AKMA's Forgiving Discussion

AKMA says that Forgiving entails recognizing a wrong, looking at it clearly and honestly, assessing responsibility for it, and resolving not to permit that wrong to determine our lives from thence forward. I would add to that comment that it is not so much "resolving not to permit that wrong to determine our lives" but more resolving to allow it to determine our lives in a positive, more inclusive manner. It is my observation that feelings like anger, revenge or even just being overly crabby have the effect of being less inclusive of others - even if only for a little while. Forgivenes is thus an important shaper of our future behaviour. We can choose to be unforgiving, and shape it more narrowly, or forgiving, and shape it more widely and positively. That might then include some element of restitution or making good, or just organising things so that the offence has less chance of occurring in the future.

Open Source in Peru

The Peruvian government has specified software they have should come with source code. Read about it at opensource.org, here.

Mark my Words, Copy Protection on CD's never felt better

Kirk Larson sent me this interesting news in an email.
Read this first
�as if this isn't bad enough
�Then this

I think we should come up with an ink formulation which will be transparent to laser light and then sell it to the felt tip manufacturers, and make a squillion.

Stupid Networks & Telecommunications Policy

There is an interesting (and long) article at the Internet Society's "On The Internet" site: Telecommunications Policy and the Internet, written by Geoff Huston. It covers the issues very well I think, and makes some interesting comments. For example, on policy objectives, states:

"* Develop the Internet as a part of mainstream public communications.
* Build on a structure of private investment into the Internet service industry.
* Ensure that the Internet continues to be cost-efficient to use.
* Ensure that the Internet continues to be useful.
* Ensure that the Internet is ubiquitous."

These seem like the right sort of outcomes. Later, the author talks about a de-regulated communications environment where:

"Within such a perspective, the Internet operates as any other value-added service, in which service definition, pricing, policy of operation, and all other aspects of the service are defined through the operation of market forces within a competitive market. Within such a marketplace, artificial denial of service through appropriate-use policies plays no discernible role, and differential tariffing of services fulfills no role other than market penetration and competitive market acquisition."

He writes about the established communications industry like this:

"The established communications industry had envisioned a data environment more on terms similar to telephony, in which the characteristics of the data service were an intrinsic attribute of the network rather than the host. This model admitted many more elements of control into the network provider domain, viewing host computer platforms as simple data-processing stations. That vision was espoused within the X.25 protocols, frame relay, and asynchronous-transfer-mode virtual circuit services, which are feature-rich network services."

And also notes these requirements for the internet:

"The requirements of the Internet are far more basic in nature. The requirement to support the Internet is for simple bit carriage services-without any service overlay. For the established communications industry, this is not a market that admits a high degree of added-value elements. For some time, the established communications industry resisted this Internet approach to supporting networking services, offering an open-system-interconnection-based network service architecture as an alternative approach to the industry. This has largely receded in importance, and the current approach from this sector is to quickly come to terms with the market, recovering from a somewhat slow response to the arrival of the Internet as a significant market force."

The author points out that the existing communications industry has tended to act like a cartel, and that:

"...although the collaborative community and the deregulated market may see continued change and evolution as positive attributes of the environment, the established communications sector may be more interested in establishing a somewhat slower pace of change in this area."

The author covers the whole range of policy issues which need to be addressed, and comprehensively. The problems are described very well, but I am not so sure his predicted outcomes (Likely Directions & Conclusions in the article) are what we want to hear.

For example:

"Already the skew between the ethos of an Internet as a community resource heavily populated with voluntary effort and the Internet as a medium for mass-marketed commerce and entertainment is readily visible. However, it is both inevitable and correct that the policy initiative of the service network shifts to those who make the investment in operating the service network."

and

"Conclusion

A gulf certainly exists between the typical method of constructing a public policy framework for the communications industry and the exigencies of the Internet.

* The Internet ethos of collaboration as the mechanism for policy formulation has failed to meet the demands of an environment of widespread deployment across many market sectors. Collaboration simply does not scale.
* Industry self-regulation is perhaps more an expression of faith in the outcomes of the competitive market as being an efficient distributor of a public resource of service than it is a well-understood mechanism to achieve the desired objectives in all situations. Industry self-regulation is a faith, not a science.
* The established communications industry players perceive a substantial threat to their existing mode of business within the guise of the Internet.
* The traditional methods of policy formulation in the public sector are attuned to gradual and well-researched changes to a relatively static policy framework, and a very strong tendency exists to preserve the status quo within the process. Public policy often comes as too little, too late."

