Category — Political Economy

Engineers on TLDs: “

Engineers on TLDs: Do You Want Me With Fries? on CircleID by Vittorio Bertola:

This is why engineering solutions are not carved in stone, and young engineers have always been eating up old engineers since gave engineering to the world. That’s not because the old solutions were better than the new ones, or the opposite, but because new needs and new expectations arose among the users of the technology.

One word: Lovely!

I was one of the 30-something engineers who ‘ask’ for (IDN) TLD.

While I can sense some consensus on stage and off-stage of the need of IDN TLDs, the response I get from 60-something engineers (whose status is close to been ‘God’ right now) revolves around trying to get things 100% right before proceeding.

Don’t get me wrong: I have great respects for elderly engineers who has contributed so much to make Internet what is today – and I always value their wisdoms and advises. But seeking perfect solution is no difference then say ‘no’ – at least to the one making the request.

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(Via James Seng’s Blog.)

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it might also be that 60 year old engineers are embedded in institutions and with that they take a representational role of their understanding of those institution’s interests…. if you make money off of fewer tld’s and your friends make money off fewer…. you might, subconsciously, make more stringent ‘engineering decisions’ than you would otherwise. this is a form of sub-political governance.

:::: open ::::: The Digital Artisans Manifesto: “We are not the passive victims of uncontrollable market forces and technological changes. Without our daily work, there would be no goods or services to trade. Without our animating presence, information technologies would just be inert metal, plastic and silicon. Nothing can happen inside cyberspace without our creative labour. We are the only subjects of history.
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(Via .)

it is worth a read.

UNESCO Free Software Portal: The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software.

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12034&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

(Via Information Policy.)

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this could be handy.

Can You Retire on One Meal Per Month?: “

Angry Bear has an interesting post on the further decline in the US savings rate (go read it) which contains this arresting statistic:

The personal saving rate fell to just 0.2% of after-tax income in October. That means that an average family that earns $75,000 per year, with take-home pay of about $5,000 per month, is saving about $10 per month. That’s it.

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(Via Discourse.net.)

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hmm, i can’t, but then again i doubt the u.s. can either….

frontline: the persuaders: neuromarketing | PBS: “But 30 years after the commercials debuted, neuroscientist Read Montague was still thinking about them. Something didn’t make sense. If people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn’t. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn’t particularly like.

What he found was the first data from an entirely new field: neuromarketing, the study of the brain’s responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape. Montague had his subjects take the Pepsi Challenge while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too. Coke “lit up” the medial prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain that controls higher thinking. Montague’s hunch was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers’ choices. Now, there appeared to be solid neurological proof. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a cottage industry was born.”

(Via .)

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manage my brain, know my interests, make me happy…..

well, this is perhaps not as interesting as one would hope, but it does show the extent that the market is reconstructed as scientific object…..

Amateurs and professionals: “The distinction between professionals and amateurs is one that’s so familiar today as to seem perfectly natural. Professionals are serious, amateurs are dilettantes; professionals know what they’re doing, and have credentials and training, amateurs don’t; professionals get paid, amateurs are hobbyists. Of course, in a few fields there are exceptions to the rule: astronomy, for example, continues to have a place for amateur comet-watchers. —snip—

(Via Future Now.)

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I generally term this the professionalization of leisure in the DIY culture. this theory fits with some of my thoughts though.

Netcraft: SCO “own all your code”: “”

(Via .)

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it would be better, of course, if this wasn’t their position…..

EuroScience Open Forum 2004: “”

(Via .)

some good papers here

Senate Passes CREATE Act: “

On 11/20/2004, the Senate passed, and House agreed to S. 2192, the Cooperative Research and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) Act of

…”

(Via beSpacific.)

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it will be interesting to see what effect this has….. not now, but in say 3 years, when people figure out how to exploit it.

Linus, Monty, Rasmus: No Software Patents: “Jan Wildeboer writes “The three most famous European authors of open-source software have issued an appeal against software patents on NoSoftwarePatents.com. Linus Torvalds (Linux), Michael “Monty” Widenius (MySQL) and Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) urge the EU Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adopt a draft directive on software patents that they consider “deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate”. They also call on the Internet community to express solidarity by placing NoSoftwarePatents.com links and banners on many Web sites.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

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This is one of those core political decisions that will transform the power structure of europe, not the big P political power structure but the small p political power which actually has more power than big P, it just is not as visible.