Nuclear Power

Today I found some links on different blogs to this book, where Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist, journalist and former nuke protester "changed her mind" and is now supporting nuclear power over the alternatives.

History taught us that it takes either courage or a large sum of money to admit you were wrong. In this case "altering" your view would infact be a shortcut to being a succesfull novelist, as it's proven yet again that there is no such thing as "bad" publicity. I for one am ordering this because it re-interested me in the subject.

I'm not saying that she "sold out", but the fact that we can make more energy from nuclear resources, than we can make from burning *all* the fossil fuels on earth does imply great economic forces that have everything to gain by enhancing the public opinion towards nuclear energy. As always, you have to *think* before forming your *own* opinion. So I'll give you a bit of my view to start thinking about:

A small 7 billion people on this planet are in need of increasing amounts of power, and there is 2 ways to provide it to them:

1) Burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels (oil/gas/coal) to satisfy the massive demand, and in the process take a quick route to global disaster, probably irreversibly altering this planet's ability to support most of the current species of life, thanks to the massive release of carbon dioxide (and methane).

2) Take the nuclear route and embrace the fact that we have an alternative solution, a realistic and cost effective way of generating more power than we could ever need while halving our greenhouse gas emmissions! A nice side-effect is the political issue where we minimise our economic dependancies on oilsupplying countries in the middle east.

You don't have to be a atomsplitting genius to figure out I'm pro-nuclear.

I think, therefor I *know* !

Whenever I was asked a question that I didn't know the answer to, I'd respond:"My friend Google knows!" And Google never let me down, it was always there, it always responded (swiftly I might add) with pages full of search results! I think I was one of the early adopters, switching from Yahoo and Alta Vista to Google as my favorite search engine.

As the years went by, the internet grew and so did the instruments for obtaining information. Wikipedia started, search engines evolved. Mankind even evolved into the digital era, where electronic information is at least equal to vintage sources like the televised news or the daily journal. I've been calling paper "pre-ascii" since the late 90's I think.

I valued the internet over vintage sources since it's almost impossible to censor and accessible to many. It only takes 1 guard with a cellphone to witness the execution of Sadam Hussein. Imagen a similar video of the JFK-shooter posted on youtube. The evolving and maturing the internet felt like a big step forward for mankind! It would make world a better place!

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), July 2004

Now let me take you to the cold and factual "present"

Google is not my friend anymore. It's primary objective changed from providing me with the information I requested while funding itself with adds to providing me with the best possible adds wrapped in some decent search results, while optimising the profiling of myself and selling any information gathered... no make that harvested. (read the google privacy policy and get my point)

The idealistic selfproclaimed "sum of all human knowledge", a.k.a. wikipedia, has a secret innercrowd of editors who use wikipedia as their E-peen and decide how the sum of all human knowledge should be interpreted and what is or isn't relevant to add to this sum.

If power and money corrupt the objectivity and validity of information more than ever, than there is NO reason to believe anything you read on the world wide web. Thus information is even less reliable than it was before. And there is no turning back, the digital era is here to stay and even dominates vintage sources of information

On the other hand, there is no use in going back to the pre-ascii age, since information was just as subjective. There have always been innercircles, determining the "best" version of history for humanity or for themselves. The Council of Nicea already decided for you what books the holy bible should and shouldn't include somewhere around 400 A.D.

So here's some wise words ;-) Although in present time you have more information available to you than you ever had before you don't KNOW anything unless you actually gave it some thought yourself, and the general opinion equals the absolute truth no matter what you know.

Sue! Sue! Sue!`(and think later)

In my humble opinion it's pretty normal to take a dispute about some matter to court. The courts are there to provide aid in cases where 2 or more parties are in dispute and can't find a solution by themselves. Offcourse I'm talking civil law here, not a lawsuit to convict OJ or something similar.

I noticed a blog on slashdot.org which really got me thinking:

"Apple is taking legal action against adult retail chain Anne Summers over adverts for a new iGasm sex toy.

The device consists of a pair of headphones and a "vibrating unit" which, once plugged into any media player, vibrates in time to the tune. The adverts use the same silhouette figures as Apple, but with a white cord leading inside the figure's underwear."

The first thing that came to my mind was: WHY?!

I'm not talking about the added value, or the smart marketing of this new toy. I'm wondering why Apple would take legal action? What has Apple to gain?

The iGasm is added value to an iPod. I don't own an iPod, but knowing that there is a wide variety of add-on devices that can bring more pleasure to using an iPod would push me towards iPod instead of a model offered by the competition. (being male the usability off this particular devices is limited at best, but I'm thinking in general) The iGasm helps (maybe a little bit) in setting the standard for MP3-devices to Apple iPod. Not a reason to take legal action.

