"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town."

"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

"Nonetheless, the success of JMLR does provide a clue that the cost of running a premier journal might be far less than publishers imply, if they were to rethink the process substantially — maybe not $10 per article, but surely far less than the $5,000 average revenue per article that scholarly publishers currently receive. This expectation is borne out by the several non-profit and commercial open-access journal publishers that are able to operate in the black with publication fees a fraction of that average."

"The industry is inhibited by several obstacles that executives themselves candidly acknowledge. One involves the difficulty of changing the behavior of people trained in the ways of a mature and monopolistic industry. Still another is the unavoidable fact that the part of the newspaper industry that is growing, digital, continues to provide only a small part of the revenue, while the part that is shrinking, print, provides most of the money-a paradox that is difficult to navigate and hard to resist. One pervasive feeling is that 15 years into the digital transition, executives still feel they are in the early stages of figuring out a how to proceed."

"My readers ask me that question more than just about any other. So here's my question back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download).

I've just published a 30,000 word manifesto, totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation. It took a lot to get it to you, and I'm encouraging you to take a few minutes to check it out. After you read it, perhaps you'll write one of your own."

"Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”"

"To attempt to draw a political map of the reconstituted North America is to confront these contradictions head-on. What counts as a nation? How to capture the overlapping spheres of responsibility? What about the areas all but abandoned to wilderness? Does membership confer citizen-hood?"

"The News of the World staff reportedly greeted Ms. Brooks' statements in their newsroom with hoots and derision. One would expect no less. Britain now apparently faces a period without coverage of vicars with knickers before Murdoch launches the Sun on Sunday to cover the screws of the world.

Murdoch has been brought to bay by one great British newspaper, the Guardian. It devoted two years to the task. It did what frightened politicians and cowed opinion leaders dared not do -- it defied the power and the money of the Alien. Ironic, that Murdoch seems about to lose what would have been his crown jewel because he was never able to restrain the low tastes and trashy standards that wounded my newspaper in one of his drive-by shootings."

"The German one sounds a lot more ominous, though, because it's all "Nazis chaining women to their stoves," instead of the Dutch piece, which was more "look at those lucky ladies, zipping around on their bicycles on their way to flower arranging class.""

"Below, the book is available for PDF download in a variety of languages. Check back soon, as more languages are on the way."

The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera’s 3-D photos on a laptop earlier today, and was blown away.)

"The idea is to create an open-access online philosophy journal (and then journals in other disciplines), with the peer review process crowd sourced. As many reviewers as want to read a paper can vote to accept/reject, with brief comments. Accepted papers will immediately be published online.

From what I can see, the open access will be free for authors. They are now recruiting reviewers.

Interesting idea."

"One of them, Karim Hijazi, used his Infragard password for his personal gmail, and the gmail of the company he owns. "Unveillance", a whitehat company that specializes in data breaches and botnets, was compromised because of Karim's incompetence. We stole all of his personal emails and his company emails. We also briefly took over, among other things, their servers and their botnet control panel.

After doing so, we contacted Karim and told him what we did. After a few discussions, he offered to pay us to eliminate his competitors through illegal hacking means in return for our silence. Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to give us money and inside info in order to destroy his opponents in the whitehat world. We even discussed plans for him to give us insider botnet information."

"The new PLoS Search API gives developers access to rich data that can be flexibly integrated into applications for the web, desktop or mobile devices. It allows PLoS content to be queried using any of the fields in the PLoS Search engine. By opening the PLoS content and data through this API, we hope to encourage the development of tools that will improve the way PLoS users discover and interact with our (and their) content."

"Read carefully, and you can immediately see what's going on here.  Basically, the digital world has made sharing educational documents more efficient, such that reproducing printed copies of material is no longer a necessity.  And academic publishers are freaking out because a revenue stream is threatened.  This, of course, is where fair use should come into play as a protection for those seeking to share and enhance knowledge for our nation's young people, something which virtually everyone would agree is important.  But not so-called academic publishers.  For them, it's that revenue stream that's important, and the progress of the nation's knowledge be damned. "

"What should be amazingingly clear is that books--trade publishers, self-publishers, ebooks, etc--are doing fine, but scholarly books are bankrupt. The old style academic blogs that many of my colleagues used to keep may be fading but blogging is shifting and proliferating. Writing is alive and growing. I imagine it has little concern for the humans that hitch a ride to it. Stop trying to save the monograph and instead try to answer the question that the monograph was originally developed to answer: how can I communicate with the world?"

"…"Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him. They attacked him as 'a running dog for the government' and 'the enemy of netizens.'"

According to the Associated Press, who spoke to local police, Chinese authorities are searching for the egg-loving shoe-thrower. Fang's office, however, denies the attack happened at all."

