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Patent and Piracy

"Well did you bring enough to share?"

I read about you. At least, I could have read about you. After reading your bio on Facebook, I wandered to Wikipedia to read about everything you said you were interested in. I checked your friends, I looked at their pictures, viewed their links, read their resumes, met their family too. I didn’t pay for that information, you told me what to look up. I didn’t pay for the encyclopedia I used either. Some massive community joined in league and decided to create a repository of all things. I’m not even paying for the software I’m using. It’s “people’s software” and if everyone made it, who owns it? No one. Who owns the information? The list of friends? Everyone does. Mass collaboration changes everything. Humanity loves to connect with itself and technology gives it power to extend beyond any barrier that has kept it unconnected in the past. This changes how we act, who we’re friends with, everything changes. Since technology has allowed us to interact on such a broad scale, so many people have joined the conversation—and project.Wikinomics, a book about mass collaboration, describes in fantastic detail the benefits and potential harms of having a conversation this big.

Generations today are MUCH different than the generations in the near past. We grew up with video games and computers—they are a way of life. We are the Net-Generation. We have made the world flat. Many of us don’t know how we got here. It’s just always been how things are. Children are more likely to recognize the red-angry-bird than Jesus. This is because everyone has helped to make information available. The Apache server, SQL data base, Linux, PHP (sometimes referred to as “LAMP”) dropped so many barriers that kept people from join conversations and projects and set a new precedence for collaboration. And the result? Google, Facebook, AOL, eBay, MySpace, LinkedIn, pretty much, everything that connects people to people or people to information, is a result of humanity wanting to connect and share. This new lifestyle has positives and negatives—security sacrificed for connectivity, everyone is now more transparent and exposed than ever—the progress that came; however far outweighed the bad.

"Well did you bring enough to share?"

I read about you. At least, I could have read about you. After reading your bio on Facebook, I wandered to Wikipedia to read about everything you said you were interested in. I checked your friends, I looked at their pictures, viewed their links, read their resumes, met their family too. I didn’t pay for that information, you told me what to look up. I didn’t pay for the encyclopedia I used either. Some massive community joined in league and decided to create a repository of all things. I’m not even paying for the software I’m using. It’s “people’s software” and if everyone made it, who owns it? No one. Who owns the information? The list of friends? Everyone does. Mass collaboration changes everything. Humanity loves to connect with itself and technology gives it power to extend beyond any barrier that has kept it unconnected in the past. This changes how we act, who we’re friends with, everything changes. Since technology has allowed us to interact on such a broad scale, so many people have joined the conversation—and project.Wikinomics, a book about mass collaboration, describes in fantastic detail the benefits and potential harms of having a conversation this big.

Generations today are MUCH different than the generations in the near past. We grew up with video games and computers—they are a way of life. We are the Net-Generation. We have made the world flat. Many of us don’t know how we got here. It’s just always been how things are. Children are more likely to recognize the red-angry-bird than Jesus. This is because everyone has helped to make information available. The Apache server, SQL data base, Linux, PHP (sometimes referred to as “LAMP”) dropped so many barriers that kept people from join conversations and projects and set a new precedence for collaboration. And the result? Google, Facebook, AOL, eBay, MySpace, LinkedIn, pretty much, everything that connects people to people or people to information, is a result of humanity wanting to connect and share. This new lifestyle has positives and negatives—security sacrificed for connectivity, everyone is now more transparent and exposed than ever—the progress that came; however far outweighed the bad.

Follow up on last post

If you like short stories and agree with my last post, here is an awesome piece by Ray Bradbury, an American writer, written in 1952. READ IT!

Let me stop you right there...you spent MONEY on that?

People spend real money to buy fake money! Not only that, but they waste time that they could have spent making money, to use whatever they bought with the fake money! As much as I love technology, I hate it when technology tries to get the best of me. Game theory is a great example. There are a lot of aspects to it, but essentially, game theory is used to get users to feel a need to either remain somewhere or do something. Prime examples are second life, Farmville, mafia wars, the Sims, etc. Zynga is the biggest company out there that creates apps for Facebook, and it blows my mind that the majority of its revenue comes from an online economy. As in people buy gold (or whatever) within a game using real money. I just find it so sad (borderline pathetic) when people turn their potential off and start investing in unproductivity. To reference and earlier post, I feel that unproductivity is the greatest threat that the internet has to offer. If we are not willing to take a step back and see technology (particularly the internet) for what it really is, as a tool to help us accomplish, then we are doomed as a society. As the wise man tells us: “do not spend money on that which is of no worth.”