War czar wants war serfs

With the Iraq war growing increasingly unpopular, "War Czar" Douglas Lute is suggesting the government may force people to serve as slave soldiers. He said that "it makes sense to certainly consider it."

Forcing people to fight and die in a foreign war is barbaric. I can remember the Vietnam years, when people who had gone to school with me were sent off to Vietnam and sometimes didn't come back. Thousands died at the hands of an insane governmental policy. According to the CNN article:

Still, he said the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.
 
"There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families," he said. "And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions."

In other words, Americans are sick of seeing their family members suffer and die for Bush's megalomania, and it would displease the Decision Maker if they advised their kids that it isn't worth it.

The military draft is a plain violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court has said that being drafted doesn't constitute involuntary servitude, but that only shows that the justices who made that decision violated their oath of office. Activist legal theory to the contrary, the Supreme Court does not have the authority to rewrite the Constitution.

The Bush administration sinks deeper into depravity every day.

The twilight of municipal wireless?

Government-controlled "free" municipal wireless access may slowly be dying a well-deserved death. San Francisco is running into numerous problems with its socialized Net access, not the least of which is that commercial alternatives are very cheap and sometimes free. The spectre of government censorship, as in Boston, is also making people nervous.

Looking through various articles on municipal wi-fi, I'm darkly amused to learn that all of its opponents are "sock puppets." So in the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I didn't write this post; it was written by my personal sock puppet, Pensock (front and center in the picture).

Qualcomm vs. Broadcom vs. sanity

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that 3G telephone handsets using certain Qualcomm chips may not be imported into the USA, because they violate patents held by Broadcom. The American executive branch can overrule this but probably won't. This has been a battle with no heroes, only villains, and the chief villain is our patent system.

A federal judge ruled that two of Qualcomm's own patents may not be enforced, because it concealed them during its participation in the development of the H.264 (ISO/IEC 14496-10) compression standard. Qualcomm had sued Broadcom for violating these patents in its implementation of H.264. The court said Qualcomm had engaged in "a carefully orchestrated plan and the deadly determination of Qualcomm to achieve its goal of holding hostage the entire industry."

On the other hand, at least one of Broadcom's patents is typical of the overbroad patenting of generic technical ideas. Tim Lee characterized this patent as a "Swiss Army patent" -- the combining of well-known technology into a single package.

In the realm of high-tech patents, it's often impossible to tell without a court ruling what's covered and what isn't. All patents are published; Qualcomm could "conceal" its patents only by not calling attention to them. Implicit in the court's ruling is that a standards body, consisting of highly qualified spe