Adverts are really inefficient, and paywalls just send readers to other sites. What IMO would work better, and fit US culture, is a tip jar that can be easily added to articles, blogs, etc. When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip. Why is this not a thing already?
Good. The price of computing power falls by 50% every 18 months or so. We should see these devices settle in at a few bucks, and then keep increasing in capability. The last IoT project I did used a $20 OpenWRT router (glar150) and it was already impressive how much that little box could do.
Hang on with your broad generalizations and abuse of language. I'm an author. I sell my books. If people buy them, how is that a "tax"? How is the sale of a book in a free market a "levy"? You are using these words with such woeful ignorance it's hard to know if you are sincere, or a troll. How am I "taking an advance on the proceeds"? What does that even mean?
And my last book, I wrote a few months ago, and I'm expecting to die in a month or two now (terminal cancer), and I really hope my book sales will provide some kind of income for my kids, who are young and will have lost the person who housed and fed them since they were babies.
Are you saying that the act of creating works, and selling them in a free market suddenly become "immoral" if one dies? Do you have a basis for this?
As for the copyright system, it was never a "reasonable compromise" nor was it ever meant to be a monetary incentive for creators. Utter rubbish. It was lobbied and enforced by publishers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne) on behalf of publishers. It was, and still is, all about creating a monopoly on reproduction, to benefit the powerful.
To be fair, there's no conflict of interest here. His interests are very clear. Patent attorneys make their money from patent disputes. The Unitary Patent is fantastic news for such people. It gives them larger clients willing to pay higher prices for pan-EU monopolies.
The whole point of the patent system is to tax the market.
It's that simple. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. We filed our appeal in Belgium because we know, in Flanders, how language can be used as a political tool. Here, the use of French, English, and German, suppresses dissent and appeal. It is already extraordinarily expensive to defend against a patent suit. The larger the court, the more it costs. I showed in 2007 using the EPO's own figures that specialized courts cost 4x more than courts that deal in all matters including patents.
This adds to an extraordinary burden on those trying to make products, and a downhill fight for patent owners. You think the Microsoft tax on Android is exceptional or unique? No, it's the Future According the the Patent System. The cost of production falls to zero, and the cost of licensing fills the gap, and the price to the market remains flat.
Yes, it's what people are afraid of, since the patent industry has been very clearly fighting for this for decades now. Their apologists will deny it, as usual. The EPO however is not so shy: http://www.epo.org/news-issues... lists software patents above biotech in their topics of interest with respect to the Unitary Patent.
Anyone who claims the Unitary Patent is about reducing costs and somehow "protecting innovation" is a troll, a liar, extraordinarily ignorant, and/or a paid lobbyist. This isn't magic. We've been watching this for more than a decade. I personally spent two years doing nothing else than studying the patent system and learning its motives.
The patent system is sociopathic, corrupt, and built on lies and the capture of politics by vested interests.
The C4.1 contribution protocol I eventually wrote for ZeroMQ solved this problem. You have to develop rules that catch bad actors (yet not learners) and then educate project managers on how to fire people when needed.
Our rules for instance ask that you solve one problem with one patch, that you never break existing stable APIs, that you respect style guidelines, and so on. When people break these rules we give them several chances to improve their behavior. If they persist in doing it wrong, we remove them.
Turns out, when the rules are very explicit and teach people how to make good patches, then it's very rare we have to fire people.
The Economist was, ironically, founded as a "free market" newspaper, in a period when that meant specifically, the fight against the patent system. I.e. that was its first purpose, to argue against the re-establishment of the patent system in Britain.
Samsung never intended to release a Tizen phone. They were the ones who leaked the design and photos. The whole point of Tizen was to get a stick against Google, after they bought Motorola. Samsung are/were paranoid that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment, and that Android was becoming a toxic platform for them. Tizen was their insurance. Google got the message and Samsung killed most of their Tizen team and went back to focusing on Android.
