Information Arms Race
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If the sum of knowledge is available in a smart mob, then this knowledge is also available to any hostile individual that taps into the mob network. The information's quality is only as good as its most trustworthy member.
This is precisely correct, and you should read the book to find out more. Open reputation mechanisms in such networks (Slashdot being a prime example) help to ensure the trustworthiness of the network and its individual nodes. One must accept as given that hostile forces are looking in and, in true Internet fashion, adapt or route around the intrusion.
As Rheingold states, there is a continuous competition or arms race between the development of privacy mechanisms in these technologies and technologies to counter that privacy. It is very similar to the war between those who want information to be free and those who want to charge money for it.
I'm almost finished Smart Mobs find it a most excellent compendium of the effect that communications technologies are having on our culture. I recommend it to all.
I remember when a million secretaries were dragged kicking and screaming from WordPerfect to MS Word.
Precisely. Somebody other than the folks who actually used the software for work made the decision to switch to Microsoft. Superior marketing, not superior product.
appropriate technology
on
HDTV Over IP
·
· Score: 1
Maybe IP isn't the appropriate media for high quality video transmission.
The BSA can't search your office, but they are openly pandering to "disgruntled employees" to rat on their employers by calling an 800-number. They're bombarding radio with advertising that simultaneously threatens businesses with punitive legal action for copying software and more subtly entices malcontents to report their bosses to the BSA.
The next step is they send the Lawyer Bigfoot letter demanding proof that the company doesn't "pirate" applications. The so-called "fines" are actually settlements extorted from businesses.
Hey, what other industry can demand that the workers cover 100% of production costs before they get paid? Do you think that the United Auto Workers would put up with that? Yet any recording contract requires that the costs of recording, marketing and production be paid in full before the artists make a dime from their music.
And the average hit record costs a *lot* in marketing costs and payola to radio. The label breaks even and starts raking it in well before the artist ever does.
Is the Tao neutrino the particle responsible for the balance of all forces in the universe? I assume the other two are the Yin neutrino and the Yang neutrino. Excuse me while I go catch up in Lao Tzu's textbook on particle physics.
Right. I didn't mean *literally* trademark it, as in registering with the PTO. Rather, it appears that MS is grabbing the term ".net" to signify a Microsoft brand. I think the prospect is very real that they'd try to create the dominant public perception that ".net" is associated with Microsoft. They have the market power to do so.
Microsoft is basically turning a generic name of the.net top-level domain into it's own trademark. We've all heard how Xerox, Kleenex, Velcro and other companies put a lot of energy and money into ensuring that their product trademarks do not become the generic descriptor for photocopies, facial tissue, etc. This is the first time I've seen a company do the reverse: snatch a generic term from the public domain and turn it into a brand. Someone should alert ICANN.
I can see it now: they'll provide specially-adapted SUVs and dirt bikes for tourists to go off-roading across the Lunar landscape. Chills 'n' thrills in 1/6 of Earth's gravity!
While your response to Microsoft was excellent -- restrained, balanced and firm -- I hope that Slashdot/Andover/VAlinux fights this tooth and nail. The pendulum of IP rights has swung too far in favor of corporate interests, and its time to start pushing back!
I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
Here in North Carolina a company called 123NC.com has been selling North Carolina criminal records online for a couple months now. They've got a full-bore radio ad campaign in progress, promoting it for pre-employment screening but also to check out someone you're dating.
The company has a contract with the state and a direct link to the central court records database. It's the genuine article. They may do civil court records eventually, too.
I was in Sapporo last fall and had little difficulty dialing up locally. I got an account from Ipass.net which provided me with dialup in every Japanese city I visited. If you buy an account from them, they have a little software tool which provides you with a list of access numbers for wherever you happen to be. It's worldwide, not just Japan. I did have to spend a little time playing with the phone numbers -- deleting unneccessary area codes, etc. But once I hit the phone number right, the service was great.
Japan is very computer-friendly. All the hotel rooms have a phone jack for computer, and all of the pay phones have 2 jacks, one for modem and one for ISDN.
Looking over the Princeton PEAR site, the research they describe there strikes me as very similar to that which friends of mine have participated in at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. The PEAR folks describe their work in the terminology of science and quantum mechanics. The Rhine folks are just call it psychokinesis.
