I couldn't agree with you more, BOzdune. There is no choice available for "less government" or no government. That simply leaves power in the hands of whoever grabs it. Thugs and savants.
There are so many false dichotomies; one being that the role of government is to manage markets to prevent monopoly. This ratifies the notion that competition (among the most aggressive) is good. In ratifying competition some good things result. But many bad things also result; duplication for example and game theoretic behavior. Look closely and you see *everybody* competing to get money, not to serve customers. etc.
Everybody admits markets cannot address externalities, the effects on all stakeholders. The commons, the culture, the longterm future, for example are horribly disserved by market theology.
Cut to the solution: progressive income taxation that takes off and gets really extreme at really extreme incomes. Like, $1 million per year you are in the 80% bracket. This not only recovers to the commons but disincents hyperaggressive behavior. I am not worried about recession, our problem today is the opposite, a frantic hyperactivity, energy and CO2 crisis, etc. -todd- retired CPA
In nature there's really no such thing as anarchy. When you have anarchy the very next thing is one person or group of people form a dictatorship.
Good anarchy requires a minimum of rules, I think, and that would be the essence of democracy. What takes terrific amount of work is to dislodge the special interests who exploit the power.. etc. etc.
They should teach in elem. school, the problem of distributed costs and concentrated benefit (the special interst problem) instead of bullsh*t like the pledge of allegiance to Wash. DC
Sorry for the digression... my instinct just tells me, today, radio spectrum is ridiculously SCARCE and until technology makes it abundant, some mechanism is necessary for allocation of the scarce resource instead of allowing it to be wasted in arbitrary ways!
You don't need smart antennas or anything expensive at all. There are already mesh routing products like Nokia Rooftop that achieve the 'multiplying bandwidth' phenomenon.
The mathematics of mesh networks and swarmcast demonstrate an interesting phenomenon that the more nodes who stick their antenna into the cloud, the more routes appear and there is a virtuous circle of improving performance. This principle is supported by Nokia papers on the 802.16 workgroup's site. http://wirelessman.org/ "Mesh coverage & robustness improve exponentially as subscribers are added" http://wirelessman.org/tga/contrib/S80216a-02_30.p df
Instead of heat death, from packet congestion you get a virtuous cycle of greater capacity because more paths are available. Unregulated, and all but unregulatable. Just like oral speech and visual eyesight-- except having unlimited range.
There is a voracious, out-of-control design and chipmaking industry, realizing this vision which will happen with shocking suddenness, as hardware manufacturers create the transceivers and home-owners and apartment dwellers just stick them on the roofs. You will buy these at Walmart and in drug stores for $50 in about 12 months from now, Todd Boyle www.gldialtone.com
I agree the GOVT should not grab spectrum but I totally disagree with your thesis that spectrum should be private property.
When things are "privatized" they become subject to rent capture, you dummy! NY and DC just print as much money as necessary to capture anything in god's universe that can return RENTS. To NY and DC, the world is nothing but hydroelectric sites. Wherever there is a narrows or a chokepiont in ANY economic process, they capture rents. Isnt' that NICE? Grrrr.
I seem to recall we bumbled into this spectrum auction idea to replace something even worse--the arbitrary government allocation like the railroad grants of the 1800s that still control half the western US.
My 2cents is, *all* spectrum should be subject to auction. But not for money. Each individual might be allocated nontransferable spectrum points to spend however they want. There are already hundreds of accounting databases more than 300 million accounts and this would be nearly trivially easy to account for. You login to an SSL website with your SSN and see your account, and spend or receive +(-) bandwidth points to/from any other party, to apply to transport (sending or receiving being the same thing). Enforcement? By statute, grant +bandwidth points to anybody who busts abusers. Bigg abusers would not have a snowballs' chance, against the mighty minions of mice,
HTH., Todd Boyle CPA - ARAP everywhere http://www.arapxml.net
You ask "who will pay?" We are *already* paying. In effect, we are all using the cablecos and telcos as our finance company, and we are spending *way more than $1000*. They decide what to buy, and they also dictate the terms of use! Sheesh. Then they make you feel like a criminal when you setup a server. And then, they operate as our sysadmin, and we have to kiss their butts and wait 45 days for any change order.
