2005 October « James Gross

Archive for October, 2005

Telcos Not Playing Nice

Published October 31, 2005 Corrupt , Future Leave a Comment

A great response by techdirt to an article in Business Week entitiled “At SBC, It’s All About “Scale and Scope“

“Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment.

Are newspapers going to get their money back for all the printing presses they no longer need? Investment doesn’t always mean return, no matter how many people you know in Texas.

RSS Web Feed Generator

Published October 31, 2005 Web 2.0 Leave a Comment

This is a very cool tool that was on Lifehacker.

FeedTier is a web feeds generator for web pages without an existing syndication format. FeedTier performs content analysis, picks-up the most prominent cluster of hyperlinks and automatically generates RSS web feeds from web pages without existing sydincation options. FeedTier is an experimental service and free for personal use.

From Ashutosh Nilkanth’s Blog…….

FeedTier is not a wonder but it came out of my own necessity for subscription to web sites without any provision for web feeds. Its an experimental service and not yet perfect in its results. But it can still be used for a lot of web pages and the results will improve gradually. I hope it helps.

Brilliant!

AI

Published October 30, 2005 Future Leave a Comment

A fascinating read here. Makes me want to dig into The Singularity is Near, which I haven’t even started.

From the article……

“The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,” wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. “This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.” Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. “In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas… in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain… in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs… We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”

Continue reading ‘AI’

File Sharing Predicament

Published October 30, 2005 Corrupt Leave a Comment

In the judgment the court pointed out that file sharing could cause serious damage to the film industry and that it should be a crime that is taken seriously. The fact that he didn’t profit off his activity was the reason for the court’s decision to simply hand down a fine instead of handing down a prison term.

This is going to be a huge issue down the road. So if person A “shares” something with person B and doesn’t take anything in exchange for it, is it a crime? The pro-captalist societies, or for that matter maybe any governemnt that has established players with fat wallets, seem to have written their justice system with the ultimate motivation being profit.

It seems this brave new world is throwing a wrench in that engine.