isen.blog

F2C: Freedom to Connect 2012 is on! It will occur May 21 & 22 at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, MD. Very early registration prices are in effect through January 31. Event hashtag: #F2C

Confirmed keynote speakers currently include

• Vint Cerf,
• Michael Copps,
• Cory Doctorow,
• Rebecca MacKinnon and
• Aaron Swartz

  Stay tuned for more!

One panel has been fully specified. It’s called “Big Enough to Succeed.” It provides four vital examples of a fourth way to Internet connectivity; small, entrepreneurial (non-Municipal) carriers that are leading the way to the future of connectivity. Confirmed speakers on this panel include John Brown, founder of CityLink Telecommunications, Ken Johnson, President and General Manager of Conneaut Telephone Company, Pat Kennedy, the founder of Lit San Leandro and Levi Maaia, VP of Full Channel.

Other panels will address issues such as . . .

• BIP, BTOP, UCAN, Gig-U, Google Fiber and other big pipe experiments
• Freedom and Connectivity from Alexandria, Egypt to Zuccotti Park, USA
• Surveillance, spying, and democracy
• Corruption, power and Internet progress
• and . . .

As in previous years, F2C: Freedom to Connect will feature great music, good food, and an awesome audience. Watch this space for further details.

F2C: Freedom to Connect is seeking sponsors and volunteers who are committed to an open, innovative, bottom-up Internet. Write to me — isen@isen.com

Technorati Tags: Broadband, BTOP, Censorship, CommonCarriage, Competition, Corruption, Democracy, DisruptiveTechnology, End-to-End, F2C, FTTH, Infrastructure, ItsTheInternetStupid, MunicipalNetworks, NationalBroadbandPlan, NetworkNeutrality, OpenAccess, ParadoxoftheBestNetwork, PublicGoods, Spectrum, StructuralSeparation, Stupid Network, Sustainability, VintCerf, WealthofNetworks

Alexander Ovsov has honored my essay, Making Network Neutrality Sustainable by translating it into Romanian. Thanks Alexander!

In a 2009 comment on this essay, I wrote:

We can expect today’s gained ground to erode under our feet. We can expect to
keep fighting a long time. Or we can use today’s momentum to change the core
of the entities driving the fight so it’s simply not in their interests to continue it.
The choice is ours.

Today we’re fighting SOPA and PIPA. If we win, tomorrow it’ll be something else. The Internet will remain under attack, and the battles will continue, until the applications are separated by law from the infrastructure.

The fight for the freedom of the Internet knows no borders. I am delighted that Alexander has found it worthwhile to make Making Network Neutrality Sustainable accessible to a whole new language community.

Technorati Tags: NetworkManagement, NetworkNeutrality, StructuralSeparation, Stupid Network

SOPA/PIPA Blackout: The isen.blog home page will be replaced by a protest page all day on January 18, 2012. Currently, PIPA is the larger danger — contact Senate leader Harry Reid to stop PIPA. You can find much more info here and here.

This story begins outside the Watercolor Cafe in Larchmont NY in about 2009. I had seen Bill Morrissey before, so I recognized him standing outside the door smoking a cig. I said, “Hi Bill,” and made brief eye contact. He looked. I nodded. He had no reason to recognize me. I would be a face at a table and another ten bucks in his pocket at the end of the night. I guess I wanted it that way. We went inside.

His thumb that night was like a sure footed mule on a mountain path. The melody emerged miraculously from his croaky voice. He sang about the woman who put birch on the fire instead of oak to trade heat for time. He sang about stealing a pen from the grave of Baudelaire to write a song. He sang about meeting Charlie Parker and James Dean in heaven. He sang about how the rail yard in Barstow, California on a winter night sounded like a drunk in a metal shop. He sang about wanting to take a woman home to dance the grizzly bear. He sang about an itinerant singer waiting for the 2 AM bus to the next gig:

Well thirty years goin’ down by degrees

Thirty years of thank you and please

‘Til all you get is the smoker’s cough and the alcohol disease

Little children sing this song

I shifted in my seat. Thank you and please. His thumb kept going. Going down by degrees. I told myself it was just a song.

Last week we went to the Watercolor to hear another act. The next day I thought about Bill Morrissey. I looked him up on the Internet and found him dead. He had died alone on July 23 in a hotel room in Georgia. On tour. Heart attack. Age 59. They had already done the memorial concert.

