Being a curious person, I like to learn how things work.  By things, I don't mean just objects but also processes like how breads are made, how a community like Waco are formed, and how events like Burningman came to be.  Often enough, my curiousity goes unsatisfied because people don't want a stranger hanging around their busy kitchen or business asking seemingly obvious questions.

Reading "Dave"'s blog these days is like watching a house being built from the inside.  Right before our eyes, a major conference is taking shape!  Day to day, it can be a little tedious, but spanning over time, one can't help but appreciate the unique experience Dave is providing us.  I wish more blogs would do what Dave is doing, showing rest of the world how things come to be from the insider's perspective, one day at a time.

Possibilities are endless!

On September 18th, 1931, Japanese army invaded China using a fabricated act of terrorism as an excuse.  Exactly 72 years later, 380 Japanese tourists were having a three-day orgy with 500 Chinese prostitutes in a Chinese hotel.

Intentional?  Is it even possible for all 380 Japanese tourists to not notice the date?  Are such orgies common in China?  I don't think so.

Dave is, as he would say, full of sh*t today.

[Correction: After reading Dave's Why they hate me post, I have to say Dave is not full of sh*t today.  He is full of sh*t just in the post mentioned below.]

In It's not really piracy, Dave writes:

Calling it piracy views it only from the perspective of an obsolete distribution system. They see their revenue declining because the service they provide isn't worth anything. The Internet provides efficiency in distribution that cuts out the middle man. Since the industry pays little or no money to the artist, the users can have the music, if you cut out the distributors, for $0. To blame that on people who use music is to miss the historic trend. Users are just behaving economically, not unethically; and it's even arguable that they are behaving legally.

I sympathize with musicians who are being enslaved by the music industry labels and believe Internet technologies can and will free them eventually.  But using them to justify ethical failures or advocate new business models amounts to cowardly and selfish acts.  If people really wants to solve this problem, they should first learn to see straight instead of making up false and delusionary images.

Suppose you bought a country house with apple trees in the backyard which you never tended to.  What Dave is saying amounts to saying that if apples fall from the tree and roll downhill to a public road, anybody can take those apples because the owner never tended to the trees.  Nonesense.  If they didn't know where the apple came from, they are excusable and should be excused.  But if they are doing it knowingly, that is theft and it doesn't matter who the owner is nor whether he is a beastly fellow.

Just as atrocities are made easier by demonizing opponents, we are demonizing the music industry and planting seeds of wide-spread self-justified corruption into our young in the name of newage morality.  Piracy is piracy whether the pirate is a sleezy character or a 13 year-old girl.  Whether she should be punished or not is irrelevant to the definition of the word.

I am not faulting people for falling to temptations for I have fallen as well in the past.  When Napster became popular, I downloaded many MP3 files.  It was amazingly convenient and, as a geek, it opened new possibilities.  But I have never denied the fact that what I was doing was stealing because doing so will damage me more than I could ever gain from free music.

I am going to be shifting my consulting business to PowerVenture.com and reusing Docuverse.com as it was originally intended, a wiki-variation based document universe including my blog as well as other contents.

Beside PowerVenture.com and Docuverse.com, there is another website being planned.  I can't give any details though except that it will be a shocker of sort.

What all this means is that I will be needing more bandwidth and storage space.  I have chosen to use ServInt VPS instead of dragging a T1 line to my house and running my own Linux server farm which requires too much money way too early.  ServInt has pretty good reputation so I can trust them not to disappoint me and 100GB/month transfer with 2 GB storage for $49/month is very attractive.  As traffic and load grows, I can upgrade to ServInt dedicated servers.

If you decide to use ServInt as well, tell them Don sent ya.  But then I just signed up so you might want to wait until I have used their service for a while.  Life is full of surprises you know. ;-p

Even when online social networks becomes common place, nothing much has changed in the way people meet each other.  One could even say social network is degraded somewhat by people hunting people they want to meet by following the visual map of relationships made possible by social network services.

One can imagine Power Law working at multiple levels to route attention to people with the right look, positions, professions, money, and connections.  Play forward a bit and one could see how the popular nodes becoming ragged pretty fast.

If a girl looks great, she'll get a lot of wannabe friends who ponied up money for the chance to say hello.  Even with traffic control of sort, she will eventually feel like a dumb whore, dumb because she ain't getting paid for her troubles.  Profit sharing is not a solution because that just leads to world-wide whore, sorry, dating networks.

If it's some business person in a key position like CostCo Executive VP of Purchasing, same thing happens except there is a different kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge going on.  Social connections based on one-sided needs is not a social network IMHO and unstable by nature.  Over time, these networks will be sapped dry of valuable nodes, leaving behind only a network of predators.

As I mentioned before in my posts about the value of random encounters, new solutions are needed.  Game of Seven is one example.  The Game of Seven forms a random group of seven people that lasts a month as if seven random people got stranded on a deserted island.  One could run into great, mundane, or even terrible people.

You can sell individual Game of Seven too just like packs of Pokeymon or Yu-Ki-Oh cards.  You'll never know what you are going to get.  Maybe you'll meet the girl of your life.  Maybe you'll end up changing your definition of an a**hole.  The unknown is the product being sold.

To spice things up, each Game of Seven should be given a task to perform.  Result affects individual participant's stats that has some consequences.  If one acts like an asshole consistently, his stats should reduce his chance of meeting people with good stats.

Frankly, I have no idea whether solutions like the Game of Seven will work.  I am just using it as an example of possible solutions.

Many people are expressing surprise over the AtStake fiasco, firing of Dan Geer over a report (PDF) critical of Microsoft.  How can Microsoft or AtStake not behave that way when alternative is counter to survival instinct?

Of course, AtStake did not do Microsoft any favors by firing Dan.  All they did was confirm the concerns raised by the report: Microsoft can't help but be a bully even if it turned into a flower child overnight.  One doesn't have to be a bully for others to feel threatened.  It's like bringing a 800lb gorilla to a party and telling everyone to relax because it is so gentle.

I just wanted to say that six degrees of separation is real, but I don't give a damn about it.  One degree, friend of a friend, is where the action is and two degrees is the maximum under most social circumstances.

What this really means is that so called social network services are in the business of short-circuiting the six degrees of separation so the person you want to meet is one degree away.  In the case of dating service, the dating service is the short-circuiting friend/pimp.  That makes Jonathan Abrams the first pimp to be popular among VCs.

Hey, I got nothing against pimps.  I think they have a much better business model than most startups.

But then I do believe in Lassie so let's say there is some value in being able to meet friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend.  Hold the music please.  They are not all friends, are they?  Dang.