A Future Danger

Criminal profilers are drawing up a list of the 100 most dangerous murderers and rapists of the future even before they commit such crimes, The Times has learnt.

The highly controversial database will be used by police and other agencies to target suspects before they can carry out a serious offence. Pilot projects to identify the highest-risk future offenders have been operating in five London boroughs for the past two months.

At the moment:

Experts from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Prevention Unit are creating psychological profiles of likely offenders to predict patterns of criminal behaviour.

But, as everyone knows, psychology is something of a hit-and-miss business, and not really reliable enough or scalable enough for rolling out across a nation. What we really need is something more precise, something more scientific - like a genetic pre-disposition encoded in the genome.

Some people claim to have found certain genomic characteristics of those who commit major crimes; the obvious step would be to screen people's genomes automatically for those genetic elements before they committed the crime they were hardwired to perpetrate, sparing society many problems and expenses.

Since the proof would be scientific, and not merely based on the fallible judgment of a psychologist, the guilty would have no basis to appeal against the sentences imposed upon them. Indeed, even more money could be saved by simply refusing to allow what would be unnecessary appeals in such cases, where the proof of future guilt could be found in nearly every cell of their body.

How fortunate, then, that the UK has the largest DNA database in the world....

More Fab Open Source Fabbers

I wrote about an open source fabber recently, and now here's another one, the RepRap:

The difference with RepRap, which is the size of a fridge, is that the ideas behind it are not owned by anyone. Dr Bowyer's vision is a machine that can be made, adapted and improved by its users. "I did not want an individual, company or country to make money from this," he said.

If Dr Bowyer's vision is realised there could be profound implications for the global economy. Instead of large companies manufacturing large numbers of consumer goods and distributing them to shops, consumers would buy or share designs on the internet, manufacturing items on their own replication machines.

If you want the code, Matthew Aslett has dug it out, as well as the RepRap's home page. One of the coolest aspects of the RepRap is that it can make its own parts.

Think about it.

Interview with Second Life's Philip Rosedale, Part I

As I mentioned, last week I had an article in the Guardian about Second Life and the concerns over the CopyBot program. This was largely based on an extensive interview with Linden Lab's founder and CEO, Philip Linden, conducted on 6 November, 2006, together with email follow-ups.

One of the frustrating things with articles for hard-copy titles like the Guardian is that space is always at a premium. This means that there were only a limited number of quotations that I could use from the interview, and that a huge amount of interesting material remained unprinted. Happily, blogs can function as an adjunct to traditional publishing, offering all kinds of supplementary material.

So I'm making the full text of the interview available here. I've tidied this up only minimally, since I was keen to preserve the incredible energy and enthusiasm that Rosedale transmits in his speech. This first part concentrates on the roots of Second Life; the second and final part, looks at its current state and possible futures.

Glyn Moody: When did you first start thinking about creating an imaginary world? What was the attraction of the idea?

Philip Rosedale: I'd say there are two things about me that probably made me so passionate about what we are doing. The first was that since I was a little kid I was interested in physics, and also in how things worked. I was doing doing electronics when I was really young, and started programming computers as soon as I had enough money to get one.

I think the second thing about me that made me have the particular bent on Second Life that I did was that I was very creative. Sometimes you get that, you get somebody who's fairly artistic and creative but they get into science and technology. I'm definitely one of those people. I am left-handed, and I'd say cognitively I'm really left-handed.

Glyn Moody: You've mentioned books as being very important to you as a child, and the fact that they represented an early form of virtual reality: to what extent is your work with virtual worlds a kind of authorship or creativity for you?

Philip Rosedale: I think there's an important differentiation. I think there are people who played a lot in Dungeons and Dragons, and read a lot of books, and immersed themselves in the fantasy world that can be constructed through the simulator that is your brain, by reading books. And I think there are lot of people who went in the direction of saying, Well, can't I create a book in a computer that is my own vision for a particular kind of world? And then you, the user, can wander around in my vision. I think that there are a lot of people in history who have done a lot of really interesting projects that fall into that category. But it's really important to note that Second Life isn't one of those.

