There aren’t many technologies that have come along recently that have as much disruptive potential for democratizing the infrastructure of the Internet as widespread wireless networking. Broadband Internet access is, currently, the more-or-less exclusive domain of behemoth telecommunications and cable companies — the Ma Bells and Comcasts of the world. It’s expensive, the providers are abusive and controlling, and the service sucks. But if we work at developing technologies that are available as we speak, all that can change; free wireless Internet access is becoming more and more available in businesses and public places, so that fewer people even need an ISP to provide a residential line; and with a co-operative provider, some technical know-how, and a small investment in networking equipment, you can easily form wireless community networks between yourself and your neighbors, effectively running a low-cost cooperative ISP out of your garage. It’s exciting, heady stuff, and a lot could change within a few years. And the growing availability of voice services and online content could mean that soon, cooperative neighborhood associations could provide your Internet, phone service, and television all in one low-cost package. (To get a glimmer of the potential, see Robert X. Cringley 2001-08-23: Roll Your Own; for the technical details, read Rob Flickenger’s Building Wireless Community Networks: Implementing the Wireless Web.)

So how are leading lights of the State going to respond to this potential revolution in people-first, grassroots network communications? Of course, it’s to bring it under the control of the regulatory State as quickly as possible. Item 1: earlier this month, the government of Winchester County decided to set a precedent by proposing that the government knows how to set up your wireless network better than you do. Item 2: House Democrats unveil an innovation agenda; one of the chief innovations that they hope for is a centralized, government-directed Nationwide deployment of high-speed, always-on broadband Internet and mobile communications. This will, of course, be attained by means of expanding federal telecom regulations, and providing tax-funded subsidies to large telecom companies.

Because Uncle Sam knows better than you do what kind of Internet service you want. There’s no greater expert on ever-changing network technology than a sclerotic, centralized bureaucracy. And there’s nowhere you can get better service than your local, accountable-to-the-people government-run municipal utility.

Or, as M. Proudhon put it:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

—P.-J. Proudhon (1851): General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (trans. John Beverly Robinson), Epilogue ¶ 39

Further reading

• GT 2005-06-07: Property to the People: The Leftist Case for Privatization
• GT 2001-05-29: The Battle for a Grassroots Internet Experience

The outstanding problem of the Progressive-dominated American Left is that they do not believe that the State exists. I don’t mean that they think it is a nullity; rather, they do not think that it exists in the same concrete plane of reality as the rest of us, or operates with the constraints in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue that the rest of us have. One Leftist who did see things clearly was Randolph Bourne; as he put it in The State (a bitter reaction to the eager embrace of World War I by most of his former colleagues in the American liberal press):

Government … is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.

— Randolph Bourne (1918): The State § 1 ¶ 9

I mention this because I know so many people who are otherwise perfectly sane, who understand human limitation and the dangers of concentrated power, who suddenly blank out as soon as the humans in question have government business cards and the power in question is the most systematic and reliable form of power available — access to enforcement powers of the State. Here’s an example that I noticed just today, which I picked out precisely because it’s so mundane: it turns out that there’s been something of a scuffle between Level 3 Communications and Cogent over networking contracts; hardball business dealing has led to a disconnection that left people unable to communicate with web hosts and other Internet services on the wrong side of the break. Well, that sucks, to be sure, but what’s the first thing that consumer groups shoot for on hearing about it?

However, as the Net has evolved from an academic and research curiosity into a vital part of the world’s commercial and communications infrastructure, some have called for a basic set of rules that would keep traffic flowing.

Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, compares the state of today’s Internet to the development of roads, or the creation of national telephone networks 100 years ago. Government acted in both cases to ensure the free flow of economically important traffic, he said.

There comes a point where some of these functionalities, such as the seamless interoperation of the Internet, are too important to leave to the private interest of businesses, Cooper said. We like to think that people won’t do antisocial things, but when push comes to shove they will defend their economic interests even at the expense of the public.

