the tindog coffeehouse

Cory Doctorow has a great review over on BoingBoing of the new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. I haven’t read the book, but it sounds interesting.

Overall, it’s a positive review, but one area where Doctorow disagrees with the author is on the subject of “generativity”, the ability to take an existing technology and use it in ways the creator never intended. Zittrain argues that this generativity allows people with bad intentions (hackers, spyware vendors, etc.) to leverage the Internet for malicious purposes, leading to increased regulation that threaten the good benefits that the Internet offers. Doctorow disagrees with this line of reasoning.

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Economics, at its heart, is the study of how people make choices when dealing with scarce resources, and no where is that more evident than at Chuck E. Cheese.

We promised Megan that we would take her to the pizza playground when she learned to ride her bike. She picked it up quickly on Monday night, so last night we held up our end of the deal.

We divided the tokens equally between her and Erin and let them pick which games they wanted to play. But we tried to explain that if you play the games which pay out in tickets, you’ll be able to be able to buy stuff at the counter later. They eventually came around and they ended up with a total of about 100 tickets.

With each girl having 50 tickets to spend, the choices of course were very limited. Megan chose a rubber snake (20 tickets), a plastic frog (10 tickets), and a flower-shaped yo-yo (20 tickets). Erin chose a pack of candy (40 tickets) and a barrette (10 tickets).

At the end, even though each girl was able to choose their own prizes, neither was completely happy. Erin was mad because Megan got three things and she only got two, and Megan was unhappy that Erin got candy and she didn’t.

And those, my friends, are what we call opportunity costs.

There’s some debate around the Interwebs about whether John McCain’s computer illiteracy makes him a less qualified presidential candidate. (The liberal blogs and tech blogs seem to think it does. No surprises there.)

Andrew Romano at Newsweek doesn’t think it matters:

For one thing, McCain’s computer illiteracy doesn’t reflect a lack of curiosity–it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain’s job in the U.S. Senate–where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers–has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary). When aides are responding to your messages and briefing you on every imaginable subject, the incentive to get online sort of disappears.

Secondly, even if McCain had spent some time surfing the Web over the last decade, it’s highly unlikely that he would’ve amassed enough technological expertise to single-handedly craft appropriate public policy responses to the “upheavals” mentioned above.

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I wouldn’t say we live out in the country, but maybe on the outer edge of the suburbs, far enough away from everything else so that it’s quieter and less congested while still being extraordinarily expensive to commute to work. (Sorry, just a little bitter over gas prices. I love living out here, I promise!)

Anyway… In our subdivision we live along a greenbelt which hasn’t been fully developed yet, which is nice because at least for the time being, we can enjoy the cottontail rabbits that live out there and frequently visit our yard. (We’ve also seen bobcats, but they’re much more elusive.)

Christy snapped a few pictures of them in our backyard a few days ago as they were out for their evening silflay:

Below: A couple of rabbits play leapfrog with each other.

Yes, I know I’m getting a little preachy here, but hear me out.

There were a couple of related stories that were published recently that I think are important to mention. One was an AP story about free speech on the Internet and how companies such as Yahoo and Google sometimes impose arbitrary limitations on that freedom. The other was a story on Ars Technica about the recent amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an amendment that not only grants telcos immunity for aiding in government wiretapping, but also gives the federal government much broader eavesdropping powers, allowing them to wiretap at will with almost no judicial oversight.

We’re at a point in history where our desire for certain freedoms and civil liberties and our use of the Internet for the exponential flood of information are often at odds with one another. We want to be freely connected to the world, yet even online, there are limits to those freedoms.

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“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” – Galatians 5:1

Let the rockets blaze across the sky
Raise the flag of faith up high
And let the doubters call it what they may
It’s Independence Day!