Optional paying is giving, so let me give right.

Digital artwork is easily pirated, paying is optional.

Optional payment is a gift, a reciprocation, a thanks, honouring its creator.

We give to reciprocate, so why give most of the price to intermediaries? 

I have come to realise that the above are all unavoidable statements, in order of descending certainty.

In a traditional thing-based society, we can use physical force to make sure people pay for what they take. This is necessary both because taking means the original owner no longer has it (copying is manufacture), and because resource is limited. But in a digital world, I can give you a song and keep it as well. It is also near-impossible to enforce (literatally, force) laws controlling sharing and copying of digital media.

The response of traditional media and the status-quo has been to attempt to enforce thing-world control of digital artefacts; creating rights management software to prevent you distributing your music by making it more like a physical thing; traceable, hard to copy, sending the police to find you if you disobey. Understandable, but a losing battle. Computers change often making any such systems obsolete quickly (Why can't I play my albums any more? I paid for them!) and widely evaded, because imperfections are quickly exploited and the exploits easily distributed. The internet is made to distribute data quickly and freely, so all control systems are fighting the basic nature of the system.

The result has been a two-layer system: On one it is easy and free to get digital artefacts without paying for them; until iTunes and Spotify, it was actually easier to pirate music than to go and buy it. Cheaper, faster and better = revolution. On the other it is easy and reasonably cheap in moderate quantities to buy or license music. Most people, particularly the teenagers who will drive the future culture, therefore have a choice whether or not to pay.

It is not quite as simple as clicking Pay or Free download; for the older generations (twenties and up) there is a significant social distinction between pirating and buying, and the legal difference means Spotify is limited to legally licensed music. So the two layers are quite separate, meaning each group tends to employ only one or other system in the main; some groups download everything, some buy everything. The difference is predictably related to disposable income as well as socially-enforced stigma.

It is, however, already a reasonably free choice for most people whether to accept a minor amount of guilt and download something to try it out, or to stump up for it. The barrier is far lower on renting sites like Spotify, but it still exists. I can opt to look for an illegal electronic version of a new book or buy the hardback; buying the artefact is seen as a way of supporting the author, in the same way that ticket and merchandise sales are seen as a way of supporting a team.

So people are already used to making a morally-guided choice based on personal expression about where their money goes; we have been taught by consumerism "You are what you buy". If you doubt that for a moment, consider whether any advert for a premium brand focuses on the product or the viewer's self-perception. You pay a bit more because you're worth it.

If I buy a hardback book, I know that most of the money is going to the printer, the publisher, the retailer. But some of it will go to the author (once past their advance). We accept this bargain; this is the author-sanctioned mechanism for both thanking the author and obtaining a physical artefact of self-identity; "Thank you Jo Rowling, my copy of The Half-Blood Prince will take pride of place on my bookshelf. I am a Potter fan."

But if I pay for a copy of an ebook, there is no printer, no retailer. If I already like the author, they have no need for a publicist in this transaction. It's me thanking the author and their editors. Why should iTunes or Amazon take a cut?

The (small) cut should go only to whoever creates the system permitting me to thank the artist at my discretion, which somehow lets me build my identity by the same token.

This kind of giving is expressive, social and efficient by minimising middle-men. Just what the internet is for.

The Yearning Weight Of Achieving

Compressed, but not crushed, I bear it.

Looking up from my trudging steps, I warily peer about
seeking a path.

I am in the dried ridges of a tractor's track,
compounded by many traversals.
Ahead, the paths diverge in the caked mud;
to the left, to the right, straight ahead.
All lead to more fields, more grass, more brush,
and I cannot see beyond the hill they lead over.

But I am not weary, I am hunted. Life chases me,
and decisions elude me.
I make foolish mistakes, and am humbled daily
by my own failures to live up to anything at all.

Sometimes, I am reduced to a crawl, to dragging forward
my tiredness.

What lies over the hill, past the ridge?
Is the landscape there as empty as this one,
the earth as bare?

Why am I so hunted by opportunity,
so lost amongst the available options?
And why so terrified of the choices I can make,
the decisions that make themselves
in indecision.

A generalist, I could do anything,
when ability was my only guide.
Now, chance has dealt me some distance
in a few directions.
I am walking several paths, pulled one way by day
and another in the shades of dusk and dawn.

Still the creative push inside me demands more
but is that merely the remnant of a constructed identity
based on what seemed to make me different?
Am I not merely the upside of my disability?

Most people are happy, it seems, not to change the world.
Somehow they can live with affecting only themselves,
their family.
But that sounds like arrogance on my part,
that merely being locally worthy is beneath me.

But it is not driven by elitism but by hope,
that against the futility I can improve the world.
Still that goal is worthless if nothing comes of it. Less than
that in fact, it is harmful if the demand paralyses me
and slows my progress in any direction.

So, a hierarchy, then. First I will provide for my family,
but in this time, in this society, that is straightforward.
Second, then, to use whatever I have, whatever I am
to assist those who do not benefit from my opportunities.

This feels like fear and like guilt. Who am I,
that I should be educated and supported and loved
having done nothing?
And why should others be downtrodden and thwarted
having done everything?

I benefit from the actions of the good - but is it the actions
of the many, or of few? Is the bulk of our progress
down an aggregation of many small goods, or of standing
on the shoulders of giants?
I am no giant,
and nor do I really believe a giant is of his own making.
I am one,
but I am possessed of some theories.

If I am right, I am poised to do much good.
If I am wrong, I can only make myself a fool,
another little man with little ideas
that nevertheless grip his little mind
with their dull charm.

Beneath the roaring skies of all these philosophies
tugged by many winds
pressed by the weight of expectation
(or so I feel it)
sometimes giving up life itself attracts.

Yet it is always followed by the simple thought of humility:
I am able, so I must be able to do some small good.

--

I am shortsighted, and I imagine simple things.
At time, I can screen out distracting detail
and see a truth beyond it.
Othertimes, I can screen out important detail
and see a folly of my own construction.
Convinced by a weasel in the clouds.

Hunted, stressed and fearful,
not useful things to be.
I also feel somehow stupid for feeling them,
get real, princess with a pea.

Confession, then, before absolution.
I start things but do not finish them;
journeying from fever to distraction,
from single-mindedness to
a kind of depressed defeat
at the smallest tangle.

This in particular perplexes me,
why I am so easily defeated by the difficult
by the confusing. Am I so wed to simplicity?
I read that it is fear, but that seems far off -
what could I be afeared of?
Of failure?
Of the unknown?

It feels more like boredom, but it has the ring of helplessness.
A futility with a kind of sadness; clearly I expect to be competent
and find myself wanting. I am no magician,
no sage.
Am I afraid to discover I am not even that clever?

Others are so methodical; they see through the maze,
through the morass. They seem fearless, confident
that the answer can be found,
that the answer can be found soon,
that they will not be swallowed by the task,
left struggling in the belly of the beast.

I suspect this is why I enjoy creativity;
it rewards whatever you do, and often the urge
is enough to produce.
In that sense it is easy, or at least easy for me.
It does not have a pass or fail,
judgement is not passed in the act even if it is later.

To create anew is to conquer the blank,
to defeat the nothingness.
True, that is sometimes a worthy opponent,
but it is nowhere near as hard as
the unyeilding mass of thorns,
the forest of tentacles.
At least to me.

Perhaps this is a skill I can learn,
a role I can become,
an identity I may grow to fulfill,
something not an accident of birth,
but an achievement, a triumph.

I may not get there,
but I will try,
and I will begin,
now.

Share taxis in the smartphone age

Millions of people drive from A to B every morning and then back again. Between these, their car sits empty and unused. Most people drive alone, an entire car to transport one person. This is the kind of waste that the internet and smartphones are destined to deal with - dynamic, information driven problems with real monetary effect.

So I gleefully imagined a system somewhere between a bus and a taxi; a driver picking up passengers and dropping them off, but not at predefined times and places, rather as driven by demand. No more empty buses trundling to their next vacant rendez-vous.

