There has been a growing trend where e-book versions of books are free for download, for either a limited time, or via creative commons licensing.

This is a CC licensed book that details where our open net is being threatened.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/static/ZittrainTheFutureoftheInternet.pdf

Looks to be a good read, so I thought I would link it. Been following this stuff for a long while now. Lots of issues to consider and doing so helps to grok the Internet dynamics at the same time. Fascinating stuff, IMHO.

Anybody else snagging good e-books? Wanna share your sources? Let's use this thread for that.

An excerpt:

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quote:

The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment
in traffic management. The roads serving forty-five thousand people
are “verkeersbordvrij”: free of nearly all road signs. Drachten is one of
several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called “unsafe
is safe.”1 The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters,
and even parking spaces. The only rules are that drivers should yield to
those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking
others will be towed.
The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular
safety. Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have
shown, disobey seventy percent of the time2), people are forced to
drive more mindfully—operating their cars with more care and attention
to the surrounding circumstances. They communicate more with
pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers using hand signals and eye
contact. They see other drivers rather than other cars.

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quote:

Law has long recognized the difference between rules and standards—between
very precise boundaries like a speed limit and the much vaguer admonishment
characteristic of negligence law that warns individuals simply to “act
reasonably.” There are well-known tradeoffs between these approaches.4 Rules
are less subject to ambiguity and, if crafted well, inform people exactly what
they can do, even if individual situations may render the rule impractical or,
worse, dangerous. Standards allow people to tailor their actions to a particular
situation. Yet they also rely on the good judgment of often self-interested actors—
or on little-constrained second-guessing of a jury or judge that later decrees
whether someone’s actions were unreasonable.
A small lesson of the verkeersbordvrij experiment is that standards can work
better than rules in unexpected contexts. A larger lesson has to do with the
traffic expert’s claim about law and human behavior: the more we are regulated,
the more we may choose to hew only and exactly to the regulation or, more precisely,
to what we can get away with when the regulation is not perfectly enforced.
When we face heavy regulation, we see and shape our behavior more in
relation to reward and punishment by an arbitrary external authority, than because
of a commitment to the kind of world our actions can help bring about.5
This observation is less about the difference between rules and standards than
it is about the source of mandates: some may come from a process that a person
views as alien, while others arise from a process in which the person takes an active
part.

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Ill just come out and say it and it may come as no surprise to anyone but I am too stupid to know what the hell you are talking about.

Ill watch this topic closely and hope to learn something

Whoops!

Ok, I'm clearly too close to this stuff.

The topic of interest is the dynamics of how the Internet works and what impact that has on the people that do stuff on it.

The excerpt above was a good example of why following this stuff is interesting! The take away from that is that we are discovering that a very rigid set of rules does not always equal a very rigid set of behaviors. I chose this particular excerpt because it's relevant to the MANY follow the law conversations we've had.

There is law, norms, money and physics that govern behavior. We all too often focus on the law, leaving the others out of the consideration. IMHO, this is a mistake and this little test on traffic behavior and safety suggests I might be right.

This is not to say we should just rip down all the signs. I do know, having visited Lincoln Nebraska, I drove paying very close attention in the burbs because there were just not any stop signs!

In that excerpt above, the word "standards" is used where I would say norms.

This has relevance to the Internet because it's very open, at the moment, with few rules in play. Locking / closing it down might not have the impact we want.

Also, just knowing that a city tried this with their traffic flow is a really great comparison to how we do things and why.

Sorry guys! I'll go back to my hole now.

The link goes to a full on PDF of the book I'm reading right now, BTW.

> Ill just come out and say it and it may come as no surprise to anyone but I am too stupid to
> know what the hell you are talking about.

The overall message here is that when rules get too complicated to follow, people are going to break them. The natural reaction of people whose job it is to make rules would be to make more rules. This doesn't work.

The Drachten traffic experiment made the rules very simple, and--more importantly--it created an environment where motorists are forced to think about the consequences of their actions, rather than following a complicated set of rules.