who causes it. When a new radio is added to the system, does it displace capacity -- do your 802.11b speakers fundamentally reduce my capacity to use mine? Even if the answer is no, does this impose costs on others, who will have to use more effort to accomplish the same amount of communication?

The problem is static partitioning is that demand is dynamic, so the regulatory framework creates wastefulness in space, frequency in time. We leave gaps between TV channels because receivers may not be able to disambiguoate the signals.

The Slepian-Wolf theorem: Frequency partitioning is optimal only when the bandwidth of each band is proportional to its power at each receiver.

Transport capacity is an important measure of radio-network capacity. Add of all the useful bits of received by all the receivers in a system and that's the capacity of the chunk of spectrum they have. Under static partitioning the best you can do is assume a fixed capacity and divide it by the number of stations.

An architectural improvement is hop-by-hop repeating. Many paths can operate concurrently, and energy/bit is reduced by 1/(number of hops). What happens to a repeater network's capacity as radios are added? The more stations you have, the less power and so the less receiver confusion.

The capacity of this network is not constant as you add radios -- rather, you add capacity with every radio you add, which partially offsets the drain that the radios create.

But there are other ways to think about this. Spatial organization takes into account the spatial relations of stations, and as the power of any antenna drops off exponentially over distance, you get more capacity from the same spectrum. Directional antennas provice fixed allocation with much greater spatial multiplexing.

Smart antennas (phased-array?) provide dynamic allocation -- a single smart anternna can receive two differnt signals in two directions at once. They can dynamically select direction and frequency -- blends the antenna and modulation.

Another approach is spatially organized waveforms, such as Bell Labs's BLAST, which exploits multipath in the environment to increase capacity, using a technique analogous to ghost elimination in television. Related ideas: MIMO systems, cooperative signal regeneration.

Signal is assumed to decrease at 1/(distance^2). But that's a Platonic ideal. In the real world, walls, trees, buildings and other chazzerai create much worse propagation characteristics, which makes capacity go up! If radios can adapt to these circumstances (say, by routing within a room when the signal only needs to be in that room, and by routing around the wall when they need to), the reduced propagation of competing signals is good news!

It's counterintuitive:

• Adding stations increases capacity
• Multipath increases capacity
• Repeating increases capacity
• Motion increases capacity
• Networks reduce total energy to acheive the same capacity (safety, battery life)
• Dynamic sharing decreases latency and jitter

Software-deinfed and cognitive radio are systems where a computer and a DSP generate and recognize waveforms -- hook a computer to an antenna and that's it. This can simulate all the old kinds of radio, and generate new kinds of waveforms that can "dance between the raindrops," communicating in the spaces left by legacy systems. MEMS and nanotech promise dynamically reconfigurable antennas that can adapt to their environments. Taken together, this is a set of technologies for enabling evolutionary progress.

Also worth considering: ultra-wideband (UWB). A coded sequence of extremely short high energy pulses to achieve high-rate comms -- very low average energy, and can coexist invisibly with many radio services.

Related to this is the infotech of security -- how do you authenticate who's speaking, how do you ensure integrity, etc -- this is all well-understood stuff from the crypto world. Dynamic and adaptive reconfiguration enchances security against attack and robustness against failure -- you can spread your comms over spectrum, space and time. Discuss

Another CNN driver, Mushtaq... makes sure I know he's not just a driver. He tells me that he studied computers before coming here to work. He wears hip, yellow-tinted sunglasses with small square frames, and his favorite movie is James Dean's last one, "Giant." He says the film shows how you can have all the money in the world and still not be happy. He has a fiance back in India whom he only sees once a year.

As he drives me to a hardware store to buy a tarp and some batteries, he tells me that he has killed his anger for the indignities he often suffers.

"They think of us as animals," he says to me. "When they call me over, they say, 'hamar, [donkey] come here.' But I speak Arabic so well, it surprises even them," he says with a laugh. "They look at me and whisper to each other; 'Hey, this donkey is speaking our language. How can this be?'"

