09.24.11
Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Gearing up to patents on mental processes everywhere
Summary: How the powers-that-be keep pushing for patent tyranny of global scope and almost limitless scope for patenting, including very fundamental ideas implemented in code and in mind
BEFORE globalisation brings us all a US-style patent system we must prepare for a NAFTA-like stage where Europe tries to consolidate its patent offices and set up a centralised courtroom or court system, then merging it with the trilateral systems which already accepts software patents (the US and Japan). Unless people stand up and resist this, the process often seems inevitable and irresistible. Once passed, it will be irreversible too. Earlier this month we showed many cables about the diplomatic endeavours to make the global patent system an imminent reality (see our Cablegate page). Based on this post from patent lawyers: “That Unified Patent Court which has so divided opinion in Europe has been very much in the IPKat’s mind in recent days. The problem is that, while most people are either enthusiastic or at least accepting of the idea of having a Unified Patent Court for the European Union’s 27 Member States, many experts are anxious about the actual details and a simple Kat could be forgiven that everyone seems to want a different one.
“Anyway, the Draft agreement on a Unified Patent Court and draft Statute of 14 June 2011 has now been examined, weighed, measured, pondered, praised, criticised, printed out and converted into fleets of paper darts — and there is no doubt that there are some serious problems which remain to be resolved.
“Here in the United Kingdom, the grandly-named EU Patent Reform Consultation Group (concerning which see CIPA, August 2011, pages 488-490) formed a sub-group to examine the Draft Agreement. The sub-group did not consist of a bunch of conscripts who had been dragged from the drinking houses of Holborn, sobered up and then instructed to moan about the Draft Agreement; rather, it was a select gathering of some of the finest patent experts on this part of the planet — academics, practitioners, patent owners and even a blogger — most of whom are, it may gratifyingly be said, friends of the IPKat even if, as indicated, none of them has [recently, says Merpel] been dragged from any of the drinking houses of Holborn.”
Benjamin Henrion summarises the above as:
Comments on the Unified Patent Court by the patent microcosm, Tim Frain of MS/Nokia, LJ Jacob and al http://t.co/HVWmGWUX
“Unified Patent Court” would be better off called the “No-Escape Patent Court”. It’s a mechanism for filing lawsuits internationally with no safe haven and sovereign independence to separately evaluate legal cases. As long as the USPTO is a sordid mess, it will be a problem to every citizen of the world (either a customer or a producer).
Good ol’ Stephan Kinsella is preparing to hold an event about Obama’s so-called patent ‘reform’. We always use scare quotes because it is ‘reform’ that serves Microsoft, which already abuses the patent system to behave anti-competitively and according to this Microsoft-oriented view by Kurt Mackie from the ‘Microsoft press’:
Microsoft is among several larger tech companies who pushed for the change to “first to file” — but what will the Act’s passage really mean for the tech industry (and patents in general)? Patent attorney Carlos A. Fisher walks through the potential impact.
Patent lawyers probably like this new ‘reform’, whereas patent trolls might like it a lot less in the long term. “Innovation’s down, but patent trolls are thriving” is how the Washington Post summarised the situation and quoting the article, Benjamin Henrion (FFII) rewrites this as “Paul Marks catches IBM moving to patent the “well-known” idea of partitioning software to protect against malware”. This is not innovation. Microsoft is patenting password/authentication ideas right now, proving yet again that making something more secure is now a patent violation. How is that a good thing?
Microsoft is permitted to keep its extortion deals against Linux (making money from other people’s work) which Mr. Masnick criticises as follow:
So just what are the benefits of paying Microsoft a licensing fee for free software, especially when said software was not developed by Microsoft? If these quiet settlements are any indication, the sole benefit would be to avoid being dragged through the courts by one of the largest software developers in the world. Seriously, what other benefit is there? Is there a collection of patent trolls jumping at the chance to sue companies using Linux that have yet to surface thanks to Microsoft’s cradling licensing deals? Not that I have read about. The only patent holder jumping at the chance to sue over Linux is Microsoft itself.
Microsoft is going after embedded Linux, which is massive. John Dvorak chooses to mischaracterise Linux by pretending it’s just a desktop platform, but he does slam Microsoft for this behaviour:
This strategy needs to be stopped. Microsoft should immediately sue IBM, Red Hat, and other major Linux distributors. It should establish its supposed rights and stop playing games.
