Congress has passed the Higher Education Act with special provisions requiring universities to push the content industry’s agenda on its students.  In order to get funding for students, universities will have to advertise commercial downloading services to students and educate them on a one-sided view of file-sharing and piracy.

The controversial provisions were added partly on the basis of the MPAA’s admittedly flawed research that claimed 44 percent of piracy occurred on college campuses - the number the MPAA later admitted was 15 percent.

So why are universities suddenly mouthpieces for a specific industry?  Even with flawed research, what makes universities responsible for the content industry’s obsolete business models.  The fact that these companies can’t track all the file-sharing makes me wonder how universities are expected to do better? Some artists want their content shared, others don’t, so leaving filtering up to a third parties will lead to overzealous blocking and can also affect educational uses for file-sharing tools.

Universities and consumer groups were able to block this bill last year when the MPAA included requiring filtering technology in its wishlist. William Patry points out that the content industry likely postponed filtering technology - doing it all at once caused too much backlash.

What concerns me is the silence among academic, from administrations and students.  College campus are the front line in the content industry’s Save Our Obsolete Business Model campaign simply because it’s easy to pick on students. There’s a reason the RIAA avoids suing students at Harvard.  Unfortunately, most universities are letting a lone industry and the government turn places of education into propaganda mouthpieces with a rare few standing up for their student’s rights.  Regardless of your position on file-sharing, universities should not be responsible for doing what the content industry already can’t do itself.

And universities need to stand up for themselves and student’s rights. What better way to educate than to lead by example.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been open about his lack of computer knowledge, saying “I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get.” He adds he’s “learning to get online” and “will have that down fairly soon.” He doesn’t read email and won’t blog. McCain’s aide Mark Soohoo added “you don’t have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country.”

Is that true? With so many technology issues going unaddressed or made worse with bad legislation, can we support a politician who isn’t fully informed.

Politicians, especially presidential candidates, should have a familiarity with the major technology trends, issues, and debates much like they would any other field from energy to foreign policy. I don’t expect candidates to design their own web pages or develop PHP applications, but using email and and search engines should be second nature.

The United States has no broadband policy, an out-of-date legal system unable to cope with online issues, and a steam of misinformation about security and privacy risks all likely do to a legislative body uneducated on the driving force of the world economy.  Politicians should know more than the average person because they have to make decisions that affect everyone else. Advisors are there to help filter the information, but some knowledge needs to come from the politicians, otherwise how can we trust they’ll make good decisions.

And admitting you don’t know something 73 percent of Americans use regular isn’t a good decision.

The upcoming G8 summit has many important issues to discuss - climate change, world poverty, and file-sharing. That’s about it. Everything else is fixed.

On topic for the G8 is the secret (yes, secret) Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that only became public knowledge after details were posted on WikiLeaks.  The ACTA is a new treaty being written completely in secret for the purpose of restricting international piracy, allegedly allowing border security to check your iPod for illegal downloads, bring criminal charges against file-sharers, and require ISPs to police their networks.  While the public and consumer groups have not been privy to the treaty negotiations, a RIAA got a chance to submit its wishlist.

Aside from the improprieties of privately writing legislation, why is the G8 taking the time to prop up one industry’s unwillingness to adapt to the internet.  As I’ve written before, the entertainment industry does not have a right to revenue.  It’s their job to find business models that work, not the government’s.

The entertainment industry has pushed many copyright requirements into trade agreements with other countries (often falsely referred to as free trade).  The argument is these laws are needed to encourage innovation and content creation when in reality, these laws only help current copyright holders, hampering development in other countries who now have to spend money policing their citizens.

While several countries around the world waste time spoon feeding copyright holders, I’d have hoped the G8 wanted to at least pretend it cared about helping solve the world’s important crisis, of which their are many. It’s even listed first on the official website, “protection of intellectual property rights.” Piracy is not a world issue, even if the revenue losses the entertainment industry makes up were true.  That’s because it’s not the government’s job make you money - that’s your job through innovation and competition.  The G8 should try dealing with the food crisis, climate control, oil prices, genocide, poverty, human rights, and terrorism to name a few.  Of course, the U.S. attorney general says piracy funds terrorism.  Yeah, that’s convincing.