My problem is not with the negative things that Cooper says about busineses; many libertarians might dig in and object at that point, but I think he’s right to point out how businesses often do things that are foolish or destructive in pursuit of narrowly private gain. My problem is with the inference he draws from this: he goes from businesses sometimes make bad decisions about how to use this resource, to government ought to make the decisions about how to use this resource. But the premises only support the conclusion if you have shown that government control would not make things worse. And that brings us to important questions that Cooper has left unanswered, because — not believing in the mundane existence of the State — he left them unasked. We have to ask, If these things are too important to leave to the private interests of business, then why the hell aren’t they too important to leave to the political interests of the government? And if the typical run of people have enough of a capacity for antisocial behavior that they’ll defend their economic interests even at the expense of the public, why the hell don’t you think that, when push comes to shove, they’ll defend their political interests even at the expense of the public? No answer is forthcoming, because government is being thought of as an anonymous and benign force to be harnessed, rather than the real actions of real people blundering their way through.

If there’s anything of real value in Leftist economic analysis, it’s the way that the Left insistently points out that businesses are not large automata; that they are run by people, that people are limited in knowledge and are also easily corrupted when they have a great deal of power to gain at the expense of others. As a result, large corporations with critical resources often act in ways that are foolish, selfish, exploitative or destructive. If you’re trying to understand the economic world while ignoring the fact that it is made of people you will always go seriously astray. But if there’s one thing that’s been going wrong with the Left’s economic analysis during the past several decades (basically, since the 1930s, when Marxism and Progressivism each rose to the top of the heap in the radical and reformist wings of the Left), it’s the way in which they have refused to apply exactly the same analysis to the agents of the State. If it’s vital to remember that people run businesses, it is even more vital to remember that people run the government. And that is exactly what is being forgotten, because it is covered over by the shimmering mystical glow of the State. If Leftists are willing to call out cheerleaders for business when they fetishize the anonymous, undirected forces of the market and their supposedly reliable and benign march towards equilibrium, then they had better stop being cheerleaders for the State, and stop fetishizing the anonymous, undirected rules of the government and their supposedly reliable and benign pursuit of the public interest. That ain’t how it works now (just pick up any newspaper) and — this is the important part — it ain’t how it would work under any government. Bureaucracies are run by fallible human beings blundering their way through no matter what the party in power is; in the government they face the same knowledge problems and incentive problems that corporate bureaucrats face. In fact, they face even more severe knowledge problems and incentive problems — beacause, as agents of the government they hold a monopoly on whatever resources they control, and that monopoly is backed with handcuffs, guns, and bombs.

If critical resources are too important to leave in the hands of private businesses, then yes, they are damn well too important to put under the monopolistic control of government bureaucrats.

Now, pro-State Leftists might object at this point that I’m being unfair; the position is not that government is run by people any more perfect than business is, but rather that people in a democratic society, the people in government have restraints put on them that tends to direct them towards the public interest, whereas the environment in which business decisions are made is one that rewards the irresponsible pursuit of private advantage. But this, again, relies on a mystical conception of the State; here the mysticism comes in not with the conception of government intervention, but rather with the conception of control by the people. The idea that government officials — and appointed government bureaucrats especially, who are after all the people who run all the regulatory bodies — are responsive to what people like you and me want under most circumstances is so obviously refuted by a quick look at the daily operations of government that I must conclude that people who make these kind of arguments are being stopped from looking, because democratic mysticism is used as a substitute for observation.

If, to put it another way, the pro-State Left’s is making their argument for government control over some resource or another by claiming that you can always vote the jerks out of office if you don’t like how they are running things … well, then, how’s that been working out for y’all lately?

So, it turns out that today is–by edict of WIPO—World Intellectual Property Day 2005. Among the objectives set out for the day are:

• To increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps to foster creativity and innovation;
• To raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents, copyright, trademarks and designs.