Microsoft has accumulated so many patentable ideas regarding its OS designs that it might be impossible to abide by all of them. However, there are ways to code around a patent, if someone actually knows what patent to code around. Microsoft has not exactly rolled out the portfolio for people to debate because it knows that this would be a bad idea. So instead, it uses its ability to act the bully and threaten the schoolyard kids.
To me, these dubious business practices follow those that got the company in trouble with the U.S. government during the Gates era. It seems as if nothing has changed.
Microsoft and its patent trolls very much like the status quo and as Groklaw points out, this whole ‘reform’ led to “A Rush To The Courthouse By Trolls”. To quote Professor Webbink:
One consequence of the passage of the America Invents Act (HR1249) signed into law by President Obama last Friday (September 16) was a mad rush to the courthouse by some patent trolls. You see, one of the favorite tactics used by patent trolls is to bring a suit with dozens of defendants regardless of whether there are common issues of infringement other than the commonality of the asserted patents. This tactic allows the troll to benefit from a consolidated action, thus drastically reducing the troll’s cost of litigation. Of course, this tactic doesn’t always work as we learned in the Interval Licensing case.
51 cases against 680 defendants is how bad it is based on Masnick’s summary and the “[q]uality of patents ‘falling dramatically’, warns OECD,” which works well for patent lawyers and harms everyone else. To quote:
Quality of patents ‘falling dramatically’, warns OECD
A book dealer friend once told me of an affluent American who walked into his London shop and asked if he could buy “20 yards of books”. It didn’t matter what they were, he announced airily, as long as they were leather bound they’d look good on the mahogany shelving in his new abode. Well, it appears such attitudes now dominate the thoughts of what we once thought of as innovators, as they treat patents as a similar commodity to be bought in bulk.
In summary, the US patent system remains very messy and there is no solution to this in the pipeline. Sooner or later the powers-that-be will try to impose this system on the whole world (which to an extent they already do). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE at 4:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bumps on the road for the only Microsoft-’approved’ distribution of GNU/Linux
IT HAS BEEN a long time since SLE* was last released. RHEL has a lot more releases and a lot more demand. A couple of years ago OpenSUSE reduced the frequency of releases and already we see retractions (as covered some days ago) and delays, according to the following summary which says:
In fact, Systemd is being removed from Tumbleweed as well. Greg K.H. said, “Due to a number of inter dependencies on packages that are not ready for Tumbleweed, and other interactions with the system that are causing problems for some users, I’m going to remove systemd from Tumbleweed today to allow the developers to spend more time on getting it stable for Factory and 12.1 instead of having to chase down problems that are specific to Tumbleweed only.”
Other issues are still up in the air as well:
- there are still 22 build failures in openSUSE:Factory:Staging:DtNeeded
- 11.4 artwork needs to go
- several kmps do not build: ndiswrapper, omnibook, vmpware-guest, xen, xtables-addons
Stephan Kulow summed it up by saying, “All in all I see no beta this week and next week SUSE has hackweek blackout ;(” It is believed the delay will not affect the final release date.
If the project continues to shrink, then more such delays will be expected. Several Microsoft-’approved’ (and Microsoft taxed) distributions have already died, leaving just SUSE.
To be fair to OpenSUSE, there are some non-Novell/Attachmate people in there, as demonstrated for example by those photos Andreas Jaeger mentions and the many assorted posts about the OpenSUSE Conference [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Hackweek is coming too [1, 2]
“To never depend on SUSE is a good thing.”The problem with OpenSUSE it that it is still owned or controlled by Microsoft, by proxy. The promotion of Mono software often comes through OpenSUSE (the first to adopt a lot of it) and SUSE even has a special relationship with Xamarin, which promotes proprietary derivatives of Mono (core).
According to this new post, “recently we had a huge discussions at the conference about how openSUSE was faring in India and it seemed that India was not faring well. ”
Actually, India is faring well; it’s SUSE that’s not faring well. To never depend on SUSE is a good thing. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Comcast comes to the UK with patent demands; UK-based patent lawyers still cheer for software patents (which they would profit from)
Earlier this month everyone was speaking about patents in the context of the so-called ‘reform’. This reform did nothing to remove or prevent patents on very basic ideas. To give an example from the news: “Comcast, based in Philadelphia, asked for a jury trial and an award of legal fees from London-based BT Telecommunications Plc in a complaint filed Sept. 19 in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. [...] The patents cover network-traffic management, pricing methods, fault monitoring and other functions, according to court papers.”
