China has no history of embedded civil code; it has always been run from the *center*, by powerful interests that made the law punitive only when one upset "the natural order of things" - e.g. poisoning a rice paddy, or carrying a sign in 1967 that claimed "capitalism is good" - those things would get you killed. However, if you stole someone intellectual property, the dispute was settled strictly between the parties, without the intervention by a civil authority; essentially, it was between you and the thief. In those situations, the person who had the most political power, or local connections, would win. This is simply the way things have been, until very recently, in China.
In other words, no LEGAL sense of protected IP. That is starting to change, slowly, as the world gets wired up, but it will take a while. Another way to say this is that many, many people in China have no problem with lifting someone else IP, because that's the way things have always been. btw, this doesn't make China a thieving culture, but rather a culture where there have been no strictures embedded in civil code to prevent this sort of thing. This is one more reason why international companies need to be cautious with IP in China, and understand how to play hard ball when they have IP stolen.
These telecommunications companies are little more than parasites. They don't ENABLE anything on their own. First, they leverage all kinds of free subsidies (your tax dollars) to build their networks. Then, they wrangle out of taxes by taking business deductions, usually paying their worthless CEO's and other senior executives obscene amount of money for doing exactly what? Taking credit for the INternet and its associated benefits to technology, even as they choke off the benefits of those technologies.
What's even more breathtaking is that its tax money (made from our tax dollars, earned by the sweat of our ever-longer work days) that actually *paid* for their infrastructure.
Last, the thing that really amps me up about stuff like this is that telecommunications companies and ISPs, etc. are essentially using technology that they didn't invent, to leverage YOUR and my communicative assets!
Communication was "free" until we began to find ways to increase it's speed, depth, and breadth. From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
Guess what? That model isn't going to work anymore, not if we want a sustainable information ecology that is as diverse as possible.
Sorry, but these ISPs and telcos are little more than traitors to human advancement, masquerading as enablers. They want to suck us dry; they want all the benefits. They want tax breaks made by the policy makers that they buy every few years to build their infrastructures, and then they want us to pay them more, as if the tax breaks (which we ultimately pay for) and the infrastructure (which we also pay for), and the very source of communications that they leverage (you and me), isn't enough.
We need to start finding ways (I don't have the answers, just posing the possibility) to once and for all RID this world of these gatekeepers, because they are interested in keeping only one thing sustainable - their bank accounts. They could give a damn about whether the world is better serves by more transparent and facile communications technology. The Telco and ISP sector are, again, traitors to human growth and development. We need to find another way.
This is exactly right; it's an "economy" move that will strip more employees. Whitman is, and always has been, nothing more than a figurehead. She sat by while eBay dropped into oblivion, and now she will do the same at HP. They're prettying up hp (if that's possible, after Fiorina's debacles) for a sale, period. They will simplify operations so that it will be an easier pill to swallow for some buyer, a few years hence. Whitman will get credit for "saving the stock value" of some other such nonsense, and more thousands of hp employees will be out of work. It's a pathetic sideshow, with talentless, worthless senior executives and board members playing checkers with people's lives. Hewlett and Packard would roll over in theor graves if they could see what has happened to a once-great company.
I'm not a Marxist, but we have never seen true Marxist Communism. Soviet Russia and The People's Republic of China were/are corrupt "capitalist" systems, where there is a lot of reward at the top, and practically nothing left over for anyone else.
How does google or Time Magazine, or the New York Times make most of their respective revenues? Advertising.
Who buys the advertising? Paying ad customers (subscribers barely break even). Why do advertisers pay media companies? Because the media companies deliver a "product" - i.e. our eyeballs and ears. You (we) are the product, whether you want to admit it or not. Without delivering your (our) attention to advertisers, there would be no priivate media. Our attention is what the media sells; it's a complex relationship, but that's the guts of it.
I don't like this any more than you do. However, I do see the logic in arguments made to show that *responsible and transparent* surveillance can help keep a society safe, *if* surveillance is not abused.
For instance, how are we going to prevent small groups of people from doing ungodly amounts of real harm (via violence) as the means to do that becomes more and more easy to access. Just look at Bill Joy's now-famous essay - "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", written some years ago, to get a clear idea where we're headed http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html.
The key here is that all surveillance activity that takes place in a Democratic society *must* be transparent. You and I should be able to know when , where, for how long, for what reason, and by whom we have been the subject of surveillance *on demand*.