Maybe Apple is worried about it's good name and thinks this could be negative publicity. Well... if you have enough braincells to go out and buy an iPod, download MP3's and upload them to your iPod, chances are you won't actually think that Apple is expanding it's market to the adult industrie!

Offcourse it could be just a very cheap publicity stunt by Apple, abusing the introduction of the iGasm. This would be pretty hypocrit though... If I thought that was the case I'd think twice about picking Apple as my brand in anything. Which means that if Apple's motivation to start taking legal action aren't cheap publicity for them, they certainly are free publicity for the iGasm! Untill Apple decided to take legal action, and offcourse someone blogged this, I had never heard of "Anne Summers" and/or a device called the iGasm. And chances are I would never have...

If Apple had brought out a public newsmessage and sent a copy to the adult store saying:

"We at Apple giggled and had a good laugh about the introduction of the iGasm, and although we are pleased to see that our products are inspiring in many ways, we will have to ask the adult store to stop selling this product. Or at least alter the way they present it, because this might get people to think that Apple has expended it's market into other industries than we actually have."

It would have had *at least* the same impact, would have had all options open to take legal actions, and would have much better been beneficial to Apple.

"Anne Summers is taking the request less than seriously. "Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put a smile back on their faces," company head Jacqueline Gold told the News of the World."

The people at Anne Summers seem to know how to play this game! By only putting out a single sentence they:
- were provocative enough to reach a big audience
- were subtle enough not to provide more ammo for Apple's autornies
- probably altered the public opinion in favor of themselves
- get even more attention to there product

This product will most likely go out of stock 5 times before Apple actually puts a stop to it.

A fresh view on the ethics of piracy

I ran across some interesting stories lately where different people express their view on the added value of piracy. Check "The Marketfunction of piracy" as an example.

It's safe to say that giving something away for free is the most effective way to market a new or even existing product. So in my opinion we can safely conclude that from a marketing point of view, piracy is the illegal equivalent of handing out free samples to everyone who has a slight interest in your product.

Writer Cory Doctorow, who makes his work publicly available in electronic formats, has a solid point of view: As long as the gain outweighs the losses, it's good business to make my work publicly available. Offcourse it's the distinction from all other writers who do not do this yet, that got his name in the news and his work spread around. But the fact remains that he now earns more due to the fact that uncontrolled copies are widely available.

There are bands and artists that made their fame and fortune through filesharing and p2p-networks. And there are even more of them trying to make their way to stardom through these methods of uncontrolled copying.

I will take Microsoft as an example now, but remember this thesis can be applied to a lot more products and companies.

If Microsoft had made an operating system which could not be pirated, would they still have had such a dominant share in the market and would there revenues be better or worse than they are now? An unpiratable version would have "forced" a good share of users towards alternatives, which would have had a much better chance to gain popularity and maybe become a new standard.

Would it be fair to say that by deliberately not making a solution that cannot be copied/abused/pirated, the company has gained more or secured more than it has lost or could have lost? That in turn would mean that a user of pirated software added to the company value, for example through using the Microsoft standard for webbrowsing, the Microsoft standard for documents, etc. etc.

Taking this into consideration, I still think software should be bought if the author chooses to make it closed source, but I can't really be very harsh when judging piracy. Offcourse a pirated copy is illegal, but how morally wrong is it?

If I put 1000 cars in front of my house with the key's easily obtainable and the doors open. They run on regular gas, but even better on my own what is known as "mrbeekfuel", which is offcourse widely available at my own gasstations. I'd consider myself a hypocrit for judging the carthieves while they fill there tanks with my very profitable "mrbeekfuel", and slowly setting my fuel a new standard.

The Essence of "Thinking outside of the box"

What's up? - A direction away from the center of gravity of a celestial object.

I gave this a bit of thought, and figured this quote from bash.org would be an appropriate way to start my blog. I've heard people asking each other this question for years, and the person who thought this up, actually took the time to find a compleet and accurate answer to the literal interpretation of that question.

This required some thinking "outside of the box".

In the time to come, I will post some of my thoughts on different subjects on this blog. "Thinking outside the box" will be me, trying to look at problems and subjects from a new perspective without preconceptions through the process of lateral thought.

It's only fair to warn YOU (hello there dear reader) I've never been much of writer, and although I've been surfing the internet long enough to remember browsing on 16-bit operating systems, I never started a blog before.

So bare with me... it's gonna be a bumpy but refreshing ride!