KGB reportedly spent $2.6 million on their Super Bowl ad inviting people to use their service, but should have done some investment in their servers instead. According to our source with quite a bit of KGB experience (who will go unnamed), s/he only received two questions during the entire Super Bowl due to KGB servers being so overloaded that they turned off virtually all features of their site (including CSS) and begged people not to refresh their screens.

Tags: server overload

Well, I’m pretty calm about this, because it didn’t happen to me, it happened to Scott. Luckily, he has lots of experience with such emergencies from traveling with us when he was younger (that sounds a lot worse than it actually is), so things worked out pretty well. But still…

It all started last Friday. Scott’s fiancee, Heidi, flew down to be there when he graduated from BMW Step School in Rancho Cucamonga (I could just say Cucamonga all day, couldn’t you?). Their plan was to drive back home the next day, since Scott had a job interview at East Bay BMW in Pleasanton on Monday. So they stayed at Heidi’s grandfather’s house, and Saturday morning took off heading north.

So far so good, until they decided to change their plans slightly and take the scenic route, which in this case is the famous California Route 1. If you’ve seen any horror movies, you know what happens next…they have car trouble and are forced to stay at a weird motel, far from anywhere. The desk guy has no eyelids, and just about midnight, they hear a creak from the back door that they were sure was bolted and barred…

OK, it wasn’t quite that bad. But he did notice the alternator light going on and off, and finally he did stop at a lonely motel somewhere near Big Sur, where (shudder) there was no cellular service!

There was a pay phone, though. And they needed a tow truck by this time, so they called Allstate, since Heidi has all sorts of road coverage with them. But Allstate gave them the runaround and basically said they wouldn’t, couldn’t, or dassn’t come out to help them (leading Heidi’s dad to cancel all their Allstate coverage on all their family’s cars, plus their boat, and their trailer, and their boat’s trailer, and oh yes their house too, but that’s another story).

But our State Farm insurance also has all kinds of road coverage too, so Scott was finally able to get a tow truck to get them up to Monterey or so, where there was a shop where they got the belts replaced, and where they could stay Sunday night and hopefully enjoy a bit of the weekend.

So now it’s Monday morning and they’re starting out fresh with new belts and everything, and all they have to do is drive to Pleasanton for the 1 PM interview and then back up here. But no…they made it as far as San Jose when the light started going on again and they found a Midas, where they eventually found he needed a new alternator too. This Midas didn’t have an alternator tester so they had to wait a few hours while Midas borrowed or bought one, so they didn’t actually get to leave until around 5 PM. So poor Scott finally rolled in around 9:30 PM last night and went right to sleep.

But he’s here!

Tags: Allstate, car insurance, road trip, State Farm

Copyright laws threaten our online freedom
By Christian Engström

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

The internet is still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.

The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time.

Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?

The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.

The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

(and yes, I’m totally aware of the irony of the copyright statement — DF)

Tags: copyright, online freedom, pirate party

I am just so proud of this kid.

It was just 4 years ago or so that Scott was floundering a bit in high school. He had/has the brains, but he just didn’t have the motivation or interest for most academic subjects, at least the way they were being taught to him.

But he had shown a heck of a lot of aptitude for doing a bunch of mods to my car back in 2003 when we first got it, and that got him to take some automotive tech courses, and suddenly he was getting A grades. Susan and I both grew up in academic backgrounds, but we did not hesitate to encourage him to follow his own path…the one he not only desired, but was good at. And when he said he wanted to follow his dream to Universal Technical Institute, arguably the best school for automotive mechanics in the country, we supported him there too.

The decision to attend UTI was not taken lightly. Not only was there a serious financial commitment (I believe the proper term here is "a shitload of money"), but Scott would have to leave every day at 5 AM for classes…and this is a kid who used to have trouble with attendance and lateness. And UTI is very serious about attendance, because their full program takes 22 months of straight instuction — no languid summers off here — to get you the equivalent of 3 years’ schooling in just under 2. Individual courses are 3 intense weeks long, and if you miss more than one day, you have to take the entire course over.

Scott put his head down and never looked back. And when he graduated today, he had taken just about every course you could: Automotive Technology. Diesel. Industrial. And an optional Ford course (he has an entire binder full of Ford certificates). And he got on the Director’s List (like the Dean’s List) almost 20 times.

But the thing he wanted most was to be accepted in one of the prestigious MSAT courses, which prepare you for a career working with a specific manufacturer’s vehicles. And he set his sights high: he wanted no less than the BMW program, which is called STEP (Service Technician Education Program). And you can’t just decide to take it…they must choose you. And if they choose you, you’re essentially getting a full scholarship, because BMW pays for the whole thing.

So I’m doubly proud to announce that he will be starting BMW STEP training in August…as the only one in his entire graduating class to be accepted.

Congratulations to Scott…a wonderful, mature, hard working, and very talented young man.

(See all the pictures here).

Tags: automotive technology, BMW, family, mechanic, Scott Fiedler, UTI

When President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the usual suspects were all like “Wow! First woman Hispanic Hispanic female Latina woman from Puerto Rico!” and I was like “Cool, but what about Benjamin Cardozo?” Well, it turns out that ol’ Ben don’t qualify as Hispanic, as Lord Peter Wimsey might have said, because his antecedents were Portuguese, and that’s not Hispanic. However, it is Latino…and then again some people think that Cardozo’s family was originally Spanish, not Portuguese. But plenty of people wouldn’t count Cardozo as anything even remotely “Spanish” in origin, because he was Jewish, and hey, we’ve let lots of Jews onto the Supreme Court so now they’re no longer considered minorities any more.

So what’s the big deal about this stuff? Nothing! It’s just that some people get all excited about the “first this” and “first that” until the end result is that everyone is issuing press releases like the “first disabled lesbian Native American to be named CEO of a green renewable energy firm in the Midwest” or something. As far as I’m concerned, an announcement of this magnitude should be about someone’s qualifications and background, and all this minority rah-rah nonsense should be left for the last sentence in the last paragraph of the press release, if at all. But what do I know, I only spent 20 years as a journalist.

So what about her qualifications? Well, Judge Sotomayor is apparently a top-notch pick and more than just well qualified, having graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and having spent almost two decades as a respected Federal judge. No problem there. And I have nothing to say about any of her so-called “litmus test” beliefs — where people decide if they like a judge based on their “check the box” position on abortion, gun rights, free speech, death penalty, etc. — because apparently she hasn’t signaled one strong preference or another on these subjects in all this time. So that’s very good, because every case should be decided on its own merits, not as a rubber stamp based on a judge’s personal opinion.

My main concern with Judge Sotomayor is simply her reported viewpoint, given in a speech, that a “wise Latina woman” (sic), presumably herself, “would reach a better conclusion than a white male”.

Let’s pause here for a moment. Can you imagine any Supreme Court nominee in the last 25 years who wouldn’t have been totally demolished if they had said “a white male would reach a better conclusion than a [fill-in-the-blank minority]“? That sort of remark would be rightly considered as totally racist, and before anyone on either side of the aisle even considers confirming Judge Sotomayor, they ought to get a very clear answer from her on how she reconciles that kind of statement with her sworn duty to judge cases fairly…especially given her decision in Ricci v. DeStefano.