Two additional problems, yet to be solved accompany the coming of universal surveillance:
1) Massive retraining and transparent accountability of *all* persons involved in surveillance, with harsh penalties dolled out for abuse.
2) Keeping the most dangerous among us from knowing how and when they are subjects of surveillance. This is a complex problem, because it also deals with the "mission creep" of those who are governing surveillance systems, because they get to decide what and who is considered "dangerous". Thus, the absolute importance of #!, above.
Again, I don't like the idea of being watched; I don't like the idea of being groped at an airport; or, taking my shoes off before I board a plane; or, being made the subject of search based on nationality or skin color; or, the chilling impact that comes from having certain kinds of speech assumed as "terrorist", if they're clearly not intended to be so.
We are approaching a time when we *must* make ourselves aware of the impending trend toward universal surveillance - because it *is* going to happen. The advantage we have in a Democratic culture is to insist on and legislate transparency, and do everything we can to insure that abuses are not institutionalized, and kept to an absolute minimum, otherwise.
Also, AT&T spent $15.4 million lobbying Washington last year, the eighth-highest of all corporations. And it has ties to the White House — Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, is a former president of SBC Communications Inc., which bought AT&T in 2005, creating the current telecom giant.
This isn't just coziness, it's near collusion.
The telcos make me sick, and they are making America sick! Imagine what this will mean as education, training, and other necessities migrate online - with massive, bandwidth-sucking applications; those who can pay for bandwidth will be able to access these things; those that can't, won't.
The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.
In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America.
Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.
What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.
Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!
No! It will cost you and I an increase in the product price from both companies - because win or lose, the IP attorneys will charge a king's fortune for their services, and Apple and Samsung will pass that on as higher prices.
These IP suits, in most cases, only profit the lawyers on both sides. It's a sick game.
Drive from Menlo Park through to Mountain View, California someday - or Google how many IP law groups live there. They're popping up like mushrooms, and are often more successful than many tech companies.
Some years ago, Wilson, Sonsini - one of the biggest in the country (home is Palo Alto) showed more than $1.1M profit per *partner*. (that's after the partners were paid and the light bill, rent, etc was paid. These IP law firms even have "sleep over rooms" so their paralegals can literally live there on the job to rack up more billing hours. It's a scam - and we're paying for it.
Thomas Jefferson:
""Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." "
from:
http://english.people.com.cn/200203/15/eng20020315_92153.shtml
"China's key legislative body is expected to come up with a preliminary draft of the nation's first civil code this summer.
"The code is scheduled to be presented to the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress (NPC) for a first reading in December after passing key tests.
"It was revealed by Wang Shengming, director of the Civil Legislation Office with the Legal Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee."
The fact is that there is *no* history of civil code in China. The law has historically been punitive *only* when an activity upsets the natural order of things. For instance: if you carried a flag into Bejing in 1968 that said "Capitalism is Good", you were guaranteed to die or suffer in prison for years. China has, for its entire history, been controlled from the center, by emperors, despots, etc. At the same time, the absence of civil code has meant that when someone steals you property, or copies your invention, it was between you and the perpetrator, and the person with the most personal and networked power would win. That tendency continues to live in China, today.
Things are changing, slowly, but it will be a long time before China embeds the private property meme, protected by civil laws, rules, authority, etc. into its society. Also, it will be a long time - if ever - before the Chinese end control from the center.
So, their current criticism about the iPad fits perfectly fits their cultural and legal DNA. They think one should have easy/free access to a neighbor's (or a company's) IP, and that all control over a population should emanate from the center.
How about I start paying AT&T "up to" $30 per month for the "up to" 3mbps that they promise me?
What we have here is pure deception. It's a manipulative deception because we're talking about communication speed that is dolled out in tiers. Communication is a human-species-defining quality. We're wired to want more of it, and this is the reality that all communications companies - ISP's included, bank on.
An analogy would be a company that sold breathable air, saying that they would provide "up to" a certain amount of oxygen per month. They would give you enough, but just enough so that you would always want more.
ATT, Comcast and the rest have this all figured out, and they continue to limit the potential of America's social and intellectual capital, in the name of their tunnel-vision profits. I say this makes the senior executives of those companies charlatans and criminals of the first order, because they are stealing our future, as other countries pass us by.