Well, who could disagree with such educational goals? The Ministries of Culture and Science in this secessionist republic of one applaud the educational purposes of World Intellectual Property day, and offer the following in the effort to raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents and copyrights, and to make sure that you understand exactly how protecting IP restrictions is fostering creativity and innovation.

Intellectual property restrictions are government-granted monopolies. They have nothing, actually, to do with property rights; what they do is seize ordinary people’s property and hold it hostage to the license-holders’ demands for ransom. They kill innovation because they kill new products; they kill new products because they invade other people’s real property — meaning pens, paper, scanners, computers, DVD players, and so on — in the attempt to lock down ideas — which are, by nature, non-rivalrous resources; this amounts to nothing less than a systematic and ruthless intellectual enclosure movement against what is and ought to be the common property of all humanity.

Now, as a techno-geek, I don’t like how this strangles the amazing innovation that we could be seeing in the intelligent use of audio, video, and text content, in this age of cheap computers and plentiful storage. But the plain fact is that this isn’t, really, about what your latest gizmo can or can’t do with your music library, and it’s not a topic for polite debate and economic wonkery. This is life and death. For example, in India recently:

India, a major source of inexpensive AIDS drugs, passed a new patent law yesterday that groups providing drugs to the world’s poorest patients fear will choke off their supply of new treatments.

The new law, amending India’s 1970 Patent Act, affects everything from electronics to software to medicines, and has been expected for years as a condition for India to join the World Trade Organization.

But because millions of poor people in India and elsewhere — including by some estimates half the AIDS patients in the Third World — rely on India’s generic drug industry, lobbyists for multinational drug companies as well as activists fighting for cheap drugs had descended on New Delhi to try to influence the outcome.

It’s very disappointing, but it could have been worse, said Daniel Berman, a coordinator of the global access campaign for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders. All generics could have been removed from the market.

Instead, all the generic drugs already approved in India can still be sold, though sellers must now pay licensing fees. There are also provisions allowing companies that make generics to copy drugs in the future.

But there are relatively tough criteria for such copying, and activists predicted that prices for newly invented drugs will be much higher, because drug makers will have the same 20-year patent monopolies as they have in the West. As AIDS patients develop resistance to old drugs, new treatments will become less affordable, they said.

In addition, it is unclear whether makers of generic drugs in other countries, like Brazil, China and Thailand, will fill any increasing demand for cheaper medicines.

…

All Western countries grant product patents on new inventions. Since 1970, India has granted process patents, which allow another inventor to patent the same product as long as it was created by a novel process. In pharmaceuticals, that has meant that a tiny tweak in the synthesis of a molecule yields a new patent. Several companies can produce the same drug, creating competition that drives down prices.

Before 1970, India’s patent laws came from its colonial days, and it had some of the world’s highest drug prices. Process patents on drugs, fertilizers and pesticides have extended life expectancy and ended regular famines.

In Africa, exports by Indian companies, especially Cipla and Ranbaxy Laboratories, helped drive the annual price of antiretroviral treatment down from $15,000 per patient a decade ago to about $200 now. They also simplified therapy by putting three AIDS drugs in one pill. Dr. Yusuf Hamied, Cipla’s chairman, called the new law a very sad day for India.

— New York Times 2005-03-24: India Alters Law on Drug Patents

And the same folks want to do the same thing to Latin America, through the adoption of CAFTA:

Found to be HIV-positive shortly before her husband died of AIDS-related complications last fall, an ailing Garcia was convinced of her own death sentence. But generic drugs have kept the virus in check and restored 60 lost pounds to her frame.

I now have hope, said the 52-year-old grandmother and flower vendor, who gets her medicine free from a nonprofit clinic.

Public health experts fear that hope might fade for Garcia and thousands of the region’s chronically ill if the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA, is approved this year.