My wife asked me what, “Little children sing this song,” meant in Bill’s Thirty Years lyric. Good question. It might’ve been simple bitter irony. Juxtaposition of the narator’s experience with the naïveté of a nursery rhyme. Or maybe an admonishment to learn from another’s experience.

I went back to the Watercolor again last night. There were six people in the audience, including me. It was pouring rain out. The slide guitar and the harmonica worked expertly against each other. I wasn’t all there. One can’t listen to Bill Morrissey attentively without being changed. I had been.

For some people I’ve known who have died, a simple goodbye is enough. Bill Morrissey was not one of those, but that’s all that’s left. Goodbye Bill.

[The picture above is by Dan Tappan. It originally appeared here and I have re-published it above under Dan's Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. Thanks, Dan!]

Technorati Tags: Music, RIP

Technorati Tags: Music, RIP

“LightSquared is building the ultimate dumb pipe. We want to be the dumbest wireless broadband pipe. No intelligence in our network. None. Zero.”

Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, LightSquared, at Open Mobile Summit yesterday [source].

(Note: Network, sure. Pipe, uh . . . not such a good analogy.)

Technorati Tags: Stupid Network

This year’s Nobel Prize, shared by Ralph Steinman, Jules A. Hoffmann and Bruce A. Beutler, had the momentary thrill of a grand slam home run in the bottom of the ninth, where the ball hit the top rail of the fence and bounced over with two out, a full count and the home team behind by three. (I beg indulgence from the non-baseball-savvy world — what I mean here is that the victory was unexpected and especially sweet.)

When the Prize was announced, Ralph Steinman was dead. They awarded the prize to him anyhow. Even though the Nobel Prize rules specify that winners must be living, the logic was that when the Nobel committee made its decision, Steinman had been alive.

The closest precedent may have been Stephen Kuffler, who, according to at least one writer, was considered for the Nobel Prize in 1981 with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel but had died almost a year before the award. I grew up with the Kuffler kids. My father and their father were friends. As I’ve written before in this blog, in Woods Hole the news is in the air at Nobel season. Yesterday morning when the news about Steinman’s death first hit the wires, I emailed the story to the Kufflers.

Damien Kuffler, son of Steve and himself a neuroscientist, replied:

An honor awarded is as significant as one received. Although prizes are an honor and a delight to win, but of greater importance is having put forth good and constructive efforts and having done so with integrity. Since it is all too easy to strive for honor without integrity and in so doing to win awards, relying only on being awarded prizes to be considered “good” is most unfortunate.

Those of us had the good fortune of growing up around individuals who did good science, are even more fortunate in having had the greater pleasure of knowing some of those people were both good scientists and good persons. What greater honor can there be than being considered a good person, of having integrity, and having one’s efforts be considered to have been constructive. In fact, those very individuals are themselves most fortunate and honored by having been supported in their attempts to fulfill their own passions. What could be a greater privilege?

Although by their very existence, prizes preclude most people from winning them, many people in additional to awardees are worthy of being awarded aspects of an awarded prizes. After all, it is only as a consequence of the minor and major contributors of all others working in our field of expertise that our own work can rise to be seen in the context of the broad fabric of our research field. Since no research is performed in a vacuum, the honor of any prize really goes to all those who participated in, supported and allowed exceptional work to be performed, and many of these individuals are not even scientists. In the end we can hope that we each one who contributes is a winner in our own domain.

Indeed. The sweetest victory is a constructive life well lived among good friends.

Technorati Tags: NobelPrize, WoodsHole

Source

Technorati Tags: Economics, PublicGoods

One regular reader of my blog, noting that I haven’t posted since August 1, wrote to inquire about my health. I’m fine. And Hurricane Irene was, to a first approximation, inconsequential for me and those close to me.

The reason I’m posting less these days is that I’m finding my patterns of communication changing. I’m simply using twitter more and blogging less. Accordingly, I’ve moved my sidebar twitter feed (look to your right) up closer towards the top of this page.

I’ll still be blogging here when I have something to post.

Technorati Tags: isen.blog

I can’t get this cartoon by Matt Wuerker out of my head. Brilliant. More than brilliant . . . prophetic.
You can see Matt Wuerker’s most recent work at Politico. Reprinted with permission of the artist — thanks Matt!

Technorati Tags: BarackObama, Obama, Politics, Stupidity, wingnuts

Technorati Tags: Freedom to Connect, Internet