the idiocy of copy protection

When people wonder why there is such hostility to the intellectual property framework in the United States and how companies are allowed to inflict intentional damage into their products in the name of 'copyright protection', Blizzard is a poster child for some of the worst behavior. When you buy a software package from them, you don't actually buy the right to use that software on your computer. You buy the right to maybe sometimes use that software under certain circumstances solely under Blizzard's discretion.

Oh, but I forgot, hampered functionality is what customers are demanding. After all, as senior producer Alex Mayberry helpfully explained to MTV, "with our games as a whole we're tying everything into Battle.net these days...We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line."

Ah, maybe it's just a rogue software developer. Oh, nope, senior executive Robert Bridenbecker shows it's a management decision, stating, "When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that." Let's assume the guy hasn't made it to senior management by being a total idiot himself. Which leaves the only conclusion that DRM crap is, well, crap. Or in Blizzard's words:



How do you like them stable and connected and persistent apples? Apparently Blizzard customer service likes 'em so much they don't even respond to support requests. But the exclamation points make it all okay!

Update: Contrasting the corporate spin with the actual legal agreement is downright hilarious.

13. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES.
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS FOR YOUR USE, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND THOSE ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. BLIZZARD DOES NOT WARRANT THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS OR USE THE SERVICE AT THE TIMES OR LOCATIONS OF YOUR CHOOSING; THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE; THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED; OR THAT THE GAME CLIENT OR THE SERVICE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.

in defense of delta

I've been helping prepare some info at work for a press conference tomorrow on our HVRP program, so I've got veterans on the mind. I checked YahooFinance when I got home, and a story about Delta charging soldiers bag fees naturally caught my attention.

On first glance, it appears pretty outrageous that a big company would tack on fees to members of our armed forces for checked luggage on a flight from DC to Atlanta.

But the thing is, as hard a critic as I am of failures in corporate governance, it's important to observe when the policy under scrutiny isn't actually that terrible. Delta (and the other major airlines) actually have quite friendly policies toward off duty members of our armed forces using domestic, civilian transportation networks. Relevant to this story, Delta doesn't charge any bag fees to checked luggage until the fourth bag, even though they do charge bag fees to other customers on the same routes. Southwest Airlines thinks this is such a huge issue that they've invented an entire television advertising campaign highlighting their policy that 'bags fly free'.

What this demonstrates is one specific example of the economic costs of militarism. There are the direct costs shown on the federal budget, which are astronomical. But then there are the indirect costs on the civilian economy which are even larger. It costs money to fly four bags from DC to Atlanta. It costs money to train soldiers on their return to the US from overseas deployments, on what they should expect right down to the logistical details of how to return home (the military reimburses bag fees). Somebody has to pay for all this.

It's right to be angry.

But in this case, don't be angry at Delta. The problem is DC. When you have Presidents and Congresses that are too deceitful and cowardly to fully account for all of the costs of war, those costs don't simply disappear. They're just externalized onto private actors, from the soldiers themselves to their family members and community to the various actors they encounter in the civilian economy.

And of course, if we weren't deploying troops overseas in Afghanistan, there wouldn't be any troops needing to carry four bags back from Kabul in the first place.

drug test corporate criminals

(P) So Missouri Republicans want to drug test poor people.

Might I suggest they look in the mirror? The corporatist wing of the GOP are the biggest druggies on the planet.

And they snort waaay more federal dollars.

pop quiz for the day

(R) So, you just walked into Finance 101 and the professor hands you a quiz.

Don't worry, it's not a bad dream! It's multiple choice, so you've got good odds. Much better odds than the ratings agencies seem to have of rating things.

The assertion that pricing for various financial products (stocks, commodities, derivatives, etc) is normally distributed (ie, bell curve, Gaussian, etc) is best described as

a. True
b. False

If you chose B, you're correct! (Note, if you wrote in choice c. So wrecklessly false that the regulators should be fired and the corporate executives prosecuted for threatening our national security, that answer would also be acceptable. Please be aware the NSA has been notified of your opinion, so they can forward that to Goldman Sachs, who is requesting that the FBI begin an investigation of you.)

I've been doing a little reading of book reviews to add some items to my Amazon wish list (hint, it's right here), and I have enjoyed the commentary mocking our esteemed Masters of the Universe (no, not this).

I've never excelled at the probability and statistics arena. Perhaps that's part of what makes it so juicily delicious that the guys who thought they did understand screwed up so royally. Being part of a tail, an outlier, one develops an appreciation for other outliers. The way I figure it, if you can recognize when the professor puts up the data points for the test that you're an outlier and calculate that your score was in the bottom 5% because you were over two standard deviations from the mean, that should mean you understand the material. But alas, I digress.

The point of this diatribe isn't to look back fondly upon those lovely two semesters of stats ('Quantitative Business Analysis' in the Olin lingo du jour). Rather, the point is to serve as a reminder that common sense is a bedrock principle for designing policies in the real world. The mathematics itself is rarely flawed. Unfortunately, real people have a tendency to apply math in ways where the real world doesn't match the academic assumptions. When this is done accidentally, it's sad enough.