“Opposition to patents has grown more popular, with even political parties like the Swedish Pirate Party speaking out against patents, as a matter of fundamental policy.”In other words, poor Comcast (with almost $40 billion in revenue) wants British people to pay it some tax via BT and due to patents — patents on software and business methods to make matters a lot worse. BT is actually not quite the victim here because as we showed some years ago, based on reports from India, BT uses patents in a colonialist fashion as well. It got patents on very controversial ‘inventions’ which were also trivial.
There is this ongoing debate about the meaning of “abstract” — a debate which even the EFF participated in. It has become clear that protectionist measures for taxing one’s competitors have gone too far, especially scope-wise. There is a need for real reform, not lipstick on a pig.
Opposition to patents has grown more popular, with even political parties like the Swedish Pirate Party speaking out against patents, as a matter of fundamental policy. The German Pirate Party is now funded by patent supporters as we noted earlier this month, so as patent lawyers in London help show, one oughtn’t expect a real reform coming from them. There are other patents boosters (usually lawyers with blogs) who seek to discredit critics of this system, trying to paint them as greedy thieves or something along those lines (some use the word “pirates”).
Should one pay attention to them at all? “Don’t feed the trolls” probably applies here. █
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Posted in Apple, Asia, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 4:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Via and Samsung launch a defensive assault against the aggressor, Apple, which might have its own phones removed from the market rather than Android phones (although it is merely a deterrence strategy)
THOSE WHO lose the mobile race are trying to transform it into a patent race or a sort of Cold War where each alliance is a form of cartel.
RIM is increasingly being evaluated based on its patents and not its products or loyal customers. It is claimed to be worth just over a couple of billion because there are not many patents in there (RIM is often targeted by patent trolls and using patents against them would not work, not even as a deterrence strategy).
According to this other new article, “Jefferies performed a deep dive on 1,400 patents to determine the firms with essential LTE patents, in consultation with industry experts.”
Nokia/Microsoft is meanwhile planning to use a patent trolls to attack Android [1, 2]. Antitrust authorities do pay attention or were at least notified.
“Just remember who started this.”
–RonBGoogle’s approach as described in this week’s post would not be effective against patent trolls. The Times of India writes about the Oracle-Google talk falling through, so there too problems exist. The best solution to Google’s headache would be a blanket removal of all software patents. These monopolies were not supposed to be granted in the first place as these impede thought and expression, not physical creation.
From what we can gather based on the past couple of years, these patents breed trolls, cartels, and embargoes, including some of Apple’s that now backfire. Slashdot says that “Via Files Suit Against Apple” after Apple indirectly attacked Via, the company which “owns a number of fundamental technology patents inherited from Centaur…”
“Via also has a vested interest,” notes Slashdot, as “CEO Wenchi Chen is married to the head of HTC, which Apple sued for patent infringement last March.”
RonB writes (in USENET); “Just remember who started this.”
Via is “seeking to ban sales of Apple’s iPad and iPhone,” says the article he cites, “which it says infringe upon three of its U.S. patents. VIA is also seeking damages and has asked for a trial by jury.”
“Death by a million cuts,” RonB calls it. “Apple basically took on the whole industry. Let’s see how well it plays out.”
The more M.A.D. this gets, the less popular the patent system will become.
Meanwhile in Korea, only old companies use patents. Samsung has a whole load of them, even in Europe, so it is likely to try and embargo Apple there, having been attacked by Apple first. Always remember who started it.
The president of the FFII, based in Belgium, writes:
Samsung will try to block iphone with patents, the more mess the better
Indeed.
In Korea, only old iPhones may be sold. The next iPhone might be banned by Samsung. As one author puts it:
Samsung may be planning more aggressive tactics against its number one customer, Apple, after legal setbacks in Germany and The Netherlands. The Korean-based company will move to have Apple’s next-generation iPhone banned from sale in Korea following EU-wide injunctions issued against Samsung’s tablets and smartphones in those countries.
