So the other day I was finishing off listening to This Week in Tech #155 which included guest Jason Calacanis. If you have ever listened to Jason on TWiT he speaks highly of the Tesla sports car and how electric cars will be the future. Certainly the Tesla is a great sports car after all the car can accelerate 0-60 in 4 seconds. I love fast cars. However a comment by Jason pointed out one huge issue with these cars. Jason was asked by host Leo Laporte to come up to Petaluma with the Tesla from his home in Los Angeles. Jason said he couldn’t because of the 220 mile limitation of the car. He indicated to make the trip he would have to stay overnight somewhere along the way. What good is having a car with killer stats like this if you can’t drive to places like Las Vegas, San Francisco or Petaluma from L.A. without one or more overnight stays to “charge” your car. At least with other “clean” fuels you can refuel them. No matter what until the infrastructure is built and these new energy options are somewhat widely available we won’t see them replacing the gas engine any time soon.

O’Reilly Radar is reporting that a Federal Appeals court ruled that just beause there is no exchange of money as part of the licence does not mean there is no financial damages. Clearly the court has ruled correctly here as you should be able to licence your works the way you choose. Open licences are effective for those that choose them and they should be honored. If the court had ruled differently open souce licences would have been in danger.

According to an article on Business and Media Institute FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said the Fairness Doctrine could extend to the Internet. He indicated that involving the government in net neutrality regulation would also involve them in content regulation. This regulation then could spread to blogs:

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

I don’t understand how any American liberal or conservative could support the free speech limitations placed on content by the Fairness Doctrine. It seems liberals will do anything and everything to force their agenda down Americans throats.

I was listening to the first half of This Week in Tech #155 with Jason Calacanis. During a discussion about China Jason said he didn’t think China could really innovate and grow in an entrepreneurial way under communism. The other guests and Leo Laporte were trying to call him on this. However he persisted that entrepreneurism cannot flourish with out freedom. Specifically he mentioned freedom of speech. The counter by Leo was that communist China has managed to make financial freedom available while maintaining totalitarian rule. My contention is that you do not feel fully free with out financial freedom and personal freedom. They are interconnected and you cannot be completely free with out them both. I would not be surprised if we saw revolts against the communist Chinese government. I’m not sure when but I know it’s coming. However until the Chinese can achieve personal and financial freedom the glowing entrepreneurial spirit cannot flourish in communist China.

So the Democrats are doing a full court press to get a “windfall profits tax” on Exxon and big oil. If Exxon is ripping off Americans with a 10% profit margin. Where is the call for a Windfall profits tax against Apple with their 14% profit margin? This is all a political game and a way for the “heroes” in Washington to stick it to the man. The problem is they never stop with the man. If they get away with this they will progress further and further until we find ourselves wondering why the government is controlling our wages. The rest of the developing world is embracing capitalism and shunning socialist/communist economic policies. However we in America are embracing these same failed socialist/communist policies. It will be a sad day if they succeed.

Techdirt had an interesting article about the audacious claims made by both camps in the net neutrality debate. Including the comment below:

Net neutrality proponents…. would prohibit Internet service providers from using price to address the ever-growing popularity of streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive programs that cause bottlenecks.

As Mike Masnick points out in his post that net neutrality is not going to affect the prices broadband providers can charge. As I’ve stated many times the way to solve this debate is remove the regulatory shield from these guys and open the markets. Open markets will resolve this debate and forces these players to behave. Currently we don’t have real competition.

So today I was speaking with a co-worker about a friend of his that moved to Brazil for an expat position. He mentioned that his friend was having issues with education because classes there are taught in Portuguese. This got me thinking why is that American liberals want us to teach immigrants legal or illegal in Spanish yet the rest of the world doesn’t teach in English for Americans. I’m not sure what their motives however I think it is clear they are wrong. Immersion in the English language is the only way we can effectively teach these students. Why must we alter our society to suit those who come here. This isn’t the way it has always been in America. Immigrants for years have been coming here learning our language and succeeding. By refusing to teach immigrants English we are holding them back from fully succeeding and becoming a part of the American fabric. I doubt if I dragged my family to Mexico they would teach my family in English. Why should they? Equally why should we teach them solely in Spanish?

Well in very sad news today “Spam King” Edward Davidson killed himself, his wife and 3 year old child after escaping from a minimum security prison in Florence, Colorado. Mr. Davidson was serving 21 months for serving up spam. According to reports I’ve read he pushed his wife into her car and drove off during a visit at the minimum security prison. He had been on the lam for some length of time when an injured teenager escaped his rage and got help. Police later found Davidson and his family dead in their car. Apparently there was an infant in the car that was not injured thankfully. However it is so sad this incident ended so tragically. Nothing here justified killing of his family or himself. He was obviously deranged. May god bless his departed family members and have pity on his soul.

Mahalo page on Edward Davidson

So I heard about this new software package from Microsoft via Twitter. Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy is a package that helps middle school students learn to program. The tool offers the following:

Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0 is a software package particularly designed by Microsoft to help middle school students learn computer programming. It consists of the following five components:

• The Visual Sort Designer Control is a supplementary teaching tool developed to help middle school students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular computer sorting algorithms. It supports bubble and insertion sorting. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the sorting process. It also generates sorting source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
• The Visual Search Designer Control is a teaching tool developed to help middle school students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular data search algorithms. It supports binary and sequential searches. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the searching process. It also generates source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
• The Visual Declarative Designer is an intuitive variable declaration tool designed for novice programmers. During the coding process the student can declare variables of various types and generate the corresponding source code. Visual Variable Declarative Designer provides a visual approach to variable declaration. Teachers in the Information Technology (IT) field can use this designer to teach students the basic concepts of variable declaration and naming, variable types, access modifiers, and initial values.
• The Assistant Class Designer is a visual class designer intended for novice programmers such as middle school students. During the design process, students can easily add classes, properties, methods and events. The designer also generates source code that can be inserted into a project and modified as needed. By using this class designer and code generator, complicated classes can be easily created and configured. The Assistant Class Designer provides an intuitive approach to designing classes and helps students to understand key object-oriented programming concepts such as classes, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.
• Visual Programming Flow Chart is a supplementary teaching tool designed to help students understand program control flow. It generates flow charts for functions and saves them in the JPG picture format. This tool is easily activated from the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by simply right-clicking on a function name and choosing “Generate flow chart…” from the context menu. The resulting flowchart can be customized by changing its colors and other effects. This visual tool provides an intuitive way to explore source code, to examine its control flow, and to identify logic errors.

Well if you believed everything you read on Digg sale rumors you would have seen Digg sold about a dozen times. Here is another one from CNET. I hope it true because the folks over there deserve a paycheck for their hard work.