Prices fall, people are forced to sell, prices fall some more. Prices fall, loans go bad, the price of money goes up, and prices fall some more. It is going to happen. The only question is when.

There is a reason I never feared John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness plan, why I don’t even fear the secret NSA equivalent now being built. It won’t work. My suspicions were confirmed this week by Bruce Schneier, a name to reckon with. Schneier runs Counterpane. He is THE leading computer security expert on the planet. […]

I’m old enough to have a pleasant feeling of deja vu watching Democrats debate. As a youngster I watched the exact same debate, from the other side.  In the 1960s there were three Republican Parties: Javits Republicans, centered at the heart of Democratic power, who sought to modify (slightly) the incumbents’ programs but generally went […]

The simplest answer to the nonsense of proprietary spectrum advocates is pretty simple. The bidding was rigged. The golden age for spectrum auctions, the 1990s, were marked by outright fraud, some of it perpetrated by investor (and frequent TV guest) Mario Gabelli. A charming fellow. Knows how to fill out a suit. Even has executive-style […]

I watched part of the World Baseball Classic yesterday. Cuba vs. the Dominican Republic. No one mentioned this. The DR guys were BIG. Not just tall, not just muscular. They were steroid-filled freaks. The Cubans? Small, slim, ordinary-looking. Want to get the fight against International Communism out of this argument? OK. Turn to the previous […]

There is a reason the Bells have sicced their friends on the idea of open spectrum. It can kill them.

Recently I wrote about The Broadband Gap, the growing difference between the Internet access Americans can get and what citizens elsewhere enjoy. It surprises many people that such a gap exists. But, thanks to the Bell-cable duopoly, the fecklessness of copyright owners, and the wrong-headed policies of the Bush Administration, the gap is real. And […]

The time has come to demand that technology companies interested in real progress, and real freedom for competition, quit the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Quit it. Now. Leave. Loudly. Otherwise I brand each and every one of you as Luddites. This means you, Sun Microsystems. And you, Microsoft. It means Disney and eBay and BMG […]

Is the only way to fight piracy through Digital Rights Management, copy protection and industry pressure? A small games company called Stardock decided it made no financial sense, and decided to offer their newest game, Galactic Civilization II, without any of it. According to Techdirt, which quotes company officials, the game is now the top-seller […]

When the technology histories are written, this will be called the Gadget Decade. It is the first time in 30 years that client hardware has been the trend: The 1950s were about mainframes. The 1960s were about minicomputers. The 1970s were about PCs. The 1980s were about local networks. The 1990s were about the Internet. […]