As chief of Enron's Western energy trading wing, Timothy N. Belden is the guy who turned out the lights in Silicon Valley during summer 2001's bogus energy crisis. He described his depredations as "experiments," and in some profound sense that was true: They were so far ahead of the curve that a lot of them probably weren't even illegal. Nonetheless, he recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, coughing up $2.1 million and promising to sing in federal court. His cadre of 100 or so energy traders, crammed onto a tight little floor together under his supervision, was just like Johnson's Skunk Works - an elite division of wonks who were quick, quiet, and right on time.

"Unsubscribe" instructions are not included. Link Discuss (thanks, Steve)

Transportation officials say a contractor will be picked soon to build the nationwide computer system, which will check such things as credit reports and bank account activity and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.

Civil liberties groups and activists are objecting to the plan, seeing the potential for unconstitutional invasions of privacy and for database mix-ups that could lead to innocent people being branded security risks."This system threatens to create a permanent blacklisted underclass of Americans who cannot travel freely," said Katie Corrigan, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. There also is concern that the government is developing the system without revealing how information will be gathered and how long it will be kept.

[from the NYT story:] The ruling means the case could go to the Supreme Court. In Washington, a Justice Department spokesman said no decision has been made about whether to appeal the ruling there. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it would not accept any other petitions to reconsider last June's ruling by a three-judge panel that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public classrooms. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow, the court panel decided 2-1 that Newdow's daughter should not be subjected to the words ``under God'' at her public school. The court said the phrase was an endorsement of God, and the Constitution forbids public schools or other governmental entities from endorsing religion.

[from the Reuters item:] "We may not -- we must not -- allow public sentiment or outcry to guide our decisions," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in concurring with the opinion. "It is particularly important that we understand the nature of our obligations and the strength of our constitutional principles in times of national crisis... It is then that our freedoms and our liberties are in the greatest peril."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

In [the Sony Betamax] ruling that home time-shift recording of television programming for private use was not copyright infringement, the Supreme Court relied on testimony from television producers who did not object to such home recording. One of the most prominent witnesses on this issue was Fred Rogers.

The Supreme Court wrote: "Second is the testimony of Fred Rogers, president of the corporation that produces and owns the copyright on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The program is carried by more public television stations than any other program. Its audience numbers over 3,000,000 families a day. He testified that he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children's programs and to show them at appropriate times. "

(Excerpt from Mr. Rogers' trial testimony: ) "Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the 'Neighborhood' at hours when some children cannot use it. . . . I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the 'Neighborhood' because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."

Thing is, those wires and poles are fragile, so the eruv has to be checked every week. If there's a problem, the whole community has to be alerted so that we don't end up using an eruv that isn't there. This is where the website comes in - in the top-left corner of the front page you'll see a traffic light image and some text that indicates (this week anyway) that the eruv is up and running.

What's that? You can't see it? Ah. That'll be because you're using Mozilla. Or Safari. Or a phone browser. Or anything that isn't MSIE. Or you're running MSIE with Javascript turned off. Or you're a disabled person using a browser with extra accessability features, and now you're really annoyed because the main recipients of the benefits of the eruv are, of course, disabled people. The silliest thing here is that the web page seems to be dynamically-generated anyway (or, at least, hand-edited at least once a week)

Once a board of ethics, headed by Falklands War veteran Simon Weston has given the go-ahead, Lena will receive the face of a dead donor, removing her own severely burned face...

The surgery involves "degloving" the donor's face from a four-hour-old corpse, severing the top layer of skin and then grafting it onto the recipient's face.

I think there's a reason that this interview is so good: Richard did it in person, interactively. I get a lot of requests for email "interviews" that consist of five or ten essay questions (generally questions that I've already answered in various FAQs). I hate doing these things, and avoid them whereever possible. For starters, if I wanted to write ten short essays, I'd just pitch that to your editor -- I'm a freelance writer, after all, so writing a bunch of essays that appear under your byline and that you get paid for doesn't make a lot of sense.

But there's a much better reason that email interviews don't work. The ten essay questions are set in stone. No matter how I answer question one, question two will be the same. I've conducted a fair number of interviews for magazines and newspapers, and while preparing a list of questions is a good idea, it's a poor interview indeed that consists solely of the questions you start with. An interview is a conversation -- ten questions is a questionnaire.

I appreciate that email interviews are easier on the interviewer -- for starters, you don't have to transcribe a phone or in-person conversation. But email interviews are much harder on the subject, who doesn't get to collaborate with the interviewer on his answers, and has to struggle to sound interesting all on his own (not to mention, the interviewer doesn't have to do any transcribing, but the subject has to do a lot of typing).

