Copyright Monopoly – Johnny Olsson: I’ve followed and participated in the copyright debate for years, and I’ve come to realize there are certain patterns that repeat themselves. You can roughly say there are three lines of defense: One that appeals to emotions, one that appeals to pragmatism, and one that appeals to a sense of responsibility. I’m going to take this opportunity and try to break them down.
In both Iceland and Hungary now, the governments stood tall and “kicked out” the “banksters”. We will see other countries follow. Unfortunately, the banksters still control the US government, so this country may be one of the last ones to become independent of the banking cartel. I know that there are strong forces at work attempting to end the rule of the Fed, and restore the US government to the republic that it once was, but it is turning out to be a slow and difficult process.
It will succeed; the question is not if, but when. Hopefully we are talking months, not years.
(Editor’s note: A paper presented to the International Forum on Malaysia 50 Years On: Expectation Vs. Reality,1 BORNEO GRAND BALLROOM; Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia on 5th October, 2013]
Murray Hunter
Introduction
Malaysian society has been preoccupied with political discussion since the electoral ’tsunami’ of GE-12 back in March 2008. The result of the last election (GE-13) left many feeling that the system, or distortion of the system, cheated them out of the chance of changing the political landscape of the country. However political aspirations, expectations, and debate has been primarily limited to the formal federal and state political arenas.
The Federal and State legislatures are not the only levels of government in Malaysia. Both the Penang and Selangor State governments have been toying with the idea of direct local government elections. However these initiatives have been blocked by both the federal Government and Election Commission (EC) on various grounds.
There is yet another level within the system government that has been ignored and almost forgotten about within the public domain, although it has been a ’battle front’ in the fight for ’winning voter hearts and minds’ within Pakatan held states since 2008. These are the Village Security and Development Committees (JKKK), which exist in all Malaysian states except Perlis.
Swarm Management: As much as people would like to disrupt the world by going their own way entirely, you cannot change an existing system without also becoming a little part of it in order to change it from the inside. Everybody can change something, but nobody can change everything. Your swarm’s focus probably isn’t on changing the way oldmedia works, so this is how you deal with them.
Kyra Maya Phillips, the co-author of the upcoming book “The Misfit Economy,” encourages readers to think like pirates, gangsters and hackers when approaching business. While researching and writing the book, Phillips spent a couple of years delving into the darker side of innovation; setting out to uncover the often nefarious operating methods of society’s outcasts. Phillips and her co-author Alexa Clay wanted to know what underground and black market cultures might be able to teach those of us who stick to the more conventionally straight and narrow.
The result of their “Misfit Economy” quest has taken shape in the form of three very different characters, whose particular attributes might be synthesized to create new perspectives in business. At The Conference in Malmö, Sweden, last month, Phillips introduced attendees to the pirate, the hacker and the gangster as archetypes whose individual codes of conduct have made valuable contributions to the process of innovation.
The Martin Fleischman Memorial Project (MFMP) is a modular, open source LENR/Cold Fusion commercialization project designed to rival the aspirations of proprietary LENR/CF corporations such as Leonardo (Rossi), Brillouine, and Defkalion. Lead researcher Tyler van Houwelingen calls the MFMP the “Linux of LENR”.
Their Mission Statement:To make the biggest impact and overcome the hurdle of institutional bias against this type of phenomenon, we aim to make the whole process, from the apparatus to the procedures, to the whole plan of the project, as transparent and understandable as possible. We want this project to be for the people by the people as much as possible. We will be open about the plan, the designs, the process, the data and the results.The other part of the plan is you. We will pursue crowd-sourced funding, crowd-sourced engineering, and hope for near real time scientific review. Are we 100% sure the New Fire is real and reproducible? No. But given there is significant evidence that it is, isn't the upside for the world worth attempting to validate it?
Filtering—or the lack thereof—presented the single biggest challenge when we tested MicroMappers last week in response to the Pakistan Earthquake. As my colleague Clay Shirky notes, the challenge with “Big Data” is not information overload but rather filter failure. We need to make damned sure that we don’t experience filter failure again in future deployments. To ensure this, I’ve decided to launch a stand-alone and fully interoperable platform called MicroFilters. My colleague Andrew Ilyas will lead the technical development of the platform with support from Ji Lucas. Our plan is to launch the first version of MicroFilters before the CrisisMappers conference (ICCM 2013) in November.
A web-based solution, MicroFilters will allow users to upload their own Twitter data for automatic filtering purposes. Users will have the option of uploading this data using three different formats: text, CSV and JSON. Once uploaded, users can elect to perform one or more automatic filtering tasks from this menu of options:
