Darwin Magazine: Who Should Own What? Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. The reality now is that every new innovation has got to not only fund a development cycle and fund a marketing cycle, it's got to fund a legal cycle during which you go into court and demonstrate that your new technology should be allowed in the innovative system. [Tomalak's Realm]

11:29:59 PM  #   your two cents []

Open Sourcers Say Grid Is Good. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and IBM honchos don't always see eye to eye, but at LinuxWorld they agree that grid computing needs to be part of their future. [Wired News]

11:28:43 PM  #   your two cents []

The history of David Weinberger's face.  [Scripting News]
11:27:46 PM  #   your two cents []

Appropriately enough?. Internet news: Companies should offer web services that match consumers' needs rather than their own, says Victor Keegan. [Guardian Unlimited]
11:22:13 PM  #   your two cents []

3Geeeeee...

So Vodafone has asked the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation (ODTR) for a delay until September to pay its euro44.4 million for its class B 3G license. Hmmm. Competitor O2, with the other class B license, and Hutchison Whampoa, with the class A license, have apparently forked over their cash. I wouldn't be surprised if they all attempt to get changes to the terms of their agreements -- given that Orange is asking for such changes in Sweden, and several other European operators have said they'll delay rollout (Vodafone among them, in the UK). At least the cost of our licenses didn't head off into the realm of the utterly ridiculous.

Thus Ireland is in the curious spot it often gains by default -- looking prescient for having done nothing. Such was the case in the dot-com era, when VCs here invested in almost no companies that smacked of the New Economy. So we had few to fail. Then, we delayed longer than everyone else in Europe in awarding our 3G licenses (no thanks to the Dept of Finance and its, erm, expert telecoms advisors, whose advice sounded like it was straight out of late 1999 over-enthusiasm -- charge as much as you can! -- and brought the Dept into a long-running standoff with the ODTR, who wanted to charge little and get the damn network moving. 

It's good that we delayed long enough to watch the auction fiasco rebound with such frightening brutality on the companies that bought the UK and German licenses at the height of boom telecoms fever. So our license charges are much lower. Nonetheless we are way, way behind. Given the delays  happening in other European countries now, we have the opportunity to roll out a network faster and actually lead for a change... And Hutchison Whampoa, with the big A license, are the company to watch. They also bid for the Global Crossing network and could thus suddenly be the most important player on the island. They also aren't strapped down with legacy (GSM or GPRS) networks -- they're all 3G. Let the build-out begin...

11:51:31 AM  #   your two cents []

Girls Go!

Fascinating to see in today's Irish Times that girls are outperforming boys even in such traditional 'boy' subjects as physics and chemistry and received more honours in mathematics as well. There are many arguments about why girls are doing better and I'm avoiding that particular landmine-filled discussion here for the moment [ducks] -- but it is quite a contrast to the situation when I was in school. I can only recall a single girl who excelled at maths -- eg, was 'as good as the boys' -- and indeed, she was better than all the boys, the star maths student. I wonder what she is up to now. Certainly, all this has something to do with the way hard sciences were taught to girls in previous decades. I know that we weren't expected to do well in these areas, and very definitely we weren't encouraged to do well in them. Girls themselves viewed the subjects as absolutely uncool and you risked damaging your social cred by being interested in such areas (even in these computer-saturated days, my non-techie friends sometimes think I'm pretty weird for finding science and computing so compelling...). Also, maths teaching was often quite poor -- presented by teachers, mostly female and therefore also of generations who would not necessarily have felt comfortable with maths, who taughts maths alongside social studies and art and all the other stuff we did in school. It was definitely not a passion for them. We tend to find subjects interesting because of the way they are presented to us, not despite the way in which they are taught. Thus do many of us go and and find careers in areas we once thought would never, ever interest us! A good teacher does wonders...

Glad to see the gals are doing well but best of all would be to see a leap in the number of all students who do well in these subjects or at the very least decide to follow them out of their own personal interest.

11:39:16 AM  #   your two cents []