The cablecos get the content *free* from networks because its loaded with commercials. They sell our eyeballs to the networks. Ditto the commercial internet. Before this is over, the Wired internet will pay the NANs for access to the destinations--becauses we will be dropping out of the $50/mnth broadband internet.
I'm not stupid enough to imagine these networks will be built out by geek volunteers. There will need to be NAN kits at Walmart for $149 with a router and 2 or 3 dishes. But there will be NANs.
People are going to share Cable TV channels, pool our phone lines, buy and sell whatever we want outside the banking system just exactly like we do with paper cash. We are going to get up in the morning, make coffee and turn on the neighborhood videoconference to chat with our neighbors at 100mbps. Do you think the Telcos are ever going to give us this??
Metcalfs law, Moores law, Guilders Telecosm-- the Telcos just KEEP all the benefit and don't drop their prices. They concentrate more and more. Finally we will just build our own NANS
Draw a circle around any aggregate of hardware, software, people or bandwidth. Bolt on a general ledger and call it a business. If its a router, bolt on an embedded general legdger.
Let all the stuff bill each other. When the accounts receivable or accounts payable pile up, offload them to settlement agents for clearing.
This is what we have today except the freakin circle is wayyyy too big, it is ridiculously too big.
The smaller decentralized finance model will help evyerybody. If somebody deserves 1% more of the revenue from some arbitrary process, go in there and up their fraction of the revenue of that object.
Todd. www.arapxml.net
In general I support the uncoupling of the various financial layers involved in music, video, and other commercial content. I am against todays IP laws but let's assume for a moment that quite a lot of music and video will be distributed within some kind of DRM system. Just relax and think this through, ok?
Todays music and film industry is heavily concentrated at most of the levels, acquisition, production and distribution. Markets were always too rigid for consumers to find and sample and buy direct from artists.
Distributed finance on the internet, technically, allows every one of millions of artists, to go forward creating and selling content and every song could be with different musicians, writers, producers, distribution. And all of them could have different "cuts" of the proceeds (fixed, percentage, etc.) This is a good thing folks. Everybody wants this flexibility even the record labels and distributors. But the accounting was simply impossible before.
Distributed financial systems let the original funder, and the whole chain of distributors thru to the final website, radio station, record store etc. similarly, bid to perform distribution at different prices. This is a good thing too.
What is REALLY great is that if this kind of flexible, distributed system takes root in the media industry, you have also uncoupled the payment or settlement system. You have really unleashed a pandoras box because, at the same time unleashed 1 million artists looking for ways to get paid for gazillion small credits from a gazillion places his music might have been sold. Many to many charging, crediting, and settlement on a peer to peer basis. That is a cool thing. Even if there are clearinghouses. Once this is setup, it will educate millions of people about distributed finance. The central clearinghouse would be the only choke point and it would literally stick out like a sore thumb. It will look ridiculous. The artists, distributers, etc. would route around it within a few years, i.e. alternative settlement houses would appear.
Hacker activity has always been and will continue to be, the operative force preventing the emergence of alternative systems of commerce and payments on the internet. Fostering insecurity is the business of the banking/government establishment. Fostering jitter and latency is the business of telcos involved in the backbones and NAPs.
Banks, governments, telcos and backbone operators want the 'net as a top-down broadcast platform to sell you stuff, not to enable geodesic commerce.
As long as freenet, gnutella, or publius run on the same crappy IPV4 internet, their users will be susceptible to the same kinds of intrusions and threats as any other application.
Wireless MANs like SFNet enable a business model in which cells of known, authenticated citizens might conduct business extremely cheaply, in relative saftety and privacy, behind gateways or firewalls. Net operators would provide inter-galactic jumps to other wireless freenet universes. Webledgers would form the basis of payments, and the usual accounting needs. Webledgers based on dayfiles are one architecture suitable to freenet, which enable conduct of purchases, sales and settlements. There are scores of communities that have issued local currencies. Read www.gldialtone.com/GeneralLedgerPost7.txt and -post8.txt
TOdd
Glad to read at least one post on this stupid Slashdot website that has some common sense. The whole planet operates on CONTRACTS people. You work until Friday and the company gives you a paycheck. If they don't give you a paycheck, the cops come and make them give you a paycheck. Otherwise the company would just find a new sucker every monday. Duh. Apparently most of Slashdot either has never heard of CONTRACTS, or thinks humanity is advanced enough to work without contracts.
