Archive for July, 2008
The Virtual Grocery Store
Friday, July 18th, 2008
“It won’t be any permissions scheme, but rather fear, that will keep the grid masters lawful and in line. - Desmond Shang”
Not just fear, but the fact that the majority of people are honest.
A grocery store has no “technical protections” to prevent you from walking out without paying.
Sure, they could lock you in an airlock while they scan every item in your cart… but they don’t, because people are honest on the whole, and will pay for what they take off the shelves.
The old way was to have a clerk fetch everything from behind the counter. Sure it worked, but it didn’t scale.
Now that we are moving to an “open store” paradigm, we just have to get over the fact that people will shoplift a little, and that our remedy is going to be pretty much limited to bring legal action against the most egregious offenders.
Woot
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008I have my own taggy-cloudy-thingy-url on massively:
SLCC 08 Registration
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008Why haven’t you registered yet? These people did!
I will be presenting an Open Source mini-track, sponsored by Pleiades Consulting. Hope to see you there.
My reply to her:
One may wonder why this would make all open source devs felons, even if they don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright. It has to do with the way the DMCA is written. Distributing a “device” that “primarily exists” to bypass the “effective copy protection” is a felony. This goes beyond merely using the device to actually infringe, distributing the tool is also a crime.
(Image: Klaus with K, from wikicommons)