Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Piracy Edition (Piracy being assumed as the natural, efficient and convenient way to get software over the internet). It's working for Adobe, despite glacial user acceptance and strong vociferous opposition.

Step 1) entering product categories involving widely used standards: In this case we look at the "product category" as "minimal effort and cost software downloads" - what everyone lovingly calls digital piracy.

Step 2) extending those standards with proprietary capabilities: Beat-out the pirates on even the 'minimal effort' part by not requiring a crack, key or navigation of noisy comments for affirmation of operation/safety and worry of nested nasty bits in your bytes. Also the cost is actually less, since it's free of money and of questionable legitimacy.

Step 3) using those differences to disadvantage its competitors: No more trial downloads to easily crack, deeper mechanisms for software updates coupled with the ability to release consitent and constant updates which actually contain scoped functionality thereby daunting the crackers and hackers with new security mechanisms and version hell which results in a saturation of the pirate space with even more questionable softwares with varying levels of functionality/stability thus severly diminishing the causual pirate's desire and ability to identify and use the software they wish.

Brilliant. It works. Now I have to pay ;) (I, personally, have a personal moral stance which makes me inevitably wind up paying for, conservatively, %50 of the software I download - because it is the software I actually like or use and YES, believe it or not I actually want to pay programmers to write stuff!).

Still, it seems like there is another shoe to drop here. Now to read everyone else's comments for that shoe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naver

Maybe it's just Europeans or westerners that are affected by or really notice this US dominance of the internet. Our most eastern asian relations don't seem concerned - but please anybody from an east asian culture feel free to chime in and enlighten me beyond my 30 seconds of googling.

Alrighty, you are inarguably an awesome person and so I feel no problem waxing abstract with (or at, if you do not reply) you. Here's my question for you: Is homosapien speciating?

You see, I was watching a survival show and the host said that expending little energy was the key to survival. This is true for obvious reasons, and yet if this were a general rule of the universe then there would be only the most efficient plants as lifeforms - things like mammals could not have evolved unless there is a counter argument to this. This thinking worries me at times because of the apparent contradiction of the human being in regards to this. My reasoning or thoughts go somewhat like this.

Every person I've met that I would call "intellectual" (not schooled, mind you, just intellectual) has an affinity for exactly your mode of activity: the introvert modus operandi. This makes sense because how else could one study, read, learn, imagine or think if every moment of their life is occupied with physical and social activity? Obviously one can't. However, most of the socially 'successful' do occupy their lives with physical and social activity (business leaders, politicians, celebrities). Yet the MOST successful people seem to be exceptions - Bill Gates is well known to have a love for introverted activities (going to cabin for weeks and months to just read). This post is becoming a bit of an outlet for me and a brainstorm so bear with me.

So then, let us assume that there are 2 types of success: 1) Social or societal success, and 2) Individual success. The result of type 1 success I think is money and fame. The result of type 2 success is confidence and well, well-being I guess. But honestly I don't think type 1 or 2 in general is more or less energy consuming or conserving than the other...I guess I haven't thought about this as much as I thought I had.

I'll just end this now and submit it for the record, but before I do I must mention Asimov's view of the future speciation of humanity. Asimov framed a future of Earthlings and Spacers. Those Earthlings crammed together living in gargantuan enclosed cities on an overcrowded planet with diminishing resources. The Spacers living on vast, unoccupied planets, living for centuries in relative peace and quiet.

The spacers sound ideal, but Asimov is keen to point out the negatives - the spacers do not drink or intake any drugs, they rarely come into contact with one another and because they live so long they have little motivation to progress. Asimov framed the two polarities of the human future as the two types of stability, dynamic Earth and static spacers and in doing so he showed that both were paths to ultimate extinction. The answer in Asimov's mind was some middle-ground, where humans left their coddled cities to explore and colonize the galaxy, but never fully settled on any one of them...at least for about 20k years which is when the foundation books kick in to tackle another form of social stagnation and decay.

Of course, Asimov had robots to help - and one beloved, fair-skinned android in particular. His humans remained a single species (solarians and mutants like the mule aside). I wonder, though, if that is realistic? I think we must speciate. I wonder if it is trying to happen as we speak. Thanks for reading!

Shut up and take my data!