But the recording industry has a story of, "We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists." But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn't for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn't have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.

Napster filled a niche that the music industry was actually incapable of filling for legal and organizational reasons. I've had very earnest conversations with recording industry executives who told me it took forever to get the clearances to put 100 tracks online. Napster put 100 tracks online in the first eight seconds of its existence. So whatever happens, I can't believe that the hundreds of millions of people around the world currently enjoying filesharing--not just filesharers, but the people who get CDs from filesharers--those people aren't going to willingly say, "Yes, let's take the lion's share of our shared musical heritage and throw it away again, put it back in the vault for another 30 years until we can figure out how to make it available--minus whatever disappears between now and then because all known copies of it are destroyed." That isn't a possible outcome to the current struggle. There are lots of other possible outcomes, like serious damage to the rights to build general-purpose tools and so on, which I'm very concerned about. But I'm not concerned that the solution to this will involve throwing that music back in the vault.

* Over 50% of teenagers download music.

* About two-thirds of teenage boys download music

* Surprisingly, teenagers are the most receptive demographic toward the concept of paying for online services.

* Surprisingly, downloaders appear to buy more CDs

"EVERYTHING THAT HAS to do with time-keeping has slowed down. If it's an electric clock, it’s running slow," said Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid.

"Your computer isn’t affected. Your television isn't affected. No other devices ... just clocks," he added.

Name one genius inventor who has gotten rich from a software patent. There must be some, but the system mostly benefits a handful of businesspeople and lawyers who don't write code. Look at British Telecom. It took years before BT's patent lawyers "discovered" the company had invented hypertext linking. Now General Electric claims it invented the JPEG file format. If GE is so smart, why did it take so many years to figure out it invented such a popular technology? Which genius inventors get rich on such claims?

Massine Productions GmbH hopes to recreate a 10,000-square metre (107,600 sq ft) replica of East Germany, complete with surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food.

"The aim isn't to make big joke out of East Germany," said Susanne Reich, a spokeswoman for the company which is expected to invest several million euros on the project, slated for the southeastern Berlin district of Koepenick.

from Carly Milne's Pornblography comes word today that porno-journalist Stephen Ochs is selling his XXX-writing expertise on eBay. for the right amount of cash, Ochs will personally pen for you a write-up of the next porn set that he tours:

"What I'm auctioning today is a personalized description of my next visit to an X-rated movie set. Want to know what kind of food your favorite porn star eats? I'll tell you. Curious what kind of cameras they use? Just ask. Have something special you'd like me to take a picture of? I'll do it. Want to get a personal message to a porn starlet? I'll deliver it for ya. Win the auction, and you can specify any personal area of interest of the next set I visit, and I'll describe it and photograph it in a one-of-a-kind document suitable for framing, publication or use as kindling."

[Playboy spokesperson Theresa] Hennessey said that while Playboy had not approached Starbucks beforehand, it was sensitive to copyright and trademark issues. "However we use or title the piece, we'll be using it within the boundaries of fair use of trademark law. By saying 'Women of Starbucks,' that's using it an a descriptive manner within the boundaries of fair use," she said. "If the girls want to submit their photos and want to do something in their off time, they should be able to do that."

You were thinking of a shadow.
Can liquids pass through it? you said Yes, I say Doubtful
Are there many different sorts of it? you said No, I say Yes
Do you know any songs about it? you said No, I say Yes
Can it fit in an envelope? you said Yes, I say No
Would you be lost without it? you said No, I say Yes
Is it useful? you said Probably, I say No
Can you touch it? you said Yes, I say No
Can you walk on it? you said Yes, I say Doubtful
Is it flexible? you said No, I say Probably

A contradictory mix of anonymity and intimacy is also part of the blogosphere's nature. You can, for example, know what [Heather] Havrilesky's fourth grade teacher told her about the Apocalypse but never know what makes her laugh. You can, as one blogger confides, be a vixen in the blogosphere but a wallflower in person. In the spirit of intimacy, [Doc] Searls confesses why the line to the bathroom was so long -- he was in there blogging.