Incidentally, it's trivial to know which players to keep. You hire freely, openly. You allow people to self-organize around problems. You reduce the latency of all communications from business through the whole company to development and back. And then you rank people simply by their ability to solve relevant problems, to gain users internally. In a software business, you allow anyone to start a project and you rank people on their value in the supply chain.
I've written loads about this. http://hintjens.com/blog:73#toc1 would be an example. Build asynchronous lock-free self-organizing structures, and you can add and remove people trivially.
Netflix isn't the first business to put all the weight on the players while ignoring the game. It doesn't matter how many A players you hire if your organization has deep structural problems. Microsoft would be a prime example.
In contrast, you can build extremely effective organizations out of ordinary people, if you allow them to organize freely around problems, compete honestly, delegate at will, and so on.
No way, it's impossible that sociopathic power-hungry politicians, bankers, military men, and intelligence officers who treat human lives as disposable would stoop to such things. That would be unAmerican. And beside, CNN and MSBNC would tell us if it happened, right? "Controlled opposition"... laughable! Next you're going to tell me the FBI infiltrated Anonymous chat channels and encouraged young guys to hack into their own systems!
There's a dark irony in so-called skeptics pushing their own conspiracy theories (mysterious gangs hate our way of life) to muffle out the obvious truth that it's (always) all about the money.
It's not only probable, it's by far the simplest explanation, that the military-security complex needs to create threats to justify its existence, so a handsome slice of its budget consistently goes back into black operations against the very people it's meant to be protecting. If you argue that only crooks would do this, then my question is, what evidence do you have that the FBI, CIA, NSA, GCHQ et al are not run by simple crooks?
As for being pessimistic, it's a normal feeling but not useful. Read my book (free, see below) for a background into how this state of affairs came to be, and how to fix things.
The War on the Internet is as much about creating an environment of fear that will justify increased spending, as it is cracking down on the young smart kids who are the real threat to the corporate para-State.
So it's fairly likely that the FBI/NSA and their legal or criminal subcontractors are heavily involved in any dramatic security-related event. The fact that government websites are targeted makes no difference. Simple little false flags that keep the pressure up on legislators.
It's easy to mock all this but the threat to our digital lifestyle is real and serious. We're a few years away from a fully regulated Internet where if you don't conform -- by running approved hardware, approved software, approved monitoring -- you simply won't get access, period. Clipper chip, remember that?
And the only way to convince the mass of "who cares?" public are a series of dramatic, dangerous, unacceptable attacks on websites, infrastructure, transport, etc.
The SIM firmware runs silently and in the background and by some reports, even when the phone is switched off, it continues to slowly ping cell towers, making your phone trackable unless you remove the battery.
IMO it's part of an undeclared war on the Internet, funded by the intelligence-security complex, who need to reign in and control the Internet. The usual structure is official organizations (NSA, GCQ) funding subcontractors (like Stratfor) who fund off-the-books teams to build up armed capacity, attack targets to create a climate of fear, and to blackmail third parties into cooperation. Your tax dollars hard at work, keeping the Children Safe from cyberterrorists, hackers, and criminals, aka an independent Internet.
Cheap communications has changed our society more than any other of our inventions and it has removed more tyrants from power than any weapon. Let’s take another step into the history books, back to May 1st, in 1844. Alfred Vail, working with Samuel Morse, was setting up the first telegraph line, and on that day sent the world’s first ever electronic message down the 24 miles of cable that were working, from Annapolis Junction to Washington D.C., to report the results of the Whig Party presidential nominations (Henry Clay won that nomination, and lost the subsequent election).
Just a decade later in 1855, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company merged to create Western Union. One assumes new-york-and-mississippi-valley-and-western-union-printing-telegraph-company.com was already taken by domain name squatters.
By 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines, and by 1945 it had an effective monopoly over the US market. As the New Yorker wrote, monopolies make spying easier. It is an easy and obvious trade: the government allows, by inaction or by intervention, a powerful telecommunications company to become dominant in a market through mergers and acquisitions. In return that company provides the government with surveillance.