To me "Bandwidth caps" means "Internet limits". To me "Internet" means "freedom of information": Anyone who can hold sand in their hand can see what I'm inferring.

Artificial scarcity may be my least favorite of all the artificial things.

Please stop muddying the water. Here, I have some sonar.

Ping.

Reply: I don't agree with you on any of your points, I think even in principle. You could be mistaken, I could be mistaken or you could be a very elegant troll. Regardless here is my reply.

Lawmakers passed anti-monopoly laws without lobbyists. Lobbyists always spend money pushing an agenda, that's the definition of a lobbyist: They are trying to get lawmakers to meddle to protect their business. A government that doesn't screw with the private industry creates an unregulated private industry. I think that lack of regulation in the private industry results in bad outcomes. I think there are historical examples supporting this.

I don't think this is a counter-example or an argument against your point, but I did something like this recently on several articles and had unexpected results.

Just as a pet peeve (and a bit of a test) whenever I would find the phrase, "owing to" I would change it to "because of".

Surprisingly none were reverted. And it was surprising.

Perhaps because it was such a small and simple edit the bots didn't notice or perhaps the editors realized that "because of" was truly the most neutral way of stating cause. Whatever the cause, these changes actually stuck.

Who can resist that stare!?

So personal. So appealing.

"Jimmy, here's 20 bucks man. No, just keep it dude. I'll check out your cool homepage later."

He's like that cool friend who rarely asks for anything, and when he does you totally don't mind hooking him up. His car is totally old and beat-up and has taco bell wrappers in the back seat but everyone loves riding to shows in it. And....

The analogy goes further but I'll leave it there.

I wonder what articles have been targeted? (maybe a comment posted concurrently with my composition will list them).

To speculate - I've noticed that articles on wikipedia fall into the three broad categories, unsurpisingly the same as those of nouns: 1) people, 2) places, 3) things.

3) "Things" articles are the 'simplest' to disentangle or find the truth of because "things" include works of art, mathematics, science and physical objects. It's easy to tell a lie when an article says that the hit song, "I feel good" is written by Mozart, or when an article claims gravity makes things fall up. These claims are relatively easy to test or refute. The problem with these types of articles is they may require some real expertise (especially philosophical and mathematical articles) to verify - but that is also their virtue

2) "Places" articles (which include 'historical events') become more difficult because often these places do not exist any more, or the events usually have already happened, usually a really long time ago. These articles suffer the classic problems of history multiplied by the power of the internet.

1) "People" articles. These articles are rife with arguments over what actions events in a person's life are significant, and what elements of those actions are significant. The words chosen to describe a person can make all the difference - he was a "Great Leader" or he was a "Good Leader" - which one best describes Hitler*?

So I would venture that this firm has targeted articles in categories 1 and 2, although I guess there maybe product articles in category 3 which could be gainfully modified.

Ah the truth of things. And the relative truth of places and people ;)

*you graciously forgive this overused example.

Thank you!

That's a very good point. I'm sure you see where I'm coming from though - after all, the results of any experiement support or oppose the results of others. If a collider result opposes a non-collider experiement then the non-collider experiement can be modified in light of the collider results. Sure that would a bit inductive and fuzzy, but it's better than just trusting. Regardless, your argument is strong and illustrates the fundamental challenges of cutting-edge discovery and research. Thank you for your succinct answer.

That's faith man.

How about actual proof?

Seriously, how do these studies get published? I mean this "trust" thing goes both ways and is probably why some really cool results don't get published - like the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction

From the wikipedia: "Belousov made two attempts to publish his finding, but was rejected on the grounds that he could not explain his results to the satisfaction of the editors of the journals to which he submitted his results."

What the hell? Who needs to explain results when one can just perform the experiment!?

Trust? That's for friendships and financial dealings.

Proof (or disproof as you fancy). That's for science and knowledge.

Alright, now someone enlighten me and fix my apparently skewed view on this matter please because I don't get how this crap is happening.

Slighly tangential line of thought here:

Let us imagine a cylinder of empty space with radius r = 5mm and length l = 10 meters. Allowing for any kind of medium in this space (fiber, copper, neutron-star matter, etc...), what is the maximum throughput in principle of this communication channel?

In other words, I've been wondering lately if there is an upper-bound (in principle) on bandwidth. Like how there is a speed limit for light, is there something similar for information transmission?