No user serviceable part inside

Cory Doctorow was the moderator on this panel with, as participants,  C Meeks, Howard Davidson and Jack William Bell.  The discussion was about how people relate to technology and is it possible to take control of it.  For most people technology is like a black box, a very complex black box with no possibility to thinker with.

But in fact its possible to repair or modify many things.  We only need to change our mindset to “I can do it and it won’t explode”.  Its not that hard and it can be a rewarding experience.  You will find a list of projects at the end of this post related to making things by ourselves.  As Doctorow said: All you need, is to know its possible, how to spell it and how to use Google.

But there is a good chance that many projects will fail or be too difficult for most people.  Its necessary and help us to discover what we can do and to develop related skills.  The blogging project where anybody is publishing on the Internet is a classic case of failure on massive scale because many blogs are dying without any readers.  The blog system has given to many peoples the opportunity to try and to discover if they are made for blogging.  As a whole we have found many talented writers and we are still discovering new ones because its easy to blog and it only need access to a computer.  Its a brilliant experiment.

A problem with the maker approach is the trade secrets and protection used by companies to protect their rights.  Nokia was a big fan of this kind of protection.  At one time someone estimated the number of transistors used to detect a non Nokia brand battery.  He found that there is five time more transistors devoted to detect the battery brand than to protect the data exchanged.  A lot of money and time has been invested in the battery and it doesn’t give usable features to the user.  In fact, there is no value added for the us.

Here is some links and Google keywords:

Feral robotics dogs
Sugar linux
Arduino
Radio amateur handbook (this book has been reedited many times)
RepRap
Afrigadgets
CNC machine shop
Electronic frontier foundation
Fair copyrights for Canada
Myth TV

Keywords:

maker bill of rights