The New Yorker explains how Western Union used its monopoly to serve those in power:
What we now call electronic privacy first became an issue in the eighteen-seventies, after Western Union, the earliest and, in some ways, the most terrifying of the communications monopolies, achieved dominion over the telegraph system. Western Union was accused of intercepting and reading its customers’ telegraphs for both political and financial purposes (what’s now considered insider trading).
Western Union was a known ally of the Republican Party, but the Democrats of the day had no choice but to use its wires, which put them at a disadvantage; for example, Republicans won the contested election of 1876 thanks in part to an intercepted telegraph. The extent of Western Union’s actions might never be entirely known, since in response to a congressional inquiry the company destroyed most of its relevant records.
It is quite visible how cost gravity drove communications down from an experiment for the wealthy to a mass market product so cheap even Western Union couldn’t make profits from it. By 1980 its telegraph business was dying, and the old Western Union business was finally closed in 2006, after 151 years of operation. The name was, as we know, reused for a financial services company which today enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Curiously, Western Union’s long telegraph monopoly seems to have had only a small impact on the size of communications networks. If cost gravity was operating fully, at 29% a year, and telegraph costs were in free-fall, there would have been 37M miles of telegraph by 1900. Instead, assuming Western Union had half the market, there were 2M miles. That is a factor of 16 over 55 years, which is not much, and a part of that can be accounted for by quality improvements.
I’m also not sure what to do with the random figure of 113 million kilometers of fiber optic cable produced in 2010. A cable is a bundle of fibers, and the traffic rates are rather higher than Western Union’s old stock. Has cost gravity been working?
One smoking gun pointing to a century and half of cost gravity being hijacked by telecoms monopolies back through AT&T and Western Union is the cost of the modern equivalent of a telegraph, the text message.
Slashdot Mirror
This robot has been in the worldwide news three times already. Whoever is planning the press campaign is doing a great job.
Adverts are really inefficient, and paywalls just send readers to other sites. What IMO would work better, and fit US culture, is a tip jar that can be easily added to articles, blogs, etc. When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip. Why is this not a thing already?
Good. The price of computing power falls by 50% every 18 months or so. We should see these devices settle in at a few bucks, and then keep increasing in capability. The last IoT project I did used a $20 OpenWRT router (glar150) and it was already impressive how much that little box could do.
Hang on with your broad generalizations and abuse of language. I'm an author. I sell my books. If people buy them, how is that a "tax"? How is the sale of a book in a free market a "levy"? You are using these words with such woeful ignorance it's hard to know if you are sincere, or a troll. How am I "taking an advance on the proceeds"? What does that even mean?
And my last book, I wrote a few months ago, and I'm expecting to die in a month or two now (terminal cancer), and I really hope my book sales will provide some kind of income for my kids, who are young and will have lost the person who housed and fed them since they were babies.
Are you saying that the act of creating works, and selling them in a free market suddenly become "immoral" if one dies? Do you have a basis for this?
As for the copyright system, it was never a "reasonable compromise" nor was it ever meant to be a monetary incentive for creators. Utter rubbish. It was lobbied and enforced by publishers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne) on behalf of publishers. It was, and still is, all about creating a monopoly on reproduction, to benefit the powerful.
A shame the NRA can't deal with being sliced into like this.
Your mum's so FAT32...
To be fair, there's no conflict of interest here. His interests are very clear. Patent attorneys make their money from patent disputes. The Unitary Patent is fantastic news for such people. It gives them larger clients willing to pay higher prices for pan-EU monopolies.
The whole point of the patent system is to tax the market.
It's that simple. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. We filed our appeal in Belgium because we know, in Flanders, how language can be used as a political tool. Here, the use of French, English, and German, suppresses dissent and appeal. It is already extraordinarily expensive to defend against a patent suit. The larger the court, the more it costs. I showed in 2007 using the EPO's own figures that specialized courts cost 4x more than courts that deal in all matters including patents.