Not good news for professional photographers. Yes, many beautiful images are shot by people with access to cool photo equipment, but there is a lot that goes into framing context and theme for a photo that relates to a story, or even an event. This is a money grab by Getty's new owner (In February 2008 it was announced that Getty Images would be acquired by Hellman & Friedman in a transaction valued at an estimated US$2.4 billion). Pro photographers are going to have to start looking for ways to add value to their traditional services. This is a purely disruptive technology and service offering that is going to hurt the professional ranks. Flickr is also making out on this deal. Digital has democratized access to, and creation of, the photographic image. Add Photoshop and it's a whole new world. I know a few professional photographers who have been put out of business by these new technologies. I see this profession going the way of professional writers, who are still trying to figure out how to surf this powerful, disruptive wave of change.
I would love to see some ideas posted on this thread about how professional photographers can adapt to these changes, and continue to put their well-honed skills into play to make a living.
Not quite in time to help the "Great Leader". Oh, well. Looks like the start of a North Korean multi-level marketing scheme, with guaranteed buyers (all citizens will be compelled to attend). I can see Kim's people setting up the living room sell-through meetings, with free kimchee on the side.
From the WAPO editorial: "Disclosure: The Washington Post Co. has interests in broadcast and cable television and businesses that depend on the Internet..."
That says it all. Thus, communication, one of the premier qualities that defines us as human, gets to be thrown around like a political football, to the loss and dismay of all. What is the cost to decisions like this? Answer: a continued receding of innovation and a disadvantaged American public, compared to those who have unfettered access to broadband, a theoretically unlimited resource. We are metered only because we CAN be metered, and only because someone is on the receiving end of a political or financial payoff. Damn the public interest!
I agree that it's very difficult to stop the authorities from piling up so many invasions of privacy that by the time one gets started we have already lost many of those rights.
That said, think about the world we are moving into as described by Bill Joy, then Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, in a now-famous essay published in Wired Magazine.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html
Joy's point is that in the near-long-term technologies will be available that won't take huge infrastructure or ultra-sophisticated terrorists to use against us in ways that could be so devastating as to pose a threat to mankind in its entirety, including terrorists.
Joy's article wasn't aimed at the terrorist scene; it was more about the coming onslaught of technology in ways that we had hardly yet imagined.
Yet, implied are factors that plainly lead one to think that the only way to ultimately protect human beings in a largely technologically run, networked environment will be to deploy universal surveillance - and even with that we will face large challenges.
My sense is that the only way through this is Democratic societies will be to deploy what I call "metasurveillance" policies that permit anyone, anytime, to go into the network, log on, and see where one was watched, why, for how long, for what purpose, etc. In other words, perfect transparency.
This is the only way, with the major problem that those who pose threats will also have access, if they are members of an open society that values privacy. It's going to be cat and mouse. The most difficult part of this is going to be keeping those who would do harm away from information that would inform them of their being watched. I don't know if this is possible.
All that said, given where we are headed (read the Joy article, it's still spot on), I don't see any other solutions other than universal surveillance. We are going to have to protect rights along the way, or else we'll end up destroying one of the basic tenets of an open society.
I would love to hear other ideas in this realm, because so far what I see is people (me included) arguing that personal privacy should not be taken away, but intuition and the works of others tell me that privacy will disappear for the reasons that I and others have mentioned.
There was a time when privacy was hard to maintain; think of small village life prior to the industrial revolution. It's only with the rise of large urban complexes that anonymity became nearly ubiquitous. We evolved in small tribal cultures where everyone knew mostly what you were doing, anyway. So, one *could* argue that the anonymity provided by large urban complexity is a new environmental variable that we have yet to adapt fully to, in ways that protect out participation in that environment, including the (urban, networked) environment itself.
The network places us in one, large big "city" - how do we protect that and maintain individual rights? That's the conundrum.
Seems like Flat World Knowledge is doing something right. They can sell a textbook for $30.00 and the authors make a profit. I've been following this company because I've been involved in the open content movement for some time. If you have a book that you want to get out to the world, and you can pass muster in reviews, as an excellent author with a strong reputation among your peers, give them a call and ask to submit a manuscript (basically, a synthesis of the book's main goals and a table of contents will get the attention you need). Also, keep in mind that FWK uses a Creative Commons CC-NC-SA license, which means that nobody can profit from your book except FWK and you. Wiki's and other open repositories are places where commercial companies can literally take your work and sell it for a price, leaving you out in the cold. Know your open licensing options before you venture further. btw, FWK is run by some very serious publishing dudes who are both out to make a profit, combined with fulfilling a social mission. They're succeeding, with more than 380 institutions of higher learning and more than 40,000 students using their books after only 5 months in the market. A friend of mine at the local university is using their Principles of Econ book this Fall. I checked it out and it's damned impressive. Watch this company; they're going places.
