Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation: Library of Economics and Liberty

The natural tendency of profits then is to fall; for in the progress of society and wealth, the additional quantity of food required is obtained by the sacrifice of more and more labour. This tendency, this gravitation as it were of profits, is happily checked at repeated intervals by the improvements in machinery, connected with the production of necessaries, as well as by discoveries in the science of agriculture which enable us to relinquish a portion of labour before required, and therefore to lower the price of the prime necessary of the labourer.

tags: trend control point cycle

Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation: Library of Economics and Liberty

It is through the inequality of profits, that capital is moved from one employment to another.

Control point - one's ability to maintain inequality of profits, e.g. know-how in a specific area.

tags: quote control point

Patent application for Seamless Ad | CNET News.com: "Video game developer and marketing company Nightlife Interactive has filed for U.S. patent protection for its brand of game advertising, known as the Seamless Ad. Created in conjunction with online marketing firm In Touch Media Group, the Seamless Ad allows players to click on advertisements without interrupting the game. Instead, an e-mail from the advertiser is sent to the player's in-box.

Nightlife Interactive is currently developing 'Nightscape,' a role-playing game that incorporates Seamless Ads into a virtual world of urban bars and clubs. Nightlife Interactive CEO Bob Cefail described the game, which is scheduled for a summer 2007 release, as 'a cross between MySpace, Second Life and Match.com.' Video game advertising has recently been recognized as a potentially lucrative market, and big technology companies have begun to take note--including Microsoft, which bought in-game advertiser Massive in May."

tags: patents example virtual control signal

Heavies float data center standard | CNET News.com: "Computing industry heavyweights on Monday announced a plan to create a standardized way for computing resources to 'talk' to each other, a move they say will lower the cost of running corporate data centers.

The initiative calls for the creation of an XML-based standard, called Service Modeling Language (SML), and its adoption in commercial products, including systems management software, hardware, and application development tools.

The companies involved--BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems--published a draft SML specification on Monday and pledged to support it in the future.

The goal of SML is to establish a lingua franca for computing resources--servers, networking gear, applications and the like--to exchange operating information, such as security requirements or performance problems.

The language will allow vendors to create a model that encapsulates and communicates performance information to network monitoring programs, according to its backers. In addition, software developers can use modeling tools to specify the computing resources, such as the number of servers and databases, required to put a newly developed application into use."

tags: packaged payload control standardization scale

Real estate's Net turf war | CNET News.com: "
By matching buyers and sellers more efficiently, the Internet has whittled away at the influence of those middlemen. Not only have companies like eBay, Expedia and E*Trade Financial upset established industries, but they've delivered lower prices by axing once-lucrative fees and commissions.

The Internet "has not put us out of business," said David Liniger, founder and chairman of Re/Max International, the largest real estate agency in the United States and Canada. "It will not put us out of business."

Even more important has been real estate brokers' stranglehold over their local Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, a database of homes up for sale. Unlike securities or commodities exchanges, an MLS is not regulated by state or federal authorities. In addition, local brokers tend to restrict full access to the database to members of a professional association such as the National Association of Realtors."

Justin McCarthy, Google's partner development manager for real estate, tried to assuage the audience's concerns. "The proposition is to drive people back to you, the MLS who is supplying us with data," McCarthy said.

tags: control point scalability scarcity information

Variety.com - Amazon ambitions: "In its first feature-film venture, Amazon has optioned screen rights to Keith Donohue's bestselling novel 'The Stolen Child.' Amazon will move to secure a filmmaker and then a studio partner to turn the fantasy into a live-action feature."

A very important development. Amazon moves from content distribution to content creation. When movie theaters are gone nobody needs Hollywood heavyweights to create and distribute video content.

tags: control distribution source

New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Brain-implant enables mind over matter: "Electrodes implanted in Nagle's brain measure the neural signals generated when he concentrates on trying to move one of his paralysed limbs. Software trained to recognise different patterns of neural activity then translates imagined gestures into the movement of an on-screen cursor or a robotic arm at Nagle's side.

'The fundamental findings are that you can record activity from the brain years after injury, that thinking about movement is sufficient to activate the brain, and that we can decode the signal,' says John Donoghue of Brown University in New York, who led the work."

tags: control interface brain example

BitTorrent inks licensing deal with studios | CNET News.com: "Under the deal with the independent movie studios, the titles will be for sale as part of a subscription service. This differs from the pay-per-title service that BitTorrent plans to use with Warner Bros.