This adds to an extraordinary burden on those trying to make products, and a downhill fight for patent owners. You think the Microsoft tax on Android is exceptional or unique? No, it's the Future According the the Patent System. The cost of production falls to zero, and the cost of licensing fills the gap, and the price to the market remains flat.
Language is a weapon, in this case.
Yes, it's what people are afraid of, since the patent industry has been very clearly fighting for this for decades now. Their apologists will deny it, as usual. The EPO however is not so shy: http://www.epo.org/news-issues... lists software patents above biotech in their topics of interest with respect to the Unitary Patent.
Anyone who claims the Unitary Patent is about reducing costs and somehow "protecting innovation" is a troll, a liar, extraordinarily ignorant, and/or a paid lobbyist. This isn't magic. We've been watching this for more than a decade. I personally spent two years doing nothing else than studying the patent system and learning its motives.
The patent system is sociopathic, corrupt, and built on lies and the capture of politics by vested interests.
The C4.1 contribution protocol I eventually wrote for ZeroMQ solved this problem. You have to develop rules that catch bad actors (yet not learners) and then educate project managers on how to fire people when needed.
Our rules for instance ask that you solve one problem with one patch, that you never break existing stable APIs, that you respect style guidelines, and so on. When people break these rules we give them several chances to improve their behavior. If they persist in doing it wrong, we remove them.
Turns out, when the rules are very explicit and teach people how to make good patches, then it's very rare we have to fire people.
The rules are at http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22
The Economist was, ironically, founded as a "free market" newspaper, in a period when that meant specifically, the fight against the patent system. I.e. that was its first purpose, to argue against the re-establishment of the patent system in Britain.
Samsung never intended to release a Tizen phone. They were the ones who leaked the design and photos. The whole point of Tizen was to get a stick against Google, after they bought Motorola. Samsung are/were paranoid that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment, and that Android was becoming a toxic platform for them. Tizen was their insurance. Google got the message and Samsung killed most of their Tizen team and went back to focusing on Android.
Incidentally, it's trivial to know which players to keep. You hire freely, openly. You allow people to self-organize around problems. You reduce the latency of all communications from business through the whole company to development and back. And then you rank people simply by their ability to solve relevant problems, to gain users internally. In a software business, you allow anyone to start a project and you rank people on their value in the supply chain.
I've written loads about this. http://hintjens.com/blog:73#toc1 would be an example. Build asynchronous lock-free self-organizing structures, and you can add and remove people trivially.
Netflix isn't the first business to put all the weight on the players while ignoring the game. It doesn't matter how many A players you hire if your organization has deep structural problems. Microsoft would be a prime example.
In contrast, you can build extremely effective organizations out of ordinary people, if you allow them to organize freely around problems, compete honestly, delegate at will, and so on.
"primary" "antagonists" are discrediting his real detractors by taking any criticism and sending it to the edge of insanity.
No way, it's impossible that sociopathic power-hungry politicians, bankers, military men, and intelligence officers who treat human lives as disposable would stoop to such things. That would be unAmerican. And beside, CNN and MSBNC would tell us if it happened, right? "Controlled opposition"... laughable! Next you're going to tell me the FBI infiltrated Anonymous chat channels and encouraged young guys to hack into their own systems!
You're right, history proves you can't shut down the flow of information.
Doesn't mean people aren't trying, people with excessive amounts of money and technology, and no laws to keep them constrained.
I'm impressed by the quality of your arguments. Wait, you didn't make any arguments, you were just rude and dismissive...
There's a dark irony in so-called skeptics pushing their own conspiracy theories (mysterious gangs hate our way of life) to muffle out the obvious truth that it's (always) all about the money.
It's not only probable, it's by far the simplest explanation, that the military-security complex needs to create threats to justify its existence, so a handsome slice of its budget consistently goes back into black operations against the very people it's meant to be protecting. If you argue that only crooks would do this, then my question is, what evidence do you have that the FBI, CIA, NSA, GCHQ et al are not run by simple crooks?
