All of the Copyfight coverage
of the Grokster case is worth following. This one reminds me the
differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough
to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School.
Several years later, I went back to Harvard to get my doctorate at the
Business School. As part of that process I took the basic course in
Industrial Economics from Richard Caves
who was Porter's thesis advisor and learned that Porter was possibly
even more clever than I already thought. Porter's fundamental insight
was to take the academic research field of Industrial Economics and
invert it. Industrial Economics studies the question of market
failures. What conditions lead to markets that don't conform to the
economic ideal of perfect competition? What conditions make monopolies
and oligopolies likely? The economists study this area with an eye
toward what public policies are useful and necessary to maintaining
competition in its close to ideal form.
Porter's genius was to see that an economists' market failure was a
CEO's wet dream. Competitive strategy could be viewed as an effort to
create market failures. This is what executives are trained to do and
rewarded for. Absent the appropriate policy checks and balances, you
end up with the world that the RIAA and MPAA hope to preserve.
At the heart of Petitioners'
argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim–even if made to the
legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social
policy–that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their
business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other
concerns, the Internet should be illegal.Petitioners' view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright
law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of
technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their
financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime.Despite petitioners' apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a
familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders
have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force
innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.
I'm in the midst of a similar project as a way to learn WordPress as a step toward converting McGee's Musings to WordPress in the not too distant future.
In the opening post, John Hesch quotes an observation from Paul Allen that struck home forcefully:
Last weekend I did a seminar at DePaul University's School for New Learning on
the topic of personal knowledge management and I've been thinking on
this odd problem of technologies that need to be experienced to be
understood.
Blogs, wikis, and social software all suffer from this need to
spend time with them on their own terms. In organizational settings,
this makes them hard to introduce. Decision makers want a clear story
about investment and return (and they'd prefer hard numbers). I'm still
working out how to best formulate one. I suspect it will depend on the
unique characteristics of each organization.
The series continues with Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Something to check out. Enter McGee's Musings in question #16 if you head there from here.
Something to come back to when I get a little free time (2022 by my best estimates right now)
and visit this, Erik Demaine's origami site at MIT..
and here for an introduction to paper folding and cutting as a deep tradition..
[Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc.]
What worries me more than anything else about today's public environment is the loss of any sense
of humor by the powers that be. Granted, the powers that be are, by
definition, likely to be humor challenged. But humor and the ability to
laugh at oneself is essential to flexibility and adaptability. More
than anything else, isn't that what we're likely to be most in need of
in today's world?
Oh my, that's good.
The morons at the Tribune and three other papers banned this comic. Not only is it hysterical, it's accurate (and we all know it).
It's also now being viewed by my
10,000 daily readers. Please post the comic on your blog so your
readers can help counteract this obvious political censorship.
-Russ By weblog@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie Notebook]
Go figure, but it is a fascinating example of how effective visualizations can get more out of any data. And it's fun.
Who would have thought a historical baby-name database could be so compelling?
If you are curious about how interesting the world turns out to be, here are two great articles to add to your reading list.
Fantastic and fascinating editorial turning the purported 'logic' of
intelligent design against itself. The only drawback, of course, is
that ID is only superficially about logic, so this isn't an argument
that will carry any weight with anyone who finds ID appealing.
In mammals, for instance, the
recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the
larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead,
it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and
then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a
20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is
evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural
order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died
out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will
inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of
designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their
environments that they were doomed to extinction?The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones.
Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by
pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain
mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to
protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases —
cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too
late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is
completely useless.And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily
designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births.
The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage.
Nature appears to be an avid abortionist…
(via Kottke) [Boing Boing]
We're all admins today. Worthwhile stuff to know.
If you are a network or systems administrator, you’ll want these two lists from the
SilentNight Network and Systems Information Pages (their
descriptions, not mine).
The Default Password List: Here you will find a list with default usernames and passwords to Routers, Printers
etc. This list is useful for system engineers and administrators, and let them easely find security holes, and provide
unknowing customers with a little bit tighter network. If you have one of the items in this list, check it out and be
sure to change user/pass to something not known by every hacker on this planet.
Most Used Passwords: This is the list of passwords you dont wanna use, In fact you would be quite stupid using
one of these combinations cos the use is so widely spread that if anyone would try to compromise your system this will
be their first try.
Hint: If you have a broadband connection and cable/DSL router on your home network, you’re an admin (and if you
don’t, you’re vulnerable to a huge array of attacks)! If you run a WiFi access point, you’re an admin!