advocacy

What the Public Commons Is Missing

What the Public Commons Is Missing:

It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.

[You reap what you sow.]

Source: The Technium

Lack of constraint is most expensive of all

Glenn Fleishman on Roboto:

Carter said last year, “All industrial designers, and I consider myself one, work within constraints. Architects have to build roofs that keep the rain out and so on. It’s particularly severe in the case of type designers, because what we work with had its form essentially frozen way before there was even typography. The Latin alphabet hasn’t changed in a very long time,” said Carter. (Carter declined to comment on Roboto in particular, but gave me permission to quote generally from last year’s interview.)

Duarte echoed this in an interview conducted a few weeks ago. He said, about constraints around developing interfaces and fonts for new media, that “The important thing is each of the new technologies creates new boundaries for new types of expression. There are new tradeoffs. For everything that is lost, there are new possibilities.”

Gruber says: Roboto is just the new Arial.

[Setting aside the typographica for the moment, deciding on constraint maybe the single greatest factor in any work. Nothing is free when it comes to this decision.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%

Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%:

Knutson, Boyer and the other Occupy geeks don’t have to build everything from scratch. “These are standards that have been around for a while, and we are not reinventing the wheel,” said Boyer.

For instance, the projects will rely on set of technologies known as Open ID and OAuth that let a user sign into a new website using their logins and passwords from social networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Those technologies let you sign up for a new service by logging into a Twitter or Google account, which vouch for you to the new site without giving over your password or forcing you to get yet another username and password to keep track of..

[snip -Ed.]

“I think any type of small or medium-sized group or a team that has one person in eight different cities,” could use it for collaboration, says Knutson. And he sees no reason against spinning off the tech to businesses.

“Every small and medium business owner is a member of the 99%,” said Knutson.

[Sooo let me see if I have this correctly. A system that is being built because the Occupy movement doesn’t want to rely on corporate hosts will… A) Rely on the current corporate identity systems. B) Rely on crafting human agreement that historically has never happened around RDF C)Is trying to solve too large a problem. D)Is willing to spin technology off to business (and says I with some cynicism, vaulting the coders into the 1%? Oy. Despite my “never bet against youth” belief, I don’t think these efforts will come to anything. Either way, building a social network is either about inclusion or exclusion. Neither works in this case.]

Dave Winer had this to say…:

4. Now there are news reports that some people associated with Occupy are taking aim at Facebook. They want to make the Facebook for the 99 percent. Oy. Here we go again. There is no market for that. Facebook is the Facebook for the 99 percent. The goal should be to make something open and non-monolithic that provides many of the most valuable services of Facebook without the silo walls. It should not be something that an individual does, or a small group laboring heroically, rather it should be something that the Internet does.

[I totally agree. He also mentioned the solving small pieces of the problem thing that I spoke about to a couple of you. I wish they would, they’d stand a better chance.]

Google and Facebook… they’re never free.

Pusher 2.0:

This also puts the “new business model” mantra in a new light. Remember that the classic business model is a simple monetary trade: the customer gets something of value and they pay money for it. It is fair and easy to understand. The further we go from it, the closer we come to a point where we are forced to choose between going out of business or throwing business ethics out of the window. In order to maintain the illusion that the customer can get something valuable for free, we may have to introduce the illusion that they are getting it for free (while in reality, we collect stuff from them that they may not be inclined to give away). Once you cross that moral event horizon, it becomes much easier to do other objectionable things. I mean, that’s how the new economy works, right?

I’m just thinking out loud and I have no ready-made conclusions to offer, but perhaps we should be a little more hesitant to sing praise of “revolutionary” new ways of doing business. Unless there’s a clear element of trade evident and the terms are set out, chances are that somebody’s getting cheated. Continue reading →

[This piece continues my theme that the more convoluted transactions become the more problems they create for our society—Stay close to the source. If I drive to a store and purchase something made by the individual selling it (or at least the person in the shop in the back) that has tremendous social value. And it doesn’t matter if that’s a kitchen knife or software or a bicycle. The longer the chain gets from “I did it” to “you bought it” the chances for negative social effects increases, and happily the positive social effects increase the closer you get to the source. In the case of Google most of us were happy users because of their great search results. That was a long time ago, and they started tracking me long before I paid any attention to them. Facebook’s “sale” takes place when you sign up, with no explanation of the game whatsoever. I recently saw a news program where individuals were asked about the GOP candidates by name. And while I realize it was a produced segment (edited for results) they had no problem finding people who didn’t even know the names of the candidates, never mind anything about them. Considering the barrage of coverage and the endless debates… imagine what people don’t know when it’s actively being hidden from them? ]
Source: The Cynical Musician

The Carbon Footprint of Carbon Bikes

The Carbon Footprint of Carbon Bikes:

“Right now, you can’t recycle the carbon back into a bike, but we’d love to see that happen someday,” says Bjorland. He says that completing the circle is still the holy grail, since obviously an aluminum or steel frame can, at least in theory, be turned back into another bike — and more to the point, can be repaired rather than junked post almost any crash. Carbon’s obviously never going to be as mendable as metal.

[At least people are paying attention… And all but one of my bikes are metal, and mostly have no paint. What little I can…]
Source: adventure journal

Who wants to break the Internet? (Companies that support SOPA)

Who wants to break the Internet?:

It’s not the struggling artists, it’s corporations, lawyers and boards who are in favor of such a shortsighted law . Here’s the list of companies behind one of the lobbying groups pushing for SOPA (here are three links about the law). Now you know who to call:

ABC
AFTRA – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
AFM – American Federation of Musicians
AAP – Association of American Publishers
ASCAP
BMG Chrysalis
BMI
CBS Corporation
Cengage Learning
DGA – Directors Guild of America
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc.
EMI Music Publishing
ESPN
Graphic Artists Guild
Hachette Book Group
HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C.
Hyperion
IATSE – International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, its Territories and Canada
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Kaufman Astoria Studios
Macmillan
Major League Baseball
Marvel Entertainment, LLC
McGraw-Hill Education
MPA – The Association of Magazine Media
NFL – National Football League
National Music Publishers’ Association
NBCUniversal
News Corporation
New York Production Alliance
New York State AFL-CIO
Pearson Education
Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
The Perseus Books Group
Producers Guild of America East
Random House
Reed Elsevier
SAG – Screen Actors Guild
Scholastic, Inc.
Silvercup Studios
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
Time Warner Inc.
United States Tennis Association
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Publishing Group
Viacom
Warner Music Group
W.W. Norton & Company
Wolters Kluwer

[Disclosure. I worked for or have been a member of various entities on this list over the course of my career.]
Source: the domino project

3D printing needs to be Apple’ized

Now imagine you had a good 3D printer, like a polished version of this: MakerBot.

Imagine a lost Lego piece… Now imagine that it could scan in 3D as well. If I have one, but need two, no problem. Scan the original I have, and churn out a new one. Or anyone in the world who has that piece could send me the data that would allow me to recreate it. Or Lego themselves could set this up with some nominal charge per replacement. Or sell whole kits. Or…

That would be cool.

Recently my parents broke a knob on their oven. You can only buy replacements as a set and the company wants an incredible $100 (Six plastic knobs. $100? Seriously). Or. They take a whole knob. They place it in their 3D printer. It scans it, and creates a replacement in an hour.

That would be cool.

3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes:

And as just one parting example of why this stuff’s exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft’s hardware group (long one of the company’s undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:

Related Reading

Source: Anil Dash