Dr. J.B. Rhine started his research into paranormal phenomena at Duke University in the 1920s. Rhine's research applied scientific methods to the question of whether ESP and psychokinesis did in fact exist -- he coined the term "extrasensory perception" or "ESP" -- and tried to find out how such things worked. Eventually Duke got concerned about their public image and, in the early 60s, ran Rhine out of the University. Unperturbed, he moved his lab to a building directly across the street from Duke (where it remains to this day). His institute is continuing the research long after Rhine's death.
I don't begrudge continued academic research into "paranormal" phenomena -- in fact, I think mainstream-style research methods are the only way to go when examining whether ESP and psychokinesis exist. But I do find it ironic and humorous that image-conscious Duke University threw J.D. Rhine out for doing the same work which continues -- in another guise -- under the official sanction and aegis of Princeton University. (Dookies know another shade of irony, that the architecture of Duke's main campus was modeled after Princeton.)
>Kaphka is right, the only connection to IBM is that the patent record appears in IBM's database. The patent belongs to PEAR, Inc., a Minnesota corporation.
I have to question the patent, however. I mean, to get a patent, you have to have a working prototype. But rather than a device using quantum principles as a mind-control input device, Pear, Inc., would appear to have a softward application which lets the user train exercise his/her psionic powers by wishing a certain trend in the output of a randomly-generated signal from the application. A game, more or less.
I'd be interested in seeing what Pear, Inc. has to say about itself, but the corporate website isn't responding. Slashdotted?
Considering that the trial's ongoing momentum was heavily favoring Justice, and Microsoft's continuing arrogant attitude, it's no surprise the talks reached an impasse. Justice has no incentive to settle, especially in an election year, and especially having been burned by Microsoft before. Judging from Microsoft's behavior after the last settlement with DoJ, I'd expect MS to respect a new deal with Justice about as much as Hitler respected the Treaty of Versailles.
It seems like the Slashdot effect is being felt in the "real world". A couple of my buddies just got back from Circuit City with their new Apex players, and reported that the model is selling like hotcakes. The store clerk told them that people were calling and buying them on the telephone. They're expected to be gone by lunchtime.
Stephen King's actual first electronic offering
on
King's New eBook
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Dykki Settle and his little company DreamTech published a short story by Stephen King many years ago, 1994, I think. Umney's Last Case was the title. Dream Tech followed up with a full length novel Bless This Food by Adrian Butash.
Settle & DreamTech were subsequently acquired by Ventana Communications, which was the first publisher to put CD-ROMs into paper books with hyperlinks to the Web from the book's content. And the first to put a web browser (Netscape) into a retail product (The Internet Membership Kit).
Slashdot Mirror
If the sum of knowledge is available in a smart mob, then this knowledge is also available to any hostile individual that taps into the mob network. The information's quality is only as good as its most trustworthy member.
This is precisely correct, and you should read the book to find out more. Open reputation mechanisms in such networks (Slashdot being a prime example) help to ensure the trustworthiness of the network and its individual nodes. One must accept as given that hostile forces are looking in and, in true Internet fashion, adapt or route around the intrusion.
As Rheingold states, there is a continuous competition or arms race between the development of privacy mechanisms in these technologies and technologies to counter that privacy. It is very similar to the war between those who want information to be free and those who want to charge money for it.
I'm almost finished Smart Mobs find it a most excellent compendium of the effect that communications technologies are having on our culture. I recommend it to all.
Precisely. Somebody other than the folks who actually used the software for work made the decision to switch to Microsoft. Superior marketing, not superior product.
Maybe IP isn't the appropriate media for high quality video transmission.
The next step is they send the Lawyer Bigfoot letter demanding proof that the company doesn't "pirate" applications. The so-called "fines" are actually settlements extorted from businesses.
And the average hit record costs a *lot* in marketing costs and payola to radio. The label breaks even and starts raking it in well before the artist ever does.
Is the Tao neutrino the particle responsible for the balance of all forces in the universe? I assume the other two are the Yin neutrino and the Yang neutrino. Excuse me while I go catch up in Lao Tzu's textbook on particle physics.
Right. I didn't mean *literally* trademark it, as in registering with the PTO. Rather, it appears that MS is grabbing the term ".net" to signify a Microsoft brand. I think the prospect is very real that they'd try to create the dominant public perception that ".net" is associated with Microsoft. They have the market power to do so.
