Larry Lessig begs Democratic North Carolina governor to veto a bill that would ban community broadband networks:

On your desk is a bill passed by the overwhelmingly Republican North Carolina legislature to ban local communities from building or supporting community broadband networks. (H.129). By midnight tonight, you must decide whether to veto that bill, and force the legislature to take a second look.

North Carolina is an overwhelmingly rural state. Relative to the communities it competes with around the globe, it has among the slowest and most expensive Internet service. No economy will thrive in the 21st century without fast, cheap broadband, linking citizens, and enabling businesses to compete. And thus many communities throughout your state have contracted with private businesses to build their own community broadband networks.

This bill is a terrible idea. Banning local communities from providing services that voters are willing to pay for on behalf of corporate political contributors is fundamentally undemocratic.

I’m going to skip the diatribe about what this kind of legislation says about Republican priorities. I will add that Governor Perdue is almost certainly not going to be reelected next year, so she may as well do the right thing.

Update: Governor Perdue will allow the bill to become law without her signature, taking the most gutless possible course.

Here’s a project that looks interesting: journalist/programmer Christopher Groskopf is moving from Chicago to Tyler, Texas for reasons mostly not of his choosing. In doing so, he’s going to work to adapt the town to be what he wants it to be. Here’s a taste:

Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has government that could be opened. Tyler has news that could be hacked. Moreover, Tyler has an almost completely unexploited market. There are no hackers there. The small number of high-tech businesses that exist in the region are either web development shops serving local businesses or robotics companies.

Should be interesting.

Chris Dixon explains how Tom Pinckney got into MIT without a high school diploma:

Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter – all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges.

It’s worth noting that the incentives for college administrators are completely misaligned with this sort of flexibility in admissions standards.

In the larger sense, this is a reminder that when it comes to evaluating things, room should be made for the exercise of human judgement, especially when the relationship between measurable factors and the final results cannot be easily quantified.

Nobody rounds up the news like Dan Froomkin, and his latest piece is on the reaction among interrogators and intelligence professionals on whether torture helped us track down Osama bin Laden. Here’s the summary:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

The truth is that the US captured a number of people who knew the name of the courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden, and none of them ever gave up the name, even under torture.

It’s sad but unsurprising that having invested their legacies in the promotion and defense of interrogation techniques that the US has, in the past, treated as war crimes, the defenders of torture are absolutely compelled to make completely unjustifiable claims about its efficacy. And, as Andrew Sullivan pointed out yesterday, the eagerness of torture apologists to justify its use in response to Osama bin Laden being found shows that they were always lying about reserving it for “ticking time bomb” scenarios.

Tim Bray mourns Derek K. Miller, the Vancouver blogger who wrote about his battle with cancer right up to (and indeed, past) the end. Here’s Tim’s last bit of advice:

If your plans for your approaching death include a closing magnum opus, well then get your caching setup right.

Andrew Sullivan rounds up what we know about the trail to Osama bin Laden. Despite the fact that torture apologists, as predicted, are crediting waterboarding with leading us to bin Laden, that does not appear to be the case.

Update: You’ll want to read this post at the Inverse Square Blog as well.

I would imagine that none of this is news to people who regularly read my blog, but in the coming days people will be asking whether torture was helpful in capturing Osama bin Laden. I think the facts on the record show it did not, and if my linking can lead other people to those facts, I am happy to assist.

Here’s another exhaustive post from Naked Capitalism on the same topic.

Further Update: This is the nonsense we’re up against.