I wrote an individual income tax system that printed 60 forms on laser printers for Ernst & Young; we printed all the returns with it, for several hundred people, for 1987, 88 and 89. Our commercial system had totally failed, after the massive tax reforms of 1986.
An income tax system could definitely be built in the bazaar model but it would require two things:
1. a core team of 2 or 3 very dedicated fulltime developers who were also deeply expert at tax. Some foundation or company would have to pay for at least this core team.
2. a very elegant system and methodology capable of maintaining a large number of moderately complex formulas, anchored against a whole hierarchy of the major subtotals within taxable income, and flexible enough to absorb massive changes. This would have to be some kind of system where variables as well as formulas could be added, maintained, and deleted in a standard way.
Having this infrastructre we could truly maintain it in a bazaar model. The 1000 eyes would find the mistakes, and there would be a mechanism for making modifications without nuking the whole code base.
An open-source tax project would be a very good thing. It would create an open platform for consensus solutions to tax issues.
Many of the rules written by congress are either ridiculously complex to calculate, or ambiguous, or altogether impossible to calculate because of a lack of specific answers from congress necessary to calculate the tax quantity.
* Upstream questions: Congress often fails to identify precisely what inputs should be used to calculate the new quantity, when you consider the festering mass of pre-existing provisions that apply to the amounts that are supposed to be used as building blocks in the new calculation.
* Downstream impacts: Frequently, after a new provision is calculated, other pre-existing calculations can no longer be calculated without addressing how the new provision should be reflected.
An open-source tax system would relieve a great deal of misery all over the country. Existing software companies and the tax industry, have disincentives to just simplifying and getting the job done. They never provide an interface from your business to a tax return. Given an open tax system, accounting software developers would be able to interface to achieve more tax reporting, automatically,
Good topic! Are you just wanting to eval/choose commercial products? Check out these products and links. http://hydra.carleton.ca/info/wlan.html There are lots of free-range solutions to sort thru, for example http://www.tapr.org/ Steve Stroh writes the wireless column for Boardwatch http://www.boardwatch.com -Go read those, they are full of information, steve is at strohpub.com Todd gldialtone.com
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree with you more, BOzdune. There is no choice available for "less government" or no government. That simply leaves power in the hands of whoever grabs it. Thugs and savants.
There are so many false dichotomies; one being that the role of government is to manage markets to prevent monopoly. This ratifies the notion that competition (among the most aggressive) is good. In ratifying competition some good things result. But many bad things also result; duplication for example and game theoretic behavior. Look closely and you see *everybody* competing to get money, not to serve customers. etc.
Everybody admits markets cannot address externalities, the effects on all stakeholders. The commons, the culture, the longterm future, for example are horribly disserved by market theology.
Cut to the solution: progressive income taxation that takes off and gets really extreme at really extreme incomes. Like, $1 million per year you are in the 80% bracket. This not only recovers to the commons but disincents hyperaggressive behavior. I am not worried about recession, our problem today is the opposite, a frantic hyperactivity, energy and CO2 crisis, etc. -todd- retired CPA
In nature there's really no such thing as anarchy. When you have anarchy the very next thing is one person or group of people form a dictatorship.
Good anarchy requires a minimum of rules, I think, and that would be the essence of democracy. What takes terrific amount of work is to dislodge the special interests who exploit the power.. etc. etc.
They should teach in elem. school, the problem of distributed costs and concentrated benefit (the special interst problem) instead of bullsh*t like the pledge of allegiance to Wash. DC
Sorry for the digression... my instinct just tells me, today, radio spectrum is ridiculously SCARCE and until technology makes it abundant, some mechanism is necessary for allocation of the scarce resource instead of allowing it to be wasted in arbitrary ways!
Thanks fr your patience
Todd
Todd
You don't need smart antennas or anything expensive at all.
p df
There are already mesh routing products like Nokia Rooftop that
achieve the 'multiplying bandwidth' phenomenon.
The mathematics of mesh networks and swarmcast demonstrate an interesting phenomenon that the more nodes who stick their antenna into the cloud, the more routes appear and there is a virtuous circle of improving performance. This principle is supported by Nokia papers on the 802.16 workgroup's site. http://wirelessman.org/ "Mesh coverage & robustness improve exponentially as subscribers are added" http://wirelessman.org/tga/contrib/S80216a-02_30.