Microsoft is basically turning a generic name of the .net top-level domain into it's own trademark. We've all heard how Xerox, Kleenex, Velcro and other companies put a lot of energy and money into ensuring that their product trademarks do not become the generic descriptor for photocopies, facial tissue, etc. This is the first time I've seen a company do the reverse: snatch a generic term from the public domain and turn it into a brand. Someone should alert ICANN.
I can see it now: they'll provide specially-adapted SUVs and dirt bikes for tourists to go off-roading across the Lunar landscape. Chills 'n' thrills in 1/6 of Earth's gravity!
While your response to Microsoft was excellent -- restrained, balanced and firm -- I hope that Slashdot/Andover/VAlinux fights this tooth and nail. The pendulum of IP rights has swung too far in favor of corporate interests, and its time to start pushing back!
I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....
Instead, I offer a 27-year-old poem by Wendell Berry. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front . The poem speaks for itself. Read the whole thing, but I offer here the first stanza as a teaser:
Here in North Carolina a company called 123NC.com has been selling North Carolina criminal records online for a couple months now. They've got a full-bore radio ad campaign in progress, promoting it for pre-employment screening but also to check out someone you're dating.
The company has a contract with the state and a direct link to the central court records database. It's the genuine article. They may do civil court records eventually, too.
In terms of large & venerable Web-based collections of just about anything, Metalab (formerly Sunsite) is still going strong.
I was in Sapporo last fall and had little difficulty dialing up locally. I got an account from Ipass.net which provided me with dialup in every Japanese city I visited. If you buy an account from them, they have a little software tool which provides you with a list of access numbers for wherever you happen to be. It's worldwide, not just Japan. I did have to spend a little time playing with the phone numbers -- deleting unneccessary area codes, etc. But once I hit the phone number right, the service was great.
Japan is very computer-friendly. All the hotel rooms have a phone jack for computer, and all of the pay phones have 2 jacks, one for modem and one for ISDN.
Looking over the Princeton PEAR site, the research they describe there strikes me as very similar to that which friends of mine have participated in at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. The PEAR folks describe their work in the terminology of science and quantum mechanics. The Rhine folks are just call it psychokinesis.
Dr. J.B. Rhine started his research into paranormal phenomena at Duke University in the 1920s. Rhine's research applied scientific methods to the question of whether ESP and psychokinesis did in fact exist -- he coined the term "extrasensory perception" or "ESP" -- and tried to find out how such things worked. Eventually Duke got concerned about their public image and, in the early 60s, ran Rhine out of the University. Unperturbed, he moved his lab to a building directly across the street from Duke (where it remains to this day). His institute is continuing the research long after Rhine's death.
I don't begrudge continued academic research into "paranormal" phenomena -- in fact, I think mainstream-style research methods are the only way to go when examining whether ESP and psychokinesis exist. But I do find it ironic and humorous that image-conscious Duke University threw J.D. Rhine out for doing the same work which continues -- in another guise -- under the official sanction and aegis of Princeton University. (Dookies know another shade of irony, that the architecture of Duke's main campus was modeled after Princeton.)
>Kaphka is right, the only connection to IBM is that the patent record appears in IBM's database. The patent belongs to PEAR, Inc., a Minnesota corporation.
I have to question the patent, however. I mean, to get a patent, you have to have a working prototype. But rather than a device using quantum principles as a mind-control input device, Pear, Inc., would appear to have a softward application which lets the user train exercise his/her psionic powers by wishing a certain trend in the output of a randomly-generated signal from the application. A game, more or less.
I'd be interested in seeing what Pear, Inc. has to say about itself, but the corporate website isn't responding. Slashdotted?
Considering that the trial's ongoing momentum was heavily favoring Justice, and Microsoft's continuing arrogant attitude, it's no surprise the talks reached an impasse. Justice has no incentive to settle, especially in an election year, and especially having been burned by Microsoft before. Judging from Microsoft's behavior after the last settlement with DoJ, I'd expect MS to respect a new deal with Justice about as much as Hitler respected the Treaty of Versailles.
It seems like the Slashdot effect is being felt in the "real world". A couple of my buddies just got back from Circuit City with their new Apex players, and reported that the model is selling like hotcakes. The store clerk told them that people were calling and buying them on the telephone. They're expected to be gone by lunchtime.
Settle & DreamTech were subsequently acquired by Ventana Communications, which was the first publisher to put CD-ROMs into paper books with hyperlinks to the Web from the book's content. And the first to put a web browser (Netscape) into a retail product (The Internet Membership Kit).