"When I privately asked them why they had used R*-trees, while it was easy to check experimentally that they did not help, the answer was “it was the only way to get our paper in a major conference”. So my work has been made more complicated for the sole purpose of impressing the reviewers: “look, I know about R*-trees too!”"

"Political FORCE offers a robust data analysis platform for campaigns, and is offering full access to its file of 182 million registered voters as a free service to all NationBuilder subscribers, in compliance with applicable laws limiting access to authorized entities for political purposes. Starting immediately, candidates can sign up for NationBuilder with full, free access to their voter data at NationBuilder.com."

Those corporations that successfully implement these techniques will be torn apart as their traditional hierarchies and silos dissolve into right-sized communities; those that fail will be nibbled to death by community-based "competitors" who ignore those hierarchies. Either way, it's full of win.

After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

But the general agenda here is worth comment: like most of the other industry groups, BSA is very invested in proving that majorities of people approve of IP rights.  This feeds into a larger industry belief that, in the long term, the problem of piracy is one of cultivating respect for IP and, relatedly, demonstrating popular support for stronger enforcement measures.   Our view is that this notional ‘respect for IP’ is irrelevant in the face of (1) basic disconnects between high prices for media goods and low incomes, especially in developing countries, and (2) the ongoing rapid decline in the cost of digital technologies (that permit widespread copying, that need software, that facilitate music listening, and so on).

"No wonder they shut down the internet. It's more powerful than guns. Smart mobs with online capabilities are defeating status quo organization ruled by hierarchy and unfamiliar with coordinating technologies. These mobile smart mobs can be built on the fly in a matter of hours or days and they will continue to get smarter. Reaction rates are getting much, much faster."

"… Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity."

"Netflix has been a business partner to the movie and television studios through licensing deals, but increasingly it is seen as a partner with its hands far deeper in the pockets of the media companies than anyone thought. Through its success, the company has positioned itself at the center of the media universe — at the nexus of technology and content — and is now finding it a place increasingly under attack."

"Research programmes, even ones as successful as Newton's, eventually degenerate. A programme "is degenerating if ... (1) it does not lead to stunning new predictions (at least occasionally...); (2) if all its bold predictions are falsified; and (3) if it does not grow in steps which follow the spirit of the programme." (ibid, p. 106) (This last seems to mean avoiding the ad hoc additions mentioned above. But I think there's also a less pin-down-able sense. It would not be in the spirit of an agile method to extend itself by adding more and more examples of written process documentation.)"

"…I’ve invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. My goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek, aiming to capture his range of styles (colloquial conversation on the street, philosophical debate, rhetorical displays, poetic analysis, and so on) in a contemporary idiom. The nature of the project requires a wide readership for its success, so I hope you will pass this along."

"The economy has started creating jobs—albeit at a slow rate—in recent months. But those with new master's degrees often aren't at the front of the line to get them, say experts. One reason: They frequently compete for jobs that require those advanced degrees with older workers who have the advantage of more work experience."

"I see a future computing world which is networked and platform independent. And that means gatekeepers of bandwidth and content will be the winners in that world. Over the short-term Microsoft and the telcos will play their part in protecting their legacy franchises in these arenas. But ultimately, people just want to get their content when- and where- ever they can. And that means the organizations which dominate the multi-device interfaces of the future will take on a leading role in technology, perhaps the leading role.…"

"Maybe depressed isn’t quite the right word. “Cognizant of absurdity” captures it better (I’m sure the Germans have a good word for this). What I’m seeing on the Javitz Center floor plan is an effort by publishers to remove themselves once and for all from the people they perceive to be their customers–librarians and booksellers. And the people who actually buy the products…you know, actual readers? Of course, they continue to be completely shut out. Not invited to the party."

"They attempt to co-opt nascent OER initiatives by directing them toward commercial enterprise, arguing that resources must allow commercial licensing, and directing production toward enterprises and initiatives that must receive see funding and draw a return on that investment through the conversion of OERs into commodities.

And they foster a sense of incapacity in opinion and the media to suggest to students themselves that they are incapable of independent action without the comforting support of corporations and institutions, that they are simply not capable of learning form themselves. From the first utterance that "OCW is not an MIT education" the suggestion has been that education must need be a high-priced endeavour, available, really, only to those willing to pay the price."

"…But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."

"Instead, this effort is about competition. It is to build new social and economic systems that can compete with the current political and economic monopolies and if successful, force them to compete in order to stay relevant. It's about building something new from the ground up, a start-up culture of independence and sanity, that attracts better participants and delivers more results than any other alternative.

The start-ups these entrepreneurs are building work within the current system and against it, growing in power with each cycle of innovation. They compete against each other to provide the best possible results, yet connect on a level that allows them to accelerate faster than if they were alone. "

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training--a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

WORTH TATTOOING: “The adult human being simply knows too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.”