As for being pessimistic, it's a normal feeling but not useful. Read my book (free, see below) for a background into how this state of affairs came to be, and how to fix things.
The War on the Internet is as much about creating an environment of fear that will justify increased spending, as it is cracking down on the young smart kids who are the real threat to the corporate para-State.
So it's fairly likely that the FBI/NSA and their legal or criminal subcontractors are heavily involved in any dramatic security-related event. The fact that government websites are targeted makes no difference. Simple little false flags that keep the pressure up on legislators.
It's easy to mock all this but the threat to our digital lifestyle is real and serious. We're a few years away from a fully regulated Internet where if you don't conform -- by running approved hardware, approved software, approved monitoring -- you simply won't get access, period. Clipper chip, remember that?
And the only way to convince the mass of "who cares?" public are a series of dramatic, dangerous, unacceptable attacks on websites, infrastructure, transport, etc.
The SIM firmware runs silently and in the background and by some reports, even when the phone is switched off, it continues to slowly ping cell towers, making your phone trackable unless you remove the battery.
IMO it's part of an undeclared war on the Internet, funded by the intelligence-security complex, who need to reign in and control the Internet. The usual structure is official organizations (NSA, GCQ) funding subcontractors (like Stratfor) who fund off-the-books teams to build up armed capacity, attack targets to create a climate of fear, and to blackmail third parties into cooperation. Your tax dollars hard at work, keeping the Children Safe from cyberterrorists, hackers, and criminals, aka an independent Internet.
The old WU was renamed First Valley, asset-stripped, and the remains sold to First Financial.
MoneyGram's money transfer business was taken over by WU in 2008.
Once Upon a Time in America
Cheap communications has changed our society more than any other of our inventions and it has removed more tyrants from power than any weapon. Let’s take another step into the history books, back to May 1st, in 1844. Alfred Vail, working with Samuel Morse, was setting up the first telegraph line, and on that day sent the world’s first ever electronic message down the 24 miles of cable that were working, from Annapolis Junction to Washington D.C., to report the results of the Whig Party presidential nominations (Henry Clay won that nomination, and lost the subsequent election).
Just a decade later in 1855, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company merged to create Western Union. One assumes new-york-and-mississippi-valley-and-western-union-printing-telegraph-company.com was already taken by domain name squatters.
By 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines, and by 1945 it had an effective monopoly over the US market. As the New Yorker wrote, monopolies make spying easier. It is an easy and obvious trade: the government allows, by inaction or by intervention, a powerful telecommunications company to become dominant in a market through mergers and acquisitions. In return that company provides the government with surveillance.
The New Yorker explains how Western Union used its monopoly to serve those in power:
It is quite visible how cost gravity drove communications down from an experiment for the wealthy to a mass market product so cheap even Western Union couldn’t make profits from it. By 1980 its telegraph business was dying, and the old Western Union business was finally closed in 2006, after 151 years of operation. The name was, as we know, reused for a financial services company which today enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Curiously, Western Union’s long telegraph monopoly seems to have had only a small impact on the size of communications networks. If cost gravity was operating fully, at 29% a year, and telegraph costs were in free-fall, there would have been 37M miles of telegraph by 1900. Instead, assuming Western Union had half the market, there were 2M miles. That is a factor of 16 over 55 years, which is not much, and a part of that can be accounted for by quality improvements.
I’m also not sure what to do with the random figure of 113 million kilometers of fiber optic cable produced in 2010. A cable is a bundle of fibers, and the traffic rates are rather higher than Western Union’s old stock. Has cost gravity been working?
One smoking gun pointing to a century and half of cost gravity being hijacked by telecoms monopolies back through AT&T and Western Union is the cost of the modern equivalent of a telegraph, the text message.
+1.
I don't have mod points and couldn't vote you up if I did but +1.