This was covered here the other day. Apple deserves no sympathy as it started this whole mess. █
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Posted in Patents at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The study on the cost of patent trolls is getting a lot of attention in the mainstream
The other day we mentioned the newer Bessen study. Groklaw reposted the full text of his paper, after it had received permission and the subject was brought up in the Against Monopoly Web site.
Later it made it into CNN (not a blog), which can hopefully increase awareness of the problem. To quote:
Patent trolls — companies that license patents but do not actually sell anything — have long been looked on with fiery scorn in Silicon Valley. This week, a Boston University study offered fresh fuel for those flames.
Lawsuits from non-practicing entities, or NPEs — better known as patent trolls — have cost innovators $500 billion in lost wealth from 1990 through 2010, the BU study found. The study arrived at that figure by observing patent defendants’ stock prices following a lawsuit, excluding general market trends and random stock movements.
We all owe a warn thank-you to Bessen and his colleagues, who are providing scholarly ammunition to those who seek to reform the patent system and remove multi-trillion taxes on everything we buy (those taxes go towards the super-rich, not scientists). █
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09.23.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Server
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Beyond that I’ll find discussions on virtualization, the cloud, and Linux, as well as how to noodle lifecycle costs by factoring in the cost of operation and incremental changes on top of the cost of acquisition. I can categorize some of that as “must know” and some of it as “hope I can skip through that.”
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Big Blue has joined the ranks of server makers that are pitching servers using over-clocked processors to latency-sensitive financial services companies.
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Kernel Space
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ARM is often toted as one of Linux’s largest successes. Thanks to Google’s Android platform it is true that a penguin powers at least half of the world’s mobile devices today.
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Linus Torvalds wants to do the Linux 3.2 merge on kernel.org.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Desura Game Client, which is a similar service to Valve’s Steam game distribution platform for e-delivery, is now in beta on Linux.
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Even having these oddities, this distribution gains popularity. As per recent voting, Pardus got just below 5% of votes for best KDE-based distribution. More than monstrous Mandriva or newborn Mageia.
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Intel saved $200 million by switching from proprietary Unix software to free software running on GNU/Linux.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A year ago, when I wrote about a group of Mandriva former employees and contributors who’d decided to create a fork called Mageia, I had no idea whatsoever whether the project would survive to actually release a product. Well, a year has come and gone and Mageia not only released Mageia 1 in June, it’s now a distro with a year’s worth of organization under it’s belt. That may not sound like a lot, but to my mind it’s quite an accomplishment.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT: News ), the world’s largest seller of Linux software, said Wednesday after the markets closed that its second quarter profit rose 69% from last year, as revenue surged 28% amid strong demand for its products and services. The company’s quarterly earnings per share, excluding items, also came in above analysts’ expectations as did its quarterly revenue.
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Following a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 report this afternoon by Linux operating system and tools vendor Red Hat (RHT), CEO Jim Whitehurst was kind enough to take a few moments to talk with me about the results but also about how his company is progressing in “cloud” computing.
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Red Hat has reported financial results for its fiscal second quarter, which ended August 31, and the company continues to prove that a business model of supporting robust open source software can lead to remarkable success. In fact, as we predicted it would be, the company is emerging as the first ever billion dollar a year open source company. Red Hat’s total revenue for the quarter was $281.3 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $238.3 million, up 28% year-over-year.
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Iomega’s StorCenter PX px4-300d NAS (network attached storage) device is a solid contender for the SMB market, says this eWEEK Labs review. The four-bay, Linux-based device runs on a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525, offers up to 12TB storage, and supports hot-swappable solid-state disks as well as Iomega’s Personal Cloud.
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Phones
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The open sourcing of Bada is designed, it is reported, to attract more developers to the platform. Another reported reason is that the move is a reaction to the takeover by Google of Motorola Mobility, producers of Android phones and other devices; it is believed that Samsung would aim to counterbalance the threat of Google preferring to work with Motorola.
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OpenMobile has demonstrated OEM-focused technology that permits any Android app to run on MeeGo, with versions planned for Linux, Bada, WebOS, and Windows, Symbian, and QNX. OpenMobile’s Application Compatibility Layer (ACL) was shown in a video running Android apps and quickly switching between MeeGo and Android environments on a MeeGo tablet.