8:28pm. For those of you just joining us, we're having a baby (something we've been working on for about 9 months). Quinn's doing most of the work, though. Please note that if you were expecting Quinn or Danny or Gilbert to do anything tonight or in the next few days, you're probably going to be out of luck.

Also, for those of you who are on the East Coast, *no* we're not going to the hospital, we're having a home birth. The human race has been giving babies in the wild for tens of thousands of years; none of us see any reason to stop now. Plus, hospitals scare us.

9:19pm. this is a lot of work. can i have some water?

"We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack. Here in our offices overlooking the tranquil Persian Gulf, despite the flurry of activity, it does not seem to me as if we are on the threshold of war.

That's partly because from here, right now, I can't see the Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Paladin howitzers and the 100,000 American troops amassed in the Kuwaiti desert. I can't see the military staging areas, Camp New York and Camp Virginia -- named after the states hit in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Here, facing the morning sun in the east, I see only the rippling blue water and the needle-piercing orbs of the Kuwaiti Towers."

Professor Martin Russell, project head, said: "The Glasgow accent is very pleasant and is heard a lot on television these days - but it causes problems for computers.

"Speech software caters only for speakers of standard southern English and fails to take regional variations into account.

"We're looking for 10 men and 10 women, aged 18 to 50, who have lived in Glasgow all their lives and whose parents are also from the city.

"They'll be asked to read words, sentences and paragraphs, which we'll use to develop Glasgow-friendly software."

The map belongs to Folha de São Paulo. Drug jailed leader commanded a cellphone bomb and riot today in Rio de Janeiro. Rio awakened with bomb explosions, burning buses and gangs of armed robbers ordered by Red Command's jailed drug leader Fernando Beiramar, shutting down schools, commerce and services. He coordinated the movement by cellphone from Bangu's jail. At least 19 buses were burned and 13 people wounded, 2 seriously hospitalized. The goal of initial action to paralyze transport services was sucessfully achieved. When morning came, 3 bombs exploded at Vieira Souto avenue in Ipanema, one of the richest parts of Rio de Janeiro, breaking windows and terrifying people.

"Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday." It's 7.6 billion miles away; in only 2 million more years, it should reach Aldebaran.

Cory Doctorow's first novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, borrows freely from tropes established by pioneers like John Varley, Spider Robinson, and Robert Silverberg, and refined more recently by the likes of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker. But Kingdom establishes its individuality with smooth and practiced ease, drawing out a kinetic, immersive yarn that seems far more detailed than its scant 200 pages should permit...

Kingdom expertly blends the peer-rating mania of current net-entities, from Slashdot to eBay, with current corporate strategies, hiding it all behind a colorful futuristic façade. Meanwhile, Jules puts a personal face on an impersonal world, as he struggles with technological failures, a suicidal friend, a painful love triangle, and an unknown rival who casually, publicly murders him. The result is a moderately prescient, wholly entertaining yarn that's short enough to be read in a single sitting, and involving enough that it almost inevitably will be.

There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world's most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire. I should know. On Saturday morning, I slipped into and out of a top-secret area of the lab while guards sat, unaware, less than a hundred yards away.

Despite the nation's heightened terror alert status, despite looming congressional hearings into the lab's mismanagement and slack-jawed security, an untrained person -- armed with only the vaguest sense of the facility's layout and slowed by a torn Achilles tendon -- was able to repeatedly gain access to the birthplace of the atom bomb...

Over the past decade, Curtis Ebbesmeyer has tracked 29,000 duckies, turtles and other bathtub toys; 3 million tiny Legos; 34,000 hockey gloves; and 50,000 Nike cross-trainers that went overboard in the Pacific in 1999. He and government oceanographer Jim Ingraham have published their results in academic journals as well as Ebbesmeyer's newsletter, Beachcombers' Alert. After the two shoes washed ashore on the Olympic Peninsula in January, Ebbesmeyer calculated that they had moved more than 450 miles in a month - up to 18 miles a day. At that pace, he calculated the Nikes could bob and weave an additional 1,600 miles by the time the current eases in mid-April, sprinkling basketball shoes along the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian coasts. Lee Weinstein, a spokesman for Beaverton, Ore.- based Nike, said beachcombers who find shoes can mail them to Nike for recycling.