Instead of heat death, from packet congestion you get a virtuous cycle of greater capacity because more paths are available. Unregulated, and all but unregulatable. Just like oral speech and visual eyesight-- except having unlimited range.
There is a voracious, out-of-control design and chipmaking industry, realizing this vision which will happen with shocking suddenness, as hardware manufacturers create the transceivers and home-owners and apartment dwellers just stick them on the roofs. You will buy these at Walmart and in drug stores for $50 in about 12 months from now,
Todd Boyle www.gldialtone.com
I agree the GOVT should not grab spectrum but I totally disagree with your thesis that spectrum should be private property.
When things are "privatized" they become subject to rent capture, you dummy! NY and DC just print as much money as necessary to capture anything in god's universe that can return RENTS. To NY and DC, the world is nothing but hydroelectric sites. Wherever there is a narrows or a chokepiont in ANY economic process, they capture rents. Isnt' that NICE? Grrrr.
Todd Boyle CPA Kirkland WA. Overthrow the Govm't!
I seem to recall we bumbled into this spectrum auction idea to replace something even worse--the arbitrary government allocation like the railroad grants of the 1800s that still control half the western US.
My 2cents is, *all* spectrum should be subject to auction. But not for money. Each individual might be allocated nontransferable spectrum points to spend however they want. There are already hundreds of accounting databases more than 300 million accounts and this would be nearly trivially easy to account for. You login to an SSL website with your SSN and see your account, and spend or receive +(-) bandwidth points to/from any other party, to apply to transport (sending or receiving being the same thing). Enforcement? By statute, grant +bandwidth points to anybody who busts abusers. Bigg abusers would not have a snowballs' chance, against the mighty minions of mice,
HTH.,
Todd Boyle CPA - ARAP everywhere http://www.arapxml.net
You ask "who will pay?" We are *already* paying. In effect, we are all using the cablecos and telcos as our finance company, and we are spending *way more than $1000*. They decide what to buy, and they also dictate the terms of use! Sheesh. Then they make you feel like a criminal when you setup a server. And then, they operate as our sysadmin, and we have to kiss their butts and wait 45 days for any change order.
The cablecos get the content *free* from networks because its loaded with commercials. They sell our eyeballs to the networks. Ditto the commercial internet. Before this is over, the Wired internet will pay the NANs for access to the destinations--becauses we will be dropping out of the $50/mnth broadband internet.
I'm not stupid enough to imagine these networks will be built out by geek volunteers. There will need to be NAN kits at Walmart for $149 with a router and 2 or 3 dishes. But there will be NANs.
People are going to share Cable TV channels, pool our phone lines, buy and sell whatever we want outside the banking system just exactly like we do with paper cash. We are going to get up in the morning, make coffee and turn on the neighborhood videoconference to chat with our neighbors at 100mbps. Do you think the Telcos are ever going to give us this??
Metcalfs law, Moores law, Guilders Telecosm-- the Telcos just KEEP all the benefit and don't drop their prices. They concentrate more and more. Finally we will just build our own NANS
Todd
Draw a circle around any aggregate of hardware, software, people or bandwidth. Bolt on a general ledger and call it a business. If its a router, bolt on an embedded general legdger. Let all the stuff bill each other. When the accounts receivable or accounts payable pile up, offload them to settlement agents for clearing. This is what we have today except the freakin circle is wayyyy too big, it is ridiculously too big. The smaller decentralized finance model will help evyerybody. If somebody deserves 1% more of the revenue from some arbitrary process, go in there and up their fraction of the revenue of that object. Todd. www.arapxml.net
Todays music and film industry is heavily concentrated at most of the levels, acquisition, production and distribution. Markets were always too rigid for consumers to find and sample and buy direct from artists.
Distributed finance on the internet, technically, allows every one of millions of artists, to go forward creating and selling content and every song could be with different musicians, writers, producers, distribution. And all of them could have different "cuts" of the proceeds (fixed, percentage, etc.) This is a good thing folks. Everybody wants this flexibility even the record labels and distributors. But the accounting was simply impossible before.
Distributed financial systems let the original funder, and the whole chain of distributors thru to the final website, radio station, record store etc. similarly, bid to perform distribution at different prices. This is a good thing too.
