Month: January 2004

To the Moon

It is good to hear that the US is heading back into space, aiming for Man on Mars just in time for me to retire so I can follow the whole thing from my jelly sofa listening in on my wireless brain implant.  Whatever it is, however, it is not quite “news” as this was the plan in ’89  and even back soon after Apollos were still dropping on the Moon.

Why now?   Maybe because China’s been eyeing the Moon for a few years.  The EU has also been poking around the Moon…as has  India…and Japan…and, oh, yeah, Russia buddying up with China…and with India.   What’s the rush?  China wants to do some military mining.    Private groups are looking to win the X Prize – even Romanians.   Seems like everyone has a space agency, even the Swiss.

So if you are the United States, its about time to get moving or there won’t be much room left.

Logo

I don’t know why I feel like a logo is required but I messed around with a design last night and came up with this, which I have placed temporarily permanently to the right, scroll down.

I think I have visions of shelves of coffee mugs or a trucker’s cap on Justin Timberlake. I have heard it does not suck. I may tinker and I do reserve the right to have many logos….for my many moods. If Naomi Klein is coming after me it is going to be in a big, big way.

Discount Carnival

Michael in Atlanta has this week’s Carnival of Canucks up and Radio Steve leads the issue with the party tonight at Rob1’s barn making the top news from PEI. Rob has a keg, by the way, and is giving away beer.   This guy is doing being the ex-banking-exec-country-drop-out thing in a big way.

By the way, the fact that this post won’t lead to a high school style kid invasion is an indictment of the supposed popularization of blogs. Best invite to mass teen party ever? 1980, Truro, Friday at 2:55 pm. Vice principal comes on the intercom to say “The girls volleyball team will be having tryouts at Black Rock this evening at 8 pm. Bring your own ball.” Black rock was a sand pit on the edge of town. 400 teens showed with their own balls of black rum. Cop car rolled around midnight.

Bizzare Call to Stop Innovating

The best way to ensure nothing new happens is to make that a principle, as Dave Winer has advocated:

Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly. Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it’s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.


Read Winers whole statement here.

As soon as rules outside of the marketplace of ideas are made which guard against innovation, advances stodge and we are stuck with innovations led only by those who advocate conservativism. We are witnessing an effort again now to control change on the web by a few as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s. There is an interesting analogy to a point in legal history in the 1800’s in which logical innovations such as negligence were held back by capitalists who did not want to be held accountable under civil law for the accidents caused by industrialization. The same theme is seen now in the rejection of criminal sanctions for industrial polluters.

A call to control of standards is foremost a call to “follow and pay me” to tell you what you what you can figure out yourselves.

If you want to be led, listen to self-appointed leaders aka “gurus” – a word which should be seen as a slander. If you want the best, unleash the innovative.