Under the pact American pharmaceutical giants would gain a five-year edge on the development of new drugs by low-cost competitors. Generic versions of name-brand drugs are the main weapon for battling the AIDS pandemic in the developing world.

Healthcare activists say those intellectual property protections would drive up the cost of treating chronic conditions, particularly HIV/AIDS, sufferers of which routinely develop resistance to old medications. About 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and more than 275,000 of them live in the six Latin American CAFTA nations, according to United Nations statistics.

— LA Times 2005-04-22: AIDS Patients See Life, Death Issues in Trade Pact

Patents kill people. They mean that the pharmaceutical cartel can call up the armed bully-boys of almost every government in the world in order to enforce artificially high prices for their top money-makers; and that means that State violence is being used to prevent affordable, life-saving drugs from reaching the desparately poor of the world. The multilateral so-called free trade agreements of the past couple decades — NAFTA, the WTO, and upcoming plans such as CAFTA and the FTAA — are slowly cutting back on traditional industrial protectionism while dramatically expanding the scale, scope, and deadly reach of intellectual protectionism.

To hell with that. Intellectual property is not about incentivizing or encouraging or opportunities. It’s about force: invading other people’s property to force them to render long-term rents to you long after you have stopped putting any particular work into what you’re claiming to be yours. A necessary corollary is that it also means invading those who offer innovations based on the work that you have done unless those innovations comply with a very narrow set of guidelines for authorized use. You have no right to do that, and you sure don’t have the right to do it at the expense of innocent people’s lives. A free society needs a free culture. Patents kill and freedom save people’s lives. This is as simple as it gets. Écrassez l’inf?@c3;a2;me: écrassez l’etat.

Further reading

• GT 2004/11/24: Free your mind, and the rest will follow
• GT 2004/11/07: M?@c3;ba;sica libre
• GT 2003/11/06: Copyleft and Copyright: The Prospects for Liberty
• Stephan Kinsella, Mises Institute 2005-03-07: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent
• In A Blog’s Stead 2003/09/14: Thoughtcrime

Like the Holy Roman Empire, this Friday Random Ten is neither Friday, nor Random, nor Ten. But it is (I think) a good idea; thanks to Random Thoughts and to Trish Wilson for it. Here’s the idea: you’ve probably all heard of the Friday Random Ten music game. This is sort of like that, except that it’s ten links. The links go to ten worthy posts by webloggers outside of the usual club of folks you link to. Why? Because weblogging, and political weblogging in particular, is interesting and fun and increasingly important but it’s also got a tendency to be inbred and clubby. Most of us are not atop the A-list “dominant link hierarchy,” but we participate in it, and if we don’t try to break up the cartel a bit, who will? The Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere? I think not. So here’s mine:

1. When it comes to the hand-wringing and the bloviating over the Left’s attitude towards feminism, abortion, and sexuality, media girl 2005-02-24: Not negotiable puts it better than I could in just three sentences:

   What a lot people — mostly men — don’t seem to understand is that women’s control over our own bodies is not negotiable. We are not slaves. We are not breeding machines to be regulated and controlled by the government.

   Read the whole thing.

2. Bitch, Ph.D. 2005-02-22: The Washington Monthly points out that it’s that time of the three months again: Kevin Drum has come down with a nasty case of QMS, and it’s made him impulsive and irrational enough to start spouting off without so much as bothering to so much as search Google for female political bloggers first. Or, as we have it from the good doctor:

   Oh look. We have another well-meaning non-sexist liberal non-discriminatory fuckwit around being all concerned about how women just don’t choose to talk about politics. Or maybe it’s that they’re innately less comfortable with the “food fight” nature of political discourse.

   Hey Drum, you moron, try doing some goddamn research before you shoot your mouth off, ok?

   How the fuck do men ever manage to succeed in any kind of intellectual endeavor without bothering to find out what the fuck they’re talking about before shooting their mouths off? Oh yeah, right, it’s the magic power of the cock. Jesus.

