child labour?

by gtdonovan on July 9, 2009 at 10:07 am · Filed under iphone, labour, quote, youth

Inc. on 11 year old Owen Voorhees, creator of the “Math Time” iPhone App:

Murphy believes the billion-dollar iPhone industry will keep growing. MathTime, a 99-cent application, was downloaded 141 times in a day. “It started booming,” says Owen, “I woke up, and I was like, ‘I’m an entrepreneur now.’

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Berners-Lee on the “insidious” quality of vertical integration

by gtdonovan on June 25, 2009 at 7:43 pm · Filed under Berners-Lee, informationalism, medium/message, quote, semantic web

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, on the “insidious” quality of vertical integration:

The Web’s infrastructure can be thought of as composed of four horizontal layers; from bottom to top, they are the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and the content. … I am more concerned about companies trying to take a vertical slice through the layers than creating a monopoly in any one layer. A monopoly is more straight forward; people can see it and feel it, and consumers and regulators can “just say no.” But vertical integration — for example, between the medium and content — affects the quality of information and can be more insidious.

– Weaving the Web, p130

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experience is the life of the law

by gtdonovan on June 20, 2009 at 8:37 pm · Filed under experience, governance, Holmes, pragmatism, property, quote

from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

(emphasis added)

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