"It is an experiment born from the common production of shared knowledges, and resistance to exploitation inside and outside the universities. Moreover it is a step toward the goal of building up autonomous institutions. The journal has two sections: "occupations" and "anomalies", which aim respectively to analyze transformations of the university and conflicts in knowledge production. The edu-factory journal has an editorial board, comprising critical scholars, students, and activists from all around the world, and it is open to free contributions. Finally, by experimenting with forms of collective reading and review, it aims to question the traditional peer review processes, and to open new spaces of thinking, learning and struggle within and against the hierarchies of the global knowledge and university market."

"Principle #6: Working for other people (full-time or in some other capacity) often divorces our experience of work from the fruit of our work. Living off your own projects, created of your own accord, is an entirely different kind of existence. And it is AWESOME."

"I am sorry but I do not participate in this dead ritual of anonymous ‘peer review’. This dishonest procedure brings out the worst in people. By now we all know that it does not improve quality but merely (re)produces mediocre standards and language. IMHO this format is out of sync with the open access aspects of today’s publishing tools and the debate-focused tools such as blogs, lists and forums, in particular when an article like this aims to contribute to the emerging research on online video. Criticism in the Internet context is a lively entity, not to be dealt with in such a grumpy backroom manner."

"Personally, I’d love to see some of these problems above fixed and I’d love to be able to really nod my head in agreement when I read that Yahoo is serious about a more “open and relevant web.” That would be much better than me shaking my head in disagreement and writing letters."

"Scrum set the flywheel in motion and caused the rest of the IT process life cycle to respond. ITIL’s processes still form the solid core of service support and we’ve improved the processes’ capability to handle intense work velocity. The organization adapted by developing unprecedented speed in the ability to deliver production fixes and to solve root cause problems with agility."

"Parsons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The program is based in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, which encompasses innovative programs that apply design thinking to study the intersection of cities, services and ecosystems."

"Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours."

"We’ll learn so much about how much it really costs to bring high speeds to communities. We won’t have to rely on the carriers’ doomsaying about these expenses (”Hundreds of billions of dollars!”)"

"If the Internet has a motif, it is rock 'n' roll's Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock 'n' roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.

The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project."

"How can we control quality on the Internet?"

"Each of the presenters gave a nice, thoughtful, 5-minute talk about their views on the issue, but what everyone was waiting for was the fireworks when open discussion began. For a while the discussion was tame enough, with everyone exchanging platitudes about how they view the issues. But then things got a LOT more heated...."

"Until and unless Western executives begin to aggressively challenge these assumptions and awaken to the potential of institutional innovation, they will remain vulnerable to attack. They must begin to recognize that the most promising forms of innovation emerging in developing economies are not at the level of individual products or services but rather at a much deeper level – novel approaches to scalable peer learning shaped by institutional innovation."

"The system in which they are relevant is not called the market economy, not the financial system or capitalism, but democracy. Democracy is about a community shaping its future together. And the media, in all its forms – print, broadcast and digital – is one of its most important creative forces. The proof of the relevance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 and continues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire history of German democracy."

Been here, met these people, and laughed in their faces: "This is just like when teachers ask their students to model or code parts of a system that will be used in the teachers own research eventually. this is really bad for academia in general. Never again propose such things, please." I'm looking at you, winning bidder on the Erdös auction

"An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise."

"Winston Churchill once said, "Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together- what do you get? The sum of all fears." If you collect a group of commentators, just like any Sunday morning news show, you will hear the sum of their fears, all the reasons why not."

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

What I'll be doing in November

"The Agile Skills Project is a non-commercial resource that will establish a common baseline of the skills an Agile developer needs to have, including a shared vocabulary and understanding of fundamental practices. The Project intends to:

establish an evolving picture of the skills needed on Agile projects;
encourage life-long continuous learning;
establish a network of trust to help members find like-minded folk, and to identify new mentors in the community."

""Никто не осмелится назвать это тайным заговором" immediately became a hit on the Russian blogosphere. Both repressive governments and greedy, cowardly businesses are finding it ever harder to suppress information"

"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

"Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred. Where this category of users has become absolutely central to everything we do. So when we talk about newspapers, we have to think about the users who communicate with a commercial organization like TPM, the users who basically get together and make their own new party presses, like DailyKos or Townhall, like the users who make up YouTube, like the users who make up Wikipedia. Suddenly you have radically decentralized practical capacity to act. And what do people do? They act."

'I asked her whether the city government would support large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is irrelevant,” she answered. “Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution of humankind do not start with governments. They start right here in our living rooms and kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for.”'

This is how a newspaper should work. And note: no business was closed and re-opened to escape legal obligations to pay employee benefits to create this story.