BitTorrent is building a video store from which customers can download movies at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, according to the company. The store is expected to launch sometime in the fall, company executives said."

tags: video distribution infrastructure

With Checkout, Google is ready to take your order | CNET News.com: "Last week, Google introduced Google Checkout, an online checkout system that lets people make purchases from participating merchants using a single sign-in system. Google gives its AdWords paid search customers a discount to use the service. An icon on their ads tells shoppers they can make a fast purchase from that store.

It's a similar idea, but a different company, different time and no privacy hubbub--at least not yet. It begs the obvious question: Does the world really trust Google--the company with the 'Do no evil' motto--that much more than Microsoft, the company sued by the Justice Department on antitrust grounds?"

Microsoft was creating a payment/identity system from scratch, while Google just adds a yet another service to its package. To majority of customers Checkout looks like an incremental step, it doesn't exceed sensitivity threshold ( cf frog that gets boiled incrementally).
In reality this is a much stronger play than Microsoft ever envisioned. It closes search-advertisement-sale loop, which enables Google to fine tune its "lead generation" engine and lock its customers within a walled garden.
Another product that is targets customers' control sub-system, thus creating a strong control point within internet-based marketplace.

tags: control point google microsoft multi

New game trades wizards, elves for barflies, bouncers | CNET News.com: "The game, announced Wednesday by online marketing firm In Touch Media Group, drops players into virtual versions of real-life nightclubs, where they party and schmooze with an eye toward climbing the cyber social ladder and 'owning' the clubs themselves.

tags: virtual world advertisement distribution

'We found that individuals over 25 are very interested in this,' In Touch CEO Laura Betterley said, referring to surveys of more than 4,500 potential game users, who voted on everything from the game's objective to its name. 'It shows that people want to meet people but may not want to go through the pressure of going to a (brick-and-mortar) club to do so.'

And as you might guess--with a game being developed by a marketing firm--there's another objective, at least for the game's makers. In Touch has filed a patent application for a form of 'seamless,' in-game product placement that lets players click on items and receive an e-mail from the advertiser, with no interruption in the game.

'In-game advertising is huge,' Betterley said, citing phenomena like the ad-skipping TiVo that may be driving advertisers to market online rather than through more traditional media."

Digital music sales on a crescendo | CNET News.com: "Looking at the entire sales picture--comprising physical albums, digital albums and digital tracks--overall sales to date this year have gained about one-tenth of a percentage point over the first six months of '05.

A total of 270.6 million physical albums were sold domestically through the end of June, representing a drop of 12 million units from last year's six-month total of 282.6 million.

Digital albums improved by 8.2 million units, with 14.7 million units sold since January compared with 6.4 million units in the first half of 2005. Digital tracks gained by 122 million units; 281 million tracks were sold in the first six months of the year versus 158 million in the same period last year."

tags: trends packaged payload distribution mature

Later still, there was a further innovation: several lines of writing, added at the end of the text on the back surface, identifying what the text contained, more or less as a table of contents does today. This acquired the term colophon, derivded from the Greek kolophon, meaning "finishing touch". .. The colophons were numbered, and recorded how many tablets the text was comprised of.

Ideas, by Peter Watson. p. 89

tags: control, scale, metadata, search, quote

YouTube challenger offers to pay for video | CNET News.com: "The latest challenger to video-upload powerhouse YouTube, Eefoof arrives at a time when more than 150 such companies are trying to figure out how to make money by hosting homemade movies on the Web.

More than a year since its founding, YouTube has not yet fully disclosed what its revenue model will be. Other video-sharing companies, such as Guba, say they are profitable but aren't generating much cash. Guba expects to see $12 million in sales this year, according to Thomas McInerney, the company's CEO.

Analysts will want to know whether eefoof can sustain itself by cutting videographers in on revenues. But at a time when many video-sharing sites are looking for compelling content, the payment offer could give Eefoof an edge in attracting superior videos."

There's no control point in this model, as long as authors can take their content elsewhere.

tags: source distribution control point

Anaheim opens Wi-Fi network | CNET News.com: "He expects 95 percent of the outdoor area and 90 percent of the indoor area of Anaheim to have access to the network, even if indoor use will require the use of signal-enhancing hardware.

Residents can sign up for $21.95 per month, and Anaheim's 20 million yearly visitors--attracted mainly by Disneyland--can sign up for shorter sessions.

No free service will be provided. The network is entirely subscription-funded. EarthLink expects 15,000 to 20,000 of the 340,000 residents to sign up for what it calls an 'Open Access Model.'

'We are opening a new chapter of broadband competition in the U.S.,' said Betty, pointing to the fact that other Internet service providers will be allowed to sell access on the EarthLink network."

tags: distribution scale infrastructure