But most things I think up either exist or have been imagined before. So I looked for it. And in developing countries, where the costs of transport are proportionately higher and time is proportionately cheaper, there are Sharing Taxis. Or Collective Taxis. Often these will wait to fill up and then set off; the trade-off is a significantly longer expected wait for the reduction in price. I had heard of this mode of transport before, where the bus drivers will wait for a morning until they are full.

Some services act more like unscheduled buses - they are official services which travel between specific places. London apparently has some of this, although the page on the Transport for London website doesn't specify any actual information. There are also a number of community bus schemes and dial-a-ride services, largely targeted at those not covered by normal public transport; the elderly, the rurally dispersed, the disabled.

I think the time has come for a more dynamic system. One where a professional can request a service from their smartphone, indicating whether they have additional baggage or passengers, and the taxi companies can bid to take the custom. They give a price and an arrival time, and are penalised for every minute later they are. The users of the service rate their trip; largely this is a feedback mechanism for when the taxi is late, unhelpful etc.

It could begin with manual bidding and selection of services - opting for sooner and more expensive if preferred. I suspect the ultimate aim would be for taxi companies to automatically bid for each journey using live pricing systems taking in traffic data, etc. The user could subscribe to a monthly contract much like a mobile phone, which gave them a certain amount of usage. Thus the price matching would happen between the demand and supply sides.

Ultimately a market in such things, particularly one including forwards or future contracts, would allow a taxi company to buy a minibus and finance the purchase by selling a number of journeys in the near future; demand-led investment. It would also create a market for forward-looking traffic data.

The basic mechanism, however, is just that a user can request a taxi and permit sharing part or all of the journey, with a central system to connect the supply and demand sides of this; the drivers and passengers. With that in place, many daily journeys would be much cheaper, which itself enables a huge swing towards on-demand transport services (taxis).

To bring it back to the current demand-responsive transport, they could hook into such a system as providers if they already run services, or as customers if they are consumers - residents associations, charities etc. It should make both sides of that equation more economically viable as there would be both more available supply and more available demand. How? By reducing inefficiency.

Stab vest ideas

Electrified

A layer of conductive fibres beneath a few layers of insulating material, acting as a switch - if the fibres in one direction (say, horizontal) are broken, the circuit switches on, and the unbroken fibres in the opposite direction (vertical) conduct the charge from the capacitor through the knife and the attacker, down to the ground.

Active Material

A series of pockets interwound with tensile strands, such that when a fibre is severed, it contracts at high speed and somehow deflects the path of the blade to the side. With enough layers like this it could create a shear force that deflects the attack and pushes the victim sideward in the same action. The key is the energy stored in the material, which is not there in a standard multilayer plus metal plate vest.

Variable speed buffer playback idea for delay-free high quality audio conferencing

Reading an article on VoIP audio quality, it seems that one can increase the quality of VoIP audio by increasing buffering, essentially giving the connection more time to deliver the packets correctly. The tradeoff is that it adds a delay, somewhat like talking to someone in a far-flung country, or via satellite. In the article, the author contends that delays are tolerable but low audio quality is not.

People converse in a fairly simple fashion: A talks, then B talks, then A talks. We do not all talk at once, so synchronisation of speed between A and B is not important.

The idea, then, is that we work out when B starts talking, and send a burst of packets with low latency. The receiver then starts playing these immediately (no delay) but plays the buffer at a lower speed (pitch-adjusted) until it has built up a reasonable buffer. Thus there is a delay between the B talking and A hearing it (ignoring the transmission time), but not an audible silent delay between B starting to talk and A hearing it.

It is the usual game of introducing complexity to handle to competing goals. Is the complexity worth it?

Make your happiness work for you

Endorphins, serotonin and their friends are the happy chemicals in your brain. When you have tasty food, they are released. When you get attention that you desire, they are released. They are mechanism by which a naughty child learns to be naughty to get attention - she gets a happy rush when she gets attention, and if her parents give her that attention when she's naughty and ignore her when she's good, she has been trained to be naughty. Why?

