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.

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.