(Certainly a reasonable pitch… – promoted by odum)

Less than 24 hours from now, 600-plus Vermont Democrats will caucus in Barre and choose six of our own to carry the torch for Barack Obama as national convention delegates in Denver.

I’m casting my six votes for grassroots activists who, like me, spent months pounding the pavement for Barack in Vermont and the surrounding states. If you go to Barre, I hope you’ll do the same.  

Together we will create the change we so desperately need.

Obama ’08 – Yes We Can!

Jamie

P.S. I welcome your comments on which grassroots activists have earned your vote.

If you’re really paying painfully close attention, you’ll notice that the newsfeeder link on the right-hand side of the page has changed. Previously, it just displayed the three most recent VPR stories. What I’m doing now is keying it to display the most recent stories by (in my opinion) Vermont’s top political/statewide journalists. Nothing’s showing yet, but the last one took a while to work, so we’ll see.

And it’s a work in progress. I’d like to include Seven Days’ Ken Picard, for example, but Google doesn’t recognize Seven Days as a news source for purposes of generating a keyword-driven, readable rss feed (and 7 Days own website doesn’t have specialized feeds of that sort themselves). I’m still on the fence about whether or not to add Hallenbeck. I probably will. And heck, if it works, we can see about making it prettier and expanding it to add reporters from some of the more local papers.

In a major victory for consumers’ rights, a federal district judge has firmly rejected software vendor AutoDesk’s claim that its license agreement restricts its customers from re-selling the software they lawfully owned.

. . .

This proposition is being put to the test in the context of eBay sales. After Autodesk repeatedly alleged that Timothy Vernor was violating copyright law by attempting to sell copies of Autodesk’s copyrighted AutoCAD software on eBay, Vernor (with the able assistance of Public Citizen attorney Greg Beck) asked the court to declare that his activity was legal under the first sale doctrine. Autodesk predictably responded by insisting that AutoCAD is licensed, not sold. Nonsense, said the court — Autodesk may have called the transfer a license, but it didn’t look much like one. For example, the license didn’t require consumers to return the software when they were done with it, nor to make ongoing payments for continued use. Thus, the “license” might put some restrictions on use, but those restrictions did not void the first sale doctrine.

(If It Looks Like a Duck . . . Seattle Judge Finds Software Was Sold, Not Licensed, Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Rulings favoring the purchaser of products are hard to come by nowadays in the United States, and it certainly is good to see this one. You buy … you own it! Doesn’t matter what the seller wants you to believe.

Why does it take a court ruling to state this?

..That quote was toward the end of a Rutland Herald article about getting the malfunctioning crane back up and functioning. Headlined :Yankee analyzes crane test data …I would think the real story is the increased radiation readings coming from the cask.Enough concern existed to check monitors at the local school .A little bit more about the aging Vermont Yankee crane “mishap” last week creeps out.The only mention of specific radiation levels is those at the frencline not near the cask or in the plant .

The cask involved in last week’s incident is still missing its permanent outer shield and as a result is emitting slightly higher levels of radioactivity into the reactor building.

Workers are using additional precautions around the cask, according to Williams, and the additional radioactivity is remaining in the reactor building.

Sharon Moffatt, acting health commissioner, said Thursday new tests conducted by Vermont Emergency Management earlier in the day showed there was no increase in fenceline radiation emitted by the plant.

Moffatt said she consulted with Bill Irwin, the Department of Health radiological health expert, about the data collected by people in the field. She said that the radiological monitor at the nearby Vernon Elementary School was also checked to make sure it was functioning properly.

“It confirmed that the readings were normal, and within the background range,” she said, of 10 to 15 microroentgen per hour readings.

“We reviewed the data and we’re not seeing any elevations or reasons for concern,” she said.

Yup, its all the big news. Karl Rove got subpoenaed over the recently reinvigorated concerns about the about the politicization of the Department of Justice. Yeah! That’ll show him! Can’t ya just smell the justice! I know long-lost GMD front pager Kagro X can over at dKos:

The bad news comes in two parts:

  1. In case you’ve forgotten, Karl Rove’s already been subpoenaed. A year ago. By the Senate Judiciary Committee. Never testified. Never held in contempt. So how scared do you think he is this time?