The difference is that Second Life is not under my control, and it was never my fantasy to be the Dungeon Master of Second Life. I was very, very passionate from the earliest times about the idea of creating a place that re-implemented the laws of physics in a simulation. But once that was done, I like everyone else would be free to play however I wanted with those Lego blocks, where the Lego blocks were atoms in this new world.

I point that out because there is a real upper limit to what one creative person can do when they are the only artistic input into the structure of a world. And I think there is also an experiential upper limit: World of Warcraft or Everquest can only be so interesting so long as all the content is basically laid out by a first Michelangelo who draws out the world. Second Life just was never that way - it was just dirt at the beginning. I never tried to create anything beautiful, I didn't want to make a book.

Glyn Moody: So in a way you had the same intuition as the free software people about collaboration being a much richer avenue for creation?

Philip Rosedale: I was excited by the idea of being able to build things and show them to people. And I wanted those other people to build things and show them to me. The ability to communicate with great sophistication and to externalise one's thoughts – about my intentions, my thoughts, my designs – those were the two foundational things that I was trying to enable in building the environment.

Glyn Moody: With 20-20 hindsight your career looks as if at every step you've done things in order to achieve your final goal; to what extent did you consciously say: I'll do this and then this in order finally to build my virtual world?

Philip Rosedale: When Snow Crash came out in 1992, my wife bought me the book for my birthday and said: Oh, you're going to like this, another one of these crazy people like you thinking about this simulation stuff. So by then amongst my friends I was well known as the guy into this digital world idea.

I used to do a presentation on the mythology of the Metaverse. Movies often present you with a picture of a future that's mature, and then they try to suggest in some either really detailed or minimal way how things got to be that way. And I always laughed about how the mythology of the Metaverse was always wrong.

People would always say, Well, it all started because businesses wanted to visualise data in 3D and time went by and now we have people walking their dogs and dancing – that's baloney. It never happens that way. New mediums are always used by creative people for play first. And they're not used by big businesses to better imagine their data. The same thing was true of instant messaging, email, television, radio, the Web itself – all of those mediums were used initially for entertainment and just for people who wanted to goof off. They were not trusted; and then as time went by they became trusted, and then people began using them for business because they were in the vernacular by that point.

In the mid-'90s I was already telling my friends this Metaverse thing isn't going to work until it's really sexy and exciting, and it's not going to be with the computers that are around. All these companies and projects are going to fail, and that's going to suck. Because we're all dreaming this dream, and all these people are getting companies funded to go after it, and I want to do that too, but I know that it isn't going to work.

I said to people: video compression over the Internet – this is 1995 - however, will work, and that's a powerful communication enabler. And besides that, I wanted to get some experience writing programs for Windows. So I said, OK, I'll write a program that does multipoint video conferencing – a solvable algorithmic problem if you're just trying to do 2-way 28.8 modem communication of video streams.

So I built this product called FreeVue. Rob Glaser saw it, asked me to go to RealNetworks. I didn't want to move to Seattle; the big final decision that I made to go to RealNetworks was that – and I told my friends this – I'm going to go to Real Networks because I'm going to get a great engineering management experience because this project is going to be a big project – this virtual world thing.

In mid-1999 networking got fast enough, and Nvidia released the big 3D card, the GeForce2, and I said, Man, I'm out of here, I've got to start this, it can be done. But the "it can be done" was always contingent on the idea that it had to be playful and fun and chaotic and just crazy for the kind of vision for the Metaverse to take off.

Glyn Moody: I believe that originally Linden Lab was going to be a hardware company: could say a little about those early days – what you were trying to do, and what happened to change your mind?

Philip Rosedale: In '93 I was trying to imagine a way to put multiple cheap monitors around one's head. For $300 you could buy pretty good monitors. If you wanted to create an immersive display where you could really have the world all around you, you could put three of these things right next to each other – or more, but three was good – but you had to hold your head 15 inches from the screen to be immersed in the image. All these companies were trying to build head-mounted displays so you could look around, but that was dumb because you couldn't build LCDs that had anyway near the quality of a monitor, even for $30,000.

