Nuttin’. Just nuttin’

Really, there hasn’t been anything going on recently, and I’m kinda tired of it. I haven’t even finished another book yet, but I should be close. I’m just going to type to hear myself hitting the keys. Who knows how long they will ramble around the keyboard?

I’ve been watching with some interest as the Fed requests information from Google about search history. Ars has a good update about it. The gov. has requested information about search history from several online search entities in order to use that information to try to rally support for a child protection law that as struck down as constitutional. Yahoo and Microsoft have already complied, but Google has so far refused too. First of all this move is probably to protect Google’s secret search technology and information gathering power. Frankly I bet they don’t want everyone to know exactly how much information they are capable of gathering. It’s also acting as a good distraction from the concerns about their censored site in China. Frankly, I agree that if the government got the information it could be manipulated very easily to support almost anything. It is a huge amount of information they are requesting. I don’t know what in the world they expect to glean form it, but the signal to noise ratio is probably atrocious. Like the automated eavesdropping on thousands of phone calls by the NSA, there should be way too many false positives to be anything other than a waste of resources. It looks like more of this is going to be decided in the courts.

With all the goings on about DRM and root kits, Ars put an amusing little piece about David Birch jumping up and giving the tech industry what for. It does the standard stick of pointing out that DRM is about getting consumers to pay multiple times for content: theater, DVD, UMD, sound track CD, sound track MP3, HD DVD/BlueRay, and whatever else they will think up in a few months. It also points out that many of the large tech and telecom companies could collectively buy and sell most of the content companies. Interestingly, it recommends strong-arming them into supporting more free use of format switching and portability of material. The idea is interesting but futile. Right now I’m waiting for the huge backlash as many of the people who bought HDTVs and video cards to find out that they can’t watch HD content unless they get a new TV. Well except that pirates will have HD stuff that will work. Oo that’s going to be a mess. And it looks like some of the initial moves are going on.

Sony’s PS3 is supposed to be out some time this year, but Merrill Lynch has a report out that is casting some doubt on that. Ars has their usual excellent coverage of it. There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft skipping the HD DVD drive on the XBox 360, and from the looks of Sony’s numbers it is obvious why it was done. It seems that the Blueray requirement is throwing a huge wrench into making the PS3 cost competitive with the XBox 360. Then on top of that you have the delays in the finalization of the stooped DRM spec. I’m really curious about the console wars this year. Nintendo has the Revolution coming out, and it’s so different from the other two in technology and price that no one knows what it’s going to do. All I know is that is that if ML is right about the numbers, and “All signs point to yes”, then Sony stands to loose a huge amount of money if they try to get close to the XBox 360 price.

I was interested to see an article up on the NYTimes today about an explosion in legislation to limit the use of eminent domain in local government. Some months ago a friend and Ars both mentioned about the Kelo decision relating to eminent domain being used to acquire property for private development purposes. It seems that while the SCOTUS decision was based purely on law, a path was set marked out to allow state governments to prevent this from happening again. I like the fact that action is being taken by the states. I just hope they don’t spike the ball too hard in a knee jerk response, but that’s why we have 50 state governments. There are plenty of models to observe if yours doesn’t work that well.

As a closing I want to give a shout out to some “Good Samaritans” doing the right thing. To have people willing to travel hundreds of mile to place themselves between protesters and the families of fallen soldiers shows the outstanding character of people in this country. And it makes me pray for the misguided people out there protesting.