What is REALLY great is that if this kind of flexible, distributed system takes root in the media industry, you have also uncoupled the payment or settlement system. You have really unleashed a pandoras box because, at the same time unleashed 1 million artists looking for ways to get paid for gazillion small credits from a gazillion places his music might have been sold. Many to many charging, crediting, and settlement on a peer to peer basis. That is a cool thing. Even if there are clearinghouses. Once this is setup, it will educate millions of people about distributed finance. The central clearinghouse would be the only choke point and it would literally stick out like a sore thumb. It will look ridiculous. The artists, distributers, etc. would route around it within a few years, i.e. alternative settlement houses would appear.
Todd www.gldialtone.com www.arapxml.net
Hacker activity has always been and will continue to be, the operative force preventing the emergence of alternative systems of commerce and payments on the internet. Fostering insecurity is the business of the banking/government establishment. Fostering jitter and latency is the business of telcos involved in the backbones and NAPs.
Banks, governments, telcos and backbone operators want the 'net as a top-down broadcast platform to sell you stuff, not to enable geodesic commerce.
As long as freenet, gnutella, or publius run on the same crappy IPV4 internet, their users will be susceptible to the same kinds of intrusions and threats as any other application.
Wireless MANs like SFNet enable a business model in which cells of known, authenticated citizens might conduct business extremely cheaply, in relative saftety and privacy, behind gateways or firewalls. Net operators would provide inter-galactic jumps to other wireless freenet universes. Webledgers would form the basis of payments, and the usual accounting needs. Webledgers based on dayfiles are one architecture suitable to freenet, which enable conduct of purchases, sales and settlements. There are scores of communities that have issued local currencies. Read www.gldialtone.com/GeneralLedgerPost7.txt and -post8.txt TOdd
Glad to read at least one post on this stupid Slashdot website that has some common sense. The whole planet operates on CONTRACTS people. You work until Friday and the company gives you a paycheck. If they don't give you a paycheck, the cops come and make them give you a paycheck. Otherwise the company would just find a new sucker every monday. Duh. Apparently most of Slashdot either has never heard of CONTRACTS, or thinks humanity is advanced enough to work without contracts.
I wrote an individual income tax system that printed 60 forms on laser printers for Ernst & Young; we printed all the returns with it, for several hundred people, for 1987, 88 and 89. Our commercial system had totally failed, after the massive tax reforms of 1986.
An income tax system could definitely be built in the bazaar model but it would require two things:
1. a core team of 2 or 3 very dedicated fulltime developers who were also deeply expert at tax. Some foundation or company would have to pay for at least this core team.
2. a very elegant system and methodology capable of maintaining a large number of moderately complex formulas, anchored against a whole hierarchy of the major subtotals within taxable income, and flexible enough to absorb massive changes. This would have to be some kind of system where variables as well as formulas could be added, maintained, and deleted in a standard way.
Having this infrastructre we could truly maintain it in a bazaar model. The 1000 eyes would find the mistakes, and there would be a mechanism for making modifications without nuking the whole code base.
An open-source tax project would be a very good thing. It would create an open platform for consensus solutions to tax issues.
Many of the rules written by congress are either ridiculously complex to calculate, or ambiguous, or altogether impossible to calculate because of a lack of specific answers from congress necessary to calculate the tax quantity.
* Upstream questions: Congress often fails to identify precisely what inputs should be used to calculate the new quantity, when you consider the festering mass of pre-existing provisions that apply to the amounts that are supposed to be used as building blocks in the new calculation.
* Downstream impacts: Frequently, after a new provision is calculated, other pre-existing calculations can no longer be calculated without addressing how the new provision should be reflected.
An open-source tax system would relieve a great deal of misery all over the country. Existing software companies and the tax industry, have disincentives to just simplifying and getting the job done. They never provide an interface from your business to a tax return. Given an open tax system, accounting software developers would be able to interface to achieve more tax reporting, automatically,
* Todd F. Boyle CPA http://www.GLDialtone.com/
Good topic! Are you just wanting to eval/choose commercial products? Check out these products and links. http://hydra.carleton.ca/info/wlan.html There are lots of free-range solutions to sort thru, for example http://www.tapr.org/ Steve Stroh writes the wireless column for Boardwatch http://www.boardwatch.com -Go read those, they are full of information, steve is at strohpub.com Todd gldialtone.com