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Here’s a slick piece on the scrubbing of the voter roles in Florida. If you don’t like Katherine Harris, you will like this piece.

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Jane Black at BusinessWeek has written an article about why Voice over IP isn’t normal telephony and shouldn’t be regulated in the same way, despite the nefarious intentions of the incumbent telephone companies:

The rush to lump VOIP in with phone services obscures the larger problem: The 100-year-old regulatory structure for telephones is no longer adequate for today’s advanced telecom services.

Scott Bradner has written on the same subject, and is particularly scathing about the hook regulators are trying to hang VoIP providers on: They don’t offer 911 service. He writes:

Maybe these regulators should insist on truth in advertising, such as requiring ads to say that 911 is not provided, and let customers decide what they want. That seems to work in many other areas.

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JiWire decided to tell bloggers about their new service before telling the “real” media, so I’m rewarding them for their blogginess by writing up the conference call we just had. See, guys, it works! (On the other hand, this morning I got spammed with a press release announcing anti-spam software. Oy, the irony!)

JiWire is a directory of hotspots in North America and Europe (so far) with some marked as “certified,” meaning they’ve been vetted by actual human beings. The directory shows useful info about each hotspot, including whether there’s a power outlet nearby. The site is aiming at being the leading place for info of all sorts about wirelessness. And the’ve snagged Glenn Fleischman as their editor-in-chief, a coup.

The site, on a quick inspection, looks really useful. In fact, it’s an idea that seems obvious once someone else has come up with it. (Too bad I have to connect to find out where to connect. Some of us don’t plan that far ahead… :) From a business point of view, I worry that the site will lose its value if wifi ever actually gets easy. That’s one reason it’s good to have Glenn on board; the site will quickly accrue ‘zine-y value.

BTW, the name “JiWire” comes from “Join Invisibly” and the company hopes it’ll catch on as a general purpose word. (It won’t.) And the “JI” in the logo is supposed to looks like the warchalking symbol for open access.

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John Ashcroft had the chutzpah to stage the Boston leg of his pro-PATRIOT Act road show in Faneuil Hall, where Sam Adams proclaimed the liberties he was ready to die for. Apparently, this is the first time Faneuil Hall has been closed to the public for a political event since it was built in 1742. (If that factoid is more ‘toid than fact, well, it’s still worth believing for a couple of minutes.)

Here are some of the signs I enjoyed:

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AKMA worries about what will happen to web sites when their owners die. (We will skip the part where he uses my own demise as his example.) I’ve been thinking about that for a while also. So, being of sound mind and body (well, the old 80:20 rules applies, of course), I hereby name AKMA the executor of my site. When I die, my heirs will pay all reasonable expenses (up to $30/year) to keep my site publicly available as well as a small stipend to AKMA to prune the hedges and scrub the grafitti off every now and then.

Thanks, AKMA. And feel free to pick a couple of pairs of socks for yourself. They’re in the second drawer of the dresser in our bedroom.

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As far as I know, I’ve never heard a Warren Zevon song, but I miss him.

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Attorney General John “No Boobies” Ashcroft is bringing his PATRIOT Act Wild West Show to Boston. Gotta give him credit for stepping foot in Massachusetts. On the other hand, won’t you please join a few thousand of us in telling him just how unwelcome his rights-repressing policies are? MoveOn.org is putting out word about the rally sponsored by the ACLU. There’s information about the rally at Faneuil Hall here, and directions here.

Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s intro to the PATRIOT act. Here’s the ACLU’s analysis. Here’s the act itself. And here’s John Ashcroft, one of our oddest and most frightening public servants, singing his song, “Let the Eagles Soar.”

The protest is also noted in DeanLink, a friendster-ish site that enables Dean supporters to find one another. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it’s a very cool app.

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Microsoft Word autocorrects “poppish” to “popish“, “Of or relating to the popes or the Roman Catholic Church”. Doesn’t that strike you as a word that probably shouldn’t make it onto the Most Frequently Misspelled list. Well, perhaps it’s misspelled a high percentage of times, but how often is it used? (Google lists 37,900 hits on popish and 4,780 on poppish. ) “Eleemosynary,” a word that has only been spelled correctly once without the aid of a dictionary, and that’s only because the writer was misspelling “eely missionary,” is also on the autocorrect list.

The corrections Word makes without asking are not all on the list of AutoCorrections at Tools-> AutoCorrect options. Anyone know where this list is kept?

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Paul English has an idea about how to turn conspicuous consumption into a good thing….

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