If you are interested in this topic, have a read of the whole thing.

Will the Stupid Network Prevail?

Perhaps the Connectivity 2002 forum was a case of Goliath against David, David & David ...

Let's Open the Bottle

I read here, at the ABC Science site about the fact that drinking white wine in moderation is good for your lungs. This is good news. Now I can enjoy red and white wines and irritate people at the same time with my extraordinarily up to date knowledge. Just about everything else seems to have become bad for us, it nice to know some of the old pleasures are really OK.

Keeping Networks Stupid

Referring to David Weinberger's weblog on "The Telecommunications Story" , I'd thought I'd throw my comments in as well, being an ex-telecom guy.

Just before I left Telecom Australia (in 1987!), I remember sitting in an internal briefing meeting where someone in marketing had just come back from a trip to the USA, and considering the effects of deregulation on the future of Telecom. We were talking about various "new" technologies (ISDN, Intelligent Networks), and also the merits of circuit switched technologies in general. These were heralded as the key infrastructure of the future, upon which which "value added services" would be built.

I have never forgotten the declaration made at that meeting that:

"we in Telecom must not be reduced to just carrying the bits - that will make us just a commodity!".

So it appears that the implications of the "stupid network" idea have been understood by Telcos for a long time, even the government owned one here in Australia, and they have all been fighting it ever since.

But that is the paradox, as you have noted - this kind of network is much harder to make money out of, being a commodity. But someone still has to invest in it and build it - where will the money come from?

Of course, I've referred to the infrastructure of the Internet, which despite being called stupid, is really quite clever. All those routers have CPUs and memory and an operating system, they do a certain amount of error correction, they decide where the data has got to go when there is a problem somewhere in the network etc. When we talk about the Internet being kept simple & stupid, we are really referring to the Internetworking Protocol, which hides the underlying networking, allows systems to establish communications sessions with one another and leaves the rest to other end-to-end protocols like TCP etc.

Networks evolved in very purpose-built ways because of the need to manage scarce and expensive resources, and because networks were very prone to add a lot of errors or noise. It needed to be designed for efficiency. Technology has now got to the point where data can be transmitted with very low error rates and very high bandwidth - allowing simplification of what the network must do, and lower cost per volume of information transmitted. So we can relax the efficiency principles now, and gain some flexibility.

Maybe the clue can be taken from the way the brain has evolved - lots of inefficiency and redundancy, and massive interconnectivity (but don't take that analogy too far, I'm not one who thinks the internet will develop any kind of conscious experiences any time in the next million years!)

We will be watching carefully what happens in the USA, since Australia will broadly follow the US lead - although there are some important differences, not the least being we've only got 18 million people in a land mass about the same size as the USA.

BTW, David commented that he was "nowhere near as up on this area as just about anyone you'll meet, but it's good to know that ignorance doesn't deter me from making large-scale pronouncements." But with friends and acquaintances like David Isenberg and David Reed, I'd say all the Davids have it exactly right!

Still Conscious

I now have David Chalmers' book "The Conscious Mind". He has a very different take on conscious experience. He thinks there is a "hard problem" - that is, the problem of explaining the actual inner experience of consciousness - "what it is like to be" something. This is very mysterious to him, and he feels that it means that conscious experience must be a fundamental property or force of the universe.

This means you cannot argue with him that conscious experience might just seem "ineffable", but in fact be a result of neurological actions in the brain. He accepts that the neurological actions are there, associated with the conscious experience, even giving rise to it, but not explaining it. His view is quite different from Daniel Dennett's, (his book: Consciousness Explained) who believes Chalmers has it backwards - the "easy problems" are actually the hard ones (because they will give an account of consciousness) and that the "hard problem" isn't one, because it doesn't really exist! For the time being, I'll stick with Dennett, I think. We'll see what Chalmers comes up with.

Binary Binary

There are 10 types of people in the world.
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.



(I sent this in an email to AKMA, who liked it! So did I.
Silly, I know.