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Android
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DaniWeb recently reported how Apple had won a ban on the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Europe and even published the rather generic-looking design drawings at the heart of the case. Now a Düsseldorf regional court judge, Johanna Brueckner-Hoffmann, has heard the Samsung appeal against the ban and concluded that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 gives a “clear impression of similarity” to the iPad: the result being that the ban has been upheld, but only in Germany rather than being across the EU. If reports are to be believed, Samsung could fight back with an attempt to delay or block the sale of the new iPhone 5 in Europe (on the grounds that it infringes some basic technology patents held by Samsung) before it has even arrived.
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Google today rolled an update of Google + app for Android devices. The update brings the most demanded feature to the Android device — Hangout. Now Android users can join Hangouts from the mobile app. Another notable new feature is changing Huddle to Messenger. You can now send photos to each other using Messenger (Huddle).
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Acer’s newest mobile has been leaked by Orange. The Android-powered C6 Liquid Express has popped up on the network operator’s website, along with a list of its specs.
The C6 Liquid Express, spotted by Unwired View, will come running Android version 2.3 Gingerbread, backed up by both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. It’s going to have a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen, and around the back it’s set to pack a 5-megapixel camera.
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The town of Kankaanpää in the western Finnish region of Satakunta has been able to halve its project hardware costs by deploying enterprise virtualisation software from a global open source (OS) solutions provider, it was announced on 24 August 2011.
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Events
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After a terrific response to the opening of early bird registrations just one week ago, the linux.conf.au 2012 organising team are excited to announce open source law luminary Karen Sandler as the first keynote for the January conference.
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SaaS
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The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.
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Databases
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MySQL founder and developer Monty Widenius announced on his blog that the MySQL relational database management system would no longer be a free software project and will instead be under an Open Core model. Widenius pointed to an Oracle announcement last week, which detailed new commercial extensions for MySQL Enterprise Edition.
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Education
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If you’re unfamiliar with the fast-growing world of online learning (e-learning) it’s becoming a huge business, and top universities such as U.C. Berkeley now offer free webcasts and podcasts to the public. Did you know that one of the biggest players in software and platforms for e-learning is a free, open source offering? If not, consider Moodle, which we covered here. Moodle is a course management system (CMS) that leverages developers from all around the world, and allows people to deliver and take courses online. In the latest piece of Moodle news, there is now a Moodle iPhone app.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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People have been using our email servers since around February. The systems are basically up and running, but at this point mainly on borrowed and donated hardware. We set our membership fee at 300 SEK per year (around 33 Euros) and that’s basically covering the running costs of an exclusive internet connection for the main server. Though it’s consumer grade at this point, we’re currently looking at a better solution; we want to be hosted in a more serious location.
We’ve discussed whether or not a virtual private server is OK, seeing as we want to keep everything under our own control. Obviously we want to control all hardware as well as the software. But at the moment we basically receive email and store it on our IMAP server. We have no outgoing email, though we are currently working on setting this up. We received the server just this week which has been lent to us for this purpose.
This spring we had a party which was quite successful, basically a “launch party”. We are looking to organize another party for October 1st. It’s nice that parts of the Fripost work are already going on outside the “main” channels, which means we can spread the work load amongst more people; a goal that we have for everything in the project.
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I’m pleased to announce GNU Health 1.3.3
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Lo and behold! We discovered that Microsoft is secretly including Unix-like runlevels into their new OS. Some of these runlevels will be available to the user (although they won’t be called “runlevels”) and others will only be able to be activated by MS through the Windows Update feature, without user control. Doesn’t sound good, does it? Things from Redmond seldom do.
So, here it is, our list of the top 10 runlevels for Windows 8….
9. Reboot. It’s predicted this will be the most used runlevel in Windows.
8. Big Brother Mode. We can’t find anything about this because the information is classified and requires clearance from either Homeland Security or the Chinese government.
7. Pre-Infected Mode. Why wait for a drive-by attack. Go ahead and get it over with. Offer your machine as a bot to the Russian mob.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Just because she offers advice on manners in the modern world, don’t expect blogger/columnist Amy Alkon to stand by quietly if she thinks a government employee is violating her rights at the airport.
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Cablegate
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They were putting copies of Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography in the window of Waterstone’s this morning when I arrived to buy a copy, which was cool — I really thought that was no more than a movie cliché. Inside, half a dozen copies sold in 10 minutes — most of the purchasers looked like newsroom interns — and a film crew from German state television was sharking around interviewing people.
