This will be the next big copyright war — whether this form of noncommercial creativity will be allowed. But there will be a big difference with this war and the last (over p2p filesharing). In the p2p wars, the side that defended innovation free of judicial supervision was right. But when ordinary people heard both sides of the argument, 90% were against us. In this war, the side that will defend these new creators is right. And when ordinary people hear both sides, and more importantly, see the creativity their kids are capable of, 90% will be with us.
Roof Ads
Some commercial outfits are painting giant ads on their roofs for the benefit of the aerial/satellite photos used by services like Google Earth/Google Maps.
Archives Help Businesses Learn From Past Mistakes
NPR:
The documents, products and records a company keeps in its archive help it to create institutional memories — good and bad. Nike turns to shoes in its archives to be reminded of past successes and failures.
Chocolate & Zucchini
Well worth repeated visits. via Doc.
“The Origins of the Great War of 2007”
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict – far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 – were in place.
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region’s relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world’s oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
Sort of a bolt of lightning as I’ve been reading Shirer’s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I’m now entering 1939 in this amazing 1960 work. The look back with respect to opportunities missed is simply astonishing. I hope Ferguson is dead wrong, but one can see the seeds of war…
Constant Innovation
The book’s central question is: How can companies innovate continuously? He writes: “Evolution requires us to continually refresh our competitive advantage, sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in major cataclysms, but always with some part of our business portfolio at risk and in play. To innovate forever, in other words, is not an aspiration; it is a design specification. It is not a strategy; it is a requirement.”
Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution Author Geoffrey A. Moore
“I have a Dream”
MP3 and Text of Martin Luther King’s Speech.
Thinking Different – US Foreign Investment More Productive?
Dan Drezner writes:
Given the fact that foreigners currently have a net claim on $2.5 trillion in U.S. assets, one would expect the U.S. to be paying out a lot more in interest, dividends, and profits to foreigners than Americans would receive from their investments.
The weird thing is that, so far, this hasn’t been true. Last year the U.S. earned $36 billion more on their foreign investments than foreigners earned in the United States. The question is, why?
It turns out Americans both (seem to) make riskier investments and earn a higher return on investment. One extreme view (not Dan’s) suggests the following:
World Snowmobile Racing Championships – Eagle River
But the wintertime blues disappeared Friday night, Day 2 of the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby, which residents herald as the Indianapolis 500 of snowmobile racing.
Jimmy Blaze followed a fireworks display, which opened Friday Night Thunder, by defying physics and doing a back flip on a snowmobile to the whoops and mitten-muffled applause of the 10,000 people who crammed on a snow-covered hill at Eagle River Derby Track. The temperature had dropped to 25; the wind chill made it feel like 11 and a steady snow fell.
Hundreds of the young men and women in parkas bearing the logos of their favorite sled manufacturers, like Polaris and Arctic Cat, arrived by snowmobile. Families, too, planted camping chairs in the white bowl, but while mothers and fathers watched the racers hit 100 miles an hour on the track’s icy oval, their snowsuit-bundled children found a steeper hill for body-sledding.
The Fiction Zone that DC Has Become
Lessig explains why we’re (the US) so far behind in terms of broadband performance and economics:
How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan.
It will be interesting to see where our Wisconsin politicians land on this matter.