I was sitting one night just totally obsessed with this problem, and thought: God, you know, what would be really cool would be if I didn't have to move my head - I can't move 40 lb monitors around: what if I didn't actually move my head at all? What if I couldn't move my head at all, but when I tried to look to the left and right, there was something that could feel me trying to look to the left and the right, and would move my view around. And I realised this was a powerful idea.

Fast forward six years. I had some money, and I had time. I said: I am going to get a shop and a welder and a milling machine and I'm going to build this thing, because it's going to cost 50 grand to prototype. So this is '99 to late 2000 - and we actually got it working: we have it here in the office. There's all our machine tools and stuff at the back and you can try it out. They call it "The Rig": our users have heard about it, most people don't know what it is. But it's really, really a cool idea, and we want to get back to it.

There were probably four or five of us in the office by the time we were fiddling around with this prototype, and I remember saying: you guys, even if we build this haptic rig, and you can literally walk into a virtual world and hold your hand up in front of your face and look at it: Where are we going to go with this thing - Doom? It seemed like a pretty paltry use for such revolutionary technology.

Obviously, even in '99 we had been prototyping some of the simulation layers of Second Life, but we had this realisation: the much bigger problem is the software, the hardware's easy. You can use any number of interfaces for this stuff, but the thing that matters so much here is the place. The place that we're all going to go is the hardest problem from a technology perspective and also probably the best business. So that was it.

Glyn Moody: In April 2003, you made a major change to Second Life when you decided to allow residents to keep the intellectual property rights to the things they made. I've come across a couple of explanations for what led up to that, including de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital, and a meeting involving Larry Lessig and Edward Castronova: could you untangle what exactly led you to make that change, and why it was important?

Philip Rosedale: In 2002 a guy named Doug, who works here, gave me that book, The Mystery of Capital, and he said: You've got to read this. It had a terrible front cover, and I don't have much time for business self-improvement books, and I remember looking at it and thinking: oh god, this is one of these books that some academic wrote because he needed to finish his degree. But Doug's a really smart guy, and I was like, OK, if Doug says to read it, I'll read it. Those first 15 pages it reads like – I don't know what it reads like – it reads like the Gettysburg Address – it's just moving. Basically I read that, and I was like, man, oh man, that's so convincing.

There's a book I read before that, though, that we were talking about a lot, which really informed our design, and that's Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That was one of the most important things because it was in 2001, 2002, that we got into this idea that the way online games worked was just completely inconsistent with what we're trying to do, and that Everquest or online games of the time were what Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said that planned cites all failed.

Then you read Death and Life of Great American Cities, and what that says is that it all has to be random. The randomness gives way to overlapping behaviours where some people are walking to go to the store, some people are walking to their home, some people are walking to go to work. Those people all run into each other, there's a kind of a commons behaviour where they'd like to just double click on their work and get there immediately, but they can't: they have to walk. That means they entertain each other: some of the times you're the one being entertained, and some of the times you're the entertainment, that's kind of what Jane Jacobs said. And we were like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we want. Because if the world is just created by everybody, then you'll have this very haphazard, crazy kind of feel to it, and that'll be incredibly powerful the way New York is.

The Mystery of Capital was like a follow on to that, because it said for people to build that way everybody has to own their own intellectual property - including of course physical real estate - in a very explicit way with alienability and all that stuff.

Then we had this little Star Chamber, with Larry Lessig, Ted Castronova, Julian Dibbell, Mitch Kapor. We all sat down and looked at what was going on and those guys were like, yeah, you've got you're thinking exactly the right way, you've got to let the economy be free running and real.

Glyn Moody: Around the same time there was something of a revolt among the residents of Second Life over the tax system then in place: what exactly happened?

Philip Rosedale: That was us doing dumb stuff and getting reminded of it. We were never misaligned with people's creative intentions – the idea of no taxation without representation. Our initial economy wasn't very real – the economy more or less worked the same way, but you couldn't convert things back and forth to dollars. We always intended to make it completely real, so that people could use those tokens of value, transferable in any way they wanted. That went back to some of the 2001 thinking about how people that owned property or whatever in Second Life would be the operators of Second Life, and that at least some of them would want to make money doing that.

