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[pozorvlak]

Rob Colvile, over at whyoftheworld, has responded to my recent post about IP law. It's a good column: go read it. I appear to have been comprehensively misunderstood (by Rob's commenters, though not by Rob himself), but hey, such is life on the Internet.

The only thing that makes me less than completely reassured by Rob's explanation is that, with software, we're getting damn close to selling pure thoughtstuff (and let's not forget the dizzying tower of abstractions that is modern finance). How much further up the "value chain" is there to go? Will someone eventually invent a way of selling mathematical theorems? The day they do is the day I (and most of the world's mathematicians, I suspect) hand in my chalk and open a bar. The Straightedge and Compasses, perhaps. With blackboards on the tables, and packets of chalk behind the bar.

Comments

[totherme.livejournal.com]

That does look very cool :)

Having said that, what's your definition of a Golden Age? I've been reading my collection of "trashy, but old, and therefore cultured" books recently- Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Dorian Grey - and the empire of the time seems pretty Golden Age to me...

And then I get off the train... The mechanical barriers at the exit notice a particular bit of card-shaped plastic in my wallet without my having to get it out, deduce that I've already paid for this journey, and clear the way. I get outside, and fish a second bit of plastic (this one's a bit larger) out of a pocket, which I ask the current location of the friend I'm due to meet at the cinema.

He's late, so I use another bit of card-shaped plastic to alter a two numbers in two different databases - which are probably located somewhere in London but I don't really know or care - the result is that I get to drink some tea. While doing so I use yet another bit of plastic (the largest yet - this one weighs a whole kilogram) to correspond real-time with my relatives on the other side of the world, read the latest up-to-the-second news from several mainstream sources and a couple of weird out of the way ones too... Some of the news is augmented with audio and video - some of it is just text. My second bit of plastic politely beeps to let me know that my friend is getting close, so I finish my tea, pack up my stuff and accompany him to a room where we'll spend 3 hours watching photographic evidence of things that never happened.


I think you're right though - it does seem to get even better...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Indeed. We live in an age of wonders, and I for one try not to forget it. Of course, we also live in an age of great poverty, injustice, and other Bad Things.

Maybe a Golden Age is one in which things get better rather than getting worse?