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The Ninth Circuit US Court held yesterday that P2P software makers Grokster and StreamCast are not liable for copyright infringement by users of their software. The key difference between this software and Napster (which was, of course, smacked down with extreme prejudice) is that Napster used a central server to index files shared on the network, whereas these companies do not. Of course, this ruling just gives the copyright industry a greater incentive to bribe Congress to pass more absurd legislation restricting what kinds of software we can use and write. ...

Kevin Drum explains how to figure out the percentage chance that a candidate is actually leading in a state based on their lead in a close poll and the poll’s margin of error. Update: The CJR Campaign Desk also has an explanation of margin of error.

I’ve created a tag in del.icio.us for aggregating information about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, swiftvets. Please feel free to add on.

An Iraq veteran rejects the war in Iraq.

Former Pentagon testing chief Phillip Coyle emailed Noah Schactman at Defense Tech to explain why the recently deployed missile defense system won’t work, and why pretending like it will is a danger to us. It’s hard to think concretely about government spending, given that there’s so much of it, but remember that we’re spending billions of dollars on this thing, and it has literally no chance of working. It’s stunning.

After seeing it mentioned at Medley, I picked up a copy of Paste magazine last night. It’s a music magazine that comes with a sampler CD with songs by the musicians featured in the magazine, and it’s really really good. What I like best about it is that it seems to be directly targetted at people around my age, so the writers have had the same formative music experiences that I’ve had. I don’t know if I’m going to subscribe yet, but I am going to try to catch the next issue on the news stand. (The editorial in the issue I bought says this is an extra-twangy issue, so under ordinary circumstances it may be two poppy and not enough rootsy for my tastes.) ...

So, the other day I made my first political donation ever. Well, actually my wife made our first political donation. Not counting the boxes you can check off on your state income tax to fund judicial elections. A canvasser for the DNC came by our house seeking donations, and my wife made a $100 donation to the cause. Under ordinary circumstances she would have said no, but I’ve been mentioning all summer that I think we should pump some of our hard earned dollars into the political process, and I even made sure that she gave them our name and other information so we could get on the mailing lists. (Now that I think about it, I imagine that they have to take down your information anyway to make sure you’re not violating election laws by donating too much.) My reasons for donating are pretty straightforward – I’m interested in how much it costs to buy access to politicians. I figure I’ve taken the first step, which is getting my name on the list of people who are willing to cough up money to support Democratic candidates. The question then becomes how much money you have to give yourself or get other people to give to get someone to listen to you. This question has been much on my mind since I read somewhere that Robert Rubin couldn’t get an audience with the movers and shakers in the Democratic party until he brought in massive amounts of campaign money. He then became Secretary of the Treasury, and by most accounts did a great job. I’d be pretty interested in talking to some politicians about various issues, especially those near and dear to my heart and more in my area of expertise, like DRM. My theory is that I have to pay them to get them to listen to me. That donation was the first part of the experiment. Given the fact that I’m not rich, it will be interesting to see where the experiment leads. ...

Unsurprisingly, people are clamoring for more and more feed splicing on the part of FeedBurner. Given that “feed splicing” is really just a form of presenting multiple RSS feeds, it’s looking like the difference between Bloglines and FeedBurner is one of degree rather than kind. They’re both services that monitor feeds and then present them in different ways. I’d think that Bloglines could be in the feed splicing business next week if they so chose. What this really all points to is how compelling the idea of publishing your content in a machine readable format really is. I’m not sure if this is what people were talking about when they were harping on the semantic web, but it might as well have been. ...

Since last night, I’ve been thinking more about the Phil Agre essay What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? After giving it some thought, I’ve realized that the essay is fundamentally flawed in that Agre saddles conservativism with thousands of years of history, but he puts forth a form of liberalism that means something very specific to him, and compares that to conservatism. But if you’re going to take an expansive view of conservativism, you have to do the same thing to liberalism if you’re going to be honest about things. Defined most basically, conservatism favors the status quo, and liberalism opposes the status quo. Agre is right that liberalism is basically a movement of conscience. The idea of liberalism is that we can build a society that is more just, more egalitarian, more compassionate, more whatever than society as it exists. The basic conservative argument is that when liberals try to do this, they just screw things up. If you’re going to make conservatism accountable for its full history, you have to do the same for liberalism, and liberals have shown poor judgement in the past when it comes to putting their trust in people and institutions that promise to shake up the status quo. If we’re going to pin the pharaohs on the conservatives, we have to pin communism and socialism on liberals. There have been plenty of other revolutionary concepts that liberal people have supported out of conscience that really have turned out to screw things up. Conscience is never enough. Agre knows this, as he factors it into his personal definition of liberalism, but that doesn’t exonerate liberalism in the larger definition. The other problem I had with the essay is that it doesn’t really make it very clear which conservatives are dupes and which are knowing supporters of the aristocracy. As Agre points out repeatedly, nobody wants to come out and say that they’re a shill for the aristocracy, and he also makes the point that many conservatives don’t even know what conservativism is really about. So which ones do? And what is the nature of that knowledge? I find it impossible to believe that even big name conservatives would define themselves as supporters of the aristocracy, so while it seems clear that conservatism does perpetuate the aristocracy that Agre describes, I find it hard to believe that very many people accept that as a goal. I do think that conservatism does more openly embrace the idea of preserving society’s current institutions, some of which are undervalued by liberals. Anyway, this whole argument strikes me as sophistry. If people are unknowingly supporting the aristocracy, then shouldn’t he address what it is that they do knowingly support rather than dismissing them as willing dupes? ...

UCLA professor Phil Agre has been writing erudite and provocative essays and emailing them around for years, usually via his Red Rock Eater mailing list. His latest essay concerns the modern practice of conservatism and its history, and it’s a must read for, well, everyone. It’s wide ranging and as I read it, I felt the particles of thoughts I’ve had on politics for years coalescing into crystals. Agre’s thesis is, in short, that conservatism exists solely to perpetuate the aristocracy, and I’d advise you to read it and think about it before dismissing it. Update: One thing that’s worth noting about Agre’s essay is that he has his own definitions of conservatism and liberalism. (He’s not talking about Republicans and Democrats, or, say, free marketeers and socialists, for example.) Given that, conservatism means exactly what he says it means. In fact, the more I think about the piece, the more I find myself disagreeing with it in places and finding it incomplete in places. It’s definitely a conversation starter rather than a conversation ender, but I think the conversation is one worth having. I think a similar piece on “liberalism” would be an interesting read as well. ...