   Read the whole thing.

3. Bean has a new blog (you may know her from her posts on Alas, A Blog), and in Cool Beans 2005-03-03: The Invisibility of Feminism she points to another one for the what is seen and what is not seen file. Here we have one of the countless examples of why men in the media seem able to confidently declare feminism dead once every five years or so, without the least bit of circumspection: because nobody seems to feel obligated to actually, y’know, look up feminist publications before they gather their data and start spouting off.

   Read the whole thing.

4. Jill Walker at misbehaving.net 2005-02-27: The Debian Women Project notes the lack of women in open source development, or at least in Debian development specifically.

   Hanna Wallach posted her slides from a talk she gave on Debian Women yesterday. She showed statistics showing that 10-20% of computer science undergrads are women, and that 20-35% of IT professionals are women, and yet there are only 4-8 women among the nearly 1000 developers of the open source Debian "universal" operating system. That’s less than one percent. While Hanna mentions possible reasons briefly, her main concern in the talk is to show what is being done in Debian Women.

   It’s good to see that the topic is being addressed, and everyone’s best wishes should be with Debian Women, which seems to be off to a good running start; one can only pray that the boys will keep tabs on the organizing and action that’s going on, instead of treating everyone to a trimonthly outbreak of oblivious Where are all the female software developers? e-mails on devel mailing lists…

   Read the whole thing.

5. Mouse Words 2005-03-05: 10 things you need to know about men demonstrates once again that shooting fish in a barrel can be damn funny if you have the talent (as Amanda clearly does).

   From iVillage and by Richie Sambora. Sambora couldn’t tell you shit about playing guitar, and he’s a guitarist. So why do we assume he knows something about being a man? As usual, we women are presumed pretty clueless when it comes to men. Men, however, know everything they need to know about us.

   …

   We want you to be our mothers.

   Heather Locklear is a saint. And now I have the unfortunate image of her man calling her Mommy and I’m all upset.

   We don’t mind it when you dress us.

   If he asks for a sponge bath next, I hope Locklear takes a moment to remember that she is a stunning beauty who has exactly zero reason to fear that she’s headed for spinsterhood if she suddenly gave up playing Airplane in order to get her husband to eat.

   Read the whole thing.

6. Avedon Carol 205-03-05: How you become crazy takes on the pervasive idiot notion that any ideological skew in the media, if it exists, is prima facie evidence that the media is doing something wrong and therefore needs to change:

   I have never understood why this should be a criticism of the media, anymore than it makes sense that this is a negative trait of academe; if the people who are best educated and most aware of what is going on are more liberal, maybe that’s because you have to be ignorant to swallow conservatism. What is really suggested by this “criticism” is that the alleged “bias” isn’t bias at all, it’s just a recognition of what is, and that bias is required to lean to the right of this “liberal” position. Indeed, the behavior we’re seeing from the administration is fairly explicit in that we are told that simple facts are “biased”. The news media are not supposed to tell the public the truth about anything because that would bias us against the administration. The real question is not, then, about a bias toward liberalism or conservatism, but rather a belief that “news” should make some attempt to serve the public rather than just the corporate hierarchy.

   …

   Those people really do need reminders. They need to be told every single time they spew right-wing bull. They need to be reminded over and over that reality still holds sway for at least half of the population. Most of all, they need to be told that we’re not talking about forgetfulness and errors and “misstatements” from Condi and George and friends, we’re talking about lying, and they should call a spade a spade.

   Whether Avedon’s right or not about all that (I think she’s clearly right about the media’s limitless charity for Bush administration fraudsters, probably right about some parts of reporters’ policy skew, and probably mistaken about others), the underlying point is awfully damned important: the demographic arguments that “liberal media” bloviators (and their “corporate media” comrades on the Left) aren’t enough to show anything in particular. The perverse sort of ideological identity politics that the Right especially loves these days needs to be called for what it is: pure bluff.

