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But, will it have games geared for people OVER 5 years old?

Games for people over 5 are called school and career, where winning and losing have a deeper meaning and there are few second chances.

From the ESA report:
Around 68% of U.S. households now play computer or video games and it's not just the youngsters in the family that are doing so. While the average age of a gamer is 35, over a quarter (26%) is age 50 or over. The bulk of gamers are in the 18 to 49 year age range.

Dammit, how dare I challenge your preconceived notions with abhorrent facts! What a cad I am!

A quick google finds this 50 million texts an hour sent in the UK:

Answered my own question.

http://www.bizreport.com/2009/06/esa_releases_gaming_demographic_facts_and_figures.html

This seems very similar what Fairtunes was doing years ago.

Oddsock even had/has a Winamp plugin for it http://www.oddsock.org/tools/gen_fairtunes but seems fairtunes.com is no longer and just a parking page now. Here's some more info from 2000 http://www.bizreport.com/news/66/ and some google action http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=fairtunes.com&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

I'm interested in your thoughts. What about a completely ad-free town? Is there a small town somewhere that is willing to go completely ad-free (maybe there already is one)?

Perhaps not real towns, but how about a rick752 Memorial Day, where website owners take down their ads completely? Something like a no ads day?

It's not something thats horrible for a government to do. But, what about the economic impact. According to bizreport

Nearly 58 million, or 75 percent, of U.S. households now subscribe to broadband according to the CEAâ(TM)s recently released research entitled âoeBroadband in America: Access, Use and Outlookâ.

That would mean that 19.3 million households in the US don't currently subscribe to broadband. Lets say that all of those don't cost as much as it would to get broadband to your house, but some would cost more. If we figure an average cost of $5K / household. (thats just a guess let me know if you think it would be more or less than that) That would be a cost of about $1200 - $1600 more per household per year.

What is so important about every last household having broadband access that makes it worthwhile to me to pay $130 more a month?

150,000 dollars is simply a maximum, isn't it? To receive this sum, you still need to argue that the amount you set per infringement is realistic. The reason why we don't witness this is because it never goes to court.

See http://www.bizreport.com/2006/11/riaa_under_fire_for_750_lawsuits_over_70_cent_songs.html

Really, who uses hotmail anymore?


As per this report
more people use Hotmail than Gmail.

Your AC comment would indeed be "insightful," were it not completely wrong. In the end, at least one company was forced to pay Pamela and Tommy Lee substantial damages for making the video available on the internet. The only battle that the porn people won was its claim that the couple signed away their rights in their initial settlement agreement with the porn people who first aired it. After the trial judge's throwing the case for internet distribution out of court was overturned on appeal, the porn people threw in the towel and judgment was rendered against them for the illegal distribution of the video.

I think there has been at least one made by FTC before this one.

Yahoo tried to do just that with sex.com. Didn't work for Yahoo, won't work for Google.

The real problem lies in web browsers that append ".net" to a domain name when the .com version cannot be accessed.

storage space is cheap.

In fact, they already provide programmatic access to their results via the Web APIs, spawning services ranging from a recipe generator to a site for detecting online plagiarism. According to this story, the developers of Google Alert, one well-known APIs application, have recently been granted permission to commercialize their service. My guess is that it won't be long before there are many more 3rd party Google applications, bringing in a lot of new money to Google's coffers. Anyone for a BUY rating?

Also, there is a difference between a judge ruling a copyright invalid and approving its seizure.

I am not reffering to a court ruling that a copyright was not valid, nor I am not reffering to a "seisure". I am reffering to the court's ability to rule such rights unenforcable due to misuse of copyright.

I apologize for confusing the issue by calling it "abuse of copyright". The correct legal term is "misuse of copyright". It traces back to at least 1942 in Morton Salt v. G.S. Suppiger, 314 U.S. 488. More recently the issue arose when Napster counter-sued the RIAA:

A judge's decision allowing Napster to pursue copyright misuse claims against major record labels seems to signal a sea change in the music industry's lawsuit against the peer-to-peer song-swapping service, according to a trio of legal experts. In a Jan. 16 hearing, the transcript of which was obtained by Newsbytes, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel told lawyers that she had decided to begin a discovery phase in the trial, allowing Napster to examine whether music labels have misused their copyrights. If she were to rule that labels have misused their rights, one expert told Newsbytes, at the extreme it could mean the labels could not enforce their copyrights.

Obviously it didn't happen in that case. The RIAA has repeatedly been on the virge of an anti-trust case for it's on-line service shenanigans.

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Jeremy Jaynes and Richard Rutowski each face four felony counts of using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail.

These routers have nothing to do with the up and coming trusted computing hardware

Yes they do. You described how such a system should work. Unfortunately you are not describing the Cisco system.

From their press release:
Customers using network admission control systems can allow network access only to compliant and trusted endpoint devices

And check the C-Net story:

However, the technology won't work unless security software can tell the Trusted Agent application the current state of security on the computer or mobile device.

