Dave Farber's Year In Washington

Tim O'Reilly writes "Dave Farber is not only a great technologist (one of the founding fathers of the Internet) but also one of the people most concerned with technology and society (co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example). This brief report on Dave's year as Chief Technologist of the FCC gives a few impressions of the policy makers in Washington D.C. Well worth a read, and immensely credible to those of us who know Dave." (Read More.)

"One highlight:

Washington is a town with very, very few technical people advising the top levels of decision-makers. In an era where technology has such an impact on our economy, that is dangerous. Most of the senior people are lawyers and economists with little knowledge of science and technology. They get their information largely from the few technical people on their staffs and from hordes of lobbyists.

For those who don't know it, Dave's IP (Interesting People) email list is a previous generation of the same spirit that led to slashdot. The interesting people on the list send interesting tidbits to Dave, who forwards them on (or not) depending on whether he finds them interesting. Dave does no reformatting or cleanup of submissions, so the stuff is sometimes a bit hard to read, depending on how many times it's been forwarded, but the content is almost always worthwhile. And Dave's own pieces are almost always worth a read. They range from what's new and hot in Akihabra (Dave's a gadget guy) to what Dave had to eat on that same trip to Tokyo. There's a leaning towards stories that hit the intersection between technology and policy, but lots of other goodies come by here too.

For web archives going back to mid-1993, see http://www.interesting-people.org/."