Re: sketching out HTTP 402 workflow

On 7/27/15 12:40 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

>     These are the stories society needs most to know about, and it
>     would be a loss if the teller is silenced by local action.
>
>
> Thanks.  Well I feel this is an admirable goal, but my primary focus
> for payments is to use it to help open source developers help each
> other (and themselves) to create code, and maybe make enough of a
> living to pay some of the bills.  In general most people in that
> community are not anonymous.

Aha, I misunderstood--your mechanism isn't intended as a general 
solution to the sale of digital materials on the Internet, then. It's 
a specific subset.

And here I was ready to go further in the other direction, more 
general -- which thoughts I might as well include, in case someone 
else comes upon this thread: here are some reasons why pseudonyms have 
been used throughout history; a paragraph from the Wikipedia "List of 
Pen names" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pen_names), which 
gives a summary as to why such a system has evolved:

"A pen name or nom de plume is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen 
name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to 
disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of 
his or her other works, to protect the author from retribution for his 
or her writings, to combine more than one author into a single author, 
or for any of a number of reasons related to the marketing or 
aesthetic presentation of the work. The author's name may be known 
only to the publisher, or may come to be common knowledge."

In the list given at the Wikipedia link above (which is noted as being 
incomplete), I see many well-known authors whose pseudonyms were:
George Orwell
Mark Twain
Ayn Rand
C. S. Forester
George Eliot
Guillaume Apollinaire
John le Carré
Joseph Conrad
Lewis Carroll
Pablo Neruda
Stendhal

...many more

So it wouldn't be as if creating a payment mechanism for 
'pseudo-anonymity' would be adding a new function for the Internet; 
it's already part of our publishing system. It's evolved over past 
centuries, and the Internet would in effect be removing this evolved 
function of publishing if it doesn't provide for it.

But to return to this thread, such an evolution didn't occur with 
reference to code-writers, since there weren't any, and maybe as you 
say they don't need it...yet? But they might some day? Or, maybe it's 
already important for some code-writers? Didn't Gibson say that the 
future is already here, just unevenly distributed? Isn't code-writing 
political, sometimes, already?

And...isn't all work written in 'natural' language just code for the 
brain? So if we're all in the process of becoming cyborgs, won't the 
difference disappear?...if it hasn't already.   ;-)

SR

Received on Monday, 27 July 2015 20:35:21 UTC