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I don’t have much time to experiment with this right now, but I’ve been wondering if it would work:

Step 1: Obtain some 3D scanning software (like David 3D) and a laser/camera
Step 2: Scan an inanimate object (like parts of a Roomba)
Step 3: Use a 3D printer like the RepRap to spit out a replacement or build entire fleets of Roomba’s

I’m sure eventually someone or some organization will put together a bits-to-bytes streamlined hardware/software approach to this. But what about today?

Is it possible to import a 3D scanned object into software that a 3D printer can recognize and reassemble?

IP lawsuits on the way?

Kidding, but… people have been sending me happy May Day text messages all day. Pretty weird, huh? And we get a day off at work. Heroic communism?!?

Or not.

- The Frock-Communist Coated Communist, the life of Engels (Times Online)
- Rural Riddle: Do Jobs Follow Broadband Access? (Washington Post)
- Interview with monetary economist George Selgin (Richmond Fed)
- Pushing Plastic Solar Cells (Technology Review)
- Intellectual property in China (The Economist). ruh roh, this could be unfortunate (see also: Against Intellectual Property [pdf])
- The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket (Volokh)
- DIY chip fab (RepRap). Be sure to check out the flickr images too.
- Steam Hardware Survey: April 2009 (Valve). Note the low uptake in quad-core processors (14.6%) as well as Vista (28.28%). That is surprising considering how many gamers bill themselves as bleeding edge.

Tudou is by far the most popular web-based video site here in China, boasting similar traffic numbers as Youtube.

One of the big reasons is you can watch full episodes of TV, movies and songs. For instance, many of my students enjoy “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and the guys can watch all of the 007 movies… por gratis.

And this is no fly by night operation, as heavy hitters such as VW and Dell actively advertise on the site. In addition, Google is trying to get people to switch from Baidu, here is one ad I just saw:

This is part of Google’s campaign in which they allow China-based users to listen to high-quality songs for free. On the right side the Red tab is for Chinese music, Yellow is Western, Green is Japanese, and Blue is for Korean.

With any luck, Chinese firms (including P2P groups) will be able to withstand lawsuits that their Swedish and American counterparts have succumbed to.

Btw: a quick piece of trivia, “tudou” is Chinese for potato… a word I quickly learned when ordering food. Love the spud.

See also: Stealing Music: Is It Wrong Or Isn’t It?
A Book that Changes Everything (Jeff Tucker’s live blog review)
Against Intellectual Property (pdf)
Oh the irony

Juxtaposition of the day, courtesy of CNN:

See also: Stealing Music: Is It Wrong Or Isn’t It?
A Book that Changes Everything
Against Intellectual Property (pdf)

Always thought provoking. Probably talks about every geeky concept ever… at Google no less:

Here is the online text to his new book “Future Imperfect.”

Earlier today Peter Klein pointed to a very interesting article regarding elite universities from the WSJ aptly titled, “Any College Will Do.” In it, the author notes that only 10% of the chief executives of Fortune 500 firms attended an Ivy League school. In fact, most of the executives simply matriculated to seemingly generic schools (e.g. large State-supported schools).

This piece is germane as The Economist recently noted that because of the advent of relatively cheap and easy-to-use electronic media (e.g., e-reserves, bulletin boards, listserves, electronic digests, etc.), the top universities no longer have a resource-based advantage over their less-affluent counterparts with respect to conducting cutting-edge research.

It also ties into learncasting (educational podcasting) and of particular interest: the case of Robert Schrag, a communications professor at North Carolina State University. At the beginning of the Fall semester he began to sell his lectures in podcast form for $2.50 — to both student and public denizen alike. However, he was recently required to take them down until the University had come up with a formal policy to handle the intellectual property issues surrounding the class material.

This is a perfect example that illustrates my thesis regarding the transformation of the traditional, residential-based college in the “Web 2.0″ era.

The administration and its stake holders are at cross-roads. On one hand they could adopt this technology – as numerous Universities have – and use it as an additional revenue source. Ignoring the much maligned DRM issues, in the long-run this could enable Universities to reach the distance-based education customer who is short on commuting time and/or lacks the ability to pay for lodging each semester. They could even develop these lectures into a full-blown video series, a low-tech product that everyone is familiar with and capable of reaching mass-markets.

On the other hand, if the administration did decide to go this route, they would tacitly be admitting that the competitive advantage of attending classes via meatspace is at a dead-end. This is not to say that there are no advantages of living at a residential college: building a social rolodex can still enable students to gain advantages over their isolated, virtual peers — in theory at least (one could argue that because of chat rooms, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and a slew of other social web services, a self-motivated individual could become just as proficient as their college-bound peers).

See also: 1 2 3

Update: according to The Chronicle, the professor’s podcasts are back online.  However, they are password-protected and thus are currently only accessible to students (and now for free).

You may have heard the term Darknet mentioned throughout your days on the internets.

In a nutshell, it is simply a private virtual network in which its members only share with people they trust. If you have used IRC, there are private, password protected channels that only friends can join. That is a very low-tech, yet effective proto-darknet.

In the era of lawsuits from the RIAA et al, a new generation of wares is being developed to increase a users anonymity and security. This includes the use of file encryption, proxies to continuously route and reroute traffic, and masking schemes designed to prevent the public from peering into their metaverse.

Enter AllPeers. Sean Lynch, a friend of mine, pointed me to it today and after testing it out, it seems like a usable proof-of-concept peer-to-peer darknet.

It is currently in beta mode and it shows, you can only share 300 files at a time and there are no subdirectories.

It plugs into your browser through a Firefox extension (other browsers will be supported later on). And because you only share files with people you know, there is really no way the RIAA can trace this kind of thing unless the developers install a backdoor into the software… or if the RIAA tries to trick you into sharing files with them.

