Luis Villa’s Blog

Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader:

• shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ So true. Via.
• I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since a non-neutral network is yet another way to lock out competitors.
• “White space activity today is sort of our last hope to get some good spectrum.” — Craig Mundie, Microsoft. Possibly very true, depending on what happens with the D block. I wish both Microsoft and Wu luck.
• ‘Active investors are silly people.‘ The interesting question, in my mind, is why so many people are so irrational. This is a gold mine for the behavioral economists, and a nice counter-argument for when someone tells you that better information creates more efficient markets. (See also and also, but I long for a Love-ian explanation of why this happens in theoretically rational markets with nearly perfect price information.)
• Colin, great post, thanks.
• I’m not sure I entirely agree with SFLC’s position on the MS Open Specification Promise, but anyone who is relying on the OSP should read this, one way or the other.
• I’m likely to be way more involved in my journal next year; Crooked Timber’s stimulating bits on the subject of free academic journals are therefore timely.
• This book looks fascinating for my next bout of free time: ‘Patent Failure.‘ via Patently-O.
• Next week I’ll be in Redmond for their Technology Summit; my hopes are similar to Matt’s for OSBC. But we’ll see.
• Felten doing interesting thinking on Privacy, and particularly why people say they want privacy and yet do so little to actually achieve it. He identifies legally binding commitments to privacy as part of the problem- everyone assumes that the companies they give their data to will be promiscuous with the data anyway (see, e.g., non-denial denials), so they don’t bother to discriminate between companies. Interesting idea; not sure if it is really that important in practice, though.
• Walt Mossberg dropped by my Telecoms class last week and gave an extended discourse on why he calls the telecoms Soviet ministries. Interestingly, Lessig apparently was saying things recently about blowing up the FCC as well.
• Mark Pilgrim asks an interesting question about iphone and GPL; I haven’t had time to think about an answer. (My immediate guess is that, possible tivoisation issues aside, GPL v3 is probably better than v2 on this account because of Section 6(d).)
• In case you’re a European and think software patents don’t apply to you, a friendly reminder that they do.
• I’ve wanted to do this to the Boston and NYC anti-terror posters for years; I hope they’ve actually been printed and put in trains.

Enough for today, I’m going out in the sunshine.