Factory Factory
Dollops of
Mr Messina.
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2009-08-07
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On taking over the world, and other things…
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2009-08-06
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
— Thomas Jefferson, around the time when copyright was being conceived (via Dave Gray)
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2009-08-04
The digital commonwealth reflects an understanding of the dynamics that have led to technology successes like Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone app store: the platform provider creates enabling technology, “rules of the road,” and visibility for participants, and then gets out of the way, leaving room for third parties to create additional value. This is a great model for all future government technology efforts.
— Tim O’Reilly, Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO
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2009-08-03
These are so crazy.
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2009-08-01
Is this post an indictment about a lot of what I’ve said and written about why the social Web is so powerful? A little bit, yeah. I’ve always been an optimist and some of the things I said at this two-day blogger retreat shocked me. Two years ago, I would have heartily agreed with Johnson’s rosy statements about the good in humanity. Not anymore. As I wrote in my book, the Web isn’t good or bad, it’s just a medium for channeling raw human nature. What I wrote about the Web wasn’t untrue— I just gave human nature too much credit.
— Sarah Lacy on her decision to no longer use Twitter for personal communication: No More SarahLacy™
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2009-07-30
[Lene Hau] and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.
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That’s because the America you grew up in… was segregated.
— JON STEWART, responding to Sean Hannity saying that President Obama is “literally ripping apart the foundation of the America we knew and grew up in”, on The Daily Show (via inothernews) (via aodouls) (via explorers) (via kayrutledge)(via furrowedbrow) (via asprettyasasong) (via mikehudack)
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2009-07-28
If you stare at your shoelaces while you walk, you’ll run into a tree. If you look too far off into the distance, you’ll trip on those shoelaces. And tie those shoelaces regardless!
— via Gong Szeto
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2009-07-15
As Paul Starr, the great sociologist of media, has often noted, journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience. For a TV show with an audience of a million, no one cares whether it’s the same million every week — head count rules. A public, by contrast, is a group of people who not only know things, but know other members of the public know those things as well. Both persistence and synchrony matter, because journalism is about more than dissemination of news; it’s about the creation of shared awareness.
— Not an Upgrade — an Upheaval, Clay Shirky on the newsmedia