If we parse "survival" to mean something like "adaptation", then I think we're on to something. Sheer survival doesn't imply intelligence. As a gedankenexperiment, consider that the Loch Ness Monster really exists, and exists solely because it's living in a place (the deep waters of Loch Ness) where it doesn't have to adapt, because it's very seldom preyed on, or seen. Then, all of a sudden, an adventurer finds a way to track it. Game over. Now, if the Loch Ness Monster could figure out a way to hide or get away from that adventurer, or adapt in a new environemnt, I would think that's more akin to intelligence that sheer length of survival.
First, it will be impossible to create open K-12 textbooks in a few months, as a prior poster has pointed out.
Second, I predict that any public mandate to create open textbooks will probably fail, or end up getting bogged down in bureaucracy.
The State needs to partner with *private*, commercial organizations that are publishing open content. Here's one: Flat World Knowledge www.flatworldknowledge.com; they're publishing in the post-K-12 market right now, but there's no reason they couldn't put their model to work in service of K-12 publishing. The people behind this left the traditional textbook sector because they got fed up with watching the digital revolution pass them but, as their employer (Pearson) continued to non-innovate itself to eventual destruction (it will happen, as a matter of time).
How in the world are academic institutions, or the K-12 bureaucracy going to motivate people to write, and then more importantly *sustain* open content? How much money will this cost? Will we see for-profit innovators like Flat World left out of it, even though their textbooks are provided online with a free, non-commercial open license, with Print-on-demand versions of their books available for only $30, *if* the student (or school district wants print. What a deal! Why isn't the State approaching Flat World and saying "help us out", because obviously Flat World has figured out a way to do this, *and* make a profit.
What we *don't* need is academics, academic administrators, and textbook writers trying to become publishers. How will these books get marketed to users? Will the content live on interoperable archives? Will it be universally accessible? Who will guarantee regular updates? And so on. The problems in the purely public model are huge. We need the public AND the private sector to cooperate in this arena.
This seems the only way to go, *if* we want a sustainable open textbook ecology. Otherwise, we're going to get stuck in a bureaucratic maze that ends up with a lot of dormant and little used content. We need to include *innovative* private sector agents in this effort, so that we can maximize the intellectual capital of textbook authors, as well as those who know how to make a textbook "work" (on-, or off-line), and make sure that everything is interoperable, accessible, and sustainable down the road.
And you probably weren't even born when Fuller was inventing up a storm. He was a genius, period. WAY ahead of his time, and STILL ahead of his time.
I had the good fortune to hear Fuller speak when I was in grad school; he was in his early 80's. He walked on to a stage with a small folding chair and weighed in on everything from physics to the environment, and everything in between for THREE HOURS!
He didn't repeat one idea; he connected everything. To this day, I have NEVER been exposed to that kind of genius. He was otherworldly - a true Renaissance man.
I have long argued for something I coined as "meta-surveillance". Essentially, this would permit any citizen to query the surveillance network for information about how, when, where, and why s/he was surveilled - and by whom. Exceptions would only be made for those under criminal investigation.
Granted, the latter point creates a problem, in that a negative response to one's meta-surveillance inquiry, if one were a criminal, would be a tip-off. Thus, there would always be some "loose play" in the system, but systems might actually be worked out that could adapt to these exceptions.
Either we open up to meta-surveillance, or we risk losing rights down the road.
I believe that most societies will ultimately introduce surveillance; it's the ones that won't let their citizens have access on-demand access to surveillance data that will be the most repressive.
btw, I'm not a surveillance fan, but plainly see the handwriting on the wall. We are approaching an era when just a few people with easy access to certain technologies will be capable of doing irreversible harm to the planet and our species. As this scenario intensifies, I think we will see surveillance used far more heavily than we ever imagined.