The whole tax revolt thing was very funny because what we were trying to do was balance the public commons - resources that you access in Second Life like scripting and land and how many prims you could build and whether they had lights on. We built this taxation system that every Monday would automatically tax you according to how much stuff you had in the world and how big it was. It's still fundamentally a good idea; the problem was this tax bill that you got every week that was so algorithmically complicated that no human, us included, could estimate what their tax would be. It was terrible. So people just had a horrible experience with that.

It was kind of chance that people were so pissed off with the prim accounting system at about the same time we switched over to allow people to own land. The other thing was, in the initial economy you couldn't pay more and get more land – you had to earn more money within the economy to buy more land. When we made that change at the end of 2003, we said, look look look: this is just land, this is just property. If you want to buy more of it, you can buy it with dollars, we're not going to stop you from doing that.

That pissed off people too, because they said: Look, we want it to be a pure meritocracy. If you're successful in Second Life you cannot use US cash to get more land, you have to please other people. And in principle, I think that's lovely. But the problem is you've got a sort of "water seeks it's own level" there around design; arbitrage always exists. So it seems foolish to be a big central "we're going to catch you if you're cheating" organisation and try to keep people from selling those credits, those Linden dollars on the side. So we said, screw that, we're just going to open the system all the way – you can buy land and turn Linden dollars into dollars.

Enclosing the Pharmaceutical Commons

The biotechnology industry has proposed to change the international generic naming of medicine ingredients, which at the moment are public property, into unique names for each medicine, making it harder to substitute them with cheaper versions, and linking them to trademarks, sources say.

And why are they doing this? Not to stymie generics that can be made available to those unable to afford high drug prices, oh my word, no. As Nathalie Moll of EuropaBio, the European association for biotechnology industries, explained, the change is

"not so much for us but for the patient"

Aw, bless 'em: always thinking of others these selfless pharmaceutical companies.

No Copyright Extension for Brit Music

I can't believe it:

The copyright on sound recordings will not be extended after an independent review commissioned by the Treasury.

Is that the sound of an airborne porker?

A Lightbulb Goes on in My Head

Yes, of course:

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.

Relatively easy and painless, too: what are we waiting for? Let there be light.

Meta-Knowledge is Mega-Power

Surprisingly subversive little piece in the FT:

Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

Best bit:

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

It gave instant publicity to Google Earth and contributed to growing sophistication among Bahrainis in circumventing web censorship.

Not just knowledge, but meta-knowledge. (Via Ogle Earth.)

Petard, Meet Australian Government

Welcome back to the dark ages, Australia:

Plugging a word or phrase into a search engine may soon give you fewer results if proposed new Australian copyright laws are adopted, according to Internet giant Google.

The laws could open the way for Australian copyright owners to take action against search engines for caching and archiving material, Google says in a submission to a Senate committee considering the legislation.

This could potentially limit the scope of the search engine results, which the Internet company describes as effectively "condemning the Australian public to the pre-Internet era".

This is what kowtowing to intellectual monopolies gives you. (Via Boing Boing.)

Why RMS is Right...

...to be a pain in the anatomy: because if you nag intelligent people enough, it works. (Thanks, Jamais - Richard will be jolly grateful.)

Boo! - It's Bubble 2.0

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Why Does Iceland Hate the World?

In 2004, a report compiled for the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and other environmental groups concluded that bottom-trawling was "...highly destructive to the biodiversity associated with seamounts and deep-sea coral ecosystems and... likely to pose significant risks to this biodiversity, including the risk of species extinction."

And yet:

Conservation groups accused Iceland in particular of blocking further protection. Iceland is already under fire from the conservation lobby over its recent decision to resume commercial whaling.

"The international community should be outraged that Iceland could almost single-handedly sink deep-sea protection and the food security of future generations," said Ms Sack.

Why?

The Game God Speaks

I am not a gamer. Until recently, I had no idea who Raph Koster was. But the more I read of his stuff, the more impressed I am: he is clearly one of the deepest thinkers about the digital world today. Note that I do not say about games: for what he writes has ramifications far beyond the gaming world, and should be read by anyone with an interest in things digital.