[Via CustomPC]

Government’s love losing. That’s the only way to explain the constant addition of Wars on _______ they keep launching. There’s the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, and the still ramping up War on Piracy which might soon be the legal responsibility of the executive branch. Since we have so much time and money to waste, I wanted to suggest some other wars that need to be fought. I’m sure with enough resources, we can wins these in a few hundred years.

7. Software bugs

An exciting new problems arrives, you install in, and quickly boot it up only to find out you have to type upside down to make it work. Publishers race their products to market with the piece of mind they can release patches at any time to fix bugs. It’s much more profitable to let other people pay to be your quality assurance team rather than pay one yourself.

Estimated cost to fight: $5 billion/year

Length of war: 75 years when computers become smart enough to conquer the world, but crashes after an automatic Windows update

6. Bathroom graffiti

The obsolete business model for dating services needs to be replaced by superior technology. Writing girl’s phone numbers or pictures of penises should be kept in controlled, safe environments like the World Wide Web. The last thing anyone wants to think about in the bathroom is how cool Dan is.

Estimated cost to fight: $200 million/year

Length of war: 50 years when we discover a safe way to hold it in

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Last night’s Daily Show reveal the news media’s true goal this election cycle - to make it never end. Asif Mandvi had his fingers crossed as Hillary Clinton, on the night Obama won enough delegates to claim the nomination, refused to concede defeat. If she ends her campaign, how will three 24-hour news channels fill up their time?

This entire primary season has been an effort in futility for anyone seeking information. Beyond the wasted time on out of context quotes, inflammatory relationships, and flag pins, the media punditry has desperately tried to frame this election as a horse race where if you turn away for a second, you’ll miss the crucial turning point. The result has been a ratings boon for the cable networks, with CNN seeing 90 percent increases over last year’s first quarter. MSBNC grew 68 percent. Fox News hasn’t benefited as much, with a 14 percent increase. The Democratic candidates had shut out the station from interviews until Hillary Clinton went on Bill O’Reilly’s show, giving his show a 30 percent boost in total viewers.

The 24-hour news networks relied on the image of a close race to build its ratings and are continuing the mirage heading into the general election. I don’t mean to say Hillary Clinton and John McCain had/have no chance of winning, but the odds were/are so against them. The media knows a close race is better television than a sure thing and that is causing them to be unobjective in their reporting, often overblowing non-issues in the hopes that flag pins and Reverend Wright would keep the race going.

The general election looks be a Democratic landslide even as polls show Obama and McCain are in a statistical dead heat. These polls do not account for a unified Democratic party, one this split between rabid Clinton and Obama supporters who, very likely, have no intention of voting for anti-abortion, pro-war Republican McCain even though they say so now in polls. McCain has already collected support his primary challengers just as Obama will once Clinton accepts her 2nd place finish. The result will be an unprecedented coalition of the two biggest voter and fundraising networks in history, a network McCain can’t catch up to even if he didn’t have a fundraising issue.

The other point ignored by polls is that the electoral college counts, popular vote doesn’t. I think the popular vote will end up close between Obama and McCain. The electoral college will be a Democratic landslide benefited by anti-war and anti-Republican sentiments, McCain’s lackluster appeal to hard conservatives, and Obama’s massive appeal to the youth and African-Americans. Democratic wins of special elections in Illinois (Dennis Hastert, former speaker of the house’s seat), Louisiana, and Mississippi (Trent Lott’s seat former seat), by sizeable margins spell doom for Republicans. McCain might toy with winning states like New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, but he has to hold prior swing states like Ohio, Florida, and Iowa while playing defensive in Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, and in optimistic circles, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Kansas, Montana, and Texas. Short of an Obama imposition, it’s impossible to see an electoral scenario where McCain can win.