Update: Many BoingBoing readers have sent in links to blogs, astronomy websites, and news articles about the fire that destroyed the telescopes in these panoramas on January 18, 2003. Joh3n writes, "The Mt. Stromlo fire was devastating for Australian astronomy. For the most part, the telescopes there were of historical value, but nearly all the offices were destroyed too. Off-site backups were not had in many cases so a lot of work was lost. Every time I go to a telescope to do my research, I wonder what would happen if there were a big fire. It scares me to see the answer."

How true. My grandpa was an amateur astronomer, and I grew up with much love and respect for the scientific passion that shaped his life... and the lives of others similarly obsessed. It's sad to see the results of so much effort and human curiosity destroyed. Link to site with more info on the fire, and the astronomers whose work and lives it impacted. Discuss

The new Napster will offer songs for a per-track fee alongside subscription services that will allow users to download songs for a monthly fee. The company has hired Napster's founder Shawn Fanning as a consultant.

As you can see, the kids have to be down with installing a metric arseload of supporting extras before they can get jiggy with the winking action. This includes MSN Messenger 5.0 and the MS Black Ops P2P Infiltrator. I had a brief bout of swearing when MSNIM 5 started up because it was clearly ignoring my preference to hide the never-used info tabs on the left. Investigation showed I was wrong; it hadn't so much ignored my preference as removed the option entirely. Clearly, being able to view Expedia travel deals in a 100-pixel-wide buddy list is too important a feature to ever be turned off. Dammit, if you can't get stock price alerts, the terrorists have already won! Also, the banner slot at the bottom was refusing to budge, proudly displaying an ad telling me to use the app that was displaying it.

It's part of a worrying trend MS have been displaying recently that I'll call (for want of something wittier) feature-creep-away. Version 7.0 of Windows Media Player (a.k.a The Huge Blue Useless One) removed the ability to install .mov support. Now the latest version has removed streaming MP3 and AVI support (i.e. play during download). The lockdown has started. It's more than just "Trusted Computing"; they're trying to be Apple '90.

"There's a whole range of emotions people go through when they lose data," said John Christopher, a DriveSavers engineer. "From anger to grief."

When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail.

The inventor, a proponent of free markets, also wants Congress to help him sell more Segways to consumers by funding projects that would create paths for the scooters in cities, and by providing environmental tax credits to people who buy them.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." This is, after all, the man who coined the word "cyberspace," a word that appears to have grown so popular as to be embarrassing, at least when Gibson checks into a Manhattan biz-hotel and takes temporary possession a magnetic key-card on which "WELCOM TO CYBER SPACE" is emblazoned.

"The street finds its own use for things." Madison Avenue has found its own use for CYBER SPACE, made itself very WELCOM indeed, as have an infinite and dazzling array of scam-artists whose FATHER, the LATE GENERAL M'BUTO SESE SEKO, has left them with the SUM of $100,000,000. The Dreaded Rear Admiral Poindexter, Congress's favorite convicted felon, is still attempting to convince our lawmakers that they must be Totally Aware of Information, lest the scions of the LATE OSAMA BIN LADEN use our informational supercyberhighways to commit more uniquely mediagenic XXIst Century atrocities.

KELLY: You mentioned Mark Beyer a few moments ago. I always find it kind of disappointing that you stop seeing his stuff after a while.

PANTER: The weird thing about cartooning is -- and I compare it to poetry and short-story writing -- is that the rewards are similar. There's just not many rewards for doing it. There's the personal satisfaction and the meeting people, and that's cool. But financially, it's extremely hard to do comics and justify it in any way. Anything I do in comics just totally puts me at risk of going under financially. It takes hundreds of hours to do. It's hard and takes a lot of time, and I'm sure that's what happened with Mark. I imagine he's out there drawing cartoons somewhere or painting paintings, but no one's beating his door down lauding him as the great artist that he is. And there's a lot of great artists like that. One needs to be a kind of salesman as well as a business man, and very few sensitive artists are.

Residents gather at a community computer room to take free classes on everything from how to plug in a mouse to setting up Web sites. Camfield Estates resident Paris, 13, creates his own music with help from a computer program. The project, mostly paid for with a $200,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation and supported by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft as well as public and nonprofit entities, is now taking another step. Now that Camfield's Internet provider has ended its two-year commitment to offer discounted cable modem access, the project's organizers will soon give residents the option of replacing their wired Internet access with a wireless connection.

