Test post to verify a phishing scam

Just in case anyone ever comes here. My blog is really at the link below

http://www.di2.nu/blog.htm

Two ecomonists - Boldrin and Levine - have come up with a controversial idea that copyright and patent protection may actually be harmful for the innovator as well as society at large. The paper, called "Perfectly Competitive Innovation" is long dense and thought provoking. I have yet to read it fully, let alone fully digest it. However there is a commentary on it here which discusses both the paper and the responses to it, which seems to provide an excellent summary. I hope to come up with more topical thought later but in the meantime I offer this thought:

I think that most (all?) of the debate on IP - and indeed the above commentary - found misses one big thing: why innovation occurs. I'm still thinking about this but it seems obvious to me that there are two distinct forms of innovation.

The first is the innovation required to solve a perceived need. This is where cures for diseases come in, along with all sorts of other things from computer programs to wheels. For these sorts of innovative effort the Boldrin and Levine argument is fine. If I have a need of something to reduce my expenditure I will be willing to invest sufficient money to fix that need as long as it is less than the eventual reduction in expenditure (plus/minus interest rates, inflation etc etc). So, for example, if an HMO wants to cut its cost of treating a disease it will be willng to pay for the development of a drug that cures the disease quicker and faster. The 90% of computer software that is written but not sold generally falls under this umbrella. This is all classic return on investment stuff.

The second type of innovation is the creation of new markets by making something that no one has ever seen before and that doesn't solve a need. Here I think its a bit trickier, because you have to grow the market AND that takes time. Hence it may well be that you need some kind of protection because otherwise as soon as the market tornadoes you have no protection against imitators coming in and copying the product. Since they don't have to recover the fixed costs in developing the product and building the market they can sell for a lot less than you can. But it may well be that you can still sell for a premium because of branding so it is not neccessarily the case that you will see no benefit from originating the market - "The original and still the best" is quite a common slogan in all sorts of commodity based markets.

DD

I have to say that I think this USS Clueless article is somewhat simplistic, let alone biased. However despite that I do think it (and the article discussing Chirac that it starts commenting about) are right in parts.

What I disagree with is the imperialistic nostalgia bits. I don't think nostalgia has anything to do with it, especially given that in the grand scheme of things the Imperial powers were the UK, Austria and Spain not France or Germany. The reality is its all about power and influence today.

What is also missed is that Socialism is a popular idea. The fact that it doesn't work is irrelevant as far as the average man in the street is concerned. It has seemed to work for most of 50 years - because the rebuilding of the global economy after WWII drove massive growth rates, unfortunately it has too many short comings to work in places and times where populations and economies are not growing hand over fist.

The aims of socialism and the welfare state are laudable, but they come with two deadly side effects. The first is that they remove the incentive to do something and the second is that they require a large government bureaucracy to administer them. These two side effects mean that countries that implement a socialistic wellfare state system will eventually end up in deep doo-doo because the productive part of the economy becomes overwhelmed by the "drones". There is a great story by Rudyard Kipling called "The mother hive" that should be read by anyone who likes socialism.

However I do think that we are indeed seeing the evolution of a new Europe and I do think we need to worry about how it turns out. What really scares me is that we will see a socialist superstate show up. I know that eentually it will collapse under its own contradictions, but its collapse could be vrey unpleasant. Indeed it is arguable that one reason why the EU is so keen to enlarge is that it will stave off this collapse, rather as dying comapies merge to create bigger dying companies.

The other problem I see in Europe is a growing cynicism with the government. Effectively people are beginning to no longer trust their politicians and no longer believe that voting will provide a change. This is extremely worrying as it has the potential to lead to demagogues and tyrants. I do not think this can be fixed by outside assistance. It needs Europeans to fix it.

DD

This Time Magazine article does agood job showing the problems and issues with NASA:

The problem is that space research in its current form doesn't have a direct commercial driver (its mainly pure research so this is not surprising) so it needs to be funded by hobbyists or universities/governments. Unfortunately it seems to be way too expensive to be funded by anything except governments which means you end up in the nasty position of having a government bureaucracy acting as lead researcher and sole customer.

As everyone should be aware by now bureaucacies are hideously innefficient and terrible at making decisions, they also tend to produce bloated designs - "the elephant is a mouse designed by a government committee" - and are always incentivised to spend all their money rather than look for savings. Richard Feynman's Appendix to the Roger's inquiry on Challenger is, IMO, the classic expose of this. More and more I fear that what we saw over the weekend was a repeat of this institutional stupidity despite the undoubted dedication of the grunts.

Two web links to the appendix are:
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

I don't know what the solution is - but I suspect the ideal solution requires a billionaire with a passion for space travel. Anyone know any?