But the news media doesn’t want to entertain electoral math. It’s more fun to pretend Obama has a white problem (how many African American’s live in Montana, Iowa, and Wisconsin?) or highlight how much independents love McCain. It keeps the race looking closer than it really is.

I don’t want CNN to call the race for Obama or ignore McCain as an also-ran. Their responsibility should be to inform us of the facts of the campaign - who did what when and why. What if questions or conjecture have no place in objective journalism. Blogs, on the other hand, can go conjecture crazy. Without some source for objective, investigative reporting on both candidates, this election is going to once again defined by talking points, 527-organization, and out-of-context crap that doesn’t matter. Change and leaders we can believe in requires a media to change and lead.

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John Grapper of the Financial Times points out (registration required) U.S.’s lagging infrastructure from worn out roads to spotty cell coverage and poor broadband penetration.

If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

Throw this on the pile with healthcare and green technology and it’s scary to think how the richest country in the world can keep calling itself that.  Creative Class Exchange and Economist’s View echo Grapper’s concerns. Thomas Friedman wrote in The World is Flat how he traveled up and down Japan on the bullet train, easily sending emails all along the way.  I compare London’s amazing subways with a new train every 2-3 minutes to Boston’s horrendous 10-20 minute waits, even during peak hours (and don’t get me started on the $20 billion Big Dig).

This faulting infrastructure costs U.S. money and productivity.  We can’t get municipal wireless into major cities and the FCC would rather limit cable companies than let them spread broadband around the country.

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Environmental activists threw pies at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman while he was speaking about energy at Brown University Tuesday. Friedman spoke about the need for green and sustainable technology (his Power of Green article is a must read), believing developing green technology will make America “stronger, more innovative, [and] more energy secure.”

Protestors threw two green-colored pies at Friedman at the start of his speech, though he managed to dodge most of the dessert. A flier circulated by the protestors said:

“Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet, for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change.”

I want to know what the protestor’s alternative is to Friedman’s suggestions. Alterative power sources are inefficient and expensive still. Even as oil jumps in price, coal remains cheap but dirty and developing nations like China just want power, at the cheapest price. In the Power of Green, Friedman’s argument for market forces is the need for green technology at the “China price,” namely at the price China currently pays for coal plants. China could make cleaner coal plants, but they cost 40 percent more to build and are 20 percent less efficient. And when they’re building two 500-megawatt power plants a week, they need every drop of power they can get.

It’s not that China, India, or America don’t want to become green (well, certain oil companies might be against it). The problem is we don’t want to sacrifice. China estimates pollution costs its economy $67 billion, so fixing the problem is in the nation’s interest, but it’s just too expensive - the technology isn’t there yet. Friedman wants the government, especially the American government, to take an active role in developing green technology at the China price, creating something like the Manhattan Project but around green offering a market incentive to get companies and technologists working on the climate crisis.

Friedman regularly promotes free market ideals, recognizing benefits from outsourcing and free trade helping build up developing countries to match the developed world faster. I agree oil companies, who are making record profits, have little incentive to invest in new technology - its likely we’ll have enough oil during current oil executive’s lifetimes (even if it costs $10 a gallon). With government leadership and incentive, in the form of tax breaks and research grants, can spurn a new green industry that can literally save the planet.

But throwing pies is totally rational. After all, it’s not like we’re also in the middle of a food crisis.

Update: April 24th, 2008, 2:50 p.m. - Here’s a shaky video of the pieing.

There are lots of sexy political issues, usually following whatever George Clooney is promoting that week, and sadly patent law is not one of them. Intellectual property issues and patent law is too complex to be highlighted on billboards, and from the public’s perspective, doesn’t affect our lives too much. But the more I learn about these issues, the more I realize how much America’s patent system is hurting us economically and intellectually.