   Read the whole thing. (Thanks, Trish.)

   [Update 2005-03-27: Incidentally, the name is Avedon Carol, not Carol Avedon as I originally wrote. Oy. My bad!]

7. What Is Past Is Prologue 2005-03-04: How Low Can You Go follows up with this fine look at how the Great Americans at MSNBC ensure that the tough questions get asked in spite of the fiendish plot of the liberal media hegemons:

   Then he went on to flagellate that old tired concept that everyone knows is a lie: The Vicious Liberal Media. His commentator? The resentful Ari Fleischer, clearly still smarting from his days as White House Press Secretary

8. Clancy at CultureCat 2005-03-04: Orphan Works: Tell the Copyright Office Your Stories calls for shedding light on one of the rarely-seen but often-onerous unintended consequences of the intellectual enclosure regime: valuable works are left in limbo when you can’t find their copyright holders. I’m sure that making works completely impossible to reproduce for a good 70 years or so is really incentivizing some creative excellence. Somehow.

   Read the whole thing.

9. Micha Ghertner at Catallarchy 2005-03-06: Small Is Beautiful points out something that you just don’t see in most discussions of prying education out of the hands of the bureaucratic State: the way that government monopolization of schools and politicized pressures constrict schools into multimillion dollar all-things-to-all-people facilities–thus forcing down the number of groups that could reasonably get a school off the ground–thus forcing them into crowded splinding-and-sorting centers for thousands of students:

   Would people want to send their kids to small, simple, less expensive schools? Would some parents drop off their kids at an individualized schooling program for a few hours, and then take them to the gym or the community center for a sports league or a friendly pick-up game with other children? Those who are satisfied with the current system of institutionalized babysitting may want to stick with the status quo. Those who would prefer a close-knit atmosphere, where everyone knows each other by name, and where the programs and costs are specially tailored to each individual student’s needs, may conclude that bigger is not always better.

   Read the whole thing.

10. Alina at Totalitarianism Today 2005-03-01: International aid worthy of the title? reminds us of the dirty little secret about government-to-government foreign aid: when you give money to the government instead of to the people in distress, they just waste it.

11. Voltairine de Cleyre (1907-04-28): They Who Marry Do Ill argues (under the title of a particularly delightful turn of phrase) that marriage — whether government-sponsored or wildcatted, whether religious or secular — offends against individualist principles:

    Some fifteen or eighteen years ago, when I had not been out of the convent long enough to forget its teachings, nor lived and experienced enough to work out my own definitions, I considered that marriage was a sacrament of the Church or it was civil ceremony performed by the State, by which a man and a woman were united for life, or until the divorce court separated them. With all the energy of a neophyte freethinker, I attacked religious marriage as an unwarranted interference on the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals, condemned the until death do us part promise as one of the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his future to his present feelings, and urged the miserable vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony, by which the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made topic of comment and jest by the public.

    By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear. Need I recall, for example, the unprinted and unprintable floating literature concerning the marriage of Alice Roosevelt, when the so-called American princess was targeted by every lewd jester in the country, because, forsooth, the whole world had to be informed of her forthcoming union with Mr. Longworth! But it is neither the religious nor the civil ceremony that I refer to now, when I say that those who marry do ill. The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed. Now my opponents know where to find me.

    Read the whole thing.

O.K.; that was eleven, not ten. And the eleventh isn’t exactly a blog link anyway. But I did warn you ahead of time that Friday Random Ten would be a name here, not a definite description. And if the dominant link hierarchy in the weblog world is worth breaking up, then I’d have to say that it’s also worth breaking up weblog reading with a bit of material that was written before the turn of the 21st century. Enjoy the subversion!

Gmail seems to be expanding its tentacles outward; I noticed today that I have a good 50 invitations or so to give away. If you want a Gmail account and haven’t already gotten one yet, feel free to drop me a line. Let the prisoners of Hotmail taste sweet freedom!