Take his latest post, called "Are microtransactions actually the future?" This pieces ranges widely, touching on all the big issues that intellectual monopolies like copyright throw up. And he really gets it. For example:

since anything that can be seen by our senses can be reproduced, for better or worse, all digital forms of enforcing copyright are doomed to fail. Every form of encryption is moot, because everything must be decrypted in order for us to see it. At some point, the data is in the clear, and then it can be copied.

He then goes further, offering a suggestion about how content industries can and must cope with this ineluctable fact:

The value is in the service, not the content. In the service, not the microtransactions. A digital item is worth nothing. What is of value is the context. People are increasingly not willing to pay for the experience of hearing a song by itself in the abstract. They pay for the concert as a whole (the iTunes experience as a whole, the CD experience as a whole, the movie-going experience as a whole, the EverQuest experience as a whole), and it will be smart venue operators who survive and make the money in the long run.

Amen to that.

Eppur Si Muove

Sigh.

Italian prosecutors on Friday put two Google Italy representatives under investigation as part of an inquiry into how a video of teenagers harassing an autistic classmate surfaced on its Video site, a judicial source said.

The two are being investigated for allegedly failing to check on the content of the video posted on the Internet search engine's Web site.

Right; and I suspect that they don't check all their search results, either. Shocking: what is Google thinking?

The Italian authorities can order the sun to orbit the earth all they like; eppur si muove.

Open Source-y Gift Guide

Here's a handy list from Make, with a bunch of open source-y things, many of which have been mentioned before in these posts. Still, I'd like to single out the PortableApps Suite - happiness on a thumb drive:

PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition): ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Firefox Portable (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Sunbird Portable (calendar/task manager) and Thunderbird Portable (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.

Installation and use are easy.

The Intellectual Monopoly Screw

One of the US's favourite tricks is to apply the intellectual monopoly screw. That is, demanding over time ever more from nations who wish to enter into trade agreements with them. In this way, the overall context becomes ever-more favourable towards intellectual monopolies, and the baseline moves inexorably forwards.

The latest example is Russia:

In its bilateral negotiation with the United States in order to join the World Trade Organization, Russia appears to have agreed to intellectual property rights standards that push those of the WTO and US law to new levels.

This is particularly bad news, because it's going to make unwinding all of this excessive protection for monopolies much harder. And that's the idea, of course.

Second Life by Numbers

Here's a fun list of financial figures associated with Second Life. The really significant one is the following:

652,581 USD - Real dollars spent in SL in the last 24 hours.

- not least because it hasn't wavered during all of the CopyBot kerfuffle, despite what all the gloom merchants were saying.

Speaking of which, I have a piece in the Guardian on the subject, mind-melded with some background to how Second Life came about. The basic message is: Don't Panic.

Turbo Wizpy

A long time ago, TurboLinux was a cool company with a turbo-charged CEO, Cliff Miller. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Born in San Francisco, he had lived in Australia for a year as a child, and then went to Japan for two years, where he stayed with a Japanese family and attended a public school. After he moved back to the United States, Miller attended college, and spent a year in Macedonia, then a part of Yugoslavia, to further his studies of the Macedonian language. "I finished my BA when I was nineteen," he explains, "and then a year later got my MA in linguistics as well," and adds with what amounts to something of an understatement, "I tend to be pretty intense, and just get through things as fast as I can."

But that was in another land; Miller moved out, TurboLinux moved on.

And now here it is, with a dinky little object that sounds, well, cool:

It's an MP3 player. It's an FM radio. It's video and photo display device. It's an e-book reader. It's a sound recorder. It's a Linux-based personal computer ready for web, email and office usage. Yes, it's Wizpy, the Swiss Army Knife of handheld gadgets announced by Japan's Turbolinux this week.

I particularly liked this feature:

Just plug it into a PC's USB port, restart the host machine and it'll boot up into the open source operating system so you can surf and work and be sure nothing's being recorded on the hard disk.

Spitting the Atom

If you're using the main/atom feed for this blog at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml

there seems to be a problem with Blogger at the moment. The other feed at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

seems fine.

Sorry about that, but short of buying a majority holding in Google, there's not much I can do about it.

Get 'Em While They're Young

I was going to write about this, but Matthew Aslett has done such a good job, there's not much point:

Several UK Members of Parliament have signed an early day motion* criticizing current government agencies for preventing the adoption of free and open source software in UK schools and universities.

