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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (21604)	5/24/2007 8:16:46 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Are you going to make us go through the entire batch, or can you save us a little bit of grief ;) I'll check it out, thanks. -- Here's one that I know you'll enjoy. It's from David Pogue of the NY Times. Click on the URL for best read and embedded links, not to mention the readers' comments, which are equally enlightening, if not perversely entertaining: -- Following the Money Trail Online By David Pogue \| May 24, 2007 New York Times pogue.blogs.nytimes.com The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org maplight.org . It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups. All of this is public information. All of it has been available for decades. Other sites, including OpenSecrets.org, expose who’s giving how much to whom. But nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect. If you click the “Video Tour” button on the home page, you’ll see a six-minute video that illustrates the point. You find out that on H.R.5684, the U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, special interests in favor of this bill (including pharmaceutical companies and aircraft makers) gave each senator an average of $244,000. Lobbyists opposed to the bill (such as anti-poverty groups and consumer groups) coughed up only $38,000 per senator. Surprise! The bill passed. If you click “Timeline of Contributions,” you find out that — surprise again! — contributions to the lawmakers surged during the six weeks leading up to the vote. On this same page, you can click the name of a particular member of Congress to see how much money that person collected. Another mind-blowing example: from the home page, click “California.” Click “Legislators,” then click “Fabian Nunez.” The resulting page shows you how much this guy has collected from each special-interest group — $2.2 million so far — and there, in black-and-white type, how often he voted their way. Construction unions: 94 percent of the time. Casinos: 95 percent of the time. Law firms: 78 percent of the time. Seems as though if you’re an industry lobbyist, giving this fellow money is a pretty good investment. A little time spent clicking through to these California lawmakers’ pages reveals a similar pattern in most of them. (A few, on the other hand, appear to be deliciously contrary. Jim Brulte has accepted over $67,000 from the tobacco industry, but hasn’t voted in their favor a single time. Is that even ethical — I mean, by the standards of this whole sleazy business?) For some reason, Maplight.org doesn’t reveal these “percent of the time” figures for United States Congress, only for California. You can easily see how much money each member has taken, but the column that correlates those figures with their voting record is missing. Now, not all bills exhibit the same money-to-outcome relationships. And it’s not news that our lawmakers’ campaigns accept money from special interests. What this site does, however, is to expose, often embarrassingly, how that money buys votes. I probably sound absurdly naïve here. But truth is, I can’t quite figure out why these contributions are even legal. Let the various factions explain their points till they’re blue in the face, sure — but to cut checks for millions of dollars? Maplight.org isn’t always easy to figure out, and not all of its data is complete. In fact, it’s not even evident from the list of bills which ones have already been voted on — a distinct disappointment, since the juicy patterns don’t emerge until the vote is complete. On the other hand, it’s painstakingly non-partisan. And it uses very good data; for example, the information on contributions comes from the Center for Responsive Politics (the nonprofit, nonpartisan research group behind OpenSecrets.org), and each special industry’s interests (for or against each bill) are taken exclusively from public declarations of support or opposition (Web sites, news articles, Congressional hearings and so on). Spend a few minutes poking around. Check out a couple of the people you voted for. Have a look at how often their votes align with the interests of the lobbyists who helped to get them elected. And be glad Maplight.org makes it so easy to spot those correlations. ------

To: ftth who wrote (21604)	5/25/2007 8:13:37 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

ftth, those last minute filings are something else. Lotta work, I wonder what kind of expectations most of them have. I took to reading them for amusement, at one point, and shall continue to do so probably until I'm done. A lot of rehashing, though. Maybe I'll tire of them soon, perhaps after the next one or two ;)

To: ftth who wrote (21604)	5/25/2007 9:15:11 AM
From: ftth	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 46821

In a strange way, I have a certain empathy for the FCC on this 700MHz issue. With the complex interplay of all the permutations of financial and technical parameters their ruling will affect, and without knowing for sure who will really show up for the auctions and how long they will stay in the auctions (in fact their ruling will impact who shows up for the auctions), how exactly do they decide what is best? Every issue seems to have people of at least 2 polarities, so no matter what they ultimately rule on this collection of issues, they will be scorned as being unfair and playing favorites. If they err to the side of disfavoring incumbents in their rules, will all the rhetoric from the non-incumbents actually materialize into some meaningful turn-around in our broadband duopoly? Let's say hypothetically that all incumbents were banned from the auction. Was the lack of tiny 700MHz channels of spectrum really the missing ingredient in the broadband equation in the US? Even if all the 700MHz spectrum was mandated to be wholesale-only, open access, and all the other things incumbents hate, does it really solve anything longer term? Essentially that would create "dial-up internet service qualities, but at maybe a megabit rather than 56kb." Maybe up to a few megabits in rural areas where there are fewer customers vying for the limited bandwidth. These networks won't be up and running in their initial phases for another 3 years, and won't have moderate coverage for at least another 5-7 years, and won't break 80% coverage til about 8-10 years. So I ask this basic question: Is that really a cure for what ails us? Is a "next generation dialup network" (i.e. having all the openness qualities of dialup, except via 700MHz wireless) at about a megabit, in 7-10 years from now, really an advancement that is worth all this toil?

To: ftth who wrote (21604)	5/25/2007 3:40:53 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

AIRWAVES AUCTION SHOULD AIM TO FOSTER NEW BROADBAND CHOICES [SOURCE: Center for Democracy & Technology] A substantial portion of soon-to-be-available public airwaves should be allocated to promote new competitive alternatives for general-purpose broadband Internet service, CDT said in comments filed this week with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC is facing a momentous decision over what to do with valuable wireless spectrum in the 700 MHz band that is being returned by broadcasters as part of the switch from analog to digital television signals. CDT believes that allocating substantial spectrum to broadband with preconditions for neutrality and wholesale access will be the best way to foster competition and innovation on the newly available airwaves. CDT Comments: FCC Spectrum Auction: cdt.org * Public Interest Groups Want FCC To Create Wireless Broadband Competition Art Brodsky on the subject: feeds.publicknowledge.org Discuss@isoc-ny.org lists.isoc-ny.org ------