Slashdot Mirror
China has no history of embedded civil code; it has always been run from the *center*, by powerful interests that made the law punitive only when one upset "the natural order of things" - e.g. poisoning a rice paddy, or carrying a sign in 1967 that claimed "capitalism is good" - those things would get you killed. However, if you stole someone intellectual property, the dispute was settled strictly between the parties, without the intervention by a civil authority; essentially, it was between you and the thief. In those situations, the person who had the most political power, or local connections, would win. This is simply the way things have been, until very recently, in China.
In other words, no LEGAL sense of protected IP. That is starting to change, slowly, as the world gets wired up, but it will take a while. Another way to say this is that many, many people in China have no problem with lifting someone else IP, because that's the way things have always been. btw, this doesn't make China a thieving culture, but rather a culture where there have been no strictures embedded in civil code to prevent this sort of thing. This is one more reason why international companies need to be cautious with IP in China, and understand how to play hard ball when they have IP stolen.
These telecommunications companies are little more than parasites. They don't ENABLE anything on their own. First, they leverage all kinds of free subsidies (your tax dollars) to build their networks. Then, they wrangle out of taxes by taking business deductions, usually paying their worthless CEO's and other senior executives obscene amount of money for doing exactly what? Taking credit for the INternet and its associated benefits to technology, even as they choke off the benefits of those technologies.
What's even more breathtaking is that its tax money (made from our tax dollars, earned by the sweat of our ever-longer work days) that actually *paid* for their infrastructure.
Last, the thing that really amps me up about stuff like this is that telecommunications companies and ISPs, etc. are essentially using technology that they didn't invent, to leverage YOUR and my communicative assets!
Communication was "free" until we began to find ways to increase it's speed, depth, and breadth. From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
Guess what? That model isn't going to work anymore, not if we want a sustainable information ecology that is as diverse as possible.
Sorry, but these ISPs and telcos are little more than traitors to human advancement, masquerading as enablers. They want to suck us dry; they want all the benefits. They want tax breaks made by the policy makers that they buy every few years to build their infrastructures, and then they want us to pay them more, as if the tax breaks (which we ultimately pay for) and the infrastructure (which we also pay for), and the very source of communications that they leverage (you and me), isn't enough.
We need to start finding ways (I don't have the answers, just posing the possibility) to once and for all RID this world of these gatekeepers, because they are interested in keeping only one thing sustainable - their bank accounts. They could give a damn about whether the world is better serves by more transparent and facile communications technology. The Telco and ISP sector are, again, traitors to human growth and development. We need to find another way.
This is exactly right; it's an "economy" move that will strip more employees. Whitman is, and always has been, nothing more than a figurehead. She sat by while eBay dropped into oblivion, and now she will do the same at HP. They're prettying up hp (if that's possible, after Fiorina's debacles) for a sale, period. They will simplify operations so that it will be an easier pill to swallow for some buyer, a few years hence. Whitman will get credit for "saving the stock value" of some other such nonsense, and more thousands of hp employees will be out of work. It's a pathetic sideshow, with talentless, worthless senior executives and board members playing checkers with people's lives. Hewlett and Packard would roll over in theor graves if they could see what has happened to a once-great company.
Act first, apologize later is how that regime acts! They're pathetic.
I'm not a Marxist, but we have never seen true Marxist Communism. Soviet Russia and The People's Republic of China were/are corrupt "capitalist" systems, where there is a lot of reward at the top, and practically nothing left over for anyone else.
How does google or Time Magazine, or the New York Times make most of their respective revenues? Advertising. Who buys the advertising? Paying ad customers (subscribers barely break even). Why do advertisers pay media companies? Because the media companies deliver a "product" - i.e. our eyeballs and ears. You (we) are the product, whether you want to admit it or not. Without delivering your (our) attention to advertisers, there would be no priivate media. Our attention is what the media sells; it's a complex relationship, but that's the guts of it.
For instance, how are we going to prevent small groups of people from doing ungodly amounts of real harm (via violence) as the means to do that becomes more and more easy to access. Just look at Bill Joy's now-famous essay - "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", written some years ago, to get a clear idea where we're headed http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html.
The key here is that all surveillance activity that takes place in a Democratic society *must* be transparent. You and I should be able to know when , where, for how long, for what reason, and by whom we have been the subject of surveillance *on demand*.
