Rayne does TED

[marsden_online]

Last week the Least I Could Do webcomic (N always SFW) ran a series of strips which had one of their main characters (Rayne) doing a TED talk. (TED.com - Ideas worth sharing)

It starts with a premise that "the world we live in is driven by a sense of fear and a sense of entitlement"

5 strips, starting here
Follow-up blog post by the author of the strip

~~~
As a tangent, last week in the NZHerald Anthony* Doesburg asked Faster, wider bandwidth - but what will we do with it? He didn't answer the question directly, but I'd like to suggest that even getting the majority of the country on the same sort of speed I'm accustomed to (4Mb/s) would open up access to things like the TED talks. (OK, also need much cheaper data rates because y'know, streaming video glug glug glug).

*the fact that no-one at the herald has bothered correcting the blatant typo in his name in the headline irritates me.

Gosh, do I have a sense of entitlement about fast, cheap broadband? Probably, but I believe the benefits are so great that it need to be designated a public good* like electricity and in earlier years the telephone.

*I know I'm not using the proper economic definition here, but I can't recall the correct term. Nationalised good?

Comments

[meataxe.livejournal.com]

I disagree, most companies DO care but there's very little they can do about it.

The copyright laws are there to protect the investment put into a product before it becomes commercially available. Without it, there's not a lot of incentive for that investment and innovation to occur AND commercial prices need to be higher to cover the opportunity lost of those potential customers who might have paid for it but instead decide to take it for nothing.

[adrexia.livejournal.com]

That last part is a fallacy. Usually the people who decide to make their own are the people who would never have bought it. Not everyone who has a use for something is a potential customer.

This is a commercial issue, not a moral issue. There is nothing morally wrong with self-sufficiency.

Personally, I think patents should have an expiration date of about 15 years. Anything more than that stunts innovation.