DD

Here's an interesting one. Julie Birchill is not someone I regularly agree with and the UK's Grauniad is not a paper where Pro-War comments are common. But nonetheless here is a coherent argument of why WAR NOW may in fact be the best option. Excerpts below.


Why we should go to war

Julie Burchill
Saturday February 1, 2003
The Guardian

In the mode of Basil Fawlty, I've tried not to mention the war. I know that Guardian readers are massively opposed to any action against Saddam Hussein, as are 90% of the people I love and respect both personally and professionally. But I am in favour of war against Iraq - or, rather, I am in favour of a smaller war now rather than a far worse war later. I speak as someone who was born and raised to be anti-American; ...

The new enemies of America, and of the west in general, believe that these countries promote too much autonomy, freedom and justice. ...

When you look back at the common sense and progressiveness of arguments against American intervention in Vietnam, Chile and the like, you can't help but be struck by the sheer befuddled babyishness of the pro-Saddam apologists:

1) "It's all about oil!" ... Are you prepared to give up your car and central heating and go back to the Dark Ages? If not, don't be such a hypocrite. The fact is that this war is about freedom, justice - and oil. It's called multitasking. Get used to it!

2) "But we sold him the weapons!" ... surely it is our responsibility to redress our greed and ignorance by doing the lion's share in getting rid of him.

3) "America's always interfering in other countries!" And when it's not, it is derided as selfish and isolationist. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

4) "Saddam Hussein may have killed hundreds of thousands of his own people - but he hasn't done anything to us! We shouldn't invade any country unless it attacks us!" ... On this principle, if we'd known about Hitler gassing the Jews all through the 1930s, we still shouldn't have invaded Germany; the Jews were, after all, German citizens and not our business. If you really think it's better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise. ... Military inaction, unless in the defence of one's own country, is the most extreme form of narcissism and nationalism; people who preach it are the exact opposite of the International Brigade, and that's so not a good look.

What this article doesn't touch on - quite - is the responsibility we in the West have to actually do some nation building in the oil states. Just about every oil producer (obvious exceptions are the US, the UK, Norway and the Holland) is or has been until recently an unpleasnant despotic government. We in the west have benefited from their tyrannies and have often funded and trained their armies and policemen. We have ignored and often profited from the corruption and nepotism that allows a small elite to become exceedingly wealthy from the oil while the rest remain in poverty. Unfortunately tyranny is unstable. The Russian version collapsed, the (first) Iranian version was overthrown and the second version may also collapse under the weight of its own hypocracy. In coutries such as Venezuela economic mismanagement has permitted a rabble-rouser to take control.

Some oil producers - like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Indonesia - are gradually changing on their own. We need to help them and support mor representative goverments and the rule of law in these countries, but it is best to let them come to their own systems rather than imposing one of ours. However the real failure has been in the gulf, where the west has turned a blind eye to all sorts of injustice just as long as the oil flows. As a result we are seen as oppressors and hypocrites by the average man in the street. We need to correct that impression and the best way to do this is to overthrow the tyrants and organise the rebuilding of the nations they have so mismnaged.

Rebuilding the nations does not need war or conflict, but convicing the tyrants and the hangers on to quit probably does - at least it does for the first one or two. A swift defeat of Iraq now, as long as it is combined with the nation building afterwards, is probably the best way we can repay our debts to the inhabitants of the gulf.

DD

Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article on Europe and the Europeans in the NY times recently (free subscription required) which touches on the refexive anti-american sentiment in much of Europe.

Wide sweeping generalizations are generally bad. But, having said that I have to say that the sweeping generlization of that article does seem to me to be reasonably accurate.

The chattering classes in Europe - i.e. the politicians, the media and the "intellectuals" are in fact depressingly reflexively anti-american and hypocritical. The reason for this is IMO a strong desire to not face reality because that would put them out of a job. The average European chatterer seems to hold the mutually contradictory views that a) all governments lie and cheat all the time and b) the government can and should fix everything. The result is that the USA which rejects the nanny state idea of b) is automatically tarred with a) whether or not there is any evidence for it.

GMOs are an excellent example this argument at "work":

A) GMOs are new therefore they are inherently dangerous
B) The scientists who fail to find harm in GMOs are clearly biased
C) Scientists that might find harm in GMOs are muzzled by the government and/or their evil capitalist lackeys
D) The "government" needs to fix this by banning GMOs until we can prove they are bad and then really banning them

Since the US government has not done D they must be doing C - evidence supported by the fact that the work done for B is often US based. Suggestions that the "harm" research parts of B&C could be caused by the fact that A is untrue are of course evidence that the suggestor is himself guilty of C.

the logical fallacies that abound in this sort of argument clearly escape the chatterers, presumably because their grasp of basic logic and statistics is somewhere below their grasp of quantum mechanics

DD

According to the BBC we have a second space shuttle crash

Nasa loses contact with shuttle
The US space agency Nasa loses contact with the space shuttle Columbia, minutes before it is due to land in Florida.
...