Two additional problems, yet to be solved accompany the coming of universal surveillance:
1) Massive retraining and transparent accountability of *all* persons involved in surveillance, with harsh penalties dolled out for abuse.
2) Keeping the most dangerous among us from knowing how and when they are subjects of surveillance. This is a complex problem, because it also deals with the "mission creep" of those who are governing surveillance systems, because they get to decide what and who is considered "dangerous". Thus, the absolute importance of #!, above.
Again, I don't like the idea of being watched; I don't like the idea of being groped at an airport; or, taking my shoes off before I board a plane; or, being made the subject of search based on nationality or skin color; or, the chilling impact that comes from having certain kinds of speech assumed as "terrorist", if they're clearly not intended to be so.
We are approaching a time when we *must* make ourselves aware of the impending trend toward universal surveillance - because it *is* going to happen. The advantage we have in a Democratic culture is to insist on and legislate transparency, and do everything we can to insure that abuses are not institutionalized, and kept to an absolute minimum, otherwise.
Also, AT&T spent $15.4 million lobbying Washington last year, the eighth-highest of all corporations. And it has ties to the White House — Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, is a former president of SBC Communications Inc., which bought AT&T in 2005, creating the current telecom giant. This isn't just coziness, it's near collusion.
The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.
In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America. Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.
What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.
Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!
No! It will cost you and I an increase in the product price from both companies - because win or lose, the IP attorneys will charge a king's fortune for their services, and Apple and Samsung will pass that on as higher prices. These IP suits, in most cases, only profit the lawyers on both sides. It's a sick game. Drive from Menlo Park through to Mountain View, California someday - or Google how many IP law groups live there. They're popping up like mushrooms, and are often more successful than many tech companies. Some years ago, Wilson, Sonsini - one of the biggest in the country (home is Palo Alto) showed more than $1.1M profit per *partner*. (that's after the partners were paid and the light bill, rent, etc was paid. These IP law firms even have "sleep over rooms" so their paralegals can literally live there on the job to rack up more billing hours. It's a scam - and we're paying for it.
Thomas Jefferson: ""Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." "
from: http://english.people.com.cn/200203/15/eng20020315_92153.shtml "China's key legislative body is expected to come up with a preliminary draft of the nation's first civil code this summer. "The code is scheduled to be presented to the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress (NPC) for a first reading in December after passing key tests. "It was revealed by Wang Shengming, director of the Civil Legislation Office with the Legal Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee."
The fact is that there is *no* history of civil code in China. The law has historically been punitive *only* when an activity upsets the natural order of things. For instance: if you carried a flag into Bejing in 1968 that said "Capitalism is Good", you were guaranteed to die or suffer in prison for years. China has, for its entire history, been controlled from the center, by emperors, despots, etc. At the same time, the absence of civil code has meant that when someone steals you property, or copies your invention, it was between you and the perpetrator, and the person with the most personal and networked power would win. That tendency continues to live in China, today. Things are changing, slowly, but it will be a long time before China embeds the private property meme, protected by civil laws, rules, authority, etc. into its society. Also, it will be a long time - if ever - before the Chinese end control from the center. So, their current criticism about the iPad fits perfectly fits their cultural and legal DNA. They think one should have easy/free access to a neighbor's (or a company's) IP, and that all control over a population should emanate from the center.
What we have here is pure deception. It's a manipulative deception because we're talking about communication speed that is dolled out in tiers. Communication is a human-species-defining quality. We're wired to want more of it, and this is the reality that all communications companies - ISP's included, bank on.
An analogy would be a company that sold breathable air, saying that they would provide "up to" a certain amount of oxygen per month. They would give you enough, but just enough so that you would always want more. ATT, Comcast and the rest have this all figured out, and they continue to limit the potential of America's social and intellectual capital, in the name of their tunnel-vision profits. I say this makes the senior executives of those companies charlatans and criminals of the first order, because they are stealing our future, as other countries pass us by.
Not good news for professional photographers. Yes, many beautiful images are shot by people with access to cool photo equipment, but there is a lot that goes into framing context and theme for a photo that relates to a story, or even an event. This is a money grab by Getty's new owner (In February 2008 it was announced that Getty Images would be acquired by Hellman & Friedman in a transaction valued at an estimated US$2.4 billion). Pro photographers are going to have to start looking for ways to add value to their traditional services. This is a purely disruptive technology and service offering that is going to hurt the professional ranks. Flickr is also making out on this deal. Digital has democratized access to, and creation of, the photographic image. Add Photoshop and it's a whole new world. I know a few professional photographers who have been put out of business by these new technologies. I see this profession going the way of professional writers, who are still trying to figure out how to surf this powerful, disruptive wave of change. I would love to see some ideas posted on this thread about how professional photographers can adapt to these changes, and continue to put their well-honed skills into play to make a living.
