What definition of "not okay" are we using?<p>Congress can afford to make big mistakes wrt the internet. If the internet can't afford those mistakes .....<p>Congress will never know anything, so it's unclear why folks are so eager to have it do things.
Dear citizens. It's no longer OK to not participate in democracy. And I don't just mean vote. I mean spread information and encourage others to vote. In essence; Lobby.<p>Everyone who fancies themselves someone who cares about legislation should be lobbying their friends and followers to participate with them.<p>If you don't, corporations will continue to do it for you.
"Dear Internet..." Oh wait, someone already wrote that blog post and it was already featured on several outlets. Look, Internet, I love you, but here's the thing: it's true. If you want to effect change, you're going to have to work within the framework of the govt. That means that posts like these, after a certain point, aren't gonna do much to help Congress understand the problems with their approach. To recap and paraphrase, Congress does not really care much what some bloggers are saying about issue x; instead the group that does the best job of figuring out how to educate Congress probably has the best chance of seeing the change they want. What say we focus on doing more of that?
"Bing: A Microsoft & Yahoo Production?"<p>This reminds me of mistakes I've seen semantic analysis engines make. I'm not totally sure if this is a triumph of computing or a failure of Congress.
<i>Watching all this political discussion happen in September, around an area I know so well, I realized one chilling thing. It’s not that Washington doesn’t know search. It’s not that Washington doesn’t know the internet. It’s that Washington doesn’t know anything but what paid lobbyists are pushing on it.</i>
Google maps is immensely helped by it's placement on Google whenever a location is searched, compared to say, sites like MapQuest. This is akin to Microsoft's placement of IE in Windows against Netscape.<p>You can argue that Google Maps is superior to MapQuest, but back in the day IE was indeed superior to Netscape. <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html</a>