Tag Archives: capitalism

General

Domain name speculation goldmine

Hmmm, I wonder if The Simpsons is a goldmine for domain-name speculators. In a 1999 episode, Homer is picking through the Sunday newspaper looking for something he cares about, and reading the names of the sections aloud:
“Now to trim away the fat: Outlook [tosses in trash], Vista [tosses in trash], Spotlight [tosses in trash], Mosaic [tosses in trash]”

Though I’m sure the writers only intended it to be (partly prescient) commentary on bloated software, a smart speculator could have looked at that list and predicted the name of two future popular packages and grabbed up all the good domains, ya know, *.com, *-help.com, *-for-dummies.com, *-sucks.com, a-*-ate-my-baby.com, *-forums.com, viagra-and-*-for-fathers-day.com, learn-*.com, learn-*-underwater.com, that kind of stuff…

General

Burning down libraries remotely

Seeing this article over at Wired (Public Libraries, Private DRM) reminded me of a cool thing you can do to help accelerate the downfall of civilization:

  • Invent a DRM scheme with revocation (naturally, most of the ones coming out, such as AACS, have this).
  • Get useful content recorded with your scheme, then into libraries, through the force of the marketplace.
  • Let people go on thinking that libraries are a way to preserve cultural content beyond its life in the market and outside of the hands of future censors.
  • Revoke, revoke, revoke! The content magically disappears off library shelves (given that devices can no longer read the content, ever again).
  • Instead of revoking explicitly, you can also go out of business, release a new and incompatible version of your DRM scheme, have a bug in your DRM, let your servers go down, etc. The possibilities are wide open.
General

“Price Tag for Lost Productivity”

Ya know, I was going to construct a list of all the ways in which this sort of study is wrongheaded, but then I thought, you have to get it to get it, and if you don’t, my arguments won’t help… So, I guess there’s no point to this post, but still:

Price Tag for Lost Productivity: $544 Billion

General

Marketplace of ideas

The idea of the Internet (or any other cloud of technology you might choose) as a “marketplace of ideas” is an evocative one. But it occurs to me that the idea brings along one of the flaws of marketplace thinking that could be even more damaging in the realm of ideas than in the realm of products-and-services.

Just a moment ago, on a blog that I follow, I read an article that made me a bit sick to my stomach. It wasn’t that the author was totally off his rocker, just that I couldn’t agree with his premises and found his conclusions to be way off the mark. This being the worst of three or four times that I’ve had that reaction to articles on the blog, I removed it from my feed list.

That’s the flaw I’m talking about. “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” is the rule by which I make many decisions in the “real world”, and also in the “world of ideas”. That’s also an argument I hear advanced against someone who complains about a product, service, company or idea. But that’s a pretty weak sort of choice, “yes or no!”. What about some “yes, and…”, “no, but…”, “here’s another choice…”, etc.

General

“Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far”

Urgggh, is all I can say:
Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far