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Julian Assange Press Statement on the Unauthorised “Autobiography”: Thursday 22nd September 2011, 0100
I have learned today through an article in The Independent that my publisher, Canongate, has secretly distributed an unauthorised 70,000 word first draft of what was going to be my autobiography. According to The Independent, Canongate “enacted a huge security operation to secretly ship books out to thousands of stores nationwide without tipping anyone off as to the content of the book”. It will be in the bookshops tomorrow.
I am not “the writer” of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O’Hagan. By publishing this draft against my wishes Canongate has acted in breach of contract, in breach of confidence, in breach of my creative rights and in breach of personal assurances. The US publisher, Knopf, withdrew from the deal when it learned of Canongate’s intentions to publish without my consent. This book was meant to be about my life’s struggle for justice through access to knowledge. It has turned into something else. The events surrounding its unauthorised publication by Canongate are not about freedom of information — they are about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity—screwing people over to make a buck.
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Finance
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government is continuing an aggressive drive to hold accountable those responsible for the 2007-2009 financial crisis, but prosecutors may find it tough to prove criminal intent in some cases, a top Justice Department official said in an interview.
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A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) trader and his father were accused by U.S. regulators of making illegal trades based on confidential information related to the Wall Street firm’s exchange-traded fund investments.
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The Wall S. Journal reports that DOJ is seriously considering criminal charges against Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director whose wire tapped conversations were played at Raj Rajaratnam’s insider trading trial. The SEC, whose administrative proceeding against Gupta was discontinued, reportedly is also considering filing civil charges in court. WSJ, Focus on Goldman Ex-Director
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Federal prosecutors are moving closer toward bringing criminal charges against Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director who allegedly leaked inside information about the Wall Street giant at the height of the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the situation.
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Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE:GS) traded today at a new 52-week low of $92.33. Approximately 8.8 million shares have changed hands today, as compared to an average 30-day volume of 8.8 million shares.
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If a protest is considered a success based on whether its revolutionary spirit proves contagious, then Occupy Wall Street may indeed become a triumph in the long run. The event’s official website recently announced that a similar protest is now being planned in Los Angeles.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin has been riveted this week by reports that more of Governor Scott Walker’s top aides may be implicated in an ongoing “John Doe” investigation into potentially illegal campaign practices related to Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Although the investigation, first reported on by Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has been underway for at least a year, a recent FBI raid on the home of Walker’s chief lieutenant, Cynthia “Cindy” Archer, has the state abuzz with speculation about who may be the target of the investigation.
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When Jeff Wright walked into the lobby of the New Orleans Marriott on Aug. 3, he wasn’t sure what to expect. As the director of public policy advocacy for the Florida Education Association — a prominent teachers’ union that had been bearing the brunt of legislative attacks from Florida Republicans throughout the 2011 legislative session — he wasn’t there for your standard Mardi Gras-themed party. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a national nonprofit organization made up of elected officials and private interests who gather regularly to try to directly influence the substance of public policy, was holding its annual four-day meeting there, so any “partying” would probably be a little more conservative, and — going by a recent glut of press coverage pointing out ALEC’s clearinghouse mentality of privately linking big corporations with the state legislators willing to pursue their bottom-line agendas in the form of “model legislation” — slightly more nefarious. Nevertheless, he wanted to see it for himself.
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When Jeff Wright walked into the lobby of the New Orleans Marriott on Aug. 3, he wasn’t sure what to expect. As the director of public policy advocacy for the Florida Education Association — a prominent teachers’ union that had been bearing the brunt of legislative attacks from Florida Republicans throughout the 2011 legislative session — he wasn’t there for your standard Mardi Gras-themed party. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a national nonprofit organization made up of elected officials and private interests who gather regularly to try to directly influence the substance of public policy, was holding its annual four-day meeting there, so any “partying” would probably be a little more conservative, and — going by a recent glut of press coverage pointing out ALEC’s clearinghouse mentality of privately linking big corporations with the state legislators willing to pursue their bottom-line agendas in the form of “model legislation” — slightly more nefarious. Nevertheless, he wanted to see it for himself.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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A new Global Game Download Report by Pando Networks is out, and it includes a ranking of countries by their respective average download speeds. The Pando data also features a drop-down of ten “gamer friendly” countries around the world.
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