New York City plans to build a public safety wireless network, including the capacity to provide tens of thousands of cops and city workers with the ability to send and receive data while traveling at speeds of up to 70 mph citywide.

Okay, cool enough. How about using the system to helping the residents -- like find parking spots, avoid congestion, and issue location-based calls for help?

At http://www.electoral-vote.com/ you can see the electoral college votes as they lay based upon polling data, updated daily. Kerry had been ahead, but a recent Survey USA poll placed Florida once again in Republican Red, swinging the tide back to GW.

Found a reference from a fine blog about Java by Matt Croydon for a J2ME RSS reader (with source). I'll have to try it out -- not so much for the techie-ness of it, but to see if the experience of reading blog feeds (which are so often only relevant and important vis-a-vis the content they link to) is worth the effort.

Finished Lessig's Free Culture, and it's an amazing read.

He starts the discussion with the tale of P2P versus the RIAA, and end up in the middle of the Eldred case he argued (and lost) in front of the Supreme Court. In the chapter about Eldred, Lessig steps outside of his usually very orderly and lawyerly discourse to show his passion (and dissapointment) about the case -- his very public mea culpa points to his focus on precedent, and not on the concrete damage that endless copyright extensions do to our culture (and society). Who knew Sonny Bono's legacy would be more notable than Gopher from the Love Boat? What would've happened if Ike Turner became a congressman? But I digress. Lessig offers some possible solutions -- or at least a roadmap out of the current mess -- partly by pointing out the fact that we should not legislate around the current technology in a way that limits advancement -- but find solutions that will support growth, and equitably handle these same issues with the technology still to come. If we had generated complex laws to protect consumers from the danger of electricty in the days before plastic cheaply covered copper wire, where would we be?

Too bad, Lessig's just declared email bankrupcy. No, in fact, it's kinda cute that he even still cares enough to bother to try to reply to all the mail his work generates. His work is critically important, and he is a hero for "the little guy" fighting the big corporate machines. Buy it, really.