I'm so Bored of the Future Internet

today I am going to BIS to talk about the Future Internet
this is Yet Another Initiative which is the
Future Internet Strategy Board of the UK.

The Internet has a great future behind it, of course. However,
my thesis is that the
Future Internet is about as relevant as
Anthropogenic Global Warming
It is not necessary to invoke all the hype and hysteria - it
is both necessary and sufficient to talk about
sustainable energy (c.f. David Mackay)
and
good technical communications research, develeopment, deployment and operations -
What we really don't need is yet more climatologists
(or ethnographers studying internet governance) - we do need some solid engineering
to address a number of problems the Internet has - but this is happening and wouldn't stop happening if the entire Future Internet flagship was kidnapped by aliens.

we don't need no government agency doing top down dictats about what to do when -
it won't work and it will be a massive waste of time, energy and other resources - i.e.
like AGW, it will be a load of hot air:)

my slides are linked off my home page in the usual way...

There are a number of deeper lessons from the Internet architecture which might prove useful in other domains, and in my talk I give examples of these (applying the Postel and End-to-end principles to transport, energy, government information/servies)

telco-mpare.the.research.com

{AT|B|D|F|I|T}telco-mpare-the-research
i.e. what are thre relative merits of
AT&T research
BT Research
Deutsche Telekom (t-labs)
France Telecom research (actually telecom paris tech:)
telecom italia
telefonica

ask me in a pub:)

did you know vint cerf is...

vint cerf...only 3 years older than Patti Smith

now reading Just Kids about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, who took that iconic pic for the cover of Horses....awesome - a true 20th century (and 21st) Rimbaud....

Jesuit 2.0

I'm trying to reason about religion

doh - time to acquire
jesuit 2.0
and see how it stacks up
against
islam 1.7

I don't know, but maybe it was the roses

the internet: the death of distance and the price is poverty

the internet is sposed to bring the death of distance

but on the internet, content is king
and content is zipfian

so popular content is, in all liklihood
from far away

yet content is about somethign real - a band, a play, a beach, a cause

yet if the band don't play near you, the play is in a foreign tongue, the beach is washed by tides from a different ocean, and the cause is not yours to wonder why
then it impoverishes you - it does not enrichen.

the internet is going to be the greatest cause of poverty since
the church burned people for translating and printing the bible

Free Plot Device - what if #2701?

what if
humans were the only creatures in the world
unable to timetravel,
and the fact is that
every other creature
on earth,
and in other worlds
can travel, freely, not just
like Billy Pilgrim,
unstuck in time,
or the time traveller's wife's husband
but just like you and I
can travel in space - forwards, back, up, down, left, right

so this is the answer to Fermi's paradox:- we havn't met the aliens
because we were always
too late
or
too early

wouldn't that be sad

why is government so slow...?

this is the age of the interweb, but government (and its cloud) move like a geriatric patient with arthritis - there don't seem to be any parties (or peope in their associated think tanks) who realize what the problem with having a time constant that is geological is when faced with novel problems like religios fundamentalism revivals, climate warning (or not), and a population suffering from post traumatic stress due to the pace of technology change (telephone to internet to web to myspace to facebook/buzz on an iphone; walk to horse, to car, to electric car; illiteracy to newspapers to books to ebooks; certain death to antibiotics to vaccination and immunisation to diet and lifestyle control; the church and the king to the aristos, to the middle classes to the working classes being educated; etc etc)

all the systems of government are still modelled as if there was no sigificant difference in any of these areas since before the industrial revolution (roughly).

its pathetic - and don't talk to be about socialism:)