Selling your information

[Oberon]

An interesting read, one that Skybird might like, but I can't see the people of the internet paying for information, or if such a circumstance does arrive then a large black market in information will rapidly grow in the manner of Pirate bay.
This is something that is not going to go away, although I suspect that many young people will consider it to be less of an issue as each generation is born into an era where information is spread around as easy as clicking a mouse button, as opposed to those who are from the generation where you had to spend money to buy books, or borrow the information from a library.
Of course, equally there are the ISPs, the gateways to the information, the toll-booths of the internet perhaps, but does the cost of internet access correlate to the amount of information received? What is the value of information?

Anyway, enough of my blurb, here's the article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22658152

[Respenus]

Another interesting read with a similar message was published recently by Foreign Policy's editor in chief. While it concerns law-making in a world of ever changing technology, outpacing our ability to learn more about it before regulating it, it also includes a warning on how things are and will be developing for the worse if nothing is done soon.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...umb_laws_cyber

As for 'big data' in general, here's more of an optimistic/positive overview and here's one questioning all the supposed benefits of it.

[Skybird]

In fully libertarian tradition I see the guarantee of private property as the indispensable fundament of freedom, any freedom order worth the name. That includes copyrights for non-material intellectual and imaginative content: from a book one has written over an album one has recorded to an idea one has got a patent on and has turned into a business. To give up the right to own and and use to your will property and the fruits of your own endavour, to me are nothing but the axe cutting the tree. States today already have penetrated deep into the private sphere of people and have their hands deep inside people's pockets and strangle us with thousands and tens of thousands of regulations, growing month by month. Has that increased our freedom? No, exactly the opposite is the case.

Depending more and more on machines also has cultural as well as psychological consequences. Machine and computer interfaces forces us to tailor AND LIMIT our approach to problems we want to solve with by using these. That is not to be mistaken with comfortable interfaces. Its alike with doiung a statistics-based scientific evolution: you need to reduce the thing you are interested in quite dramatically in order to have your examination produce data of that nature and structure needed for qualifying them to undergo statistical processing. You may do it in a well-sounding language, with a nicely designed pencil, and in an atmospheric office - but the reduction still is there. And for the most you tend to not be aware of it anymore. You start to take the reduced reality you are dealing with with the real, unlimited reality. In other words: your models takes over the way you see the world. And it is a simplified, reduced world view only.

I wonder since many years now whether man really has the needed cognitive level of evolutionary development needed to hand these technical options we have created reasonably and without damaging himself more than gaining positives from it. The positive results of our science cannot be rejected, from modern medicine to fertilizers and so on - but there is also another side of the bill listing our losses, I think. And they weigh as heavy, maybe.

We need a Butler's jihad.

[STEED]

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