“Happy Birthday” words and music copyrighted Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill, 1934. “Doc” is a trademark of the Walt Disney Company™.

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Andrew Odlyzko who has the annoying tendency to be right and, worse, fact-based about it has posted a paper called “Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet.” It is to appear in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on eCommerce. From the abstract:

The rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles. Why is it occurring, and why do people care about it? This paper proposes an explanation for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing importance of price discrimination.

From the beginning section of the paper:

The key point is that price discrimination offers a much higher payoff to sellers than any targeted marketing campaign. Adjacent seats on an airplane flight can bring in revenues of $200 or $2,000, depending on conditions under which tickets were purchased. It is the potential of extending such practices to other areas that is likely to be the “Holy Grail” of ecommerce and the inspiration for the privacy erosion we see. For it is the privacy intrusion represented by airplane tickets being non-transferable contracts with named individuals that enables airlines to practice yield management in the extreme form it has reached.

In an email to a mailing list Andrew writes: “If you consider the main questions in communications, namely how open or closed networks should be, should the end-to-end principle prevail, etc., they are really questions about price discrimination, as in ‘Should your cable TV company be able to charge you more for a bit of voice traffic than for a bit of video?'”

PS: Fun Fact from the paper:

Coca Cola was discovered
in 2000 to be experimenting with soda vending machines that would raise prices when temperatures were
high.

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Small Pieces Loosely Reiterated

Boris Anthony has found a CD called “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” which is also the name of my book. He recommends a google search to get more info about it and writes: “It appears to be some kind of electro music done by a brit in germany and sold mostly in japan… ;)”

According to a review at NZZ Online (and forgive whatever mistakes I make in translating it):

The British, living-in-Cologne multinstrumentalist Adam Butler, alias Vert, loves daring soundworks. His new album, “Small Pieces Loosely Joined,” is an experimental pop album, moving between spontaneity and discipline, poetry and science, classical beauty and futuristic aggressiveness.

Wow, exactly like my book! (There’s a Japanese review here.)

Do you think Larry Lessig (at the new address of his blog site, btw) would agree to handle my law suit?

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I’m on vacation with a bad dialup connection, so I’m passing along these links without having tried them.

Meaning Map apparently is a way of exploring “opinion space,” seeing how opinions are statistically related.

Martin Jensen has posted a page about how HIPAA, touted as requirements that will protect patient privacy, is being implemented in a way that will bring the health care industry, and possibly the economy, to its knees.

Chip says that this site will help you select your presidential candidate.

WEASEL WORDS: Don’t blame me if you don’t like ’em. I’m just the messenger.

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Have I mentioned that I’m sorta kina intermittently on vacation for the next couple of weeks? I’ll still be blogging, but I might miss a day or two. Like yesterday. (Actually, yesterday I drove a total of 10 hours for a 2-hour meeting, so we’re not counting that as vacation.)

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Care for a little cheap irony?

According to an article in eWeek (July 7) by Peter Galli, “the linux operating system has transformed the digital animation movie business over the past two years…” So, the same entertainment industry that would like very bit on the Internet to be owned and accounted for is happy to reap the benefit of the open source movement.

If, as it has been argued, the “trusted” computing initiative (AKA the Orwellian computing initiative) ends up locking out open source software even as it locks in Microsoft as the player for Hollywood’s products, we will go from cheap irony to real irony.

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I just got a spam trying to sell me the Iraqi Most Wanted deck of cards that actually had a clever subject line:

Saddam’s Evil Biological Weapons: His Sons.

Hard to find anything good to say about them. Nor do I want to.

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There’s a story in this photo waiting to be written.

In fact, I bet someone’s going to point us to where the story’s already been written…

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Doc’s Linx Journal article on saving the Net is setting new records for page views and comments. Jeez, all it does is tell the truth. I don’t see what the fuss is about :)

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Here’s a site that lets the world vote in the next US presidential election.

Since the world’s vote counts about as much as that of a confused elderly Jewish lady in Dade County, Florida, it’s too bad the site is only publishing the results afterthe US polls close when it can have absolutely no effect. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager for the link.)

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