[ My America is certainly not looking like yours, Wm. Safire.

Please. Don't tell me that the 25 bucks that fictional lady saved on shoes makes up for fact that Bush's tax cuts have cost her 100 times that much in the form of increased local and state taxes, not to mention the fact that there is no consideration given to the quality of life of the american factory worker who is collecting unemployment because his job is now done by someone in Myanmar for a buck a day -- at the very least not a wage that's going to tear down the walls and bless the poor nations of the world with our freedom and prosperity.

Safire accuses the dems of fear mongering - all the while clouding the issues with linguistic image distortion - phrasing that draws mean 'ol democrats stealing the shoes right off poor kids' feet.

He also quotes 5.5% unemployment, which is as optimistic as Bush saying he's gonna manage to create 2 million jobs this year. His analysis of how the numbers are affected by people dropping out of the job search is also absurd... the fact that a process is not reversible doesn't invalidate it, jackass, especially when it's partially based on psychology, not some mechanical, invariant system. If my analysis of the economy makes me a "gloomy-Gus" (when did we revert to elementary school, by the way?) then the republicans should all change their names, because i've heard nothing but fear, distrust and anger governing our foreign policy of late. Bush loves to bring up how dangerous the world is, how things have changed, how much the fundamentalists hate us... and you know what, the world *is* dangerous and some people *do* hate us. I disagree with some of the ways the Bush whitehouse has responded to these issues, but the door swings both ways here. No one's used more fear to sell the Patriot Act, CAPPS, TIA, and War than the republicans. Drawing attention to the bad shit that's going down in the world isn't the same as being pessimistic -- it's called addressing the problem.

Jesus, take your pseudo-populist ("my momma didn't raise no fool") cheerleading and shove it. -k]

My Anti-Stump Speech

[ I'm not ready to call doomsday on the american economy, but certainly we need to take a long look at the kinds of jobs we're likely to be able to retain. IT jobs ain't it, manufacturing ain't it, so what can we keep? If the answer is "Low paying service jobs and not much else." then I don't see how we can justify free trade. I see the argument that free trade *can* enrich the world-at-large, which ends up being good for everyone, but that's not the way it's going... we're slightly enriching India, while seriously enriching american executives. So, what is america good at? Good enough that no one else can really threaten yet? -k]

Theory vs. Reality

] The EU has asked the WTO for permission to impose
] sanctions on U.S. goods to punish it for failing to
] repeal anti-dumping rules declared illegal by the WTO.

but, we're AMERICA! We can do whatever we want. Fuck the UN, fuck NATO, fuck the EU (except england, cuz tony & co. hooked us up in iraq) and fuck the WTO, too.

this can't be good for us.

CNN.com - EU seeks sanctions against U.S. - Jan. 15, 2004

stealth inflation may be a sensational name for it, but the things described in this article certainly major problems.

State of the Art: Checking Your Bill for a New Charge Called

Yep, another NYT story. This one is a view of how musicians feel about the current situation :

] "On one hand, the whole thing is pretty sick," said John
] McCrea, a singer and songwriter in the rock band Cake.
] "On the other hand, I think it'll probably work."

An interesting point at the bottom of the first page is the industry claim of 31% drop in sales since file sharing started. Directly following that they quote the Forrester reports which shows only 15% decline and attributes only 35% to downloading. It's what we've been saying all along -- that lots of factors have been fucking the music industry recently -- but it's nice to see a respectable analyst say so.

And of course, the main bs RIAA spews ("it's about the artists") :
"Much of the stated concern over file sharing has centered on the revenue that record companies and musicians are losing, but few musicians ever actually receive royalties from their record sales on major labels, which managers say have accounting practices that are badly in need of review."

and

"I don't have sympathy for the record companies," said Mickey Melchiondo of the rock duo Ween. "They haven't been paying me royalties anyway."

indeed.

File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught in Middle

Update to the story about little Miss Lahara

P2P group: We'll pay girl's RIAA bill | CNET News.com

Hm, hadn't thought about that -- wonder just how far this will go...

Techdirt:Lawsuit Filed Against RIAA Amnesty Program

Dell pulling all-too-familiar shenanigans as pertaining to software licencing. They should all be fined.

Dell's Software License Policy: Dude, you're getting screwed.

This one could spell trouble for apple. From what i could tell on a real quick parse, Tibco's Rendezvous is a proprietary, generic message passing interface (presumably XML based), used to establish communications between their own various 'ebusiness application components'

IIRC the standard for trademark infringement is when the same name describes a product that would be confusingly similar. So, i could name a matchmaking service Rendezvous, because no one would mistake one for the other. That being said, how similar is tibco's message passing system to zeroconf? To me, they're completely different, but to a non expert? They're both "Computer networking software that lets one thing talk to the another and then do something, right?"

I'd like to think this gets tossed out, but...

Apple sued over use of Rendezvous trademark

Decius and i were talking about this last night. Here's the summary... last year, congress set a royalty rate of 0.07 cents/song/listener that webcasters would have to pay. This deal was negotiated by a consortium that represented primarily large webcasters. small webcasters felt this was bs and would put them out of business (which it did, in many cases) and eventually, a new deal was struck that would allow small stations to avoid that rate. However, it didn't set a new rate, just permit the small webcasters to negotiate their own deal. That's almost the same thing because, lets face it, negotiating with RIAA is a huge pain, if not expensive in it's own right, making it far from feasible for most small webcasters.

So now, the Webcasters Alliance is striking back at the RIAA on behalf of small webcasters, suing them on a claim of antitrust for trying to push independents out of the game.

Small Webcasters sue RIAA | CNET News.com