Boing Boing pointed to a response from Howard Knopf to Richard Pofhl, who wrote a response to a piece that Geist wrote on the 8th of this month. *whew* You can read the whole exchange: follow the links.. My insight is below.
Michael Geist June 8
Richard Pofhl June 12
Howard Knopf June 17
– Compared to the rest of the world, Canada’s file sharing has decreased as its broadband ranking has decreased. In other words, other parts of the world are getting faster speeds and are using those faster speeds to download.
This is the perfect corollary as to why ISPs in the U.S. refuse to – or even admit the need for – upgrade their networks. “Upgrading isn’t the problem” they say. “Traffic is the problem.” That’s a classic cop-out. Instead of upgrading their service, they buy their competitors so that no one can offer better service. All of this is done for one specific reason.
Anyone who says that the ISPs can’t see the future is blind. They know where all of this is going. Eventually, every form of media will be served across TCP/IP (the internet). They are biding their time. If they don’t upgrade their networks, and continue threatening to cut off people’s access, they hope to wait until the media companies are prepared to distribute across their pipes. Then they’ll cut exclusive deals and collude with the biggest ISPs to transform the internet into the technologies it replaced – television and radio.
That is why the ISPs continue to focus on traffic, piracy and bandwidth caps rather than network capacity and transfer speeds. They are not going to build a fast network until they can fully control the traffic that travels across it. And perhaps not even then.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WiMhsipu9DM/truth-about-myths-ab.html
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/647038
http://www.thestar.com/article/649521
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-myths-about-myths-about-file.html

Why Michael Moore is a Moron (today)

Michael Moore, June 1 2009.

Micheal Moore declared Monday that he is glad that GM has failed. (This may feel familiar to Limbaugh fans.) While he does stress and, I imagine sincerely, wish that GM would have changed the way they do business, he doesn’t go out of his way to acknowledge the great things they did for this country – and I don’t disagree. Like the scientific and mathematic contributions of the Muslim world, most of GM’s contributions are memories of a bygone era. But, like all Michael Moore pieces, once he sets up the premise, he goes wildly off track, pretending that we all live in the type of imaginary socialist commune that only a Liberal could dream up.

In his dream world, the oil companies are fleecing us, and don’t care that they are literally burning through the last reserves of fossil fuel available on the planet. This half truth is one of the few connections to the real world Moore makes on his journey. While they may or may not be ‘fleecing’ us, it is not them, but us, who are burning through the world’s oil. And why shouldn’t we? The faster it’s used the faster we get clean energy! People won’t go out of their way to replace something that is already available. And don’t make the mistake of believing that people could harm the earth beyond repair. It’s a common fallacy for the Liberal to assume that ‘Mother Nature’ needs our help. In reality, it’s the opposite. That reality, in fact, is why I find it hard to agree with most of the suggestions Moore presents in this piece.

His first ‘suggestion’ -- he calls them suggestions; in reality they are actually regurgitated Liberal straw man talking points -- I've touched on already, and his second I agree with. The U.S. cannot survive with a service industry economy alone. We need people making things, putting objects into the economy that will encourage our people to work and spend. That’s the basic tenant of a functioning economy. But, ignoring the basic tenants of everything, i.e. common sense, seems to be Moore’s strong point, and the evidence lies in the rest of his post.

Points three thru six are the same pie in the sky disproven ideas of the type that Liberals love to talk up to rally their supporters. This one in particular, mass transit, is a once and future failure. Time and time again, advocates of bullet trains and mass transit serve up the example of Japan and Europe as a success story for the U.S. to emulate. Never mind the fact that no one will choose a 17 hour train ride over a four hour flight. Moore only makes a passing remark to address the fact that no one wants to use public transportation in his 6th suggestion with this gem: “It will take a few years for people to get used to the new way to transport ourselves…” Mr. Moore, people have had the option of public transportation for more than “a few years,” and it is certainly not “new.” Trains and buses have been available for as long as the car. Again and again, people vote with their dollars for the car. Even in large metro areas like New York, people vote for cars every time they hail a taxi. If you really cared about this nation, and had any understanding of technology, you would realize that the future isn’t mass transit, but individual transit. Autonomous vehicles, powered by the highway grid they travel, which gets its energy from wind, water, solar and nuclear sources. In other words, if you are going to dream; dream forward, not in reverse.

His 7th suggestion is forward, convert those unused factories, and new government workers into a green-energy production workforce. Well, sort of forward. At least it’s an idea – and idea the new owners of GM should seriously consider. And with that, there is no more forward thinking for Mr. Moore, and no insight used to parrot his last two points: Create a tax, and give the proceeds to those willing to do as their told. His example, a two-dollar tax on gasoline. Collect and give that tax revenue to people who retrofit their houses to be more energy efficient. I can’t help but laugh at this idea when I see where our fuel tax ends up in California, or the Social Security tax ends up nationally. And retrofitting? It’s cheaper to bulldoze a house and rebuild it from the ground up with the right technology than it is to retrofit it. But really, with his party in power, why should Mr. Moore base his ideas in reality?

Because reality is what the Democrat party hopes to destroy. For example, what happens if every home in the country goes ‘off-the-grid’? (Which isn’t possible, by the way.) If it were possible, and it did happen, the party of Mr. Moore would be called upon to bail out the energy companies. Can you imagine what would happen in that scenario? Don’t worry, you won’t have to, this is reality, right?

Kindle, Free Economy, and how they are connected.

It may be old news now, but because I was looking for "thirtysomething" on DVD, I've been exposed to Amazon's capitulation to the publishers by removing "text to speech" from some books that have already been purchased. While I imagine that this is covered in some obscure "License Agreement" I still thing it's crap.
[Texas: EULA -PDF File-] Here, a Texas court decided that when you click "I accept" in a terms of service that you should have to click "I accept" again if changes are made to that service.
For example: If your ISP decides that they are going to start selling your data to third parties, the fact that the original EULA says "You consent to any changes" is complete crap.
I wonder if Amazon's EULA for the Kindle would hold up to this kind of scrutiny?
But, that's only part of the story. In the end it comes down to the fear of the free economy.
When the publishers complained to Amazon about the Text-To-Speech function of the Kindle, it opened up a huge can of bees.
1. Amazon had to decided if they were going to fight the suggestion that having an inanimate object speak words in a poor imitation of a human voice was going to provide them with a win. If Amazon had fought, they surely would have won, but at what cost?
2. While fighting, Amazon could have been subject to fines, or sanctions that forced them to disable the Text-to-speech in every one of their books. (As it stands, publishers can opt-out. And it seems that many, many of them are.)
3. While fighting, many publishers would refuse to offer their books in Kindle format, citing the short-sighted and obtuse objection that having a robot read a book is piracy.
In the end, even if Amazon won the legal battle the publishers would come to see Amazon's Kindle as an aggressor, and move to products such as Sony's reader.
As far as that goes, I can see the boardroom where this decision was made. Presented with the option of losing publishers, and a huge amount of revenue, or not really loosing any revenue to people who have already bought a Kindle... Well, I think we could all see where that choice would naturally go, I'm sad to say.
How does this apply to the Free Market? Kindle owners are rabid, jealous, cutting-edge, techno-nerds. They are the ones that will sell this product to the mainstream. And if the mainstream catches wind of something like this and interprets it in the wrong way, the Kindle will fall apart as simply another product and company that has no other interest in mind but its own. And we already have enough of those.