  2. It was also about a year ago that the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. Their testimony was demanded and refused over a series of sliding deadlines over July of last year. A year later, neither one has testified, or even shown up at a hearing in person to say why they refuse to testify.

So I’m thinking – hey Representative Conyers, Senator Leahy, I’d like a subpoena too! Why not? I can magnet it on my fridge with all the other cool crap I like to have on display, as well as the menu from the local Chinese restaurant. At this point, I think I’d find the menu more threatening. I mean, I can’t pronounce half that stuff.

Okay, I know this is blowing my own horn, but I can't help it.

I've mentioned before that I'm a regular viewer of bloggingheads.tv, a site that posts diavlogs, generally setting up disagreements between the two interlocutors.

Today I get Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus not only to mention one of my comments, but to both agree with it.

We’ve read a lot on this site about the conflicts between the rapidly developing, community-based broadband network in central Vermont – ECFiberNet – and the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, which is the body created by 2007’s Act 79 to implement the Governor’s ambitious “e-state” project, covering Vermont with broadband and cellular access by 2010. A lot of what we’ve heard is sketchy – stories that the VTA was rejecting requests for startup assistance from ECFN by placing unreasonable, even nonsensical demands on their viability in order to qualify for help. The story broke in the Times Argus, and what was leaking out was replete with contradiction and uncoordinated info. There were bad feelings on all sides, and when the dust settled, ECFN got some assistance (not what they wanted), but everyone seems to be holding hands and singing kumbaya for now.

But looking a bit deeper into the mandate of the VTA reveals that, not only is this not a match made in heaven, it’s really not a match at all, as the way the legislation manifests the laudable goals of universal broadband and cell access counterinuitively put ECFN and VCF on very different paths.

First of all, by “broadband,” the VTA means broadband. 1.5 mbps or higher, not the kind of mini-pipes offered by a lot of ISP’s as “broadband” simply because they’re not dial-up.

Now in terms of universally access to broadband service, the gold standard for a project like this is in my native state of Kentucky – a project called Connect Kentucky, which has been lauded far and wide, and is a model currently being exported around the country. CK works by seeding and supporting projects not unlike ECFibernet, and continues to be wildly successful, putting Kentucky in the forefront of creating such an “e-state.” In the e-state legislation, part of the VTA’s mandate has rhetoric consistent with this approach, and the VTA is directed to support such community based startups. Here’s the nice language:

(5)  to support and facilitate local initiatives to extend the availability of mobile telecommunications and broadband services, and to promote development of the infrastructure that enables the provision of these services;

(6)  to provide resources to local, regional, public and private entities in the form of loans, grants, and other incentives funded through bonded capital and other resources;

The problem is, that it is within that very admonition that the clumsiness of the legislation really manifests itself.

To acheive that kind of coverage with that size of a pipe, you’re looking at either a wireless infrastructure or fiber optics. The obvious choice for a project like ECFibernet is fiber, for obvious reasons. The appeal of fiber in a broader sense – especially with a community based project like ECFN or the projects supported by CK, is that it affords an opportunity to maintain some community control over the infrastructure. Why does this matter? You’ll hear different answers to those questions, but the ones you’ll get from me is that it gives a leg up on issues of open access, specifically the long-litigatorally-defined principle that competing telecommunications companies have access to existing infrastructure (a principle not on the chopping block currently, but one that’s never quite 100% in the clear), and of course, the principle of Net Neutrality, which is currently a hot topic. Net neutrality is the principle that the owners of differing segments of the physical internet infrastructure should not be able to use that power to preferentialize specific content over others – giving bandwidth priority to sites they want to promote, while leaving others (like pesky blogs) to scrape for what’s left, possibly making their real-time loading speed on a subscriber’s computer so slow as to drive off traffic. Public control of a piece of that infrastructure makes controlling that kind of policy at that level less problematic.

There’s also the less tangible positives of the CK (and EC Fibernet) model – that there is community organizing happening. Local citizens and businesses coming together to buy into this sort of infrastructure development means a shared investment in, and commitment to the advantages that such access brings. And that’s a very cool thing.