Apparently it was seen breaking up over Dallas...

Compared to Iraq or N Korea its nothing, but somehow it seems worse. The dream of leaving this planet becomes a nightmare (again).

I'm sure we will learn more over the coming days, but I just wonder if this isn't caused by the same institutional ignorance of statistics and probability that caused the Challenger disaster all those years ago...

My thoughts and condolences are with the families of the astronauts

DD

Good Cop / Bad Cop

From Reuters/Yahoo

Blair confident of new U.N. Iraq motion

By Andrew Cawthorne

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair is back home from his "war council" with U.S. President George W. Bush expressing confidence the United Nations will pass a second resolution potentially authorising war on Iraq.

"I believe that there will be a second resolution," Blair told reporters on the plane back to London after Friday's pivotal meeting with Bush at the White House.

Blair used his visit to the United States to insist on sticking with the U.N. route over Iraq. But Bush appeared less enthusiastic over a second motion at their joint news conference, saying it should not be used as a delaying tactic.

The PM, who has been Washington's closest ally since September 11 and was effusively hailed by Bush as "a friend of mine", said it was "nonsense" to suggest a diplomatic chink over Iraq had opened between London and Washington.
...

It seems to me that the Bush / Blair combo is doing an excellent bad cop/good cop double act as seen in endless police TV shows. And, as in the TV shows, the act really gets results; in this case doing an exellent job in smoking out weaselly politicos and their intellectually bankrupt academic supporters.

I don't know if this is intentional or if it was planned from the beginning, but it could well be that this results in a moment of truth for the UN and the other great powers. Essentially what I think we will see is that the Iraq war is placed (correctly IMO) into context in terms of its complete and utter flouting of UN resolutions and treaty conditions. Then we have a moment of truth - how should the UNSC react to such flagrant abuse? At this point all those countries (mainly beginning with F and G) that have claimed the UN as the ultimate fount of authority and justice will be forced to either say "yeah well actually we don't have either testicles or vertebrae" or do some serious backpeddling with, in the case of G at least, some possibly fatal results in national politics.

The end result however is likely to be that the UNSC either becomes publically discredidited as a toothless paper tiger - in which case the case for an alternative Pax Americana becomes strong - or we see the UN becoming more like it was originally proposed to be in the 1940s. I truly hope that we get to the second option because I believe that the US acting in the role of self appointed gloabl policeman will eventually cause a lot of grief.

If looked at in this context the whole Iraq disarmament debate becomes more of a sideshow as the world finally gets to grip with the New World Order we hoped for in 1991. It is quite possible that the Bush and Blair administrations have gone this route deliberately as they feel that the laternative drift scenario leads to more Sept 11th style unrest but I doubt we will know this until 30 or more years from now when the various governments release the relevant papers.

DD

I've posted some pictures I took with my digital camera recently on my photo web-site. This site is under serious construcion at present so there isn't much point in looking around at other parts of it.

DD

I've been playing around with the stylesheets again. I hope its better. It won't work properly with idiots who use IE6, but does look OK in IE5.x and looks perfect in Mozilla, Netscape 6/7 and probably Opera. It should also look good for MAC IE users.

DD

My name is Francis Turner. I usually go by the nickname of [Dirty]
Dingus, which is the name wished on me by a bunch of Samurai hashers.

I live on the Riviera, but for the last year have actually been
working in Wiesbaden most weeks. This is good for air miles but has no
other advantages I can think of. Despite the ocasional little issuettes,
such as a need to completely rewire the place, I love our house in France,
which is 'un vrai mas provencal' - see my web page for some pictures
of our olive trees - and the quality of life in France, so I'm not moving to
Germany full time.

I'm originally English but have not lived in England since I graduated
from university. Since then I spent 9 months in Finland, 2+ years in
Japan, nearly 7 in California and now 3 here. As one of my colleagues
put it I am "try-lingual" in that I try to speak many languages. I've
travelled a lot (40+ countries so far and about 2/3rds of the US
states). My wife is Japanese, an excellent cook, artist and budding
photographer. She'll be exhibiting in Kobe next June so feel free to
come see :)

A large part of my social life has been defined by the Hash House
Harriers - a group defined as a "Drinking Club with a Running
Problem". The hash has resulted in many friendships, many hangovers,
being run over by a mercedes, my nickname and my marriage. It also
keeps me fit and lets me see the parts of places normal tourists often avoid.

I work with computers. I started off as a programmer, discovered I was
good at troubleshooting and so became a bugfixer ratehr than creative
programmer. Then I became a network designer/troubleshooter. Now I'm
CIO of a small biochemical company which means I do everything for
them including writing programs in Perl.

DD