Posts by Andrew Orlowski 1435 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2006
clean_state Your comment makes a strong argument against your beliefs.
Population rates aren't rising, they're falling. Land isn't becoming scarce - as we live in urban areas, we use less land.
Much more importantly, we make much better use of the land - India doesn't have famines - it exports rice. People don't die of famines any more, starvation is caused by regional conflict. We have enough land to feed everyone.
All this is the result of prosperity - it came about by people ignoring arguments like yours about natural resource constraints - and doing inventing clever and useful ideas.
... that's not a terribly original observation.
Most people can value originality even if some nerds can't. (It's characteristic of autism).
If you're interested about how this idea went in out of fashion, and why, I wrote about it here:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/5795/
To whet your appetite:
<snip>
... the misanthropy runs even deeper with many digital rights activists. Not content with challenging the economic incentives to creativity, they question the validity of the notion of creativity itself.
‘Substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them’, wrote Jonathan Latham in an essay widely cited by digital rights activists (4).
Latham’s view owes much to Structuralism, the lit-crit fad that usefully blew away the romantic notion of the author as the sole font of creative expression – but replaced it with one of the author as a dumb conduit, lacking autonomy or even the most basic self-awareness.
‘Since my creative work is non-unique’, wrote one commenter, encapsulating the digital rights philosophy, ‘I can’t expect compensation for it; because anyone could have done that. I just happened to get the idea first.’ (5)
From such a position of absolutism, it must be hard to see that one idea added to an existing body of work can nevertheless create something interesting and new.
</snip>
That's all it takes, usually.
There are a few UK brewers using US hops to create American-style IPAs. My pick is:
http://www.brewdog.com/product/punk-ipa
Malts: Marris Otter Extra Pale Malt
Hops: Chinook, Simcoe, Ahtanum, Nelson Sauvin
Tesco and Sainsbury's do it, 4 for £5.50. I haven't found anything as good at anything like that price. and it's very good.
You're correct, five years funding for a search engine without much of a business plan would not happen here.
but:
"Google seem to have done okay at finding UK engineers and designers (we got some of the best designers in the world with several world renown design universities in several fields), with them employing several thousand people in the UK."
Google doesn't employ several thousand people in the UK - and most of the employees are in sales.
Indeed.
Perhaps it works because it's voluntary, and they bundle in utilities.
No room for the discussion in my piece, but I see no reason the BBC Media Company could not also offer telephony and broadband, in exchange for a smaller (or no) license fee. It's discrimination not to allow it to do so.
I love the internets:
-------------------------
From: Fuck you <Fuckyou@you.com>
Subject: Reg reader comment: Top Brit authors turn flamethrowers on barmy IPO
Date: 8 March 2012 09:30:21 GMT
To: Andrew Orlowski <andrew.orlowski@theregister.com>
A Reg reader has the following comments to make on the story Top Brit authors turn flamethrowers on barmy IPO. The request to send this message came from the IP address 212.---.---.---
Fuck you.
-------------------------
As I've said, when enlightened self-interest breaks out, with ISPs capturing the real value of the good stuff that goes over their pipes, then legislation becomes superfluous. Everyone wins.
Until that happens SOPA or something like it will be back every year. And every time you write "MAFIAA" the politicians reach for their biros.
Have a think about an enforcement code that's fair and that you can live with, and you'll never see a SOPA again.
There are some VERY fair points in your post struggling to get out from a shouty anti-capitalist rant :)
One is that people can do a lot by themselves - you can do your own production, distribution, marketing and lawyering from your own bedsit. But it's a real ballsache and time sink. So a creator needs a wide choice of professionals when they go to market. If the market is healthy nobody needs to assign rights in perpetuity.
At the end of the day you need to show how your system will be better, providing more economic incentives for making culture, so a talented person does not have to work in Tescos or a call center. So far nobody really believes it will be - and emotive crap about "owning and suppressing ideas" is a silly red herring.
People will pay for convenience, which should be written on the wall of every entertainment company, publisher, games house, etc.
But the economic decision remains: save a fiver (or tenner, or thirty quid on that box set) and Torrent it at no risk. And no FBI warning. There's no comeback.
So long as that proposition is on the table you do need some enforcement that's fair and proportionate, that's cheap, and that scales. I wish it wasn't true. But here we all are.
Enforcement alone isn't going to save anyone's media business, but the "aggravating irrelevance corner" is already chock full of people it seems :)
FEAR is more of a factor than GREED. It is hard to describe industries that have shrunk by half greedy - desperation is much more of a factor. That is what results in short-sightedness and fear of making radical market experiments.
I am not sure what you mean by FRAND. A movie studio which has a hit film like Inception or Sherlock 2 is going to want to maximise its income and look after distribution. There's no reason they shouldn't either, because it inconveniences some bloke in a shed somewhere.
The best way to encourage industries to innovate is to reward them with your cash. This is why the Free crowd have made themselves irrelevant to the debate, they have removed their economic vote.
Do you think it's a grand publicity stunt?
To make sure everyone hears about Metro. And runs around for a year thinking it's really the future of Windows.
And at the last minute the product team go, "Oh yeah, it's a widget layer like Dashboard after all."
I'd be tempted to do so myself if I was Microsoft, and had a good mobile UI that nobody was interested in.
"The 'traditional' vendors have this thing called making a profit. Something two guys in a garage don't."
Quite!
That's the bit our anonymous newbie doesn't think is important.
That, and not all bits have equal value. People will pay more for bits they really want.
Where an idea is profitable the telco can partner or co-opt the service. More tomorrow on this...
Maybe it's for the Heritage Industry?
You can go to an industrial museum today, there seem to be hundreds, and see somebody working a Victorian loom. In the future you may be able to look around a Heritage software house, see somebody in a BOFH T-shirt and be told:
"And here C programmers used to chase memory leaks"
Maybe.
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