Here's ChadRocco's Lamar Smith anti-election poster, in honor of the congressman's advocacy for the net-killing Stop Online Piracy Act and his blithe dismissal of the bill's critics.

There are consequences associated with telling everyone on the Internet that their concerns are not legitimate. Lamar Smith is about to become the memetic poster child for corrupt, indifferent politicians.

Lamar Smith Can't Hear You - Boing Boing

I was disappointed when Borders went out of business. Borders is, er, was the bookstore in my neighborhood. Now my neighborhood doesn't have a bookstore. I used to say that not having a bookstore says something about a neighborhood - if the people who live around you can't sustain a bookstore, you probably don't live in a nice place.

At least I've still got Barnes and Noble. I like going there - particularly for the newsstand. The coffee shops always seem full of people - the Starbucks at the Georgia Tech Barnes and Noble is a central hangout for the Atlanta startup community.

Perhaps if I had a nook or an iPad my gratification would be even more instant. But I don't. I haven't really been motivated to switch formats because I always buy books ahead of my consumption, so I have a bunch of books around that I plan to read, and by the time they are read I'll have collected more. I haven't managed to get myself on the wagon.

Also, I find that I get a lot of reading done at times when I cannot use an electronic device - I read while airplanes taxi.

Am I a dinosaur?

One Motley Fool author has called for B&N to go out of business.

The financials look pretty bad:

Barnes & Noble cut its yearly guidance for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a financial measure known as Ebitda, to between $150 million to $180 million. In December it said that figure would be at the low end of the range of $210 million to $250 million.

The bookseller expects a yearly loss of $1.40 to $1.10 per share on total sales between $7 billion and $7.2 billion. The loss is far greater than the loss of10 cents to 50 cents Barnes & Noble forecast in August. And it’s bigger than the 63 cents per share expected by analysts, according to Fact Set. Analysts expect revenue of $7.34 billion.

Given the number of people who always seem to be in these stores when I go there, I find this surprising, but perhaps they are just there for the coffee?

What will happen when Barnes & Noble dies? There is something about the task of "going to the book store" that I enjoy. Its a fun outing.

I used to think that record stores played an important roll in... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The end of the book store?

"It’s a vocal minority, he said. "Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number."

Rep. Lamar Smith Decides Lying About, Insulting And Dismissing Opposition To SOPA Is A Winning Strategy | Techdirt

I'm not suggesting a read of the linked Greenwald post but this short passage and the articles it links is very interesting:

In the 1990s, John Yoo attacked President Clinton for abusing executive power; today, he attacks President Obama for doing so; in between, when there was a GOP President, he essentially insisted that Presidents were omnipotent. This is the sort of party-in-power-dependent hackery that is nothing short of loathsome, and that’s equally true when it occurs in the other direction.

Now, the article about Obama is not about war powers and so it doesn't necessarily conflict with Yoo's position regarding Bush administration anti-terror policies, but it is extremely difficult to reconcile the Yoo of the Bush years with the Yoo of the Clinton years. He literally accuses liberals of blind partisanship for making the sort of arguments about Clinton that he later makes about Bush.

People do change their minds, but I think this is an important datapoint in terms of understanding the legal wranglings of the Bush years.

John Yoo partisan hypocrisy

EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain accounts of alleged terrorists. In a December 14th article in the New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they “may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close” a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, the Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two “propaganda” accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.

Lieberman clearly has absolutely no clue about freedom of speech.

U.S. Government Calls for Twitter Censorship | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Scariest thing I've read in a while:

A couple of months ago we highlighted how the implied yield on a traditional balanced portfolio comprising a mix of bonds, equity and cash had fallen to below 3%  less than half of what it was 20 years ago. We suggested (and still do) that with such low yields, generations of investors are facing a potential future income crisis going forward.

Not Even Corp Mgmt Believe Their Own Equity Return Assumptions | The Big Picture

The number of those who consider a home a safe investment fell from 83 percent in 2003 to 66 percent this year, according to a survey by Fannie Mae and two other organizations. In another poll last April, commissioned by real estate data firms RealtyTrac and Trulia, 40 percent of renters questioned said they plan never to buy a home.

The New American Dream: Rent, Don’t Buy

On a slightly more meta level, I have serious concerns about even the most rock star entrepreneur’s claim to job creation, on a net basis. Let’s look at the newspaper industry (just in case I haven’t depressed you enough already.) In 1990, the industry employed 460,000 people. Today it employs 250,000, and is projected to shrink to 180,000. The two companies who sucked all of the profits out of that business, Google and Craigslist, collectively employ about 25,000 people (Craigslist makes up 30 of that number. Not a typo.) So, did the heroes who founded and funded Google and Craigslist create 25,000 jobs, or did they destroy a quarter million jobs?

Job Creationism | For The Win

Me writing in the comment thread:

There is a lot I disagree with here and if everyone on the Internet who opposes SOPA is spouting nonsense about it, their opinions will be easily dismissed. Nothing in this post explains what the mechanisms of SOPA have to do with "eliminating low cost competition." SOPA supporters are quick to point out that SOPA doesn't have anything to do with domestic content hosting sites like YouTube. This is not the problem.

The backers of SOPA want a way to go after foreign websites that violate US laws. Those websites might be legal in their respective countries. So, SOPA's answer is to prevent Americans from accessing them, and to prevent American companies from helping them raise revenue. This is really what the SOPA supports want, and they don't see what the problem is with it. If these sites were in the US, the Department of Justice would shut them down, and although the case of Dajaz1 indicates that more checks and balances are needed, that fundamental fact is not going to change.

Articulating the problem with this does not require elaborate conspiracy theories about the content industries, nor are those conspiracy theories likely to be persuasive to the Congressmen who will ultimately be making a decision on this thing.

There have been different drafts of SOPA with different problematic provisions but I'll focus this post on what I see as the central problem.

In order to prevent Americans from accessing these foreign sites, American ISPs are going to have to buy networking infrastructure that enables them to ban websites. This is going flush a lot of money into the development and refinement of products that provide this capability. These products will become more efficient and sophisticated, and the companies that make them to seek out new markets for them and encourage other governments to require their adoption.

Furthermore, banning American users and American revenue sources from a foreign website that US businesses view as a criminal enterprise will not be the end of these foreign websites. In order to SOPA to really work, these American companies will need to go to other major economies and ask them to adopt laws that are similar to SOPA.

Its worth mentioning that discussions and tests of internet filtering infrastructure are going on in Australia. Infrastructure already exists in the UK. It was originally targeted at child pronography but the blacklist has expanded in 2011 to include sites that violate copyright, so in reality SOPA is already in force in the UK. So you get more countries deploying systems for banning access to websites, and you get more and more money flooding into an industry that designs equipment that does this.

With the cost associated with this equipment going down, and an industry out there marketing these products, they'll find wider uses in more places. More governments will be convinced to pile on the bandwagon. It will ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Articulate explanation of how SOPA came about, and how it might be stopped - Boing Boing

Claymation penguins battle outer space menace for two awesome minutes.

Pingu's THE THING - YouTube