This week, Jim's wireless industry work finds him traveling and working in Finland -- today, he's inside the arctic circle! From what he's shared with me, Jim has some pretty special plans for the BoingBoing guestbar during his stay, and I think you're really going to enjoy his mobile travel-blogues. Welcome, Jim!

Link to Jim's personal website, Link to more pics from the Sunday pho list get-togethers in LA, Discuss

...many luxury brands, observes [ Danielle Keighery of Vertu], subsequently launch more affordable versions of their products. So the gap between Vertu's cheapest phone and Nokia's most expensive may yet be closed. In the longer term, Vertu plans to exploit the emergence of "wearable" technology, as phones morph into jewellery. Here, Vertu may be on to something, says Sofia Ghachem, an analyst at UBS Warburg. Siemens, another handset maker, has just launched a new range of wearable "fashion accessory phones" under the name Xelibri. It will produce two "collections" of Xelibri phones a year, in the hope that marketing phones as fashion items will encourage people to buy new handsets more often. With market penetration at around 80% in western Europe, growth in handset sales has stalled and Siemens believes its new approach could give the industry a much-needed boost.

The domain was registered by Walker in September 2002 in the relatively new .me.uk space and, according to the Response, was set up to offer tutorials on developing web content, web marketing and search engine submission tips. Walker claimed that he had been nicknamed "Johnnie Walker" since childhood and was therefore entitled to keep the domain. However, evidence presented by the Complainant indicated that the web site had, in fact, "contained several references to alcoholism, alcoholics anonymous and contained a representation of an apparently intoxicated man walking across the screen".

The bad news:
1. You have to use public transportation
2. You have to stay in a government building
3. both the bus and the hotel were designed, and are operated, in cost-maximizing military-industrial complexes.

Saturday, 5-6: Doing Good Onlne: Innovative Ideas from Non-Profits on the Internet

Sunday, 11:30-12:30: Some Rights Reserved: The Creative Commons Project

Monday, 3:30-4:30: Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter

Tuesday, 11:30-12:30: The Hollywood Agenda

I'll be doing a signing for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom after the "Cultural Gutter" panel, and there's an EFF/EFF-Austin party on Monday, March 10.

Hope to see you there! Link Discuss

His son, John Kahl, who became CEO after his father stepped down shortly after the election, told CNBC last week that "we're seeing a doubling and tripling of our sales, particularly in certain metro markets and around the coasts and borders." The plant has "gone to a 24/7 operation, which is about a 40 percent increase" over this time last year, Kahl said. The company had more than $300 million in sales in 2001.

And Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge keeps pushing the product. "You may want to have a safe shelter for four or six hours," he told PBS's Jim Lehrer on Wednesday, "until . . . the chemical plume moves on." So "you may need that duct tape."

(The plaintiff) "was sucked into a "Scare Tactic" episode last March 1 by actors Mathew Mertha and Travis Draft, who said they were taking her to "an exclusive Hollywood industry party at a desert resort" near Los Angeles. On the way to the resort, the car that the trio were riding in stalled in a remote desert road and Mertha and Draft "feigned that they were being seriously physically injured ... or killed " by a costumed "alien," the lawsuit said.

Sparks flying from the wheels of the train or from its funnel are believed to have ignited tinder-dry undergrowth as the train completed a run over the 90ft-high viaduct towards Glenfinnan station. Unusually for February, the area has not had any rain for 10 days...

A helicopter had to be brought in to bomb the blaze with water as over 20 firefighters and forestry workers struggled to prevent the fire, close to the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the West Highlands, from spreading and causing more damage. At one stage, fire was raging along a one-mile front.

Here is my mom buried in rice. She introduced me to this AMAZING experience. It's a wooden box full of the outer layer of rice mixed in with special bacteria that does what bacteria does and produces major heat. You basically strip down and get covered in this stuff for 15 minutes...and that must be the maximum because when you get out, your body is jeeeellllooooo. The rice and bacteria combined with the heat open your pores, suck out bad stuff, and infuse you with good stuff (minerals?). Sorry I can't be more specific, but there's something phenomenal going on: you get heated to the core in a very different way than a hot bath.