Exporting copyright: Inside the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership
Meet “ACTA plus,” and the people trying to stop it.
via Exporting copyright: Inside the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership | Ars Technica.
Category Archives: World affairs
Interesting – Civilian informal communication in the Libyan civil war
People Power 2.0
How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.
MAY/JUNE 2012BY JOHN POLLOCK
The force of laughter: Graffiti on a wall in Tripoli represents the Libyan leader, Colonel Qadaffi, as a fleeing rat. Credit: John Pollock
China is stealing software? Yes, but it’s not as useful as it sounds.
Inside the Chinese Boom in Corporate Espionage is the headline in a recent article in Businessweek (now named Bloomberg Businessweek). It reports an 007ish tale of software theft by a Chinese windmill company. American Superconductor Corp (AMSC) had a profitable partnership selling control systems to Chinese wind turbine company Sinovel. As for all expensive industrial equipment, software plays a vital role in wind turbines. So when stolen/edited copies of their software turned up in Sinovel machines, and Sinoval stopped accepting equipment from AMSC, it was a calamity for AMSC.
The Business Week article implicitly blames high tech “Chinese espionage,” which has been getting a lot of coverage in the US press recently. But as a very interesting blog post by Steve Dickinson points out, the actual theft was very traditional. An insider (one of the software’s chief developers) was bribed to turn over the source code. Nothing high-tech about the theft, unless you still call email “high tech.” And according to Dickinson, the theft was predictable, and was facilitated by lack of low-tech protection measures by AMSC.
Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics
Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics.
Good summary of the battle between LightSquared, and GPS users/makers. On the political/interest group side, it shows that established industries have ability to protect their regulatory interests, even against a well-financed lobbying campaign. (LightSquared) Perhaps it also shows that the FCC is also able to make technically appropriate decisions, at least when the two sides are approximately balanced in political power.
Classic definition of recession no longer useful
We now need 2 separate concepts of recession. 
“Total GDP recession” is the conventional one. “Actual people recession” is the one that matters to almost everyone. The rationale is that all of the “growth” after the 2001 recession, and this one as well, is in the upper few percent of the income distribution, or in corporate profits. Median income, for example, has been approximately stagnant or declining for a decade. Much more important to “the 99%” is what happens to their share of national income – which is much slower to recover. (If you adjust for increasing health care costs, then median income is doing even worse – but that’s another story.)
(This interpretation is my own. I got the graph link from Andy McAfee
Fiscal FactCheck: payroll tax = income tax!
Astonishing fact is buried here: Payroll taxes (social security, medicare etc) have almost caught up with federal income tax. Payroll taxes are 40% of federal receipts in 2010, while personal income tax was 41.5%.
Payroll taxes tend to be quite regressive — they start at about 10% of ALL payroll income for your first dollar, and fall to about 2.3% above $100,000 or so. So this means we have a bizarre combination of progressive and regressive tax rates. And it’s more evidence of how high health care costs are dragging everything down (in this case, via Medicare costs).
By the way, many “conservatives” have suggested a “flat income tax” e.g. 17%. As far as I can tell, this does NOT include payroll taxes. So it would not be flat at all – it would be highly regressive. Another factor is that richer people earn more from capital gains and other sources not counted as income. I’d love to see someone lay out the numbers carefully on this. Some information is in this report by Congressional Research Services.
Short-attention spans; does anyone still THINK?
I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.
One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:
Act II: Bottom up: Information for people8.35 amFlash of genius: How to translate the internetLuis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University8.45 amFlash of genius: Turning information into knowledgeAmit Singhal, Engineer, Google8.55 amData exhaustThe intersection of search and big dataLuc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram AlphaArkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex LabsModerator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist9.15 amFlash of genius: The information entrepreneurScott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
The audience is finding plenty to Twitter about. But 10 minutes is only time for a sales pitch; it is not enough time to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an idea.
On the plus side, this means there’s still a need for academics who can sit in an empty room and work on one thing for an hour. Of course to accomplish that I have to discipline myself not to check email…..
A friend who was there told me he “never follows Twitter.” It turns out that he means he keeps a Twitter feed in the corner of his screen 100% of the time; he just does not explicitly devote time to reading it! Talk about distractions…