Not quite in time to help the "Great Leader". Oh, well. Looks like the start of a North Korean multi-level marketing scheme, with guaranteed buyers (all citizens will be compelled to attend). I can see Kim's people setting up the living room sell-through meetings, with free kimchee on the side.
From the WAPO editorial: "Disclosure: The Washington Post Co. has interests in broadcast and cable television and businesses that depend on the Internet..." That says it all. Thus, communication, one of the premier qualities that defines us as human, gets to be thrown around like a political football, to the loss and dismay of all. What is the cost to decisions like this? Answer: a continued receding of innovation and a disadvantaged American public, compared to those who have unfettered access to broadband, a theoretically unlimited resource. We are metered only because we CAN be metered, and only because someone is on the receiving end of a political or financial payoff. Damn the public interest!
That said, think about the world we are moving into as described by Bill Joy, then Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, in a now-famous essay published in Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html
Joy's point is that in the near-long-term technologies will be available that won't take huge infrastructure or ultra-sophisticated terrorists to use against us in ways that could be so devastating as to pose a threat to mankind in its entirety, including terrorists.
Joy's article wasn't aimed at the terrorist scene; it was more about the coming onslaught of technology in ways that we had hardly yet imagined.
Yet, implied are factors that plainly lead one to think that the only way to ultimately protect human beings in a largely technologically run, networked environment will be to deploy universal surveillance - and even with that we will face large challenges.
My sense is that the only way through this is Democratic societies will be to deploy what I call "metasurveillance" policies that permit anyone, anytime, to go into the network, log on, and see where one was watched, why, for how long, for what purpose, etc. In other words, perfect transparency.
This is the only way, with the major problem that those who pose threats will also have access, if they are members of an open society that values privacy. It's going to be cat and mouse. The most difficult part of this is going to be keeping those who would do harm away from information that would inform them of their being watched. I don't know if this is possible.
All that said, given where we are headed (read the Joy article, it's still spot on), I don't see any other solutions other than universal surveillance. We are going to have to protect rights along the way, or else we'll end up destroying one of the basic tenets of an open society.
I would love to hear other ideas in this realm, because so far what I see is people (me included) arguing that personal privacy should not be taken away, but intuition and the works of others tell me that privacy will disappear for the reasons that I and others have mentioned.
There was a time when privacy was hard to maintain; think of small village life prior to the industrial revolution. It's only with the rise of large urban complexes that anonymity became nearly ubiquitous. We evolved in small tribal cultures where everyone knew mostly what you were doing, anyway. So, one *could* argue that the anonymity provided by large urban complexity is a new environmental variable that we have yet to adapt fully to, in ways that protect out participation in that environment, including the (urban, networked) environment itself.
The network places us in one, large big "city" - how do we protect that and maintain individual rights? That's the conundrum.
There are many music download and music access services available. Just go elsewhere. Like so many "firsts" on the Net - e.g. eBay, Yahoo, etc. - iTunes seems old in the tooth. Couple that with egregious DRM policies and attempts to choke interoperability. Why bother. I like Apple products, but who really needs iTunes for music. Other than as a software platform for playback, I could care less about the iTunes music store. Try these: http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011 http://pandora.com/ http://www.emusic.com/ http://www.slacker.com/ http://www.napster.com/ http://music.myspace.com/ www.youtube.com http://www.rhapsody.com/home.html http://www.walmart.com/music http://www.last.fm/ http://social.zune.net/music/ http://www.seeqpod.com/
Seems like Flat World Knowledge is doing something right. They can sell a textbook for $30.00 and the authors make a profit. I've been following this company because I've been involved in the open content movement for some time. If you have a book that you want to get out to the world, and you can pass muster in reviews, as an excellent author with a strong reputation among your peers, give them a call and ask to submit a manuscript (basically, a synthesis of the book's main goals and a table of contents will get the attention you need). Also, keep in mind that FWK uses a Creative Commons CC-NC-SA license, which means that nobody can profit from your book except FWK and you. Wiki's and other open repositories are places where commercial companies can literally take your work and sell it for a price, leaving you out in the cold. Know your open licensing options before you venture further. btw, FWK is run by some very serious publishing dudes who are both out to make a profit, combined with fulfilling a social mission. They're succeeding, with more than 380 institutions of higher learning and more than 40,000 students using their books after only 5 months in the market. A friend of mine at the local university is using their Principles of Econ book this Fall. I checked it out and it's damned impressive. Watch this company; they're going places.