Because we are all addicted to happy chemicals

It's the only good addiction, and it's the root of all those psychological addictions (not the chemical ones). You have somehow learnt that there is only one thing that will give you that happy rush right now, so that's what you indulge in, even if you know at the back of your mind that it's not right.

Hedonism

So are we all hedonists, just doing whatever makes us happy? To a degree, yes. Many hedonists are just doing whatever makes them happy. There is a kind of logic that if you are doing something that makes you happy but which is damaging your future (like spending all your money), then you will be storing up unhappiness, so you try to fit your hedonism into a longer-term picture.

But you can train yourself (or be trained) to seek some future goal which will make you happy, or to change your values so that your happiness depends on something else. So I can pin my happiness on academic achievement, so I work to do what it takes to get that goal, in order to get that happiness waiting for me. This is what hedonism lacks - the willingness to change what makes you happy. For hedonists, happiness is the goal itself.

For me, that's a problem. Chasing happiness itself means that if I find a way to get a steady drip of happy chemicals then I should take it. So if I was offered a lifetime on a cocaine and morphine drip, then I should take it. Happy ever after, right? No, I want more from life than just some happy chemicals. I want to make a difference, I want my genes and memes to survive, to live on, to improve the human race and its future. Maybe that's some successful memes showing through, enslaving me to their goals, maybe it's just common sense not to want to end up as a body in a hospital bed with an ecstatic smile.

Choosing a new goal

So an ecstatic smile is not a good enough goal. What is? I'm a husband and father, so I want the best for my family. I want to support them, house them and feed them. I also want to inspire my children to live joyful lives. I want to make a difference to the world, not just live a quiet life in the corner.

So if those are my goals, I need to pin my happiness on them, so that I learn to derive happiness from the steps I make in that direction, in pursuit of those goals.

I could do with losing a bit of weight, being a bit more focused at work and at home, having more of a plan. So I'm defining some medium term goals, setting aside reasonable amounts of time for them, planning to succeed. I lose focus when I can't see my efforts leading to some worthwhile goal, so I'm weaving these goals into a longer term achievement.

Change

Often people fail with long term goals because circumstances change. Aiming for that job or that dream may make sense now, but not work out when you get there. So the goals have to be largely about how you are improving yourself and your circumstances, not about achieving specific targets that may move. Fortune favours the prepared, so aim to be prepared.

Jobs, companies, houses, all pass in the night. Getting attached to any single one is easy, because of all the improvements to your life you imagine will result. But the key is to notice what they mean to you, what you yearn for. Sometimes it's recognition, self-worth, belonging; if you realise it's one of these then they are better (and more cheaply) worked on by addressing the real issue rather than seeking the answer in purchases or jobs, which won't actually resolve an underlying emotional problem.

Coda

So this is me working out what I actually want to achieve, what will make me a happy man in the long run, and trying to avoid the pitfalls of vainly seeking fulfilment in jobs and purchases, taking an active approach to getting to where I want to be.

Looper live jam

The basic problem with live jamming on the net is latency. You play along, hearing yourself in perfect timing, while the people receiving your music hear a delay, because of the time taken for the data to get from your computer to theirs. Unfortunately the delay is twice as big as that lag, because their notes have to get from their PC to yours, and then your notes have to get all the way back again. Not conducive to good jamming.

How about using loops, then? Someone plays a 4-bar section, which everyone receives, along with the timing data. They begin jamming with a delay, and their sections are sent back again to the other player(s). Instead of attempting to play person B's notes with no lag, person A's software plays them at the beginning of the second loop. So the players can now play with no lag, and have their notes heard with no lag.

The price is that the leader has to change to the next pattern on their own.

Since people are receiving each other's notes with this fixed delay, I would expect a layering to happen - B harmonises to A, C to B, and so on. Each gets a different actual rendering of the music, since they are all synchronous with their own notes but offset with respect to everyone else's.

Would be a great experiment...