Solipsism Gradient

Posted by cava:
Entendo que muitos dos erros cometidos por legisladores fazem parte de um unico sentimento protecionista. Alias, muito comum no territorio americano.

Percebemos isso ao ver os mesmos defendendo penas muito leves para uma empresa que feriu as leis anti-truste ou tambem vendo os mesmos tentando “proteger” o mercado fonografico ou cinematografico.

Tambem e’ o que vimos a pouco com a questao dos direitos autorais do Mickey e sua turma. O simples fato destes personagens movimentarem milhoes e a possibilidade da liberacao causar estrago e encadear uma crise foi suficiente para encorajar o poder judiciario e legislativo a cometer novo erro.

Sempre foi assim e com apos a crise de 11 de setembro, o sentimento piorou. O medo de um colapso na economia iniciado por uma grande empresa (ou um mercado especifico como o fonografico) em crise, tem como consequencia tais erros que, ao meu ver, estao apenas adiando e aumentando o prejuizo futuro.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of the classic Cluetrain Manifesto, did it again with World of Ends. In less than a day this article climbed to the #1 spot on indexes such as TechnoRati and DayPop. Hundreds of weblogs are already linking to it, and in a couple of days major news sites should follow.

I’ve posted a translation into Brazilian Portuguese. This was written in a hurry, so I make no claims of elegance or fidelity; both will hopefully be added during the following days. Please post comments over there if you see an error, or know a better translation for some phrase or word.

Update: Doc Searls has linked to this post and my translation. David Weinberger has posted several interesting comments he received from readers. Tim Moors published a technical paper about end-to-end design which concludes that although implementing functions at the network edge is often useful, certain others (like routing and congestion control) should not be edge-implemented. Richard Bennett calls the article a cluetrainish hallucination. BurningBird thinks the article oversimplifies the issues. Marc Canter comments at length, a must read. There are tons of other links – unfortunately TechnoRati seems to be down at the moment.

Dave Pollard uses Steven Covey‘s Time Management Matrix to show why you never get anything important done… and why less important issues often get undue priority.

As soon as I find the time I’ll have to set up a matrix for my own stuff… especially since the Brazilian business year supposedly starts today, just after Carnaval. 😉

A sidenote: while looking at Covey’s site, I was very amused by the last paragraphs on his main page:

WARNING: Privacy Protection Software NOT DETECTED

Your Internet habits are being recorded.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PRIVACY PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Your ID: 2Cust108.tnt9.tco2.da.uu.net

Your computer: x86 family 6 Model 8 AT/AT compatible

Privacy Protection Software: NOT DETECTED

…as I’m definitely not on uu.net, and am writing this on an Apple iBook/600 – which I’m reasonably sure is not x86 AT compatible – it seems my built-in “privacy protection software” is already powerful enough.

Posted by Michael Tsai:
My guess is that Feynman’s Samba School comments can be found in Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.

It’s Carnaval, a major holiday hereabouts. (Warnings: some links may not be work-safe, whatever that means, in fundamentalist countries. Also, Safari seems to choke on the JavaScript pop-ups.) Although only Tuesday and Wednesday morning are official holidays, many people take the whole week off…

The Hairy Eyeball has photos and comments; so does The Enigmatic Mermaid. Linguistic note: I’d translate “Escola de Samba” literally as “Samba School”, since “school” is used here in the sense of “school of fish”. I seem to remember Richard Feynman commenting on this, but was unable to find a reference.

Although I’m steadfastly refusing to turn the TV on, the heat makes working at home less attractive, and production has been very low… I’ll try to work some more at internal weblogging stuff, like referrer logs and automating trackback pings.

Update: Düsseldorf, where I was born, also has a very traditional Karneval holiday.

Der Schockwellenreiter tells all about the perils of automating cease-and-desist letters. It seems that Münster University got such a letter from the BSA, regarding their distribution of “unlicensed copies of copyrighted material” through their FTP server.

As it happens, the offending material was Open Office, an Open Source package. Here are copies of the letter and responses; the BSA subsequently apologized, blaming an automated script for reacting to the word “office” (not yet a Microsoft trademark).

Update: Boing Boing picked up the link.

Update: lots of interesting comments at the Boing Boing discussion board, including one by Ned Richards, one of the OpenOffice project leads:

Yes we think its cool that the BSA believe we’re completely compatible with MS Office. 🙂

…We’re obviously worried that this might harass our mirrors, our most important means of distribution.

… We haven’t yet heard of any further reports of this occuring, obviously we’d treat them with the utmost seriousness.

Here’s an extremely disquieting and profoundly interesting note about the 2003 WEF at Davos.

Viridian Design‘s Bruce Sterling comments a leaked e-mail from Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett:

If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed against the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

Thanks to ext|circ for the link!

Posted by Pressepapiers.net:
Pressepapiers.net linked to this post

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