It also claims to use SSL encryption and BitTorrent, however seeing as you are only sharing with a few friends, there shouldn’t be much of a need to distribute and balance the load. Also, based upon a Wikipedia entry, it seems that it is built on a bug that might be “fixed” and in doing so, would terminate its ability to act as a P2P application.

Note: this is different than a “BrightNet” like Offsystem.

Guess what online music service is looking to offer unrestricted (i.e. non-DRM) music? Surprisingly, it is Yahoo.

Anyone else remember that little program called Napster? What about Allofmp3.com?

In rememberance of this historical occassion, I would like to reference the latest factoids compiled by the EFF:

1. The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 music fans for file sharing, yet file sharing continues to rapidly increase both online and offline. When will you stop suing music fans?
2. The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?
3. The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing. Recently, an RIAA representative reportedly suggested that “students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford [P2P lawsuit] settlements.” Do you stand by this advice? Is this really good advice for our children’s futures?

Mark Cuban has suggested that if/when the RIAA does sue someone, the maximum amount they should be allowed to sue for is a $5/month fine, as it is the “prevailing market” rate for unlimited “legal” downloads.

I personally think the whole IP system is bupkis.

Via Martin Geddes.

I always assumed that Vaudeville was a mixture of off-the-cuff sketch comedy and pretentious Soap Opera.

And then I am reminded of Abbott and Costello’s infamous skit: Who’s On First.

Along with Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Fred Astaire, and Judy Garland, Abbot and Costello were among the few acts that made a successful transition from Vaudeville to radio and television.

Because these disruptive technologies forced enterprises to change business models in order to survive, I wonder if there were many lawsuits from organizations similar to the RIAA and MPAA during that time.

See also, The DMCA, The Most Creative Solution To Preventing Creativity and Without IP who will invent? How about everybody.

Who owns your body? If you do not personally own your body, who does?

Does the State? Does a supernatural entity? Do your parents still own you?

Despite fighting wars in the name of “freeing slaves,” humanity is by-in-large still enslaving one another through acts of fiat legislation. One such instance involves that of organs. Do you own your organs? If you do not, then who does? Regardless as to how you answered, the unfortunate reality of the situation is that the State claims ownership of yourself and your bodily parts — organs included.

Furthermore, this mental ownership exercise can continue to the microscopic level, including that of genes. Who owns your genes?

While these questions of ownership run around in your mind a germane tangent that meanders into this topic is that of genealogy. The National Geographic Society, along with IBM, has put together an endeavor called the Genographic Project. Basically they are trying to get individuals throughout the entire globe to self-administer a test – swabbing your inner-mouth cheeks – whom in return then send these samples back to National Geographic labs for further analysis.

Unsurprisingly, the project is not without its critics who believe the native indigenious people around the world are being exploited by, in their own words, racist scientists. The word “biopiracy” appears several times in their press release condemning the project, which is seen as “eugenics” in nature – suggesting that the results may be used to prove one group is inferior to another. They also suggest that firms may try to commercialize and “patent” whatever oddities or new things they discover.

This same claim of “biopiracy” was recently leveled upon Google whom is helping J. Craig Venter of the Human Genome Project fame. Several years ago Wired magazine published a detailed writeup of Venter’s latest project, which is to sail the seven seas in search of microbes and fish whose DNA he can analyze and hopefully “patent.” Google is reportedly allowing Venter to use their computer resources to analyze and catalogue each genome.

The issues that are being skirted around by all parties involved on both sides of these projects is the issue of property, what is it and who can own it? This is where “intelletual property” (e.g. patents) and the State do a great job of perverting contract law. If I own my body, then I own everything in it, including my DNA. One firm in San Francisco believes that I can copyright my DNA, ultimately suing for copyright infringement. The market for such as service, is being touted as a way for celebrities and VIPs to protect their image and “likeness.”

Sooner or later, the State and proponents of IP will have to face the music in terms of what “intellectual property” is and is not. While this is being sorted out, one thing is for certain: it is not physical.

If it is not physical, then is not property in the classical definition of the word. So assuming that IP concepts such as copyright and patent are heretofore invalid, then how can this quagmire surrounding native peoples and microscopic fish genomes be sorted out?

Another question that should be asked is, can things in nature, things that nature invented, be patentable? While it may be the case that a scientist discovered “gravity” can someone “patent” it? You may laugh at this example, however this is precisely what has happened to the field of biology, as firms and universities have been granted patents for what nature actually built. Techdirt recently highlighted one such instance,

Metabolite claims a patent on the discovery of a correlation between raised levels of the chemical homocystein, and a defficiency in two B-vitamins. This is a naturally occuring phenomenon, but the company demands a royalty any time a B-vitamin defficiency is tested using this knowledge. As the court itself has put it, the case revolves around whether a company can “claim a monopoly over a basic scientific relationship used in medical treatment”. If so, we’ve noticed that legs tend to kick when a mallet hits the knee; it seems like a good way to test a patient’s reflexes. Our application is in the mail.

When the dust clears, in terms of free-market libertarianism, the issue of “biopiracy” should be non-existent. Neither Google nor Venter own anything more than the fish they caught. Similarly the National Geographic Society does not own the people or their genomes it has received samples of. Nor can these firms “patent” something they do not own, such as the various genomes at stake.

By granting a monopoly on research and development in these areas of discipline to these firms, the State and proponents of IP are simply hindering economic development and retarding innovation. Innovation such as the ability to discover genetic predispositions years in advance – deadly defects that may go unnoticed until it is too late to fix and repair.

And if you do not own your body, let alone genome, then who owns your voice?