If we parse "survival" to mean something like "adaptation", then I think we're on to something. Sheer survival doesn't imply intelligence. As a gedankenexperiment, consider that the Loch Ness Monster really exists, and exists solely because it's living in a place (the deep waters of Loch Ness) where it doesn't have to adapt, because it's very seldom preyed on, or seen. Then, all of a sudden, an adventurer finds a way to track it. Game over. Now, if the Loch Ness Monster could figure out a way to hide or get away from that adventurer, or adapt in a new environemnt, I would think that's more akin to intelligence that sheer length of survival.
I didn't create FWK, We just adopted one of their books - Intro to Macroeconomics. It's excellent! and, it's FREE. Check it out http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/printed-book/1628
First, it will be impossible to create open K-12 textbooks in a few months, as a prior poster has pointed out. Second, I predict that any public mandate to create open textbooks will probably fail, or end up getting bogged down in bureaucracy. The State needs to partner with *private*, commercial organizations that are publishing open content. Here's one: Flat World Knowledge www.flatworldknowledge.com; they're publishing in the post-K-12 market right now, but there's no reason they couldn't put their model to work in service of K-12 publishing. The people behind this left the traditional textbook sector because they got fed up with watching the digital revolution pass them but, as their employer (Pearson) continued to non-innovate itself to eventual destruction (it will happen, as a matter of time). How in the world are academic institutions, or the K-12 bureaucracy going to motivate people to write, and then more importantly *sustain* open content? How much money will this cost? Will we see for-profit innovators like Flat World left out of it, even though their textbooks are provided online with a free, non-commercial open license, with Print-on-demand versions of their books available for only $30, *if* the student (or school district wants print. What a deal! Why isn't the State approaching Flat World and saying "help us out", because obviously Flat World has figured out a way to do this, *and* make a profit. What we *don't* need is academics, academic administrators, and textbook writers trying to become publishers. How will these books get marketed to users? Will the content live on interoperable archives? Will it be universally accessible? Who will guarantee regular updates? And so on. The problems in the purely public model are huge. We need the public AND the private sector to cooperate in this arena. This seems the only way to go, *if* we want a sustainable open textbook ecology. Otherwise, we're going to get stuck in a bureaucratic maze that ends up with a lot of dormant and little used content. We need to include *innovative* private sector agents in this effort, so that we can maximize the intellectual capital of textbook authors, as well as those who know how to make a textbook "work" (on-, or off-line), and make sure that everything is interoperable, accessible, and sustainable down the road.
And you probably weren't even born when Fuller was inventing up a storm. He was a genius, period. WAY ahead of his time, and STILL ahead of his time. I had the good fortune to hear Fuller speak when I was in grad school; he was in his early 80's. He walked on to a stage with a small folding chair and weighed in on everything from physics to the environment, and everything in between for THREE HOURS! He didn't repeat one idea; he connected everything. To this day, I have NEVER been exposed to that kind of genius. He was otherworldly - a true Renaissance man.
Granted, the latter point creates a problem, in that a negative response to one's meta-surveillance inquiry, if one were a criminal, would be a tip-off. Thus, there would always be some "loose play" in the system, but systems might actually be worked out that could adapt to these exceptions.
Either we open up to meta-surveillance, or we risk losing rights down the road.
I believe that most societies will ultimately introduce surveillance; it's the ones that won't let their citizens have access on-demand access to surveillance data that will be the most repressive.
btw, I'm not a surveillance fan, but plainly see the handwriting on the wall. We are approaching an era when just a few people with easy access to certain technologies will be capable of doing irreversible harm to the planet and our species. As this scenario intensifies, I think we will see surveillance used far more heavily than we ever imagined.
Some of what I'm suggesting was prompted by a read of Bill Joy's essay in Wired, some years ago. Here's the URL for that essay http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html