"This important problem can't be addressed individually," said John Thompson, CEO of Symantec. "Collaboration is a must."

The technology might also spur sales of PCs and devices that use trusted-computing hardware--controversial technology that uses encryption, special memory and security software to lock away secrets on a PC from prying eyes. Adding further protections to the system that attests to the security of a computer owned by a company is a reasonable use of the system, said Bob Gleichauf, chief technology officer for the Network Admission Control program at Cisco.

"We need a trust boundary between the network and these devices, and the system needs hardware and software to do that," he said.

A Trusted Agent isn't Trusted unless it is running on Trusted hardware. Without Trusted Computing then a virus infected PC could mimic a Trusted Agent and claim it is running the latest anti-viral software. This is the remote attestation feature of Trusted Computing. The C-Net artical mentions this attestation as well:

Cisco's Network Admission Control program would enable companies to install on every PC and mobile device a client, called the Cisco Trust Agent, which could attest to certain levels of security

"Attest" is a rather obscure word. You are NOT going to be seeing it used anywhere execpt in refference to Trusted Computing.

Also note that these routers can be configured to check for any software, not just anti-virus software. They can require you to run software that enforces their Terms Of Service, such as bandwidth usage. It is promoted as fighting Viruses. It WILL be promotes to fight spam.

These routers grant the ISP control over the end user's PC. What ISP's isn't going to have any number of motivations to control end user's PC's?

These routers can be configured to grant access to Mac and Linux boxen, but they first must be Trusted Computing compliant Mac and Linux boxen.

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Going off-topic.

Swillden, we were talking a couple of days ago about TCPA. I was wondering if you saw the Slashdot story: Cisco Working to Block Viruses at the Router, and if you caught that Slashdot got the story wrong? These routers don't block viruses, what they really do is deny anyone a connection unless you are running TCPA. The "virus blocking" spin comes in that they could then use TCPA to attest that you are running specific anti-virus software. If you carefully read their press release you can see it really does use this Trusted Computing mechanism.

Of course they are spinning it for corporate use, to secure an internal network and to allow laptops and employee's home PC's to link in. But what happens when ordinary ISP's start installing them? Yeah yeah, they just do it to ensure everyone is running anti-virus software, groan. This is even worse than the scenario I expected, I figured more and more random websites would start requiring TCPA. With this, if you aren't running TCPA you could be denied internet access, period. Now THAT's scary!

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Here's a summary of the reasons why itms isn't in europe yet. Hint: if it were up to apple, it would be, but sadly it's not up to apple.

Except that they'd find that there wouldn't be very many people left over here to buy the RIAA's stuff.

Here is a good article on the subject.

You can get the Merit MP2000 here.

so, here are some others for your reading enjoyment:

MSN Money Article

Boston Globe Article

BizReport Article

On an offtopic note, the new strong bad email is also slashdotted. Anybody got a link for me?

If they get back up to that 79% number and hold it for any length of time, legally, that makes them a monopoly. No matter how much we may like Google today, it's a lot of power for one search engine to be able to have. It seems like a matter of time if they keep gaining share before they start abusing that power. Microsoft was innovating when they were at war against 1-2-3 and Wordperfect just as Google is today against Overture. With AskJeeves, Inktomi and Altavista looking like they'll go away soon, we will see Google to keep 'innovating ' making the little guys not show up in their search engine anymore?

As much as we may love them now, remember who they're trying to serve: their venture (vulture) capitalists.

The link seems to be slashdotted, try this one.

A paper on the death of print media? Why not just have web news story on the survival of newsprint dailies?

So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...

Your analysis would be correct if the RIAA had no plans to create an online music distribution system similar to Napster. But we all know that various RIAA members have expressed interests in online music delivery including Sony, BMG and EMI. The reason the RIAA has cleared the scene of Scour.net and Napster is so that people stop getting used to the idea that online music should be free. Once all the free online music services for the masses have been eliminated the RIAA can step in to fix the MP3 cravings with an online service that charges a mere $10 - $20 a month.

As for hackers creating a rival service, as long as the RIAA owns the copyrights on the music that people want to hear the law will be on their side. This means that any hacker(s) who create(s) a popular online music distribution system must be ready to contend with lawsuits and harassments from law enforcement and RIAA lawyers. Since most hackers already know where to get MP3's without the common tools (Gnutella, Napster, Scour, etc) it is unlikely that any hacker will put himself through the RIAA wringer just to enable other people to be able to download free music. Corporate investors will also tread warily with regards to facing the RIAA after what has happened to Scour and Napster.

Quite frankly, the RIAA is about to prove that "He with the most lawyers wins".

Here's an article about reacto.com which appears to be doing something very similar to TUCOWS, except, erm, they're charging $130,000 to set you up to allow you to sell domains.

Or have I missed the point of reacto.com?