But in my research and discussions with people, I found myself challenged as to describe my position. I am not specifically anti-copyright or anti-patents and wish there was a term to describe my political position so I knew what to call the Facebook group.

I would like to recommend Pro-Innovation as the term.

Pro-Innovation has that positive marketing spin, being for something rather than against something else. And innovation is good, and in truth, the intended purpose of a patent system. Unfortunately, for all the conventional wisdom, there is no evidence that more patents helps innovation, rather it hampers innovation more than helps.

The Pro-Innovation position looks to bring back American intellectual property laws to their minimalist state as dictated by the Constitution “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Meaning any patent or copyright is granted only to promote the development or more and better stuff and only granted for a limited time (70 years after the creator dies seems a little long).

This is an extremely complex issue that I will be tackling more on Prodigeek, but I wanted to throw my suggestion in the ring. I have already trademarked Pro-Innovation and expect a quarter every time somebody says it.

Another primary, another exit poll, and more pundits proclaiming the what ifs that have yet to become reality.  Mississippi voted yesterday and its sizeable black population gave Barack Obama a sizeable win.  But his modest turnout of white votes are once again giving pundits pause.

I ask why?  Time.com’s Michael Duffy writes "Only a Democrat who could win 35 to 40 percent of the white vote, while holding onto a lopsided percentage of blacks, could put the state in play in a head to head match with a Republican in the fall" saying Obama’s 30 percent of the white vote falls short.

But politics is not a zero-sum game.  White votes for Clinton do not instantly transfer to John McCain in the general election, just like Clinton’s wins in swing states Ohio do not mean only she is allowed to win it come November.  Exit polls in Ohio showed 44 percent would be satisfied with either candidate.  50 percent of them voted for Clinton.

Also, exit polls are showing just how hard it is to predict some states and voting groups.  Obama faired poorly with whites in Mississippi and Ohio but won the white vote in the larger Virginia, a once solid Republican state that will be a major swing this year.  And how many black people voted in Iowa and Wisconsin?

This election cycle has simply proved how little all the pundits (including myself) can know and predict.  But that hasn’t stopped the predicting and analysis which is captivated by the fight at hand without considering how things we didn’t predict will change everything else.  And remember votes don’t disappear after they’re cast.  We get to do this all over again in November.  I can’t wait.

Running for president in the 21st century calls for a different kind of politician and especially, new forms of political geeks.  From all the blogs, commentary, stats, videos, websites, and news shows, a political junkie can get quickly overwhelmed.  With the election still churning along, here are some ways geeks can best support and learn about the candidates.

Social networking

Facebook and MySpace haves several groups, some official, some not, dedicated to the candidates.  You can be friends with all the candidates, receive updates about events, and meet other people who share your views.  Most impressive has been Barack Obama’s creation of his own social networking site, My Barack Obama, where you can create your own profile, blog, groups, etc. all dedicated to the one candidate, allowing the common voter to help organize other voters in their neighborhood as well as provide the campaign.

You Digg them

Ron Paul would be president right now if it was up to voters on Digg and Reddit.  The internet sensation had an army of loyal social bookmarking power users who propelled any news story about him to the top of popularity.  Didn’t do much to help his campaign (he did raise lots of money), but having fans who care that much has got to matter for something.  They even…

…Hold virtual world parties

Yes, Ron Paul would also be voted president of Azeroth.  On New Year’s, World of Warcraft fans held a rally for Ron Paul, the only candidate on the Azeroth ballot, I believe.  Several candidates like Obama and John Edwards created spaces on Second Life, but since there was no porn or gambling there, popularity didn’t ignite.  Nevertheless, dedicating the next raiding party of a candidate has got to be the best show of support.

User generated content

Blog from events, show off pictures, post videos on YouTube.  Instead of doing their own research, mainstream news networks love using user-generated videos and research (or lack there of) to mull over for hours on air.  This means you could get your 15 minutes of fame while supporting John McCain.  That’s my rap.