But the problem is threefold: One – the VTA’s mandate is not simply boadband access, but cellular access as well. Two – the VTA has a deadline of 2010 to reach its goals, and three – to make this happen, the VTA has bonding authority of $40 million (and if that sounds like a lot – with a project like this, it isn’t, and I’ll explain why).

Combining that timeframe with that mandate equals one approach, and one approach only: wireless.

The VTA is squeezed into that singular approach by the text of the legislation. While they can look to places where broadband service basically is available and nudge or incentivize providers to scootch their infrastructure down remote, uncovered roads and spots here and there, they are basically looking at filling in the cellular deadzones in Vermont themselves, as there is no financial incentive to spend a lot of money on expensive infrastructure enhancements to broaden coverage to geographically large remote areas with very few potential paying subscribers. That means building towers (or financially seeding the building of towers) themselves in these areas, and using the Public Service Board to make sure providers take advantage of that VTA controlled infrastructure as part of doing business in Vermont. And since $40 million dollars is not going to go that far in such a major project, they’ll be needing every penny – and will by necessity, piggyback broadband access onto that wireless infrastructure. With that money, time and mandate, there really is no other direction for the VTA to proceed. They will likely be going public with the nitty-gritties of such a plan in the not-too-distant-future.

Which, frankly, sucks. Since Vermont is the size of a county in many other states, one could make the argument that such an overarching approach might make sense, but the fact is, given the challenges of mountain ranges and physical accessibility, Vermont is very much a state, and a community-based seeding process like the tried-and-true KC model would be more appropriate, and more advantageous for all the reasons discussed before. You can certainly forget about impacting neutrality under this model, as the real infrastrucure in play will be the airwaves – airwaves owned and controlled almost exclusively by AT&T and Verizon. Policy issues around access are hot, heavy, and a bit scary regarding the control and sharing of wireless frequencies, and Vermonters will simply be further put at the mercy of federal policymakers under this scenario.

So where does a project like ECFibernet fit into this approach?

Simple – it doesn’t.

A project like ECFN, given the constraints of time and money on VTA’s only available path to proceed, can at best be a distraction, and at worst a drain on resources, but the excepted bit from the legislation above mandates that VTA encourage just this kind of thing.

If you’ve gotten this far on this topic, you’re probably a serious geek, so I’ll give you a geek analogy. It’s sort of like the bit of mission parameter programming slipped into the HAL9000 computer that was fundamentally at odds with the HAL’s fundamental programming guidelines (as revealed by Clarke in, coincidentally, 2010: Odyssey Two). And we all know how well that went. Not to suggest that the VTA is going to go crazy and send a homicidal spacepod after David O’Brien, but… y’know. This is the internet. I’m a geek. What can I say?

So ECFN never had much of a chance with this group, and it’s likely that the support they have received was the best attempt by the VTA to accomodate their contradictory mandate. In fact, given that the initial organizing success of ECFN could easily spur more such projects locally – all of which will be coming to the VTA for assistance, it is likely the reason why VTA recently went public with the sweeping overview of their approach.

From the Freeps last week:

MONTPELIER — The Vermont Telecommunications Authority has decided to pursue a largely wireless strategy as it tries to bring higher speed Internet access to rural parts of the state, but some critics are questioning whether wireless is best.

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VTA Executive Director Bill Shuttleworth said the authority, created by legislation passed in 2007, would use the majority of its $40 million in state bonds to build hundreds of towers providing wireless Internet and cell phone service.

Smart move. With this out there, the VTA can now point at a plan on the table that clearly doesn not include startups like ECFibernet, and keep from wasting everybody’s time.

As for the future, expect to hear a lot more about this in coming months – and especially in the next legislature. If the VTA wants to meet that 2010 goal, they’ll need to start building towers by spring of ’09 – and those towers will have to be placed in some of the most environmentally sensitive land in the state, whether it be the northeast kingdom, Bennington County, or places in between. There will also be considerable concerns over aesthetics, as towers will have to extend over treelines on onto ridgelines. In 2007, the legislature passed sweeping exemptions to Act 250 that would allow such construction to be fast tracked – even over the concerns and authority of local communities – given a priority ruling by the Public Service Board. The potential is certainly there for some fireworks.

I’m makin’ popcorn.