MIT Free Culture.

2008 Feb 22, started 17:10.

Present: price peabo sheets kxu@fas thwang@fas deaner quentin



Elections.  (at end)

Greg is president, Quentin treasurer.

(Both unopposed and unanimous.)

New officers take office in two weeks.


FCC hearing.

Greg: It's Monday, basically all day, in Ames Courtroom at HLS.  See
  mail.  The subject is to what extent ISPs favor/disfavor particular
  content, what's the consequence, and to what extent there's enough
  consumer choice in broadband that the market can handle this and
  make sure it's ultimately good for consumers.

Christina: schedule: morning panel of law profs, lunch break during
  which freepress.net will be collecting video comments (not clear if
  FCC will really watch those), and afternoon panel on the technology.
  It's not clear just how ordinary people can actually comment.  We do
  think the commissioners will all be there.

Dean: BT is important to Miro; would cost 6x as much to serve their
  content directly, and scale linearly rather than ~constant with
  usage.


FCC wireless auction.

David: 700-800 MHz of spectrum, where analog TV will be vacating
  around Feb 2009, is being auctioned off in four blocks, and divided
  regionally.  Google is in it, which is a surprise; they said if the
  FCC put three conditions requiring open use of the spectrum, they
  would make some >$4B bid.  FCC agreed to one of those, and Google
  entered anyway.  Looks likely to create a new wireless carrier;
  might be Google, which would be interesting.

  The minimum bid has been reached now, so someone will win and this
  version of the auction will go through.


YouTomb.

Quentin: The dev site (http://youtomb.mit.edu:2668) now has the fancy
  new design.  Check it out.  Send feedback.

David: Whatever happened to the experiments people tried last week?
  Was there any outcome?  Follow-up?

David: We seem to have so much data (Quentin: 5G of it.)  We should
  come up with some kind of data-mining experiment.


Tim: Oliver Day's been looking into this country-restriction thing.
  Apparently videos of Yao Ming are all blocked.  He's found a bunch
  of other classes of blocked videos, too.



ROFLcon.

Tim: We're organizing ROFLcon to bring every famous Internet celebrity
  of the last decade or so to Cambridge.  Homestar Runner, Rocketboom,
  Bert Is Evil, others.  Kevin will give a talk on the history and
  development of Soulja Boy.  Some of these have been tough; Numa Numa
  Kid has a publicist and wanted $5K.  It's April 25th and 26th.
  Saturday the 26th there'll be a dance party.

  We've been working toward space at Harvard and at MIT.  Harvard is
  harder.  We hope to be at MIT; we might wind up at one place Friday
  and the other Saturday.

  If you want to come, register; we're capping admission and will
  likely sell out.  See http://roflcon.org/.


Ended 17:56.