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Pastimes : I AM A MINDLESS ZOMBIE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (171)	10/18/2002 10:41:56 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 258

Silicon.com gets a Mindless Zombie award. silicon.com Mindless Zombie alert. Three for the price of one: <...While not themselves quite living the mobile good life of South Korea or Japan, Americans are quick to point out that us Europeans have 'messed up big time' with the move to third-generation networks and handsets. The biggest, most embarrassing blunder has been the auction process several countries went through to allocate spectrum licences, lumbering major operators with billions of euros of debt. At the time, only a few enlightened souls protested against this approach. MIT guru Nicholas Negroponte was one of them, as was silicon.com columnist Sir Peter Cochrane on this side of the Atlantic. Today, that the auctions were a mistake is barely an argument. Now, the Americans know a thing or two about botched auctions. The fall out from the PCS spectrum auction in the mid to late 1990s as well as earlier, almost farcical licence-awarding can still be felt today. But the Americans have a point...> Negroponte, Cochrane and Silicon.com get the MZ award. They presumably think that everyone should sell things for less than the highest bidder will pay. Or perhaps they think that valuable public resources should be given away to cronies. Or maybe they think a lottery should be held to convert some lucky people into billionaires at the public's expense. Or maybe they think the one who pays the biggest bribe should get the goods. Or maybe they think the people who will waste most resources building white elephant networks in the desert should get the business. Or the people who lie the most. Or some other mindless way of carving up the commons. Mqurice PS: I see Negroponte is on the board of Motorola - he perhaps thinks that infrastructure suppliers should be given spectrum to go with their equipment. web.media.mit.edu Or maybe the Silicon.com people don't quote people correctly.