When this is coordinated policy at some of the most powerful corporations in the country, it's infuriating. And dangerous, a threat to our welfare and even our democracy.

Perhaps the most skewered comment by an executive back in 2007 when all this was unfolding was offered by David Viniar, Goldman Sachs' Chief Financial Officer. See if you can spot the crazy.

“We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row,” said David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer.

He followed that with, oh, and the Kansas City Royals are going to win the next 5 World Series.

For the book review from Naked Capitalism on Lecturing Birds on Flying, click here. For some handy concise definitions and charts, Risk Glossary is very nice. For regulators/executives/both I'm not too fond of, see Hank 'the banks are sound' Paulson, Gary 'don't regulate derivatives' Gensler, Ed 'AIG bonus contracts are sacred' Liddy, or Lloyd 'we're fully hedged but put me in the meeting anyway' Blankfein.

And those are just the recent Goldman visionaries.

Don't even get me started on Robert 'see, Dems can represent corporate America, too' Rubin, Larry 'don't ask who paid me money when it looked like I was going to be close to the new President' Summers, Tim 'I couldn't possibly be responsible for anything, all I did was run the NY Fed' Geithner, or Ben 'at least I'm not Alan' Bernanke.

/(R) That does feel a lot better.

Now if we could just please have our trillions of tax dollars back please.

ten commandments for an economic resurrection

(P) A couple weeks ago, I wrote a detailed post emphasizing that we have options in restoring our financial system and our broader economy. We don't have to panic or accept bailouts of the very corporations that are responsible for our mess.

This morning, I'm posting a concise version that boils it down to the solutions. If you are interested in a more thorough discussion, here are the thoughts behind this.

Ten Commandments

for an

Economic Resurrection

"Human destiny will be what we make of it."

-- President Barack Obama in Prague

There’s a lot of concern about the current status of our economy. It leads to natural questions like

What, exactly, should we do about it?
Don’t we have to bail out these companies?
What alternatives do we really have?

These steps can be taken immediately to address our present situation:

1. Take over failed firms that are 'too big to fail'.
2. Break up non-failed firms that are 'too big to fail'.
3. Provide direct assistance to stimulate the economy.
4. Make the jump from a minimum wage to a living wage.
5. Use our public policy to save communities, not companies.

After these initial coping mechanisms, we can start addressing some of the broader challenges we face:

6. Re-connect wages and productivity.
7. Re-regulate industries like financial services.
8. Re-invest in our public commons.
9. Re-write our tax code.
10. Re-think our social and military policies.

Call your Senators and Representative to see what they think about bailing out people instead of companies.

well scratch that

I guess hope will have to wait another day. What a pathetic sellout. Naturally, Clinton and Obama couldn't go on record for the cloture vote.

I've thought of a fun challenge. Try to draft a bill that is so blatantly authoritarian and so blatantly a sell-out to corporate demands that the Democratic leadership would enforce party unity in opposition to it.

people are pissed

(P) And it's a good thing! Nevermind what the candidate of change says. It looks like there has been such massive contempt for the outright corruption and unconstitutionality of the FISA changes from Americans of all political stripes that we might have succeeded again in delaying two very simple, very bad ideas: broad warrantless searches by a government that wouldn't even have to make its reports public, and broad legal immunity for corporations that knowingly broke the law, repeatedly, over a number of years.

There's not much more to add about Senator Obama's stance. He's wrong on the issue, he knows he's wrong on the issue, he knows we know he's wrong on the issue, and he knows we know he has purposefully altered his stance from back when Senator Dodd, former Senator Edwards, Senator Clinton, and others were competing with him for the nomination. Either his campaign staff didn't show up for work this week, they think voters are stupid, or they actually favor the unitary executive/corporate authoritarian worldview permeating this bill. None are particularly appealing options to explore from the campaign of the de facto, barring-more-election-theft next president.

So let's talk about the good that is happening. For example, Senator Dodd continues to impress on this issue, proving that a good strategy and being right can produce results. And Senator Feingold continues to prove that one's stature is strengthened, not weakened, by taking strong positions among constituents in a state that's not solidly Democratic like New York, California-or Illinois (apparently 'centrists' and 'moderates' and 'independents', not to mention leftists and libertarians, like leaders who don't sell out to corporate criminals on basic matters of rights and accountability). And Senator Reid came out (was forced?) to publicly announce he wouldn't support the bill. Even Speaker Pelosi, after ramming the bill through the House, was forced to publicly acknowledge that perhaps spending some time debating the bill (in the Senate) would be a good thing after all.

Who knows, maybe we'll get more speeches like this one from Senator Dodd from other Democrats in the future, on this issue or something else. Click on the link, it's worth listening to. Perhaps the most exciting and refreshing speech since Edwards' talk at the winter DNC meeting last year (warning: it's a tad longer than that speech).

Of course, Senator Obama, it is never too late to change your stance to the right one. Abandon the language of fear and deception, the very rejection of which you are basing your campaign on. Americans know national security is important. We also know this bill has nothing to do with national security. Give us the benefit of the doubt; trust us to handle the Constitution the way you trusted us regarding your pastor. You just might be pleasantly surprised.