The motion, tabled by Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh, says the Department for Education and Skills and Becta (British Education and Technology Agency) policies are denying schools the benefits of open source software adoption.

Update: Mark Taylor has now weighed in with some useful information on what's really going on here.

Inspired or Not?

This sounds good news:

The European Parliament and Council reached agreement last night on the contents of the proposed INSPIRE Directive, which aims to harmonise spatial information across Europe.

Key points resolved during the final stages of the discussions between the institutions included the principles according to which citizens should be allowed to examine the official maps and other spatial data covered by the directive, and rules for granting authorities access to data held by other authorities.

...

Data search services designed for the public will generally be free of charge, although the directive allows fees to be charged for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports.

However, the cynic in me suggests that the devil is in the details. Anybody know?

Update: Michael Cross of the Guardian does: the answer is "not inspired". We've been stitched up by the Ordnance Survey, invoking that perennial favourite, "reasons of national security" for withholding information - just like that nice Mr Bush does. Ever heard of Google Earth or Google Maps, which already give all this information?

Shaming Marcus Peacock

I know nothing about Marcus Peacock, but I know that this is scandalous:

Contrary to promises by EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock that all of the former library materials will be made available electronically, vast troves of unique technical reports and analyses will remain indefinitely inaccessible.

Meanwhile, many materials formerly held by the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA’s Washington D.C. Headquarters, were directed to be thrown into trash bins, according to reports received by PEER. This month, EPA closed the OPPTS Library, its only specialized library for research on health effects and properties of toxic chemicals and pesticides, without notice to either the public or affected scientists.

Clearly this is being done to protect those industries that pollute, and at the behest of those close to those industries. I don't know whether it's too late to save the EPA library materials, but I can only hope that the people behind this shameful act are brought to justice - at least in the court of history. (Via Open Access News.)

The End of the End for Academic Writing

Scholarship never ends. There is never a last word, even about established facts. What we've had up till now in published works are static snapshots. Sure, there may be follow-up articles, second editions and corrections, but each work stands alone as a completed product. I find myself wondering if researchers - and writers - will continue to be content with snapshots when the technical barriers to revision are so low and readers' comfort level with edited online works is growing.

Ergo, we need other ways of publishing - online, wikis etc. Not rocket science, but definitely something of a leap for the academic world. (Via Open Access News.)

TV's Spiralling Vortex of Ruin

Sounds good to me, in a double sense: form and content. (Via IP Democracy.)

Why Elsevier is Worse than Microsoft

I've sometimes made the comparison that Elsevier stands to open access in much the same way that Microsoft does to open source. But as I was reading this Evolgen post on Michael Ashburner, one of the Fly People, and a key player in keeping genomics open, I came upon this interesting link:

Reed Elsevier is a publishing company with an arms trade problem. While the bulk of their business is in scientific, medical and educational publishing, they also - through their subsidiaries Reed Exhibitions and Spearhead Exhibitions - organise arms fairs around the world. These include events in Brazil, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and in the UK, one of largest arms fairs in the world, DSEi (Defence Systems and Equipment International), which is held bi-annually in London Docklands (next due September 2007).

The $1 trillion global trade in arms and military goods undermines human rights, fuels conflicts and causes huge civilian suffering. Arms fairs are a key part of the global arms trade, and allow arms companies to promote weapons to countries involved in, or on the brink of conflict, as well as those with terrible human rights records.

It makes Bill Gates look positively saintly in comparison. (Disclosure: I used to work for Reed Elsevier a decade and a half ago, but to my eternal shame was unaware of this side of their business if it existed then.)

The Middle Kingdom Moves Up the Pack

I mentioned the intriguing Uniform Office Format (UOF), from China, a little while back. Here's a presentation on the subject. As well as the information about the format, two other things are worth noting from this.

First, are Chinese views on openness and intellectual monopolies. And secondly - and more importantly - is the fact that the creation of the UOF shows that China is no long content to follow its Western counterparts in this area: it has started to take the initiative - and not for the last time, we can be sure. (Via ConsortiumInfo.org.)